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
