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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
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Politics & government

LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE

Scott Miller

Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj

LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE - 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.

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Book Published 2025-10-28 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Comments

The story of Ghadar (Urdu for "revolt") is dizzyingly complex, and Miller, a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, has excavated a fascinating trove of archival material. Uniting Sikh loggers with high-caste Hindu intellectuals, Ghadar was part of a larger diasporic movement dedicated to liberating India from British control. . . . Let My Country Awake is at its strongest and most resonant when telling a very American story about immigration.

"Scott Miller tells a compelling and little-known story about India's freedom struggleone 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 Statesand it all comes together in a made-for-Hollywood trial."

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 improbableyet trueevent dramatically follows another, and the result is a riveting, page-turning read.

Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj In his new book, Scott Miller explores a bit of overlooked history. Read more...

"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 shootoutcomplicating 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."

This propulsive account . . . brings to vivid life a little-known episode of WWIthe U.S. crackdown on an American-based movement to oust the British from India . . . The result is a thrilling excavation of a forgotten revolutionary moment in American and world history.

Inside Scott Miller's book on the Ghadar revolt We spoke to author Scott Miller about his new book 'Let My Country Awake', which chronicles the Ghadar movement. Here's what he had to say. Read more...