EXHUMATION: The Life and Death of Madan Lal Dhingra

PROLOGUE

2019: Doctor Who and the Photograph

‘You know, when a trauma is undigested, it gets repeated. It’s a known fact. Partition was a terrible trauma and nobody ever talked about it. And it got repeated again and again. In Mummy’s life, in Daddy’s life, in my life, in your life. We never had a country, a family, a home, a room of our own.’

In the summer of 2018, as a jobbing actress, I took the train to Cardiff to play a role in Doctor Who. Since it’s a cult show, its producers are very secretive about content and so I had not been sent a script and when I arrived at the hotel I was given only my two scenes.

My part was Nani Umbreen, an elderly Pakistani woman aged around ninety, living in Sheffield, having a birthday party with her daughter’s family and handing over gifts and mementoes to her two granddaughters through which we learn that the old lady has a story and a secret – something she can’t or doesn’t want to talk about.

Arriving on set in my big grey wig I asked what the episode was about.

‘It’s about the Partition of India.’

‘Oh my God.’ I replied, ‘Really! I can’t believe it. That’s my story, my history, my trauma, my mystery. It’s why I’m here.’

It was also why my character, Nani Umbreen, was in Sheffield.

The young director walked across to greet me.

‘Hello, I’m Jamie,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Doctor Who.’ He then squatted down beside my chair to be on a level with me and said, ‘I never knew about this, about Partition, never learned about it in history and I certainly never knew that we were implicated in any way in this terrible, terrible tragedy.’

I vaguely raised my shoulders and said: ‘I know. I always found it hard when I was a growing up here and I would mention Partition and no one knew what that was.’

‘I’m so, so sorry.’

I could feel a wave of emotion beginning to well up and immediately sought to diffuse it – so I said, in full theatrical mode: ‘It’s not your fault, darling, you weren’t even born and had it been left up to you, you wouldn’t have done it like that.’

Jamie, by then, was busy scrolling his phone to show me the various books he had been reading to inform himself whilst shaking his head and repeating under his breath that it was all too shocking. As he did this, I told him about a character in The Satanic Verses called Whisky Sisodia who stutters: ‘The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas so they dodo don’t know what it means.’

The episode, entitled ‘The Demons of the Punjab’, by Vinay Patel was aired on 11 November 2018 – Remembrance Sunday. The plot involved time travel to Sunday, 17 August 1947, the day the Radcliffe Line demarking the Partition border was announced. It had been arranged that I would watch the episode with my daughter and her family, all great Doctor Who fans who thought it was really, really cool that I was playing a grandmother in one of their favourite TV programmes. After it was over, for some reason I felt impelled to return home at once. The family was surprised that I didn’t stay for a cup of tea – and so was I, and I felt a bit bad leaving.

Walking home, an incident with my late sister some twenty-five years earlier came to mind. We were having a coffee in Polly’s Tea Rooms overlooking one of the approaches to Hampstead Heath when she suddenly said with great intensity: ‘You know, when a trauma is undigested, it gets repeated. It’s a known fact. Partition was a terrible trauma and nobody ever talked about it. And it got repeated again and again. In Mummy’s life, in Daddy’s life, in my life, in your life. We never had a country, a family, a home, a room of our own. Have you ever thought about it?’

I didn’t reply, just vaguely nodded.

‘That’s the trouble with you Leena, you never know what’s going on. You just switch off. You block out your feelings and go into denial.’

My phone in my bag was pinging messages as these memories were coursing through me.

‘You see,’ she’d continued in a slightly softer tone, ‘when one has had an unsettled life like we have had, one of the things that happens is that you lose touch with your instincts. Think about that.’

Back home, my phone still pinging, I was thinking. Did I go into denial? Was that why I’d suddenly felt impelled to come home, to be on my own?

The following day I settled down alone to watch the episode again. As it unfolded, I realised just how much I had drawn on my own mother in the portrayal of my character: her warmth, her humanity, her quirky humour, her knowing looks. When Nani Umbreen says of her life in Sheffield that it gave her a ‘home, a life, stability’, I felt happy for her – but so, so sad for my mother, as those were the very things Partition took away and that she never managed to restore – a loss and longing that never lifted.

Two weeks before she died, aged ninety-nine, as I was putting her to bed, she asked, ‘Are you taking me back to Lahore?’

‘Come on Mama,’ I sighed, ’Don’t you remember Partition and Pakistan?’

‘No.’ She smiled. ‘But I remember Lahore. Do you remember Lahore?’

Watching, and remembering, I found myself weeping and weeping – weeping from sadness and in joy and pity and peace. And release.

In the silence of observing, came a distancing. That story on the screen was a part of me, but I was also apart from it. As that realisation unfolded, identification dissolved and its concomitants – timidity, fear, failure, invisibility – floated away, like steam.

‘For the eye altering alters all.’ As the great poet William Blake wrote.

I called my friend Ginny, an experienced drama therapist whom I’d known since we were teenagers at drama school. ‘You know what darling,’ she said, ‘I think you are in the process of releasing that inherited trauma.’

Walking in the park one sunny and surprisingly mild December afternoon, I reflected on all the coincidental elements of my experience of Doctor Who – that of all the stories that could be told, it was Partition; of all the moments of time travel, it was to the actual day the infamous Radcliffe Line was revealed; of all the actresses who could have told the story, it fell to me; of all the days in the year it could have been aired, it was on Remembrance Day. And this year, it actually fell on a Sunday. Remembrance Sunday.

All significant and potent – partition, remembrance, release and time travel.

Exactly two Decembers earlier, I had written a piece entitled ‘Being Here and Now’, to send out to friends informing them of my move from London to the countryside, my commitment to writing and my search for a project.

But the project I resisted, which was clearly the most significant, was the story of my great uncle, Madan Lal Dhingra – freedom fighter, patriot, revolutionary, terrorist, misguided youth, murderer, martyr – and of his execution at Pentonville Prison in 1909.

The story had haunted me since I first heard it as a child. It would lap at the edges of my mind and every so often flood it. I had tried to find, grasp and tell it in so many ways: as a play, a film and finally a novel. This needed revisiting. But it felt daunting and painful. The trauma of my forebears had tangled with the trauma of my own immediate family and created a knot.

Maybe now that, too, could be resolved with the touch of Doctor Who?

I returned home with a resolute step and a clear purpose. In my garden the shy snowdrops were in bloom. I wondered what colours and flowers there might be by the time I had finished.

I started to prepare my working space, retrieving the material, the existing manuscript, folders and notebooks – and laying them out on my desk. In my hand I held a yellow duster and in my mind was the intention of wiping away the layers of fear, failure and pain, along with the dust.

And just as I had done on previous occasions, I pinned the photograph on the wall above my desk – the photograph around which I had written a prologue in my original manuscript. I started to read it:

THE PHOTOGRAPH

Dhingra the Immortal

‘Dhingra has behaved at each stage of his trial like a hero of ancient times. He has reminded us of the history of mediaeval Rajputs and Sikhs who loved death like a bride. England thinks she killed Dhingra; in reality he lives forever and has given the deathblow to English sovereignty in India. In time to come, when the British Empire shall have been reduced to dust and ashes, Dhingra’s monument will adorn the squares of our chief towns, recalling the memory of our children to the noble life and the noble death of him who laid down his life in a far-off land for the cause he loved so well.’ (Har Dayal, 1909)

On the board above my desk I have pinned up a photograph of you. You are wearing a striped lounge suit with a contrasting waistcoat in lighter material. You are sitting in a chair, in a garden. It is a bentwood chair, rather like the ones I have. Your legs are crossed, your hands are in your lap, you look relaxed and your face bears a forthright and determined expression. You are looking straight through the camera, and across the years, at me. Sometimes that feels very strange. I remember the first time I saw this picture of you, when my Canadian cousin sent me a copy. It was a few years after my father died, and I was struck by your resemblance to, a particular photograph, taken on the porch of Villa Nova, my grandfather’s house in Simla. My grandfather, your elder brother. My father is there in the last row of a formal family photograph that is hierarchically arranged – expressing a patriarchal, colonial culture. They all look like proud examples of Macaulay’s ‘Minute’: ‘to form a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’.

There’s a look in my father’s face, a rebellious almost wild look that I imagine you might have recognised. It’s as though he wants to burst out of the confines of his straight, double-breasted jacket.

Your photograph is in the form of a postcard. On the back and across the two halves marked ‘Communication and Address’, is written:

The last photograph of Deshbhakta Madan Lal Dhingra (d.17.08.09).

To the members of his family, from D. S. Madhava Rao. Paris, 19 août 1947.

This photograph was taken in the summer, quite possibly in June, maybe even sometime around when my father was born, on 16 June 1909. Just a month between his birth and your death

It is a photograph of you becoming an icon, and I imagine that is what you were thinking about when it was taken. Thinking determination. Thinking sacrifice.

Sacrifice means to make sacred.

I have often wondered about my wanting to know you, and at the same time about my resistance to finding out. And you have now been around a long time.

There is violence at the heart of each of our stories. Violence and silence.

Will telling set us free?

January 2019

Alongside the photograph I have now pinned a poster. One hundred years separates the two. The photograph was taken in 1909, and the poster was made in 2009 by the Indian Workers’ Association to commemorate the centenary. It is a headshot in colour.

Across the top is written:

‘The only lesson required in India today is to learn how to die and the only way of teaching it is to die ourselves. Therefore, I die and glory in my Martyrdom.’

And below:

‘First Freedom Fighter to be hanged on foreign soil. England.

GREAT MARTYR MADAN LAL DHINGRA. Indian Workers’ Association (G.B.)

Resonant images. I look at them both and remember that it was a request by the Indian Workers’ Association in 1976 that I should find a photograph, that finally made me take an interest in Madan Lal and made me embark on my quest for his story in the archives of the city. And although I didn’t find the photograph then, my connection and commitment was cemented.

My mother’s voice drifts into my head:

‘Madan Lal Dhingra was your father’s chacha, that is to say he was your grandfather’s younger brother. But I am told your grandfather, Sir Behari Lal, never allowed his name to be mentioned in the house.

‘Then, when we were in Paris, we met this man. He’d known Madan Lal in London. I remember your father was so happy to meet him.’

‘This man’ must have been Madhava Rao. I unpin the photograph to look at his handwritten message on the back:

The last photograph of Deshbhakta Madan Lal Dhingra (d.17.08.09).

To the members of his family, from D.S. Madhava Rao. Paris, 19 août 1947

As I look at it a parallel emerges. Violence and silence are there in the dates, for the 17 August 1909 is the date of the execution.

And 38 years later on 17 August in 1947, the Radcliffe Line demarcating the boundaries of the Partition was announced. Overnight some 15 million people were on the move and more than a million people lost their lives.

Both events were silenced.

The short, handwritten message is redolent of the past and rich in intimation of what would come. I read: To the members of his family … Paris, 19 août 1947. And I think of my young father holding the photograph, being so happy to learn of his mysterious uncle, Independent India being four days old. Maybe he thinks of his return the following month to resume his teaching at Government College in Lahore. Not realizing that the Radcliffe Line had placed Lahore in Pakistan. That he would never return. That he would stay and die in Paris – far from me. It was all a long time ago – and yet, how does time work?

As I am settling to write, I receive an article forwarded by a friend from the New York Times entitled, ‘The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class’, in which the writer Pankaj Mishra draws analogies between the historic incompetence of the Partition of India and the present incompetence of Brexit.

‘It is actually more accurate, for those invoking British history, to say that partition – the British Empire’s ruinous exit strategy – has come home. In a grotesque irony, borders imposed in 1921 on Ireland, England’s first colony, have proved to be the biggest stumbling block for the English Brexiteers chasing imperial virility. Moreover, Britain itself faces the prospect of partition if Brexit, a primarily English demand, is achieved and Scottish nationalists renew their call for independence.’

More parallels: Partition and Brexit. My past, present and future.

Now for some time travel …

1.

23 JULY 1909:

PENTONVILLE PRISON,

LONDON

The door shuts with a heavy metallic clang. The sound seems to go on and on, echoing in the prison corridors outside, reverberating from the walls of the cell and through the young man who has just been led in and left. He stands there, rooted to the spot, waiting for the deafening noise to subside, the interminable clanking of keys in locks and the echo of footsteps. He listens carefully, trying to count the footfalls. Are all three leaving? Or is it only two? Soon they are lost among other sounds, more doors opening, slamming, voices shouting. Is he alone? He senses he is still being watched as he quickly surveys the cell: bare brick walls, bed, bucket, window. Three paces long, two-and-a-half wide, he guesses, as he strides across to verify his assessment. A slight breeze catches him. In the window above, a tiny pane, not much bigger than the palm of a hand, is open. He reaches up, and as he does so the coarse cloth of his prison clothing rubs up against his neck. He grips the wall to balance himself as he feels the tears welling up behind his eyes. The urge to cry out loud is almost irresistible.

‘Hey Ram’! He implores. ‘Help me God! Help me! I must not, I will not, break down now! Please help!’

He conjures the memory of just a few hours earlier, standing up, erect in the court watching the judge as he put on his black cap for the sentencing.

He’d bowed and said, ‘Thank you, my Lord. I am proud to have the honour of laying down my life for my countrymen.’

He had felt weightless then. Possessed of an energy and lightness from the ether. Now, alone in his cell he willed the memory to sustain him, to help him stay erect when all his body wanted to do was to crumple.

Down the corridors there is a scream, followed by the sound of running feet. From the door outside his cell footfalls move away. He is alone. At last. Then he starts to breathe rhythmically and becomes composed. Straightening himself out, he wipes away the dampness that has squeezed through his clenched eyelids, tidies his prison clothes – a habitual gesture from smarter days – and looks again at the room. His gaze stops at the small parcel of his belongings on the bed: a book, a notebook, some letters and a pencil that he has been permitted to retain – all wrapped, tagged and labelled.

‘Madan Baba, this time you are going properly ...’ Ratan’s words flash through his mind, together with the image of himself three years earlier standing in the outer courtyard of the family house. Alongside Ratan, the old family retainer, inspecting the tags and labels of the trunks that will make the voyage with him from Amritsar to London. ‘Cabin’, ‘Not wanted on Voyage’, ‘Wanted on Voyage’. Trunks freshly painted with his name: Madan Lal Dhingra. ‘Madan Baba, this time you are going properly, like the son of a noble house.’ Images flash into the mind’s eye: Ratan, with his misty eyes, oil lamps and incense, kumkum and rice, flowers and coconuts, blessings and goodwill, embraces, touching feet, taking leave, waving at the station, Bhajan running alongside as the train steams away, darkening the day with its grits and smoke.

‘Madan Lal Dhingra, now prisoner number 9493, is that me?’

The sound of his voice in the cell feels strange, solitary, trapped. What do you do when nothing remains for you of the outside world, other than a slight breeze and a small patch of blue? When images flood your mind of all that you will never do again: laugh with your friends; shadow-box with your brother; embrace your mother; touch your young wife; chase the jugnu fireflies on the roof terraces at night to trap them in a bottle to read by their light; walk along the Thames in the moonlight, like that long, last walk.

‘What do you think when they have put you in a condemned cell, taken away your clothes and shoelaces, given you a number instead of your name?’

‘My statement! My statement! Pompous, arrogant hypocrites in your wigs and gowns who wouldn’t read my statement. But how did I forget it then, when I remember it all now?’

The walls slap your words back at you, beating you down from your feet on to your knees and racking your body with breaking sobs, which slowly let way into a great, yawning weariness. You lie crouched on the floor, feeling broken and beaten. How long? Until a faint breeze stirs the stillness and touches your forehead. You move. Slowly. Drag yourself across to and onto the bed. But just before the weariness engulfs you, you invoke the goddess riding resolutely on her tiger: ‘Mother, I vowed my unflinching devotion to you. Help me to fulfil myself.’

You sleep, your damp locks streaking your face. In your dream it is the face of your own mother that smiles at you.

‘I fed the sweet rice to the fish, my son. You will have a safe journey.’

Gently she lifts the tangled curls from your forehead to mark it, first with the red vermilion kumkum and then with the grains of rice. In your sleep you smile.

2.

1956: TRAIN JOURNEY FROM BOMBAY

‘When you are in India, you call people who are older than you uncle or aunty and if they are children you call them bhai or bhen.’

‘Yes, Daddy.’

I was thirteen, an English schoolgirl in Parisian clothes. I landed in Bombay to go to a new school in South India. It was a two-day journey by train and, having been equipped with the necessary bedroll and clothing from the school lists by family friends in Bombay, I met up with the school party to make the long journey south.

It was my ninth school in as many years and my third in India. There had been three in Switzerland, two in France and one in England. Partition had had left us displaced in Paris waiting to go home. I now felt like a proud trailblazer who had come home and was paving the way for the others.

My parents had informed two family friends of my arrival and both had come to the airport to meet me. ‘Uncle’ had sent his secretary and ‘Aunty’ had come herself. It was agreed that I should go with aunty and visit uncle the next day.

Standing there in the muggy heat and bustle of Victoria Terminus – the steam, the whistles, the chatter, the clatter – I wished I’d worn one of the new Indian cotton dresses that Aunty had had stitched for me, as she’d suggested I do. But on the morning of my departure I wanted to put on the special going-away dress that had been bought for me the previous month at Galleries Lafayette. I had gone there with Marie Thérèse, one of my father’s friends, ‘We’ll get something très jolie, à la Parisienne,’ Marie Thérèse had said. ‘Something in which you will feel confident.’

Now my tailored attire made me feel conspicuous. I noticed a group of girls who eyed me with curiosity. Then one of them smiled. A tomboy in plaits, she detached herself from the group and strode over as the others turned to throw side glances.

‘Hello! You’re new, aren’t you? What’s your name?’

‘Leena.’

‘Good. I’m Amrita. Welcome!’ She thumped my arm. ‘Come!’ she commanded, both to the group and me. ‘Come on, you guys!’ The group of girls moved forwards, and we met halfway for the introductions: ‘Charu, Anita, Sheila, Vijaya.’ All around my age.

They took in my clothes as discreetly as their curiosity would allow. ‘Are your parents posted overseas?’ ventured Charu.

‘Well, no ... not quite ... but well …I don’t know, but sort of, I suppose. My father works in Paris, actually.’

My flustered reply was because we were not ‘posted’. Posted meant that you were sent from somewhere with somewhere to return to, whereas we were displaced by accident. My father, a lecturer in English at Government College, Lahore, had taken a six-month job with the new UNESCO in Paris. My mother had come to join him for a short holiday and six weeks after her arrival, and two months before they were due to return and reclaim my sister and me from the boarding school in which my mother had left us, Partition took place and there was nowhere to return to.

‘Your parents are quite right to send you to India for your schooling. This is where you belong.’

It was warming to think that one belonged.

On the train Amrita asked me what caste I was.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ I replied.

‘How can you not know what caste you are?!’ She sounded incredulous. ‘You must write to your parents and find out.’

My father replied by return of post and stated emphatically: caste was not an issue. I was a citizen of Free India and, as such, of the world, and he was surprised that a girl in a Krishnamurti school should ask me about caste. He suggested I should both remember and remind my friend of what Gandhiji had said.

I wasn’t quite sure what that was.

Sitting under the tree in the recess, Amrita was diligently working with a penknife, transforming a branch into a staff for herself.

‘Your father is modern,’ she said, ‘and that’s good. But your name, Dhingra. Are you any relation to Madan Lal Dhingra?’

I knew that I was, but didn’t know what that meant. A few years earlier, in boarding school in England, my older sister had asked me, ‘Have you ever heard about Madan Lal Dhingra?’

‘I don’t think so ... I can’t remember,’ I’d replied.

‘Well,’ she’d continued, ‘he was Daddy’s uncle, and I’ve just read about him in a magazine series about famous murderers.’

‘Gosh! Was he a murderer?’ I shuddered.

‘Well, that’s what they called him. He shot some important Englishman and was hanged! Funny, isn’t it, that Daddy’s never spoken about him.’

I hadn’t known what to make about this at the time.

Amrita was carving her initials on her staff. ‘Are you?’ she asked again.

‘I think he was my father’s uncle. But I don’t know anything about him,’ I added defensively.

‘Your father’s uncle! Really?’ Amrita stopped and closed her penknife. ‘Well, if Madan Lal Dhingra was your father’s uncle, then you come from the family of a great patriot – and patriots are above caste!’ She smiled at me. ‘Here, have this.’ She held out her newly made staff. ‘They are very useful, you know.’ She sliced the air with it to prove her point as we walked along. ‘You can use it to knock tamarinds off trees and protect yourself from snakes and scorpions.’

I flinched. ‘Snakes and scorpions? Are there many around?’

‘Oh yes!’ she replied cheerfully. ‘But most of the time they hide away – and only a few are dangerous.’ We walked along towards the ‘summoning bell’.

‘Did your parents go to jail?’

‘No. They didn’t. My mother always says it’s her biggest regret.’

‘What is?’

‘That she didn’t manage to get to jail.’

Amrita laughed. ‘Well, my parents only went to jail during the Quit India movement, but my grandfather was in and out for much longer and it ruined his health.’

‘Gosh!’ I exclaimed, quite impressed.

‘It was my grandfather who told us about Madan Lal Dhingra and the inspiration he had been.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he was a great patriot who sacrificed his life so that India could be free, and that we must never forget him and the many others who died so that we could regain our self-respect. It’s our duty to remember.’

Throughout my year at the school in India, Amrita remained my staunch friend, investing me with a respect I felt I hadn’t earned. In the beautiful valley where our school was set we went for long walks. She taught me many skills: how to scale tall trees; how to dig