Congresses and Conspiracies

Abstract

The story of how a student named Madanlal Dhingra, the Indian assassin of Sir William Curzon-Wylie,¹ became part of the connection between the Indian and Egyptian nationalists demonstrates a number of developments in modern anticolonial movements. First of all, he—like many of the Egyptian students in Europe—was from a family that seemed unlikely to produce “agitators,” an upper-middle-class home that hoped to get the sons the education that could get them a post in the government’s bureaucracy. His political baptism took place in Europe, where natives could easily mix across the class, ethnic, and religious divisions that governed their own societies. The laws in Europe also guaranteed far more personal and political freedom than in the colonies. Dhingra belonged to a group that was well aware of other nationalist movements, through the Indian Sociologist, visiting speakers at the many assemblies that could not be banned in Europe, and the cosmopolitan awareness of the metropoles, where imperial questions were debated vigorously in the press and among the students. While he almost certainly sympathized with the Egyptian nationalist movement, he could not have imagined he would have the impact on it that he did. The nationalist papers of India and Egypt, the contacts and cooperation that already had developed between nationalists from both colonies, and the reaction of the press in both London and Cairo, combined to make him a hero and an inspiration to Egyptian Watanists.