Agnes Smedley and the Friends for the Freedom of India: A Transnational History of Anticolonialism

Abstract

The newly renamed Prime Minister’s Museum and Library (PMML), formerly known as the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), in New Delhi, has been the primary repository for the archival record of India’s anticolonial movement and home to the institutional papers of the All-India Congress Committee and All-India Trade Union Congress, among others. Buried within this substantial cache of archival documents is a small collection of papers from an American woman named Agnes Smedley, dating back to 1919. Smedley was a writer, journalist and activist who collaborated with South Asians such as Lajpat Rai, M. N. Roy, Tarak Nath Das and Virendranath Chattopadhyay for the cause of India’s freedom from British colonial rule. Her small collection of papers in Delhi includes correspondence with Indian revolutionaries and her work in establishing the Friends for the Freedom of India (FFI), a transnational organization linking India’s freedom struggle with sympathetic activists based in the USA. This article examines the significance of Smedley’s FFI as a conduit between India’s freedom struggle and global anticolonialism, underscoring an important and oft-neglected transnational dimension of anticolonial histories of South Asia.

The newly renamed Prime Minister’s Museum and Library (PMML), formerly known as the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), in New Delhi, has been the primary repository for the archival record of India’s anticolonial movement and home to the institutional papers of the All-India Congress Committee and All-India Trade Union Congress, among others. Buried within this substantial cache of archival documents is a small collection of papers from an American woman named Agnes Smedley, dating back to 1919. Smedley was a writer, journalist and activist who collaborated with South Asians such as Lajpat Rai, M. N. Roy, Tarak Nath Das and Virendranath Chattopadhyay for the cause of India’s freedom from British colonial rule. The content of her small collection of papers in Delhi, includes her correspondence with Indian revolutionaries in San Francisco, Seattle and New York City, related to her work in establishing the Friends for the Freedom of India (FFI), a transnational organization linking India’s freedom struggle with sympathetic activists based in the USA. ¹ This article seeks to contextualize and situate Smedley and the FFI within a transnational history of Indian anticolonialism.

Agnes Smedley first came to sympathize with Indian anticolonialism in California, where she met members of the Ghadar Party and began writing about the freedom struggle. The first known article about India by Smedley appeared in the Fresno Morning Republican in September 1916, where she wrote about a local meeting of Indians demanding political independence from British rule. ² Shortly after, Smedley met Har Dayal and discussed the issue of colonialism in India, piquing her interest in the plight of the colonized and inspiring her search for connections between anticolonialism and her ongoing commitment to socialism. Both socialism and anticolonialism became her dual commitments when she moved across the country from California to New York in December 1916. On the east coast, Smedley befriended several Indians working covertly within a network that connected the Ghadar Party on the west coast with Indian revolutionaries based in New York City and Berlin.

Smedley did not evade the notice of USA authorities who opened a file on her in 1917. Her file was part of a wider net of surveillance against Indians in the USA during the Great War. Funds from Germany moved through the Ghadar networks, affording the USA an opportunity to charge activists politically involved with Indian anticolonialism for espionage on behalf of America’s wartime adversary. Fuelled by wartime concerns and anti-Asian sentiments, the USA collaborated with the British Secret Service to detain and deport Indians in the USA. As Seema Sohi argues, the USA in this period worked in lockstep with the British Secret Service, creating a transnational nexus for the oppression of Indian anticolonial revolutionaries that brought together British imperialist efforts with America’s racist policies towards Asians and their anxieties over socialist and communist radicalism. ³ Smedley was formally arrested and charged with espionage on 18 March, serving a prison sentence until she made bail on 7 May, although returning in October for several more weeks before charges were dropped on legal technicalities. This brief stint in prison, however, did not convince her to abandon India’s cause, and in March 1919 Smedley launched the FFI.

On the West Coast, Smedley assisted the Indian Ghadar Party, while in New York City, she forged solidarity between the Ghadar Party and the FFI. The Indian Ghadar Party, founded in 1913, was an organization of Indian expatriates (students and workers) waging a campaign for Indian political freedom from the British Empire first on the West Coast of North America and later globally. Perhaps most famously, they attempted to smuggle arms to India and incite military mutiny among Indian soldiers during the First World War. ⁴ Those Indians based in San Francisco disseminated anticolonial propaganda, and took support from German and Ottoman sources, leading the British to pressure American authorities to suppress the movement and arrest Ghadar Party members operating in the USA. After the Great War, the Ghadar Party increasingly turned to Soviet Russia for support and funding, shifting their bases away from the USA and toward Europe and Asia.

This article examines the significance of Smedley and the FFI as conduits between India’s freedom struggle and anticolonial transnationalism. Modern historians have made a compelling case recently that anticolonialism was not tied to the nation or the state, rather anticolonialism was global and transnational. ⁵ Even nationalist-oriented parties of the early twentieth century, like the Indian National Congress, positioned local anticolonial struggles within and among a global movement against empires worldwide. ⁶ A strong emphasis on Indian diasporic revolutionaries likewise has demonstrated the power of global imaginaries and transnational networks to the making of anticolonialism that worked within and beyond the borders of India. ⁷ Smedley’s stewardship of the FFI offers one such example, providing a compelling case of the interplay between Indian anticolonialism and the global politics that sought to destabilize capitalism, imperialism, racism and patriarchy in the early twentieth century.

American women were critical to transnational networks of anticolonialism in North America. In spaces like the United States, where Indian workers, students and exiles were regularly threatened by deportation, American women became important allies. They served a crucial role as couriers who transported documents and funds covertly and often evaded American authorities who concentrated on Indian men and primarily dismissed the political capacity of women. No doubt, the status of citizenship for US women also protected their rights to freedom of speech and assembly in ways that left Indian expatriates more vulnerable to authorities. Many of the most high-profile men of the Indian diasporic revolutionary networks had developed professional and at times intimate relationships with Western women, including M. N. Roy, Har Dayal, Taraknath Das, Virendranath Chattopadhyay, A. C. N. Nambiar and Benoy Sarkar to name a few.

So far, little has been written about women like Smedley who supported and served the Indian revolutionary movement in the United States. Much of the scholarship on Indian revolutionaries in the USA concentrates on the Ghadar Party and the men who dominated it. Such histories represent the Ghadar Party as a fraternity of men who eschewed marriage and worked within a homosocial movement dedicated to martyrdom and the cult of the bomb. ⁸ Yet, as Kanwalroop Kaur Singh has argued, the historiography of the Ghadar Party draws upon patriarchal and colonial sources, which are both complicit in silencing ‘non-masculine’ voices and dismissing women as ‘instrument and as instrumental to history’. ⁹ The historical record reveals a strikingly different story, one rich with the active participation of women from India and the USA in the networks of the Ghadar Party. For example, Singh points to the absence of histories of women like Padmavati Chandra, wife of the infamous Ram Chandra, whose oral history transcript sits in the largest Ghadar Party archive in Stanford’s Bancroft Library. ¹⁰ As Tim Harper also argues, women and families were central to the politics of anticolonial resistance of Indians in North America. As Indian labourers and students crossed the Pacific and settled on the west coast of Canada and the USA, they increasingly called upon US governments to ease immigration restrictions for their families. When met with exclusionary and anti-Asian immigration laws, many expatriates were politicized and turned to the Ghadar Party. ¹¹

A double silence exists for women like Smedley. Not only does her allegiance and activism on behalf of India remain unrecognized in South Asian scholarship, but also her commitment to radical socialism and revolutionary politics remains absent in the histories of the USA left. Only two biographies of Smedley exist, one by Janice and Stephen MacKinnon who recount ‘just the facts’ of her life. ¹² The book is a seminal text for bringing to light sources and narratives of Smedley’s biography, yet it is quite dated, published in 1988 before many of the archives of the former Soviet Union opened to scholars after the Cold War. At the same time, MacKinnon is trained as a Chinese historian and the biography is arguably weighted toward Smedley’s China years rather than her work with South Asians in the USA and Germany. The second biography by Ruth Price offers a sensational account of Smedley’s biography, emphasizing her ties to international communism and focusing on whether she was a member of the party. ¹³ This focus elides the complex, transnational politics that informed Smedley’s life and journey as an anticolonial activist whose work intersected with but was not dominated by communism and communists.

This essay’s recounting of Smedley’s stewardship of the FFI and collaboration with the Ghadar Party encourages a reexamination of her biographical life within a transnational framework. It also emphasizes the significance of American women in India’s anticolonial movement launched from the USA, while situating her historical record within a rich transnational milieu of the early twentieth century. I argue that Smedley was crucial to the campaign against British colonialism launched by Indian students, workers and exiles in the USA. She became a crucial intermediary, linking a disparate and often contentious group of Indians in the USA in ways that quickly fell apart after she left the USA for work on Indian independence in Europe. Second, Smedley served as a conduit and translator between Indian revolutionaries and leftists within the USA who aligned with the causes of socialism, trade unionism, Bolshevism, Irish republicanism, suffrage and feminism. Harnessing her vast connections with leftists in New York and San Francisco, Smedley was able to develop the FFI as a hub of anticolonial transnationalism that united the Indian diaspora and linked India’s freedom struggle to other liberation projects of the early twentieth century. Finally, this essay adds to our understanding of anticolonial transnationalism by focusing on the actions as much as the ideas that informed solidarities created by the FFI. Much of the existing scholarship on USA and Indian connections in this period has emphasized either the significance of ideas and discourse in building imagined solidarities or the power of transatlantic surveillance and oppression at the hands of American and British powerbrokers. ¹⁴ The FFI certainly harnessed the power of ideas to establish transnational affinities between Americans and Indians, yet it was in the realm of practice and action that demonstrated the significance of the organization to the making of anticolonial transnationalism for India’s freedom.

Smedley’s Anticolonial Transnationalism as Idea and Action

Oh ye who love mankind, ye who dare oppose not only tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Freedom has been chased around the globe; receive ye, oh the captive, and let us prepare an asylum for mankind to dwell in. ¹⁵

The words of Thomas Paine appeared prominently on the letterhead of the first circular Smedley drafted on behalf of Indians facing deportation in the United States. Drawing upon the words bequeathed by one of America’s luminaries of anticolonial revolution, Smedley highlighted the central contradiction posed by the US policy to detain, prosecute, and deport South Asians for advocating for India’s independence from British colonial rule. She asked rhetorically readers in the USA if America was the land of ‘asylum for mankind’ or if had it sacrificed its core ‘principles’ by denying the right of South Asians to live and speak freely within its borders. Smedley announced the launch of the Hindu Defence Fund in February 1919 to fundraise for the legal representation of South Asians who ‘sacrificed themselves for liberty’ and sought the political asylum articulated by the founding fathers of the United States. ¹⁶

Within a month, in March 1919, Agnes Smedley transformed the Hindu Defence Fund into the FFI as a transnational hub for activism for India and the Indian diaspora in the United States. Based in New York City, the FFI mission was twofold: ‘to maintain the right of asylum for political refugees from India’ and ‘to present the case for the Independence of India’. ¹⁷ The latter goal revealed the necessity of organizers to persuade American public opinion to see India’s freedom struggle as relevant to their lives and worthy of their support. To this end, Smedley was an ideal candidate in the propaganda work directed at American audiences.

Smedley was keenly aware of her strengths and limitations as an activist for the Indian anticolonial cause. As an American, she was able to harness citizenship and, therefore, her constitutional rights to defend her freedom of speech and assembly, a protection unavailable to Indian migrants. She frequently used this as a cover for publishing anticolonial tracts penned by Indian revolutionaries. At the same time, in wartime America, Smedley and other US citizens were detained alongside their Indian counterparts for agitating against wartime allies like Britain and with the assistance of funds from adversaries like Germany. Equally as important, Smedley leveraged her American identity to build affinities between sympathetic leftists in the USA and India’s anticolonial cause. Smedley candidly reflected on her value as a conduit between the American public and the Indian revolutionary: ‘In working with them (Indians) I realized how American I was, how native of my soil, and how I could instinctively appeal to principles, traditions, and ideas of the American people, when they (Indians) could make but an intellectual appeal’. ¹⁸

Smedley’s FFI campaigned for the hearts and minds of Americans who could be moved to see affinities between India’s struggle for freedom and US anticolonial traditions stemming from the Revolutionary War. In her early pamphlets, she appealed to Americans who supported the cause of Ireland’s independence and the Bolshevik Revolution, arguing that Indians shared in their struggle for freedom yet unlike the Russians and Irish in the USA, Indians were ‘few in number, poor in financial resources, and without political backing’. ¹⁹ The FFI sought to change this condition by appealing to an audience of Americans for moral, political and financial support, drawing upon the revolutionary spirit of 1776 as anticolonial and not unlike India’s struggle against the British. She argued that America’s ‘proudest tradition’ was ‘granting refuge to the oppressed of other lands’, an idealism that should be extended to Indians in the USA who organized around the anti-colonial cause.

Smedley’s transnational appeal, linking American and Indian discourses, had several registers. Literary scholars have been attentive to the transnational dimensions of Smedley’s texts. Manan Desai argues that Smedley’s significance was in rendering Indian freedom ‘legible to American liberals and radicals’. Her rhetorical practice ‘refracted the cause of Indian freedom through the language of American nationalism, evoking the discourse of US history, national ideals, and sovereignty’. ²⁰ First, it sought to appeal to American anti-colonial tradition in the case of the revolution against the British monarchy, drawing parallels between the two struggles. She also sought to persuade readers that the colonized and the American proletariat shared a common struggle against capitalist classes and imperialist powers. As Desai points out, this was not a facile equivalency between race and class, but rather she situated workers and the colonized within the global and historical conditions imposed by ‘colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and empire’. ²¹

The FFI texts underscored this latter point, offering a strong connection between India’s independence and the wider world of leftists struggling against empire, capitalism and racism. Smedley candidly wrote in her autobiographical novel that her encounters with Indian revolutionaries ‘showed me that it (freedom struggle) was not only a historic movement of itself, but that it was part of an international struggle for emancipation—that it was one of the chief pillars in this struggle’. ²² Similar arguments about the centrality of Indian anticolonialism to the world informed the politics of many early twentieth-century mobilizations, including the Indian Ghadar Party, the Indian National Congress and the League against Imperialism. ²³ This appeal specifically called upon the intersectional solidarity of workers, women, and the colonized to support India, for it was the keystone to a future free of capitalist, imperialist and patriarchal oppression transnationally.

Another register for anticolonial transnationalism was strengthening the solidarity between Indian anticolonialism and American labour movements. In her appeals to American union organizers, Smedley called upon the historical narratives of the United States, which ‘since it gained its independence from Great Britain in 1776, has extended the principles of political asylum to political refugees from other countries who have fled from the wrath of tyrannical governments’. ²⁴ The imprisonment and deportation of Indians by American authorities at the urging of Britain is a ‘flagrant violation of the spirit of democracy involved in this denial of the right of asylum’. ²⁵

At the persuasion of the FFI, the American Federation of Labour (AFL) resolved to ‘enter a vigorous protest’ against the deportation of Indian men for expressing their desire for a ‘greater measure of freedom and democracy’. ²⁶ The measure also resolved to establish a committee to investigate the status of deportation cases and offer assistance within the powers of the AFL. Smedley was tireless in her efforts to establish contact with individual trade unions that were members of the AFL, requesting each union pass similar resolutions. Her work resulted in the passage of resolutions by hundreds of trade unions in big cities such as New York, Chicago and Detroit, as well as smaller South Bend (Indiana), Brownsville (Pennsylvania) and Wichita (Kansas). ²⁷

The anticolonial transnationalism of the FFI extended beyond the realm of ideas and included legal and political action. By the summer of 1919, Smedley’s FFI was at the centre of a network of lawyers, politicians, union leaders and civil liberty activists that circulated legal briefs, resolutions and propaganda to thwart government attempts to deport Indians who spoke out against British imperialism. She arranged for attorneys based in New York, San Francisco and Seattle to draft and share legal briefs on the South Asians up for deportation, serving as a hub that connected a network of FFI in the USA. In New York, Gilbert Roe represented the cases for deportees, as well as frequently travelling to Washington with Smedley to lobby Senators for the passage of immigration law that would better protect South Asian labourers and students who also advocated anticolonialism.

By 1920, Smedley and the FFI staged transnational anticolonialism in several high-profile events. The year began with the India Freedom Dinner, which convened a star-studded audience of influential leaders representing trade unionism, civil liberties, socialism, Bolshevism, Irish republicanism and women’s rights. Held on 28th February at the Central Opera House in New York City, the India Freedom Dinner staged anticolonial transnationalism. The headliner was Éamon de Valera, the well-known Irish revolutionary and politician who had been touring the USA in the hopes of shoring up American support for Ireland’s independence. The Irishman presented a case that added Ireland to the anti-colonial solidarities of Americans and Indians that had been the foundation of Smedley’s FFI. His speech opened with familiar ground by pointing to the American Revolution and George Washington specifically as he once wrote: ‘Patriots of Ireland, your cause is identical to mine’. He added rhetorically: ‘Were George Washington alive now, are we not certain that he would repeat these same words to the patriots of Ireland of this day, and who doubts that he would couple, were he here tonight, the patriots of India with the patriots of Ireland?’ ²⁸ Washington’s message ‘united the people of Ireland and the people of America in a closer bond of sympathy’, while de Valera believed his message at the Indian Freedom Dinner ‘will unite the people of India and the people of Ireland in a similar union of mutual understanding which will go on strengthening during the years’. ²⁹

While the dinner is often celebrated as a pivotal moment for Irish and Indian connections, the emphasis on Ireland elides the far more global and transnational content of the programme. ³⁰ Future Prime Minister of Egypt, Mohamed Mahmoud Pasha, left the USA on few days before the event, but he sent a message of transnational solidarity against colonialism that warranted attention by the audience, while other speakers represented Russia in the context of revolution and workers solidarity with the colonized. Taraknath Das drew connections between the plight of Indians and Chinese as the opium trade oppressed and drugged the ‘Asian nations’. ³¹ Smedley recalled the speech by the FFI’s attorney, Gilbert Roe, as the ‘best’ he had ever delivered and ‘would have swung any jury’ to side with the protection of Indians in the USA. Equally significant, the Ghadar Party on the west coast sent a strong message of support for the FFI, while taking to the podium to donating $200 as a symbolic gesture that Indians were united in solidarity from coast to coast.

The dinner was a remarkable success in fundraising thousands of dollars for the FFI, while establishing a benchmark for transnational connection among those who support anticolonialism in India and around the world. Smedley reported that every seat was taken in a hall that held 550 people, while ‘hundreds’ had ‘poured in’ after the dinner to hear the speakers. ³² She enthusiastically added in her report that ‘people literally stood up and yelled’ as speakers delivered ‘fine’ remarks. ³³ De Valera’s speech inspired many and served as content for a pamphlet by the FFI, ‘India and Ireland’ which was circulated to over three thousand members on Smedley’s mailing list. ³⁴

On the heels of the dinner event, Smedley and the FFI organized a representation of Indians to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City. Reporting to Ghadar Party colleagues on the West Coast, she described the Indian delegation as wearing ‘native costume and turbans’, while supportive American women also wore Indian clothing and ‘blackened their hair’. ³⁵ All carried flags and banners coloured orange and green, chanting for India’s independence. Despite the cultural appropriation of the American women by blackening their hair and wearing Indian costumes, the FFI otherwise had reached a high point in the transnational ties between India, Ireland and the USA.

The FFI also worked beyond the nexus of USA–India–Ireland solidarities. In July 1920, the FFI adopted a resolution on global events unfolding in the wake of the Great War and the Paris Peace Conference. As the great powers carved up the map of empires that were toppled because of war, the most controversial decisions for Indians were the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the breakup of the Caliphate. The FFI moved into action, opposing the ‘dismemberment of Turkey (and) virtual destruction of the independence of Persia’ as well as the ‘extension of imperialism of Great Britain and other powers in any part of the world particularly in Asia’. ³⁶ The FFI also articulated support for Gandhi’s non-cooperation programme as it sought solidarity with Indians protesting the break of Turkey’s Caliphate known in South Asian historiography as the Khilfat movement.

While the FFI never established direct contact with either Gandhi or other leaders based in India, the organization was critical in collecting news through diasporic revolutionary networks and disseminating anticolonial ideas for American and international audiences. For the FFI platform, Gandhi and the Ali brothers served as evidence of anticolonial discontent within South Asia, while Indians abroad and especially the Ghadar Party confronted the inequalities among the Indian diaspora in North America as well as their ongoing struggle from a distance for India’s freedom. The FFI also took a cue from anti-imperialists outside of Asia who argued that India’s manpower, arms and industrial output had bolstered the power of the British Empire around the world. India had to do more than join the Muslim world in protest, it also refused to deploy arms and troops on behalf of the British in places such as Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Persia, Afghanistan and China. ³⁷

December 1920 marked a climax in the transnational work of the FFI. In just under two years, Smedley launched a strong propaganda campaign reaching over 3,000 individuals, organizations and newspapers. She established a political network and pressure group that linked American labour to the Indian cause, while lawyers, Congressmen and union organizers pressured the USA government to protect Indians in the USA. She also extended the FFI’s work to the courtroom, raising funds and organizing a web of attorneys on the east and west coast who wrote briefs and litigated on behalf of Indians facing deportation for their anticolonial commitments. On 5 December, Smedley’s final act as secretary of the FFI was the launch of the organization’s first National Convention, held in the grand ballroom at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. The ‘friends’ who attended the convention were affiliated with a variety of causes beyond India and included trade union organizers, socialists, Bolsheviks, feminists, Irish Americans and civil liberties advocates. Each attendee paid a $5 registration fee to serve as a delegate to the FFI convention, with proceeds going to the ongoing work of the Indian anticolonialism in the USA. Among the highlights was a passionate speech by representatives of the Ghadar Party on the Pacific Coast, read aloud in their absentia, and the presentation of $100 for the FFI, further solidifying the solidarities between the two organizations committed to the freedom of Indians in the USA and the British Empire.

Anticolonial Women in India’s Freedom Struggle

There is no question that Smedley’s tenacity and networking skills were crucial to the FFI’s success, a point lost in anticolonial revolutionary histories that ignore the many allies, especially women, who worked for the cause. When she amicably resigned from the FFI to pursue a journalist and revolutionary career in Germany, the solidarities she carefully forged fell apart almost immediately. Only days after she orchestrated the very public twinning of the Ghadar Party and FFI missions at the National Convention, Smedley set sail for Europe and left her friend and colleague, Taraknath Das, in charge of the FFI. She promised to be in touch with news from abroad and share articles whenever possible. In her absence, however, Taraknath Das clashed with Ghadar Party leadership almost immediately, accusing some of his Pacific coast colleagues of borrowing money without repayment and attempting to ‘disrupt’ the work of the FFI and ‘harm’ his reputation by not keeping the New York office informed of the status of his membership application. Only a month after Smedley’s departure, in January 1921, the Ghadar Party secretary ended the organization’s formal relationship with the FFI, arguing that Das used the resources of the FFI for his personal benefit. In May, the New York executive council voted to remove the Ghadar Party advisory committee from the FFI, officially severing the ties that Smedley had worked so hard to build.

The abrupt rupture of the FFI and Ghadar Party read through the lens of Smedley’s archival record, reveals the importance of more than ideas about solidarity. The FFI was an organization dedicated to action in the political and legal arena, litigating in courtrooms and fundraising in hotel ballrooms. When the practice of anticolonial transnationalism was suspended in the wake of Smedley’s departure, the FFI’s networks fragmented, and the organization declined. At the same time, the centrality of American women to Indian revolutionary politics in the USA is noteworthy and yet silenced in scholarship on the men who dominated the movement. This essay demonstrates that it took committed individuals like Smedley whose personal and professional relationships were the bedrock of organizational solidarity. Likewise, Smedley’s outsider profile as an American woman working among and for Indian men afforded her a unique position as an intermediary among Indians and between Indians and Americans.

Smedley’s leadership of the FFI was only the beginning of her lengthy career as a transnational revolutionary for anti-colonialism. From 1920 to 1929, Smedley served in Berlin, supporting the anticolonial causes of the Indian Information Bureau and the League against Imperialism. She also worked as a journalist and published her first novel, which became an early and defining contribution to the surge of proletarian literature in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. She left Berlin for Shanghai in late 1929, embarking on twelve years in China as a journalist, propagandist, informant for the Communist International and author of five additional books before returning to the United States in the midst of the Second World War. When she died in 1950, Smedley’s ashes were sent to China where prominent leaders of the newly established People’s Republic of China oversaw her burial in the revolutionary cemetery in Beijing.

Despite her remarkable story, there remains a curious silence around women like Smedley who shaped anticolonial politics in a heady moment of global turmoil and revolution in the early twentieth century. Smedley joined a myriad of women who participated in anticolonial revolutionary activities across the world. These women published widely, demonstrated in the streets and served the cause by performing as wives and intellectual partners to their more famous husbands. While historians of Indian anticolonialism have recognized the transnational work of some women, Margaret Cousins ³⁸ and Bhikhaji Rustom Cama, for example, this brief history of Smedley encourages a more rigorous recovery of the many women who worked on the front lines and behind the scenes to dismantle colonialism in India and worldwide. There is no dearth of examples of influential women from Europe, North America and Asia who came to shape global revolutionary and anticolonial history as writers, activists, politicians, spies, stenographers, secretaries and typists. Smedley’s life history is both extraordinary as an accomplished writer and global sojourner, and yet representative of the many women whose activism was critical to the making of the twentieth-century world.