The Imperial Institute
Madan Lal Dhingra, 1 July 1909: an engineering student fires at the Imperial Institute, and his statement outlives the trial
On 1 July 1909 Madan Lal Dhingra, an engineering student from Amritsar and a regular at India House in Highgate, shot Sir William Curzon Wyllie at the Imperial Institute in London, and killed a Parsi doctor, Cawas Lalcaca, who tried to stop him. He was tried at the Old Bailey on 23 July, hanged at Pentonville on 17 August 1909, and his written statement reached the London press through a friend from India House. This lesson quotes him only from the record, counts the full cost including Lalcaca, and follows his remains home in 1976.
The At Home at South Kensington
It is Thursday, 1 July 1909, about eleven at night. The Jehangir Hall of the Imperial Institute in South Kensington is emptying out. The National Indian Association has held its annual At Home here, an evening where Indian students in London meet English hosts over tea and speeches. The gas is bright. The floor is full of dinner jackets and a few turbans.
A student of engineering, twenty-five years old, stands near the door. His name is Madan Lal Dhingra. He is the son of a civil surgeon in Amritsar, he has been in London for three years, and he is reading mechanical engineering at University College. In his jacket he has a Colt pistol.
Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie comes past him with his wife. Wyllie is the political aide de camp to the Secretary of State for India, which in plain words means he is the man in London who watches Indian students. Dhingra steps forward as though to speak to him. Then he fires.
Four of the five bullets hit Wyllie in the face. A Parsi doctor named Cawas Lalcaca, visiting from Shanghai, moves in to pull Dhingra back. Dhingra shoots him too. Lalcaca dies as well. Dhingra turns the pistol on himself, and it misfires, and hands take hold of him.
Everything about that minute is in the record: the room, the bodies, the arrest. What is not obvious is why a surgeon's son from Amritsar was standing at that door with a loaded pistol. He would answer that question himself, twice, in words that are still on the page. This lesson is about the answer, and about the second man on the floor.
The Road from Amritsar
Dhingra was born in Amritsar on 18 September 1883. His father, Dr Ditta Mal Dhingra, was a civil surgeon and a loyal servant of the government. The family was comfortable, English speaking, and well placed.