Har Dayal: The Great Revolutionary

E. Jaiwant Paul is a man of varied interests, having authored books like: By My Sword and Shield - Weapons of the Indian Warrior; Rani of Jhansi Laksmibai; Baji Rao - The Warrior Peshwa; The Story of Tea; Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan and The Greased Cartridge: The Heroes and Villains of 1857-58. A hardcore corporate, he initially worked with Hindustan Lever and was later a Director of Brooke Bond, India. Thereafter, he headed the National Mineral Water Company in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. A keen cricketer and tennis player, he now lives in Delhi and serves as a Director of a few companies.

Shubh Paul was at school in Lahore and after Partition moved to Shimla and Chandigarh where her father was a judge of the Punjab High Court. She did her master’s in History from Delhi University. After her marriage, she worked with Mother Teresa and took a keen interest in the West Bengal Council of Women in Calcutta. An enthusiastic trekker, she has trekked with her husband in Kashmir, Kulu Valley and Garhwal. This book is of special interest to her as Har Dayal was her grandfather.

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Contents

Dedication

Introduction

The Early Years

The Historical and Political Backdrop

Scholar at Oxford

India House: ‘A Sinister Institution’

‘Disassociation’ from Oxford

India Again: The Political Missionaries

Paris and Bande Mataram

Despair and Hope

Shaking Up San Francisco

The Founding of the Ghadar Party

‘Maro Firangee Ko’

Constantinople and Berlin: Mission to Afghanistan

Disillusionment in Germany

Somersault in Sweden

Back to London

A Sudden Ending

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

D

EDICATED TO

S

HANTI

D

EVI

DAUGHTER OF

H

AR

D

AYAL

AND TO OUR DAUGHTERS

N

ISHA AND

V

IVEKA

Introduction

He was a handsome man with a chiselled nose, strong chin and a trimmed moustache. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, but behind them his eyes were sharp and penetrating. A friend once presented him with gold-rimmed glasses, but he put them away, saying they were not for him. He wore rumpled, inexpensive and badly cut clothes. His complexion, for a North Indian, was darkish. He was not tall, just about 5 ft. 7 inches. But he had a strong presence, and people, especially students, were drawn towards him. His laugh was hearty, a trait inherited by his progeny. By far his most outstanding feature was his colossal intellectual power. His prowess in this regard was legendary, and not only was he capable of brilliant and provocative ideas but his memory was encyclopaedic. He mastered fourteen languages including Esperanto!

‘I am a revolutionist first and everything else afterwards,’ Har Dayal once said. It sums up the man. He had one thought, one passion: overthrowing British rule in India. He lived for it and was willing to die for it. He sacrificed everything to this end. He sacrificed his home and his family. He remained in exile for most of his life and never again set eyes on his young wife or ever saw his unborn daughter. He sacrificed a glittering career and his wealth and lived instead in dire poverty, sleeping in garrets on bare floors and going through countless mortifications. Many Governments issued warrants of arrest against him, and he had to fly from place to place and became a man without a country. Death passed by him many a time. His hopes were dashed again and again; a lesser man would have been shattered, but he became stronger and marched on. He was a man possessed. Sadly, after all this, he missed by a few years seeing his country get its independence.

As a nationalist and a revolutionary he was steadfast, but otherwise, he was many different people at different times. He was an anarchist, whose creed was the bomb, yet in later years he was a pacifist. He was an ascetic, who at one time thought of founding a new religion. He was a staunch Hindu, but he never worshipped or bothered with prayers or the scriptures. He cared little what God a man believed in. He rejected the West, and yet for a while, embraced it. He was a scholar whose knowledge was prodigious, he was a man of culture and sensitivity, he was a Marxist, a rationalist, a modernist and a humanist. He was many things, but he was always, at all times, important. He was a paradox. He changed tack at various stages of his life. But his ‘inner spirit’ was steadfast and he never swerved from his one single aim, which was to throw the British out of India so that his motherland could be free. This was the fierce fire that raged within him, unchangeably, steadily. Revolution was the only way, any other way was self-defeating. His personal sacrifices were enormous. The nation owes him a great debt of gratitude, and nothing can dim the flaming magnificence of his patriotism and idealism.

I had heard of Lala Har Dayal as a little boy. My father, when he was a student in the 1920s, like every other student of his time was a great admirer of Har Dayal. He could repeat long excerpts from his speeches, specially the more stirring ones, without any reference to notes. So I grew up in awe of the very name ‘Har Dayal.’

Several years later, I was introduced to a very charming young lady at Scandal Point in Shimla. I was then a student at St. Stephen’s College at Delhi, which incidentally was Har Dayal’s College also. She joined the University at Delhi soon after, and I got to know her rather well. Some time later, I discovered, to my delight, that she was Har Dayal’s granddaughter. A few years later, we were married—not entirely because she was Har Dayal’s granddaughter!

The family, except his brother Kishan Dayal, knew little about Har Dayal. After he had been thrown out of India, he corresponded over several years with his wife and his daughter, whom he had never seen. But all his letters had been left in Lahore when the family was forced to move to Shimla after Partition. For several years after Har Dayal had been exiled from India, the rest of the family was also under surveillance. Their mail and parcels were censored. The British suppressed all revolt with great ferocity, and rebels were shot or hung up on gibbets. Terror stalked all those even connected with revolutionaries, their families and friends. There was no sanctity of life or property. Har Dayal’s family therefore talked little about him, many thoroughly disapproved of him, and therefore he was swept under the carpet.

The literature about our first line of national leaders is vast. The libraries and archives are full of material, books, records and documents about them. There is, however, an unfortunate paucity of material about, what for a better term, can be called our second line of national leaders. Not more than a handful of these pioneer nationalists are remembered. This is particularly true of the extremists, the ones who took risks and threw bombs. These are the people whose spectacular and heroic acts created mass awareness of the struggle against the British. They are the ones who fired the popular imagination and did, what is termed, ‘propaganda by deed.’ Unfortunately, these pioneers have almost completely been overshadowed by the Gandhians or have been relegated to a minor status as representatives of a phase of nationalism. Take Lala Har Dayal, who in his time inspired a whole generation and commanded great mass appeal, but material about him was hard to come by.

When my co-author and I decided to stalk the man, not only the revolutionary leader, but also the husband and father, we came across many blanks. The family had had little contact with Har Dayal, and all we got from them were isolated anecdotes about him and hardly anything about his worldwide activities that spanned continents or the grand sweep of his revolutionary organization. We forgot Har Dayal for a while, but then a visit to the National Archives yielded about twenty letters written by him from Paris, Algeria, San Francisco and London to various people. These revealed a man of great sensitivity and charm, and the language, both Urdu and English, was immaculate. But then, this was just a hazy peep into his life. The real break came when we visited the little known Delhi Archives situated in a poorly maintained building near the Qutub Minar. The very helpful staff there, after a two-week search, dumped a whole heap of disorganized papers and documents in a red file bound with a tattered tape in front of us. By way of explanation, they added that no one had asked for them in more than twenty years. These included British Intelligence reports, police history sheets, unpublished notes in long hand by Har Dayal’s friends, especially Hanwant Sahai, a couple of short sketches about him, again in long hand by associates, and some papers of the German Foreign office that detailed his activities in Germany during World War I. Although most of it is dry officialese and somewhat dreary, it gave us authentic facts and was valuable for our research. In the Delhi libraries we found two biographies of Har Dayal written several decades ago, one by Dharmvira of the Indian Civil Service and the other a treatise by an American journalist and academic, Emily Brown, both of which we found very useful.

We have referred to the nationalists and freedom fighters about whom little is known. There are, in addition, countless others who gave up their all for the national cause. Thousands were executed or sentenced to imprisonment at the dreaded Andaman Islands jail known as Kala Pani, tortured and maimed, and we do not even know their names. We have referred to some in this narrative, but the vast majority will sadly remain unseen, unsung and anonymous forever.

My co-author and I are not historians or political analysts, and so this book about this colourful and exciting revolutionary Har Dayal is for the lay reader. This being the purpose, we make no apologies to scholars and chroniclers of the national struggle. However, it must be added that the markers of history are never ignored and the story of Har Dayal’s life is based on the actual facts garnered from various sources. We have also made an effort to portray him not only as a revolutionary, but also as a flesh and blood man.

The Early Years

Lala Har Dayal was one of those rare people who are from the city of Delhi. It is seldom that you meet in this cosmopolitan city a person who belongs to it and whose family roots go back three hundred years or more in Delhi. He was from the Mathur community, whose surnames are interestingly limited to a handful: Dayal, Narain, Sahai, Bahadur and Chand. There are those too, of course, who have manufactured their own new-fangled surnames. Someone jocularly referred to the Mathurs as ‘the aborigines of Delhi!’ Har Dayal himself once described Mathurs as ‘a literary caste.’

Har Dayal was born in the old city on 14 October 1884, a mere twenty-six years after the Revolt of 1857–58. Up to the time of the Revolt, Delhi was known for its arts and letters. The Urdu poetry of the time was widely acclaimed. Ghalib, one of the greatest Urdu poets, lived in Delhi and drank in its taverns. Zauq, another great poet, also made his home in Delhi, and both his and Ghalib’s ghazals were sung and recited in the salons and streets of the city. There was popular appreciation and much discussion of philosophy and theology. There was emphasis on etiquette and manners in the elaborate ritual of social intercourse. The elite, both Hindus and Muslims, lived in spacious havelis in Chandni Chowk, which was lush and green with a canal running down the centre of the street. Elephants and horses were tied at the haveli gates, and palanquins were kept ready for the women in purdah. Singing and dancing girls, lithe-limbed and sparkle-eyed, coquettish and coy, refined and quick on repartee were in demand. Mujras were held at all important social occasions, where the rapid, staccato and yet graceful movements of the kathak were performed. Cockfights were a popular pastime, and much money was won and lost. Rearing of pigeons was pursued with enthusiasm.

The Red Fort or Lal Qila stood pristine and untouched by the ravages of time. Its walls made of solid red sandstone soared to a height of a hundred feet. Inside were the exquisite palaces of white marble inlaid with crystal, lapis lazuli, Jaipur jade, rose quartz, onyx and blood stone; buildings which were beyond compare anywhere in the world.

But the Revolt had destroyed Delhi. It was a dead city. When Har Dayal was born, the crenellated walls of Delhi, its domes and soaring minarets, gardens and bazaars were still an entrancing sight, and although the brutal terror unleashed by the British after the Mutiny had subsided, the old fire, the joy and exuberance of the city was gone. The elite still lived in their spacious havelis in Chandni Chowk, but a great hush had descended over the old capital. The British had been traumatized by the Mutiny, and waves of hysteria swept over them from time to time. If there was the slightest suspicion of disloyalty, they came down with a heavy hand. People found themselves in jail with their properties confiscated and auctioned to turncoats. Many havelis in Chandni Chowk thus changed hands.

Har Dayal was born close to Chandni Chowk and the Red Fort. He was born in an area called Cheera Khana. The name has since been changed to Har Dayal Katra, and the house he was born in still stands albeit with many alterations and additions. This area is right next to a street called Parathe-wali galli, where delicious stuffed parathas are sold off the hot plate to eager customers. Even today the parathas are excellent, but regretfully the hygiene has suffered. Not far is Dariba where gem-studded, heavy gold jewellery made in the Mughal style is still sold. In this old quarter the by-lanes are so narrow that you cannot walk three abreast, but the houses have imposing arched entrances and large courtyards.

Har Dayal had a life-long attachment to the city, and when he left the country at the age of 24, he hardly realized that he would never set foot in it again. In the