Abstract
In the good old days, when History of England used to be a compulsory subject for History students, the entire gamut of a very disturbing Anglo–Irish relationship would be subsumed in two words: the ‘Irish Question’. However, there was never a dearth of literature on Irish nationalism, its heroes and related dimensions—Mitchel (1868), Taylor (1904), Fergusson (1906) Green (1911), De Valera (1920), Hammond (1938), Mansergh (1965), Beckett (1966), McCaffrey (1968), Norman (1971), Canning (1985), Hutchinson (1996), Kiberd (1996), Banerjee (2012), Foster (2014)—and there were special reports, such as Devon Commission (1845), Richmond (1881), Bessborough (1881) and Cowper (1885), to name a few.
Varahagiri Venkata Giri, the fourth President of India (1969–74), who had held important positions in the post-independent government, was a trade union leader and a freedom fighter earlier. This slim book by an Irish historian deals with a less-known chapter in his youth, studying law at King’s Inns and the University College, Dublin from 1913 to 1916. Woven around Giri’s Dublin days are some very interesting information about the tumultuous days in Ireland, and the activities of some youthful Indians and their interface with Irish nationalism.
A quick look at the society and politics of Ireland of that era may help in appreciating the role of Giri. Ireland was a predominantly Catholic country under the ruthless control of the British-the Anglican Church, tilted towards Protestantism, was their established Church since the Tudor times. Ireland was in rebellion against the colonisers. There were potato famines, the Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone), Gaelic revivalists and Celtic literature providing the necessary backdrop to the freedom fighters confronted by serious ecclesiastical, agrarian and political issues. There began the ‘Home Rule’ movement in late nineteenth century that continued in the twentieth. Interestingly enough, three British Prime Ministers had been Irish-Canning, Wellington and Palmerston. Much of Gladstone’s reputation (four times prime minister of England) also stemmed from his ‘liberal’ policy towards the Irish colony (and India too).
As for Ireland’s Indian connections, one Irish Home Rule MP, Frank O’Donnell had set up the Indian Constitutional Association in 1882, and was in touch with the London-based India Society. Sister Nivedita, originally Margaret Nobel, from County Tyrone, a disciple of Swami Vivekananda, who had dedicated her life to the service of her adopted land, was called ‘Loka mata’ or ‘Mother of the People’ by Tagore. Annie Bessant of Home Rule League fame, associated with Tilak was also from Ireland. Incidentally, Aurobindo Ghosh (later a fiery revolutionary and a savant) had composed three poems on Irish themes, including one on the Irish national hero, Parnell. One may also recall a character in Tagore’s famous novel, wherein a dynamic young man Gora, a fiery nationalist and devout Hindu, later on, turned out to be the son of an Irish couple killed in the uprising of 1857 at Meerut, and brought up by a Bengali Hindu family. Madan Lal Dhingra who assassinated Sir Wylle in London (July 1909) and was sentenced to death won much admiration in Ireland as we see it in the bilingual nationalist-feminist newspaper Bean na h’ Eirenn and elsewhere.
Mulvagh reminds us about Tagore’s friendship with the famous Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, who found ‘spiritual simplicity’ in the former’s poems much akin to their own and wrote a ‘laudatory introduction’ in 1912 to Tagore’s collection of poems. While Tagore got the Nobel Prize in 1913, Yeats got this honour in 1923. Mulvagh suggests that ‘Ireland’s wartime and insurrectionary experiences inspired V. V. Giri’s work for the Indian independence movement, and had a profound effect on his fellow students.’ It is also believed that young Giri was so much influenced by the courage of conviction and tenacity displayed by the Irish freedom fighters, that once he had described himself as ‘when I am not Indian, I am an Irishman’.
Giri arrived in Dublin along with twelve other Indian students in 1913. Another alien, who became a ‘trusted friend’ of Irish nationalist Arthur Griffin, was a Jewish solicitor, Michael Nyok. This book is also about the students and migration as also about the Irish-Indian relations. Be that as it may, Giri later on explained that the absence of a discriminatory attitude as compared to England had prompted Indian students to come over to Ireland. However, there would be occasional murmurs on this matter!
In Giri’s autobiography, there are some interesting account of his experiences in Dublin, and Mulvagh comments that it is ‘difficult to substantiate much of what Giri recounted in this memoir. On first reading, much of what Giri claimed seemed too fantastic to be true’. Mulvagh reads much in President Giri’s staff asking the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in 1972/73 asking for books on Irish history to assist Giri in the composition of his memoirs! For Mulvagh, this ‘—raises a question mark over the originality of Giri’s recollections’. Having said that he, however, admits that ‘time and again, the claims made by Giri have been substantiated’. He found out a proscribed pamphlet referred by Giri with which he was associated.
This was the time when the University College Dublin began taking a ‘national’ character in literature and history disciplines. One may compare this with the post-independence university/school curriculum in India, wherein the state was actually involved in promoting ideas which undermined its civilisational and nationalist interests, distorted the very fundamentals of our historical experiences to serve narrow ideological and political objectives of the ruling class in the social sciences/humanities and literary disciplines to promote all the inimical forces and subversive ideas.
There is much information on Giri’s fellow Indian students. It was in 1913, that the Irish Volunteers meant to defend the Irish Home Rule had been set up in Dublin, and they were trying to reach out to Indian students. In their newspaper entitled The Irish Volunteer, one Indian student Pangulury Sesha Thalpasaye (also known as P. S. T. Sayee) had contributed articles like ‘Indian Nationality: A Parallel with Ireland’. Sayee was comparing the British policy in India in promoting the Indian Chiefs by comparing it to the policy of Henry VIII (1509–47) in Ireland in manipulating the Irish nobility. He also called for solidarity of the colonised people and had ‘almost a prophetic vision of imperial collapse’.
In his autobiography, Giri had mentioned destroying his diaries and how it had escaped ‘discovery’ by the authorities. He had met Gandhi in London, differed with him on Indian support to the British war efforts, believing that ‘England’s difficulties were India’s opportunity’. At Gandhi’s urging, he had joined the Red Cross but walked out of it holding his head high. While many of Giri’s Indian friends joined ‘both open and secret societies’, Giri with some other Indians joined the ‘Anarchical Society’ and told later that they ‘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’.
Among the teachers Giri had in Dublin, was MacDonagh, a Professor of English literature, and a member of the Irish Volunteers, who provides the strongest link between militant Irish republicanism and him, and had once, in course of his lecture taken out a revolver from his pocket and put it on the table saying, ‘Ireland can win only freedom by force.’ He was executed in 1916. Giri, suspected of being involved in the 1916 Rising, was asked to leave the UK. Though Mulvagh could not trace the deportation order, one Indian student T. Adminaruyana Chettiar was deported. After Giri left for home, for many Indians, Ireland remained an important destination.
Scholars, fond of archives-based research, may note that the retrieval of documents on Ireland’s revolutionaries conducted under the oral history project, was led by its army which completed the work by the 1950s, though it was made public only in 2003! Hence, when this reviewer visited, An Chartlann Naisunta, Dublin (Irish National Archives), to look up for some details of Subhas Bose’s visit and other Indian connections, a lot of materials were not available. As for Bose’s visit to Ireland in 1935, he was very warmly received and had three meetings with President de Valera and many more celebrities. One of the reasons behind Bose’s visit was because he had promised that to V. J. Patel (elder brother of Sardar Patel), who had set up the Indo-Irish Independence League at Dublin. Bose also met Col. Smith his jailer in the infamous Mandalay jail without any bitterness. Records of Garda Siochana, the Metropolitan Division of the Special Branch tell you more!
Being based on hitherto unused archival materials, it makes a very interesting study on a little-known aspect of Indo-Irish history and would provide some missing links to the history of this phase of revolutionary nationalism.