THAT HEAVEN OF FREEDOM

THE HEAVEN OF FREEDOM - the true story of an audacious movement to liberate India from colonial rule during World War I. The Ghadar Movement was arguably the most consequential movement for Indian independence before Gandhi assumed leadership of the Congress Party. This is the first book to tell this story.

On the eve of WWI, a band of Indian immigrants living in the United States hatched an audacious plan to liberate their homeland from British control. Founded by a group of leftist students at UC Berkeley, the Ghadar Movement mounted arguably the most significant challenge to colonial rule before the rise of the Indian National Congress under Gandhibut unlike the INC, the Ghadar Movement used violence to achieve its aims. From its base on the West Coast, the movement recruited thousands of supporters via its underground newspaper, and sent hundreds of freedom fighters across the Pacific in an attempt to smuggle guns and seditious literature into Indiaan effort abetted by the German government, which was keen to undermine an adversary. All the while, the movement was tracked by Britain's intelligence service, which eventually convinced the US government to crack down. The result was one of the most complex trials to date, culminating in a courtroom gun battle that shocked the nation. Scott Miller's That Heaven of Freedom is the first book to tell the story of this overlooked moment in Indian, and American, historyone that offers a new perspective on anticolonial struggle in the twentieth century. 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. A former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, he reported from more than twenty-five countries in Asia and Europe for two decades. He lives in Seattle, Washington.