Conor Mulvagh of University College Dublin talks to DEEPA ALEXANDER about his book on former President V.V. Giri’s life at the university and his part in the Easter Rising

“When I am not an Indian, I am an Irishman,” Varahagiri Venkata Giri, fourth President of India (1969-1974), would often say of himself. It is this unique facet of Giri’s life, inspired by his years as a student at University College Dublin (UCD), that Dr. Conor Mulvagh emphasises in his book, Irish Days, Indian Memories – V.V. Giri and Indian Law Students at University College Dublin, 1913-16.

The four years mark a period that Irish poet W.B. Yeats would refer to in his poem ‘Easter, 1916’ as a time when ‘All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born’. The Easter Rising, an armed insurrection in Ireland in the Easter week of 1916, was not just a footnote to the catastrophic central event — World War I, but an incident that laid the foundation for a modern republic. Although stamped out by the British in no time, the rebellion, a century old this year, changed the course of history in Ireland, pushing opinion towards independence and away from devolved home rule.

Mulvagh’s book reflects Dublin’s political and student life against this tumultuous background drawn from a vast treasury of diaries, letters, military and university records.

In Chennai, as part of a tour to promote his book, Mulvagh says, “History has never been so good in Ireland. The commemoration of the revolution has seen a surge in papers being written, podcasts that have drawn over a 100,000 hits and videos.”

A lecturer in Irish History at UCD with a keen interest in the Irish revolutionary decade (1912-23) and the university’s place in that period, Mulvagh completed his doctoral thesis in 2012. Set to be published as a monograph, it examines the work of Irish Nationalist MPs at Westminster (1900-1918). At 30, Mulvagh has already supervised seven MA theses on topics as wide ranging as POWs in World War I and land agitations.

At the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, Mulvagh, dressed in a dapper suit and willingly posing for photographs, looks more investment banker than serious academic. “I nearly became a scientist,” he laughs. “My father was an industrial chemist, my mother was with a national broadcasting network. My grandfather worked at the National Library of Ireland, and my grandma, fluent in Spanish, French and English, at the university library. History met me at every turn, and though I chose political science and history of art, and was in love with Gaelic as a language, it was pure history that held me in thrall.”

Established in 1854, UCD, Ireland’s largest university, is also remembered for many of its staff and students lending heft to the Irish War of Independence, and is the major repository of archives relating to the period; which is how the 130-page book came to be in the spring of 2014.

“I had freshly started in a lectureship at UCD, and I was asked to verify whether or not V.V. Giri had studied at the university prior to the 1916 Rising. What started out as a small task opened into a fascinating journey of discovery into an almost forgotten episode in the deeply connected histories of India and Ireland,” says Mulvagh.

With a foreword by Giri’s grandson, Amba Preetham Parigi, Group CEO-Network 18, the book begins with Giri’s arrival in Dublin in the late summer of 1913 along with 12 other Indian law students.

“While the fact that Giri studied in Dublin is well known in India, the details of his time here were relatively unknown. Most Indian students left little personal records and, moreover, Giri’s retrospective prominence eclipsed his compatriots here. The persons at the centre of this study are almost ghosts. They left their names in the records of institutions in which they studied, their lodging houses have been found, but their lived experiences come from a variety of memoirs, including Giri’s autobiography written in the 1970s, their assignments, their work at King’s Inns, and material from British Library, U.K., and National Library of Ireland,” says Mulvagh.

“The social records were most interesting — they speak of an Indian integration with the Irish people. Students like PST Sayee wrote on Indian nationality in an early issue of the Irish Volunteer. Giri, however, burnt his diaries because of impending police raids.”

Despite scant first-hand accounts, Mulvagh addresses well the Irish and imperial contexts, the changing attitudes to Indians in Britain, studying in a city in turmoil with lockout, war and revolution as a backdrop, subversion and student societies, Indian activism and radical Irish connections, suspicion and sedition, Giri’s expulsion from Ireland over claims that he participated in the insurrection and his later tryst with railway trade unionism and the Independence movement in India, spurred by his first-hand experience of the Rising.

Replete with photographs, the book uncovers a neglected narrative of a turbulent time that had far-reaching effects on the histories of India, Ireland and Britain. A part of the team that organises national commemorations for the 100th anniversary of the Rising, Mulvagh says, “My commitment will always be to advance the prominence of history.”

The book, published by Irish Academic Press, is available on Amazon.