Udham Singh

Background

Born Sher Singh, he was orphaned young and raised, along with a brother, at the Central Khalsa Orphanage in Amritsar, where he was given the name Udham Singh. He was present in the city around the time of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919, when troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired without warning on an unarmed crowd gathered in an enclosed garden; accounts of the precise extent of his involvement or injuries that day vary, but the event is treated as the formative influence on his later political radicalization. He subsequently traveled and worked abroad through the 1920s, including in East Africa and the United States, and became associated with the Ghadar Party, a movement of expatriate Indians on the American west coast committed to armed opposition to British rule; he is also said to have taken an interest in the trial and 1931 execution of the revolutionary Bhagat Singh, whose example influenced his own turn toward direct action. He returned to India in the late 1920s and was arrested and imprisoned for several years for possessing arms and banned Ghadar literature; while sources differ on the exact length of this sentence, it is generally placed in the range of four to five years. On his release he left India again, eventually settling in England under a series of aliases while preparing to act against those he held responsible for Jallianwala Bagh.

The assassination

Michael O'Dwyer had been Lieutenant Governor of Punjab at the time of the massacre and had publicly endorsed Dyer's actions, making him, alongside Dyer himself, a central figure of nationalist anger over Jallianwala Bagh. On 13 March 1940, more than two decades after the massacre and roughly a year after Dyer's own death in 1927, Udham Singh attended a joint meeting of the East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society at Caxton Hall in London, where he shot and killed O'Dwyer, reportedly concealing the revolver he used inside a hollowed-out book carried into the hall, and also wounded others present, including Lord Zetland, the Secretary of State for India.

Trial and execution

Udham Singh was arrested at the scene and tried at the Old Bailey. During and after the trial he used the composite alias Ram Mohammad Singh Azad, intended to signal Hindu-Muslim-Sikh unity in the nationalist cause. Reaction in India at the time was divided: some nationalist figures, including within the Congress, distanced themselves from the killing as an act of individual terrorism outside the sanctioned campaign of civil resistance, while others, particularly in revolutionary and Punjabi political circles, hailed him as an avenger of Jallianwala Bagh. He was convicted of murder and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 31 July 1940. His remains were repatriated to India in 1974 and cremated with state honors, and he is commemorated in Punjab and elsewhere as a nationalist martyr.