ABSTRACT
This chapter inserts women into the iconic history of radical anti-colonial activism among South Asian migrants in North America in the early twentieth century. Sikh women in California, though few in number, were fervent participants in the gadar revolutionary movement that aimed at overthrowing British rule in India. Whereas most gadar scholarship focuses exclusively on male intellectuals and leaders during the 1910s, this chapter examines the living resonance of these anti-colonial protest songs in women's lives. It explores the predominance of the water motif in the gadar lyrical poetry favored by women, elucidating the alternative fluid identities and water ontologies of diasporic Sikh women, and delving into the rivers of collective memory that they created in performing and teaching the songs to their children.
