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Chapter 2

Changing Attitudes to Indians in Britain, 1907–13

University education in Ireland had been radically overhauled in 1908 with the passing of the Irish Universities Act. A constituent college of the new National University of Ireland, the reconstituted UCD opened its doors to its first students in 1909. However, word of Ireland’s great university reforms is unlikely to have been the reason why Indian students were beginning to look beyond the more established English universities for their education. A very different event in 1909 appears to have signalled the alteration of conditions faced by Indian students in the British Isles.

On 1 July 1909, while attending an evening’s entertainment for the National Indian Association at the Imperial Institute, South Kensington, London, Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, a senior official in the British Government of India, was shot and instantly killed by a Punjabi student studying engineering at London University, Madan Lal Dhingra. In the course of the attack, Dhingra also shot Dr Cawas Lalcaca, a Parsi physician, who intervened in a failed attempt to save Wyllie. The assassination caused panic in British administrative and security circles. Political assassination was not altogether uncommon in India at the time but the fact that Wyllie had been gunned down in London rather than Lahore was what shocked the British authorities. Attitudes towards Indians in Britain, especially students, soured dramatically after this point. Even before the assassination of Wyllie, Indian students had begun to be viewed with increasing suspicion by Britons.

Alex Tickell notes that a fellow student who turned police informer at Dhingra’s trial claimed that the primary target at the Imperial Institute assassination may not have been Wyllie but rather William Lee-Warner. Lee-Warner was a seasoned colonial administrator, the former political and secret secretary at the India Office in London and, since 1902, member of the Secretary of State for India’s Council.1 Crucially, in 1907, Lee-Warner had chaired a committee established to inquire into the position of Indian students in Britain. The Lee-Warner Committee had interviewed Indian students in a variety of British universities in the course of its report.

There is an interesting Irish dimension to the case of Madan Lal Dhingra. Following Wyllie’s murder, Irish support for the assassin came from the perhaps unlikely source of a radical bi-lingual nationalist–feminist newspaper, Bean na hÉireann (Woman of Ireland). In its July 1909 issue, the paper carried an article among its editorial notes entitled ‘The Indian Assassination’.2 The article aligned the plights of India and Ireland.3 The following month the magazine lent further support to Madan Lal Dhingra:

Madar Lal Dinghra [sic], who shot Sir Curzon Wylie [sic] in London, is to be duly hanged on the 10th of August.

The assassination of the officials who exploit India and the Indian people for the enrichment of England is an eventuality that the English had not reckoned on. For the Indian to retaliate when he was kicked like a dog is unthinkable. Now that Dinghra [sic] has retaliated on behalf of his country all England shrieks ‘murderer’, and he will be hanged by the neck. The epithet has been ever ready to her lips when any man has dared to pay her back in kind for the ruin she has brought on his people. The same hypocritical cry swept England when Burke and Cavendish were killed in the Phoenix Park as when Wylie [sic] was killed in London.4

By linking the 1882 Phoenix Park murders to Wyllie’s assassination, the author was making a very clear point about the justification of retaliatory acts of violence among colonially oppressed peoples. Continuing along these lines, the anonymous author then added the plight of the Boers to a litany of imperial abuses:

The England that has brought famine and death to untold thousands in India, that slew in her African Concentration Camp twenty thousand Boer women and children, that organised a famine in Ireland whereby two millions of our people died by the roadside of hunger and disease – this pious, Christian hypocrite, England, without pity – without shame, with nothing but her blind and boundless greed and lust for power – with her canting pretence to religion, is ever ready to brand with the foul name of murderer men who have the courage to stand against her and sacrifice their lives for the people. She has sown Dragon’s Teeth and they have sprung up armed men. If political assassination be crime, the guilt belongs to those who provoke it rather than to the man who strikes back in an effort to stay the ruin of a nation. If Curzon Wylie [sic] was murdered [,] England and not Dinghra [sic] was the murderer. It is at her door the responsibility must be left. She is reaping where she has sown, and the harvest is of her own creation.5

Returning from Dhingra to the common experience of oppression, the author questioned not only the causes of famines but the legitimacy of government more generally before giving a final justification for Dhingra’s actions:

India, like Ireland, is systematically plundered and oppressed. When its population is inconveniently large it always happens to be swept by State-aided famine, and thousands die of hunger. Indian leaders are deported, charges are invented by perjured police, national papers are suppressed and their editors imprisoned. The strong ones of the nation are captured or killed and the weak are either purchased or intimidated. The country is given over to a horde of English officials who drain the life blood of the nation. If an Indian protests it is ‘sedition’, if he retaliates it is ‘murder’. The same system worked in Ireland. We are familiar with its every detail. Yet we who suffer under the same blighting influence refer in our newspapers to an Indian Patriot as ‘this unhappy and mis-guided man’ and his action as ‘fearful crime’. Surely Ireland is not going to be the contemptible echo of the arch hypocrite among nations. Rather than condemnation of Dinghra [sic] or any patriot Indian, Ireland should stretch hands of sympathy to help the Indian groaning under the same tyranny as ourselves, and we should pray and work that we like India may have men and women who are ‘proud to have the honour of laying down their lives for the cause of their country’.6

Signed ‘F.’, the case that advanced political opinion in Ireland looked sympathetically upon Dhingra’s actions was thus dramatically stated.

The following month, Bean na hÉireann began with a long article justifying physical force as a political tactic juxtaposed incongruously with its monthly ‘The woman with a garden’ column before offering further commentary on Irish reactions to Dhingra’s execution. In the ‘Editorial Notes’ section of the August edition, the following appeared:

Our complaint last month about the attitude of the Irish Press and the Irish people towards Madar Lal Dinghra [sic], the Indian patriot, was premature. The Press indeed has preserved the same neutrality, and discharged its duty to its own satisfaction by advising the Government how to prevent such incidents in future. The Irish people, however, have shown that they have a bigger conception of the nobility of this young man’s sacrifice and the spirit that prompted the deed is worthy of honour in Ireland. On the day following his execution large placards bearing the following words appeared: –

IRELAND HONOURS

MADAR LAL DINGHRA [SIC]

Who was proud to lay down his life for his country.

In Dublin at least six beautiful floral wreaths appeared on our own patriots’ monuments, and holy spots like St. Catherine’s Church where Robert Emmet gave up his young life. We congratulate our country-men and women – for certainly those wreaths were the work of feminine fingers – who thought it fitting to honour Dinghra [sic] by decorating the monuments of our own mighty dead, who were ‘proud to lay down their lives for their country’.7

Helena Molony, the editor of Bean na hÉireann, recalled her involvement in the Dhingra solidarity campaign to the Bureau of Military History with remarkable clarity forty years after the fact. In recounting her involvement in Inghínídhe na hÉireann (the Daughters of Ireland) and Bean na hÉireann, Molony explained:

… about this time a young Indian revolutionary, Madar [sic] Lal Dhingra, was captured and hanged for complicity in the assassination of a prominent Indian police official. From the dock, when sentenced, he declared, ‘I am proud to lay down my life for my country’.

We got printed immediate1y, and fly-posted through the City, posters stating ‘Ireland honours Madar Lal Dhingra, who was proud to lay down his life for his country’. There was nothing insular about Inghínídhe’s political outlook. We reproduced this poster in ‘Bean na hEireann’, and it resulted in the loss of some advertisements and subscriptions.8

It is interesting that Molony recalled Dhingra’s trail as having included a patriotic speech from the dock as this is a trope which carries much significance in the Irish revolutionary tradition going back to Robert Emmet. Emmet had delivered a celebrated oration from the dock prior to his execution in 1803. The other interesting point about Molony’s recollection of the episode is that the stance taken by Bean na hÉireann on Dhingra resulted in a loss of revenue for the paper. Evidently advocacy of political assassination was not generally in vogue in the Ireland of the time.

A separate witness statement in the Bureau of Military History by P. S. O’Hegarty, a prominent republican and, in these years, an important member of the London Gaelic League, adds a further layer to the story of Irish nationalist women’s interest in the cause of Madan Lal Dhingra. O’Hegarty suggests a potential point of contact between Irish and Indian nationalists resident in London at the home of a Mrs Dryhurst. Mrs Dryhurst was the wife of an official in the British Museum and, to quote O’Hegarty, she was ‘sympathetic with “any good cause at all”, in Thomas Davis’ sense, and especially the small oppressed nations’. Mrs Dryhurst was, likewise, a member of the Gaelic League in London and O’Hegarty recollects that ‘it is seldom that there was not a political refugee from the Baltic, from India, or from Georgia, in the house. And she was in everything Irish helping in everything, running little concerts, lending her drawing-room for rehearsals of plays, and so on.’9 In searching for the elusive meeting places of Indian and Irish nationalists, Dryhurst’s home in London is an obvious contender. However, Dryhurst’s involvement with the Dhingra case goes much deeper than her role as a radical salon-host. O’Hegarty states:

I do not recollect the year but it might have been round about 1908. An Indian, Nader Lal Dhingra [sic], had shot a British official in England and had been convicted and was awaiting execution in, I think Brixton Jail, or at any rate somewhere in South London. Mrs. Dryhurst got the notion of rescuing him and asked us to bear a hand. She had it all planned. She had discovered that, every day about the same time, Dhingra was taken out somewhere near the prison along a road which was fairly unfrequented, and accompanied by only two warders who appeared to be unarmed, in a slow-moving vehicle. The idea was to hold the party up with two empty revolvers which she had procured somewhere and get Dhingra well away before releasing the warden, and we were asked to find six boys and two girls for the purpose, the girls to walk with the boys so that it would not look like a party. All arrangements were made, and the thing looked feasible enough on Mrs. Dryhurst’s premise, but a couple of days before the execution – the rescue was planned for the day before – Dhingra was moved to another prison, and there was nothing to be done. We had such faith in Mrs. Dryhurst that we went into this at her request without any attempt to check up on the particulars which she disclosed and on which the plan was based.10

On top of her Indian sympathies, Mrs Dryhurst was involved in the early days of Bean na hÉireann, thus providing another tangible link between the paper and the case of Dhingra. The Dhingra case sent a clear signal, especially to Indians in London, that Irish advanced nationalists, especially or even exclusively suffragists at this point, found common cause in the plights of Ireland and India. In the case of Dryhurst, these activists were even willing to work outside the law in offering practical assistance to Indian political activists. In a history in which so few concrete links can be established, the case of Irish nationalist-feminists and their solidarity with Madan Lal Dhingra provides the most likely avenue of approach between Irish and Indian activists in London at a time when Britain was becoming a cold house for incoming Indian students. It would seem this type of connection may well have played a role in the decision of Indian law students to travel to Ireland to undertake their studies four years later in 1913.

The other strong Indo-Irish connection at around this time centred on Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who came to the attention of W. B. Yeats in 1912. Yeats was captivated by Tagore’s writings which he read in translation ‘in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close [the manuscript] lest some stranger would see how much it moved me’.11 Yeats championed Tagore, writing a laudatory introduction to his collection of poems published by the India Society in London in the autumn of 1912. In his exploration of the Yeats–Tagore relationship, Malcolm Sen records that Tagore’s collection was reprinted a dozen times within a year. Yeats’ introduction, notes Sen, is ‘exemplary of western conceptions of the Orient’.12 Arguably what Yeats found in Tagore’s writings was an apparent spiritual simplicity reminiscent of what he had ‘discovered’ in the west of Ireland years previously. In any case, Yeats’ patronage was instrumental to Tagore being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, a full decade before Yeats himself was bestowed with the same honour. Given the international prominence which the award gave to Tagore in 1913, this is just one other possible reason why Ireland may have sparked the interest of prospective law students either at home or lingering in London and contemplating their choices of institution. In a concluding note on Tagore and Ireland, in 2011, a bust of the poet was presented to the Irish government by the government of India and was put on display in Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green.13 Perhaps appropriately, the site chosen for the bust is directly across the road from the original premises of UCD where Giri and his Indian classmates would have studied almost a century beforehand.