[Reader-list] Yasmin Khan: "The Ghost of Udham Singh"

[Rana Dasgupta]

In the early evening of 13 March 1940, a seventy-four year old man was 
shot dead. The man was Sir Michael O’Dwyer and his assassin was Udham 
Singh. O’Dwyer – who had been the Governor of Punjab at the time of the 
Amritsar massacre in 1919 – was taking part in a discussion on the 
future of Afghanistan. Udham Singh shot him twice in the chest with a 
revolver and the former Raj official died shortly afterwards. This was 
retribution for his role in imposing martial law and defending the 
perpetrators of the Jallianwalla Bagh killings at the end of the First 
World War, carried out almost exactly twenty one years later.

The impact of the Caxton Hall assassination lay in the fact that it was 
carried out in the heart of Westminster; a stone’s throw from 
Westminster Abbey, within minutes of the Houses of Parliament. The 
assassination seemed to shrink the distance between Amritsar and London, 
collapsing time between 1919 and 1940. It brought back to the 
newspapers, and to many memories, the bloody scenes at Jallianwalla 
Bagh, where hundreds of innocent men, women and children had died. The 
grand surroundings of the Tudor Room, with its heavy drapes, and wooden 
beamed ceiling was the setting of a murder that evoked those horrific 
event thousands of miles away in Punjab. Resistance to the Raj had 
literally reached the epicentre of the British empire. Two worlds had 
collided.

The room was packed with around two hundred people, among them many of 
the bespectacled and besuited grandees of the British establishment in 
tweeds and pinstripes. They had gathered to hear a lecture by Sir Percy 
Sykes on ‘Afghanistan: the Present Position.’ Well heeled and well 
travelled this was a select crowd of members of the Royal Society of 
Asian Affairs. Many were retired civil servants and administrators, keen 
to hear about lands in Asia where they had served many years before. 
Others were majors, doctors, former provincial governors and their 
wives. Among them sat the splendidly named Miss Bertha Herring who would 
soon rugby tackle Udham Singh to the ground after he had fired the fatal 
shots, stout, in her sixties, an active member of the association and of 
the local church in Ascot. The most important guest was Lord Zetland, 
the Secretary of State for India, who chaired the meeting.

Udham Singh, in a trilby and blue lounge suit, must have been 
conspicuous in this crowd. There is little doubt that the assassin was 
something of a dandy: an earlier passport photo shows him in a crisp 
white shirt, striped tie and with a carefully clipped moustache framing 
his full mouth. After his arrest, the police found coloured 
handkerchiefs, Russian roubles, a silver watch and cigarettes among his 
possessions. Looking at him, few could have imagined his origins and 
experiences – the loss of all his immediate relatives to disease while a 
young child, years spent in an orphanage in Amritsar, the ducking and 
diving through prisons and legal systems, the aliases and different 
passports, the numerous affairs with women, scraping a living from 
handouts and odd jobs, living, quite literally, ‘on the edge’ in Europe, 
North America and Britain.

It is hard to disentangle truth from fiction, and the myth of Udham 
Singh has been well-inflated by political activists, writers and 
film-makers. The false leads and strange assumptions in the notebooks of 
detectives and policemen have also muddied the picture. Did he make it 
as far as Russia? What was his connection with Irish nationalists? 
Communists, socialists, anarchists, Punjabi Indian nationalists and Sikh 
separatists have all claimed him as a hero. The British refusal to open 
archives relating to the assassination until the 1990s also increased 
his mystique. He may have had links to – or sympathy with – several 
movements but the hard evidence remained scanty: present day political 
needs were projected back onto his ghost.

The mysteries around Singh’s life have done his reputation no harm. Born 
at the turn of the century, he received a fair education in the Central 
Khalsa orphange in Amritsar after his destitute father died. Was he 
actually a young man in the crowd when the shooting at Amritsar took 
place? It’s said that he was giving out drinking water to the parched 
crowds on the day of the Amritsar killings. He claimed to have been 
there, and some say that a scar on his arm was the result of an injury 
received that day. His life seems marked by rootlessness and a restless 
struggle to settle on questions of political and personal identity, with 
sojourns in North America, Europe and the UK. At different stages of his 
life his aliases included the names Sher Singh, Udham Singh, Udhan 
Singh, Ude Singh, Uday Singh, Frank Brazil, and Ram Mohammed Singh Azad. 
Was he a revolutionary warrior or an oddball and fantasist?

There can be little doubt that he was violently opposed to British 
imperialism. When Scotland Yard did finally release the files on his 
trial they revealed his reaction when the judge gave the verdict: he 
spat and swore ‘against the King and Emperor’ and declared that he 
wasn’t afraid of death and that when he had gone ‘thousands of (my) 
countrymen would drive you dirty dogs out of my country.’

But the story of his life poses interesting challenges for the historian 
interested in ‘facts’ – for the stories about Singh are fragmented and 
seem sometimes only to take sustenance from their repetition. Some say 
he fraternised with members of the Ghadar party – the ambitious 
revolutionary movement started in North America which struggled for 
India’s liberation from British imperialism during the First World War – 
and met members of the IRA in Britain. In 1927 he was jailed in Amritsar 
for keeping illicit ammunition in his possession. He was given a 
passport nonetheless and travelled widely in Europe, arriving back in 
Britain around 1934. In the 1930s he moved from place to place, perhaps 
earning his keep as an itinerant peddlar of hosiery and lingerie, and he 
may also have worked as a handyman, driver and mechanic. He knew Indians 
in Coventry and Southampton, appears to have liked going to bookshops 
and to Indian restaurants. He also made some cash as a film extra in 
crowd scenes. But in the conditions of depression-era England, it was 
probably far from a glamorous existence.

This assassination, then, was not a straightforward story of nationalist 
heroism in conflict with British imperialism. By 1940, the political 
picture was too complex to allow that. Gandhi was weighing up the 
question of a renewed satyagraha, and the Lahore resolution, demanding 
Pakistan, would soon be placed on the table. Indian constitutional 
negotiations were imminent and the Congress leadership feared losing the 
upper hand and the moral high ground if they associated too closely with 
an assassin. In the context of war – when nightly blackouts were taking 
place, rationing had begun and the battles over France and the Low 
Countries were imminent – India’s role in the war was a matter of great 
sensitivity and anxiety. From the British perspective, there was a lack 
of comprehension about India’s resistance and the public did not equate 
British imperialism with Nazi fascism, although to many Indians this was 
not far-fetched. As the London based Congress activist Krishna Menon put 
it in a pamphlet for the India League, ‘Indian opinion has always been 
opposed to fascism and Nazism, but it does not see them as separate or 
even essentially different from imperialism.’ There was a risk of Udham 
Singh’s case being used for Nazi propaganda and, indeed, within hours of 
the news, the British Nazi, Lord Haw Haw was broadcasting on the subject 
from Berlin. From the British administration’s point of view, O’Dwyer’s 
assassination came at a bad time.

Nehru made ambiguous statements, generally displeased by the killing, 
while Gandhi made his outright condemnation clear, sending condolences 
to O’Dwyer’s family. Reactions in the Indian press to the murder were 
also decidedly ambivalent while the British Indian community in London – 
well networked through the restaurants, hotels and political groups in 
the capital – was split down the middle. Some members of the British 
public wrote letters pleading against the death penalty for Singh; Joyce 
Tarring wrote to the Secretary of State for India from a hotel in 
Cumberland to say that ‘it would be a great act of clemency which would 
touch the heart of India.’ Another woman from Hampstead was concerned 
that ‘there is a real danger of this affair being misinterpreted in 
India.’ Edward Thompson also urged the Secretary of State for India to 
show leniency.

Udham Singh was hung in Pentonville prison on 31 July 1940. His story – 
full of ambivalences, exaggerations and glorification – lives on to the 
present day. His importance as a Sikh hero has seemed to grow over time, 
and myths about him abound; there is a statue of him in Amritsar, he has 
been depicted in at least three movies and streets and public places are 
named in his memory.

Over time, just as the myths around Singh grew, the political parties 
looked more favourably towards him. The Indian government was successful 
in literally reclaiming him (after several failed attempts in the 1960s) 
and Udham Singh’s casket was exhumed from the grounds of Pentonville 
prison in 1974. It was a profound symbolic act. The coffin was taken to 
Heathrow, loaded into a decorated bus at Delhi airport, followed by 
large crowds and taken to Kapurthala House so that people could file 
past it and pay their respects before its final journey along the Grand 
Trunk Road and through Punjab to its resting place in Sunam, the town of 
his birth. Ironically, it was Indira Gandhi herself who came to see 
Udham Singh’s coffin before it left Delhi, laying a wreath, and praising 
in her speech a man who ‘had sacrificed his life for his country.’

Yasmin Khan

*
Yasmin Khan is a historian based at Royal Holloway, University of 
London. Her first book, /The Great Partition:/ T/he Making of India and 
Pakistan/ (Yale/Penguin India, 2007) won the Royal Historical Society’s 
Gladstone Prize. She is currently writing a narrative history of India 
during the Second World War to be published by Random House in 2012.*