The seeds of Indian independence from British rule were planted in Northern California nearly a decade before Mahatma Gandhi began his civil disobedience campaign in 1922.

At the University of California, Berkeley, in 1913, several Punjabi students – on scholarships funded by a Sikh potato farmer from Stockton – helped launch the Gadar independence movement, a violent rebellion against the British overlords. About 700 South Asian Americans – most of them Sikhs with roots in the Punjab region of India – gathered at Sheldon High School on Saturday to honor the memory of the Gadar rebels.

Some call them freedom fighters, others, terrorists. They sent ships laden with arms and rebels to India and staged a bombing of the British Parliament in London and violent uprisings in India.

Several thousand, including two UC Berkeley students, were hanged by the British, who didn't grant India freedom until 1947.

"The credit has not been given to the people whose sacrifices really brought independence to India," said Darshan Kelley, a Punjabi American nutrition professor at UC Davis. "It is not just Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, whose peaceful ways alone could never have brought independence to India."

The British were not ready to leave, but succumbed after the Gadar Party inspired a liberation movement that grew to nearly half a million Indians worldwide, said Gurdev S. Khush, a UC Davis professor of plant science.

On Nov. 1, 1913, the first issue of Gadar, the party newspaper published at UC Berkeley, declared war on the British raj: "What is our name? Revolution. What is our work? Revolution. The time will soon come when rifles and blood will take the place of pens and ink."

One of the authors, Kartar Singh Sarabha, 16, had come to Northern California in 1912. He returned to India to trigger the revolution and was captured and hanged in 1915.

The Gadar Memorial Punjabi Conference was held in Sacramento because the region is home to 35,000 Sikhs, said Onkar S. Bindra, a retired professor who attended UC Berkeley and now lives in Gold River. Many have heard stories of the Gadar rebels from their parents and grandparents, farmers and laborers who settled in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1890s and helped finance the rebels.

Around 1913, about 5,000 Gadar Party members from throughout the West Coast and Canada met near the cemetery in downtown Sacramento to plan the revolution, Bindra said.

"The Berkeley students were folk heroes, the shadows of the farmers who organized everything," said Amrik Singh, who teaches Punjabi language and Sikh American history at California State University, Sacramento. "Wherever there is oppression, Punjabis raise their voice."

"The Sacramento Valley is sacred for the Gadar Party," said Harish Puri, one of three scholars from India who spoke Saturday.

Surinder Singh Manh, a professor from Punjab, added, "It's a common saying that, 'The sun never sets on the British empire,' but to set the sun on British rule, the Gadar freedom fighters marched from this land of North America." Until the Gadar Party called for all Indian expatriates to return home to fight for total independence, "no other party had even dreamed of it," Manh said.

In Northern California, they suffered bitter discrimination because they wore turbans and had been treated like slaves by the British, but also tasted freedom, Manh said.

"On behalf of Indians and all of the people of the world who believe in justice, I pay my cordial regards to this great land where the soldiers of our freedom struggle dreamed of breaking the shackles of slavery, and were willing to pay the ultimate price," Manh said.

The Gadar Party – 95 percent Punjabis – planned a socialist revolution in India several years before the Russian Revolution of 1917, Manh said.

India is now a democracy of 1.2 billion people, according to the CIA World Fact Sheet.

The Indian government emphasizes Gandhi's nonviolent movement; textbooks don't teach the Gadar movement and most professors and students have never heard of the Gadar rebels, several scholars said Saturday.

But many at Saturday's conference – who saw a play, "Gadar Express," by Punjab Lok Rang of San Francisco – believe they owe a debt to the Gadar rebels. And some want to establish a memorial in Sacramento "to honor the martyrs who laid down their lives," Khush said.

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