India House

[9] The committee was successful in calling the British public's attention to issues of civil liberties in India, but it largely failed to bring about political change, prompting socialists such as Henry Hyndman to advocate a more radical approach.

Nationalist leaders in India (such as Bipin Chandra Pal, who led the agitation against the Bengal partition) and Indian students in Britain criticised the committee for what they perceived as its overcautious approach.

[8][11] Against this background, coincident with the political upheaval caused by the 1905 partition of Bengal, a nationalist lawyer named Shyamji Krishna Varma founded India House in London.

It was inaugurated on 1 July 1905 by Henry Hyndman in a ceremony attended by, among others, Dadabhai Naoroji, Charlotte Despard and Bhikaji Cama[14] When opened as a student-hostel in 1905, it provided accommodation for up to thirty students.

Krishna Varma admired Swami Dayananda Saraswati's cultural nationalism and believed in Herbert Spencer's dictum that "Resistance to aggression is not simply justified, but imperative".

[21] Subsequently, Krishna Varma used his considerable financial resources to offer scholarships to Indian students in memory of leaders of the 1857 uprising, on the condition that the recipients would not accept any paid post or honorary office from the British Raj upon their return home.

[8] TIS quoted extensively from the works of British writers, which Krishna Varma interpreted to explain his views that the Raj was colonial exploitation, and that the Indians had a right to oppose it, by violence if necessary.

[36] Valentine Chirol, foreign editor of The Times, who had close associations with the Raj, accused Krishna Varma of preaching "disloyal sentiments" to Indian students, and demanded he be prosecuted.

[40] Morley refused to take any action contrary to his liberal political principles, but Chirol's tirade against TIS and Krishna Varma forced the Government to investigate.

Nearly seventy people, including several women, regularly attended the Sunday evening meetings at which Savarkar gave lectures on topics ranging from the philosophy of revolution to bomb-making and assassination techniques.

[15] Savarkar was at the heart of these, spending a great deal of time in the explosives workshop and emerging on some evenings, according to a fellow revolutionary, "with telltale yellow stains of picric acid on his hands".

[55] The residents of India House and members of Abhinav Bharat practiced shooting at a range in Tottenham Court Road in central London, and rehearsed assassinations they planned to carry out.

In addition to questions raised in official Indian and British circles, Savarkar's unrestrained views had been published in English newspapers including the Daily Mail, Manchester Guardian and Dispatch.

[63] The culmination of these events was the assassination of Sir William H. Curzon Wyllie, the political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, by Madanlal Dhingra on the evening of 1 July 1909, at a meeting of Indian students in the Imperial Institute in London.

Investigations into the killing were expanded to look for broader conspiracies originating from India House; although Scotland Yard stated that none existed, Indian intelligence sources suggested otherwise.

[57] Lack of direction and information from Indian political intelligence, compounded by Lord Morley's reluctance to engage in postal censorship,[71] led to Special Branch underestimating the threat.

[71] In spite of these problems, and although Special Branch was wholly inexperienced in dealing with political crime,[70] the first observations of India House by Scotland Yard began as early as 1905.

[72] Unknown to Scotland Yard,[74] by the beginning of 1909 the Indian Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) had made covert efforts of its own to infiltrate India House, with more success.

[80] A committee set up in 1907 under Sir William Lee-Warner to investigate political unrest among Indian students in Britain noted the strong influence that India House had on this group.

[49] The Paris-Safranski link was strongly suggested by French police to be involved in the 1907 attempt in Bengal to derail the train carrying the Lieutenant-Governor Sir Andrew Fraser.

[52] Some of his subsequent writings, including Hind Swaraj, were opposed to the activities of Savarkar and Dhingra, and disputed the argument that violence was innocent if perpetrated under a nationalist identity or while under Colonial victimhood.

An India House, though not officially allied to the London organisation, was founded in Manhattan in New York in January 1908 with funds from a wealthy lawyer of Irish descent named Myron Phelps.

The arrival of Har Dayal around this time bridged the gap between the intellectual agitators and the predominantly Punjabi labour workers and migrants, laying the foundations of the Ghadar movement.

[92] Taking up the post of Professor of Urdu at Tokyo University, Barkatullah was responsible for East Asian distribution of The Indian Sociologist and other nationalist literature from London.

During the conspiracy, the revolutionaries collaborated extensively with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Sinn Féin, Japanese patriotic societies, Ottoman Turkey and, most prominently, the German Foreign Office.

The threat posed by the conspiracy was key in the passage of the Defence of India Act 1915, and suppression of the movement necessitated an international counter-intelligence operation on the part of the British empire lasting nearly ten years.

[69] It sent delegates to the International Socialist Congress in August 1910, where Krishna Varma and Iyer succeeded in having a resolution passed demanding Savarkar's release and his extradition to France.

[104] After World War I, ex-members of India House and erstwhile members of the Berlin Committee and the Indian revolutionary movement increasingly turned to the young Soviet Union, becoming closely associated with communism.

Moving to Weimar Germany after the war, Chatterjee's program of revolutionary nationalism developed into the Indian Independence Party in 1922 which won Chicherin's approval and Comintern funding.

[52] Further, the Spencerian theories of evolutionism and functionalism that Savarkar examined at India House strongly influenced his social and political philosophy, and helped lay the foundations of early Hindu nationalism.