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Chapter 1

Irish and Imperial Contexts

Despite the vast geographic distance between Ireland and India, the two countries share much in common experience. Imperialism, the demand for Home Rule, independence, partition and the incremental achievement of sovereignty are all common tropes in the stories of these former colonies of the British Empire. Decolonisation and the formation of so-called nation-states was, arguably, the most dominant historical force in the politics of the twentieth century. The movements that agitated for independence from kingdoms, empires and commonwealths in the period were led by men and women with a detailed knowledge of the regimes against which they were fighting. University education played a major role, not only in creating educated and socially conscious young agitators who contributed to the new politics of their day, but also in establishing networks where those interested in different but invariably related causes could meet and associate.

Home Rule had been the dominant force in Irish political life between 1885 and 1918. Loosely analogous with the Indian term Swaraj, ‘self-rule’, the linkages between the two movements are not merely linguistic. The Irish Home Rule MP Frank Hugh O’Donnell had founded the Indian Constitutional Association in 1882 and had established contact with the mainly student-led London Indian Society which had been founded a decade previously.1 O’Donnell’s interest in India was by no means half-hearted. Although it ultimately came to nothing, the most ambitious plan for an Irish–Indian alliance proposed that four Indians be selected to represent Irish constituencies in parliament at Westminster in a mutual pact that would see Irish MPs support all Indian legislation while the Indians would be obliged to provide representation to their constituents and to lend support to the Irish campaign for Home Rule.2

In 1913, a tumultuous year in Irish political life, a group of Indian students arrived in Dublin city. They enrolled at the Honourable Society of the King’s Inns to study for the Bar. Additionally, they enrolled at University College Dublin, a constituent college of the National University of Ireland. This group of Indian students appears to have been the first bulk influx of international students to the new university arriving from a single country to study a single subject. In the history of international education in Ireland, this constituted an important chapter.

The subject chosen by these Indian students was not arbitrary. For many years prior to their arrival, law had been the subject of choice for Indians travelling abroad for study and those who were interested in the Indian national cause. Although the historian Alex Tickell points to the politicising impact of study of the law due to its ability to expose the student to the disparity between British and Indian legal systems, Shompa Lahiri offers a more pragmatic reason for the popularity of legal study among Indian students.3 Lahiri states that ‘the popularity of law among Indian students [in Britain] was due to the privileged position English-trained barristers exercised over Indian-qualified pleaders’.4 Furthermore, Lahiri claims that ‘Bar examinations were even said to be easier than legal examinations in India.’5

In London, the National Indian Association estimated that there were more than 160 Indian students in British Universities by 1885, a number that had risen to 700 by 1910.6 Elsewhere, Lahiri has written that, owing to the fact that no formal census of Indian students in Britain was ever taken, figures can vary widely and accuracy in numbers remains elusive. Lahiri does, however, produce a table, working from the best available sources – the Journal of the National Indian Association and the Indian Student Department report which will be considered in greater depth later. From a base figure of 40–50 students in 1873 – more than a decade before Burton’s count on students begins – Lahiri sees the number of students growing slowly from 100 in 1880 to no more than 400 by the turn of the century. However, 700–800 in 1907 more than doubled to 1,700–1,800 by 1913 which represents a high water mark. In 1922 there were an estimated 1,500 students with numbers not returning to 1,800 until 1927.7

Underlining the importance of legal study to the Indian student community, Antoinette Burton observes that Indian students in London gravitated towards Bloomsbury. This neighbourhood was close to the British Library, the Inns of Court and Temple Bar.8 A Parliamentary Report from the India Students’ Department for 1913–14 estimates a total of 1,600 to 1,700 Indian students studying in British institutions in this period. In 1914, 609 of these were registered at the Inns of Court in London, meaning that law students accounted for almost two-fifths of all Indian students in Britain at that time.9

In his autobiography, V. V. Giri recalls how ‘Indian students preferred to study in Ireland in preference to England because there was neither a colour bar nor racial prejudice of any kind among the Irish, probably due to the adverse circumstances of their history.’10 Lending support to Giri’s impression that Ireland was a more welcoming destination for Indian students, the Indian Students’ Department’s report notes that, while the figure for law students entering London’s Inns of Court in 1913 was 609, ‘the number of new students who have joined the Inns in the last twelve months shows a sensible decline. At Dublin the number of Law students at the King’s Inns had risen on the same date to 17.’11 Thus there is some empirical basis for Giri’s claim that attitudes to studying in England were changing at this point and that, for a small number of student pioneers, Ireland was considered an attractive alternative.

On the existence of a racial and colour bar in England, the Indian Students’ Department also has information to offer. In a tone that fluctuates between the defensive and the patronising, the Indian Students’ Department reported that

Some Indian students not unnaturally expect that facilities for joining English institutions like the Universities … will be thrown open to them as a matter of right and are disappointed to find that so many formalities have to be complied with first … these institutions are independent bodies, with distinctive rules and traditions of their own, free to lay down any conditions they like for the admission of any class of students, and, it may be slow to act when asked to throw open to students from the other side of the world privileges that were once reserved for limited classes of English people.12

Admitting the inequality of the system, the Committee urged Indian students ‘to comply with the regulations imposed, while doing all that can be done to break down prejudice and to alter any conditions that are illiberal or unfair’.13

Alex Tickell also examines the moral dimensions of British perceptions of Indian students in the early twentieth century. He details how popular literature emphasised the mixture of fear and fascination about Indian life in the metropolis. Story lines frequently mixed themes of seditious plotting with moral panic over liaisons between white women and Indian men. Such topics were not merely the fodder for potboiler novellas, the same concerns about morality, assimilation and the excess of liberty which young Indian (male) students supposedly had in Britain led to the establishment of a committee of investigation into Indian students in Britain.14

The Lee Warner Committee reported to government in 1907 (although the findings were not made public until 1922) and suggested that Indian students be housed with ‘respectable’ English families so as to afford a degree of paternalistic guidance, oversight and control that would mitigate against the dangers of either political or sexual expression as the drafters behind this report saw it.15 The report recommended the establishment of an advisory board and a bureau of information for subcontinental students which resulted in the establishment of a new Indian Students’ Department within the India Office in London.16

The Indian Students’ Department was, however, found to be more of an agency of surveillance and control than of assistance to Indian students. By 1913, some of Britain’s Indian students were complaining that the India Office and its constituent Indian Students’ Department were actually at the centre of this ‘illiberal’ and ‘unfair’ regime of entry requirements and background checks to which Indian students in Britain were being subjected. Lacking other means of accrediting incoming Indian students, institutions of learning, hospitals and the Inns of Court began to require clearance from the India Office or the Indian Students’ Department on a student’s suitability. Local advisers had been appointed to work with the Indian students at Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities in 1913. However, Shompa Lahiri explains that the students made formal representations against these advisers and they were replaced by the universities’ own advisers as a result.17

Interestingly, within only a few months of Indian students having arrived in Dublin, the same sentiments were being expressed by figures within the Irish establishment in the pages of Dublin’s southern unionist newspaper, the Irish Times. An article published on 17 April 1914 questioned whether more stringent regulations as to the admittance of Indian students to Dublin’s King’s Inns would be a ‘wise and necessary measure’.18 Fearing that the recent tightening up of regulations in the Inns of Court in London would mean that ‘if there be any undesirable Indian students in these countries, they would tend, under the existing regulations, to find their way to Dublin’.19 It is revealing that the author of this piece was not concerned about academic standards at the King’s Inns slipping but rather about Indian ‘undesirables’ making Dublin a destination of choice.

It was not only academic interest and career advancement that saw a large proportion of Indian students in Britain and Ireland choose law. One of the objects of Indian nationalists who encouraged and sometimes funded young Indians to travel to the British Isles for study was to expose these young men first hand to the difference between the Indian and British legal systems.20 The Indian legal code included many laws which did not have a counterpart in Britain. Penalties and sentences under Indian law were markedly harsher than those which existed under the justice system at the centre of the empire in Britain.

Ireland and Scotland had, like India, region-specific legal codes. Part of the justification for the disparity of legal codes for regions within the United Kingdom was attributed to the religious distinctiveness both of Ireland, with its Catholic majority, and of Scotland with its predominance of Presbyterians, dissenters and non-conformists. Thus culturally sensitive areas like education and the licensing of liquor were given different treatment in England and Wales than they were under Irish and Scottish law. However, regional disparity in the law was also used to impose restrictions in Ireland which would not have been tolerated in Britain. Among these were restrictions on the ownership and importation of firearms – something paralleled by legislation in India – and the exception of Ireland from the territorial system which saw an overhaul of army reservists and militias in Britain in 1907. In both Ireland and India, coercion bills had been introduced following waves of political agitation, most notably following the 1857 India mutiny and the Irish Fenian uprising of 1867. Agrarian as well as political agitation were common to both Ireland and India. In Ireland, a raft of legislation was passed between 1870 and 1909 which offered both carrot and stick to the Irish tenant farmer transforming Irish land holdings from a tenanted model to the principle of owner-occupier. Despite being slow and relatively lacking in violence, the gradual resolution of the Irish land question precipitated the most far-reaching social revolution seen in modern Irish history.