Let My Country Awake - by Scott Miller (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The true story of an audacious international movement to liberate India from colonial rule during World War I.

WANTED: Brave soldiers to stir up revolt in India;
REMUNERATIONS: Death;
PRIZE: Martyrdom;
PENSION: Freedom

In November 1913, a recruitment notice appeared in the first issue of an underground newspaper in San Francisco, the Hindustan Ghadar. The paper was founded by a charismatic anarchist from India named Har Dayal with the help of a group of Indian students at the University of California, Berkeley. Under the leadership of Dayal and fellow radical Sohan Singh Bhakna, this group hatched an audacious plan to put their words into action: they would convince other Indians, many of them Sikh lumber workers and farmhands on the west coasts of the United States and Canada, to launch a violent insurrection against the British Raj.

The Ghadar movement, as it came to be known, eventually mounted the most significant challenge to British colonial rule until the rise of Mohandas Gandhi. It recruited thousands of supporters via its newspaper, and sent hundreds of freedom fighters across the Pacific in attempts to smuggle guns and seditious literature into India--an effort abetted by spies working for the German government, which was keen to undermine the British during World War I. All the while, the Ghadar movement was being tracked by Britain's intelligence service, which eventually convinced the US government to crackdown on the organization's leaders. This led to one of the biggest conspiracy trials in American history, culminating in a courtroom gun battle that shocked a nation already roiled by suspicion of immigrants. Scott Miller's Let My Country Awake is the first book to tell the story of this overlooked moment in Indian--and American--history, offering a new perspective on the struggle against colonialism in the twentieth century.

Review Quotes

"Scott Miller tells a compelling and little-known story about India's freedom struggle--one involving a brave band of students and workers in America. This is a fascinating prism through which we see the wartime machinations of Germany, Britain, and the United States--and it all comes together in a made-for-Hollywood trial." --Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's GPS and author of Age of Revolutions

"In Let My Country Awake, Scott Miller has written a true-life international spy thriller that is both an education in a forgotten corner of American history and a compelling adventure filled with a well-crafted cast of larger-than-life characters who jump off the page. One improbable--yet true--event dramatically follows another, and the result is a riveting, page-turning read." --Howard Blum, New York Times bestselling author of In the Enemy's House and Dark Invasion

"Scott Miller's Let My Country Awake is an audacious work of history which explores a now mostly forgotten effort by a group of freedom fighters to liberate India from colonial rule. Spanning multiple continents, the story blazes with gun-smuggling, espionage, and an explosive courtroom shootout--complicating our understanding of the fallout from the colonial world order during World War I. This original and well-researched work is a powerful reminder that today's immigration battles in the U.S. have long and tangled roots. Let My Country Awake makes a profound contribution to our understanding of the early twentieth century. --Julia Flynn Siler, New York Times bestselling author of Lost Kingdom and The White Devil's Daughters

About the Author

Scott Miller is the author of two previous books: The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century and Agent 110: The American Spymaster and the German Resistance. Formerly a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, he reported from more than twenty-five countries in Asia and Europe. He has been a contributor to CNBC and Britain's Sky News and appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Miller holds a Master of Philosophy in international relations from the University of Cambridge. He lives in Seattle with his wife and their Labrador retriever, Lucy, and enjoys visiting his daughters, wherever in the world they may be.