Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Recreating radical London

I came across a pile of newspapers when I was doing some tidying up on Sunday, somehow hadn’t got around to reading them & putting them in the recycling.

Well they date from last Christmas, when we had Weather to cope with on top of all the usual.

And so I have only just read an intriguing report from Rhys Blakely in Mumbai.

It tells of a house newly constructed in Mandvi, Gujerat in memory of Shyami Krishna Varma, the radical, Oxford educated lawyer who lived in London in the early years of the 20th century, a replica of a substantial house at 65, Cromwell Avenue in London’s Highgate – except that the red brick exterior is painted pink (“the navy blue of India”*). Varma bought it in 1905 to be a hostel for Indian students & a place where they could be radicalised as anti-colonial nationalists. He gave it the name India House. Gandhi visited it in 1906.

Varma left Britain in 1909 after one of his followers, Madan Lal Dhingra, assassinated Sir Curzon Wyllie at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington.

Two points to take from this story – England has, historically, taken a rather relaxed attitude towards foreign radicals, be they visitors, political refugees or living in her midst, most often regarding them as falling somewhere along a line from lunatic to incompetent clown, but sometimes as heroes fighting against injustice or oppression at home.

Those attitudes will turn, all sympathy will be lost, the moment the threat directly affects even just one of us. And then life can & will get very uncomfortable for those who are regarded as ‘one of them’.

Hence the national panic against the Irish who had been living in our midst who suddenly seemed all to be Fenians after the murder of Police Sergeant Brett in Manchester, & the way that Scotland Yard made life in Highgate’s India House uncomfortable after the assassination of Wyllie.

The other thing that can turn the authorities against a radical is any sign that they are becoming too popular with the populace – even if the exasperation is just with the need to provide crowd control & protection from those foreigners ‘on the other side’ who might try to make their point through an assassination on English soil.

The second point is that these incidents will be remembered by the other side long after we have forgotten about them, or at least ceased to talk about them.

And I cannot think of a previous example where the government has taken it upon itself to instruct universities to police or control discussion on their premises of these ‘extreme’ ideas, to adjudicate between the correct & mistaken interpretations of a religion other than the one to which they themselves cleave.

The architect of the Mandvi house is called Hiren Gandhi.



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