For South Asian Heritage Month, archivists and curators from LSE Library delve into the LSE student files archives to spotlight three LSE alumni from the region. In the second of the series, LSE Library Archivist Lisa McQuillan investigates what Sasadhar Sinha’s student file adds to our understanding of his time as an Indian student in Britain in the 1920s.
The Open University has created a great resource for researching South Asian British heritage: Making Britain: Discover how South Asians shaped the nation, 1870-1950; by searching “London School of Economics” on this database we discovered an interesting LSE graduate, Sasadhar Sinha.
Sasadar Sinha opened a shop called Bibliophile Bookshop at 16 Little Russell Street, in 1935, which became a hub for Indian and South Asian students, writers and activists in London. He was one of the many academics and writers in the Indian diaspora in London at the time, connected to people such as Krishna Menon, another LSE graduate. Sasadhar Sinha went on to be Director of the Publications Department for the Indian Civil Service when he returned to India after independence.
One theme running throughout the student file is Sinha’s struggle to fund his study in the UK. There is a perception that those able to go to university in the pre-war period were all from wealthy backgrounds, but Sinha is continually late to pay fees, and searching for funding opportunities. We also get a glimpse into events in Bengal, India, where his family live, in one letter explaining why he is late paying tuition fees:
The letter reads “I am extremely sorry that I have not been able to pay my fees yet. Owing to disturbances in Calcutta, my brother could not remit me any money to reach me in time.”
The letter was received by LSE on 20 May 1926. By this time, there had been almost a month of violent rioting in Calcutta between Hindu and Muslim communities. On 3 May, Lord Stanley reported to the House of Commons that 63 people had been killed, and almost 400 injured in the fighting (often contemporary accounts under-record the true numbers for these kind of events). The rioting caused severe disruption to everyday life in the region.
Another interesting issue which the student file sheds light on is the quota which LSE had for Indian students. There is discussion back and forward in the correspondence in the file, between academics such as Vera Anstey and Harold Laski and the School administrative staff, about whether they could exempt previous LSE graduates, such as Sinha, from the quota imposed on the number of Indian students accepted into LSE each year. In one letter, an administrator stated:
The Director decided that the number of new Indian students to be admitted for the coming session must be limited to twenty…
This suggests that the quota was at the discretion of the Director of LSE. From minutes on limiting student numbers in 1926, it seems limiting overseas students may have just been a way to limit numbers more generally as LSE struggled to keep up with demand for places, although the quota obviously displayed a preference for “British-born” citizens over British citizens born elsewhere in the Empire.
Sinha certainly fitted into a category of Indian student which the British government saw as problematic at this time: leftwing, anti-colonial and closely tied to the Indian nationalist movement. As mentioned, he was friendly with Krishna Menon, and his student file shows some links with the movement that started during his time in India. He was a student, and later teacher, at Tagore’s school in Santiniketan which was a hotbed for Indian nationalist intellectuals and leaders.
His student file also shows a recommendation from C F Andrews; Charles Freer Andrews was an English missionary and social reformer who became closely linked with the Indian nationalist movement and was a close associate of Gandhi.
The OU Making Britain database entry for Sinha states that he, along with other “active South Asians”, was under government surveillance while researching in the library of the British Museum (which he lists as one of the key resources for this PhD study in his student file). This shows the tense climate in which Indian students were operating in the years leading up to Indian independence. Along with the violent rioting in Calcutta, and financial struggles, the picture of student life we glimpse from Sinha’s file is one of challenging circumstances both at home and in his place of study and makes it all the more impressive that he completed a PhD against this backdrop.
More about LSE and South Asia
Student files along with the archive collections at LSE Library are a very rich and untapped resource for researching the connections between LSE and South Asia. LSE Library would love to do more work on this, and we’re very keen to hear from people interested in researching our collections and sharing their findings – take a look at our project page Traces of South Asia for more information.
FAO Lisa Mcquillan.
Hi Lisa. I am an LLM Alumni from the LSE and saw this article on FB. It is unconfirmed family history that my maternal grandmother fell pregnant to an Indian man when he was a student also at the LSE. My mother was born in 1931. The story goes he was called Ameen (or a variation of such) and hailed from the gunwales ?? of the palace in Hyderabad, I’m not sure which city. My grandmother remained unmarried. Any chance the archives might contain a student such as him. Scant details I know.