On 28 June 1920, a company of the Connaught Rangers stationed at Jullundur on the plains of the Punjab refused to perform their military duties as a protest against the activities of the British Army in Ireland. On the following day, the mutineers sent two emissaries to a company of Connaught Rangers stationed at Solon, … Read more
During World War I most Indians (like the Irish) supported Britain’s war effort on the assumption that some form of self-government would be granted at the end of hostilities. Instead, in March 1919 they got the Rowlatt Act, which gave the British Indian government draconian powers, including that of internment. In response, Mohandas Gandhi began … Read more
On his third visit to Britain, in 1912, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore met with a variety of literary figures, such as Ezra Pound and Thomas Sturge Moore. None would prove as beneficial as his meeting with W.B. Yeats on 7 July 1912. Tagore had initially shown his poems to the English painter William Rothenstein. Overwhelmed … Read more
Sir Charles Trevelyan, notorious in Irish folk memory for the harsh way he coordinated famine relief in 1845–7, visited Dublin Zoo in the early 1860s, prior to his departure for Calcutta. He had been governor of Madras in 1859 but was recalled in 1860; in 1862 he was sent to India again, this time as finance minister. … Read more
Mir Aulad remains a bit of an enigma, especially as his name and origins are subject to speculation. Sometimes spelt phonetically, ‘Meer Owlad Allee’ was from Oudh (now known as Audah), which had been one of the provinces of the Mughal Empire in India. Whilst this area was effectively a vassal of the British East … Read more