London, 1909
Vinayak’s grief knew no bounds when he received the telegram informing him about Babarao’s transportation for life to the Andamans. He longed to be back in Nashik with his family. But there were responsibilities in London that he could not run away from. On 20 June, at a public meeting in London, Vinayak swore vengeance against the British for their treatment of Babarao. 77 As he had expected, two days after his fiery speech, on 22 June 1909, Vinayak received information from Gray’s Inn that they had decided to postpone admitting him to the Bar. Right from May 1909, given the wide negative publicity that Vinayak had received in the British press and his brother’s conviction, speculation was rife about the Bar’s attitude towards him. On their part, the British authorities in India were keen to nab Vinayak as well and have him arrested and extradited to India. In a demi-official, J.H. DuBoulay writes from Bombay to Sir Harold Stuart in London on 8 May 1909:
The other day I was directed to send you copies of Savarkar’s letters from the India House to his brother in Nasik, with the suggestion that they should be brought to the notice of the Secretary of State. In Reuter’s telegram of 7th received this morning, I see that one student about whose call to the Bar they are hesitating has been one of the managers of the India House. We know that Savarkar has been the Manager of the India House and also that he has had some examination before him. It occurs to me that it might be worthwhile wiring to the India Office to tell them that you have papers showing a clear connection between Savarkar and his brother who has now been committed for trial on charges of waging war and sedition, in whose possession was found a voluminous typed document giving detailed instructions as to the manufacture and use of bombs, besides the draft of a most violent essay in praise of various Bengal murderers. If the India Office laid this information before the proper authorities, their hesitation should give way to decision presuming the student in question is Savarkar, and the effect would be excellent. In any case I trust you will not think the suggestion an impertinence. 78
This was possibly the lowest ebb in Vinayak’s life, with both his personal and professional lives in the doldrums. But being committed to the revolutionary cause, he was prepared to face such seemingly insurmountable challenges. He shifted out of India House temporarily to deflect the attention the place was gathering in the press. On 3 April, he moved to Bipin Chandra Pal’s residence at 140, Sinclair Road.
One of the key influencers of the Gray’s Inn decision with regard to Vinayak’s admission was Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie (1848–1909). He was a British Indian Army officer who rose to the position of a lieutenant colonel. He had served as the British resident to Nepal and one of the princely states of Rajputana. On his return to Britain, he was appointed aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton. One of his main tasks was the control of high-ranking Indian visitors to Britain and the continent who were suspected of seditious activities. This included native Indian princes such as Gaekwad, the Maharaja of Baroda. 79 He kept a close watch on their movements, the contacts they made while in Europe and the level of official recognition that they were awarded by continental governments. 80 Wyllie also made personal contacts with several Indian students, on occasion inviting them home for a drink or dinner and craftily extracting information from them, all the while behaving as their well-wisher. If any of this information merited attention, he passed it on to his superiors. 81
In late April 1909, Curzon Wyllie had personally written to the benchers of Gray’s Inn dissuading them from calling both Vinayak and Harnam Singh to the Bar. Through May 1909, he wrote several letters and supplied a plethora of information to Gray’s Inn about Vinayak’s ‘undesirable’ activities, terming him a particularly dangerous and seditious force. While Harnam Singh was called to the Bar, it charged Vinayak with ‘condoning assassination, inciting revolution and advocating against the nation’. 82 It is said that Curzon Wyllie even travelled to France to gather information about Vinayak and his associates at India House. He spearheaded a few unsuccessful attempts to establish a boarding house for Indian students sponsored by the India Office. He believed that this master stroke of his would help strip away the uniqueness of India House, wean away new recruits for Vinayak and also help foster loyalty towards the British government in the minds of young students.
The anger and resentment among several Indian students in London had reached its zenith and was all set to explode. It was merely a matter of time. On the evening of 1 July 1909, at about 8 p.m., a young, handsome Indian student left his room on the first floor of a lodging house on 106 Ledbury Road in the Bayswater neighbourhood of London. The National Indian Association (NIA) was holding one of its routine parties to encourage interaction between the British and Indians in London. It was being held at Jehangir Hall in the Imperial Institute at South Kensington. Miss Beck, the honorary secretary of the NIA, greeted him at around half past nine. She had met him a few months back and inquired how his studies were progressing. To this he replied that he had finished his course at the University College and would take up the examination for qualifying as an Associate Member of the Institute of Civil Engineers (AMICE) later in October before heading back home to India. Since he knew quite a few people at the party he told Miss Beck that he would keep himself busy socializing with them. 83 The young man walked around confidently, waiting for the opportune moment. At around 11 p.m. William Curzon Wyllie, the honorary treasurer of the NIA, made his entry into Jehangir Hall. He exchanged pleasantries with a few Indian students and stopped by to have a longer conversation with the young man. Suddenly, the young man fished out a small Colt pistol and fired four shots at point-blank range, right into Curzon Wyllie’s eyes. 84 Wyllie collapsed to the ground and died instantly. Cawas Lalcaca, a forty-six-year-old Parsi doctor from Shanghai, who rushed to Curzon Wyllie’s aid upon hearing the first shot was also inadvertently hit and lay writhing in pain on the ground. He eventually succumbed to his injuries.
Douglas William Thorburn, a journalist of the National Liberal Club, and several others rushed towards the young man, leapt on him and grabbed him tightly, pinning him to chair, to prevent further harm. In the process, his large gold-rimmed glasses fell. The young man placed the revolver to his own temple and was going to kill himself, but he had used all the bullets. People jostled and struggled to get the pistol off him. In the scuffle, one of the guests, Sir Leslie Probyn, fell and injured his nose and ribs. Thorburn asked him why he had committed such a ghastly act. The young man looked at him sternly and stoically responded, ‘Wait, let me just put my spectacles on!’ 85 He seemed unruffled and calm.
The Evening Telegraph described this trait of his in its report of him: ‘. . . not only being an expert revolver shot, but was the calmest man in the room after the tragedy, coolly inquiring if he might have his glasses’. 86 A fellow Indian, Madan Mohan Sinha, who was at the party, questioned him in Hindustani but the young man remained silent. The former wondered if the young man was under the influence of intoxicants as he appeared in a half-dazed and dreamy condition. Captain Charles Rolleston who held the young man tightly asked him repeatedly what his name was. Finally, he shouted: ‘Madan Lal Dhingra.’
The police came in no time and arrested Dhingra. Constable Frederick Nicholls and Detective Sergeant Frank Eadly testified that Dhingra also carried a dagger, a Belgian revolver with six chambers and extra ammunition. 87 A search at his apartments in Ledbury Road by Inspector Draper yielded seventy cartridges and another magazine revolver. There was a letter by Curzon Wyllie to Dhingra lying on his table. It was dated 13 April, asking Dhingra to meet him for any assistance that he might require. In fact, Dhingra’s brother, having heard that he was associating with members of India House, had written to Curzon Wyllie to counsel him. The letter was as follows:
Dear Sir: Your brother, Mr K.L. Dhingra, whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making in England, has written to tell me that you are in London, and asking me to be of any assistance I can to you. I expec
t to be abroad . . . but on my return I shall be very pleased to see you at the India Office, if you can conveniently call between 11 and 1 or 2:30 and 3:30. 88
Curzon Wyllie had tried the same trick of creating goodwill among Indian students, extracting information from them and passing these on to his superiors. But Dhingra did not respond to his overtures, viewing him as emblematic of the establishment’s efforts to track his doings. 89 A diary of his shooting practice was also discovered. 90
But how did Dhingra, the most unlikely candidate to undertake a political assassination, who barely participated in India House events, end up pulling the trigger? He would dismiss the lectures of India House as ‘mere talk’ not worth attending and believed in action rather than discourses. He considered the Indian revolutionary Kanailal Dutta of the Jugantar group as his role model. Dutta, along with fellow revolutionary Satyendranath Bose, had shot dead Narendranath Goswami, an approver of the British in the Alipore Bomb case. Dutta was hanged to death on 31 August 1908.
As a young man in Punjab, Dhingra had worked at the settlement department where he had been badly treated and racially discriminated against by Englishmen. Harishchandra Krishnarao Koregaonkar was one of Vinayak’s trusted translators of his book on 1857 and a member of India House. He was arrested by the DCI in Bombay after he returned to India in December 1909. He turned into a government approver and his testimony was collected to build a case against Vinayak. Koregaonkar testified in the trial about Dhingra:
His (Dhingra’s) hatred of Englishmen was intense. This was fed by the articles against Indians that used to appear in the English papers from time to time. He used to read them over and over again, articles like ‘Coloured men and English women’ which appeared in London Opinion, ‘Babu, Black Sheep’, which appeared in Cassell’s Weekly. 91
Dhingra had prepared for the assassination assiduously. As early as 26 January 1909 he had procured a gun licence and purchased a Colt automatic magazine pistol for £3.5s from Gamage’s Limited, Holborn. Thereafter, for three months, he made regular visits, thrice a week, to the shooting range at 92, Tottenham Court Road, to practise. Given that he had a valid licence, he managed to gain entry to the shooting range. He fired nearly twelve shots on each visit and soon ‘acquired considerable proficiency’. 92 Dhingra had supreme confidence in himself in the run-up to the assassination. The evening before the murder, Dhingra had come looking for Vinayak at Bipin Chandra Pal’s house. M.P.T. Acharya who received him there recollects that he found Dhingra ‘happy like a bird. He was always of a brooding temperament when he was in India House but not so that evening. But it is true that he spoke very little so that one could have no inkling of what was going on in his mind.’ 93 Even on the day of the murder, before heading to Kensington, Dhingra stopped by at the shooting range at around 5.30 p.m. and fired twelve shots from a distance of 18 feet; eleven of them hit the target accurately. 94
There was reason why Dhingra was so fastidious about his practice sessions. His real targets were Lord Curzon, the villain of the Partition of Bengal who was back in Britain, and Lord Morley. 95 He had narrowly missed assassinating both on earlier occasions. His icon and leader, Vinayak, met him at the Notting Hill Gate Station on the evening before the assassination and, while bidding him farewell, told him sternly: ‘Don’t show me your face if you fail this time!’ 96 Vinayak has been criticized by commentators for leading Dhingra to act as if in a haze, hypnotized by blind obedience to him. As the mastermind behind attacks who goaded his followers, Vinayak himself stayed away from wielding any weapon in his life. His threat to Dhingra to not show his face in case he failed in this attempt too was taken so seriously by Dhingra that he resolved to succeed at all costs. 97 But like every revolutionary organization, Abhinav Bharat too needed an intellectual strategist and mastermind—a role that Vinayak played—and several foot soldiers to implement the plans.
After the murder, Dhingra was taken away to Marylebone Police Station and was formally charge-sheeted. The charges were read out to him and he nodded. 98 When asked if he wished to communicate with his friends in London, he replied nonchalantly: ‘I do not think it is necessary tonight, they will know later on.’ 99 On the morning of 2 July, Dhingra was taken to Westminster Police Court. Just before being remanded, he told the magistrate: ‘The only thing I want to say is that there was no wilful murder in the case of Dr Lalcaca; I did not know him; when he advanced to take hold of me I simply fired in self-defence.’ 100 The magistrate adjourned the case for a week and remanded Dhingra to judicial custody.
The incident shook London to its core. The press was inundated with reports on the murder. Eyewitness accounts and graphic details of the scene of crime were reported in almost all the major newspapers. The issue rocked the British Parliament as well. Dhingra’s father, Dr Sahib Datta Dhingra, sent a telegram to Lord Morley informing him that the family had disowned their son forthwith. He also wrote to the Pioneer asking them to publish his public ‘abhorrence of the dastardly deed, depriving the family of one of the kindest of friends’. 101 Dhingra’s two brothers, Bhajanlal and Beharilal, were also in London, and they quickly followed their father in publicly disowning him. Condolence messages poured in from various vassals of the Empire. The raja of Benares, Sir Prabhu Narain, in a long demi-official dated 14 July 1909 stated:
It is superfluous, rather useless, on my part to tell you how very horrified and shocked, I feel at the atrocious crime which has been perpetrated in London by an Indian student and which cost the life of the two best friends of India. No man who has any stake in the country, can look with indifference upon such matters. These crimes which only a year or two before were quite unknown to this country are now becoming only too frequent and it is a wonder—rather I might be pardoned to say—a pity, nay, a shame, that nothing is being done seriously to eradicate this evil . . . it is rather a question of life and death to us. England might not think it necessary to care much for the Indians, but we Indians cannot afford to lose England’s protection. Our wealth, our happiness, our stability, even our very existence as a nation, depends upon England, and woe be the day when she would think of giving up hold upon this country . . . Indian students such as Savarkar and his associates are openly expressing their sympathy with the murder and men like Veerendra Nath Chatterjee are publishing letters in public papers and declaring that ‘the catalogue of coming assassinations will be probably a long one . . . Anarchical attempts to murder should be treated as murder and their sympathizers dealt with as felons. Until such sorts of drastic measures will not be carried out at least for a year or two, I have no doubt these crimes will rise by leaps and bounds. 102
The entire Indian community and its political leaders too began a series of condemnations of Dhingra. On 3 July, a meeting presided by Surendranath Banerjea and on 4 July, one by Gopalkrishna Gokhale, castigated Dhingra for this brazen act. Gokhale mentioned that the foul act had ‘blackened the Indian name and is one for which Indians would have to hang their heads in shame before the whole civilized world’. 103
In retaliation, Madame Cama’s Bande Mataram was scathing in its attack on leaders such as Gokhale for their denunciation of Dhingra. In its 10 September 1909 issue, it stated:
The clique of ignoble and cowardly politicians who trade in the tears and groans of their countrymen and who are represented by that conscienceless shameless poltroon, Gokhale of Poona, have been doing their best to mislead our young men by means of utterances and writings as specious as they are mischievous. All these pseudo-patriots resort to the same tricks to win the favour of the Government and secure their personal safety in the midst of the general ruin of their nation. It is amusing to see that these selfish and unprincipled wretches sometimes quarrel among themselves out of vanity and personal jealousy. So much the better for us. A house divided against itself cannot stand, and already the Moderates are showing signs of disunion and internal collapse. Gokhale has been treating the people to some fine speeches: he is a past master in the art of clothing mi
schievous nonsense in the garb of high-sounding phrases . . . meanwhile Surendra Nath Banerji has been licking the shoestrings of the British people and making himself ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world. 104
On 5 July, the Indian community congregated in large numbers in London’s Caxton Hall to condole the assassination and to condemn Dhingra. Several Parsi ladies, reported the Daily Telegraph of 6 July, ‘came attired in their picturesque costumes’. His Highness the Aga Khan presided over this distinguished audience and said that they were meeting to see how best they could ‘rehabilitate themselves among their fellow-subjects of the Empire in the face of a dastardly act of revolt’. 105 Among those who spoke on this occasion were distinguished Indians such as Sir Mancherjee Bhownagari, Surendranath Banerjea, Bipin Chandra Pal and G.S. Khaparde. The audience included several eminences such as the maharajkumar of Cooch Behar, Sir Dinshaw Petit, Fazalbhoy Karimbhoy, Syed Hussein Bilgrani, K.C. Gupta and others. The speakers used disparaging terms for Dhingra, ranging from ‘savage’, ‘brutal’, and ‘treacherous’ to ‘cowardice’, ‘unpardonable’ and ‘inhuman’. Sir Bhownagari moved a resolution to express the community’s horror and indignation at the crime and this was seconded by Ameer Ali. It also conveyed condolences to Lady Wyllie and the family of the assassinated. The resolution stated:
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