LITMIR.BIZ

      FOREWORD

      I was all of nine years studying at an Irish Catholic school when I first started thinking about the name Giri. In school, as well as public functions and social get-togethers, I would be referred to as Giri’s grandson.

      As I grew up, I realised I had been born into a political family and Giri was a household name in most parts of India. In the 1950s and 60s, many recognised Giri as India’s trade union leader, as one who took part in the Quit India Movement, and as one elected to the Constituent Assembly as a Cabinet Minister for Labour in independent India’s first cabinet. To those who were born in the late 1960s and 70s, the name Dr Varahagiri Venkata Giri meant The President of India.

      As I entered my teens, I engaged with Giri and asked him several questions on global, national and local issues. His responses, anecdotes and guidance remain today a precious source of my recollections of his student days in Ireland; and those of Giri as a presidential candidate, a politician, a strategist, a nationalist leader, an empathiser with the poor and the industrial workers, a socialist at heart, a pragmatist in achieving his goals, one who spoke well of his opponents, an orator and a family man.

      Giri held the view that one of the requisites of a parliamentary system of governance was not just the practice of tolerance but the need to celebrate our differences, particularly in public life. During his presidential campaign and in later years, I vividly recollect his enthusiasm and capacity to connect with several national leaders and political parties. I had the opportunity to closely observe his interaction with those who differed with him on the ways and means of resolving political issues.

      Taking risks and espousing a cause came naturally to Giri. His commitment to a cause would be so intense that many a time he would take great risks to achieve his goals. In 1913, when he was just 19 and a student at the University College Dublin he - directly or indirectly - supported the Irish to attain Home Rule. And, at age 75 and much against the advice of political experts and his well-wishers, Giri decided to contest the post of President of India as an independent candidate. Until today, no one has held office as the acting President of India and nor has any independent candidate won in India’s presidential elections. This was a first in the history of Indian politics.

      In the early 1900s, a foreign education used to be the birth right of the privileged rich. Today, Indian students have easy access and far greater opportunities to study overseas. This very welcome book by Dr Conor Mulvagh and University College Dublin provides a deep insight into the life and times of Indian students in Ireland at that time, with Giri as its focal point.

      While the challenges faced by Indian students today, globally and nationally, are quite different from those faced by Giri and his peers, there is no doubt that those who read this book, particularly Irish and Indian students, will be hugely inspired by Giri’s courage and conviction. He was a student who not only integrated with the Irish people but was totally immersed in their local issues - even politically sensitive issues that may have landed him in prison.

      Giri always spoke of the hospitality of the local Irish families during his stay in Dublin. He often mentioned that neither he nor the other Indian students experienced any discrimination or racial prejudice. Possibly somewhere in his mind he compared his situation as a student to that of the experiences of Indian students studying in England in the early 1900s.

      Today, members of the student fraternity are possibly overwhelmed with the speed of change. In their daily lives they witness evolutionary and revolutionary changes occurring the world over, not only in the political sphere but more often in the world of technology. Books like Irish Days, Indian Memories may give them an insight into the tough choices some students made in the 1900s as well as the risks and sacrifices they undertook.

      Even now when many books on Ireland in 1916 are appearing, there are some that will stand the test of time and remain required reading. Dr Conor Mulvagh’s book is one such account. The more I read through the pages, the more I get to walk down a memory lane laced with anecdotes I heard from my grandfather about Irish-Indian relationships of the past.

      Amba Preetham Parigi

      Group CEO - Network18

      Grandson of former President of India Dr V.V. Giri

      December 2015

      Mumbai, India

      Introduction

      In writing a history of the intersections between Irish and Indian nationality, this book is intended to appeal to two different audiences. To Irish readers, this short book offers an insight into a virtually unknown section of Dublin’s political and student life between 1913 and 1916. Among them was V. V. Giri, fourth President of India (1969–74) who would later say of himself ‘when I am not an Indian, I am an Irishman’.1 The diversity of Dublin in this era is something which still warrants analysis and it is hoped that this study will incorporate the story of Indian students into Ireland’s wartime and insurrectionary experiences. In charting the social history of Dublin as lived by Indian students in this era, I have endeavoured to present the positive and negative aspects of these interactions without dilution and, I hope, with a balance that reflects accurately the realities of the time. I am conscious that the negative aspects of encounter have a propensity to be over-represented in the archive. It is thus important to state that the best overall evidence of how well Indian students integrated into Irish life can be found in the fact that so many of their contemporaries and classmates treated them as equals and that they progressed through their studies in Dublin as peers, finding acceptance and friendship not only in the lecture theatre but in student societies, at the dinner table and in the social outlets of the city.

      To Indian readers, it is hoped that what is offered here is a detailed insight into the Irish experiences of V. V. Giri, whose three-year stay in Dublin to study law between 1913 and 1916 left a lifetime legacy. Giri was one of UCD’s first identifiable groups of international students. He arrived in Dublin in the late summer of 1913 along with twelve other Indian students. While the fact that Giri studied in Dublin is well known in India, the details of his time here remain impressionistic in the historiography. Furthermore, the retrospective prominence of Giri among Dublin’s Indian students has served to eclipse his compatriots who joined him here to live and study. I hope that this book goes some way to uncovering some of those occluded stories and, by so doing, adds depth and context to the story of V. V. Giri’s Dublin days.

      Writing the history of Indian students in pre-independence Ireland has been a challenging but highly rewarding exercise. For one accustomed to standing on firmer historical ground, this study has forced me to venture further away from archival terra firma than usual. On the face of it, the persons at the centre of this study are almost ghosts. They have left their names in the records of the institutions in which they studied, their lodging houses have been found, and other valuable snippets of functional contemporary detail about their lives have been uncovered. However, as to their lived experiences in Dublin of a century ago, the author has been forced to rely on very scant material indeed. Thankfully this has been enhanced by the existence of a variety of memoirs and oral testimony written and recorded decades after the fact.

      It is important to emphasise that this is by no means a definitive study of Indian law students in Dublin. Really, it only represents a starting point which I hope will be of benefit to scholars working on the diversity of Dublin life in this period and also to those interested in the history of international education in Ireland. Only those students who attended UCD are included in this study. By definition, these students also studied at the King’s Inns but, as will be shown, a number of Indian students

Скачать книгу