Har Dayalਲਾਲਾ ਹਰਦਿਆਲ

Har Dayal (14 October 1884 to 4 March 1939), also known as Lala Har Dayal, was a scholar born in Delhi to a Punjabi family who became a founding leader of the Ghadar Party in North America in 1913, serving as its first general secretary and editing its newspaper Ghadar, which urged Indians abroad to rise against British rule.

Early life in Delhi and a brilliant education

Har Dayal was born on 14 October 1884 in the Cheera Khana area of Delhi, the sixth of seven children of Gauri Dayal Mathur, a reader in the Delhi district court, and his wife. The family was a Mathur Kayastha family, and although Delhi was his birthplace and home, the family's roots and connections were Punjabi, a link he kept throughout his life. His father was a scholar of Persian and Urdu on a modest income, and the boy grew up in a house where books mattered more than money.

He was sent to the Cambridge Mission School in Delhi and passed his examinations young. He took his bachelor's degree at St Stephen's College, Delhi, and then moved to Lahore for postgraduate study at Government College, under the University of the Punjab. Accounts differ on the subjects of his master's degrees: most summaries give Sanskrit, while a detailed scholarly study gives English literature, taken with first position in 1903, followed by a second master's in history. No account disputes the record itself: he was treated as one of the most gifted students of his generation.

Oxford: why did Har Dayal give up his scholarship?

In 1905 Har Dayal won a Government of India state scholarship and entered St John's College, Oxford. The honours kept coming: in 1907 he was named Boden Sanskrit Scholar and won a Casberd Exhibition from his college. The scholarship carried an expectation that he would return to serve the government of India, and a career in the Indian Civil Service lay open to him. At Oxford, though, he fell in with the circle around Shyamaji Krishnavarma and his India House in Highgate, a meeting place for Indians who wanted British rule in India ended, and his views hardened.

In the autumn of 1907 he resigned the state scholarship on ideological grounds, giving up the other awards with it. He was, in effect, refusing to be trained and paid by the very government he had come to oppose. He returned to India in January 1908 and settled for a time in Lahore, where he lived simply, stayed for a while with Lala Lajpat Rai, and wrote for journals such as the Modern Review of Calcutta and The Panjabee of Lahore. Watched by the authorities, he left India again in August 1908 and never saw it again. From Paris in 1909 he edited the journal Bande Mataram.

America: Stanford, the labour movement and a new party

Har Dayal reached the United States in early 1911 and made his way to California. He lectured in philosophy at Stanford University, but his politics moved faster than his academic career: he mixed with socialist and labour circles, served as secretary of the San Francisco branch of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1912 to 1913, and resigned his Stanford post in September 1912 after his advocacy of labour ideas drew pressure. California then held thousands of Punjabi immigrants, most of them Sikhs, working in farms, lumber mills and railways, and many bitter about the racial treatment they met in Canada and the United States and about British rule at home.

Those workers had already begun organising in Oregon. In the spring of 1913, at meetings in Astoria and other Oregon towns, they formed the association that became the Ghadar Party, with its headquarters in San Francisco. Sohan Singh Bhakna was elected president, Pandit Kanshi Ram became treasurer, and Har Dayal, the scholar among labourers, became general secretary and the party's chief voice. The party set itself one aim: the complete ending of British rule in India, and it kept religion out of its politics, treating faith as a private matter.

The Ghadar newspaper and the call to return home

The party's headquarters at 436 Hill Street in San Francisco was named the Yugantar Ashram, and there it set up a printing press. On 1 November 1913 the first issue of its newspaper appeared in Urdu under the name Ghadar, a word meaning revolt. A Punjabi edition in Gurmukhi followed on 9 December 1913, and editions in other languages came after. Har Dayal wrote much of the early paper himself and edited the Urdu edition, while the young Kartar Singh Sarabha ran the printing. Copies travelled free to Indian settlements across the world, and to India itself, carrying a direct message: Indians abroad should return home and fight for freedom. It was this newspaper, more than any meeting, that turned scattered immigrant anger into a single movement, and the party took its popular name from the paper.

Arrest, flight and the war years in Berlin and Sweden

The British authorities pressed the United States to act, and in March 1914 Har Dayal was arrested in San Francisco by US immigration authorities, who sought his deportation as an undesirable alien. Released on bail, he left the country for Switzerland rather than face the hearing, and in January 1915 he moved to Berlin. There he worked with the Berlin Committee, the group of Indian activists in Germany, later known as the Indian Independence Committee, which cooperated with the German government during the First World War on plans to send arms and support to India. In 1916 the committee sent him toward Turkey to help organise a mission aimed at the Suez Canal. He got on badly with German officials, came under suspicion, and by October 1918 he had reached Stockholm in Sweden.

Sweden became his home for most of the next decade. He taught Indian philosophy, at the University of Uppsala according to the detailed scholarly study of his life, and wrote Forty Four Months in Germany and Turkey, published in London in 1920, a personal record of his wartime years that was sharply critical of Germany. His political views were changing: over the following years he drew away from the revolutionary politics of his Ghadar period, a shift that puzzled some old comrades. In Sweden he also met Agda Erikson, whom he later acknowledged as his wife.

Later years in London, his books and his death

Education and writing run through Har Dayal's whole life. His essays on schooling, many first published in the Lahore journal Punjabi and in the Modern Review, were collected as Our Educational Problem in 1922, with an introduction by Lala Lajpat Rai, and his Thoughts on Education gathered his arguments against the colonial education system. In 1927, refused permission to return to India, he settled in London and began a doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies on the Bodhisattva doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit literature. Sources differ on the year the doctorate was awarded, giving 1930 in some accounts and 1932 in others; the thesis itself was published in London in 1932 as The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature, a large scholarly work that scholars of Buddhism still cite.

From his home in Edgware he ran a small Modern Culture Institute, joined the South Place Ethical Society in 1930, and lectured widely on religion, ethics and self improvement. Hints for Self Culture, published in 1934, set out his programme of physical, intellectual and moral training for young readers, and Twelve Religions and Modern Life followed in 1937. In October 1938 the British government at last granted him permission to return to India. Before he could make the journey, he travelled to the United States on a lecture tour. He died in Philadelphia on 4 March 1939, on the evening of a day on which he had delivered a lecture, closing it, by the accounts that survive, with the words: I am in peace with all.

Why is Har Dayal remembered today?

Har Dayal is remembered first as the mind of the early Ghadar movement: the scholar who gave Punjabi farmers and labourers in North America a party, a headquarters and, above all, a newspaper that spoke to them in their own languages and turned their grievances into a call for a free India. The rising the party hoped for did not succeed, and Har Dayal himself spent only about a year at its head, but the Ghadar name and its memory shaped Punjabi political life for decades, and the party survived in San Francisco until 1947, when it handed its assets to the government of newly independent India. He is remembered second as a writer of unusual range, from Thoughts on Education to a doctoral study of Buddhist doctrine. In 1987 the Department of Posts, Government of India, issued a commemorative stamp in his honour, and Emily C. Brown's 1975 biography, Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist, remains the standard scholarly life.