Those Were the Days: When Madras protested the royal visit of Prince of Wales

When George V crowned himself the Emperor of India at the Delhi durbar, there was an outflow of spontaneous Indian loyalty. Madras even held a competition to write Carnatic songs to express its fidelity to him. (The winning poem asked Lord Rama to safeguard the Chakravarthi and Chakravarthini)

In a decade his son Edward, the Prince of Wales would visit India but would confront a whopping boycott, one the British royalty never faced before. Historians would attribute two rationales. One, the Jalianwala bagh had created an unbridgeable chasm between the rulers and the Indians. And two, Indians had a new leader, a diminutive lawyer from South Africa.

Post Amritsar massacre, British politicians felt there was an “urgent necessity to cultivate a sense of unity” with its outlying parts of the empire and suggested sending the future king to the Indian subcontinent to relight the flame of loyalty. The royal family readily agreed mainly because they did not like the married woman Freda, the Prince was having an adulterous affair with.

The Prince’s was going to be an educational tour, for the future King-Emperor to know the land. Gandhi however decided to teach him a different lesson. The people were asked to welcome their future king with silence, empty streets and shuttered shops.

From day one, there was a boycott as well as clashes between those welcoming the Prince and those opposed. Much of the inside details are obtained from ‘Dickie’ the aide de camp of the Prince. Dickie would later as Lord Mountbatten, become the last Indian viceroy.

In most places non-cooperation leaders had been rounded up. However Madras Government was confident that loyal Madrasis would not tolerate the hartal. They had arranged great receptions, firework shows and polo matches to ensure it. But they had guessed wrong.

Swadeshamitran paper screamed in its headlines. “When the Prince lands, it will be a trial for the Madras residents to show whether they possess a sense of self-respect or not. While many eminent people are suffering in jails, will you go and witness fireworks and accord cheers?”

On January 13, 1922, the Prince landed in the harbour and drove straight to the government house. A simultaneous and unprecedented hartal paralysed the town (but there were clearly instances of compulsion) Throughout the royal route of three-and-a-half miles there were only children of 50 schools who stood waving the British flag. Along with them were ex-service men and pensioners.

However the two leaders who led the boycott movement TSS Rajan and trade unionist Singaravelu (who conducted the first Mayday of Madras a few years later) lost control of the hartal soon thereafter. The non-violent hartal malformed into hostility and chaos.

Mountbatten recalled, “Policemen were stoned, cars and buildings vandalised, a crowd stormed a pavilion decorated with palms and British flags guarded by a solitary policeman. He was knocked down, the flags torn and stamped into the mud. A protestor’s body lay outside the vandalised Wellington theatre for a day. A protestor who aimed a brick at the taxi was mowed down by the driver.”

In addition Justice Party leader Thyagaraja Chetti (after whom T Nagar is named) supporting the visit had his house ransacked. Unprovoked firing was resorted to by the home guards and atleast two deaths and scores of injuries were reported.

The Prince spent four days in Madras, two of them in the Guindy Race Course. One day he played polo near St. Thomas Mount. The government thoughtfully stocked the galleries with guides and scouts. In another meeting, 15,000 school students greeted their future emperor on the banks of the Cooum river. The royal visit was becoming embarrassingly a farce.

A party was held in the government house which the British and the elite of the Indian crowd including Princes and Zamindars attended. The chandeliers above or the Conjeevaram silk on the Indian ladies or the diamonds the Rajahs wore could not uplift the mood of the party. 

The orchestra playing European music from behind a screen of plants could not drown the sounds of rioting from nearby Triplicane and Mount Road.

But far from being happy, the violence irked Gandhi who in an article in Young India criticised the hartal and Singaravelu for not imbibing the true spirit of the non-cooperation movement. 

Gandhi said it was a complete proof of non-co-operators not being fit for self-government in Madras. It’s not known how much this affected Gandhi, but soon he decided to abandon the civil disobedience campaign.