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.
Chapter 3
Indian Law Students Arrive in Ireland
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
