India House

Shyamji Krishna Varma, the Sanskrit scholar who bought young Indians out of the civil service and opened a house in Highgate in 1905

Shyamji Krishna Varma was a Kutchi Sanskritist with an Oxford degree, an Inner Temple call and three princely-state posts behind him, and the Raj humiliated him anyway. From London he founded The Indian Sociologist, the Indian Home Rule Society and India House at 65 Cromwell Avenue, Highgate, all in 1905, and paid the scholarships that brought Savarkar, Bapat, Aiyar and Dhingra over. He was disbarred in 1909, moved to Paris, died in Geneva in 1930, and was brought home in two instalments: his ashes in 2003, his membership of the Bar in 2015.

The Platform at Ratlam

It is 1897, at the railway station at Ratlam in central India. Plague has come up the line, and the medical inspection is compulsory. A military officer walks the length of the train and gives his order. The Indian passengers in the first-class carriages are to get down onto the platform and be examined there, in the open, in front of everybody. The English passengers in second class may stay in their compartments and be seen to privately.

One of the men who steps down onto that platform is forty years old. He is a Sanskrit scholar who has read to the Royal Asiatic Society in London. He took his degree at Balliol College, Oxford, and in 1884 he became one of the first Indians called to the Bar at the Inner Temple. He has been dewan, the chief minister, of Ratlam itself, and of Junagadh, and he has sat on the state council at Udaipur. His name is Shyamji Krishna Varma.

None of that buys him a private examination. He stands on the platform with the other Indians and waits his turn.

Within months he had left India for London. Within eight years he had opened a house in Highgate that turned more young Indians into revolutionaries than any single building in the Empire. He never fired a shot in his life. Almost every man who did, in the chapters that follow, passed through his front door.

The Scholar the Raj Had Every Reason to Trust

Shyamji was born in Mandvi, in Kutch, in October 1857, the year the rising began. His father worked as a labourer in a cotton press. He went to an English-medium school in Bhuj until he was about thirteen. Then he went to Bombay and did two educations side by side. One was the English school. The other was a Sanskrit pathshala (a traditional school) under Shastri Vishwanath.