By Conor Mulvagh
Published in Studies in History, January 2025.
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Abstract

This article considers the encounter between Irish and Indian advanced nationalists through the prism of a group of university students who came from India to Ireland to study law between 1913 and 1916. Before considering their interaction with Irish politics and the inspiration they drew from it, it explores the possible push and pull factors that may have drawn nationally minded Indian law students to come to Ireland in the years before 1913. It establishes for the first time the administrative and political reasons why Dublin became an attractive city for some Indians who wished to study law in Ireland rather than England. Exploring the life of Indian law students in Dublin in the years before the Easter Rising of 1916, the article focuses on V. V. Giri, at the time just one of the small groups of Dublin’s Indian law students studying between the King’s Inns and University College Dublin. Giri later became the fourth president of India, but his prominence here is that he left a memoir of his time in Ireland. The memoir allows for an exploration of a history that is otherwise largely forgotten and of which only the slightest traces remain in Irish and British archival sources, making this as much a study of the process of historical reconstruction as it is of its subjects.