INDIA, IRELAND AND ANTI-IMPERIAL STRUGGLE: Remembering the Connaught Rangers Mutiny, 1920

Description

This volume of essays is based on an international conference jointly hosted by the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and by the Embassy of Ireland in India to mark 2 November 1920, the centenary of the execution in Dagshai Prison at Solon in the Punjab of Private James Daly of the 2nd Battalion, Connaught Rangers.

James Daly, a twenty-one year old private soldier from Tyrrellspass, County Westmeath, had served in the Great War before re-enlisting in the Connaught Rangers in 1919. Thirteen other soldiers of his battalion who had played prominent parts in the mutiny at Jullundur and Solon were also sentenced to death by courts martial, but their sentences were commuted to imprisonment. Forty-eight other received jail sentences of varying length. All the imprisoned men were released from prison in Britain in January 1923. Most returned to a newly independent Ireland very much changed, and in the midst of civil war.

This collection revisits and recontextualises some of the existing interpretations of the Mutiny in the light of new archival material. Historians and descendants of mutineers maintain that the men who downed arms at Jullundur and Solon on 28 and 29 June 1920 were motivated by reports of the misconduct of British forces in Ireland. Others have linked the mutiny to the wide matter of solidarity between the Irish and the Indian independence movements. The book enriches the understanding of Mutiny at the local, national and global levels.

Dr Jyoti Atwal is Associate Professor of Modern Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Adjunct Professor at Department of History, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Limerick, Ireland. She teaches Modern Indian and Irish history at JNU. She was awarded a grant by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Government of Ireland in 2017.

Professor Eunan O’Halpin recently retired as Bank of Ireland Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He specialises in Twentieth-Century Irish and British History.