Working Title
The Untitled Ghadar Documentary
Feature Length Documentary
Genre: Hybrid documentary - interlaceing verité footage with reenactments and theatrical presentations.
Logline: Lit with Punjabi folk music, poetry, and dance, we immerse in the artistic journey of Bay Area choreographer Joti Singh—re-imagining and reclaiming her great-grandfather’s legacy and the Bay Area-based Ghadar revolutionaries, who battled racist laws and British rule in India, expressed through diasporic voices of those preserving this lost history.
Project Stage: Early Production
Expected Completion Date: June 2026
Joti Singh, a first-generation Punjabi American from Georgia, ventured into choreography and dance grounded in her ancestors' culture. She felt unmoored in her identity until she uncovered her family’s fascinating ancestral journey to America.
In the 1910s, her great-grandfather, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, landed in San Francisco and joined the Ghadar Party, a revolutionary group plotting an armed uprising against British rule in India. This untold chapter of San Francisco and Desi-American history remains unexplored, even within the diaspora.
The Ghadar Movement is deeply tied to early 1900s South Asian migration, particularly Punjabi Sikhs, to California. Fleeing British atrocities, they faced racial discrimination and violence, fueling their anti-colonial sentiments. They founded the Ghadar Party along with a newspaper, Ghadar, as channels for inciting mutiny in India. As 8,000 expatriates returned to spark the uprising, British spy networks thwarted the plan. The United States' neutral stance in world politics, which allowed Ghadar members to organize freely, shifted when America joined World War I as a British ally.
Inspired by her findings, Joti became an activist artist and is now determined to immortalize the Ghadar Party's legacy through her upcoming show, Ghadar Geet. As she queries her mother, delves into archives, interrogates historians, and excavates history, she transforms this knowledge into a theater piece, melding history, dance, poetry, and music spanning Indian folk to hip hop to amplify the Ghadar Party’s legacy.
This hybrid documentary engages Joti's production as a narrative thread as she researches, re-imagines, and re-creates a critical event in Ghadar history: San Francisco’s 1917 Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial, which led to the imprisonment of many of its members.
Countering dominant historical narratives that branded Ghadar freedom fighters as criminals and seditionists, the film reclaims their story through experts, descendants, and South Asian voices, bringing key figures and events into sharp focus.