The Assassination Cases of Madan Lal Dhingra, 1909 and Udham Singh, 1940 as Social Drama

Abstract

There were two Indian nationalist assassinations in London in the twentieth century: Sir William Curzon Wyllie by Madan Lal Dhingra in 1909 and Sir Michael O’Dwyer by Udham Singh in 1940. We read these assassinations as social dramas during which shifting meanings of British imperialism were articulated, contested and reinforced. We compare the cases to examine how Dhingra and Singh’s insistence on the iniquity of colonial violence contested dominant narratives of the British Empire as benign. Capital trials offered Dhingra and Singh the chance to state their views on a public stage. The final act of these social dramas was the death penalty, a measure intended to restore order, but which also posed the risk of turning them into martyrs.

INTRODUCTION

On the evening of 1 July 1909, 25-year-old engineering student Madan Lal Dhingra made his way to the Imperial Institute in South Kensington to attend an ‘At Home’ event held by the National Indian Association, of which he was a member. Dhingra had spent the afternoon at a shooting gallery on the Tottenham Court Road. While at the Imperial Institute, he conversed with various people and commenced pleasantries with Sir William Curzon Wyllie, Aide de Camp to Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India. Dhingra knew Curzon Wyllie personally. He calmly drew a revolver from his jacket and shot Curzon Wyllie five times in the face, killing him. Dr Cawas Lalcaca attempted to intervene and Dhingra shot him twice, killing him too. Madan Mohan Sinha approached Dhingra, who raised the revolver and pointed it at Sinha before putting it to his own right ear. Dhingra pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire. Sinha pushed him to the ground. In addition to the revolver, Dhingra had about his person a hunting knife and another loaded gun.

On the afternoon of 13 March 1940, 39-year-old unemployed carpenter Udham Singh was admitted by ticket to a lecture at Caxton Hall in Westminster entitled ‘Afghanistan, the present position’, held by the East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society. The chairman, retired Indian Civil Service Officer and former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab Sir Michael O’Dwyer, sat at the end of the front row. As the lecture finished, Singh produced a revolver and shot O’Dwyer twice in the back. Shots glanced off the ribs of Lord Zetland, former Secretary of State for India. Sir Louis Dane, like O’Dwyer a former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, was shot in the forearm and Lord Lamington, former Governor of Bombay, in the right hand. O’Dwyer died within a few minutes. Singh attempted to leave the hall but was overpowered by two other attendees who took his gun and he was further apprehended by a woman, who grabbed hold of him. He was reportedly heard to say, ‘I am dying for my country’.¹

This article combines two analytical frameworks—assassination as social drama drawn from cultural sociology and the cultural history of the British Empire ‘at home’ in the metropole. Dhingra and Singh carried out the only two political assassinations on the British mainland in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike anti-colonial assassinations in India, they brought the contentiousness of Empire home. We adopt the well-established approach from the cultural history of crime of closely reading capital trials for wider cultural themes and contests but extend this to two explicitly political cases.

We contribute to further developing two fruitful areas of historical criminology—attention to connected histories that link different parts of the world and the analysis of events as illuminating the place and time in which they happen (Channing et al. 2023). Social drama is an especially apposite framework with which to analyse historical events as our case studies demonstrate. While cultural history and its focus on meaning has been an important strand of crime history and one that offers clear meeting points between history and sociological criminology, it has been underplayed in discussions of historical criminology. However, attention to meaning is crucial to understanding the significance of events.

By examining the interplay of crime, punishment and colonialism in the metropole we contribute to burgeoning criminological attention to colonial legacies (Parmar et al. 2023). We do this by offering an analysis of the mental world of colonialism during British imperialism as it operated in criminal cases at home—something which is largely missing from criminology. British criminologists are starting to assess how colonial legacy organises the present, such as in the biographies of criminalised individuals or in how colonial structures cause ongoing social harm (Parmar et al. 2023; Wright 2023). As part of this attention, the colonial era in Europe itself must be in the picture (Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). We show how the interpretation of Britain as imperial terrain is essential to analysing two historical cases of anticolonial assassination.

ASSASSINATION AS SOCIAL DRAMA

The murders of Sir Curzon Wyllie and Sir O’Dwyer were political assassinations. They were intentional, planned and committed to highlight specific issues, namely Indian nationalism and colonial violence. Dhingra and Singh were both deeply involved with larger political movements. Ben-Yehuda (1999) argues what counts as a political assassination is culturally constructed. While the intentions of both men and the meaning of their actions were debated, the murders were widely recognised as political assassinations.²Wagner-Pacifici (1986) and Eyerman (2008) apply Turner’s (1980) four-stage conceptualisation of social drama to political assassination. The stages are breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or recognition of schism.

A social drama occurs as a ‘breach of the norm, the infraction of a rule of morality, law, custom or etiquette in some public arena’ (Turner 1980: 150). Social dramas are expressions of deeper social divisions and make conflicts visible. The breach creates controversy and has the potential to widen unless closed again quickly, which is the moment of crisis. Measures of redress to close breaches include informal mechanisms, use of the judicial and legal machinery, and ‘the performance of public ritual’, entailing literal or moral sacrifice (p. 151). Following successful redress, order and authority are restored enabling reintegration; normal daily life continues. Measures of redress such as trials must be public and accepted as legitimate (Eyerman 2008). If redress fails, there is instead social recognition of an irreparable breach.

Social dramas involve struggle over meaning. The breach exposes a fault line potentially leading to disruption, which actors want to widen or limit. Social dramas are political processes as they frequently involve competition over resources (Turner 1980). In the redress stage, there is an increase in social reflexivity as society attempts to understand itself. Authoritative interpretations of the breach give ‘the appearance of sense and order to the events leading up to and constituting the crisis’ (p. 156). Attempts at redress such as legal and ritual procedures generate narratives about the events, which create meaning. Narratives rearticulate the plot of the drama to make cultural sense. However, the fixing of meaning is a contested process, not permanent or given. Different and opposing narrative interpretations jostle for acceptance, although they do so on an uneven field (Wagner-Pacifici 1986).

Assassination is a purposeful event, intended to enact a symbolic performance that attracts widespread attention (Wagner-Pacifici 1986; Eyerman 2008). The victim, usually someone of importance with a high public profile, is selected for a political reason. The setting, ‘almost as important as the players’, is chosen to enhance the political message and symbolism of the performance (Eyerman 2008: 33). Assassinations are plotted events open to competing interpretations: they are social dramas. Different protagonists involved in the drama attempt to have their version accepted as the truth. This struggle happens through employment of the events in different texts, including legal documents and news sources (Wagner-Pacifici 1986).

Meaningfulness is constructed for particular groups, rather than the whole society. The assassin and their supporters do not intend to convince everyone of the rightness of their actions and cause; they seek to convince or bolster certain constituencies (Wagner-Pacifici 1986). The social breach creates the opportunity for change rather than achieving a full set of aims. The authorities construct their narrative interpretation with greater social and political resources. They attempt to deny the breach, for example by downplaying the significance of the assassination, and need to act to prevent crisis (Eyerman 2008). The redress stage happens with the criminal trial at its centre. The trial is staged by the state and enables the performance of its authority. However, it is an opportunity for the political cause of the assassin to be articulated in public, with news media communicating narratives to wider audiences.

ASSASSINATION AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Dhingra and Singh had capital trials and their punishment was execution. The final act of these social dramas, enabling reintegration, was the ritual of the death penalty. The cultural sociology of punishment emphasises how punishment is communicative of wider meanings beyond legality or criminal justice to issues of politics, morality and the social order (Garland 1990; Smith 2008). As the harshest punishment available and an emblem of the state’s power over life and death, the death penalty was especially symbolic.

The capital trials of political assassins entailed different narratives from ordinary murders. The pedagogical function was political, rather than the communication of appropriate social behaviour and mores. The death penalty as an assertion of state sovereignty was symbolically prominent. In these cases, the capital trial redressed the breach caused by the social drama of assassination to prevent the spread of dissent, and execution symbolised reintegration via the restoration of order. However, the trials represented a dangerous moment for the state when its opponents were given a platform and greater publicity. The audience for the assassins’ narratives of meaning expanded and their executions risked turning them into martyrs whose deaths bolstered their cause. The potential for the death penalty to inspire ‘martyrology’ in cases of politically motivated murder made it an imperfect punishment (Doyle 2015). Although the trials and their reporting were venues for the expression of dominant ideology, they inevitably presented the opportunity for counter narratives (Smith 2008): the articulation of Indian nationalism and excoriation of British imperialism, particularly colonial violence. The trials were mediated public events and it was not possible to sustain ‘authorised closed narrations’ throughout (Smith 2008: 171), despite restrictions placed on what Dhingra and Singh could say in court, and on the reporting of what Singh did say.

THE EMPIRE AT HOME

Dhingra and Singh carried out assassinations at two different moments of British imperialism. Dhingra shot Curzon Wyllie at the tail end of the era of high imperialism when direct rule of India was understood to be a constituent part of ‘greater Britain’, a global empire in which colonies’ resources were ‘exploited for Britain’s economic and military advantage’ (Thomas and Thompson 2014: 144). Anti-colonialism grew interwar, including the Indian nationalist movement (Maclean 2011). The Covenant of the League of Nations made colonial ‘tutelage’ a core principle. This principle rendered colonial societies unready for independence and needing European oversight until they reached the requisite level of development (Thomas and Thompson 2014). However, Britain still exploited its colonies for resources, including for economic and military advantage. Colonial control ultimately rested on violence, which was deployed at all stages of imperialism.

Imperial power was ‘staged at home’ as well as in the colonies (Burton 1998: 1). The cultural history of the Empire at home understands Britain itself as imperial terrain, unsettling the boundaries of centre and periphery. Britain was linked to its colonial possessions in several ways. One of these was the presence of colonial subjects within Britain, who both ‘challenged and remade’ imperial power relations (Burton 1998: 1). Colonised people moved around the country creating the possibility for encounters with British people. Burton (1998: 30) terms the Indians who travelled to the metropole and moved through different cultural spaces in the Victorian era ‘mobile colonial subjects’.

Most of the British population was unaware of the high politics of imperialism and knowledge of empire—including which countries were British colonies—was low. This ignorance was itself ‘a manifestation of an imperial mentality, and the power relations that shaped the direction in which knowledge flowed’ (Webster 2007: 4–5). The British Empire was debated and ‘always contested’, but few voices within Britain argued against imperialism (Hall and Rose 2006: 2). The British Empire was ‘taken-for-granted as a natural aspect of Britain’s place in the world and its history’ and was fundamental to British culture and national identity (Burton 1998; Hall and Rose 2006: 2). There was widespread ‘unconscious acceptance’ of the Empire, making it part of the given world (Hall and Rose 2006: 2–3). Imperialism was a root paradigm; an accepted framework of meaning and underlying framework for action, which demarcated the boundaries of inclusion in British society (Turner 1977; Eyerman 2008).

The British Empire operated according to the politics of difference; race was the axis distinguishing coloniser from colonised. Within Britain, this distinction shaped commonsense biological and cultural understandings of racial difference (Hall and Rose 2006; Stoler 2008). The racial imagery of the Empire portrayed (white) British power, authority and superiority over ‘primitive, childlike, savage, irrational, and sometimes effeminate’ racialised others (Webster 2007: 4). Webster (2007) describes cultural narratives of imperialism as ‘empire stories’ at play in British media and popular art forms. These stories constructed different visions of empire—as power and conquest, as adventure, as a ‘civilising mission’, as self-sacrifice—and made the Empire part of the cultural backdrop. Within Britain ‘Home’ was imagined as a place distinct from ‘Empire’, despite their interconnection. Nevertheless, Empire existed in the everyday ‘mundane and familiar’ of British people’s mental world (Hall and Rose 2006: 22; Schwarz 2011).

Race undergirded the mental world of colonialism and the perception of racial difference shaped whiteness. British identity entailed people imagining themselves as white—a largely implicit identity in the metropole, which distinguished British people against who they were not. Whiteness was an ‘evolving sensibility’, whereby ‘injunctions to racial whiteness were understated or silent’ (Schwarz 2011: 20). The strict binary between whiteness and non-whiteness was demarcated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and divided the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Schwarz 2011; MacDonald 2017). Whiteness connoted civilisation and modernity, two pillars of the root paradigm of colonialism. The putative role of the British Empire in upholding these pillars vouchsafed the superiority of whiteness. Whiteness and the root paradigm of colonialism were co-articulated at home, for example through the founding of imperial organisations (Schwarz 2011).

Instances of disruption had the potential to bring imperialism into British people’s conscious awareness, creating possibility for contestation. The social drama of assassination was one such disruption. Racialised individuals were a spectacular presence in British cities and towns, attracting attention and comment (Burton 1998). In the cases of Dhingra and Singh, the spectacle of assassination was compounded by the spectacle of colonial citizens carrying it out on British soil. The criminal trials and associated reporting were sources of empire stories and opportunities for the assassins to tell counter stories about Empire. The mental world of colonialism was constructed from the stories the British told about themselves and the stories the colonised told about them (Schwarz 2011).

We researched the two cases from official documents in case files held in The National Archives and contemporary news articles, many of which were clippings kept in files from the Central Criminal Court and the Home Office. These contain witness depositions, prison medical reports, police reports, reports about mercy and supplementary notes. Singh appealed his verdict, meaning there is a partial trial transcript for his case. There was no transcript of Dhingra’s trial, but it was reported in the Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court, available online (oldbaileyonline.org, n.d.). We gained information about the cases, especially the trials, from news articles, which we also analysed as sources of cultural representation. Early-twentieth-century local and national daily newspapers helped to create a mass public and a shared popular culture. By the mid twentieth century, reading newspapers was part of everyday life and most British people read a national daily newspaper (Bingham 2004). News stories were the primary way people learned about criminal trials and capital punishment. They instructed the populace about colonialism and helped to construct the mental world of imperialism (MacDonald 2017).

The discussion of these cases is drawn from a bigger project on race, racialisation and the death penalty in twentieth-century England and Wales. This project entailed analysis of all sixty-five cases of men of colour sentenced to death in this period. Dhingra and Singh constituted the only examples of political murder. While colonialism influenced understandings of race in Britain across the era, contested meanings of Empire were explicitly a feature of these two cases.

MADAN LAL DHINGRA: BACKGROUND AND BELIEFS

Madan Lal Dhingra was born in 1883 in Amritsar into a wealthy family that supported British rule. Dhingra arrived in Britain in 1906 to study engineering at University College London. London was a ‘crucible of anti-colonialism’ and an important site of Indian nationalist activism (Snaith 2018: 95). Dhingra attended meetings at India House in Highgate and lodged there for a while in 1908. India House was a hub for adherents of radical Indian nationalism and built alliances with other anti-colonial movements (Fischer-Tine 2007). At this time, it was headed by law student Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who believed an independent India should be a Hindu state (Snaith 2018).

In 1907, Sir Curzon Wyllie was part of a newly formed government committee to assess the political climate among Indian students in London. The committee established an Advisory Board and Bureau of Information, which provided Indian students with assistance in the form of lists of boarding houses and letters of reference (Tickell 2012). Curzon Wyllie identified India House as a negative influence on students and put it under surveillance (Fischer-Tine 2016). Concerned about his son’s involvement, Dhingra’s father urged two of Madan’s brothers in London to ask Curzon Wyllie, an acquaintance of the family, ‘to use his influence to make him desist from such company’.³

ASSASSINATION OF SIR CURZON WYLLIE: MEANING AND MOTIVES

Dhingra’s choice of Curzon Wyllie as his victim was influenced by a mixture of factors, including accessibility, personal reasons and political significance. Curzon Wyllie was not a household name and Dhingra would not expect the assassination to precipitate a national crisis. However, the purpose of Dhingra’s actions was to inspire Indian nationalist activism, rather than to communicate with the British authorities or public. He sought to bolster a particular constituency, one of interconnected global nationalist movements (Fischer-Tine 2007), to create the possibility for change (Wagner-Pacifici 1986). The murder of Curzon Wyllie was the first modern political assassination in Britain and as such an act of historical significance (Ball 2013).

The Home Office report on Dhingra’s case commented, ‘Sir William Curzon Wyllie was not sufficiently eminent as an administrator to justify his being singled out as a political victim’.⁴ Nevertheless, there were reasons for Dhingra to choose Curzon Wyllie. As they knew each other and were members of the same organisation, Dhingra could plan the assassination for a time and place where he knew Curzon Wyllie would be present. Curzon Wyllie’s unwelcome intervention in Dhingra’s own life was likely a lesser factor. Rather, Curzon Wyllie’s role in surveilling young Indian radicals and attempting to dissuade Indian students from becoming involved in radical nationalism was highly significant.

In Dhingra’s case, it is fruitful to interpret the setting of the assassination as almost as important as the people involved (Eyerman 2008). The ‘At Home’ event held by the National Indian Association at the Imperial Institute was intended to symbolise (and facilitate) harmonious social relationships between Indian and British people as part of a wider system of imperial soft propaganda. The Association had branches across the country and was ‘the primary clearinghouse for Indian students until World War I’ (Burton 1998: 57). Such organisations amplified colonial idioms in the metropole and were a prominent sign of whiteness; they managed the colonial encounter and played a role in the guardianship of colonial subjects (Burton 1998; Schwarz 2011). As a young man from a privileged and pro-British background, Dhingra was meant to benefit from this guardianship.

Dhingra’s violent rejection of paternalistic guardianship made a trenchant political point and was grist for anti-imperial propaganda. The assassination was a clear breach of norms and a challenge to the root paradigm of colonialism. The potential crisis his actions heralded was the growth of anti-colonialist feeling and further violence in Britain, as well as damage to the image of cultural imperialism. The Imperial Institute was managed by the Colonial Office and promoted trade with the Empire (Making Britain, n.d.). It symbolised and was imbricated in the political and economic aspects of imperialism. While the Home Office may have been dismissive of the choice of Curzon Wyllie as victim, the setting of the assassination was undeniably meaningful.

THE TRIAL OF MADAN LAL DHINGRA

The capital trial and its reporting in the press was the main public forum for the expression of competing narratives about the assassination and represented the redress phase of the social drama. Dhingra refused to recognise the authority of the British court and was not represented by counsel. He called no defence, presented no evidence and asked no questions of witnesses. Dhingra declined offers from the East India Association and campaigning journalist W T Stead to engage defence for him. The one-sided trial had only prosecution evidence and was very brief; less than an hour and a half on 23 July 1909.⁵ Dhingra’s lack of co-operation challenged the legitimacy of British justice and resisted the process of redress.

Attorney General William Robson’s opening statement emphasised Dhingra’s crime as a violation of the kindness and consideration he received from the National Indian Association and Sir Curzon Wyllie. The Association comprised English people ‘who were interested sympathetically in the welfare of India and young Indians in London’ and the Queen was its patron. Sir Curzon Wyllie had shown Dhingra ‘kindliness’, which made the crime even worse.⁶ Robson stated Dhingra’s political motive was not relevant to how the case should be judged. The Lord Chief Justice’s summing up was similar in emphasis, describing the assassination as ‘an ordinary crime, by which as far as we know a blameless man, who had given his life to the public service and had done an immense deal for the natives of this country of India, had lost his life’.⁷

The prosecution and judge constructed an empire story of benign paternalism and selfless duty, derived from the root paradigm of colonialism. The Lord Chief Justice’s statement that Curzon Wyllie had ‘given his life to the public service’ invoked the empire as self-sacrifice trope. Dhingra was portrayed as the recipient of the beneficence of ‘kind’ English people, who were acting ‘for his own good’, evincing paternalism.⁸ Their distinction from childlike and partially civilised colonial subjects was a sign of their whiteness. This story of the benign Empire was not designed to convince anti-colonialists but to reassure the jury and wider public who read about the trial of the rightness of British imperialism and the superiority of whiteness, facilitating reintegration. Against this rightness and superiority, Dhingra’s actions were unconscionable and incomprehensible. Redress to restore order required action against Dhingra for his crime, but also dismissal of his cause.

Although Dhingra had no legal defence, he requested the Clerk of Arraigns to read out his statement from the committal hearing. This statement asserted ‘no English law court has got any authority to arrest and detain me in prison, or pass sentence of death on me’. Dhingra highlighted colonial violence, referring to the ‘murder of 80 million Indian people in the last 50 years’, and the economic exploitation of Britain taking £100 million from India every year. The British were responsible for ‘terrible oppression and horrible atrocities’ and ‘outraging of our women’. This violence made it ‘perfectly justifiable on our part to kill the Englishman who is polluting our sacred land’. Dhingra wanted to be sentenced to death, ‘for in that case the vengeance of my countrymen will be all the more keen’.⁹ After the statement was read, the judge prevented Dhingra from making a further speech. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, after which he gave a salute, stating he was ‘proud to have the honour of laying down my life for the cause of my motherland’.¹⁰

Dhingra’s characterisation of the British Empire contrasted sharply with the root paradigm of colonialism as paternalistic and civilised. Instead of ‘kindly’ concern about the welfare of Indians, he articulated an empire counter story of rape and murder. In place of duty and self-sacrifice, he highlighted economic self-interest. Dhingra’s statement demonstrated the limits of state choreography of the capital trial. He was entitled to speak, which gave him the opportunity to make an anti-colonial statement in the country’s foremost criminal court, the Old Bailey, in a widely reported trial. Dhingra’s theatrical performance did not gain a sympathetic reception in the metropolitan public sphere. However, its significance lay in symbolic disruption.

Dhingra disrupted the official symbolic meaning of the trial as redress in refusing to be represented or to recognise its authority. This refusal contested the symbolic potency of the trial as emblematic of British justice. In claiming to be proud to face execution, Dhingra dismissed the punitive and deterrent elements of the death penalty (Smith 2008). He suggested his execution was counterproductive as it would provide impetus to the Indian nationalist cause. He attempted to claim martyr status. Martyrdom for revolutionary nationalist, rather than religious, reasons was a novelty in early-twentieth-century India. The martyr sacrificed himself for the nation as a form of communication with the Indian public. Certain newspapers and journals highlighted the courage and selflessness of nationalist martyrs and their symbolic refutation of colonial authority. Martyrdom could give meaning to the execution of revolutionaries and associate them with sacredness (Sanyal 2018).

While Dhingra’s statements trenchantly challenged dominant meanings of colonialism and capital punishment, they created little cultural danger in Britain, where Empire was largely unquestioned. The British public would hardly accept Dhingra as a martyr; he was instead a criminal. However, his intended audience was not white British people, but Indian nationalists and the Indian public, as well as wider global networks of militant anti-colonialism. Indian nationalism was not monolithic, and advocates of non-violence rejected those who committed political violence as martyrs. Dhingra’s assassination of Curzon Wyllie inspired Gandhi, who knew Curzon Wyllie, to write Hind Swaraj in which he argued the violence of Western culture must be opposed by passive resistance and non-violence (Jahanbegloo 2013).

THE PRESS REACTION

The British press’s reporting of Dhingra’s trial deployed the same paternalistic narrative of colonialism as the prosecution and judge, and this narrative was maintained across different outlets. The Times stated it was ‘malicious’ of him to select ‘the blameless gentleman who had been a generous benefactor to his family’. The article made a racialised explanation for Dhingra’s actions and demeanour, opining while his ‘callous and defiant attitude may seem strange to many Englishmen, it corresponds exactly with the bearing of criminals of his type’.¹¹The Daily Telegraph evinced a commonsense narrative of racialised difference, referring to Dhingra’s ‘excitable Hindu nature’. Indian students in London were ‘unformed and unbalanced lads [ … ] given to morbid brooding’.¹²The Times and Telegraph called for measures to prevent the use of printing presses for ‘anarchist’ material that would influence ‘young and unsophisticated lads’, assigning them a racialised masculinity of immaturity and emotionality.¹³

The Telegraph suggested Shyamji Krishnavarma, the founder of India House, was an example of ‘the result of an English education upon a certain type of native mind’.¹⁴ What Stoler (2008) terms ‘colonial commonsense’ was significant in shaping racialisation and racism in understandings of criminality (Seal and Neale 2020). Racial thinking, based on perceived bodily differences and judgments about affective states, was foundational to European colonialism (Stoler 2008). Understanding of race as a category was hybridised as connoting cultural and biological differences (Lorimer 2013). The emphasis in these reports on the emotional volatility of Indian students, Dhingra’s ‘strangeness’ to English people, and the ‘native mind’ that could not cope with an English education reflected prevalent commonsense interpretations of race. The implicit comparison with rational, civilised white men cemented racial difference and the superiority of whiteness. Dhingra’s empire counter story of colonial violence made the white man a villain and challenged his authority.

Consistent with the redress stage of social drama, the Manchester Guardian downplayed the significance of the assassination and the meaning of Dhingra’s motives by arguing the crime was committed due to personal, not political, reasons. The ‘foul murder’ resulted from ‘an imaginary grievance’ held by Dhingra against Curzon Wyllie. Only Dhingra regarded himself as a political martyr and through his ‘theatricalities at the trial’ had injured his home country. The death penalty was understood to be the only ‘possible’ sentence.¹⁵ The Telegraph argued ‘weakness in dealing with all forms of violence in connection with Indians would encourage assassination and outrage’.¹⁶ The execution of Dhingra was a measure necessary to restore order and enable reintegration.

THE EXECUTION OF DHINGRA AND ITS AFTERMATH

Few voices in Britain opposed the execution of Dhingra. In letters to the press and Home Office, his father and brothers argued he was insane. The Observer published a letter from W T Stead suggesting ‘a lifelong sentence of incarceration would be much more punitive than the short, sharp shrift of the gallows’ and that the proper place for Dhingra was Broadmoor, an asylum for the criminally insane.¹⁷ Prison medical reports on Dhingra repeatedly stated he was not insane and there was no realistic prospect of averting his execution with such arguments.

Dhingra petitioned the Home Office for his body to be cremated as burial ‘would be quite against my religion’ as a Hindu.¹⁸ Minutes in the file acknowledge ‘[t]he death penalty in itself has little deterrent effect upon fanatics like Dhingra’; however, ‘it would be wrong to rob it of any terrors of a religious character which it may possess’.¹⁹ These minutes, recorded by a civil servant, indicate the Home Office understood the contextual symbolic potency of the death penalty enhanced its punitive purposes. Punishment, including the death penalty, was applied differently in the colonies from in the metropole. Colonial penalty was racialised and preserved spectacular punishment, such as public execution, past its use at home (Seal and Ball 2023). The minutes in Dhingra’s file echo colonial penality by highlighting the distinctive benefits of religiously inspired ‘terror’ in his case.

Notes in the Home Office file concede ‘imprisonment for life could be a better punishment as he wants to die’, meaning the death penalty was ‘far more merciful’. However, imprisonment would make Dhingra ‘subject to political agitation and intrigue’.²⁰ These notes show Dhingra‘s attempt to embrace martyrdom was inconvenient for the Home Office as it offered a clear alternative meaning to his execution, one which was avowedly anti-colonial. However, the notes should not be interpreted as serious consideration of substituting the death sentence with life in prison as this would have had no precedent (Seal and Neale 2020). Rather, they commented on the imperfect symbolism of Dhingra’s execution and acknowledged politically motivated murder shifted the purpose of capital punishment.

The Home Office report, prepared by a senior civil servant to inform the Home Secretary’s decision on whether to reprieve capitally sentenced prisoners, described the assassination of Sir Curzon Wyllie as ‘a deliberate piece of wanton imbecile cruelty for which there can be but one punishment’. Imprisoning Dhingra for life without a verdict or diagnosis of insanity was ‘impracticable’ and the public would resent it. The report cautioned reprieve ‘would be represented as a sign of weakness in India’.²¹ Dhingra created a double bind for the government; execution martyred him, but they could not restore order and authority at home or in India without it. He was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on 17 August 1909.

UDHAM SINGH: BACKGROUND AND BELIEFS

Udham Singh was born in Punjab in 1899 and brought up in an orphanage. Stadtler (2012: 19) comments ‘many legends’ surround his life, some created by Singh himself. One claim, important to the assassination of Sir O’Dwyer, was that Singh witnessed the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919. A mobile colonial subject, he travelled around the world as a ship’s carpenter, including to the United States, where he adopted the alias Frank Brazil. Singh was part of a global diaspora of Punjabi men who found work overseas to escape agricultural hardship in India (Webb 2018). In the 1920s, he spent time in California and became involved with the revolutionary communist and anti-colonialist Ghadr Party, which was influenced by nineteenth-century anarchism and argued for the necessity of using violence to achieve Indian independence (Stadtler 2012; Webb 2018).

Singh travelled across Europe as Frank Brazil and returned to India in 1927, where he was imprisoned for possession of unlicensed firearms and a banned newspaper. In 1934, Singh moved to Britain and worked as a film extra for London Film Productions, appearing in crowd scenes, and as a carpenter. At the time he assassinated O’Dwyer he was unemployed. In London, Singh joined the Ghadr influenced Indian Workers’ Association, which was established in the late 1930s. The IWA was a working-class organisation, founded by Punjabi men who came to Britain and worked as peddlers. It sought to promote the struggle for Indian independence among working-class Indians in Britain and to protect their welfare (Making Britain, n.d.). Singh shared the radical politics of the Ghadr Party and the IWA. He believed in global worker solidarity and a religiously plural independent India.

ASSASSINATION OF SIR O’DWYER: MEANING AND MOTIVES

The Second World War changed the context of Indian nationalism. Britain unilaterally declared war on behalf of India and relied on Indian labour and raw materials as part of the war effort (Stadtler 2012). Eight out of eleven heads of devolved Indian self-governing provinces resigned in protest at the declaration of war (Webster 2007). Democratic reforms implemented in the 1930s were undone and the Defence of India Act 1939 increased colonial powers to use detention and punishment for security reasons (Khan 2016).

Singh’s choice of O’Dwyer as his victim was highly significant. He became aware O’Dwyer was scheduled to chair a lecture at Caxton Hall when, during an unsuccessful passport application, he saw it advertised at the India Office. Sir Michael O’Dwyer was lieutenant-governor of Punjab in 1919 when the British Indian Army, under the orders of General Reginald Dyer, perpetrated the Jallianwala Bagh massacre by firing on a crowd gathered in an enclosed area for a mass meeting. The colonial authorities’ official death toll was 379, with over 1,200 wounded, although Indian estimates of the dead and injured were far higher. The massacre became ‘a byword for colonial violence’ and spurred on the movement for Indian independence (Wagner 2016: 86).

The assassination of O’Dwyer clearly protested British imperialism in India and colonial violence. Discussion of the assassination led inevitably to discussion of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, known in Britain then as the ‘Amritsar riots’. Singh’s choice of O’Dwyer was an example of didactic violence, whereby the assassinated individual represents repressive authority. The assassination was a spectacular event that unearthed the British public’s memory of the massacre’s spectacular violence. Singh aimed to condemn the imperial past and galvanise wider movements for Indian independence and revolutionary anti-colonialism in the present (Stadtler 2012). When arrested, he gave his name as Mohamed Singh Azad, a combination of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu names, to illustrate his belief in pan-Indian solidarity.

Singh knew the assassination would lead to his execution. He told the police he accepted execution because he had ‘seen people starving in India’ and had done his duty in taking action against colonialism. He claimed he did not intend to kill O’Dwyer but to protest against British imperialism by shooting at the wall.²² Singh adhered to this claim, which contrasted with Dhingra’s clarity about his political motives for murdering Curzon Wyllie. It is unlikely Singh thought this denial would elicit a not guilty verdict or a reprieve from the death penalty, but it made his martyrdom more secure.

REACTIONS TO THE ASSASSINATION OF O’DWYER

Unlike Dhingra’s assassination of Curzon Wyllie, it was impossible to not mention the colonial violence of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in reporting the assassination of O’Dwyer—although newspapers avoided the term ‘massacre’. This need to acknowledge a past episode of colonial violence was an example of the social reflexivity social dramas engender. In this case, social reflexivity entailed memory politics. The Daily Telegraph described Amritsar as ‘an old, unhappy memory’ and the Yorkshire Post conceded O’Dwyer’s name ‘recalls painful memories’.²³

News articles described ‘Amritsar’ as unfortunate but argued O’Dwyer was a committed public servant who should be commended for his service. The Scotsman mentioned his ‘distinguished service in India’ and the Newcastle Journal argued India might find ‘ground for criticism in some of his actions, yet owed him gratitude’.²⁴ Amritsar was a painful memory—potentially one that cast doubt on the inherent superiority of white men and the morality of the preceding era of Empire. Press stories acknowledged the massacre but judged it insufficient reason to question the root paradigm of colonialism.

Similarly to the empire stories told about Curzon Wyllie, the press mobilised narratives of colonialism as duty and a paternalistic narrative of imperial ‘service’ as being for the good of Indians themselves. However, these benign narratives of colonialism existed alongside acknowledgement of colonial atrocity as anti-colonialist nationalism grew, particularly in India. New narratives of Empire constructed in wartime propaganda emphasised principles of welfare, development and egalitarianism. Newsreels covering the imperial war effort depicted people of different races and ethnicities across the Empire pulling together in a common cause, a portrayal Webster (2007) terms creation of the ‘People’s Empire’. This shift in the mental world of imperialism did not displace the superiority of whiteness from the root paradigm but modified the portrayal of colonised people. O’Dwyer was a figure from a different era of Empire who, despite the consistent thread of paternalism in imperial narratives, was difficult to square with this more inclusive portrayal. His assassination potentially created a symbolic moment of crisis in threatening this narrative.

The press downplayed the assassination by reporting a widespread lack of Indian support for Singh.²⁵ The Manchester Guardian stated the assassination had caused Gandhi ‘deep pain’ and had been condemned by Indian princes, newspapers and leaders of Congress,²⁶ which adhered to a doctrine of non-violence (Sanyal 2018). The Daily Mail informed its readers Lady O’Dwyer had received ‘scores’ of telegrams expressing sympathy from India. Firoz Khan Noon, High Commissioner for India in London, witnessed the shooting. The Mail quoted him on the matter: ‘We are ashamed of having brought up a countryman capable of showing violence and taking human life’.²⁷ The reporting of these reactions supported the narrative of the ‘People’s Empire’ as a suitably modern revision to the meaning of imperialism and one that justified its continued existence.

THE TRIAL OF UDHAM SINGH

Singh’s trial began on 4 June 1940 at the Central Criminal Court. He had spent forty-two days on hunger strike in HMP Brixton and was artificially fed.²⁸ A report by the senior prison medical officer described Singh’s conduct as ‘wilful’, arising from his political views rather than insanity.²⁹ Singh’s courtroom testimony explained his hair had fallen out and he had lost five stone in weight.³⁰ Physically, he would have cut a frail figure. The hunger strike demonstrates Singh maintained his protest throughout his remand in prison, despite facing a capital trial. Hunger strikes are political events designed to exploit the power and symbolism of potential martyrdom by exposing authorities’ repression (Scanlan et al. 2008). Indian revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh in the 1930s went on hunger strike while awaiting execution, which enhanced their martyr status (Maclean 2011).

Singh’s testimony told an empire counter story. He asserted he did not mean to shoot O’Dwyer and the others he injured but wanted to fire his revolver into the air in protest at not being issued with a passport and because of British injustices perpetrated in India. He explained his hands were shaking, and the gun fired when he was pushed from behind. He chose the lecture at Caxton Hall for the protest because there would be many Indians there, acknowledging whom he intended to influence. Singh claimed to have met O’Dwyer by chance in 1937 when he saw him crossing the road in London. O’Dwyer gave him his telephone number and invited him for tea. Later, Singh drove O’Dwyer to Brighton for the day. This story of friendship between O’Dwyer and Singh was unlikely to be true but was presumably made to support Singh’s lack of intent to kill. Intentionally or not, it parodied the People’s Empire representation of colonised and coloniser associating happily together. In response to a question from the judge, Singh said Amritsar was not the only reason he hated British rule in India, but one reason. Under cross-examination, he stated, ‘I love these English people. I only hate British imperialism; that is all I hate’.³¹ Singh was clear about his anti-colonial politics, but unlike Dhingra did not represent the shooting as a militant act.

In his closing speech to the jury, Singh‘s defense counsel John Hutchinson deployed the empire story of British equality and fair play consistent with the ‘People‘s Empire’ of the Second World War. He ‘told the jury that probably in no other country in the world at this critical hour would a vehement opponent of “Imperialism” arraigned on such a murder charge be afforded so calm and full a trial by a Court of the Empire he denounced’.³² Hutchinson exhorted the jury to find Singh guilty of manslaughter, arguing ‘the door he must take should be to prison, not the gallows. That would be real British justice’.³³ ‘British justice’ was an important symbol that stood for fair play and was at this time increasingly ‘crucial to the imagining of capital punishment as a national issue’, one redolent with meaning about the national character (Seal 2014: 918). Fairness assumed greater importance in the People’s Empire narrative. Singh’s counsel reinforced positive empire stories, participating in the redress purpose of the trial, and blunting the threat Singh posed.

Justice Atkinson’s summing up described Singh as having a ‘grievance’ about British rule in India and referred to the ‘Amritsar riots’ as constituting the motive for why Singh shot O’Dwyer. Singh went to the meeting at Caxton Hall ‘I will not say with hatred in his heart, but I think he said he hated England or the British rule in India’.³⁴ Singh was found guilty, and Atkinson asked if he had anything he wanted to say. Singh attempted to make an anti-colonial speech that highlighted colonial violence. He exhorted the British to ‘Read your own history. You have had many inhuman monsters, cold blooded and bloodthirsty who have been the rulers of India’. His empire counter story reversed the racial order and racialised white colonisers as savage others. Atkinson intervened, telling him he was not entitled to make a political speech and saying he would not hear denunciation of the British government or Empire. Singh continued, stating British rulers of India were a ‘bastard blood caste, and they order machine guns to fire on the Indian students without hesitation’. He explained he had ‘great sympathy with the workers of England’ and finished, ‘England, England, down with imperialism, down with the dirty dog’.³⁵

Atkinson told Singh his comments should be confined to reasons why he should not be sentenced to death and directed Singh’s speech should not be published by the press. He pronounced the death sentence, at which point Singh ‘thumped his clenched fist on the rail of the dock, and spat into the court’.³⁶ This piece of defiance was reported. Although Singh made an excoriation of colonial violence in court, it remained there and did not circulate in the public sphere, which would have hindered the restoration of order. However, Singh’s assassination of O’Dwyer raised the undeniable violence of the British during the ‘Amritsar riots’, challenging official memories of Empire and the root paradigm of colonialism. His appeal against the verdict was dismissed as having no grounds. Consistent with narratives of colonialism as duty, the judgement of the Court of Criminal Appeal stated, ‘It was a deplorable case, resulting in the death of a civil servant who had done very fine work for the Empire’.³⁷

THE EXECUTION OF UDHAM SINGH

Singh’s execution did not provoke official discussion of the dangers of making him a martyr or whether life imprisonment was a more severe punishment for someone who wanted to die. His case was different from Dhingra’s; he mounted a defence and appealed the verdict. Colonial authorities in India were aware of martyr making and its potential to inspire anti-colonial violence (Maclean 2011). However, by 1940 Congress led the nationalist movement and rejected the framing of political violence as self-sacrifice and martyrdom (Sanyal 2018). The Home Office was concerned about Singh being contacted by Indian radicals while imprisoned, but there was no dilemma attached to his execution. The Home Office report noted his case’s similarity to Dhingra’s and simply recommended there should be no interference with the death sentence.³⁸

The official attitude towards Singh’s execution contrasted with Dhingra, but also with Peter Barnes and James Richards, IRA members who were hanged in February 1940 for murdering five people with a bomb explosion in Coventry. There was strong support in Ireland and the United States for their reprieve, which prompted anxiety about their possible martyrdom and increased sympathy for their cause (Doyle 2015). Singh did not attract similar support. Like Dhingra, there was little public reaction to his death sentence, although the Home Office received a petition arguing mercy would ‘strengthen the bonds of union between the British and Indian peoples’ signed by people from Birmingham, Southampton, Swindon and Yorkshire, including Indian people in those areas. This petition is likely to have been circulated by the Indian Workers’ Association, which was ‘animated’ by Singh’s trial and execution (Webb 2018: 49).

Singh resumed his hunger strike as a symbolic attempt at martyrdom (he co-operated with artificial feeding). Case file documents and news stories about Singh contained fewer explicitly racialised descriptions and generalisations than in Dhingra’s case, although concerning his hunger strike, the prison medical officer assigned Singh a racialised subjectivity as ‘unemotional, and ha[ving] the fatalistic attitude of the Oriental’.³⁹ Singh was transferred from HMP Brixton to the condemned cell in Pentonville. A report in the Prison Commission file interpreted the hunger strike as political fanaticism and ‘to make as much trouble as possible’.⁴⁰ By forcing the authorities to keep him alive through artificial feeding to hang him, Singh maintained his defiant protest to secure his martyrdom. He exposed the limits of official control over the death penalty’s symbolic meaning, turning it—for some audiences—into a form of sanctification rather than punishment. Singh was hanged at Pentonville Prison on 31 July 1940.

CONCLUSION

The model of social drama has much to offer historical criminology. It enables analysis of historical events, the competing meanings they generate and their effects. The assassinations were spectacular encounters staged at occasions related to British imperialism with colonial officials who were military men as their victims. They were the only Indian nationalist-inspired assassinations to happen on British soil and had many similarities. The breach the cases created to the norm (beyond public murder) was challenging the taken-for-grantedness of British imperialism and refuting ‘empire stories’ about the benevolence of colonialism. Both assassinations were examples of propaganda by the deed; Dhingra and Singh sought to highlight the iniquities of colonialism and inspire others to support the cause of Indian independence. At their trials, they offered empire counter stories. Their intended audience was not primarily white British people, although Singh’s (unreported) expression of solidarity with British working-class people was an attempt to engage them with left-wing politics. Both men envisaged different versions of Indian independence: a Hindu state; a religiously plural state based on communist ideals.

The crisis these assassinations precipitated was not fear of imminent Indian independence, but of bolstering anti-colonial violence, including within Britain, and recruiting militants to the cause. The assassinations also created potential crises by striking at the root paradigm of British colonialism, and by association whiteness, as good, civilising, fair, superior and modern. While assassination as a form of protest did not find sympathy with the British public, redress from the authorities dismissed the claims made by Dhingra and Singh about colonial violence and British rule in India as unwanted imposition by countering them with positive empire stories. These stories about duty, service, paternalism and welfare circulated during the trials and news reports and were reinforced by press commentary. There were strong continuities across these two points in time in terms of benign and beneficial meanings of Empire.

This emphasis on the benign was an especially important part of the redress phase in Singh’s case in 1940. Unlike Dhingra’s assassination of Curzon Wyllie, discussion of colonial violence in Singh’s case was unavoidable. The interwar principle of colonial tutelage elevated paternalistic meanings above imperial conquest. The wartime discourse of the People’s Empire, under development at the time Singh assassinated O’Dwyer, went further in promulgating notions of joint working across the British Empire towards a common cause. This modern version of Empire was intended to represent what Britain stood for in the war: fair play, justice and democracy. Singh’s action was in direct contradiction with this discourse but also engaged memory politics in relation to colonial atrocity at Amritsar. There was less racialised generalisation in response to Singh because of this discursive shift and the particular context of wartime. The two men’s different class backgrounds were also significant. Unlike Dhingra, Singh did not mix with the British establishment. As a working-class Indian, there was less need to explain his violence to distance him from whiteness.

In present-day India, Dhingra and Singh are considered martyrs to the cause of independence. After 1947, political martyrdom became significant to Indian cultural memory despite Congress’s position of non-violence. The construction of an inclusive nation-state led to the incorporation of martyrs into official public memory, instantiated in monuments and memorials (Sanyal 2018). The martyrdom of Dhingra and Singh exemplifies this process. Their remains were returned to India by the British government in 1976 at the request of Indira Gandhi, Congress Prime Minister, where they were cremated. The better-known Singh was cremated with full state honours (Fenech 2002). There are statues of both men in Amritsar in tribute to their martyrdom.

In Britain, their names are not familiar although broadcaster Anita Anand published a widely reviewed biography of Singh in Anand 2019 entitled The Patient Assassin, which contextualises the assassination of O’Dwyer in relation to colonial violence in India. The issue of colonial violence, and more widely of Britain’s imperial past, is deeply contentious. Memory of the colonial past involves forgetting, with recurrent themes of invisibility and the unspeakable (Schwarz 2011). Remembering these cases entails remembering colonial violence and anticolonial resistance, neither of which is easily spoken in postcolonial Britain. On the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 2019, then Prime Minister Theresa May expressed ‘deep regret’ for the suffering it caused but did not make an official apology (McKie 2019).

The colonial past retains the power to organise the present (Schwarz 2011). While stories of the benign and beneficial nature of the British Empire do not enjoy a monopoly on meaning, there has been no collective national reflection or adequate reckoning with colonial violence. Our framework demonstrates the benefits of cultural approaches to historical criminology. Through empirical analysis of capital cases in two historical moments, we put the colonial era ‘at home’ in the picture in terms of meanings surrounding crime and punishment (Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). This approach is needed in further historical research and to inform criminological analyses of postcolonial legacies, which must be grounded in understanding the history of Britain as imperial terrain.

FUNDING

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2016- 352).

REFERENCES

Footnotes