The Dagshai hills that connect India, Ireland
My wife and I were entertaining two of her cousins at our favourite watering hole in Chennai, The Lady Connemara Bar & Lounge at the Taj Connemara – a hotel steeped in history, particularly its connection with Ireland. Lady Connemara and Jameson Irish whiskey were available, but sadly no Bushmills’ whiskey or Guinness Stout, our Irish favourites!
Our banter included the fascinating Madras-Ireland link of Lady Connemara, Susan Georgina Broun-Ramsay (eldest daughter of the Honourable first Marquess of Dalhousie, a former Governor General of India), and her ‘colourful’ husband Lord Robert Bourke, first Baron Connemara and Governor of Madras, the third son of Lord Mayo of Ireland. While Bourke may have been the first Baron Connemara in the 1890s, in 1924, great England and India cricketer Ranjitsinhji, the Rajah of Nawanagar, was to become the Maharaja of Connemara, having bought out his favourite place in all of Ireland — the Ballynahinch Castle in County Galway, Connemara Province.
While Lord Bourke, by all accounts an efficient and able administrator of the Province of Madras, was philandering his way through a bevy of females, much to the consternation and disgust of Lady Connemara, some extraordinary events were taking place in Ireland, including in the Irish Province adjacent to Connemara, that of ‘Connacht’, anglicised to ‘Connaught’. Following the terrible starvation and disease caused by the horrid Great Irish Famine from 1845 to 1852, there arose in England’s ‘first colony’, Ireland, a great clamour for ‘home rule’. The 1880s witnessed the advent of a strong spirit of Irish Nationalism.
The nationalistic sentiment was greatly spurred on by the major economic disruptions and hardships caused across Ireland by the aggressive and appalling Imperialist actions of the Government at Westminster, London, in the far off areas of the ‘Empire’ such as India, Afghanistan, Boer South Africa and Egypt. It was the likes of great Irish patriots such as Eamon de Valera, Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, Margaret Noble, and Michael Collins, who could focus and capture the disgust of the Irish people and ignite a hugely popular ‘Independence’ movement.
Many of these Irish patriots had close links with Indians and were hugely supportive of India’s and desire for self-rule and Independence. Michael Davitt was a mentor to Dadabhai Naoroji. Maud Gonne became a close friend and guide of Bhikaji Cama. Eamon de Valera became a great friend of Mahatma Gandhi as well as of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and an ardent backer of Indian nationalism. Annie Besant became the Founder of the ‘All India Home Rule League’. Margaret Noble became our ‘Sister Nivedita’. Margaret Cousins and her husband, along with the great Irish Poet, WB Yeats were great friends and supporters of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and inspired the rise of Bengali Nationalism, which emulated Michael Collins and the Sinn Fein. Bose was led to remark, “In my part of India (Bengal), there is hardly an educated family where books about the Irish National Heroes are not read!”
Further, though now largely forgotten, Bose sought great inspiration for the formation of India’s INA, the Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauj) from the Irish Republican Army (IRA). No wonder then that Netaji became known in Ireland as ‘the Michael Collins of India’. Eamon de Valera would go on to give his blessings to the torchbearers of India’s freedom movement, the Ghadar Party (well connected with the INA) at a rally in New York on February 28, 1920. Not surprisingly, he was invited to be the guest of honour at a reception in Birmingham, England on January 26, 1950, to mark India becoming a Republic.
Yet, as Jane Ohlmeyer of Trinity College, Dublin, has written, “Ireland was England’s first colony, it was also imperial.” Ohlmeyer records that a very large number of top level administrators and bureaucrats that governed India were Irish. These included famous/infamous personalities such as Eyre Coote, Arthur Wellesley, Henry Lawrence, John Lawrence, Gerald Aungier and Michael O’Dwyer (of Jallianwala Bagh infamy). In fact, in the 1890s, seven out of eight provinces of India were governed by the ‘Anglo Irish’.
But what, in later years, would prove to be disastrous for British colonial rule in India was the fact that Ireland was the source of a very large number of European troops based in India. It is recorded that for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Irishmen comprised nearly half of such troops. Of these, the officers were almost all Anglo-Irish Protestants.
Some of these Irish officers were well known, highly decorated ones such as Gen Arthur Thomas Moore, VC. The one Irish officer who would go on to become really famous was Gen Frederick Young, widely recognised as the founder of the famous ‘Gurkha Rifles’. But, there were also some infamous Irish officers such as the sadistic Gen John Nicholson of what may be termed as the infamous ‘1857 Delhi’ action.
However, the rank and file serving in the colonial army in India were predominantly impoverished Irish Catholics — men renowned for their bravery in action. Several Irish regiments did multiple tours of duty in colonial India. Amongst them were the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Royal Irish Regiment, Royal Munster Fusiliers, Leinster Regiment and Royal Irish Lancers, etc.
But the formation that would go on to make real history, in the little mountain cantonment of Dagshai, in present-day Himachal Pradesh, was the Connaught Rangers Regiment from Connacht, the Irish province right adjacent to Connemara. Raised in 1793 as the 88th Regiment of Foot and having excelled in the Napoleonic Wars, the formation arrived in Dagshai in March 1852. Following tradition, the regiment did a round of the Dagshai Parade Ground with their Band playing “It’s a long way to Tipperary” and “Killaloe”, saluted their Commanding Officer Col Edmund Jeffreys before proceeding to barracks. During this first stay in Dagshai, the rank and file of the regiment contributed from their pockets, a then princely sum of Rs 5,030 for the construction of the beautiful, Gothic-style St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, right in the heart of Dagshai Cantonment.
In 1881, the 88th Regiment was formally renamed ‘The Connaught Rangers’ and in 1908, they were back in Dagshai for their second tour of duty there. But it was the third tour in Dagshai, in 1920, that was to make history not only for Ireland but significantly also for India. With the Independence movement in Ireland intensifying and the activities of the IRA and its supporters coming to the fore, the Government in London responded by forming the notorious para military force, ‘The Black and Tans’ (named after the colours of their uniform), comprised largely of very tough and aggressive ex-British servicemen.
The ‘Black and Tans’ — given virtually a free hand in putting down the rapidly developing Irish Freedom Movement — went on a rampage carrying out deadly attacks against ordinary civilians and businesses usually on an arbitrary basis. Atrocities were committed across Ireland, including the abduction and murder of a priest, Father Michael Griffin.
When word of the terrible atrocities perpetrated by the ‘Black and Tans’ reached the rank and file of the Connaught Rangers stationed in the Dagshai area, the Irish Catholic troopers mutinied against their English Officers on July 1, 1920. The Dagshai Mutiny was led by 21-year-old trooper James Daly. The mutineers managed to incarcerate their English officers and seize the armoury. A massive blow had been struck for the independence of Ireland!
A relieving army column was rushed up from Ambala, which eventually managed to put down the mutiny. Daly and other ring leaders were taken into custody and imprisoned in the solitary confinement wing of the Dagshai Military Jail.
When the news of the Dagshai Mutiny reached Ambala, by a strange coincidence, Mahatma Gandhi happened to be present there for the launch of the historic Non Co-operation Movement. Being a friend of Eamon de Valera and wholly sympathetic to the Irish cause, Gandhi rushed to Dagshai to show solidarity with the Connaught Rangers’ troopers. Gandhi instinctively, perhaps, realised that this mutiny would certainly have a major impact not only on the Irish freedom struggle but also give a new direction to India’s own fledgling aspirations for self-rule.
Offered suitable accommodation in Dagshai, Gandhi insisted on staying alongside the incarcerated troopers of the Connaught Rangers, which resulted in his being accommodated in the so called VIP cell of the Dagshai Jail, just down the corridor from the prison cells occupied by the Irish leaders of the mutiny. We can only conjecture about what Gandhi discussed with Daly, but certainly he must have derived a huge amount of inspiration for India’s own Independence movement!
On August 20, 1920, Daly faced a hastily convened court martial, whose verdict, unsurprisingly, was ‘guilty, to be shot by a firing squad’. In his last letter to his mother before he was executed, Daly poignantly wrote “…It is all for Ireland. I am not afraid to die!” The place in Dagshai adjacent to the jail where he was finally shot is now a park with flowers and swings for children. Dagshai was destined to go down in history as the place where events happened that would lead, first to the independence of Ireland and then of India, from our mutual colonial rulers.
Although Daly was executed in Dagshai by a firing squad on November 2, 1920, his mother was only informed of this by an incredibly terse letter dated December 31, 1920, written from the Infantry Record Office in Cork, Ireland. This letter, a copy of which is on display at the Dagshai Military Jail Museum, reads as follows:
“Madam,
It is with very great regret that I have to inform you that No. 7144396, Private James Daly, 1st Battalion, Connaught Rangers, was sentenced, after trial by Court Martial, to be shot for: “Joining in a mutiny in His Majesty’s Military Forces,” and that the sentence was duly executed on the 2nd November, 1920.
Signed: Colonel I/C Records”
The mortal remains of Daly and three other conspirators were interred in the Catholic Cemetery of Dagshai. However, in 1970, on the 50th anniversary of the Dagshai Mutiny, the remains of Daly and the others were exhumed and flown on June 16, 1970, to Ireland via London for reburial – James Daly in his home town, Tyrrellspass, and the others in the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
Stephen Lally, one of the Connaught Rangers mutineers, would later pen the following extraordinary and memorable words: “I thought we might as well kill two birds with one stone, and if we could get the Indian National Movement with us, it would mean a great victory not alone for Ireland but India as well. We would have officered the native ranks and in a very short time India would have gained her freedom.”
On October 19, 2024, a very poignant remembrance event was held at Dagshai’s St Patrick’s Church (built by money contributed by troopers of the Connaught Rangers) to commemorate not only the centenary of the Dagshai Mutiny and the 125th birth anniversary of James Daly but also 110 years of the hanging at Dagshai’s Gallow’s House of the leaders of the famous but ill-fated SS Komagata Maru expedition to Vancouver, organised by the Ghadar Party.
The remembrance event, graced by the presence of Kevin Kelly, Ambassador of Ireland, and Bishop Ignatius Mascarenhas, featured a superlative performance by the St Stephen’s Choir of Chandigarh, directed by Roy D’Silva. The Pipes and Drums Band played tunes connected not only to the Connaught Rangers but also to India’s own Netaji-led INA.
(The author is the founder and curator of the Military Jail Museum, Dagshai)
