The Cost of Revolutionary Struggle: Punishment, Gender, and Labor after the Ghadar Uprising in India

• In Event: 50864 - Resistance and Repression

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Ghadar Uprising of 1915, wives of the men who belonged to the Ghadar Party were severely impacted by the punishments imposed by the British, while the Empire was mired in the First World War. The Ghadar revolutionaries were tried in the Lahore Conspiracy Case Trials by the Special Tribunals sanctioned by the emergency law of the Defence of India Act of 1915. They were sentenced to death, transportation for life, and property forfeiture for ‘waging for against’ the colonial government. I show the relationship between empire and gender in this time of global war through an archive of petitions written by women to the colonial government, praying for the remission of their husbands’ sentences, especially the reversal of the forfeiture of property. These never before cited petitions highlight the deprivation that women had to bear when their homes were seized and the labor they performed as mostly destitute women caring for their families and fighting for the reversal or remission of their husbands’ sentences. By situating the colonial state’s response to the Ghadar Uprising against the backdrop of global war and colonial crisis, I argue that the colonized family was a collective recipient of colonial punishments for revolutionary activity against the state. I claim that the colonial state of exception during the First World War socially reproduced the precarity of colonized women. This article thus intends to contribute to the comparative studies of empire, social reproduction, and crisis as they work through gender.

Author

• Umaima Miraj, University of Toronto