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Home , Curzon Wyllie, Madan Lal Dhingra, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Romesh Thapar, Tavistock Square

Bharat : a South Asian Walking Tour

At the turn of the century the people of were conscious of their city’s position at the heart of a vast mercantile and military empire. But they could not have been aware of the complex interactions which this magnetic centrality was at time bringing about, and the consequent ramifications not only for the Empire but for the nature of London itself as a global city. Everyone who passed through Holborn in 1900 would have witnessed the carving of a grand imperial avenue from the Aldwych up to the northern railway termini near where you are now standing. But the really significant developments were taking place in the streets and squares to the east of this artery: literary and political encounters which did much to ensure that within a few decades one of the grand new public edifices at the southern end of Kingsway would no longer house a colonial department, but the embassy of an independent – and divided – . A photograph of a road sweeper by Camille Silvy currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery is a reminder of the thousands of seldom-remembered Indians – ayahs, lascars and servants – who inhabited or passed through London in those years. Bloomsbury was rarely their neighbourhood, but only here could Mulk Raj Anand meet E.M. Forster under a tree with a bottle of wine, and hear about what retired colonels had been scribbling in the margins of his club’s copy of A Passage to India.

Start: Courtyard of the British Library.

As you exit the courtyard of the British Library, turn left along the towards St Pancras Station. At the next crossroads turn right, cross over the Euston Road and, sidling past a glum branch of O’Neill’s, enter Judd Street. On your left will be the stern edifice of Camden (formerly St Pancras) Town Hall (1) . Between 1934 and 1947 the Councillor for Ward 4 of this borough was Krishna Menon.

After studying at LSE and UCL, Menon was called to the Bar in 1934. However, he made very little money from his practice as he directed most of his legal efforts to defending lascars who had suffered unlucky run-ins with the Old Bill. This wiry, fiery workaholic was the linchpin of nationalist circles in London, transforming the moribund India League, which had been founded by in 1912, into a radical Congress organ and influential lobby group for Indian sovereignty. He toured Britain tirelessly, seeking to marry socialism with anti-imperialism, and lived a life of privation and deranged energy, famously subsisting on black tea, biscuits and buns, and bedding down in various cheap digs in Camden Town. At one stage he slept on his own desk at the League offices in the Strand – quite appropriate given that he often paid its rent of his own pocket. A famous anecdote concerns his visit to the home of Romesh Thapar. The journalist’s father, an upright and correct man, enquired what he did for a living. Menon snapped back: ‘I don’t work for a living. I work for India’s independence!’

He became friends with Nehru when the Congress leader visited in the ’30s, and the two developed their famous bond of loyalty while visiting Spain during the Civil War. After serving St Pancras for thirteen years, Menon was made Indian High Commissioner but continued to live on a meagre diet in one austere room inside . As a councillor, he helped found what is now the Camden Arts Festival, and organised the beginnings of the borough library service. His efforts were recognised in 1979 when a bust of him was erected in Fitzroy Sq, to the west of here. Shortly afterwards the bust mysteriously disappeared, and a replacement was also spirited away by night. The hi-jinks of students living at the nearby Indian YMCA, or a vengeful victim of Krishna Menon’s acerbic manner? Until the thief is caught, the third bust will remain safely within the Town Hall (if you wish to make an attempt on it, ask at reception for the ‘Camden Centre’).

Continue along Judd Street past the bookshops and student eateries for about five minutes before turning left in Handel Street. Handel I think merits a street name far more than Lord Cromer, the British Consul-General in Egypt. As you pass by his eponymous street on your left spy the Boot Tavern. This was the headquarters of the Gordon Rioters, and hence features prominently in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, but in the same year that Kingsway was completed its slums too received an Edwardian clean-up, and a suitable imperial moniker. Back on your route, at the end of Handel Street you’ll see the entrance to St George’s Gardens, a former graveyard and one of central London’s best-kept secrets (2) . Amble through the gardens, bearing towards your right, and take the exit into Heathcote Street (if you find yourself in Sidmouth Street instead, it’s best to backtrack). Tread along Heathcote Street for a minute before taking the first right into . Authors D.H. Lawrence and Hilda Doolittle have both lived here, but look out for the for Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who rented no.21 from 1869 to 1870 (3) .

Syed Syed was a Muslim social reformer and civil servant who founded the Muhammedan Anglo- Oriental College (now Aligarh Muslim University) in 1875. He came to England with his two sons in 1869 to receive the Order of the Star of India. Lord Lawrence was a frequent caller here at Mecklenburgh Square. As with many other visiting notables (whether they wanted it or not), Sir Syed was granted an audience with Carlyle in Cheyne Walk. The Scottish historian had just published On Heroes and Hero-Worship , and this led to a discussion of the Prophet Mohammed as a modern hero. Sir Syed was present at the last public reading given by Dickens (whose only surviving London home you will be passing shortly in Doughty Street), and at the opening of Holborn Viaduct. As was often the case, however, one of his most interesting encounters actually took place on the voyage out. He befriended a fellow passenger, Mary Carpenter, only to discover that in 1833 she had nursed the dying Raja at her father’s house near Bristol. In India she had pursued Roy's goal of legal reforms for women's welfare, and met with the leader Keshab Chandra Sen, at whose instigation she founded the National India Association upon her return to England.

Sir Syed sailed back to India in 1870. He documented his stay at London in several letters to the Allygurh Institute Gazette , telling his readers that India would not be ‘civilized’ until all modern arts and sciences were translated into Indian languages. If I could, he declared, I would have this credo carved across the ridge of the Himalaya.

Carry on straight into Doughty Street. On your right you’ll see . This large building on south side of the square is a residential hall founded in 1930 for students from British colonies. Numerous South Asian students have lodged here. Stop outside 59-60 Doughty Street (4) .

This building once housed the reading room of the Northbrook Society and Club. This organisation was set up in the early 20 th century, the brainchild of Sir Gerald Fitzgerald. Its purpose was to spread ‘good influence’ among Indian students resident in England – i.e. to shield them from the radical and nationalist networks of Edwardian London. It is mentioned in the opening lines of Kipling’s story, ‘One View of the Question.’ Its patron was Lord Northbrook, the former Viceroy, and one guardian spirit was Sir Mancherjee Bhownagree, the flamboyant loyalist who served as Conservative MP for Bethnal Green North East from 1895 to 1906. Another Parsi, Sir Dinshaw Petit, donated an oriental library which was deposited here until its acquisition by SOAS in 1963. The Society still exists and is headquartered in Norfolk, from where it disburses small grants to Indians studying in the UK.

Doughty Street, which becomes John Street, terminates at Theobald’s Road. Turn right here. Laid out along the opposite side of the street are the lawns and buildings of Gray’s Inn (5) .

Aitzaz Ahsan was called to the bar here in 1967. He used to be President of the Supreme Court Bar Association in and recently fought to reinstate Chief Justice Chaudhury after he was dismissed by Musharraf. Another student was Veer Savarkar, but under pressure from government the Inn declined to call him to the Bar. The other Inns of Court lie to the south beyond Bloomsbury, but if you have fifteen minutes to spare you might like to take the next left into Jockey’s Row and bear towards Lincoln’s Inn, which may be accessed from Chancery Lane. This was the old stomping ground both of Muhammed Ali Jinnah and the poet Sir Muhammed Iqbal. Officially the Great Hall is not accessible, but if you hop up the stairs and sneak a peak through the main door you will see both Jinnah’s portrait and the vast mural ‘The Lawgivers.’ One of the ten worthies pictured is the Prophet, robed in green, and this is supposedly what attracted the future founder of Pakistan to the Inn. To regain the main tour, leave the Inn by the back exit into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, turn right, and head north again across High Holborn.

If, like the Labour Party, Jinnah isn’t your cup of tea (his extreme poshness rendered him palatable as a socialist MP), then take the third left off Theobald’s Road into Red Lion Street to continue the Savarkar story.

Towards the north end of Red Lion Street stands the Dolphin Tavern, and behind it runs a dank alleyway called Lamb’s Conduit Passage (6) . As you proceed down this gali , conjure for yourself a dingy Indian restaurant and, lodging in the room above it, Vinayak Savarkar plotting revolution. The image comes to us courtesy of the novelist David Garnett, who was in 1909 revising for his matriculation exams at a crammer in Red Lion Square, which lies at the other end of this alleyway. Garnett, only seventeen, knew very little of the subcontinent and when he met a young brown man in one of his classes he took him at first for a Madagascan. ‘I’m a Bengali,’ answered Sukhsagar Dutt, laughing, to which Garnett responded: ‘I suppose that is somewhere in India, isn’t it?’ This innocent remark led to a close companionship with Dutt and several other young Indians, and more improbably to a precocious year-long flirtation with revolutionary terrorism. This was not predicated by any particular interest on Garnett’s part in India, but rather by the magnetic personality of Savarkar, whom he first saw at the Highgate students’ hostel, ‘India House’, reading first proofs from his polemical history of the 1857 revolt. A few months later India House was closed down by the police following the assassination of Sir outside the Imperial Institute, South Kensington, by , and Savarkar, who had probably masterminded the murder, ran to ground here in Lamb’s Conduit Passage. Garnett first helped him publish Dhingra’s courtroom statement in the Daily News , and later, after his own arrest, visited him frequently at Brixton Jail. Here they hatched a not entirely harebrained escape plan, for which Garnett was despatched to France to bring two trained men across the channel by hired yacht. The plan was scuppered, however, when Garnett’s elder brother Edward caught up with him in Paris, tipped off by a gossipy Irish family friend from whom Garnett had sought Sinn Fein assistance. Shortly after this Savarkar was extradited to India and deported to the Andamans. Later he became the leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, and was implicated in Gandhi’s assassination, but acquitted for lack of evidence. Continue along Lamb’s Conduit Passage into Red Lion Square (7) . As you leave the alleyway you’ll see Conway Hall on your right.

If Savarkar’s digs were a hotbed of emergent , then Conway Hall, thought to be the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, would have been a familiar haunt for Indian leftists such as Krishna Menon, Mulk Raj Anand or Rajani Palme Dutt, as well as British socialists sympathetic to Indian interests, such as Fenner Brockway. If you enter the gardens in the centre of the square and walk to the far end, you will find a statue of Brockway. Born at Calcutta, Brockway was a labour MP and was famously imprisoned for pacifism during the First World War. After his release in 1919 he became involved with Menon’s India League. During a Prime Minister’s Question Time in 1930 he demanded a debate on India and, after seizing hold of the mace, was ‘named’ (suspended) by the speaker.

Fenner Brockway’s statue faces onto a busy road, Drake Street (also known as Procter Steet), running along the western side of the square. Exit the garden and turn right up this street, and then almost immediately turn left again into Theobald’s Road. Carry on straight, crossing over . Theobald’s Road becomes Vernon Place and then Bloomsbury Place. After passing on your right you will come to the crossroads with Bury Place (8). In the early 20 th century the area to the south of here would have lain in London’s smallest borough, Holborn, a mixture of commercial property and slum dwellings. You’ll want to turn right at the crossroads (by the Ah King noodle cafe) but before you do look down the left hand branch towards New Oxford Street and in the distance you’ll see the old Holborn Town Hall. It was here in 1886 that suffered defeat in his first attempt to enter the Commons as a Liberal MP. But more on him later. Proceed up Bury Place until you reach and the (9) . The entrance to the museum’s forecourt is on your left.

The British Museum and its reading room were a frequent meeting place for Indians and Indophiles. The poet Louis Macneice, for example, had his first encounter with the novelist Mulk Raj Anand here in 1939. ‘A conversation I had with him about Yeats brought up the subject of spiritual India,’ recalls Macneice. ‘It was a mistake, Mulk said, India was not spiritual, no Indian had even thought so until fifty years ago. India was earthy, matter-of-fact; it was the Anglo-Indians who had loudpedalled her alleged mysticism. These Anglo-Indians, Mulk said, used to spend most of their lives in India and never even look at the Indians, conscious of themselves as English, superior, a race apart; then they would retire, go back to England and find they had lost touch, were a race apart there too; it was then that they began to romanticise India – in order to bolster up themselves. Even , a very fine poet, Mulk said, in the original, had got a lot of his mystical stuff from retired English officials.’ His encounters with Indians in London ensured that Macneice kept an open mind eight years later when the BBC sent him to broadcast from during the Partition.

Leaving the museum forecourt, turn right and continue along Great Russell Street. Before turning right into Bloomsbury Street, use the pedestrian crossing to traverse to the other side . Within a minute you’ll reach , where the former home of Raja Ram Mohan Roy lies immediately to your left at no.49 (10) .

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a notable social reformer, campaigner against sati, and founder of the , who came to England in 1831 as an ambassador of the Mughal Empire. He attended the coronation of William IV and witnessed the passage of the Great Reform Act, as well as the renewal of the East India Company’s charter, the terms of which proved a disappointment to him. During his stay he enjoyed the conversation of Robert Owen and , and considered standing for Parliament. He lodged here at Bedford Square with Joseph Hare, the brother of the philanthropist David Hare whom Roy knew in Calcutta. In 1833 he visited the home of the Unitarian pedagogue Lant Carpenter in Gloucestershire, but died there of meningitis. He is buried under an elaborate chattri at Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol, which was erected by his fellow Brahmo .

Return to Bloomsbury Street and continue across the eastern edge of the square. When the square ends at the next crossroads turn right into Montague Place, which leads down to (11) . This was once a frequent haunt of the princess and suffragist, Sophia Duleep Singh.

Her father was Maharajah Duleep Singh, who after the annexation of his kingdom in Punjab was granted a pension of £40,000 and settled on an estate in Norfolk, from where he petitioned for the restoration of his lands. Sophia became an active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, which was headquartered within Emmeline Pankhurst’s house at no.8 Russell Square. She took part in their first deputation to the House of Commons on ‘Black Friday’, 18 November 1910, and spoke regularly at the WSPU’s Richmond-upon-Thames branch. As a member of the Tax Resistance League her jewellery was repeatedly impounded for refusing to pay duties, and after Pankhurst’s death she was president of the committee charged with providing flowers for her statue. In the 1934 edition of Women’s Who’s Who she registered her only interest as ‘The Advancement of Women.’

Head to the north-west corner of the square (directly on your left as you entered from Montague Place), where there is an old green cabman’s shelter. Continue up the lane here and go left through the gates of SOAS (12) . The School of Oriental and African Studies was founded in 1916 and its alumni include Romila Thapar and Fatima Bhutto. Pressing onward, pass between Birkbeck College and Senate House, and turn right into . Then turn left into Torrington Place and right into Gower Street. 112 Gower Street (now the UCL Catholic chaplaincy) was original home of the Indian YMCA (13) .

When the Indian YMCA was founded in 1920 Sir Arthur Yapp called it a "little bit of India in Britain ". It was a safe and sociable environment for Indian students without the subtext of ‘loyalty’ engraved on the Northbrook Society. came here during the Round Table Conferences to conduct an Inter- Faith dialogue, and Rabindranath Tagore told the residents to:

Build God's Throne daily upon the ample Bareness of your poverty And knowing what is Huge is not Great, and Pride is not everlasting.

In 1940 the YMCA was struck by a Luftwaffe bomb and one student lost his life. Its new premises in nearby Fitzroy Square, still renowned today among Londoners for its cheap vegetarian cuisine, opened in 1950. After its extension in 1962 the YMCA became the first mixed hostel in London, and at its inauguration the Indian High Commissioner expressed the hope that the admission of women students in the hostel extension may lead to "something more than peaceful co-existence."

Continue up Gower Street and turn right into the quadrangle of University College London (14) . The economic historian and translator of Indian epics Romesh Chunder Dutt in the late nineteenth century, as did Dadabhai Naoroji who recovered from his failure in Holborn by taking Finsbury Central for the Liberals in 1892. Another early Indian to teach here was Ganendra Mohan Tagore, and his nephew Rabindranath followed him in here in 1877. While at UCL he lodged with a doctor’s family at 10 Square. The family were kind, but unfortunately he was tormented by the India-returned wife of a colonial official, who called him ‘Ruby’ and repeatedly compelled him to sing Indian songs. The future poet came here to read law, but the city did not prove inspiring. Of London, he wrote ‘there can hardly be a more cruel place...in Winter; the sky turbid, the light lacking lustre, like a dead man's eye.’

For a shortcut, you might wish cross the UCL campus and reach (15) by the rear entrance – start by taking the ground floor entrance to the right of the main stepped portico and going straight through the south wing into a small garden. On the other side of the garden steps lead down to the refectory and then a passageway leads round to the right towards the rear entrance. If you fear getting lost, however, just carry on north up Gower Street, turn right into Gower Place and right again Gordon Street. Amble along the western edge of Gordon Square and turn left at the far end of the square by the large church. In the early 1920s this was the epicentre of literary Bloomsbury. The Woolfs lived for a time at no.46 Gordon Sq., with Llytton Strachey nearby at 51. Carry on in the same direction, until you reach the south-west corner of Tavistock Square (16) . The Woolfs’ offices where Mulk Raj Anand once worked lay here, at no.52 .

The late Mulk Raj Anand, born at Peshawar in 1905, was one of modern India’s finest novelists. It was on the advice of his literary mentor, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, and with the help of his mother (who sold her jewels), that he left Punjab for UCL in 1925, eventually completing a doctoral thesis in philosophy. Like Menon he was drawn towards left-wing as well as anti-imperial circles, and kept up with home news in Gandhi's Young India . He and other friends "followed [Gandhi’s] thoughts on national freedom as our main food, day and night, while we worked in Krishna Menon's India League Office in the Strand." For the next two decade he divided his time between India and England, and counted many of the leading literary and cultural figures of the day among his friends. He met EM Foster while working for TS Eliot’s magazine the Criterion , who in 1935 wrote the introduction for his first major novel, Untouchable . During the Second World War he was a scriptwriter for the BBC, returning to India permanently in 1946. His Conversations in Bloomsbury offers precious vignettes of intellectual circles in this neighbourhood at that time – one of the best is this exchange with Llytton Strachey, enjoyed while Anand was proofreading here at the Hogarth Press:

‘I feel,’ I said naively, ‘I can’t laugh in London. Always in the tube, I find Englishmen with long lined faces, looking at me as though I was a criminal, because I wear a bright necktie.’

‘My dear fellow, the English are prigs. They can’t laugh. The tormented figure who sent us, on the Cross, makes us miserable ... You can have your fakirs sitting on nails. We want a merry England ...’

‘Our god is called Ananda, bliss,’ I said. ‘And our favourite deity makes love to the cow girls and dances about.’

‘Indeed,’ Mr Strachey said, ‘life can only have meaning in intimate human relations.’

‘That’s what Morgan Foster says,’ I answered.

Mr Strachey looked at me sideways and said: ‘That’s what we all say. All this talk of work and duties is Ruskin’s idea. He was a prig.’

Turn left and walk along the western side of Tavistock Square, and you’ll come to no.33. From 1945 to 1979 this was the home of Ali Muhammed Abbas.

The son of a poor Bengali farmer, Abbas was educated and brought up by his wealthier maternal grandfather, who gave him a higher education that only one in thousands of Bengalis could afford at that time. By the time he came to London to study law in 1945, he was already an active member of the Muslim League, and in London he edited the newspapers 'Our Home' and the 'Voice of Pakistan'. After independence he renamed his flat here 'Pakistan House' and it was used as the unofficial Pakistani Embassy until the High Commission was installed at Lowndes Square. With the help of local councils, Abbas set up twenty-eight schools all over England which enabled over 30,000 Pakistanis to speak, read and write in English. He was also the first Asian barrister to appear in all the levels of court in England – including the House of Lords.

Enter Tavistock Square gardens. At the centre you’ll find a seated statue of M.K. Gandhi.

The statue was erected in and was designed by Fredda Brilliant, who also cast the ill-fated busts of Krishna Menon for Fitzroy Square. Gandhi was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1891, before leaving for South Africa in 1893. He returned here in 1931 for the Round Table conferences, during which he famously forsook establishments such as the ‘Imperial Hotel’ across the street and lodged at Kingsley Hall in Canning Town. Unfortunately the great advocate of ahimsa has continued to witness the long-term results of the ethnic and sectarian divisions which formed during the declining years of the . Five years ago a British Pakistani youth, Hasib Hussain, detonated a bomb on the no.30 bus as it passed just in front of this statue, killing fourteen passengers. Thankfully doctors were immediately onhand – the grandiose redbrick building opposite, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, houses the British Medical Association. However, this would not have been the case had the building’s original commissioners been more financially solvent. This was an organisation which Gandhi encountered during its London heyday: the Theosophical Society.

You have now reached the end of the tour. To return to the British Library, cross over towards the would-be Theosophical HQ, turn left and as you reach the end of the long redbrick facade you’ll find a narrow lane on the right, Woburn Walk (17) . Turn in here and look out for the blue plaque marking the long-time abode of W.B. Yeats. It is likely that Tagore, with whom he collaborated on the English edition of Gitanjali, visited him here. At the other end of Woburn Walk bear left into Flaxman Terrace, and turn left up Mabledon Place. The Library will now be directly on your right. On your way you’ll pass Mabel’s, a reputable boozer.

Alex Bubb

Exeter College, Oxford