Since I first heard about my great Uncle Madan Lal Dhingra whist at boarding school in England. My sister stopped me in the school corridor, told me she had just read about him in a magazine called ‘famous murderers’ and that he was ‘Daddy’s Uncle’.

The following year, aged 13, I was sent to school in South India and told he was a great patriot who had given his life so that India could be free and we could regain our self-respect. That we must never forget.

A year later, home in Paris, my mother told me that he was a revolutionary fighting for India’s freedom and she had been told my grandfather never allowed his name to be mentioned in the house.

I felt that I was also part of a story not mentioned: The partition of India which made us refugees, accidentally dislocated in Paris, waiting to go home. But the home of the stories I was told was always located in Lahore, before, lost in partition. Silence.

Two secret stories I was not sure if I was in entitled to and yet I inherited them. At the heart of both stories is violence – is that why they were silenced?

Madan Lal shot a prominent British official and was hanged at Pentonville in 1909. He died for the cause of India’s Freedom.

Thirty-eight years later Freedom came, and also Partition: a million people lost their lives and some 15 million were displaced and their stories buried. Like ours.

The title of the book EXHUMATION comes from the literal exhumation of Madan Lal from Pentonville prison at the request of the Government of India. Accordingly, a ‘Licence for the removal of human remains’, was issued by the Home Office and on the 22nd October 1976 the remains of Madan Lal Dhingra were exhumed. In India he received a hero’s welcome. Here the Home Office Licence stipulated the exhumation was not to be reported, so it remained ‘buried’.

The book explores Madan Lal’s journey and how it came to end on the gallows of Pentonville.

'When you start to find out about family history, you start to find out about yourself,’ my historian aunt had told me.

History, family, self, search. Assassination, execution, exhumation.

In the book my search for the story of Madan Lal, is intertwined with my memoir, so, history, family history and life come together in the narrative.

A multi-layered ‘Exhumation’. And release.

Leena Dhingra

London, 2021