How Irish nationalists inspired a future Indian President

Indian Express

2 days ago

Irish President Michael D Higgins last week condemned the recent spate of racist attacks on Indian immigrants in his country, and said that Ireland's 'connections with India are neither recent nor superficial'. Among other things, Higgins noted that India and Ireland shared 'the experience of paths towards independence'.
One interesting figure in this shared history is Varahagiri Venkata Giri, who served as the President of India between 1969 and 1974. While attending law school in Dublin from 1913 and 1917, Giri was 'drawn irresistibly into the cross currents of the Irish struggle for self-government,' he wrote in his 1976 autobiography My Life and Times.
Going to Dublin
Giri studied law at the University College Dublin and the King's Inns, Dublin.
'Indian students preferred to study in Ireland in preference to England because there was neither a colour bar nor racial prejudice of any kind among the Irish, probably due to the adverse circumstances of their history,' he wrote.
Giri spoke glowingly about the Irish people
'Giri always spoke of the hospitality of the local Irish families during his stay in Dublin. He often mentioned that neither he nor the other Indian students experienced any discrimination or racial prejudice,' Amba Preetham Parigi, Giri's grandson, wrote in the foreword to Connor Mulvagh's Irish Days, Indian Memories (2016) which traces the lives and politics of Indian students in Dublin from 1913 to 1916.
The timing of Giri's arrival was crucial. In 1912, admission rules for Indians at the Inns of Court in London and other English institutions were made stricter, pushing 'a large number of Indian students… to Ireland, where the regulations were less strict,' an article in the The Irish Times in April 1914 said.
As P H Gupta, an Indian law student in Dublin at the time, said, 'King's Inns is an independent institution and need not imitate her sister Inns at London, whose attitude towards Indians is based purely on prejudice.'
This aside, Giri's biographer G S Bhargava in his V.V. Giri: Portrait of President (1970) also suggested a social factor. Dublin was already home to a number of Telugu-speaking students, and of the twelve Indians who accompanied Giri to Dublin in August 1913, seven were Telugu.
'A youth unused to the ways of western civilisation, congenial company was naturally necessary under an alien sky,' Bhargava wrote (as quoted in Mulvagh).
Activism in Dublin
Giri, who arrived in Ireland at a time of political upheaval, immersed himself in the politics of the country.
The labour movement in Ireland was in its full swing. Months before his arrival, Dublin had seen thousands of workers, led by trade unionist James Larkin and the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, clash with employers over the right to unionise in the 'Dublin lock-out' of 1913.
Giri would attend labour meetings and observe their debates, absorbing arguments for collective bargaining and unionisation which would prove useful during his years as a labour leader in India.
The movement for Independence too was in a violent phase. 'Fresh from India and deeply imbued with a passion to fight for my country's freedom, I experienced a complete sense of identity with the Irish cause,' Giri wrote in My Life and Times.
In Dublin, he became a member of a small clandestine group called the 'Anarchical Society' which, he claimed, 'professed belief in using violence and bloodshed to achieve a peaceful end' and learned 'the techniques of incendiarism and bomb-making' to aid India's freedom struggle.
Later, influenced by Mahatma Gandhi's work in South Africa, the group would abandon violence and reorganise as the Indian Students' Association. Giri was the group's secretary for three years.
The association's semi-secret activities included publishing a pamphlet titled 'Horrors in South Africa' which sought to 'magnify acts of racial discrimination perpetrated on Indian citizens in South Africa and bring about natural sympathy for the Indian community in their struggle against the White Minority Government'.
Some 100,000 copies of the pamphlet were dispatched to India before being intercepted by customs for arousing anti-British sentiments. He was tipped off by an Irish nationalist of a police raid, allowing him to destroy all incriminating evidence and escape arrest and deportation — for the time being.
'This was perhaps one of my earliest experiences of threat of prosecution for direct involvement in the cause of India's freedom,' he wrote.
Story of Giri's 'deportation'
The Easter Rising of 1916 saw Irish republicans begin an armed insurrection in the heart of Dublin during the height of World War I. While the insurrection was crushed and most leaders hanged to death, the event became a watershed moment in Ireland's struggle for independence.
In My Life and Times, Giri recalled that 'about a week before the uprising [he] met some leaders of the movement,' such as Desmond FitzGerald, who joked, 'well, let us meet again at Easter for some hot tea.'
In fact, during his time in Dublin, Giri had cultivated friendships with members of many radical Irish nationalists, including trade unionist James Connoly who would be executed for leading the Easter Rising.
'Connolly's passionate desire was that the freedom of Ireland should yield. economic freedom for Irish labour… More than any of the leaders of the uprising it was Connolly who inspired me,' Giri later wrote.
'I resolved that as soon as I returned to India I would give a graphic account of these struggles to inspire our own people… [and] take up the organisation of the transport workers… [who] could become the bulwark of the national movement and thus subvert British authority,' he wrote.
It was this association that brought Giri to the attention of British authorities. 'There was a deep suspicion… that I was not only connected with the Irish movement but that I was actively in league with it,' he wrote.
Martial law in Dublin saw the police raiding Indian students' lodgings. Although nothing incriminating was found, on June 1, 1916, Giri was served with an order to leave the UK (at the time all of Ireland was a part of the UK) by July 1.
While he completed his final law examinations at the King's Inns, Giri was unable to finish his bachelors' or pursue further studies in Philadelphia as he had planned. Yet, he was not dejected when having to leave Ireland.
'With the fervour inspired by the revolutionaries still fresh in my mind, I determined to return to India and take an active part in the political movement to secure the independence of my country,' he wrote in My Life and Times.
Less than six years later, Giri was leading the Bengal–Nagpur Railway Indian Labour Union and emerging as one of India's foremost labour leaders.
In 1927, 'Giri managed to grow the resistance from a single station in Kharagpur to a strike of an estimated 35,000 of the railway's 60,000 employees, which ground the Bengal–Nagpur line to a standstill for almost an entire month,' Mulvagh wrote in his paper 'Indian Law Students in Dublin, 1913–16: Solidarity and Encounter Between Indian and Irish Advanced Nationalists' (2025).
The strike, in Mulvagh's eyes, bore clear echoes of Dublin's labour militancy.1