Madan Lal Dhingra

ON August 17, 1909, a 25-year-old Indian student, Madan Lal Dhingra, was hanged in Pentonville Prison for the assassination of Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, a high-ranking official from the British India office.

No Indians were allowed to attend the 30-minute trial. He defended himself, refused to recognise the authority of the British court, stating that the assassination was a legitimate act of political opposition against an occupying power – “taking away £100,000,000 every year from India to this country… deportations and hangings of my countrymen”.

After sentencing, when he was being led away, he bowed and said: “Thank you, my Lord. I am proud to have the honour of laying down my life for my countrymen.”

The authorities covered up his defiance. He was denied a cremation, his statement suppressed. His family distanced themselves, although his father tried to save him from the gallows and is said to have died from grief. Ironically, Churchill described his statement, when it was leaked, as the “finest ever made in the name of patriotism”.

Madan Lal was born in Amritsar, the sixth of seven sons of an eminent surgeon, Dr Ditta Mal. The family were wealthy and cosmopolitan. His older brothers were all successfully established in business, law and medicine, and were on good terms with the British administration (whom they considered to be a modernising influence).

He arrived in England in 1906 to study engineering at University College, London, and was already a bit of an “outlier”. He soon became involved with India House, a student hostel in Highgate, where young Indians gathered to freely discuss issues of self-determination, independence and justice for India. Calling themselves the Indian Sinn Feinists, they shared platforms with dissidents socialists, suffragettes, Egyptian nationalists, Poles, Russians etc. Madan Lal came under the influence of the radicals with more extreme views of targeted assassinations and on July 1 he shot Sir Curzon Wyllie, with tragic consequences.

Leena Dhingra

In the mid-1970s, the Government of India, inspired by the Irish Government’s successful petitioning for the return of the remains of Sir Roger Casement from Pentonville, lobbied for the return of Indian freedom fighters Udham Singh and Madan Lal buried there.

In 1976, Madan Lal’s remains were exhumed and returned to India for a hero’s welcome. A ‘D’notice forbade its reporting in the British press.

Madan Lal Dhingra was my great uncle. From an early age I was haunted by his story. Described variously as murderer, great patriot, revolutionary, martyr, misguided youth, I wanted to know – but I feared to know. I too had a secret story that no one talked about – the partition of India.

On August 17, 1947, exactly 38 years after Madan Lal’s execution (on the same date), the Radcliffe Line of Partition, demarcating the boundaries of India and Pakistan was revealed. My parents were in Paris where my father was temporarily working. Suddenly, they lost their city, home, job, friends and there was nowhere to go back to. Returning “home” became the lifelong aspiration.

In 1976, the year Madan Lal’s body was exhumed, I had started to “exhume” his story from the archives and locations in London. I would do this in fits and starts, making tentative attempts on days off work and holidays, with long gaps. It was a painful process that I would often abandon.

Then I was told “When you find out your family history you find out about yourself.”

That resonated. I made it a project that eventually manifested in my book, Exhumation. Part memoir, part history, it reveals the impact of colonial rule on a family through the course of the 20th century. But, for some reason, I resisted putting the book out.

Some time later in 2018, I was offered a part in an episode of Dr Who called The Demons of the Punjab about the Partition of India. I played a 90-year-old Pakistani woman, who has a secret she does not want to talk about: partition. When I watched it on TV I experienced a release from my inherited trauma. This enabled me to revisit and rework my manuscript.

My book was released on August 17, 2021. August 17 has a threefold significance for me: commemoration, commiseration, and celebration. Commemoration of the sacrifice of my courageous ancestor, commiseration for the cataclysmic trauma of partition. And celebration that I was able to wade through the layers of trauma and release the book.

• Exhumation: The Life and Death of Madan Lal Dhingra is available from www.hoperoadpublishing.com and on Amazon.
• Leena Dhingra is a writer and actor. Her first novel, Amritvela, was published in 1988. As an actor, her credits include East is East, The Bill, Prime Suspect, EastEnders, Coronation Street, Casualty, Doctor Who and Ackley Bridge.

Bordering on madness

AUGUST 17 is the 76th anniversary of the partition of India, the actual date on which the Radcliffe line demarcated the borders of India and Pakistan and overnight, 15 million people were dislocated and more than one million people massacred. Its traumatic impact continues to this day. My family never recovered. A week before she died, aged 99, my mother asked: “Are you taking me back to Lahore?”

I write as a way to untangle myself from that inherited trauma. The quote below from an anonymous writer on the website referenced below, says it all:

“It was one of the most dunderheaded moves in an imperial history chockfull with them: the partition of India. Its population distribution was such that there was no line that could neatly divide up the subcontinent. Yet, a boundary commission was given a mere six weeks to carve a Muslim-majority state from British India … More ridiculous still, the commission was led by a British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been in the East before. Radcliffe just drew some lines on the map without realising that his demarcation line went straight through thickly populated areas, villages and sometimes even through a single house with some rooms in one country and others in the other…”

https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/partition-of-india/