Empire: World History - 13. The Patient Assassin

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Join William and Anita as they discuss the life of Udham Singh, who is as much man as he is myth. Coming from nothing, he killed a leopard with a knife as a toddler, then joined the revolutionary Ghadar Party, smuggled himself across the US-Mexico border, and on 13th March 1940 committed his most infamous act… To get your free two week trial for Find my past, go to www.findmypast.co.uk and sign up. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirpoduk.com. Hello, and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arndand. And me, William Durimple. In this episode of Empire, we have our very own Anita Anand to talk about her astonishing prize-winning book, The Patient Assassin, which won a prize I've been trying to get and failed. I mean, I've been shortlisted three times, never got it. It's pretty much the only prize you have not won.

At least give me this. The Hesel Tiltzman Prize, which is the Big Penn History Prize. And no book has ever deserved to win this prize more because it is an absolute model for how to write history, which is both deeply researched and archival. ivily astonishing, but also which reads like a thriller. I remember reading it full of envy and admiration a couple of years ago when it came out, The Patient Assassin. Well, it's funny because we were on a book tour when I kept hiving off to do research or I kept disappearing.

Mysterious. We were on a book tour of India for Coenor, and we happened to be in the Punjab. And I just kept going, Willie, I'll be back in three days because I was going through archives and boxes of papers. And you were at that point, you were not. talking about what you're doing. So I don't know what you were up to, these little disappearances, but you had a very smug look at your face when you came back each time as your story began to form. And perhaps the best place to start is to ask why this story means so much to you personally.

So it was a story I never wanted to write because it's difficult, it's complicated and it's hideously painful, but it's kind of entwined in my family history. Which is what this podcast is about in a way, isn't it? How much of modern history is in four. by what has happened in the past. So, I mean, I always grew up with a story that my grandfather, who I never met, by the way, died fairly young. He was in Jali Amalabar. So I grew up with this story that the massacre in Jali Amalabag in 1919, if you listen to the podcast with Kim Wagner, we went into great detail about what happened there, 1,650 rounds fired into an unarmed crowd of thousands of people.

Which completely changed every Indian's attitude to the road. some people still had a lingering feeling that it was something they could live with. And work with their least. And after this, both Gandhi and Nero and also Tegor all decided that they had to dedicate their lives to getting rid of the British. So, I mean, history is made up with the stories of ordinary people, right? So, you know, one of those ordinary people in that garden on that day was my grandfather, who was this lanky kids. Literally your grandfather. My grandfather.

That recent. So my grandfather had four boys and one of them was, as we like to call him, the gift from God, very late in the Twilight Baby. Accident. My dad, you know, so there's a huge age gap between him and his next brother. But my grandfather at the time in 1919 was this lanky teenager. Depending on which member of my family, because nobody ever wrote anything down in the olden days in India, was either 17 or 19 years old when this happens. And what was he up to in Jollywana? But why was he there? He wasn't political.

So he was just this kid from the mountains. So you know the geography of India. On the border with Afghanistan is a very mountainous wild area. And that's the Northwest Frontier, which is where my father's family all hailed from, a place called Kalabag. Which is where Kipling used to romanticize the frontiersmen as these incredibly noble, brave, but also treacherous. Right. Pashtuns or Patans, as Kipling would have called them. So my family, you know, by sensibility, more Patan than they are Punjabi on my dad's side.

So, you know, you grew up with that Kipling story. I grew up with a story of my family who are ethnically Hindu, seeing those camel trains of batarns coming over, taking their wares. And at one point when my grandmother, apparently, was very pregnant with her first child. And my grandfather, then, this is sort of skipping forward, is very ill in Lahore. The only person my great-grandmother would trust her with was a Patan who would take, her safely to see my then-grandfather, and because he wouldn't ride on the panier out of respect. So he walked that entire distance to Lahore from Kalabag, just holding his

arm on the other panier so that he didn't have to dishonour her by riding on the same thing. So we had a very different impression of batans growing up. Anyway, so my grandfather in 1919 was either 19 or 17, depending on who you talk to. But he was sent down to the big city, to Amritsa, to go and buy sewing. machine parts because that was their job. They used to buy European sewing machines, refurb them and sell them on at profit. So this is a big deal

and it's like his big visit to the big smoke. I can still remember those singer sewing machines with derisies peering over them and working away. They make them last for decades. I mean these things are very, very precious. So he comes to, I mean if you heard Kim Kim's edition of the podcast, there has

been trouble in Umritsa. It has died down within 24 hours and you have had two hours of peace and you've got this oncoming event called Vesaki, which is the harvest festival. And it is the time when deals are made. Wheeler and dealers come into the city, and that's what my little lanky grandfather was coming to do.

So he is in the garden on the day of the massacre. And by a... With his sewing machine parts? No, no, he hasn't got them yet. So this is really pivotal. He was trying to get his sewing machine. So he meets two friends who are ex sort of from the mountains who've settled in the big smoke.

and he says to his mates, look, I've got to go and meet this sewing machine guy to pay him some money. Can you just keep my food warm and I'll be right back? And he goes to the main market, hall market in Amritsa. He passes an armed column, which turns out to be Dyer's column. But he doesn't know what it is because he's not from the city. He thinks this is what always happens. And the next he knows that there has been a firing in the place that he was sitting just minutes before. And are his friends okay?

Well, he doesn't find, so the thing that is why this story haunts me and why I didn't want to write it for years is that I think this episode destroyed him because he runs away. So instead of running back to the garden to try and see if his friends are okay, he hides because, you know, the soldiers are on the streets. There is wailing sweeping through hall market. People are screaming. They're trying to get in to get to their loved ones. There's no medical aid there. So people are bleeding to death on the other side of this walled tenement. and he hides.

And it's only the next day when curfew is over because there's a curfew declared, no medical aid that he goes and he finds his two friends are dead. So the place where he was sitting had he remained there and I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be here. Doing this now.

So, you know, it's a massive part of our family history. But I think I've also heard you say that you partly wrote this book also because not only was this a big part of your own personal history, but it's also an episode which has been so mythologised. It really, yeah. difficult to get to the truth and you would determine to try and find evidence for not only your grandfather, but the most famous story in India, little known here about the man who tried to take revenge, Udham Singh.

Udham Singh literally translates Udham means the upheaval. That's a word in Hindi. The upheaval sing is what his name is. And if in India... The upheaval lion. Yes, the upheaval lion, the upheavling lion. But if you go to India, everyone knows his name. If you go to Punjab, often they will have pictures of him, another man called Bagot Singh, who is another revolutionary.

Who has a wonderful hat and the moustache. They're very handsome, very, very erudite revolutionary, but sort of, you know, believed in armed conflict. And Dilip Singh, who's this Maharaja, you know, the last Sikh Maharaja of Punjab, who was, you know, sent out by the British. And we've done a podcast on that, too. So this was, in a sense, the path not taken by Gandhi. These were the people that were not satiagrais, who were not after non-violet. These are people that thought the only language the British understand is bombs and guns. Yeah.

You know, Gandhi's philosophy, if we will pile our bodies high, and when they're high enough, the British will understand they have to leave. They were like, no, we're not dying for this. We're going to, you know, we'll kill, but we won't die. So, Utham Singh is very much off that stable. But he has been mythologized in India to this point where he does not resemble the man that actually existed. So first of the image, I think you've said.

The image is wrong. They had a postage stamp that came out. It's a different man. It's a man who's standing behind Utham Singh in a group photograph, which is actually taken at the Shepherds Bush Guadwara in London. And they've got the wrong guy. They've got a man in a turban. Utham Singh did not wear a turban at the time that photograph was taken. You can see him in the picture. Well, this is a spectacular story. And in the next few minutes, we're going to take you on a world. It's certainly completely unfamiliar to me, the Indian underground, by which I don't mean sort of, you know, shady bands in nightclubs.

but visits to Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, gun running across the Mexican border. It's the most, it was totally unfamiliar to me. But let's begin with Udham Singh. The birth of the upheaval. Should do that. The birth of the upheaval. Yeah. So Utham Singh was born to nothing.

He was never meant to amount to anything. He was born in a tiny place called Sanam, which is when we were on our tour, I kept disappearing to Sanam to talk to people and look through their rifle through their belongings. But his father and mother were dirt poor. He had an older brother. Nobody ever really expected them to amount to anything or become anything. Their small holding was tiny. Their father grew little vegetables and a patch of dirt at the back of this.

It's a hovel that they lived in, which I've seen now. It's been turned into a museum now. But he was not going to be anything. When he is barely three years old, his mother dies. And again, we've talked about this elsewhere in the podcast of the huge waves. Spanish flu. It's either Spanish flu or plague that sweeps across Punjab at the time. And it kills something like 12 million across India. It's an unfathomable number. Much, much more than the First World War.

Yeah. So his mother, his mother disappears from his life. So he's just left him and his older brother and his dad. And his dad has to earn money. He has to feed these two boys. So he becomes part of, you know, whenever you talk about the Empire, you talk about the railways. Well, he becomes an employee of the railways. First of all, he tries to become employed by canal builders. So he's digging out the canals, the doab, you know, sort of making money and he can keep his children close by. Because there's no one to look after them. You know, there's nobody who's willing to take them on? All of his extended family are living hand to mouth as well. So who's going to look after these children? And eventually he takes a job at a remote railway station where he mans, basically man's a barrier. So all through the searing heat, all he has to do the barrier, drop the barrier, lift the barrier.

That's a job. Somebody has to do that job. You know, it's not all mechanised. To the day in India, they do it. this way. But at least he can keep his kids close to him. And, you know, there are many apocryphal stories from this time which are patently ridiculous.

There is one which is told in retrospect that the two children, Otham and his brother are tied, you know, tethered by the waist to, you know, in a piece of string to the crossing. And there's also a goat tethered there because that's how their father gets milk to feed them.

And Tehals seeing the father leaves them for a little while to just go and do something and a leopard, it could be a leopard or a light, depends who you talk to. A leopard, lion or wolf I've even heard comes and little otham who is barely three years old at the time takes...

Fights it off. Either an axe or a stick or some stones depending on who you listen to and batters this leopard, straight lion, straight wolf, oh my, to death, which is, you know, marks him out as the man he's going... This is like sort of child Hercules, strangling the snake. Entirely, entirely that. So, you know, that is almost certainly garbage.

Can we assume that, you know, a little toddler is not going to be capable of killing. Fighting off a wolf. Fighting off a wolf. Stroke leopard, straight lion, whatever it was. But we do know. Not least because there are no lions in the Punjab. And by the 1900s, they've been wiped out everywhere except Gujarat. So forget all of that.

But what we do know for a fact is that their father is, you know, worried and losing money and unable to support two children. So he decides that he's going to make this pilgrimage to Umritsa. And he's going to do it at a time when it's very, very busy because he might get work there. That's what we can assume. There are a lot of things we have to assume because they are low caste Sikhs who have not left a written record. So you only know this from people who knew them in Sunam, their home village. So he's on the road to Amritsa.

He's hoping, some say, to get to the Golden Temple to at least pray for salvation. But he doesn't make it. He dies halfway there. And he's got these two tiny ears. infants who are sort of left behind. And it's a relative who comes and is called to take on these two children, but they can't feed them. They haven't got money. So they take them to the orphanage in Amritsa, the second city of Punjab, you know, after Lahore. It's in Hohrish. Exactly right. And he, you know, they go this, this uncle of theirs, bangs on this door and says, look, can you

take these children because I can't look after them. No one can look after them. And the first answer, and I've been to the orphanage as well, you know, so this is, this is, this is, this is, it's, They were real sort of traipsing around North India. This was during our book tour again. Well, no, after, no, after, before. I only did that a little bit of sneaking off. But, you know, they first say no. They say, no, they can't take him on because they've got too many children.

But it's because his father worked for the canals, and there's a canal kind of bond, you know, and the guy who runs the orphanage, his father also worked on the canals. He said, okay, I'll take them. And that is what happens to Utham Singh and his brother. They are brought up in an orphanage. sort of, you know, in Indian mythology, you know, they're brought up by the Golden Temple. It's not the Golden Temple. It's very, it's close, close enough. But Amritsa is his parent.

So he grows up there with nothing but what he gets in this orphanage. Now, in the legend, Udham Singh, like your grandfather, was in Jolene Wollabar, during the massacre. Is that something you've been able to substantiate or not? Well, so people are adamant. The story of Utham Singh and his revenge, the birth of his revenge, is that he is a water carrier in the garden on the day of the massacre and he's topping people's cups up. I can find nothing, nothing to substantiate that. Would there be any evidence?

I mean, is it not quite possible that he could have been there? And it's just water. I'll tell you what I can say. Water sellers would not be living there. I can tell you what I can say with certainty is that he was in India. So what happens is that, Udham Singh, you know, again, this is all part of the podcast history that we've been doing, is one of those young people that signs up to fight for the British.

in World War I. He goes off to Basra, doesn't he? Yes, he's, you know, he's only held in the orphanage until he's a teen. And, you know, they keep him actually a little bit longer than they should until he's about 17 and a half years old because his brother dies. The only relative he has, the only person who he's ever loved and who knows him, who actually knows who he is, dies in the orphanage. And so he's all alone.

He has to make his own money. How do you make your money? Well, there's a man called Sir Michael O'Dwai who's running Punjab at the time. who is the lieutenant governor of Punjab, who is recruiting like crazy. And he's making all sorts of promises to people who sign up, saying, you know, come back with glory, you will come back and will give you land,

will give you riches. So this kid lies about his age. He goes and he gets recruited and he gets sent off to Basra, where he is an unmitigated disaster. He's useless. Again, a little bit of context here. So this is the First World War.

Huge numbers of Indian troops, particularly for the Punjab sign up. and a lot of them are sent to the Western Front but quite a few are sent off to the disastrous British expedition to what's now Iraq Mesopotamia, the Thai Mesopotamia campaign, and there's a terrible siege in a place called Cut which many people get killed

and then there's only marginally less disastrous engagement in Basra. Exactly. And he's not even a fighter by the way. You can assume that he's pretty young and useless because they put him on the repair detail. So he has to repair vehicles and boats. That's his job. Because he's learnt carpentry. One of the only things that he is taught at the orphanage is, you know, basic letters and carpentry.

And he's quite technically adept. He's good with his hands. By all accounts, he's good with his hands. I mean, there are, you know, sort of reports from the orphanage that, you know, he was good with his hands. He was good at that. So as far as they're concerned, they've equipped him to get a job. He joins up and he's doing this job. is, according to those who sort of knew the family in Sunam, he is insubordinate. He doesn't like

being told what to do. And so he is sent back in disgrace and he doesn't come back to riches and he doesn't come back to, you know, a hero's welcome. Which is what he and all the other soldiers who signed up, thought they were going to have. But instead, what he comes back to is the Rowlett Act, which we've also spoken about in previous podcasts, where there is even more draconian treatment. And so, you know, was he in the garden? I don't know and I think maybe not maybe not

but I think we can say that he was in India because at the time if you go forward 20 years and he does the act that makes him notorious and immortal in India the British try everything they can

to try and place him somewhere else not in Punjab and they can't so you know there's secret documents in those wonderful IPI folders the Indian Police Intelligence folders

where they are desperately trying to place him in any other country other than India, and they can't. All they can say is we cannot say with certainty that he was in the garden. So I don't know. Only he knows. Could be true.

But some people think he was. So this brings him into contact after Jeline Wallabag, after the massacre, everyone now is turning against the notion of British rule. I mean, it seems surprising to us, anyone would be for it in the first place, but many were. But after the Jeline Wernabug, the British

regarded as murderers, they've broken their word, they've killed these people, He, however, does not sign up with Gandhi in the non-violent brigade. He joins something called the Gutter movement. So initially, he tries, but they won't have him. Nobody will take him seriously. You know, near illiterate, he can read and write, but not much else. He's deeply unimpressive.

You know, so he's kind of a leaflet boy for a while after the massacre. He's running around. He's doing errands, one school of thought, which, you know, I'm sort of charmed by, because I suppose maybe it's because I understand about Survivor's guilt, I think that's what happened to my grandfather. You know, we sort of left it that I think that episode of what happened at Janiama Alibar, kind of ate him alive, really. You know, he was taciturn after that, never spoke, didn't want to talk about it.

He went blind very early in life. And when people came to commiserate with him, he said, just do not, I don't want your pity. God save me that day. It's only right, he takes payment. It's only right, he take the light from my eyes. You know, so Survivor's guilt is a terrible thing. So if one believes one strand of this story, which is that Udham had come back from the war,

is deeply, deeply cheesed off and is delivering letters and leaflets for the gutters, desperately trying to be something. And here's the reason that some people go to the garden. That's a great deal of guilt. How big is the gutter movement? Because again, you know, those of us have brought up on the film Gandhi. These guys are sort of revolutionaries in the corner,

making sort of muttering remarks about Gandhi. Were there a major force? I mean, numerically no, but actually, potency-wise, yes. I mean, so they all stem from, largely from the idealism of a man called Haredéal who comes, in fact, to Europe and to, you know, Britain and is faced with terrible racism and sort of feels like he is a lesser human, even though he's a man of intellect and prowess, and then just decides, hang on a minute, this doesn't feel right. How is it that Indians are treated so poorly in their own country? He's touring around Europe at the time. He spends

a lot of time in France where they're not having any truck with, you know, British Empire. and he goes back and he is, you know, he's going to be hanged if he goes back to India, so he goes to America and San Francisco becomes the headquarters of the Gother movement. So the Gother movement, you know, they have this... This is just like, I mean, this is the kind of 1920s

equivalent to, I suppose, Al-Qaeda, in the sense that it's something which is international, which is running guns, which is embracing a military, resistance, and it's also investigating bomb building. See, interesting that you should say, Al-Qaeda, because

you know, two others, it's the rebel alliance from Star Wars. You know, it's the Jedi Knights. You know, it depends on what's... Really. One man's hero, another man, yeah. And another man's... But as far as the British authorities are concerned, these guys are...

Loath. To use the modern part, that's terrorists. They're terrorists. They're terrorists. And, you know, what they are... They're completely unapologetic about what their aims are. They, you know, they have their master...

What do we believe in? Gother, which means revolution. How do we do it with, you know, guns and violence? They're very frank about it. So that is who Utham aspires to be, because they're the tough guys. We're going to have to take a break now,

but we'll be straight back and we'll see where Udham Singh goes next. Welcome back to the Empire podcast. I am William Duremple and I'm talking to my wonderful Anita Anand, my co-presenter, about her award-winning book, The Patient Assassin.

When we left, we were at the moment when Udham Singh has joined the revolutionary gudder movement. Or trying to. He's basically a boot boy. He's desperate, but nobody's taking him seriously.

He wants to do, He wants to be somebody. He wants to be a man. He wants to be the big man around town and he's nothing. And like many Punjabi is trying to make themselves, he goes abroad. So he is actually extraordinarily well-traveled by the end of his life. So he can't really be taken seriously by the others. They don't really want to know.

They give him leaflets where they don't trust him with anything else. So instead, somebody says, look, you're going to starve to death if you don't get a job. Go and work on the railways. The British are building railways in Africa, in East Africa, in Uganda. go, you'll get money there. You know, you have to sign a contract. You have to stay there for a number of years. But you get paid well.

This would be, I mean, an early form of indentured labour, effectively. Yes, but he doesn't know that when he signs up. Again, it's like joining the army. You know, he doesn't know. But what he does find, you know, he finds terrible hard work there. They call it the lunatic line, by the way. It is this long stretch of railway that stretches from Kenya to Uganda. And people die.

A lot of Indians die on this railway. where some are eaten by lions, most are taken by disease. They're treated horrifically. Are they just Indians in these labour gangs, or is a mixture of black African and, I mean, in movies in America, it always seems to be Chinese workers. Yeah, I mean, they're mixed, but, you know, the Indians are in their own sort of encampments,

and the Indians are working on stretches of their own. And inadvertently, what they've done is because they're mistreating. They are so mistreated these people. They become little revolutionary pockets. So it's the first time it actually gets some kind of notion that there is an international struggle going on is in East Africa. And in East Africa, someone says, you know, if you really want to be a revolutioner,

if you really, really want to fight this, you've got to go to America because that's where the Guthers are now. Go to go to Haarthe Ars-Lot, go to America. And that is what he does. How does he do that? I mean, it's not an easy thing to leave a railway work gang and suddenly take yourself off to California. Well, you know, and it's a circuitous route that he does it.

I mean, it's unbelievable, actually. unbelievable and I completely understand why people want to turn this into, you know, sort of a drama, because it's, if you wrote it, if you wrote it down as a fictional script, people say, go away and write something more believable. So he goes back to Sanam and he wraps up all of his affairs and he tells his uncle who's living still in the village of his father's birth, look, I'm going and I'm going to do something, I'm going to be somebody. And, but how? Exactly. How is he going to do it? He doesn't know, but with him saying it becomes very clear as a very charming, very charismatic, limpid of a man.

So he finds out that there is a young boy called Pritham Singh, who is from a neighbouring village, who has a scholarship to go to America. He is very bright, and he fastens onto him, says, I'll be his chaperone, I'll take him. But this guy, Pretham Singh, needs to get paperwork from London first. So he does this weird circuit where he goes to London, which eventually will be the place that makes him. And he's with Pretham Singh. They're trying to get paperwork.

They fail to get the paperwork because they're stuck in a nightmare of bureaucracy. Anyone who's been trying to get over to Devo lately, this walk in the park compared to what they went through. So they try to get in illegally. So they meet people in the Shepherds Bush Guadwara here in London, who say, you know what? Stop trying to ask for an official application. He's got the place sneaking through Mexico.

And that's what they do. So he is escorting this other character. Slightly bemused young kid who worships him, by the way, who thinks he's everything to him. And he goes off via Mexico. Yeah, and Mexico is a really interesting place in the 1920s. Well, it is. Butch Cassidy is the first decade.

Yeah, so maybe we're talking about 20 years after Butch Cassidy in the Labarthe West. Oh, no, it's still sheriffs and its possies and it's guns and horses. And they go to Juarez and then from Juarez try and get to El Paso, which even then is the crossing point to get into America. And Prithmsing. There's no Trumpian character trying to stop them. It's the beginning. It's the nascent beginning. And I've got it in the book of what is now ICE.

So it's the first time they're setting up offices on the border with El Paso to stop people from passing through. So they definitely don't want Odom and Preetam across the border. Even though Preetam has got letters from his professor. There's a wonderful set of documents I've had from Professor Riggs in Michigan who keeps saying, look, he's my student. Please let him through and they won't let him through. He's trying everything to get him through. He can't get him through. So what Utham does, and this is actually the mark of who he is, and it's controversial,

but I, you know, I said some things about him appall me and his ease with which he uses people around him, I find very appalling. So Utham Singh dumps Pritham at the border. Because Pritham's now sort of, you know, in the legal slipstream of, you know, his professor, Riggs is trying to get him across. Utham's not waiting. He pays underground Indians. And by the way, this is a little bit of a little bit of, you know, This is at a time at the 1920s when a man called MN. Roy is in Mexico. Founding a communist party. Founding the Communist Party in Mexico. A close, you know, sort of associate of Lenin who flies over and attends meetings with Lenin.

Trotsky is passing through this sort of territory too. Yeah. I mean, he's one of the few people that doesn't pass through this story. But Otham crosses the border and gets into America without breath of them. Underground. So, I mean, at night. Yeah. It's like, you know, proper mules taking people.

over in the shadows as they do even today. But he ends up, he washes up in America. This is going to be such a great movie when it's very. Oh, you're actually lovely. But, you know, sort of in America, what is, what is to me extraordinary is this is still a kid from the orphanage. This is still the really rough-edged kid from Punjab, who now, in America, learns to walk with a straight back. He goes to sort of Santa Claus. He reinvents himself. So he starts to learn English. He starts to walk with a swagger. He starts to wear Western clothes. There are places where there are lines through, you know, cities, particularly in California, where the fruit pickers and Mexicans are on one side, and also increasingly Indians are coming over because they're farmers. We moved from

Butch Cassidy to the grapes of Roth. Exactly. Yeah, fruit pickers and, you know, Mexicans and Indians and a lot of Punjabis, farmers who've come over actually to come and work, work in the fields and work on the trees and the harvest. And Udham does three. things. He gets himself a new name, he gets himself a new job, and he gets himself a girlfriend. Well, he gets himself a girlfriend. He actually takes on a number of names, and this is going to be a hallmark of his life from this point onwards, is that he lives in various different places, and everyone thinks he lives with them. So, you know, he's, he's a man for all seasons. He disappears into the white bits of town. So he's one of the few people who drinks in sort of, you know,

white establishments, wears sort of suits, and he falls in love. You're quite right, with a Mexican woman called Lupe. Now, again... Yeah, this isn't going to be free to Pinto playing this. Who's going to have... I don't... I have no idea.

I mean, I'll let you cast it. But you see, the thing again is with Lupe, you know, there is a woman who loves him and who, you know, he marries. And if you believe some of the later... He's obviously a charismatic and resourceful guy. He's actually very handsome. I mean, there are pictures of him and his youth, which are in the book. The right picture.

He's the right picture of the right man. I mean, just look. I mean, that's the picture on the front of one of the early editions of the book. And he's just showing me the cover of her book. And we have a man who looks rather like a rather more handsome. version of Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin and O'Ma Sharif had a baby. Somewhere between the two.

This is their baby. So, you know, handsome and dashing. But there was a thing in America where Indians were not allowed to own land, but Mexicans were. So a lot of Punjabi men at the time married Mexican women so that they could own land. And his new name is nothing to do with India at all. Udam Singh has become? Well, he becomes Frank Brazil, a Puerto Rican.

And he becomes Frank Brazil. You could say he becomes Frank Brazil so that his life will be easier. Sounds like a stage name. Yeah, but actually, you know, in all probability, it's because now he has made contact in California with the gutters. And I've managed to chart, you know, a number of alliances that he makes and residences that he lives in, where there are known gutters living and operating. And what are the gutters up to in America?

They are raising money for arms. They are sending emissaries to Europe and to Russia, in particular, to try and get their men trained up and armed so that they can be then released. I mean, Brits who are listening to this will be familiar with the Fenians doing this at the same time. So you've got the Irish Americans raising money in Boston, particularly, sending it back to Ireland and funding what will become the IRA. But this is going on among Sikhs. And Udhdom and Lupae do this moving around thing. He works in the motor industry at one point. So this is crazy.

He keeps trying to get jobs. Henry Ford cars now. So it's the whole history of America is sort of bound to him. I talk about how, you know, there are some really very racist car companies, and there are some that accept non-white workers. And he ends up sort of getting a really good job, getting a good pay packet, and then something just yanks him out. And he starts appearing on manifest going to Europe. So he's obviously working for the gutters doing this bag job, getting, taking money out to, well, gun running. Of course, it's gun running. Because he's taking money over to Eastern Europe, to Riga, to Latvia,

which is a very common jumping off point to get into Russia for those people who don't have the right paperwork. And then he's coming back. So this is now in 1920s, the Russian Revolution has happened. So in 1925 to 27 is this. And the Russians are now beginning to try and help similar revolutions elsewhere. My enemy is my friend is the doctrine of resistance for a lot of groups and particularly the gathers.

They look to anybody who hates the British Empire as much as they do. I mean, this is fantastically filmic and romantic. I mean, what was it actually amounted to do? Were the real arms being bought in quantities that's going to make any difference? Were they making it back to India, these gun runners? I mean, certainly Michael O'Dwyer and those who take over from him afterwards are worried about the gutter influence. Michael O'Dwai, even though the gathers are in their nascent form in 1990, during the massacre, is sufficiently worried about and anxious about them to make them a number one priority in his inbox.

And after that, because again, one of the things from our kind of movie, again, I'm doing this all through cinema, but in the movie Gandhi, Indians have latties but they don't have people sniping and British troops. And I mean the story that gets them first of all arrested

in 1927 is only a small amount of small arms. So he's you know, again, Frank Brazil. So Frank Brazil is an alias that the others are using to ship stuff to and from different parts of the world on different ships. So they're Frank Brazils who are Puerto Rican are different sizes and heights and ways.

on every manifest that I've looked at. But Udham certainly does this trip three or four times. But he's caught when he gets back to India. So he's carrying small arms with him. And he's in a boarding house? He is an idiot. So he's in a boarding house in Amritsa now

with his expensive clothes and his money in his pocket. And he's in his home city. So what he does is what small-time boys often do, which is trying to show off to their friends and neighbours. So he wears a Western suit. He's staying in the prostitutes quarters. of Amritsa, the red light district, the police officer in charge of that area gets an

notification that there is a Brown Sahib who's wandering around and he sends somebody out. It's just on spec. And they raid his rooms and they find the guns and money and Russian passports. How many guns? Handful. A handful of guns. Not many guns. But he gets them sent away.

He's got them into the country. And then he gets sent to prison. And then, you know, his prison years in the 30s, he sent to a really very. first all a prison in Delhi and a notorious one. A lot of people are sent to the Andaman Islands who are involved in this in circular prisons where they're sort of kept apart from everyone else. But he's sent to a prison where he comes across

again. Now, you take this with a pinch of salt, this is what I've been told, but his family says he came across Buggart Singh, who is a, you know, a lead ideological... So again, a name totally unknown in Britain, but a major national hero in India. to the Indian freedom movement, if you like. And it's after that that he becomes then set. And again, we should say that this is a, it's coming straight up in front of me now.

Bugat Singh's face upturned, upturned moustacheys, really handsome, handsome, erudite, trillby hat. Well-educated, but, you know, it's violent protests that he is involved in. He's a nephew of a man called Larchapet Rai, who is an actual nemesis of Gandhi, because they believe in such different approaches to getting rid of the British. All these places, all these names are now Rhodes and Delhi. Yeah.

Right. So anyway, so then this, again, this is such a long and winding road. But after he's released from prison, he goes back to his hometown for a little while and he starts telling people I'm going, after the big quarry, I'm going to England. And so in the 1930s. What exactly does he tell them?

And how substantiated is this? Because you've been looking very hard at intelligence files and so on. So I can tell you that, The people who knew his family in Sunam say that he, once he's standing in front of a picture of the leap saying, and he's crying and saying this must be avenged. This must be avenged. I'm going back to avenge this. Who we've mentioned in an earlier podcast is the Maharaja of the Punjab, who is as a child taken from the throne by the British. He loses the throne of the Punjab and ends up, first of all, as Queen Victoria's friend, then he's let down and he ends up dying in a hotel room.

Yeah, miserably broken alone in a Parisian hotel room. But a great symbol for Punjabis of lost statehood. Yeah. And so certainly, you know, those people who knew him at the time, and I found written records, contemporaneous records of people who said, you know, actually he just disappeared. He said he was going back to do something. He said the next time you hear from me, you'll hear about me. And he sort of washes up in Great Britain where, you know, he lays low for a number of years.

He's been to Bolshevik. He's been to Nazi Germany. Well, that's what he does when he's in Britain. So when he's in Britain in the 1930s, so this is very much Nazi Germany, he starts, again, changing his name, applying for different passports. He gets clocked and he's on the radar of the British authorities, you know, the Indian police intelligence service already have an inkling that he's somebody to keep an eye on. Because he's been running, he's been caught with guns and in a Russian passport. He's been in prison. But they lose sight of him.

You know, he keeps disappearing from sight. And he keeps surfacing. It's because he keeps multiple addresses here in Britain. And what's he called by the time he arrives in London? He keeps his, sometimes he uses Cher Singh, sometimes he uses Utham's thing. So what's he doing in Nazi Germany? And again, such a sort of filmic moment. You know, because we don't know, and because British intelligence doesn't extend into it. We know when he goes in, we know he comes out. We know they're watching him, and they put a tail on him when he comes back out. But we don't know anything other than he returns with money.

So is he getting money from Nazi Germany? Is he getting it from the Bolsheviks? He has interfaces with both of those. My enemy's enemy is my friend. But he's able to maintain numerous homes around the country. So we're now in sort of Babylon- Berlin territory. Is he talking to the German communists? Is he talking to the...

Well, there's certainly an Indian presence in Germany at that time who really do think that they can elicit the help of Hitler and the Nazis to try and excise the British out of India. You know, and, you know, one of the most famous proponents of that is Sebastian de Rose, who we talk about elsewhere in this podcast series. Who goes to during the war to seek help from Nazi Germany, and then is smuggled in a submarine through to Japan. Indeed.

So, you know, so Udden, we don't know what he does, but we know when he comes back, eyes are on him, and they're letting him stay at large and at liberty. And following him? And following him, for a while following him, but then they lose him. I mean, one of the people who sort of loses him, and this is when war breaks out, by the way. So he's in and around London in about sort of, I think, of the seven or eight addresses that all think he's living with them. And that, you know, because it's quite fairly recent, you know, there are. And the Shepherds Bush Guadwara keeps reappearing.

Well, it's funny. So he uses it as his own bank. So there is somebody who says, a wonderful recorded archival memory from somebody who says, he used to go to the Guadwara and people used to put money down on the tray. But he used to take money out. And somebody in the Guadwara said, that's scandalous. what are you doing? He goes, what are you talking about? This is the bank of Baba. This is between me and him. Because he was an atheist. He didn't believe in God. So, you know, but he was getting money from somewhere because he still was wearing the sharp suits. He always had cash. He had a car. He's one of

the few people. He gets plugged into the peddler community in the UK because peddlers can move around the country completely invisibly. Nobody cares who they are. But he becomes a peddler, supposedly. And he's sleeping in numerous peddler houses. And was it your grandfather who was a peddler too? It was my husband's grandfather who started off in Tawson, Somerset. But, you know, was part of that peddler network. They all used to buy from the same place in East London, and many of them have memories of them, staying with them and on their floors. And what are we talking?

So a guy with a bicycle, a guy with a push. So he had a car. He had a car, which is unheard of. So, you know, most peddlers, either they were on foot or they had bicycles, but this guy had a car. So where does the money come from? You know, you follow the money. And there is definitely he's doing things for other people. Is it the Guthers?

Is it the Bolsheviks? Is it the Germans? Or is it all of them? Because this guy is a wheeler dealer. He's so charming. Everybody loves him. There's sort of audio recordings of people who say, one guy who says, you know, he went for a drive to Leicestershire.

He couldn't understand why Oatham was taking him to Leicestershire. He was actually going to infiltrate an Indian Workers Association meeting where he wanted to stand at the back and see who really hated the British and sign them up. But, you know, on the way they pass, they see a policeman on a bicycle. and he shows this passenger his gun. I said, shall I do it? Shall I do it? And the guy's like, no, what are you talking?

I don't? Not while I'm here. And he goes, no, don't worry. We don't kill mice. We cats kill bigger quarry. So is he actually fixated about O'Dwai, the governor of the Punjab over whom the Jamalow massacre took place? He certainly is incensed by what happens after the massacre.

So, you know, while he's in prison, prison in 1927, Rex Dyer dies and is given almost a state funeral. So again, for those who are understandably muddled by two very similar names, which are merged in the Indian psyche, by the way, they meld him into one person. So there is General Dyer, who is the man that actually gives the order fire. But above him in the political network and still alive, crucially, at this point in the story, in the late 1930s now, is Michael. O'Dwyer, who's a complete different man, he's Irish, he was the governor of the Punjab,

but he's now back, retired in England, giving speeches about empire. Giving speeches about how everything was done correctly and how a little more of that medicine would not be amiss for the Indians. And we wouldn't have the trouble we now have in India, he says. We were a bit stronger and what Dyer did was right. You know, whereas Dyer, Dye is a broken man, by all accounts. You know, he's haunted by guilt or at least questions what happened that day in the garden.

It's very, very moving part of your book, where we have the dire and old age wondering whether he's damned. He says, you know, he says, I'm going to die and I'm going to find out very shortly whether I was right or I was wrong. I'm going to meet my maker and I will find out. But, you know, Sir Michael, on the other hand, doesn't lose it. He says, in his own memoirs, I didn't lose a day's sleep. I didn't lose a night's sleep over this. So this has definitely gripped his imagination. but does he then, it's 20 years, so let's cut forward.

So war has broken out now. Germany is marching through Europe. Belgium has fallen. There's been Dunkirk. And in the middle of all this, bizarrely, O'Dwai is still giving lectures about Amritsa and about the Punjab. But he is. But he's also, you know, now there's more attention on India because India is now, again,

a huge strategic importance. And it is at one of the, lectures, where actually Michael Edwire is not the lead speaker, he's giving the vote of thanks at the end, the Utham Singh sees his chance. The date is the 13th of March, 1940.

He prepares himself, he's got his papers in, he gets rid of them, he's registered himself under a really important name. He calls himself Muhammad Singh Azab. Now, if you're an Indian, you know the importance of that name because one of those names, Muhammad, is a Muslim name.

Singh is a Sikh name. Azad means freedom. So he knows what he's going to do that day. He goes, he's armed with a gun that he has procured with bullets that don't fit it, although he won't know that properly until it's too late. He waits, he goes into this hall at Caxton Hall, which is, actually, you know what's really amazing about this? It is, Caxon Hall is as far away from Westminster as Jali Oala Barg is from the Golden Temple. Very close. Very, very close. And he waits. He sort of comes in right at the last minute, doesn't have to take it, in his suit, with a hat over his eyes, stands at the side, waits for all the speeches to end, and then very calmly walks up to the

front after Sir Michael is sort of shaking hands with all the great and the good who've delivered the speeches, extends his hand. And Sir Michael, you know, the autopsy report is very revealing. He thinks he's shaking his hands, so he puts his hand forward and he shoots him twice through the heart at point-blank range. And the first time, the first bullet doesn't, or It was the wrong calibre. No, the bullets go straight through Sir Michael, but then he tries to kill the Secretary of State. Every bullet finds a billet.

That's what they say in the trial. So he wheels around. He tries to shoot the Secretary of State for India, who is also there. Lord Lamington, a former Lieutenant Governor of India. Louis Dane is there. He shoots, but these bullets, they don't fit the gun properly. So some of them don't have that projectile force that they ought to have.

So he only kills one man, and he kills the man that he presses himself almost up against. And that is Sir Michael O'Dwai, who ironically dies and a pool of his own blood like so many people did in Jeliala Barg. And he says when he's arrested, my name is Mohamed Singh Azar. They finally, you know, they all get into, you know, all of their motions of trying to find out, who is this man? Where did he come from? How have we not seen him? They find out he was on an MI5 watch list. And I do mean MI5.

MI5 has just been created by a man called Vernon. who personally has rung up a police station saying, can you tell me more about this man who's working here, it's with him saying, working at the Blanford militia camp. He's sort of, you know, trying to get himself into any place where he can collect information to send to whoever his masters may be at the time. But he's just there at the right place at the right time to exact his revenge. And he, you know, it's a very long story. But we haven't quite

So he gives himself up He doesn't He tries to escape first of all And he tries to run And he's body checked into a wall By a very large woman called Bertha Herring Everybody's a little bit stunned Except Bertha

Big Bertha Drops her umbrella And just physically body checks him into a wall By which time everybody wakes up And they will start jumping on him And then he lies completely still And he says right, take me I'm ready

And the police come me doesn't offer any resistance at all. And he wants his trial to be the trial of the decade. He wants to make all these incendiary speeches. But again, you know, you look to all the secret documents. The British won't let him. They issue an order and they, and this is kind of a bit shameful as a, as a journalist. They are all complicit.

And they say, we won't report a word of it. You know, there's missives to Reuters, Royter saying we won't. Don't worry. So no one knows about this. No one knows about it. And so he's there in prison. They must know that it had been shot. They know.

That is huge. Gurbals uses it. I mean, it breaks on the six o'clock news, and Gherbalz then uses it as part of his propaganda. At last, you know, this monstrous British who perpetrated the massacre at Jaliyam al-Bagh, the man responsible husband gunned down quite rightly in London. So it's a major piece of propaganda. So that's why they are beside themselves to shut Udham up, shut up his name. They take away his name, Muhammad Singh Azar, which he wants to be prosecuted under. They say, that's not your name. Your rhythm sing, we know. We've got you on a watch list. And tell me about his last days in prison Well he's he's non-cooperative

He wants to die by his own hand He doesn't want to be hanged So first of all he's under the impression That he might be able to string things out By being very confusing And giving all sorts of conflicting evidence But he does say to one of the guards And one of the little bits of information in his file

That it was high time Sir Michael went Michael's had his day now So you know those people who say Did he deliberately single out Michael O'Dwire because he says all sorts of peculiar things through his trial. Yes, he did. He absolutely did. But he goes on hunger strike. He tries to kill himself. He tries to get stuff. Where's he kept? He's at Pentonville prison in the end and Brixton for a bit. On death row. It's on death row. Yeah. So he knows. He's knows. And he eventually, you know, he goes on hunger strike. It's only when it becomes

apparent the British are going to speed through his execution. He's not going to have that. He's trying to buy his time and spin things out until the Germans win the war because he thinks he's got a chance if the Germans win the war. But they're going to speed through the trial and they do. And he's sentenced to death. So then he starts eating again. By the way, he does sort of have a suicide bit where people are trying on the outside, the gut other friends to give him poison and give him things to kill himself. But they all get intercepted in the post room. So in the end he's hung. He's hanged by the notorious. The assistant on that hanging trial was Albert Pierpoint, who is the most famous hangman in Britain. And thanks to Albert Pierpoint, we know that it was a botched execution

because he wasn't the lead executioner at the time, the man who was the lead executioner, because with him's been on hunger strike, his weight's been fluctuating wildly, misjudges his weight. And so all we know again, from records that only unsealed in 2016, that man never worked at Pentonville again. What happens to his memory? What point does he, if the news hasn't got out, what point to see become a great hero of the nationalist movement? Well, he sort of, you know, it's the word starts leaking out that everyone knows that Sir Michael has died and immediately actually Gandhi and Nairu repudiate his actions. They don't want to be seen

as men of violence. They're still hanging out for, you know, a negotiated settlement. They don't want to unleash that genie. In Punjab, the Congress party, the youth Congress movement, turn their backs on Gandhi and Neri and say, actually, this man is a hero. So under the surface, he's sort of bubbling away in the consciousness of Punjab that this man is a hero. He's hanged, news of it kind of gets a little bit buried, but it's only in the 1970s when Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister of India, this clamour goes up saying, we want our boy back, bring him home, just bring him home. And they dig up his remains in Pentonville.

He's in between Roger Casement and Crippin, his remains are. I've seen where he was buried. They dig him up as a huge diplomatic hoo-ha about it, but they take him back and he goes home to a hero's welcome. He does like a two-week tour of India, his remains do. Postumous. He finally ends up in Sonam. And, you know, I'll just end with this.

Somebody who's the son of the mayor of Sunam at the time, or the head man of Sonam said it was, Sunan was like a bride that day and the groom came home. That was an extraordinary telling of an extraordinary story, Anita. I loved your book, but hearing you just tell the tale yourself, is wonderful, just wonderful. Thank you. For anyone that hasn't read it, the patient assassin is available and is an extraordinary, extraordinary account of a wonderful piece of detective work, which won Anita, what's it called, the Hessel Tiltman Prize? Penn Heseltman.

Yeah, the Charlene Tilton. No, it's not the Charlene Tilton. That was from Dallas. No, Penn Hessel Tiltman Award, is what it was. Hesledil. Anyway, Udham Singh is a name which all our Indian listeners will know immediately. He's a household name

across India and part of the pantheon of new political gods. But I think he's almost completely unknown in England. So hopefully this podcast will start the beginnings of changing that.

That's all from us. Thank you very much for listening. I've been Anita Arnan. And I am William to report.