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File 06 · Old Bailey & Pentonville · July–August 1909
The courtroom
Forty-seven days separate the shooting from the execution. Almost everything contested about Dhingra — what he said, what was suppressed, what he asked for — belongs to those seven weeks.
The proceedings
Arrest and charge
Dhingra was seized at the Imperial Institute on the night of 1 July 1909 and taken into custody without resistance. He was charged with the murder of Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie and of Dr Cawas Lalcaca, and remanded through the ordinary committal process before being sent for trial at the Central Criminal Court.
Trial, 23 July 1909
The case was heard at the Old Bailey before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Alverstone. Dhingra did not mount a defence and was, in effect, unrepresented by his own choice. The proceedings were short — contemporary accounts describe a hearing lasting well under an hour.
Refusal of jurisdiction
Dhingra's position in court was not that he had not done it. He told the court that he did not recognise the authority of an English court to try him, on the ground that he considered himself a subject of an occupied country at war with its occupier. That argument — a political claim about legitimacy rather than a legal plea — had no standing in the proceedings and did not alter their course.
Verdict and sentence
He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. There was no appeal on his behalf; he sought none.
What was suppressed
Accounts of the trial record that Dhingra sought to have a prepared statement read or entered, that the court did not permit it in full, and that the text was withheld from the official record and from the press at the time. It is also widely reported that Indians were not admitted to the hearing. These points come from later accounts of the proceedings rather than from the court record itself, and this archive flags them as such.
Status: reported in nationalist and secondary accounts; not verified here against the court record.
The trial of Madan Lal Dhingra is entered in the published Old Bailey Proceedings for July 1909, which remain the primary record of the hearing. Readers wanting the source rather than the summary should consult that record directly.
Forty-seven days
- 1 July 1909Shooting at the Imperial Institute, South Kensington. Curzon Wyllie and Dr Lalcaca are killed. Dhingra is arrested at the scene.
- Early July 1909Inquest and committal proceedings. The case attracts heavy press coverage in Britain and India.
- 5 July 1909Meeting of Indians at Caxton Hall, Westminster, chaired by the Aga Khan, passes a resolution of condemnation. Savarkar objects that it is not unanimous.
- July 1909Gandhi, in South Africa, condemns the killings in Indian Opinion.
- 23 July 1909Trial at the Central Criminal Court before Lord Alverstone. Conviction and death sentence.
- August 1909Dhingra's statement circulates outside the courtroom and is printed in the nationalist press. Prosecutions follow against British printers of The Indian Sociologist.
- 17 August 1909Executed by hanging at Pentonville Prison, London. He was 25 — one month short of his twenty-sixth birthday.
- 1910India House closes. Savarkar is arrested; he is later transported to the Andaman Islands.
The statement
The document usually called Dhingra's final statement is the most quoted and least carefully sourced part of this story. It did not appear in the official record of the trial. It circulated afterwards, was printed in the nationalist press, and has been reproduced ever since — with variations in wording between versions.
Its substance is consistent across those versions: that a nation held down by foreign force is in a continuous state of war; that an Indian therefore has the right to act against the power holding it; that he had no wealth to give and so gave his life; and that what India needed was the willingness to die for it.
Two lines are quoted below because they are the most stable across versions. They are given as circulated text, not as a verified transcript.
“I believe that a nation held down by foreign bayonets is in a perpetual state of war.”
“The only lesson required in India at present is to learn how to die, and the only way to teach it is by dying ourselves.”
Circulated after the trial and printed in the nationalist press. Wording varies between published versions; the text was not entered in the official court record.
Status: attributed, widely reproduced, not verified here against a contemporary primary source.Other lines commonly presented as Dhingra's — including several that circulate widely on the internet — are not reproduced here, because this archive could not establish where they came from. An unsourced sentence in quotation marks is not evidence, however often it is repeated.
Final days
Between sentence and execution
Twenty-five days passed between the sentence on 23 July and the execution on 17 August 1909. He remained at Pentonville. No appeal was lodged and no petition for clemency was pursued on his behalf; the accounts agree that he wanted none.
The execution
He was hanged at Pentonville Prison on the morning of 17 August 1909. This archive records the fact and does not describe the procedure. There is no photograph of it, and none has been fabricated for this page.
Rites refused
Accounts record that Dhingra asked for his body to be given Hindu funeral rites and that the request was refused; his family, having disowned him, made no claim on the body. He was buried within the prison grounds in an unmarked grave, as executed prisoners were.
The remains, 1976
Dhingra's grave was inside Pentonville Prison for sixty-seven years. In the mid-1970s the Indian government and Punjabi campaigners pressed for the return of the remains of Udham Singh, executed at the same prison in 1940 for the killing of Sir Michael O'Dwyer. Udham Singh's remains were repatriated in 1974. During those efforts Dhingra's coffin was also identified.
His remains were repatriated to India on 13 December 1976. Accounts of what happened afterwards diverge: several state that his ashes are held at a memorial in Akola, Maharashtra, while other accounts and later press reporting describe a more complicated and disputed history for them. This archive gives the repatriation date, which is consistently reported, and marks the rest as unsettled.