THE TRUE STORY
A SOLDIER
WITHOUT A COUNTRY
The Ghadar came in the years before the war — Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim revolutionaries who crossed the Pacific to build a home while plotting to free the one they left behind. When America called for soldiers in 1917, they enlisted. When Sundar came back from the trenches in France — Sunny, his platoon called him, and the name stuck — he did what the law allowed. He petitioned for the citizenship he had earned in blood. The court didn't question his service. It questioned his race.
Set against the Ghadar movement — the Indian revolutionary party founded in California in 1913 — and the Supreme Court's 1923 ruling in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, THE PETITION follows Sundar, an Indian-American WWI veteran his brothers-in-arms called Sunny, whose land, citizenship, and love are all put on trial when the court decides he is not white enough to be American. Inspired by the men and women the ruling erased.
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923) — the Supreme Court ruled that he was not “white” in the common understanding, and therefore ineligible for naturalization. He did not surrender his uniform. He did not surrender his name. He lived the rest of his life as a non-citizen in the country he had fought to defend.