I am currently writing a book entitled The Only Road to Liberty: The Indian Revolutionary Movement in Europe, 1905-1918 (Liverpool University Press, 2019). Providing case studies from Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden, it examines international alliances, solidarities and antagonisms with similar anticolonial nationalists such as the Irish and the Egyptians, European socialists, Marxists, and anarchists, as well as collaborations with the Germans during the First World War. Drawing on extensive archival research from across Europe, it demonstrates the transnational nature of the Indian revolutionary movement and brings it into closer dialogue with a network of revolutionary discourses and practices in Europe in the early twentieth century.

‘India House’ opened as a hostel for Indian students in July 1905 and soon became a meeting place for Indian revolutionaries in Britain. Located at 65 Cromwell Avenue in Highgate in north London – ‘which is the healthiest suburb of London and which has the lowest death rate in the United Kingdom’, wrote the founder Shyamaji Krishnavarma – the house was ‘situated close to trams, within easy reach of three railway stations and also within a few minutes’ walk of Waterlow Park, Highgate Woods and Queen’s Wood’. It provided accommodation for about 25 students, had a lecture hall, library, and reading room and ‘ample space for Tennis Courts, Gymnasium, etc.’ In early 1909, a rifle range was established in the backyard.

Extending my historical lens further back, I also research and write about the Indian nationalist press in London from 1865 to 1914. Examining the East India Association and its paper the Journal of the East India Association, the British Committee of the Indian National Congress and its paper India, and Shyamaji Krishnavarma’s penny-monthly The Indian Sociologist, I illustrate the centrality of the press in confronting colonial discourse and the development of the Indian nationalist movement in Britain in the long nineteenth century.