by Anita Anand
The ambition of the anti-colonialists grew with each blast. In November 1909, two bombs were thrown into the open carriage of Curzon’s successor, the new viceroy Lord Minto. He had been travelling with his wife through the streets of Ahmedabad. A combination of quick thinking and sheer dumb luck saved them. One bomb bounced off a parasol; the other was swatted into the sand by a soldier with an outstretched sabre.34
Two British women were not so lucky. The explosive thrown into their carriage detonated on impact, killing them both.
The decision to reunify Bengal, as detailed in the king’s proclamation, was Hardinge’s attempt to calm an escalating situation. He knew his plan would not be universally popular. Some of the senior ICS cadre, Michael O’Dwyer among them, would undoubtedly see reunification as a capitulation to nationalist violence. While the crowds attempted to make sense of the words and their implication, a second proclamation stilled their chatter. His Majesty’s Indian government would be moving its capital from Calcutta to Delhi. The words sent a shockwave through both the British and Indian enclosures. Nobody had seen this coming.
From 1793, when the East India Company first abolished Nizamat, indigenous rule, in the region, Calcutta had served as the nerve centre of British control. Now, after more than a hundred years, the intricate machine of government bureaucracy was to be uprooted and transported almost a thousand miles away.
Hardinge’s plan ‘was one of the best-kept secrets in history’.35 No more than twelve people had known about it, and nothing had leaked. Having the king emperor make the announcement at his own durbar made it a fait accompli. There was no room for debate.
Hardinge’s third major decision would only become public days later, and though it would pale in significance to the news about Bengal and Delhi, it had a profound effect on one particular man in the durbar audience. Michael O’Dwyer must have spent the entire ceremony struggling to keep his expressive face from giving the game away.
At one of the plethora of parties in the run-up to the durbar, Lord Hardinge had drawn him aside for a confidential chat. The lieutenant governor of Punjab, Louis Dane, would be stepping down soon, and Hardinge had decided to name Michael his successor.36 The promotion catapulted the Tipperary boy into the highest echelons of Indian colonial rule, leaving him well placed, one day, to succeed Hardinge himself. The job was prestigious, but also fraught with challenges: ‘In informing me of my selection the viceroy made it clear that the Punjab was the province about which the government was then most concerned; that there was much inflammable material lying about, which required very careful handling if an explosion were to be averted.’37 Against a backdrop of growing civilian unrest, Michael accepted the position, hungry for the chance to prove himself.
Oblivious to the reshaping of his country and the appointment of a new lieutenant governor in his province, Udham Singh continued his quiet existence, thankful just to have a roof over his head. His young life, so defined by chaos and loss, had finally settled down. The Khalsa orphanage in Amritsar had given him peace and stability. It would not last.
CHAPTER 4
RISES AND FALLS
With news of his promotion still sinking in, an explosion on 23 December 1912 shook Michael O’Dwyer out of his private reverie. It targeted the very man who had just anointed him lieutenant governor of Punjab.
Lord Hardinge, in full viceregal splendour, had been taking part in a parade through the streets of his new capital, Delhi. The king’s visit had been a huge success. Burra Din was just around the corner, so there was every reason to keep the party going.
Riding on the back of an elephant, Hardinge took in his new capital city. Seated behind a mahout (elephant handler) in a gilded howdah – the kind of open carrier once favoured by sultans and maharajahs – Hardinge, with his wife at his side, smiled and waved at cheering crowds.
Suddenly, just as they reached Chandni Chowk, the old bazaar district of the city, a man ran out of the mass of spectators and lobbed a bomb. It landed squarely inside the elephant’s howdah and exploded, sending screaming bystanders running for cover. Hardinge and his wife were left covered in blood. Some of it belonged to the viceroy himself, but most of it came from his Indian elephant handler, killed instantly when the bomb went off.
As hands reached up to calm the frantic elephant and pull survivors from the carrier, the ringing in his ears would have drowned out the vicereine’s screaming. One look at her face would have told Hardinge how badly he had been hurt. Shrapnel from the homemade device had torn through the flesh on his back and shoulders. It could have been so much worse, but in taking the full force of the blast, the mahout had undoubtedly saved the viceroy’s life.
Michael O’Dwyer knew that a similar bomb had recently exploded in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens, just in front of Governor House. The building would become his home in a matter of months. That device had also been intended for British targets, but, like the Hardinge device, it had missed its mark. An innocent Indian chaprassi (secretary) was killed instead.
Punjab police had been working hard trying to trace the bombers and the source of their ammunition. Such were the similarities of the Lawrence Gardens and Hardinge blasts, detectives were convinced they were dealing with one specific group of increasingly confident, capable insurgents. All fingers pointed at Bengali nationalists, but further investigations threw up a Punjabi name, too. The mastermind of both bomb plots was believed to be a young North Indian called Har Dayal.
Born in the Punjab on 14 October 1884, Har Dayal was an unlikely terrorist. He had been a clever, bookish boy with a special aptitude for Sanskrit. Such was his ability, it earned him a coveted scholarship to St John’s College at Oxford University. Though it sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime, the experience of living and learning in England both broke and remade Har Dayal.
Har Dayal was made to feel inferior by his English peer group and tutors. He worked hard and did well, but the realisation quickly dawned on him that no matter how much he tried, no matter how much he achieved, he would never be anything but a second-class citizen when he returned to his own country.
All he could hope for was a lowly administrative job, grunt work for the Raj. White candidates would always be promoted ahead of him, even if he was far more capable. Frustration swept over him and pushed open a gateway into a world of underground militant anti-colonialism.
Initially, Har Dayal only vented his rage in words. The Indian Sociologist, a radical newspaper published in London, gave him his pulpit. It claimed to be ‘An Organ of Freedom and of Political, Social and Religious Reform’, as its first issue described:
No systematic attempt has, so far as our knowledge goes, ever been made in this country by Indians themselves to enlighten the British public with regard to the grievances, demands, and aspirations of the people of India and its unrepresented millions before the bar of public opinion in Great Britain and Ireland.1
The brainchild of an Indian named Shyamji Krishna Varma, the Indian Sociologist became a conduit through which virulent anti-colonialists could find each other. Krishna Varma was also the proprietor and landlord of a terraced residential building in the leafy suburb of Highgate in north London.
‘India House’, as it became known, offered lodgings to Indian students enrolled at London’s colleges. However, along with accommodation, India House also provided a regular diet of anti-British venom to any who had the appetite. The place became a magnet for the disaffected. Marxists, anti-colonialists and anarchists from all over Europe were invited to speak at India House seminars. Young, discontented Indians were encouraged to meet and mix, developing networks in the process. By 1905, India House had become a de facto radicalisation factory.
Among those who made a pilgrimage to India House in the early 1900s was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, years before anyone would call him ‘Mahatma’. Gandhi had been a practising lawyer in South Africa, butting heads with the authorities in his adopted home of the Transvaal. New and racist pass laws were being u
sed to victimise the Indian population there, and Gandhi was determined to fight them. On a visit to London in 1906, Gandhi made his way to Highgate and the place where he had heard Indian intellectuals could meet and swap ideas. However, what he heard at India House appalled him. The sheer violence of the rhetoric only reinforced Gandhi’s own developing belief in passive resistance. To men like Har Dayal, in contrast, India House’s rage felt like a balm.
Three years after Gandhi’s visit, India House would yield an assassin named Madhan Lal Dhingra, who would, in 1909, outrage British society by shooting a British official dead on British soil. Even before Dhingra shot Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie dead in London, the police were waking up to the danger of India House. Such domestic terrorism would never be allowed again.
Special Branch, the British police’s national security wing, placed tails on several Indian students frequenting the Highgate hive. Their efforts were not entirely successful at first, since the white detectives stood out at the radical meetings. As the British police persisted in their efforts and became more sophisticated in their methods, more and more Indians found themselves being watched. Not all took the intrusion well. One Special Branch officer, Harold Brust, was badly beaten up when his ‘mark’ realised he was being tailed.
Brust, despite his bruises, admired the idealistic Indians he had been ordered to shadow: ‘Most of us SB [Special Branch] men held a sneaking admiration for the ardour of these lads who mistakenly believed themselves to be appointed “saviours” of their “downtrodden country”.’2
Har Dayal, who had established a lively correspondence with Krishna Varma while at Oxford, unsurprisingly earned himself unwanted SB attention. By 1908, the echoing footsteps and intercepted letters became too much for him. Without warning, he ditched his studies, quit England and disappeared, surfacing in Paris a year later. Safely in France, Har Dayal stepped up his activities.
Establishing a newspaper, Vande Mataram, or ‘I vow to thee oh Mother [India]’, Har Dayal slammed the inequity and oppression of British rule, but his Paris writing was beginning to betray a new obsession: Germany.
Anglo-German relations were at an all-time low in 1908. The countries had been embroiled in a naval arms race for more than a decade, accelerated by a series of German navy bills rapidly increasing the rate of naval construction. The British political and military leadership responded with escalation of their own, and as trust between the countries evaporated, the sea filled with battleships.
Two years before the outbreak of the First World War, Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence agency, MI5, became convinced that German agents were secretly manipulating both the English working class and Indian nationalists. Har Dayal’s Paris publication only confirmed suspicions, particularly when he wrote an editorial pinning his hopes for a free India on Berlin – ‘the capital of the country which at present is most hostile in spirit to England’.3 Har Dayal wrote that ‘the cultivation of friendly relations with the powerful German nation will be of great advantage to the cause of Indian independence’.4
Britain may have had ‘divide and rule’ as its guiding principle, but the nationalist relied on the adage: ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’ The French seemed untroubled by his activities and he was left alone to write and disseminate his paper. Then, one day, as suddenly as he had arrived, Har Dayal disappeared again.
LAHORE, 1913
Sitting behind his desk in Lahore, the new lieutenant governor of Punjab read through his papers with Lord Hardinge’s warning still fresh in his mind: ‘Punjab was the province about which the government was then most concerned.’
Michael now had a new title to go with his new job. Knighted in the king’s New Year’s Honours list, Sir Michael O’Dwyer assumed his role as the scars on Lord Hardinge’s back were still healing. The name Har Dayal kept coming up in his security briefings, mostly in conjunction with two other names: Kartar Singh Sarabha and Sohan Singh Bhakna. Both were Sikhs, originally from his province.
A new word, ‘ghadar’, also peppered the reports. The word, he knew, meant ‘revolt’, and under its aegis it seemed Har Dayal and his new friends were creating a rebel army. They even had a newspaper, also named Ghadar. Its intentions were made abundantly clear from the very first publication. Under the masthead, writ large, was the movement’s credo:
Today there begins ‘Ghadar’ in foreign lands, but in our country’s tongue, a war against the British Raj. What is our name? Ghadar. What is our work? Ghadar. Where will be the Revolution? In India. The time will soon come when rifles and blood will take the place of pens and ink.
These Ghadars were frustratingly out of Sir Michael’s reach. By 1913 Har Dayal, who had left France for America, was firmly ensconced in San Francisco, California, where he had ostensibly taken up a job at the University of California, Berkeley, working as a lecturer in Indian philosophy and Sanskrit.
Unable to arrest Har Dayal for his suspected role in the recent outrages, Sir Michael looked again at those who had been successfully rounded up by his police. Frustratingly, the man who had actually thrown the bomb at Hardinge, a known Bengali terrorist called Rash Behari Bose, had fled the scene, detectives believed, dressed in a burqa. He was still at large, however police had managed to capture two of his co-conspirators: fellow Bengalis accused of transporting the bombs for him from Calcutta to Delhi and Lahore.
Another man, a petty official who worked at the Dehra Dun postal office, was also charged with ‘aiding the traffic of explosives’. He claimed that he was just doing his job and had no idea what was in the parcels he rubber-stamped through transit. The judge believed him and let him walk free.
Of the two Bengalis found guilty by the courts, only one was sentenced to death. The other, a seventeen-year-old boy named Basanta Kumar Biswas, was deemed ‘less intelligent’5 by the judge, who thought the older man might have manipulated him. Smooth-cheeked and small of frame, it was easy to believe. Biswas looked much younger than his years. He was sentenced to transportation for life. An alternative punishment to hanging, transportation saw convicted criminals taken on prison ships to far-flung corners of the colonies. There they were expected to serve out their time working in chain gangs till they dropped. Biswas was destined for a maximum-security prison in Burma, where disease and hard labour resulted in high rates of mortality. It was an appalling prospect for one so young. For some, however, it was not harsh enough.
Sir Michael’s irritation at the ‘leniency’ shown to Biswas was exacerbated when he read that the exonerated postal worker was now petitioning to get his old job back. This was not how Sir Michael wanted to start his term in office:
After going through the papers I decided, contrary to the opinion of my legal advisers, that government should also appeal and ask for the death penalty on the Bengalis, and for the conviction and adequate punishment of the petty official. The honourable judges accepted the appeal on both points. The petty official, who might have escaped justice had he kept quiet, was sentenced to transportation for life, and the Bengalis were sentenced to death.6
Thanks to Sir Michael’s intervention, Basanta Kumar Biswas became one of the youngest people to be executed by the Raj. A photograph of him, perhaps taken at the time of his arrest, shows what looks like a wide-eyed child with neat hair in a side parting, and ears that stuck out so much he must have been teased in the playground.
Sir Michael had set the tone for his tenure as lieutenant governor of Punjab. He would take the hardest line, overrule judges, fellow civil servants and Westminster politicians if he had to. Those who brought chaos to his province could expect the severest penalties.
A man of fastidious habit, Sir Michael rose at the same early hour every day and never worked beyond seven o’clock at night. He took his meals punctiliously, favouring the same few dishes he had loved since childhood. A maharajah had once invited him to a banquet and had paid Sir Michael the ultimate honour of preparing some of the food with his own hands. The gesture merely irritated the hono
ured guest. ‘In culinary matters I am a strong Conservative,’ Sir Michael wrote later, ‘almost a “Die Hard”.’7 He had no taste for foreign fare, even if it had been cooked by a king.
The term ‘Die Hard’ was loaded with a meaning that went well beyond the plate, as Sir Michael was well aware. Die Hards were arch-Conservatives who believed in the racial superiority of the British and the vital importance of the Raj. At the maharajah’s banquet, Sir Michael had, as had become his custom, brought his own lunch in a basket. The question was how to utilise its contents without offending his powerful host? Diplomatic incident was averted, not by any compromise on Sir Michael’s part, but by sleight of hand: ‘Being an orthodox Hindu he could not sit and eat with us; so the chicken and ham were skilfully disposed among his innumerable dishes.’8
Sir Michael was suspicious of all Indians, but the Hindu majority most of all. He loathed the educated ‘Hindu Bourgeoisie’ as he liked to call them, believing they had been coddled and needlessly empowered thanks to the recent Morley-Minto reforms. The 1909 Act of Parliament had brought about a limited increase in the involvement of Indians in the governance of British India.
Indians coming forward to take advantage of Morley-Minto were overly ambitious and treacherous in Sir Michael’s opinion. Brahmins, India’s highest caste, were the worst of the lot: ‘The Brahmin or Kayasth, with his advocate’s training, may make a brilliant speech in faultless English. But it is purely critical and barren of any constructive proposal, for he has behind him neither traditions of rule nor administrative experience.’9
Since his arrival in India, the new lieutenant governor had been categorising Indians like a botanist documenting interesting but potentially poisonous specimens. He would later share his classifications with the world, and uncharitable generalisations about Brahmins figured repeatedly: ‘The Mahratta Brahmin is from diet, habit and education, keen, active, and intelligent but generally avaricious and often treacherous.’10