Ghadar di Gunj (San Francisco, 1914), "First death, afterwards freedom"

The cover of Ghadar di Gunj, a pamphlet of Punjabi patriotic verse from the Ghadar Press in San Francisco, dated March 1914. A woman with a drawn sword stands before a spear, quiver, and rifle under three banners: "First death," "Bande Mataram," "Afterwards freedom." University of Toronto copy via the Internet Archive.

Content note: the cover shows a woman with a drawn sword beside weapons, under a slogan of death before freedom. It is described as printed.

The cover

A woman holds a drawn sword. Behind her stand a spear, a quiver, and a rifle, and beside her lies a large animal hide with a lion's head. Over the scene run three banners. The lettering is in Punjabi, written in the Shahmukhi (Urdu) script, and the archive's transcriber marks the small labels and the bottom oval as only partly legible rather than guessing at them.

بندے ماترم

غدر دی گونج

دیشی بھگتاں دی بانی

[banner, left] پچھوں آزادی

[banner, centre] بندے ماترم

[banner, right] پہلاں موت

[...]

غدر پریس - تعداد دس ہزار - سان فرانسسکو امریکہ

مارچ ۱۹۱۴ء

[English, from the archive's translation:]

Bande Mataram

Echo of the Ghadar (Revolt)

Voice/utterance of the country's devotees (patriots)

[banners] Afterwards freedom / Bande Mataram / First death

[...]

Ghadar Press - print run ten thousand - San Francisco, America

March 1914

Reading the banners

Read from right to left, the order the archive's description follows, the banners give a sequence: first death, then Bande Mataram, then freedom. The cover's one tag in the archive is transfer. The figure of a motherland with a sword, the weapons, and the lion's hide borrow the authority of the sacred and the heroic and lend it to armed resistance. The verse inside is described as patriotic; this page has only the cover.

The imprint is the most concrete line. It names the Ghadar Press, San Francisco, America, and dates the pamphlet March 1914. It also gives a print run that the transcriber reads, with a caution, as ten thousand.

Printed in America

This is propaganda for a cause abroad, printed on American soil. The record does not say how copies traveled or who read them. What it shows is that a press in San Francisco could print, in 1914, a cover that praised armed resistance and named its press and its city on the front.

A free country can let people print what other governments would suppress, and still punish acts that break its own laws. Printing and doing are different things, and a republic should keep them apart. The Wilson administration essay covers how the federal government treated speech in these years. Another paper printed in California for a movement across a border, the Spanish-language Regeneración in Los Angeles, attacked the U.S. government directly.