Between 1913 and 1916 there was an influx of Indian students who came to Dublin to study. Many were Indian nationalists who admired the Irish struggle for independence.
Varahagiri Giri was one of them. He would later be president of an independent India. He witnessed the Lockout, became interested in the Irish independence movement, lived through the Easter Rising and was deported shortly afterwards back to India.
He maintained that his Irish experience marked him, not least because he always claimed (with little or no evidence to back it up) that his tutor at UCD had been Thomas MacDonagh.
The author, a lecturer at UCD, has written a historical and somewhat anecdotal exposition of the story of Indian students in Dublin. There are comparisons in the book of the Irish and Indian struggles for independence.
This is a short book that could have been even shorter as there is no evidence for many of the claims that Giri made, including, he “was regularly invited to [Irish] Citizen Army meetings”. Giri also claimed that he “became close to James Connolly”.
