Paper short abstract:

This paper is a study of the Ghadar Movement through the testimony of Jodh Singh; a sipahi, mazdur, revolutionary, turncoat, approver, and victim of a psychotic breakdown. He inhabited the many worlds of Ghadar and the neuroses with which the Conspiracy was treated in the Anglo-American imagination.

Paper long abstract:

On 12th March 1918, a psychiatric evaluation declared Jodh Singh, a prisoner held in Alameda County Jail in California, to be legally insane. His crime was one of 'Malingering' - the refusal to testify before a court tasked with prosecuting Indian migrants in North America who had tried to launch an armed revolt against British rule in India from November 1914. It was one in a long list of similar prosecutions that had taken place in India, Burma and Canada, and was partly financed and orchestrated by British Intelligence.

Jodh Singh straddled the worlds of the Imperialist imagination and Ghadar reality. He was a Punjabi Sikh and had been a soldiers, migrant labourer, turncoat and approver before suffering a psychotic breakdown in a courtroom in San Francisco. The detailed interviews and analyses of Jodh Singh's dreams following his breakdown offers some measure of intimacy with the rank-and-file of the Ghadar Movement about whom very little was ever recorded or preserved. It also becomes a prism through which one can begin to understand the desperate neuroses that plagued both Britain and the United States. The desire to prosecute a trans-regional and trans-Pacific conspiracy about which they knew very little, resulted in Ghadar assuming a fictive, nightmarish quality in the Anglo-American imagination. And Jodh Singh, diagnosed as possessing all of the degenerative qualities of the 'homosexual type' was one such victim.