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Madan Lal Dhingra was an Indian revolutionary who was hanged to death on August 17, 1909, at the age of only 24, for killing British official Curzon Wyllie.
An unwavering patriot, he was disowned by his family for his anti-British leanings – so much so that even after his death his family refused to take his body.
Today, on the 114th anniversary of his execution, a memorial in his name is being formally inaugurated in Amritsar’s Golbagh area.
A patriot born to British loyalists
Madan Lal Dhingra was born on 18 September , 1883 in an affluent family of Amritsar. His father, Dr Ditta Mal Dhingra, was the chief medical officer of Amritsar and a staunch British loyalist.
After completing school education in Amritsar, in 1904, Dhingra was sent to Lahore for his Master’s degree. It was in Lahore that his patriotism flowered, influenced by the burgeoning nationalist movement there.
Having an innate sense of justice, Dhingra was also very much concerned by the poverty he witnessed in India. While he himself was born in privilege, his patriotism was guided, in many ways, by socio-economic concerns. He would eventually be expelled from the college in Lahore for protesting against the mandation of Britain-imported cloth for blazers, and then refusing to apologise to the management for his protest.
However, Dhingra never went to home after this expulsion, rather doing odd jobs places like Shimla and Mumbai. In 1906, his family convinced him to study in London, where he took admission in the University College of London to learn mechanical engineering.
While studying in London, Dhingra came in contact with Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Shyamji Krishna Varma, both active in revolutionary circles in the city.
A year back, Varma had founded India House – a student accomodation for Indians in north London, and a hub of revolutionary Indian nationalism. Dhingra would frequent India House and participate in meetings and discussions.
Later, he became a member of the secretive Abhinav Bharat Mandal founded by Vinayak Savarkar and his brother Ganesh. It was here that Dhingra’s eventual plan of assasinating Curzon Willie would materialise, and he would pick up the required shooting skills to carry out the killing.
By this time, Madan Lal’s father had gotten to know of his son’s activities and publically disowned him, even publishing advertisements in newspapers to that effect.
William Hutt Curzon Wyllie (1848-1909) was a British Indian officer and later on, a political official and an intelligence officer in the British Indian government. At the time of his assasination, he was trying to collect information on Dhingra and his fellow revolutionaries.
On July 1, 1909, Dhingra attended the annual ‘At Home’ function hosted by the Indian National Association at the Imperial Institute, London. Curzon Wyllie, at the time selected to be the political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, was also present in the function with his wife.
When he was leaving the function, Dhingra fired five shots at Curzon Wyllie, four of which hit the target. The sixth and seventh bullets Dhingra fired hit Carwash Lalcaca, a Parsi doctor who tried to save the British official. Both Curzon Wyllie and Lalcaca died on the spot and Dhingra was arrested immediately and put through a rapid trial.
During the trial, Dhingra represented himself, and gave a compelling justification for his deeds. “And I maintain that if it is patriotic in an Englishman to fight against the Germans if they were to occupy this country, it is much more justifiable and patriotic in my case to fight against the English.,” Dhingra would say in his final statement before the verdict. He stated, however, that he had no intention of killing Lalcaca.
Dhingra was pronounced guilty and executed on August 17, 1909 at the Pentoville prison in London. Dhingra would be buried in London with his remains returning to India only in 1976. He was cremated at Amritsar’s Mal Mandi area that year, and the location of his cremation was conscecrated with a statue, the first in his hometown, decades after his sacrifice.
A struggle to build a memorial
A demand for a memorial to be built in Madan Lal Dhingra’s name has been active for years.
Former BJP MLA Laxmi Kanta Chawla told The Indian Express that “it was a 30 years long struggle to get a memorial built in name of this martyr which was formally inaugurated on today by Governor Banwari Lal Purohit.”
It was on August 15, 2021 that former Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh announced, in his Independence Day speech, that the Amritsar Improvement trust will provide land and the Municipal Corporation of Amritsar will build a memorial in name of Dhingra. Roughly 2.5 crores have been spent on the memorial spread across 4,000 square yards.
There had also been attempts to build a memorial in Dhingra’s anscestral house, however his descendants used to live in Katra Sher Singh area of old Amritsar in Sikandari gate area . “We tried a few times to get that house for making it a memorial but the descendants of Dhingra never showed any interest. In 2012 , the family sold that house, hence the last memory had also gone . So I worked hard towards getting land for this memorial …,” Chawla said.
