“When I am not an Indian, I am an Irishman,” Varahagiri Venkata Giri, the fourth President of India (1969-1974), would often say. It is this unique facet of Giri’s life, inspired by his years as a student at University College Dublin (UCD) that Conor Mulvagh emphasises in his book, Irish Days, Indian Memories – VV Giriand Indian Law Students at University College Dublin, 1913-16 .
The four years mark a period that Irish poet WB Yeats would refer to in his poem Easter, 1916 as a time when ‘All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born’. The Easter Rising, an armed insurrection in Ireland in the Easter week of 1916, was not just a footnote to the catastrophic World War I. It was an incident that laid the foundation for a modern republic. Although stamped out by the British in no time, the rebellion, a century old this year, changed the course of history in Ireland, pushing opinion towards independence and away from devolved home rule.
Mulvagh’s book reflects Dublin’s political and student life against this tumultuous background, drawn from a vast treasury of diaries, letters, military and university records.
As part of a tour to promote his book, Mulvagh says, “History has never been so good in Ireland. The commemoration of the revolution has seen a surge in papers being written, podcasts that have drawn over a 100,000 hits and videos.”
A lecturer in Irish History at UCD with a keen interest in the Irish revolutionary decade (1912-23) and the university’s place in that period, Mulvagh completed his doctoral thesis in 2012. Set to be published as a monograph, it examines the work of Irish Nationalist MPs at Westminster (1900-1918). At 30, Mulvagh has already supervised seven MA theses on topics as wide ranging as POWs in World War I and land agitations.
The author, dressed in a dapper suit and willingly posing for photographs, looks more like an investment banker than a serious academic. “I nearly became a scientist,” he laughs. “My father was an industrial chemist and my mother was with a national broadcasting network. My grandfather worked at the National Library of Ireland, and my grandma, who was fluent in Spanish, French and English, at the university library. History met me at every turn, and though I chose political science and history of art, and was in love with Gaelic as a language, it was pure history that held me in thrall.”
Established in 1854, UCD, Ireland’s largest university is also remembered for many of its staff and students lending heft to the Irish War of Independence, and is the major repository of archives relating to the period; which is how the 130-page book came to be in the spring of 2014.
“I had freshly started in a lectureship at UCD, and I was asked to verify whether or not V.V. Giri had studied at the university prior to the 1916 Rising,” says Mulvagh. “What started out as a small task, opened into a fascinating journey of discovery into an almost forgotten episode in the deeply connected histories of India and Ireland.”
With a foreword by the former President’s grandson, Amba Preetham Parigi, Group CEO-Network 18, the book begins with Giri’s arrival in Dublin in the late summer of 1913 along with 12 other Indian law students.
“While the fact that Giri studied in Dublin is well-known in India, the details of his time here were relatively unknown,” says Mulvagh. “Most Indian students left little personal records and, moreover, Giri’s retrospective prominence eclipsed his compatriots here. The persons at the centre of this study are almost ghosts. They left their names in the records of institutions in which they studied, their lodging houses have been found, but their experiences come from a variety of memoirs, including Giri’s autobiography written in the 1970s, their assignments, their work at King’s Inns, and material from British Library, UK, and the National Library of Ireland.”
The author continues, “The social records were most interesting; they speak of an Indian integration with the Irish people. Students like P.S.T. Sayee wrote on Indian nationality in an early issue of the Irish Volunteer . Giri, however, burnt his diaries because of impending police raids.”
Despite scant first-hand accounts, Mulvagh addresses the Irish and imperial contexts well; the changing attitudes to Indians in Britain. They studied in a city in turmoil with lockout, war and revolution as a backdrop, subversion and student societies, Indian activism and radical Irish connections, suspicion and sedition. Then there’s also Giri’s expulsion from Ireland over claims that he participated in the insurrection and his later tryst with railway trade unionism and the Independence movement in India, spurred by his first-hand experience of the Rising.
Replete with photographs, the book uncovers a neglected narrative of a turbulent time that had far-reaching effects on the histories of India, Ireland and Britain. A part of the team that organises national commemorations for the 100th anniversary of the Rising, Mulvagh says, “My commitment will always be to advance the prominence of history.”
The book, published by Irish Academic Press, is available on Amazon.in.
