by Anita Anand
If I am successful then these wicked gore* will have good cause to remember us Indians. Now, there is for me one very big job which I alone can do.27
He ended with a message to his Ghadar brothers: ‘My greetings to all. I fancy that I shall put up a bit of show as I said in America, and I am not afraid to die.’28 The final message is an important one. In the 1920s, when Udham was living and working for the Ghadars in the United States, he had told them that he intended to do something big. He may even have told them what it was he had wanted to do. Even though the group had waned in its strength and influence in the 1930s, they remained vitally important to Udham Singh. He had left America years before, but his Ghadar brothers would never leave him.
A hacksaw blade was indeed sent to Brixton Prison days after his smuggled letter made it out of Brixton,29 although Udham Singh would never get to hear about it. It was intercepted in the post room and he was never told. Udham was left feeling increasingly desperate, forgotten and alone. Two weeks later, a police detective from Special Branch contacted Brixton Prison warning that Udham’s friends were still trying to help him kill himself:
A person named [name redacted] is going to try very desperately to get something through to Singh (Capital Charge) so that he (Singh) may end his life. It is not known what form it may take or what method is to be employed. It may be poison or a weapon, and it is possible the attempt will be made at a visit.30
The governor increased his watch on Udham, put the post room on notice, and for good measure confiscated Udham’s reading spectacles. If he was so determined to kill himself, he might just break one of the lenses and slit his wrists.31 The governor assured Vickery and Kell that no further letters would be smuggled out of his prison, nor would any blade or poison reach Udham Singh.
With no help forthcoming, Udham decided to die the hard way. He would starve himself to death. His hunger strike would take him right up to his trial. It was at this point that Dr Grierson, the prison medic, ordered a regime of force-feeding.
The trial at the Old Bailey commenced on 4 June 1940 and lasted only two days. Udham Singh was represented by lead barrister Mr St John Hutchinson, with Krishna Menon as junior counsel. Against him was the poetically named Mr Travers Christmas Humphreys and his co-counsel G. B. McClure.
The prosecution called twenty-four witnesses and these included eyewitnesses like Bertha Herring, Harry Wyndham Riches, Percy Sykes and Reginald Alfred Slee. They also called policemen who had interacted with Udham on the night of the shootings and the next day. Ballistics experts explained how the revolver had malfunctioned and how Udham had fired deliberately, accurately and, in Sir Michael’s case, at deadly close range.
The select few journalists who had been allowed into the court rehashed the gory details of the case for their readers. A few also took note of the shadow of a man Udham had become: ‘For forty-two days while he was awaiting his trial in Brixton prison Singh had been on hunger strike. He lost more than five stones and went almost completely bald.’32
Astonishingly, the defence had only one witness on their list, Udham himself. When he was questioned and cross-examined, he stuck to the story he had put in his statement at Canon Row Police Station. He had simply gone to protest. He had not meant to kill anybody. Somebody must have knocked his hand to make the gun go off. The prosecution tore his argument to shreds and he did little to fight back. Udham seemed to take very little interest in his trial at all.
Neither the prosecution nor the defence introduced the Jallianwala Bagh massacre or Udham’s political connections with the Ghadars and the Communists. The documents that had shuttled between the IPI, MI5 and Special Branch remained locked away. Krishna Menon hardly spoke at all.
On 5 June, just before 2.30 p.m., the jury retired for an hour and five minutes, before returning with a unanimous verdict. Udham Singh was guilty of murder.
Before passing sentence, the judge asked if he had anything to say. Though the newspapers did not report it, it was at this point that Udham came to life for perhaps the first time in months. Producing a sheaf of handwritten papers from his pocket, he unleashed a torrent of rage that had built up for years:
I am not afraid to die. I am proud to die. I want to help my native land, and I hope when I have gone that in my place will come others of my countrymen to drive the dirty dogs – when I am free of the country. I am standing before an English jury in an English court. You people go to India and when you come back you are given prizes and put into the House of Commons, but when we come to England we are put to death. In any case I do not care anything about it, but when you dirty dogs come to India – the Intellectuals they call themselves, the rulers – they are of bastard blood caste, and they order machine guns to fire on the Indian students without hesitation. I have nothing against the public at all. I have more English friends in England than I have in India. I have nothing against the public. I have great sympathy with the workers of England, but I am against the dirty British Government. Your people are suffering the same as I am suffering through those dirty dogs and mad beasts – killing, mutilating and destroying. We know what is going on in India hundreds of thousands of people being killed by your dirty dogs.
The judge ordered prison officers to drag him from the dock. As he was pulled away, Udham was heard to scream: ‘You people are dirty. You don’t want to hear from us what you are doing in India. Beasts. Beasts. Beasts . . . England, England, down with imperialism, down with the dirty dogs.’
Udham spat at the barristers as he was hauled towards the exit, ripping his papers into dozens of pieces, throwing them into the air.33 They fell like leaves after a storm. His distant voice was heard to shout: ‘Inquilab! Inquilab! Inquilab!’ ‘Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!’
When silence descended once again, Justice Atkinson placed the small square of black silk on top of his powdered wig and passed a sentence of death. True to their promise, the press did not report his final words.
After the trial, Udham Singh was taken to Pentonville Prison to await his execution. His defence lodged an appeal, which was rejected on the grounds that there was no new evidence to bring before the court. Shiv Singh Johal started a petition asking for clemency, and though almost 400 Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims signed it, Surat Ali refused to circulate it among his followers in east London, objecting to the fact that they would need to provide their addresses and worrying about police harassment. Krishna Menon did nothing at all.
Reverend Holland, a vicar who visited Udham in prison, wrote to the secretary of state, as did a number of Quakers and some British followers of Gandhi, begging the government to commute the sentence on humanitarian grounds. Holland argued that Udham had told him personally that he had lost loved ones in Jallianwala Bagh and the event had driven him slightly mad.
Even Lord Lamington, one of the men Udham shot that evening at Caxton Hall, wrote to the home secretary wondering whether it might be better to let Udham live. He seemed patently ‘insane’ after all. They were all thanked for their interest but told firmly that the execution would go ahead as planned.
Udham Singh was hanged at Pentonville Prison at 9 a.m. on 31 July 1940. Any last words he may have spoken before his execution were heard only by his hangmen, Cross and Pierrepoint, who never repeated them. When the last shovel of dirt was thrown on his coffin, the British hoped they had covered up his story with him.
Most papers pertaining to Udham’s case were ordered to be sealed for 100 years. Some of them, like Udham himself, were meant to remain buried for ever.
* * *
* Pejorative for ‘white people’.
CHAPTER 25
THE RETURN
In 1946, a year after armistice, the Labour government in Britain found itself economically crippled by the cost of war. It neither had the domestic mandate to plough fresh resources into the Raj, nor the loyalty of an increasingly restive native population in India itself. The ‘jewel in the crown’ was slipping from Britain’s grasp, and all that remained
was to determine the manner in which it would let go.
Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy, was cast as midwife both to a post-colonial India and a newly created Pakistan. Liberation from British rule would come at a terrible price, involving the division of three separate provinces – Assam, Bengal and Punjab. The divide, cutting through districts based on their religious majorities, came to be known as the Radcliffe Line, named after Cyril Radcliffe.
Radcliffe, a boundary commissioner who famously had never been east of Paris, was given just five weeks to create two new countries. His line ploughed through cities, towns, villages, friends and families. It left an ocean of blood in its wake. Some fifteen million people were displaced by partition, and two million were killed.
Punjab, the province that had given birth to Udham Singh and which he had hoped to unite as Mohammed Singh Azad, was left with a scar running through its heart. Lahore went to Pakistan, Amritsar remained in India. Punjabis scattered from their ancestral lands in an unprecedented refugee crisis, the like of which has never been seen in the world before or since.
Through it all, and despite the concerted British effort to bury Udham Singh’s name and legacy, somehow his story managed to live on. As India began to build its new identity, it found stories of anti-colonial defiance served as a foundation for a new sense of national pride. Punjab had never stopped being proud of the avenger of Jallianwala Bagh, but in the decades following independence, his reputation grew throughout the country. In the 1970s, an Indian mass movement demanded the return of Udham Singh. Eventually, it got its wish.
NEW DELHI, 19 JULY 1974
Shravan Amavasya
For Hindus, with their lunar calendar, there are certain moonless nights that belong primarily to the dead. Ancestors are honoured, little clay lamps are lit in their memory, and prayers are said for their souls. One such, the Shravan Amavasya, happened to fall on 19 July 1974.
The coincidence was lost on the hordes of bureaucrats sweating anxiously on the tarmac of New Delhi’s airport. Religion was far from their minds, though they had performed nothing short of a miracle. Working for months behind the scenes, pushing against initial resistance from their counterparts in Whitehall, Indian civil servants had fulfilled a seemingly impossible brief. They had managed to bring Udham Singh home.
When the wheels of the specially chartered flight carrying Udham’s body touched down on Indian soil on 19 July, the roar of the plane’s jets were matched by that of the crowds. They had fought so hard and waited so long to bring him home. The chief minister of Punjab, a Congress politician named Giani Zail Singh, along with Shankar Dayal Sharma, the president of the Congress Party, stood on the tarmac to receive his casket, as if they were welcoming a visiting head of state. Heads bowed, the two men, both of whom would go on to become presidents of their country, placed garlands on Udham’s coffin. A company of soldiers then gently lifted Udham, shoulder high, and placed him reverentially in a waiting hearse.
A long procession of police and ministerial cars formed an escort around Udham’s vehicle as it pulled out of the airport at walking pace, to allow crowds outside to catch a glimpse of the cortege as it went by in the darkness. Undeterred by the heavy monsoon rains, thousands had come. The rain mixed with their tears as they threw flowers at Udham as he passed. A thick carpet of wet petals guided his way to the capital.
Nehru’s daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was waiting for him, standing at the entrance of Kapurthala House, the former residence of the maharajah of Kapurthala. The distinctive brush of white in her jet-black hair streaked like lightning from her temple to her nape as she stepped forward in the relentless rain to place a large floral wreath on his coffin. In the morning he would start his final journey, an eleven-day tour of the north, but for one night the Kamboj orphan would rest under the roof of a king.
There had been such unprecedented excitement at the prospect of his homecoming that Indira Gandhi had decreed Udham’s remains should tour all Punjab, taking in every major city in the state. Udham would finally come to rest in Sunam, the town where he was born. There he could be cremated in the Sikh tradition.
A reporter from the New York Times, Bernard Weinraub, had been despatched to follow Udham on his final journey. Weinraub was struck by the depth of feeling that greeted the cortege wherever it went: ‘The coffin of Udham Singh, draped in garlands and carnations, moves slowly along the flat, wet roads of the Punjab. Thousands of Sikhs, bearded and turbaned as always, line the road and surge around the van carrying the coffin of their martyr, who was hanged by the British colonial rulers in 1940, on its final pilgrimage through this north-western state. Raising their fists the Sikhs shout in Punjabi: “Udham Singh forever!” and “Long live Udham Singh!’ ”1
Critics of Indira Gandhi accused her of using Udham for her own political ends, to distract from bigger economic problems faced by her people at the time. It was an accusation angrily brushed aside by Zail Singh, her chief minister of Punjab: ‘Why have we done it now? . . . We felt it was the correct thing . . . Udham Singh avenged our national humiliation . . . He played a role in our liberation. He vindicated our self-respect and honour.’2
Though Udham died an atheist, all religions scrambled to honour him, the Sikhs in particular: ‘“In some ways Udham Singh was a true Sikh,” [Zail Singh] said in Punjabi. “The Sikh gurus taught us to be fearless of death. We don’t want to die in bed, but on the battlefield, for the nation. We are patriotic. We are fearless. Sikhs don’t hate anyone because of caste or creed or sex. Everyone is equal. Udham Singh was a true Sikh.’ ”3
On 31 July 1974, Udham Singh arrived in Sunam and the small town was filled to bursting point: ‘My father was part of the welcoming committee and a civic leader in the town,’ remembered Gagandeep Singh, who still lives in Sunam today. ‘He used to tell me that Sunam sat like a bride, waiting for her groom the day he came back to us. She was decorated with lights and flowers, and the guests came from miles to pay their respects. All Punjab loved him. All Punjab wept for him.’4
Giani Zail Singh lit the pyre, and kept watch while it burned. The symbolism was powerful and clear, the orphan Udham was the son of all Punjab. The fire burned out, the embers turned from red to grey, and finally, on 2 August, Udham’s ashes were collected and divided into seven separate urns.5
In his speech to the court, Udham had talked about a united India and embodied that ideal in the name under which he chose to murder Michael O’Dwyer. To honour his message, it was decided that one urn of his ashes should be sent to Haridwar, an ancient city sacred to the Hindus, where ashes are submerged in the River Ganges; one urn was sent to Kiratpur Sahib, where traditionally Sikhs take the ashes of their dead; and the third urn was sent to Rauza Sharif, the dargah or shrine of a Sufi Muslim saint, Ahmad al-Fārūqī al-Sirhindī.
Two urns were kept in the library of the Shaheed Udham Singh Arts College in Sunam, where they were meant to wait for the construction of a memorial museum bearing Udham’s name. Forty-five years later, they are waiting there still.
One urn was buried under the foundation of a 27-foot-high minaret constructed in the town in honour of its famous son. The town is also dotted with numerous statues of him and memorial plaques bearing his name. Tehal Singh’s humble one-room house has become a place of pilgrimage.
The last of the seven urns was taken to Jallianwala Bagh, the site of the 1919 massacre.6 In 2018, a statue of Udham Singh was unveiled outside the gardens. It depicts him standing with his arm outstretched, palm up, holding a clod of blood-soaked earth in his hand. A reminder of a promise that took twenty-one years to fulfil.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Sir John Lawrence, Viceroy of India, 1864–69.
2. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 hardened the attitude of the Indian Civil Service for decades after.
3. The Golden Temple, Amritsar, c. 1900. The most holy shrine of the Sikhs.
4. The Raj at play, c. 1910.
5. Indian servants raising the c
hildren of the Raj, c. 1910.
6. Sir Michael O’Dwyer (back row, second from right), Lady O’Dwyer (front row, third from right) and Una O’Dwyer (front row, second from right) on a cheetah hunt, Hyderabad, 1909.
7. King George V and Queen Mary on the dais at the coronation durbar, 1911.
8. Indian soldiers marching through a French village, 1915. O’Dwyer worked tirelessly to urge Punjabis to volunteer for action.
9. Court sketch of Madhan Lal Dhingra, tried, found guilty and hanged for the assassination of William Hutt Curzon Wylie, 1909. Afterwards, Special Branch became much more interested in the activities of Indians in the United Kingdom.
10. Escorted supply lines over the Khyber Pass, c. 1910. Ishwar Das grew up nearby in the North-West Frontier Province.
11. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, leader of the Kheda agitation, in 1918 when he demanded the British ceased tax collection after a devastating natural disaster.
12. The Nihang. Akali Sikh warriors, c. 1905.
13. Kala Bagh surrounded by the dark green foliage which gave it its name ‘The Black Garden’, c. 1900. Ishwar Das grew up here.
14. Udham Singh’s childhood home in Sunam (now a museum).
15. Ishwar Das Anand, the author’s grandfather, shortly before he died.
16. Udham Singh (standing) jumping into a formal portrait of Bachan Singh (seated, left) and Manjit Singh Kassid (seated, right), Sunam, 1932.