subject for matriculation. This condition of entry lent a distinctive nationalistic character to the new university. Enthusiasm for the Irish language tended to be strong among those of a nationalist political persuasion. Before the radicalisation and transformation of Irish politics that occurred in the latter half of the First World War, the student body of UCD was, like the majority of Irish society, largely supportive of the peaceful and constitutional Irish Home Rule movement which boasted consistent control over roughly three-quarters of Ireland’s 103 seats in the House of Commons between 1885 and 1918. Among the new university’s staff the Professor of National Economics, Tom Kettle, and the Professor of Constitutional Law and the Law of Public and Private Wrongs, John Gordon Swift MacNeill, were both Home Rule MPs in this period.8
In spite of the prevailing dominance of orthodox nationalist politics in UCD, between 1913 and 1914, the fledgling university also produced new militant movements. While ideologically loyal to the Home Rule tradition, these individuals and groups inaugurated a radical departure from constitutionalism in their tactics. In November 1913, Eoin MacNeill, Professor of Early (including Mediaeval) Irish History, became the leader of a newly founded paramilitary organisation, the Irish Volunteers. The force was pledged to the defence of Irish Home Rule. In April of 1914, MacNeill’s initiative was followed up by his colleague, Agnes O’Farrelly, lecturer, and later professor, of Irish at UCD. O’Farrelly was a leading founding member of Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary to the Irish Volunteers. Both the men’s Irish Volunteers and the women’s Cumann na mBan trained their members in the use of arms. Although the university itself was keen to show its support for the war effort after Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, individual members of the college staff were heavily involved in more radical politics. In April 1916, an insurrection broke out in Dublin and an Irish Republic was proclaimed; the University found itself in the unusual situation of having to formulate a response to the fact that several of its staff had been arrested for their role in the rebellion.9 Among the leadership of the rebellion was Thomas MacDonagh, assistant lecturer in English at UCD and commandant of the 2nd Dublin Battalion of the Irish Volunteers. As a signatory of the document proclaiming the Irish Republic and as commander of one of the rebel garrisons, MacDonagh was among fourteen executed in Dublin following the surrender of the self-proclaimed provisional government.
As to the student body in UCD, taking the figures for 1915, there were 946 students in total: 722 men and 224 women. The largest faculties were Arts-Science-Commerce, which had an enrolment of 437, and Medicine which – even with the diminution of student numbers during the First World War – had 292 students.10 The Law faculty in 1915 numbered sixty-six students of whom only one was a woman, women being ineligible to membership of the Honourable Society of King’s Inns at the time thus precluding them from practicing law as barristers.11 Of these sixty-six, thirty-four were studying for a full degree course in Law at UCD while the other forty-nine, including twenty-four Indian students, were attending lectures at UCD for the period of a year in order to fulfil the requirements of the King’s Inns which conferred and governed membership of the outer and inner Bars of Ireland.12 This, the highest year of Indian enrolment at UCD, saw Indian law students constituting more than a third of all law students and just less than half of the ‘other’ law students at UCD.
These Indian students also undertook legal studies in order to qualify for the Bar at the Honourable Society of the King’s Inns, Dublin. A much older institution than UCD, the Honourable Society of King’s Inns had been established in 1541 and had moved to the site it presently occupies on Constitution Hill in the 1790s. Up until 1867, the King’s Inns catered for barristers, solicitors, attorneys and law students. However, from 1868 onwards, it only represented the barrister profession and students wishing to be called to the Bar.13 Up until 1885, students studying to be called to the Irish Bar were obliged to reside at one of the four English inns of court at London as a prerequisite to qualification.14
In a final note, while this restriction had been lifted prior to the period during which Indian students travelled to Dublin to study at the King’s Inns, one other major reform was yet on the horizon. Whereas both UCD and TCD were open to female students by 1913, the King’s Inns maintained a strict gender bar. The Benchers, who acted as the governing body of the King’s Inns, were resistant on this front. Ultimately, external legislation changed the regime at the Inns and the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act (1919) facilitated the entry of women students. The first woman to be called to the Irish Bar was Frances Christian Kyle, who was called in November 1921.15 While Indian students were arriving at King’s Inns in the autumn of 1913, the Irish Womens’ Reform League wrote to the Benchers requesting that a deputation be received to appeal to the Society to admit women. The Benchers informed the Under-Treasurer of the Society to acknowledge the correspondence received ‘and to inform the League that the law does not allow women to become students or Barristers-at-Law, and that as no good purpose would be served by receiving a deputation the Benchers must decline according to the request’.16 At a time when the first large-scale influx of Indian students was occurring at the King’s Inns, it is interesting to see the resistance of the Society to a further diversification of the student body.
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
