Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-wpx69 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-12T04:20:25.390Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Rama or ahimsa? Terror or Passive Resistance? Revolutionary Methods of Hindu Students from London University and the Christian Response, 1909–17

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Stuart Mews*
Affiliation:
Grantchester

Extract

The assassination in London on the evening of 1 July 1909 of Sir Curzon Wyllie, aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, by a twenty-six-year-old Indian student named Madar Lai Dhingra stunned the nation. The background to the shooting and its consequences shed light on the attitudes of British Christians to Indian Hindus. In turn light is shed on the response of Hindus, most crucially that of the eventual leader of the successful campaign for Indian independence, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in the crucial decade before the First World War.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Prestige, G. L., The Life of Charles Gore: A Great Englishman (London, 1935), 54, 60–5Google Scholar.

2 Moorman, J. R. H., B. K. Cunningham: A Memoir (London, 1947), 1831 Google Scholar.

3 Hobsbawm, Eric, Tlie Age of Empire 1875–1914 (London, 1991), 79 Google Scholar.

4 Gandhi, Mahatma, My Experiments with Truth: An Autobiography (New Delhi, 2010), 6871 Google Scholar.

5 Searle, G. R., A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford, 2004), 630 Google Scholar; Parkes, James, ‘The Stirring in the Universities’, in Stephens Spinks, G., ed., Religion in Britain since 1900 (London, 1952), 90124 Google Scholar.

6 Tatlow, Tissington, The Story of the Student Christian Movement of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1933), 549–71Google Scholar.

7 Ibid. 550.

8 Ibid. 298.

9 Harper, Susan Billington. In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V. S. Azariah and the Travail of Christianity in British India, SHCM (Grand Rapids, MI, 2000)Google Scholar; Tinker, Hugh, The Ordeal of Love: C. F.Andrews and India (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar, O’Connor, Daniel, Gospel, Raj and Swaray.The Missionary Years of C. F.Andrews (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1990)Google Scholar; Cox, Jeffery, ‘C. F. Andrews and the Failure of the Modern Missionary Movement’, in Mews, Stuart, ed., Modern Religious Rebels (London, 1993), 226–44Google Scholar.

10 Kemp, Eric W., The Life and Letters of Kenneth Escott Kirk (London, 1959), 17 Google Scholar; Tatlow, , Student Christian Movement, 550 Google Scholar; Foreign Students in British Universities, February 1910.

11 Kemp, , Kirk, 17 Google Scholar; Tatlow, , Student Christian Movement, 550 Google Scholar.

12 ODNB, s.n. ‘Wyllie, Sir William Huff Curzon (1848–1909)’.

13 Lala Rajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, Bal Ganghadur Tilak: Owen, Nicholas, ’The Soft Heart of the British Empire: Indian Radicals in Edwardian London’, Past & Present, no. 220 (2013), 143–84, at 156CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I owe this reference to Hugh McLeod.

14 Tlie Times, 3, 4, 5, 7 July 1909.

15 Morley to Minto, 2 July 1909, in John, Viscount Morley, Recollections, 2 vols (London, 1917), 2: 211 Google Scholar.

16 On Dhingra, see Datta, S. N., Madra Lal Dhingra and the Revolutionary Movement (New Delhi, 1978)Google Scholar; ODNB, s.n. ‘Dhingra, Madan Lal (1883–1909)’; Tlie Times, 24 July, 18, 20 August 1909.

17 McLane, John R.,‘The Decision to Partition Bengal in 1905’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 2 (1965), 221–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dilks, David, Curzon in India (London, 1970), 200–1Google Scholar; Gilmour, David, Curzon (London and Basingstoke, 1995), 273 Google Scholar; Heehs, Peter, ‘Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902–1908’, Modern Asian Studies 28 (1994), 533–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 ODNB, s.n. ‘Fraser, Sir Andrew Henderson Leith (1848-1919)’; Fraser, A. H. L., Among Indian Rajahs and Ryots (London, 1911), 276 Google Scholar.

19 Bayly, C. A., Tlie Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Oxford, 1998), 118 Google Scholar; Popplewell, Richard J.. Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–24 (London, 1995), 125 Google Scholar.

20 Fraser, , Among Indian Rajahs, 276 Google Scholar.

21 ODNB, s.n. ‘Fraser, Alexander Garden (1873-1962)’; Clements, Keith, Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J. H. Oldham (Edinburgh, 1999), 26–7Google Scholar.

22 Clements, , Faith on the Frontier, 52 Google Scholar.

23 Sundkler, Bengt, Tlie Church of South India: Tlie Movement towards Union 1900–1947, rev. edn (London, 1965), 34–5Google Scholar; O’Connor, Daniel et al., Time Centuries of Mission: Tlie United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 1701–2000 (London and New York, 2000), 9 Google Scholar; Frykenberg, Robert Eric, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present, Oxford History of the Christian Church (Oxford, 2008), 239 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Popplewell, , Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 125 Google Scholar.

25 Sharrock, J. A., ‘Some Misconceptions about the Unrest in India’, Nineteenth Century and After 56 (July-December 1909), 361–76, at 372Google Scholar.

26 Dicey, Edward, ‘Hindu Students in England’, Nineteenth Century and After 56 (July-December 1909), 349–60, quotation at 350Google Scholar; ODNB, s.n. ‘Dicey, Edward James Stephen (1832–1911)’. On the freedom – personal and intellectual – enjoyed by Indian students in Britain, see Owen, Nicholas, Tlie British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism 1885–1947 (Oxford, 2007), 64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Dicey, , ‘Hindu Students’, 352 Google Scholar.

28 Ibid. 358.

29 Kirk, Kenneth E., ‘Indian Students: Another Point of View’, Nineteenth Century and After 56 (July-December 1909), 598606, at 601Google Scholar.

30 Ibid. 604.

31 Ibid. 606.

32 Hunt, James D., Gandhi and the Nonconformists: Encounters in South Africa (New Delhi, 1986), 119–20Google Scholar.

33 Indian Opinion, 14 August 1909, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 9: September 1908 – November 1909 (New Delhi, 1963), 302–3Google Scholar.

34 Keer, Dhanannjay, Veer Savarkar, 2nd edn (Bombay, 1966) 62–3Google Scholar; Wikipedia, s.v. ’India House’, online at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_House>, accessed 1 June 2013.

35 Owen, , British Left, 75 Google Scholar.

36 Moffitt, John, Journey to Dorakhpur: Reflections on Hindu Spirituality (London, 1973), 1920 Google Scholar; Brown, Judith M., Gandhian Non-Violence: Vision and Reality (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar.

37 Tatlow, , Student Christian Movement, 565 Google Scholar.

38 Juergensmeyer, Mark, ‘India’, in Mews, Stuart, ed., Religion in Politics: A World Guide (Harlow and Chicago, IL, 1989), 98107, at 98-9Google Scholar.

39 Sharpe, Eric J., Faith meets Faith: Some Christian Attitudes to Hinduism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1977), 46–7Google Scholar.