Valentine's Special - A Revolutionary Elopement
Lala Hardayal spirits his wife away
In 1906, there was an article in The Punjabee, a Lahore Daily, titled “Wife Kidnapped By Husband!!!”, covering an incident at the Ghaziabad railway station. The sensational title now brings up images of the worst, but the truth, thankfully, is stranger than fiction.
The “kidnapper” was Lala Hardayal, soon to go down in history as the first Indian to teach at Stanford, the charming, dangerous leader of the Ghadar Party in Berkeley, and a hand behind the Hindu-German conspiracy. At this time, he was a young scholar at Oxford University, burning with ambition — and love.
He had been married at sixteen, as was the custom at the time, to Sundar Rani, a girl from a wealthy family. She was ten then. The custom was for girls to stay with their parents until they were old enough to live with their husband and his family.
In 1905, when he was 22, he got a scholarship to study at Oxford University, and sailed to England to do so. His wife remained with her family. They missed each other and communicated mainly through letters.
A year in England gave him a completely different perspective on women that had been hard to find in Delhi, Patiala, and Lahore. Women in England not only went out in public freely, but they also held jobs. He saw suffragettes protest for their right to vote and get arrested. In contrast, the women in Delhi and Lahore had to observe strict purdah and couldn’t roam around freely.
While social associations were working hard to change the status and freedom of women, it wasn’t a completely insane aspect of society - Delhi was just recovering from the War of 1857, and there was anarchy on the streets. Girls were routinely abducted and forced into the sex trade. The grandmother of the actress Nargis was, for instance, kidnapped as a child and forced to be a courtesan, and her mother was born into the trade. The novel Umrao Jaan Ada published in 1899 (which has had a couple of movie adaptations) also has this as the plot - a debtor takes away a man’s daughter when he doesn’t pay his debt, and sells her into sex slavery, and the novel is about her struggles to get out of this. It is telling that the tawaif life was and is romanticized (including in the recent Heeramandi) when it is essentially sex trafficking of minors and was the main reason why women were hidden from the public eye.
This was the context Hardayal came from, and Edwardian London must have seemed a breath of fresh air, and he wanted his wife to breathe it too.
Hardayal applied to the India Office for permission to travel to India in the summer break. This was unusual, because Indian students in Britain didn’t do the expensive three-week journey home while still studying, except for health reasons or other extraordinary circumstances.
He showed up at his family home, surprising everyone. Sensing something amiss, Sundar Rani’s father, Gopal Chand, quickly recalled her to the family home in Meerut, sending a cousin as her escort, intending to keep her there till Hardayal was safely back at Oxford.
Hardayal might have intended to convince his father-in-law to take his seventeen-year-old wife back with him, but when he realized his in-laws had other plans, he decided to act fast. He enlisted two of his friends to help him.
They intercepted the Delhi-Meerut train at Ghaziabad. Hardayal dramatically jumped into his wife’s compartment, and led her out onto the platform. Her cousin chased after them, screaming, but was held back by Hardayal’s friends.
The public at the railway station thought Hardayal was abducting someone else’s wife and was ready to beat him up. “She is my wife! I’m taking her home with me!” shouted Hardayal to pacify the crowd. “This is my husband! I want to go home with him!” Sundar Rani declared. The mollified crowd parted and let them leave.
The lovebirds made a quick getaway, and switched trains until they found one heading to Bombay.
Sundar Rani’s family was mortified, as were Hardayal’s. It was one thing to insist on taking your wife overseas where her family couldn’t keep her safe, but it was quite another to go against your inlaws’ wishes, beat up a cousin, and elope with your wife! This wasn’t just a scandal - it was an insult!
Both families followed them to Bombay, looking to find Sundar Rani and take her back. Sundar Rani disguised herself in men’s clothes, and the couple changed hotels whenever their pursuers got too close.
Finally, the SS Ville de la Ciotat was ready to sail. As the ship pulled away, the families, in Bollywood fashion, rushed to the dock to stop them.
Sundar Rani’s father yelled, “This mad genius is going to ruin himself and my daughter’s happiness!”
From the deck, Hardayal grinned, waved, and called back, “All’s fair in love and war”.
They had no idea how Sundar Rani would take to England’s cold or how they would afford two people on a meager scholarship.
But they were finally together on this loveboat, and reality was three weeks away.
They seem to have had a great time in England, with Sundar Rani immersing herself in history and political science at first.
But two years later, the couple returned to India. Hardayal had fallen in with Savarkar and the rest at India House and realized he didn’t want to take up the Civil Service exams as was expected of him, and neither did he want to work as a Diwan in a princely state. He wanted to be a political missionary with the Arya Samaj.
Besides, Sundar Rani was now pregnant and couldn’t manage the cold of London. Her father sent her a second-class ticket back home. She exchanged it for two third-class tickets so they both could go home.
When they got to her house, her father was livid, convinced that with Hardayal’s resigning from his scholarship and refusal to take the ICS exams, he was going to ruin his daughter’s life. He prohibited Hardayal from ever seeing his wife or their unborn child ever again and threw him out.
In subsequent years, Hardayal became a marked man in India as well as America. While in 1917, the Supreme Court of California gave a rap on the knuckle to those found guilty in the Hindu-German conspiracy case, the conspirators in India were put to death or sentenced to life. So Hardayal eventually divided his time between Europe and America but could not go back to India and meet his wife and daughter. They seem to have corresponded regularly, but he died unexpectedly in Philadelphia in 1939 and never met his daughter.
The personal lives of revolutionaries are filled with so much pain and sacrifice, mostly because they couldn’t go back to India without fear of arrest, and they were always on the run as governments changed and their conspiracies were unearthed. Often, their families didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. It’s a fertile ground for romance and meet-cutes, of which there are many like this one, but not so much for stable family lives. The stories are all similar - a brilliant young man with great prospects, tons of families dying to marry their daughters to him, then he marries one his parents pick, after which he gets deeper and deeper into anti-colonial activities, which has him on the run and unable to see his family.
In this context, Savarkar’s case is uniquely exemplary - he was on the run, then went to prison for many years, and came back and built a life of social service and helping underground revolutionaries with his wife at his side, and he had a few children, too. After she passed, possibly in her seventies, he voluntarily gave up food and water himself and joined her.
To close, here’s what Savarkar writes about meeting his wife after he receives a sentence of 50 years in prison:
Our eyes had met and I sat down before her. I asked if she had recognized me. “Only the dress has changed”, I added with a smile. “I am the same as ever. These clothes protect me well from the cold weather.”
The two outside the window, recovering their good humour talked to me as if were together in the privacy of our home. The conversation flowed freely, and, picking up the thread, I assured them that we might meet again if benign Providence so willed it.
Till then, they must think of life, not as mere multiplication of children, or building of houses, as birds build their nests of straw, but as something higher and nobler than these things. For the usual kind of life even the crows and kites live.
If life meant dedication and service, then they had already lived it. They had broken up their home and their fire-hearth along with it. And they had done so, that thousands may live happily and freely after them.
If they thought too much of their personal safety and comfort, let them remember how plague and pestilence had devastated a hundred happy homes. Had they not seen newly wedded couples rent asunder by the cruel hand of death? They must face the inevitable with fortitude.
They say here that prisoners are allowed to take their families to the Andamans after a few years’ term of imprisonment. I told them that, in that case, I would take them there to establish a home and live happily in each other’s company.
Otherwise, they must prepare themselves to bear it all with patience, and to live courageously.
To which they replied that they would ever try to do so, and that the brother and sister together could take care of each other. They asked me to be no more anxious about them; and what they desired was that I should take care of myself.
If that was assured to them, they would get all they wanted.
While this talk was passing between us and some words yet remained unuttered on our lips, the Superintendent intervened and warned us that our time was up.
I stopped it all at once.
Sources:
The story of Hardayal is from the book The Great Indian Genius Har Dayal by Bhuvan Lall. It’s a very extensively researched book, do buy it if you’re interested in the story of Ghadar.
The excerpt of Savarkar is from The Story Of My Transporation For Life. It’s a difficult but vital read.