Har Dayal was born at Delhi in 1884, took a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, and gave it up in 1907, writing that he could not take money from a government he intended to overthrow.
He taught at Stanford, lectured on anarchism and Buddhism in California, and became the first secretary of the Ghadar Party and the editor of its paper in 1913.
He was arrested by American authorities in 1914 on an anarchist charge, jumped bail, and went to Berlin, where he worked with the Indian Independence Committee. He later broke with that work and with revolutionary politics altogether.
His later years were spent in Sweden and England writing on philosophy and comparative religion. He took a doctorate at London in 1930 on the Bodhisattva doctrine.
He died in Philadelphia in 1939. His trajectory, from Oxford scholarship to armed revolution to a Sanskrit doctorate on Buddhist ethics, is one of the strangest careers in the whole independence period.
The Ghadar Party was founded on the Pacific coast in 1913 by Punjabi mill workers and farm labourers, with Sohan Singh Bhakna as its president. Har Dayal was the intellectual they brought in rather than the man who organised it, and the organising was done by Punjabis who had come to work.
He edited the Ghadar paper, printed in Gurmukhi and Urdu and posted to Punjabi communities across the world. Its circulation is what turned a set of grievances into an organisation.
He wrote Hints for Self Culture and an account of his years in Germany and Turkey, and his doctorate was on the Bodhisattva doctrine in Sanskrit literature. The man who edited a paper telling Punjabis to go home and fight ended in a London reading room writing about Buddhist ethics.
Ghadar Party records and American court records of 1914.