This is a lost episode of Indian history. Before Bose, much before Nehru and even before Mahatma Gandhi...there was Har Dayal. On the morning of December 23rd, 1912, a powerful bomb targeted at the Viceroy Lord Hardinge exploded as he entered the new capital city of Delhi. Though the assassination bid failed it brought back the spectre of the Ghadr of 1857 and challenged the might of the British Empire. The British Secret Service connected the bomb outrage to the brain of Har Dayal (1884-1939) a former Stanford University lecturer based in San Francisco. The history of the Indian freedom struggle has produced no greater enigma than this heroic leader. Har Dayal was the architect of the largest international anti-colonial resistance movement - the Ghadr Party, with its nerve center in California. His mission was to destroy the British Empire by an armed revolt and his weapon of choice was the colossal power of his intellect. Cerebrally light-years ahead, Har Dayal a super brilliant scholar at Oxford and St. Stephen's College was eloquent in seventeen languages and an author par excellence. Exiled from India for life Har Dayal became Ghadr personified. This gentleman revolutionary was the first Indian to teach at American and Swedish universities and an extraordinary mix of an Anarchist and a Pacifist, a Sanskritist and a Rationalist, a Marxist and a Buddhist, a Feminist and a Humanist as also an ultranationalist and an internationalist. For millions who sought to emulate the quintessential Dilliwallah, he was The Great Indian Genius.

Raza traces the anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries in the context of Communist Internationalism during the last decades of the British Raj.

This volume addresses the power of ideas in the making of Indian political modernity. As an intermediate history of connections between South Asia and the global arena the volume raises new issues in intellectual history. It reviews the period from the emergence of constitutional liberalism in the1830s, through the swadeshi era to the writings of Tilak, Azad and Gandhi in the twentieth century. While several contributions reflect on the ideologies of nationalism, the volume seeks to rescue intellectual history from being simply a narration of the nation-state. It does not seek to create a 'canon' of political thought so much as to show how Indian concepts of state and society were redrawn in the context of emergent globalized debates about freedom, the constitution of the self and the good society in the late colonial era. In so doing the contributions here resituate an Indian intellectual history that has long been eclipsed by social and political history. These essays were originally published in a Special issue of the journal Modern Intellectual History (CUP, April 2007).