Indian Law Students in Dublin,1913–16: Solidarity and Encounter Between Indian and Irish Advanced Nationalists

Abstract

This article considers the encounter between Irish and Indian advanced nationalists through the prism of a group of university students who came from India to Ireland to study law between 1913 and 1916. Before considering their interaction with Irish politics and the inspiration they drew from it, it explores the possible push and pull factors that may have drawn nationally minded Indian law students to come to Ireland in the years before 1913. It establishes for the first time the administrative and political reasons why Dublin became an attractive city for some Indians who wished to study law in Ireland rather than England. Exploring the life of Indian law students in Dublin in the years before the Easter Rising of 1916, the article focuses on V. V. Giri, at the time just one of the small groups of Dublin’s Indian law students studying between the King’s Inns and University College Dublin. Giri later became the fourth president of India, but his prominence here is that he left a memoir of his time in Ireland. The memoir allows for an exploration of a history that is otherwise largely forgotten and of which only the slightest traces remain in Irish and British archival sources, making this as much a study of the process of historical reconstruction as it is of its subjects.

Memoir and History: Substantiating Memoir Through Archives

In 1976, Varahagiri Venkata Giri (1894–1980) published My Life and Times, Volume 1. ¹ Although he did not live to publish a second volume, he captured within it a vivid account of his student days in Ireland entitled ‘Irish Days’. Were it not for this text, it would almost certainly have been impossible to piece together the stories of the fifty Indian students who enrolled at the King’s Inns and at University College Dublin to study law between 1913 and 1917. Although best known nowadays as the fourth president of India, 1969–74, V. V. Giri’s career in Indian national life spanned the period from the 1920s up until his death in Chennai in 1980. As a labour leader, Giri led some of the most successful pre-independence campaigns in Indian trade unionism. He appears to have applied much of what he witnessed in Dublin to his own trade union organizing in India. He organized a strike of transport workers, saw them through a lockout, and, unlike Dublin in 1913–14, successfully negotiated good terms for them and successfully ended the lockout. Coupled with his role in the Quit India movement, much of Giri’s activities in India appear to have been informed or inspired by events he witnessed in Dublin between 1913 and 1916. Giri’s arrival in Dublin in August 1913 coincided with the lockout of members of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, an event that, to this day, remains the single largest labour dispute in Irish history. Near the end of his time in Ireland, Giri witnessed, at first hand, the 1916 Rising and especially its repressive aftermath, to which he himself fell victim when he was deported from Ireland at the end of June 1916.

Giri’s memoir is the most complete surviving account of the Indian student experience in pre-revolutionary Dublin. His memoir also includes a note that all biographers dread: under surveillance by officers from Indian Political Intelligence, a forerunner of Britain’s MI5, Giri recalls how ‘On another occasion my diaries narrowly escaped discovery. Later I destroyed them myself and resolved to avoid this habit of introspection on paper, however commendable, I had been taught, it was’. ² In the absence of such contemporary reflective sources, Giri’s memoir takes a natural prominence in reconstructing the lived experience of Ireland’s Indian students. Although Giri takes the leading role in this study, to position him front and centre among the Indian law students of Dublin is to enter into a retrospective reading of history. While in Dublin, Giri’s greatest achievements were yet in front of him and he represented just one among fifty Indian students who studied between the King’s Inns and University College Dublin between 1913 and 1917.

This study is as much one of students and migration as it is about Irish–Indian relations. The issues and problems it considers echo other cases of student activism and the difficulties of assimilation and isolation faced by minority ethnic student communities across European cities in the same period. The longer history of Indian students in Britain and Ireland offers revealing insights, especially into the attitudes of host communities where everything from housing, moral crises, inter-racial relations, political subversion, intelligence gathering and political violence come under the spotlight. These same tropes emerge in Goetz Nordbruch’s study of Arab students in Weimar Germany and Thomas Weber’s Our Friend ‘the Enemy’: Elite Education in Britain and Germany Before World War I. ³ Similar issues can be found in older studies on the experience of African students in the USSR, Filipino students in 1940s Chicago, and even the reaction to American (male) students in Paris during and directly after the First World War. ⁴

The students under consideration here are those who came to study at University College Dublin (UCD), an institution then in its infancy. In 1908, the Universities (Ireland) Act established a new National University of Ireland, replacing the old Queen’s Colleges of Cork and Galway as well as Dublin’s Royal University of Ireland, alma mater to James Joyce and other notable alumni of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Separately, the Act established a second new university, Queen’s University Belfast, which descended from the former Queen’s College in that city. In so doing, this instituted an element of proto-partition into Irish higher education, separating the university in Belfast from the other former Queen’s Colleges and drawing a line of educational demarcation between Belfast and the three southern provinces more than a decade before the partition of Ireland.

In 1915, UCD had an enrolment of 946 students: 722 men and 224 women. The largest faculties were arts, science and commerce, which had 437 students, followed by medicine with 292 students. ⁵ The law faculty in 1915 numbered 66 students, of whom only one was a woman. Women were ineligible for membership of the Honourable Society of King’s Inns at the time, thus precluding them from practising law as barristers. ⁶ The only Indian students in UCD at this time were law students, although some of these law students took classes in arts subjects. The first Indian students enrolled in UCD and the King’s Inns in 1913 when a group of 13 arrived. By 1915, out of 66 UCD law students, 24 were Indian. ⁷ Students of King’s Inns attended lectures at UCD for one year in order to fulfil the requirements of the Honourable Society of King’s Inns, which conferred and governed membership of the outer and inner bars of Ireland. ⁸

One of the objects of Indian nationalists who encouraged and sometimes funded young Indians to travel to the British Isles to study was to expose these young men first-hand to the difference between the Indian and British legal systems. ⁹ The Indian legal code included many laws which did not have a counterpart in the British legal system and 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, something which Alex Tickell has described as ‘reinforc[ing] the legal exceptionalism of colonial government’. ¹⁰

Ireland and Scotland, like India, had region-specific legal codes. Apart from their history as three separate kingdoms that had incrementally been brought together under one crown, a further reason for the disparity of legal codes within the three constituent kingdoms of the United Kingdom was the religious distinctiveness of Ireland, with its Catholic majority, and Scotland with its high number of Presbyterian, dissenting and non-conformist subjects. Thus, culturally sensitive areas like education and the licensing of liquor were given different treatment under Irish and Scottish law than they were in England and Wales. 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 Indian mutiny and the Fenian uprising of 1867 in Ireland. ¹¹ Agrarian and political agitations were common to both Ireland and India.

Flying the Indian Kite in Dublin: Madan Lal Dhingra

In his memoir, Giri glosses over several points of detail, chief among them the reasons he chose Ireland, the King’s Inns and the National University of Ireland at University College Dublin as his destination. He explains that the decision to study in Dublin was made with his parents while he was still in India, but he also notes that he lived in London, on Talbot Road in Bayswater, for four months during 1913 ‘acclimatising’ before making the trip across to Dublin. ¹² This suggests the choice of institution and city may have been made after Giri arrived in the United Kingdom.

Obliquely, Giri explained that ‘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’. ¹³ However, his biographer, G. S. Bhargava, posits a different theory: that there were many Andhra students studying in Dublin at the time and ‘[f]or a youth unused to the ways of western civilisation congenial company was naturally necessary under an alien sky’. ¹⁴ Of the twelve Indian students who travelled with Giri to commence their studies in August 1913, seven of the eleven for whom records can be traced were indeed from the Andhra region. However, this still does not explain the push or pull factors which made Dublin an attractive destination for them. Dublin’s earliest identifiable Indian student (1905–6) was Gnanam Dhanaswami Pillai who listed his previous place of education as Madras University. A simple chain migration theory as posited by Bhargava simply is not borne out by the numbers and the chronology. The cohort which came to Dublin in the late summer of 1913 was the first group of Indian students who travelled to Ireland to study; they came together, they came via England, and they all studied the same subject. This indicates block migration rather than chain migration. Prior to their arrival, there was only a tiny handful of disparate Indian students in Ireland and they did not map onto the same institutional and subject links as the group which arrived in the late summer of 1913.

The year 1913 saw the arrival of a sizeable group of Indian law students to Dublin because of reforms initiated in England the year previous, pushing some students from London. In 1912, the India Office had established a new department: the Indian Students Department. It was headed by Charles Edward Mallet, a former Liberal MP who had been unseated in the December 1910 General Election. The establishment of the new department coincided with the changes to admission policies for Indian students at the Inns of Court and other English institutions of higher education. It is unclear if the department drove the changes or if it merely marks a period where both the India Office and institutions, including the Inns of Court, resolved to further regulate and restrict Indian students in England. Where England started, Ireland was soon to follow, but, in 1913, a loophole existed whereby it was easier for an Indian law student to be admitted in Dublin than it was in London.

In April 1914, the Irish Times outlined the changes recently effected in the British system and how admission procedures were to be amended in Dublin’s King’s Inns to bring English and Irish admissions procedures for Indian law students into alignment:

The enforcement of more stringent regulations as to the admittance of Indian students to the King’s Inns is, we believe, a wise and necessary measure. We do not mean that these students should be in any way unduly hampered in fulfilling their ambition to be called to the Bar. But it had become impossible to allow the old and rather lax regulations to continue. When Indian students first began to visit the British Isles, in order to be called to the Bar, they did not penetrate to Ireland. After a time, however, the Inns of Court in London found it necessary to pass new rules, of which a most important effect was that every Indian candidate for admission must produce a certificate of good character from a British official in his native district. They also demanded the passing of certain examinations. One result has been the that a large number of Indian students have within the last year come over to Ireland, and have been admitted to the King’s Inns here, where the regulations were less strict. The great majority, possibly all, of these Indian students are, no doubt, perfectly proper persons to be called to the Irish Bar. We have no wish to exclude them or to put unnecessary difficulties in their way. But it is clear that, if there be any undesirable Indian students in these countries, they would tend, under the existing regulations, to find their way to Dublin. The King’s Inns cannot afford to take the risk. … The standards of the Irish and English Inns of Court have always been similar … Consequently, the new regulations which are to come into force next year, were necessary and inevitable. We do not believe that they will impose any real hardship upon Indian students of good character and education. ¹⁵

While the Irish Times suggested there were large numbers of Indian students flocking to Dublin, the number admitted to the King’s Inns in 1913 was just thirteen. For context, it was estimated that there were 1,700 Indian students in the United Kingdom in 1912. ¹⁶ Although the decision was made in April 1914 to bring Dublin’s King’s Inns’ admission criteria in line with the Inns of Court in London, the display of patriotism shown by Indians when the First World War broke out caused the Benchers of the King’s Inns to soften and the rollout of new regulations in Dublin was postponed until January 1916. ¹⁷

Writing about the proposed changes to admission criteria at the King’s Inns, one Indian law student in Dublin, P. H. Gupta, wrote how ‘King’s Inns is an independent institution and need not imitate her sister Inns at London, whose attitude towards Indians is based purely on prejudice’. ¹⁸ Gupta went on to say that ‘Nowhere in the British Isles is the Indian student better treated than in Ireland. Here he finds a friendly atmosphere, and he never ceases to draw analogies between Ireland and his mother country’. ¹⁹ Thus, both the relative humanity of the Irish benchers and the wider atmosphere Indian students found in Dublin made it a welcome educational destination.

It is clear from a survey of Irish newspaper coverage of Dublin’s Indian student population that the majority of them were indeed loyal and law abiding. During the 1916 Rising, members of Dublin’s Indian student community did ambulance work in the suburb of Rathmines alongside local ambulance volunteers in support of the British Authorities. ²⁰ In 1917, the Church of Ireland Young Men’s Christian Association held a farewell evening for departing Indian students where the festivities and the speeches were replete with patriotically British pronouncements. Canon Godfrey Day of the YMCA expressed how ‘At this time of war our Empire [is] bound closely together… He hoped that the bond of fellowship and brotherhood uniting … India to England and to Ireland would grow stronger’. ²¹ However, not all Indian students were of this persuasion, and it was in a febrile climate of brewing revolution that they disembarked in the autumn of 1913. It is to this radical, nationally minded, revolutionary minority within the Dublin Indian student community that this article focusses.

Beneath the story of the change in admission rule in Britain and Ireland between 1912 and 1914, however, is a much more complex story of British state surveillance, Indian subversion in the imperial metropole and an assassination which rocked the British establishment and made London a cold house for Indian students.

In 1907, the Lee-Warner Committee considered the question of Indian law students in Britain. One of its recommendations was that Indian students be housed with British families in a paternalistic attempt to break up Indian-only housing, which it was believed was a breeding ground for anti-imperial sedition. ²² London’s India House, then presided over by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, was a notable target of British government concern and surveillance. It was a resident of India House who changed the landscape for Indian students in Britain irrevocably with an assassination which rocked British officialdom and soured relations between Indian students in Britain and their hosts.

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 engineering student of London University, Madan Lal Dhingra.

The Wyllie assassination also has an Irish dimension to it and, while it is impossible to know if the Indian students of 1913 were aware of Irish solidarity with the cause of violent Indian independence, back in 1909, a group of radical Irish feminists showed a level of anti-colonial solidarity and direct action not seen since the actions of the Irish Fenian Home Ruler F. H. O’Donnell in the late 1870s. ²³

In Ireland, the actress, republican, trade unionist and feminist Helena Molony counted among her responsibilities at this time the editorship of a newspaper called Bean na hÉireann [Woman of Ireland]. Years later, she explained her involvement in a prominent Irish solidarity campaign for Dinghra led by the paper. In a deposition to the Irish Bureau of Military History in 1950, she explained:

… about this time [1909] a young Indian revolutionary, Madar 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 [sic] Lal Dhingra, who was proud to lay down his life for his country”. There was nothing insular about Inghínídhe’s ²⁴ political outlook. We reproduced this poster in “Bean na hEireann”, and it resulted in the loss of some advertisements and subscriptions. ²⁵

In its July 1909 issue, the paper carried an article among its editorial notes entitled ‘The Indian Assassination’. ²⁶ Signed ‘F.’, the article aligned the plights of India and Ireland: ²⁷

Madan Lal Dhingra, who shot Sir Curzon Wylie [sic] in London, is to be duly hanged on the 10^th 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 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. ²⁸

The anonymous author added the plight of the Boers to the litany of imperial abuses perpetrated by Albion:

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.

[…]

She is reaping where she has sown, and the harvest is of her own creation.

[…]

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. […]

Rather than condemnation of Dinghra 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”. ²⁹

Studying in a City in Turmoil: Lockout, War and Revolution

If such were the signals being sent from Ireland to India in these years, it is also important to consider the social and political contexts of the city in which the first batch of Indian students found themselves in the late summer of 1913. Interestingly, although viewed as a calm before the storm in British and European history, the period from August 1913 to August 1914 was one of intense tumult in Ireland. Dublin would see intense industrial actions and the beginnings of paramilitary drilling and arming, which would culminate with the Easter Rising in 1916. The Rising would dramatically alter the position and stability of Dublin’s small Indian student community as they found themselves subject to searches and even deportation orders.

On 25 November 1913, a public meeting was held to inaugurate a paramilitary force, the Irish Volunteers, to defend the principle of Irish Home Rule. By February 1914, the Irish Volunteers had established connections with some of UCD’s Indian student body. On 7 February 1914, the first issue of a new newspaper entitled The Irish Volunteer aimed specifically at the organization’s membership, was published. In the third issue of the paper on 21 February 1914, the first of three articles entitled ‘Indian Nationality: A Parallel with Ireland’ appeared. ³⁰ The mystery of their authorship is cleared up by a letter written in 1948 to then Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, by P. S. T. Sayee, who claimed not only to have written these pieces but also to have ‘[undergone] training along with the Irish Volunteers in Dublin’. ³¹ Thus, decades before Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army and at roughly the same time as the Ghadar conspiracy was getting underway in the United States, at least one Indian in Dublin had begun his training in arms in a setting that would have fallen foul of sedition laws had he undertaken it in British India.

The only evidence of an Indian link with the Irish Volunteers surviving in an Irish testimony comes from the Bureau of Military. One witness, Seamus Ua Caomhanaigh, recalls his close friendship with an Indian student, which he dates to the War of Independence period. As Ua Caomhanaigh explains,

During all this time I seldom slept at home. I got frequent orders from Mick Collins not to go home … On one of these occasions I went down to Adelaide Road to the house where a friend of mine, an Indian student at the University named Gupta, was in digs. He had frequently told me to come to him if hard pressed and he would put me up. It was rather late in the night when I got there and he had no time to make the arrangement he’d have liked, but he went into the room of another Indian chap, a friend of his, and gave his room to me. ³²

Given that the only Gupta who appears in the rolls of the King’s Inns is Polisetty Hanumayya Gupta and he was called to the Bar on 18 January 1917 and was already an established figure in the Indian independence struggle by December 1921, it is possible that Ua Caomhanaigh is misremembering the date and exact circumstances of this incident, as it more likely occurred in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising. ³³ Nonetheless, this account provides the only tangible and documented instance of this level of cooperation and comradeship between Dublin’s Indian students and Irish republicans in these years.

Returning to the articles which appeared in the Irish Volunteer in 1914, the pieces raise some interesting questions not only about their author but also about who commissioned them. They provide an insight into the Irish Volunteers’ perception of where their movement is sat in global and imperial contexts. In terms of understanding Dublin’s Indian law students, the articles represent one of the very few surviving primary source documents which give an insight into the political outlook of these students while they were residents in Dublin.

An interesting editorial preface to Sayee’s article explains that ‘[t]he following is contributed by an Indian Nationalist, who is amazed at the amount of liberty England permits in Ireland. No Indian is allowed to drill or carry a weapon’. ³⁴ Within the article, a different outlook is evident. Focussing on the issues of deportation without trial and the crime of sedition, the author employs both nationalist and anti-imperialist arguments in bridging the Indian and Irish struggles. In exploring the suppression of India, he explained how

The unfortunate children of India are the objects of unthinkable wretchedness, without a spark of education for the development of their brains, which have grown to be stultified as an inevitable consequence of a long and imperfect government, the interests of which are not at unison with those of the governed. ³⁵

Broadening the Indian question out into an imperial one, he considered the Viceroy, Hardinge, ‘of whose interests in the welfare of India and her people abroad in the colonies we have been hearing so much. He is a diplomat “maintaining the integrity of the Empire” at the cost of the Indians’. ³⁶ Sayee underlines how Indian nationalism is suppressed in India through sedition legislation and how acts that would be interpreted as merely nationalistic and patriotic in Ireland are classified as criminal sedition in India resulting in widescale deportations in a system that has broken the will of the majority of Indians as Sayee saw it in the spring of 1914. ³⁷

Sayee concluded with an appeal for solidarity and an almost prophetic vision of imperial collapse, which would soon be visited not only on the British, but on the German, the Austro–Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman empires. In this, he captures a zeitgeist of emerging anti-imperialism and nationalism which would echo down through the rest of the twentieth century in different parts of the world:

My final appeal to all those that are interested in the well-being of humanity is to try and remove this crisis by the force of civilized opinion, since an Empire built on this sort of evil foundation, with all its destructive tendencies developed, and a delusive external appearance, must fall to pieces and involve world-wide disaster in its ruin. ³⁸

Though brief and fleeting, the insight into how both Indian and Irish nationalists viewed their shared struggle in global terms is of immense value in understanding transnational networks of solidarity and anti-imperialism on the eve of the First World War. In it, the seed of the 1920 Connaught Rangers mutiny in India and the Easter 1930 Chittagong rebellion can be found. ³⁹

Student Politics: Indian Activism and Radical Irish Connections

Giri tells how he was ‘drawn irresistibly into the cross currents of the Irish struggle for self-government’ when he arrived in Dublin in 1913. ⁴⁰ However, he was also mindful of the political situation he had left behind and he remained active in Indian political activism during his time in Dublin. With the backdrop of a city that was going through its largest-ever labour dispute and which was witnessing the formation of a paramilitary nationalist organization, Giri was not short of patriotic or socially progressive inspiration during the winter of 1913–14.

Dublin’s new Indian students organized themselves into both open and secret societies around this time. Giri and some other Indians were members of a small secret group calling itself the ‘Anarchical Society’. Giri explains: ‘We professed belief in using violence and bloodshed to achieve a peaceful end and started learning the techniques of incendiarism and bomb-making to help us in the freedom struggle on our return to India’. ⁴¹ Alex Tickell has observed that travel to Britain [and Ireland] as well as increased connectivity between the Imperial centre and the Indian periphery ‘allowed Indian nationalists to enter into a cross-national dialogue with … other anti-colonial groups (notably in Ireland and Egypt)’. Tickell emphasizes how these developments exposed Indian nationalists to ‘new terrorist strategies developed by [Irish] Fenian groups and anarchists … tactics such as assassination and bombing which Indian activists euphemistically termed ‘Russian methods’. ⁴²

A glance at the UCD student calendars suggests that the students would not have had to look as far as the Fenian underground for information on these topics in Dublin. Indicating the popularity of these subjects among Irish students at a time when an open nationalist paramilitary organization—the Irish Volunteers—was being established, the first lecture in the 1913–14 session of the UCD Engineering Society was ‘Use of explosives for Engineering purposes’ by a Mr M. Dalton. Without casting a cynical eye on the scholarly earnestness of a student society, one might wonder if ‘Engineering purposes’ were in the mind either of Mr Dalton or of his audience given the contemporary political context.

Again, in the following academic year, with the world war then underway, January 1915 saw the UCD Chemistry Society host a lecture given by M. J. Walsh, BSc, simply titled ‘Explosives’. ⁴³ Furthermore, the Irish Volunteer newspaper contained engineering notes and descriptive and explanatory articles on weaponry written by Laurence J. Kettle, brother of Thomas, Professor of National Economics at UCD. ⁴⁴

Giri claims that the leader of this ‘Anarchical Society’ was Shri Unnava Lakshminarayana. Lakshminarayana entered the King’s Inns at the same time as Giri and he was from Guntur, also in the Madras Presidency. Giri describes Lakshminarayana as an ‘elderly gentleman’ and ‘the leader of the Indian student community’.

Most interestingly, Giri shared a house with Lakshminarayana when he first moved to Dublin. Along with at least two other Indian students—Nadimpalli Dasaratha Ramayya and Kapally Ghantamraju—the four lived at 1 Grove Park, Rathmines. ⁴⁵ All were from Madras, two from Guntur and the other from Krishna district.

Giri claims that the society changed direction when it came under the influence of Gandhi, with them all deciding ‘to follow only the path of truth and non-violence for winning political freedom’. ⁴⁶ Thus, the closed, secret and violent society gave way to an open, or at least partially open, society named the Indian Students’ Association, of which Giri was secretary for three years. ⁴⁷ While the students renounced violence, they appear to have become more active in their work for Indian freedom through this association. The semi-secret work of this society was to propagate the ideas of non-violence and to expose the British misrule of India. Giri describes a pamphlet which the society had printed in Dublin and claims 100,000 copies were made. He recalls its title as ‘Horrors in South Africa’ which seems to put beyond doubt that this is one and the same as ‘South African Horrors: Drama in Five Scenes’ a two-page pamphlet, printed in English, with pictures and stories of atrocities. ⁴⁸

In Giri’s own words, the pamphlet aimed to ‘magnify acts of racial discrimination perpetuated on the Indian community and their struggle against the White Minority Government [of South Africa]’. ⁴⁹ He also notes that the pamphlet advocated passive resistance along the lines of Gandhi’s philosophy. The pamphlet was intercepted by customs and, in the inquiry that followed, it was traced back to its Dublin printer. This prompted a raid on Giri’s lodgings but not before he had been tipped off by the sympathetic printer and had time to destroy any evidence linking him to the pamphlet. Giri attributes the intervention of this printer, ‘[who was] a nationalist himself’ as having saved him from arrest and deportation. ⁵⁰

Radical Influences in Dublin: Agitators and Academics

Through UCD, specifically Giri’s tutor in English, it is possible to establish the closest confirmable link between Giri and the Irish Volunteers. Thomas MacDonagh had been appointed assistant lecturer in English in 1911 after securing first-class honours in his MA there. MacDonagh had previously been assistant headmaster at St Enda’s College, the experimental progressive school established by Patrick Pearse in 1908. ⁵¹ By 1913, Pearse and MacDonagh had both joined the newly founded Irish Volunteers. A member of the provisional committee of this new paramilitary group, MacDonagh rose steadily through its ranks. By March 1915, he was commandant of the Second Battalion of the Dublin Brigade and adjutant of the Dublin Brigade. As the plot to stage the Rising developed, he was sworn in to the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and brought into the planning of the Rising. ⁵² MacDonagh would ultimately join Pearse, Connolly and others as a signatory to the 1916 Proclamation. Pearse had been a member of the IRB since December 1913. In October 1914, alongside Joseph Mary Plunkett and Éamonn Ceannt, he set about investigating the feasibility of an Irish insurrection while Britain was engaged in hostilities in Europe. This body was the nucleus of the plot to rise at Easter 1916.

MacDonagh’s radical politics and his belief in physical force permeated into the classroom at UCD. By November 1915, the president of UCD was sufficiently concerned about MacDonagh’s extracurricular military activities that he told the Undersecretary for Ireland, Matthew Nathan, that ‘He [MacDonagh] would try to take an opportunity of talking with students’. ⁵³ Austin Clarke, a fellow student of MacDonagh’s, recalled years later that, by the spring of 1916, MacDonagh looked ‘abstracted and worried’ in class. Clarke goes on to recall how, ‘one day, during a lecture on the Young Ireland Poets, he took a large revolver from his pocket and laid it on the desk, “Ireland can only win freedom by force” he remarked, as if to himself’. ⁵⁴ Clarke was studying for an MA in 1916 and would go on to replace MacDonagh after the latter’s execution. Although Giri would thus not have been in the same class as Clarke, this anecdote gives further insight into the nature of MacDonagh’s classes at UCD, which one student remarked was ‘never relevant and invariably interesting’. ⁵⁵ As a link between revolutionary Irish republicanism and Giri, MacDonagh provides the strongest point of contact. Giri emphasized the influence which MacDonagh had on him when he met Irish diplomats in his later years as president. In his memoir, Giri notes that, alongside studying Law at the King’s Inns, he ‘joined the National University [and] … For my degree course I studied Literature, Economics and Political Science under distinguished professors. Professor Donavan and Professor MacDonagh taught us Literature. I studied Economics and Political Science under Reverend Father Finlay’. This is confirmed in UCD Academic Council minutes from 5 October 1914, which records, without naming Giri, that ‘two Indian students had presented themselves for lectures in Political Economy and English and it was ordered that they should be admitted’. ⁵⁶ Thus, a tangible link between Giri and these professors, as well as UCD’s law faculty, including George Murnaghan and John Gordon Swift MacNeill, can be established.

Political Economy

If MacDonagh may have instilled nationalist radicalism into Giri as a student, then his other chosen arts subject put him in contact with one of the university’s great exponents of social reform. Thomas Aloysius Finlay was a Jesuit and Professor of Political Economy. Finlay had been impressed by the reformist agricultural policies of the Prussian government when he was abroad as a student, something he applied upon his return home through his involvement in the agricultural cooperation movement in Ireland. Fellow reformer and cooperative champion Sir Horace Plunkett said of Finlay, that he had ‘for a full half-century, laboured disinterestedly for the moral, social, and economic uplifting of the Irish poor’. ⁵⁷ Between the influence of MacDonagh and Finlay, it is clear Giri was immersed in a culture of education that stressed self-sacrifice, vocationalism and volunteering.

Studying first-year political economy at UCD consisted of three lectures per week on ‘a general treatment of the subjects … with a brief study of International Trade and Taxation’. ⁵⁸ Second-year students studied the following subjects:

Fundamental Notions: economics, wealth, value, price, etc.

Production: land, labour, organization of labour, capital, growth of capital, progress, growth of population, development of industrial and commercial organization, limitations and checks.

Consumption: place in economic theory, marginal values, reaction of consumption and production.

Exchange: barter, sale, market price, relation of market price to cost of production, money and its functions, value of money, coinage, single and double standards, credit, various forms of credit, the currency, banking.

Distribution: property, communism and socialism, property in land, rent, peasant proprietors, other forms of land tenure, wages, wages fund, rates of wages, trade unions, unemployment, profits, rates of profit, combination of capitalists, the entrepreneur, interest. ⁵⁹

Given the importance labour relations would take in Giri’s subsequent career, it seems highly likely that Finlay’s lectures had at least some influence on Giri, especially his lectures on production and distribution. In a colonial context, Finlay’s lectures on property and land must also have informed his Indian listeners. Thus, just as with nationalist thought, there was a synergy between what Giri was experiencing in the classroom and what he was witnessing on the streets of Dublin both during the 1913 Lockout and the prelude to the 1916 Rising. If one is looking for a foundation narrative of the future President, the lectures he attended in Dublin were almost certainly formative experiences.

Indians and the 1916 Rising

In his memoir, Giri recalls that ‘about a week before the uprising we met some leaders of the movement. Desmond FitzGerald who was to become a minister of government later actually said, “well, let us meet again at Easter for some hot tea’”. ⁶⁰ This story is corroborated by the fact that another student, P. S. T. Sayee, wrote to Éamon de Valera in 1948 recalling his time in Ireland. As Kate O’Malley records in Ireland, India, and Empire, Sayee claimed to de Valera that

I was intimately associated with your National Leaders of those glorious days … After the Rebellion of 1916 it became impossible for me to continue to stay in Dublin. I therefore left for Bray along with Mr Desmond Fitzgerald and his family. After some time he [FitzGerald] was arrested and taken away and I found my way somehow back to India. ⁶¹

Giri claims in his memoir to have developed friendships not only with members of the Irish Volunteers but also with the Irish Citizen Army, the socialist paramilitary founded to protect workers during the 1913 Lockout and which later took part in the 1916 Rising. Giri notes in particular that he became close to James Connolly, a leading figure in Irish and international socialism and leader of the Irish Citizen Army. Of Connolly, Giri recollected:

I remember vividly meeting Connolly on several occasions as I was regularly invited to their meetings … More than any of the leaders of the uprising it was Connolly who inspired me. I resolved that as soon as I returned to India I would give a graphic account of these struggles to inspire our own people. I also felt that, at the earliest opportunity, I would take up the organisation of the transport workers in the country so that, along with other nationalist forces, we would be in a position to jeopardise the movement of the troops. When a real conflict arose, the transport workers could become the bulwark of the national movement and thus subvert British authority. ⁶²

Giri’s involvement in railway trade unionism dates back to 1922, when he became president of the Bengal–Nagpur Railway Indian Labour Union—a springboard from which he succeeded in uniting the various railway unions of India into the All-India Railwaymen’s Federation in 1923. However, Giri did not employ the tactic of an all-out railway strike until 1927. When the strike did occur, Giri managed to grow the resistance from a single station in Kharagpur to a strike of an estimated 35,000 of the railway’s 60,000 employees, which ground the Bengal–Nagpur line to a standstill for almost an entire month. Although the ways in which events in the Dublin Lockout played out differed from Giri’s 1927 campaign in some respects, the results were the same: both unions represented some of the poorest workers and they were crippled into submission by employers with deeper pockets, the support of police riot squads and the luxury of time. In Dublin, those who came to prominence during the Lockout were blacklisted. In India, 2,000 workers from the workshop at Kharagpur where the strike began were served with retrenchment notices in September 1928. ⁶³ Events at Kharagpur took a very Dublin twist thereafter when a fresh strike by workers was answered with a lockout by the railway company. However, in Kharagpur, the ninety-day lockout ended successfully for the workers on this occasion as Giri secured back-pay for the workers through skilful negotiating, playing Sir George Rainy of the Viceroy’s executive council and the employers at the railway company against each other, and secured to a compromise. ⁶⁴

Indian Students Under Irish Martial Law

In the wake of the 1916 Rising, there was a heightened suspicion in police and official circles about certain members of Dublin’s Indian community. Giri recalls that there was ‘a deep suspicion in the minds of the British Government in Ireland as well as at the India Office in London that I was not only connected with the Irish movement but that I was actively in league with it’. ⁶⁵ Given that more people were arrested and deported after the 1916 Rising than actually took part in it, Indian students were no doubt under intense scrutiny at this time of frenetic activity by the military authorities, now in control of various parts of Ireland where martial law had been declared even in districts which had played no active part in the rebellion. Suspicion over Giri led to raids on his lodgings, but, according to Giri, nothing incriminating was found. ⁶⁶ Despite this, Giri claims that the authorities were not satisfied; ‘not convinced of my innocence … a notice was issued to me on 1 June 1916 directing me to leave U.K. by 1 July’. ⁶⁷ Thus, Giri’s life in Dublin came to an abrupt end.

Although no record of Giri’s deportation order has been located either in the registered papers of the Irish Chief Secretary’s Office or in the records of the Indian Political Intelligence in the British Library in London, circumstantial evidence to add credence to the validity of his claim can be found in the case of another Indian student, T. A. Chettiar, whose experiences after the Rising echo what Giri recounts in his memoir.

The case of T. A. Chettiar was brought up in the House of Commons at Westminster after the Rising by the Irish Nationalist MP for South Donegal, John Gordon Swift MacNeill. MacNeill was also Professor of Constitutional Law and the Law of Public and Private Wrongs at UCD, where he thus would have become acquainted with many of Dublin’s Indian students. On 1 June 1916, MacNeill put a question to Prime Minister Asquith inquiring

whether he is aware that two Dublin detective police officers visited on the 24th instant [sic], Empire Day, the residence in Dublin of Mr. T. Adminaruyana Chettiar, a leading citizen of the Presidency of Madras, who has been living with his wife and son in Dublin for the purpose of qualifying for the Bar at the King’s Inns … and that the police officers, having for several hours searched all Mr. Chettiar’s papers, books, and effects, found nothing in the slightest degree which threw any suspicion on his loyalty [and asked] for the vindication of Mr. Chettiar’s character and an apology to him, and, through him, to the loyal subjects of our Indian Empire who are aggrieved at this insult? ⁶⁸

The Prime Minister replied that enquiries were being made into the matter. That the raid on Chettiar’s house took place on Empire Day and that police appear certainly to have targeted the wrong man in this instance suggests that something was suspected by authorities of the Indian students on this day. Empire Day was 24 May 1916, the birthday of the late Queen Victoria. Although celebrated since 1902, Empire Day was officially recognized for the first time in 1916. ⁶⁹ 24 May also happened to be the one-month anniversary of the outbreak of the Easter rebellion. Evidently, this gave the authorities in Dublin cause to be apprehensive. If Chettiar’s was but one among several police raids to have occurred that day, the timeline fits in nicely with Giri’s recollections. Although Giri mis-remembers the date upon which he was called to the bar by almost a month—a date he gives only vaguely as ‘the end of May’, it is nonetheless plausible that the concrete dates he gives for his deportation order are accurate. It was on 1 June, while Swift MacNeill was interceding on Chettiar’s behalf in the House of Commons, that Giri records he was issued with a notice directing him to leave by 1 July. ⁷⁰ Having successfully passed his final set of examinations at the King’s Inns, Giri was called to the Bar on 21 June, again, a date that ties in well with the timeline presented in Giri’s autobiography. ⁷¹

Although successful in completing his qualification for the bar, Giri was unable to finish his BA course at UCD. He reveals that it was his intention upon finishing his BA to travel onwards to Philadelphia to study for a Masters in law and that he had also received offers of work in Dublin. ⁷² Rather than defining his exit from Dublin by the deportation order served upon him, Giri looked more positively upon his final weeks in Dublin. In concluding the chapter of his autobiography about his Irish days, Giri wrote:

With the fervour inspired by the revolutionaries still fresh in my mind, I determined to return to India and take an active part in the political movement to secure the independence of my country. ⁷³

The fervour with which Giri wrote was not acquired merely by osmosis from having lived through the rebellion in Dublin city; Giri’s own tutor, Thomas MacDonagh, had been among the very first of the rebel leadership to have been executed on 3 May 1916. Having learnt under MacDonagh and having come into contact with Connolly and other radicals, Giri had received a baptism in revolution similar to that which created committed revolutionists across Ireland at this time.

Upon his return to India, Giri linked back up with Gandhi and Giri’s political involvement underwent a marked intensification. Following the principle of non-cooperation, Giri withdrew from legal practice. Joining the satyagraha movement at its inception in 1921, by February 1922, Giri found himself in prison for picketing shops selling alcohol. There, he led a successful hunger strike and, upon his release, led a strike of transport workers.

Conclusion

Ireland is by no means the only current that fed ideas and inspirations into the Indian independence movement. South Africa, Canada and even experiences in Britain itself provided inspiration for ideas that were greeted with enthusiasm by Indian independence campaigners. It is likewise clear that this transfer of transnational ideas was not a one-way street. Long before Giri’s time, the Irish MP Frank Hugh O’Donnell proposed the sending of Indian MPs to Westminster to represent Irish constituencies as a means of highlighting the shared plight of Irish and Indian subjects. ⁷⁴

As to V. V. Giri and his colleagues, it is clear that their Irish experiences had a deep impact on them. In particular, the Irish experience offered Indians a case study in different tactics of resistance and gave them an insight into the realities of British responses and vulnerabilities in a different subject jurisdiction.

Finally, the social dimension of this is important for Irish historians, as many of these students, not just Giri, took a strong social as well as national position following their Irish experiences. Giri reminds us that the deprivation he witnessed in Dublin was oftentimes no better than that which he had seen in parts of India. On either extremity of the empire, income inequality and deprivation proved to be vectors towards politicization and radicalization for those who came from relatively comfortable backgrounds but refused to be complicit in the system of which they were part. In these tangible connections, cross-imperial solidarity was established, and it would have lasting ramifications. Reflecting on his Irish days in the 1970s, V. V. Giri recalled to a former Irish ambassador to New Delhi, Valentine Iremonger, that ‘when I am not an Indian, I am an Irishman’. ⁷⁵