Pub. Date: October 2025
Publisher: MacMillan Publishers
Format: Hardcover, 368pp
ISBN: 9780374609672

Let My Country Awake

Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj

On the eve of World War I, a band of Indian immigrants living in the United States hatched an audacious plan to liberate their homeland from British colonial rule.

From a headquarters in San Francisco, the Ghadar movement recruited thousands of laborers and academics via its underground newspaper and sent hundreds of freedom fighters across the Pacific in an attempt to smuggle guns and seditious literature into India.

With the world descending into global war, the movement quickly became a geopolitical flash point abetted by German spies and tracked by Britain’s intelligence service, each side keen to undermine a wartime adversary, all while the US Department of Justice desperately tried to figure out what was going on. The result was one of the longest trials to date, culminating in a courtroom gun battle that shocked the nation.

Scott Miller’s Let My Country Awake tells the story of this overlooked moment in Indian—and American—history, offering a new perspective on the struggle against colonialism while raising a question that resonates still: What does it mean to be American?

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  • "Scott Miller tells a compelling and little-known story about India's freedom struggle―one involving a brave band of students and workers in America. This is a fascinating prism through which we see the wartime machinations of Germany, Britain, and the United States―and it all comes together in a made-for-Hollywood trial."

    ―Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's GPS and author of Age of Revolutions

  • "In Let My Country Awake, Scott Miller has written a true-life international spy thriller that is both an education in a forgotten corner of American history and a compelling adventure filled with a well-crafted cast of larger-than-life characters who jump off the page. One improbable—yet true—event dramatically follows another, and the result is a riveting, page-turning read."

    —Howard Blum, New York Times bestselling author of In the Enemy’s House and Dark Invasion

  • "Scott Miller’s Let My Country Awake is an audacious work of history which explores a now mostly forgotten effort by a group of freedom fighters to liberate India from colonial rule. Spanning multiple continents, the story ignites with gun-smuggling, espionage, and an explosive courtroom shootout—complicating our understanding of the fallout from the colonial world order during World War I. This original and well-researched work is a powerful reminder that today’s immigration battles in the U.S. have long and tangled roots. Let My Country Awake makes a profound contribution to our understanding of the early twentieth century."

    —Julia Flynn Siler, New York Times bestselling author of Lost Kingdom and The White Devil's Daughters