Exhumation: The Life and Death of Madan Lal Dhingra
By Leena Dhingra
Small Axes £12.99

THIS is a story with very particular contemporary relevance, given the cultural wars that are being waged by the far right at the present time.

How to face up to Britain’s colonial past? How to make sense of competing ways of remembering? And how to take account of the implications for those involved in contemporary struggles against racism and religious intolerance?

Exhumation tells the story of Madan Lal Dhingra, a young Indian freedom fighter who was convicted of assassinating a British official and accordingly hanged in 1909 at Pentonville Prison.

Ghosts of colonialism are alive here, although encountered in different ways – and for radically different purposes.

The plinth on Madan Lal Dhingra’s statue in Amritsar, India, describes him as an indominable Hindustani “who challenged the mighty British empire with his courage and valour.”

He had become active through his involvement with a group of Indians based around India House, in Highgate. Here fellow revolutionaries dreamed of an India that was free and for the benefit of all its inhabitants, a rainbow nation “assimilating the best in the Muslim, Parsi, Jewish and other civilisations” in the words of Veer Savarkar, one of the key influences on this group.

India should become an inclusive democracy, in other words. But Savarkar subsequently changed his views, promoting the cause of Hindu nationalism, stigmatising Muslims and justifying unequal forms of citizenship.

Sadly, but unsurprisingly, given the subsequent rise to power of Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP, it is Sarkar’s name that the Blue Plaque on the house in Highgate now displays and Sarkar’s name alone. The recuperation of the history of progressive anti-colonial struggles – by the far right.

Madan Lal Dhingra’s story is an extraordinary one. And so is the way in which the story came to be told. The book actually consists of parallel stories, in fact, that of Madan Lal Dhingra himself and that of his great niece, Leena Dhingra, an author and actor who came to Europe as a child, fleeing from the massacres that followed the partition of India.

The family had been living in Lahore, but this had become part of the newly created state of Pakistan in 1947, unleashing communal violence on all sides.

Leena Dhingra became interested in finding out more about her great uncle as the result of playing a guest role in an episode of Dr Who, acting the part of a Pakistani grandmother. The parallels with this Pakistani grandmother’s experiences of Partition were striking, stimulating Leena to discover more about her own family history.  

The book moves between the past and the present, as she learns more about their different experiences in the struggle for Independence, their displacement following Partition and their continuing experiences of racism in postcolonial Britain.  

I found these time shifts challenging at first, but soon came to appreciate the value of weaving these intergenerational stories together. The reader comes to appreciate the variety of ways in which such families reacted to British colonial rule, each finding their own swadharma – the path of their own true natures – in the subsequent contexts of independence, Partition, exile and return.

This is not just about one particular family then; this is also about the very different ways in which the past is being revisited and reinterpreted in India today. This will have particular appeal for Morning Star readers with an interest in Britain’s colonial past and the continuing impacts today.

Exhumation is published by Small Axes, a new imprint that describes itself as “publishing post-colonial classics that helped shape cultural shifts at the time of their first publication, and titles by contemporary authors that continue in the tradition of questioning and contesting the canon.” So their publications should continue to be of interest to Morning Star readers in the future.