Manila and Punjab

Rishma Johal’s Ghadar study records Gulab Kaur working in Manila and continuing revolutionary activity after returning to India, including arranging housing in Lahore and distributing pamphlets.[1]

A contact point in Lahore

Savinder Pal’s account gives these activities a practical setting. Drawing on earlier histories, she describes Gulab as a contact at Mool Chand’s serai near Lahore railway station. Workers arriving from elsewhere presented their credentials to her before receiving information about leaders or meeting places. In this account, her knowledge helped control access to the movement’s concealed quarters. Pal also places her activities in Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur and Amritsar, and describes message delivery after arrests disrupted the network. The work involved accommodation, communication and deciding whom to admit, rather than only the public speeches through which revolutionary leadership is often remembered. Its details come through later historical writing; they are not presented here as a surviving diary written by Gulab herself.[2]

Remembering her in Bakshiwala

Sarika Sharma’s 2024 reporting follows a different part of the story: the reconstruction of Gulab’s local memory. Villagers who saw her photograph at a 1973 farmers’ gathering recognised Bakshiwala’s name but knew little about her. Their subsequent enquiries reached elders and former comrades, producing fragments rather than an uninterrupted biography. Sharma records later booklets, a village dharamshala dedicated to her, and public commemoration. A library in the village also carries her name. During the 2020 farmers’ mobilisation, a settlement at Tikri was named Ghadari Gulab Kaur Nagar; women from Bakshiwala lived there. Her name thus moved between historical investigation, village institutions and a new protest landscape. The same report distinguishes scarce documentation from novels, plays and other literary retellings. That changing remembrance brought the name of a revolutionary known from a fragmentary record into village institutions and a later campaign’s public geography.[3]

Sources & notes

Source records include access dates and, where known, limits on what was examined. Checks used AI assistance; independent human or specialist review has not been completed.

  1. Rishma Johal; in Interpreting Ghadar: Echoes of Voices Past, edited by Satwinder Kaur Bains; University of the Fraser Valley. The Ghadar Movement and its Impact on South Asian Canadian Women ↗ · Source date: 2013 copyright; acknowledgements signed May 2015 · Locator: Actual title/copyright, contents, acknowledgements; chapter 8 printed 123–124 / PDF 136–137; bibliography printed 138 / PDF 151. Accessed 2026-11-02.Selected chapter pages and the book’s title, copyright, contents and acknowledgements were inspected. The imprint evidence does not establish a simple filename-derived publication date.Return to Manila and Punjab, paragraph 1 ↑
  2. Savinder Pal; Central India Journal of Historical and Archaeological Research 4(13), January–March 2015. Emergence of Punjabi Women In National Struggle(1905–1914) ↗ · Source date: January–March 2015 · Locator: Signed paper printed 135–139 / PDF 68–70; Gulab paragraph printed 137 / PDF 69; notes 18–22 printed 139 / PDF 70; all three PDF leaves visually checked in retained proof-images. Accessed 2026-11-02.The signed paper and references were inspected, including rendered page labels. Earlier sources cited by the author were not all independently read.Return to A contact point in Lahore, paragraph 1 ↑
  3. Sarika Sharma; The Tribune. Rebel we forgot: Ghadar icon Gulab Kaur,100 years on ↗ · Source date: 2024-08-22 · Locator: Actual full opened article, web-reader lines 156–199; original village interviews,1973 photograph/research recollection, memorial/library and 2020 camp-naming passages. Accessed 2026-11-02.The complete original report was inspected. Selection emphasises reported local enquiries and commemoration; contradictory life dates and unverified anecdotes are excluded.Return to Remembering her in Bakshiwala, paragraph 1 ↑
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Record PH-PEO-0073 · English edition · human review not performed