India House - From History To Novel
Converting historical accounts into a spy thriller
Back in November, I stumbled on this Wikipedia page for India House. I had said:
Innocuous name, no? Between 1905 and 1910, it was a hub for the Indian freedom struggle. They published an anti-colonialist newspaper called The Indian Sociologist, ran guns and money, and a lot of the revolutionaries involved in armed struggle against the British Raj lived at India house when they were students in London, usually studying law. Scotland Yard was always after them, but it ended when Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated a British official who was high up in the Indian administration. I’m incredibly fascinated, and I want to drop everything and write a novel about these guys.
I’ve been digging into books on the topic to try understanding what it was all like. It’s been much easier than I thought so far.
I started off with the Wikipedia articles about the inmates of India House, and then went on to look at the sources cited. Usually, they tend to be out-of-print books. I found a couple on Amazon, a couple in the library, and a few more scattered elsewhere on the Internet. There’s one or two I can’t seem to find anywhere, and that’s driving me nuts. Thankfully, Dr. Vikram Sampath’s book, Savarkar - Echoes From A Forgotten Past, 1883-1924 has collated everything from primary sources and put it together in a cogent, readable format, and it’s what I’m going to be basing my novel on.
While his book has a nice fat three chapters on the goings-on at India House, it doesn’t have much about the relationships between the characters, or detail about specific incidents. Which is why I dug into the sources cited in the book, which are basically books from the 50s to the 80s about these characters. Which is a little more information, plus gives you an idea of what kind of people they were.
There’s still a few more books to read to get a better idea of history. But all the sources agree on the broad strokes of the story, which gives me a jumping-off point.
The Broad Strokes
India House was established in 1905 by Shyamji Krishna Varma, who was an Indian lawyer in London. He was a wealthy man who started a few scholarships at Oxford for Indian students. The house was supposed to be a boarding house for these students who found it hard to find quality housing and food in London.
The story really takes off once Vinayak Savarkar, at that point already a fiery revolutionary, comes to London to study law in 1906. He was a small, thin, pale, bespectacled man, who was inspired by the Italian revolutionaries like Mazzini. He was already known to the British for writing seditious literature.
One of the objectives of his coming to London was to research British records, and use that to rewrite the history of the war of 1857 from an Indian perspective. He also founded the Free India Society, and wrote for Varma’s incendiary newsletter, The Indian Sociologist. The fun and games include, but are not limited to:
Scotland Yard posting incompetent spies to tail the members of India House
Several members losing their scholarships for having opinions about India being free.
Writing the book The First War Of Indian Independence, then the struggle to get it published. They couldn’t take it to India because the British were watching. But in Europe they couldn’t find a press that had Indic alphabets. So they translated it into English and French, after which no publisher or printer would dare touch it.
After getting it printed, it got banned, and they had to smuggle it to their readers.
Arguing with Gandhi
Making big plans for the future with Mustafa Kemal of Turkey, and Lenin.
Joining the Spain-Morocco war, and then both sides suspected them of being spies for the other side.
Attending an international conference where they presented the first flag of independent India.
Running guns and making bombs.
Things get serious once the British start planting moles in their ranks. And then they find out and plant their own double agent. But they realize they are on thin ice, and need to do something big.
One of the members, Madanlal Dhingra, a young man from a wealthy family who hasn’t cared much for all of this before, takes matters in his own hands, and shoots dead William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, who was the aide-de-camp of the Secretary of State for India. He is hanged.
What follows is the British putting the screws on members of India House who all scatter. Some of them go underground, some of them head to America. But they identify Savarkar as the ringleader, and get his brother in India sentenced to hard labor in the Andamans.
What follows is daring escape, subterfuge, disguises, and all those things that make novels fun to read…. But ultimately it all fails, and Savarkar too is sentenced to hard labor in the Andamans.
The Logline
I need to summarize my novel as “My story is about (protagonist) who sets out to (objective), overcoming (antagonists)”.
Protagonist: I thought long and hard through all the characters in the story about whose perspective can be the most interesting. There’s Madanlal Dhingra, the man who committed the actual murder, but he isn’t around for the bits that happen after he’s dead. Then there’s Madam Bhikaji Cama, who is known as the mother of revolutionaries, but she is way too high level, and also doesn’t figure much in the story until the end. Most characters have an entry and an exit. The more I dig into this story, the more it seems like following Savarkar is what takes this to all the fun places.
That said, I can’t have his voice be narrating the story, or have the third person narrator discuss his thoughts. I’ve read his own accounts of that time, and while he is self-deprecating in parts, it’s somehow too serious and straight for me.
My natural tendency as a writer is to focus on fun things, or on the humor or irony of the situation, and not having such a voice in the room means those things don’t work. And I tend to focus on an outsider perspective usually, so I’ll need someone who was in the situation, was sympathetic to the protagonist, but was somehow still an outsider.
When Savarkar boards the ship to London, one of the first friends he makes is someone who he only refers to as Mr. Etiquette. Apparently this person was a well-off textile merchant, who didn’t want to be seen to be publicly associating with anti-British organizations, but was happy offering help behind the scenes. This man actually smuggled out the books Savarkar wrote to be published in India.
Such a person might be able to view things more dispassionately, and have a more interesting perspective that way.
So he’s my narrator.
Objective: Savarkar’s objective was armed revolution to overthrow British rule. Or, to recruit people for his cause in London, taking advantage of the free press to espouse his views, and network with other revolutionaries. But that’s an abstract goal. We also need something more tangible that the reader can follow.
It could be that his objective is to publish a book about the First War of Indian Independence. That’s a tangible enough goal to anchor the first quarter of the book, until the next objective shows up - learn to make a bomb, and then the next - escape Scotland Yard.
Antagonists: This is the easy part. Curzon Wyllie antagonized literally all the main characters in India, and then when they came to London, he was in charge of the office that was spying on the inmates of India House. Then there’s also all the spies he sent to spy on our protagonists.
So. My story is about Vinayak Savarkar who sets out to write about the Indian war of independence, overcoming the evil officer Curzon Wyllie, and the planted spies around him.
Why This?
There’s more to cover to validate this idea.
Why does the protagonist want what he wants?
Because the clampdown on free speech in British India was extremely dangerous, and he found it hard to discuss and propagate stories of his own history with his countrymen without threat of prison. Hence the free media and laws in Britain were very attractive.
What does he gain/lose in the process?
He succeeds in raising the consciousness of Indians in Britain, learning from Irish, Italian and Egyptian revolutionaries, and publishes his book! He loses his freedom, his family’s freedom. And he loses his son.
What is the payoff?
He leaves behind a group of enthused young people who carry on his work in their own ways.
What’s the central conflict?
I find this a bit of a hard question to answer. The apparent conflict is between the British and the Indian revolutionaries. But we need an internal conflict as well.
What are Savarkar’s vulnerabilities?
The one thing I notice is that once the assassination happened, a lot of people deserted him. People’s impressions of him are of charm and magnetism, but his relationships feel very all or nothing. While there were people willing to give their lives for him, more stayed away because of the line of thought he espoused.
His is a classic polarizing personality, which brings chaos wherever he goes. While this personality gets him a lot of early wins, when things get sticky, he ends up having no one to rely on but himself and a few devoted friends. He died more than 50 years ago, but people in India argue about him violently even today.
I think it would be interesting to write about this internal conflict. While accounts of him always show him to be calm and collected and equanimous, the mental work needed to get to that state when you are incredibly hated or incredibly loved would be an interesting thing to write about, especially from the perspective of a friend who is a little detached emotionally.
Other stuff
When I thought of a narrator, I absolutely needed it to be told from the point of view of a crotchety old man annoying his grown up grandchildren with war stories. The more I let it grow on my mind, the more it feels like there’s got to be something Rushdie-esque about the narration. Maybe a hint of magic realism? Maybe some 90s post-liberalization idealism? It feels like one of those things that I’ll only figure out when I actually start writing.
I can’t find much literature about the actually exciting parts of the story, like making bombs, or joining the Spain-Morocco war. And that’s why I’m glad this is fiction, because then I can take artistic liberties to make those parts as swashbuckling and exciting as I can.
There’s also a whole cast of characters, and I don’t know who to cut and who to keep just yet. I’ll need to Save The Cat the plot to get to that. But I’m happy that here I already have the beats of a story laid out, and I don’t necessarily need to be staring at a blank page as much as when I’m making it all up in my head!