Har Daval's Campus War
Before UC Berkeley became a synonym for protest, the university had already staged a quieter revolt. In Let My Country Awake, Scott Miller shows how Har Dayal turned lecture halls into workshops of liberation. The Oxford trained scholar lived austerely near campus, teaching Sanskrit by day and drafting manifestos by night, while Punjabi laborers and radical students gathered at Shattuck presses to forge the Ghadar call against the British Raj. America’s independence story gave them language and courage and Berkeley became the hinge where scholarship met conspiracy and idealism hardened into action.
V. Covert Martin, The Sikh Temple in Stockton, California, 1915. Public domain, UC Berkeley Library.