‘Your name is rebel’: A Berkeley walking tour brings alive a century of radical South Asian activism

Youngsters, armed with fierce poetry, seeking to change the world, are just what you’d expect at Berkeley, a California university town at the edge of Silicon Valley, with a reputation for social activism; a hub for protests against the Vietnam War and a prominent site for America’s civil rights movement.

“If they ask you who you are, tell them that your name is Rebel, that your occupation is to wipe out tyranny, that your work is to create tumult,” wrote one such revolutionary poet, a turbaned teenager from rural Punjab called Kartar Singh Sarabha, who sailed to America to study electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, over a hundred years ago.

He went on to join the Ghadar Party, a political outfit comprising Punjabi students and farmers in California, fighting Britain’s occupation of India. On his return home, Sarabha was arrested by the British and hanged in a Lahore prison.

A hundred and nine years after his execution, Sarabha’s poems can still be heard on the streets of Berkeley, recited with great gusto by Anirvan Chatterjee, a Silicon Valley techie who lives in Berkeley.

The performance is part of the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour that Chatterjee and his wife, Barnali Ghosh, a landscape...

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