Taraknath Das was born on June 15, 1884 to parents of modest means in Majipara, a village near Kolkata. After completing his primary education in the village’s schools he worked as a tutor to help fund his high school education. Das’ father died shortly after he passed his entrance exams to Calcutta University, and although he attempted to complete his higher education by attending three different satellite schools associated with the University he eventually gave up his studies and began to work as an itinerant preacher instead.1 A talented orator and community organizer, Das traveled from village to village rallying the masses around the miserable economic, educational, and political condition of India. During this period, Das was also involved with the radical anticolonial organization known as the Bengali Anusilan Samiti, forming its branch in Dacca in 1905.2 He also established several village schools for the laboring classes during this time, the dawn of what would come to be a long and dynamic political activism career.
After a brief stint in Japan, Das arrived in the U.S. on June 18, 1906, three days after his twenty-second birthday. He worked as a laborer on the railroads, in hospitals as a laundry boy and janitor, and in libraries as a page until he saved up enough money to attend the University of California. While he was a student there he passed the United States Civil Service examination for “Hindu interpreter” and was appointed to the U.S. Immigration Service in Vancouver, British Columbia on July 5, 1907. During his time in Vancouver Das started The Free Hindusthan, the only publication of its kind in North America advocating freedom and political, social, and religious reform for India. In September 1908 he matriculated to Norwich University in Vermont, the oldest private military university in the U.S., as a sophomore student. He wanted to train himself for armed insurrection in India. An avid writer, he became a contributor to the college paper, The Reveille, and wrote articles and essays published across the U.S.
Despite being an excellent student and popular amongst his peers, Das was suspended from Norwich University for his anti-British organizing. He returned to Seattle in 1909 and became involved in the growing revolutionary activities of the Gadar Party, led by Lala Har Dayal. Das published articles that supported the idea that violent resistance was both necessary and just when passive resistance proved futile. Of all of Das’ work, his “Open Letter to Count Leo Tolstoy in Reply to His ‘Letter to a Hindoo’”3 is probably best known. Das was critical of Tolstoy’s call for non-violence, writing, “Non-violence is an absolute Dogma…violence and benevolence are measured by the relative value of the actions and motives underlying them.” He added, “We are not worshipers of violence…our Idea is progress and comfort to humanity at large,” and emphasized that “We are believers in universal fellowship but we are intolerant of any action of exploitation of any nation, race, society, family or individuals by others.”
In 1910, Das graduated from the University of Washington with a B.A. degree in Political Science. He went on to earn a M.A. degree and a teaching certification before becoming a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1914.4In the same year he was admitted as a research fellow to the University of California at Berkeley. In 1917 he published his first book, Is Japan a Menace to Asia?, while living and teaching in Japan.5 While abroad he received notice of a warrant for his arrest for “plotting to set on a foot a revolution to free India from British control” in the U.S.6 He turned himself in to the authorities and stood alongside sixteen others in the famous 1917 Hindu-German conspiracy trial.7 On April 30, 1918 he was sentenced to twenty-two months in Leavenworth Penitentiary.
Das’ time in prison did not dampen his enthusiasm for political organizing, however. He published an essay in the first issue of The Independent Hindustanin September 1920, which was the official Gadar Party organ until its reincarnation as The United States of India in 1923. Das was fiercely critical of the U.S.’ silence on British human rights abuses in India and urged sympathetic Americans to stand against the British Raj. He believed that “India’s fight for independence [was] the fight for world freedom against world imperialism”, and that without control over India, the British Empire would crumble. When it did, he predicted that India, China, Russia, and the countries of the Middle East would form the most powerful alliance in the world. He advised the U.S. to be on the right side when the British Empire fell.8
In 1923 Das’ citizenship was revoked when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled naturalized citizens from India were not “white”. Shortly thereafter he earned the first Ph.D. from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and married his long-time friend Mary Keatinge Morse, a founding member of the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Women’s Party. Together they took an extended tour of Europe and founded the India Institute in Munich to encourage Indian students to attend German universities. Upon his return to the U.S., Das was jointly appointed to a professorship of Political Science at Columbia University and a fellowship at Georgetown University. In 1935 he and his wife founded the Taraknath Das Foundation at Columbia University to promote educational and cultural exchange between the U.S. and Asia.
Das did not regain his U.S. citizenship until 1946, when President Harry S. Truman passed the Luce-Celler Act. During his time in the U.S. Das became friends with the Watumull family in Hawaii, who gave him the opportunity to return to India in 1952 as a Visiting Professor of the Watumull Foundation. After forty-six years in exile, Das spent six years in India and founded the Vivekananda Society in Calcutta. He continued to speak for India until he died upon his return to the United States on December 22, 1958 at the age of 74.
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