Udham Singh: The Orphan From Sunam, Six Shots at Caxton Hall and the Name Ram Mohammad Singh Azad

Wednesday, 13 March 1940. London was six months into the war, but the Tudor Room at Caxton Hall in Westminster was full of men who had ruled India and still liked to talk about it. The East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society were holding a joint meeting, with a lecture on Afghanistan.

On the platform sat the Secretary of State for India, Lord Zetland, in the chair. Near him were Lord Lamington, a former Governor of Bombay, and Sir Louis Dane, a former Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab. And there was Sir Michael O’Dwyer, 75, who had run Punjab in April 1919, when soldiers opened fire inside Jallianwala Bagh.

Somewhere in the audience sat a 40-year-old Punjabi man in a suit, with a loaded revolver on him.

The talk ended. Chairs scraped and people stood up to leave. The man walked towards the platform and fired. O’Dwyer was hit twice and died almost at once. Three more men were hurt. The shooter did not run.

His name was Udham Singh. In the version most Punjabis grew up with, he had waited 21 years for that moment. The real story is stranger, longer and more argued-over than the legend, and it is the one we tell here. (For the massacre itself, read our full story of Jallianwala Bagh, 13 April 1919.)

Udham Singh was born Sher Singh on 26 December 1899 in Sunam, in today’s Sangrur district, into a poor Kamboj family. (Some colonial papers give a date in 1901.) His mother, Narain Kaur, died when he was very small.

In October 1907 his father, Tehal Singh, a labourer, set out on foot for Amritsar with his two boys. He collapsed on the way and died in hospital there, his biographer Anita Anand writes. An uncle could not keep the children, so they went to the Central Khalsa Orphanage at Putlighar in Amritsar, a home run by Sikhs for children with nobody left.

The orphanage register records the boys’ initiation that same month. Sher Singh became Udham Singh; his elder brother Sadhu became Mukta Singh. The other children called Udham ‘Ude’. He learned a trade there, and the orphanage was the nearest thing to a home he would have.

Then, in 1917, Mukta died of a sudden illness. Udham was alone. By Anand’s account he had already slipped into the British Indian Army under age, in a labour unit sent to Basra in Iraq. He came home, went back in 1918, worked as a carpenter and mechanic in Basra and Baghdad, and returned to the orphanage in early 1919.

Which puts him in Amritsar, or very near it, a few weeks before Baisakhi.

On 13 April 1919, Baisakhi, troops under Reginald Dyer fired about 1,650 rounds into a crowd trapped inside Jallianwala Bagh. The official toll was 379 dead; Congress inquiries put it near 1,000. Punjab’s Lieutenant-Governor, Michael O’Dwyer, backed the firing.

Ask almost anyone in Punjab where Udham Singh was that evening and you will hear the same answer. He and his friends from the orphanage were serving water to the crowd. He survived, picked up blood-soaked earth and swore revenge. Statues, films and school books tell it that way.

Historians are much less sure. Here is what each side rests on.

Our verdict: open, and probably unprovable. What nobody disputes is that the massacre shaped his life. He grew up a few minutes’ walk from the Bagh, and 21 years later the man he chose to kill was the one who had defended it.

Whatever happened that April, Udham did not stay in Amritsar long. The next eight years are a blur of ships, railway yards and false names, and the sources do not always agree on the order.

He went first to East Africa. Historian Vinay Lal thinks Nairobi possible but Uganda more likely, where Indian workers had built and still ran the railway. Researchers Harshvardhan Tripathy and Prabal Saran Agarwal write that he was back in Amritsar by 1922, running a small shop and moving in Babbar Akali circles.

In 1924 he slipped into the United States through Mexico, they write, and settled in California. He is recorded as working for a while as a tool-maker at Ford in Detroit. In San Francisco he found the Ghadar Party, the movement of Punjabi workers and students that had tried to start an uprising against British rule in 1915.

The Ghadarites gave him money, papers and places to stay; he carried messages and raised funds for them across the country. Anand found records suggesting he married a Mexican woman named Lupe and had two sons, though not every writer accepts that. He then worked as a seaman, criss-crossing Europe and building contacts.

In July 1927 he came home. This time he brought guns.

On 30 August 1927, police in Amritsar arrested him with revolvers, ammunition and copies of Ghadar-di-Gunj, a banned book of Ghadar poems. An Indian Political Intelligence record later noted his aims bluntly.

had intended to murder Europeans who were ruling over IndiaBritish intelligence record on Udham Singh, as cited in The Wire

He was convicted under the Arms Act and sentenced to five years (one historian gives four). While he was inside, in March 1931, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged in Lahore. Udham later spoke of Bhagat Singh as his guru, Anand writes; some writers say the two met in jail, but that meeting is hard to document.

He was released in October 1931 and went back to Amritsar, where he opened a signboard-painting shop. The police kept watching. In the early 1930s he slipped away through Kashmir to Germany, and by 1934 he was in England.

Somewhere along the way he picked up a name that would outlive all his others. He used plenty: Sher Singh, Ude Singh, Udhan Singh, Frank Brazil, Azad Singh. But the one that stuck was Ram Mohammad Singh Azad.

One reading is the one Punjab teaches: Ram for Hindus, Mohammad for Muslims, Singh for Sikhs, and Azad, meaning free. He had ‘Mohammed Singh Azad’ tattooed on his arm, ThePrint reports, and one account says he painted the full name on his Amritsar shop sign in 1931. Three days after the shooting he asked police to record him as Mohamed Singh Azad, and to let him wear Indian clothes and a turban in court.

His faith is harder to pin down. In a letter in March 1940, while awaiting trial, he wrote in his own rough spelling: ‘I don’t want your Religious Books as I do not beleve them’. Anand calls him an atheist. Yet after his death sentence he asked the Pentonville chaplain for a gutka, a Sikh prayer book. More than half the Indian signatures on the petition to spare his life were Muslim, according to The Wire.

That mix is why everyone wants him now: Sikh groups, the left, the Kamboj community, Hindu nationalists. Each finds the Udham Singh they need.

England in the 1930s was a strange place for a revolutionary. Udham lived in Canterbury and then London, and took whatever work came: carpenter, pedlar, a job at an RAF station. In 1937 he was an extra in crowd scenes at Alexander Korda’s Denham studios; he is usually said to appear in Elephant Boy.

He went to the Sikh gurdwara at Shepherd’s Bush and to meetings of the Indian Workers’ Association. MI5 had a file on him from 1936, after a trip to Soviet Russia, and in 1939 Hampshire police described him as a man of ‘strong Communistic views’.

In July 1939 the Metropolitan Police noted that he had written to an Indian political group in London asking for an ‘Indian National Badge’, signing himself Azad Singh. His pocket diaries for 1939 and 1940 survive at Scotland Yard. In some entries the target is spelled ‘O’Dyer’, which later fed a claim that he had confused the governor with the general. We come back to that in the claims below.

The legend says he hid the revolver in a hollowed-out book. The curator of Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum, which holds the gun, told The Tribune the only book they have, a pocket diary, is far too small for that. However he carried it, he got the revolver into the hall.

When the meeting closed he fired several shots; some accounts say six. Two hit O’Dwyer in the back. A bullet struck Lord Zetland on a rib from about three feet away; he was bruised and shaken but, the Lords were told, not badly hurt. Lord Lamington was hit in the right hand and Sir Louis Dane in the right forearm.

Men in the audience pinned him down. The next day an MP asked about the ‘very gallant conduct’ of an Englishwoman in the hall who had helped stop him. At the police station, he was asked why.

I did it because I had a grudge against him.Udham Singh after his arrest, as quoted by Gordon Honeycombe in The Murders of the Black Museum

In Brixton prison he went on hunger strike, for 36 or 42 days depending on the account, and was force-fed. He was formally charged with murder on 1 April 1940.

His trial opened in Court 3 at the Old Bailey on 4 June 1940, before Mr Justice Atkinson. V.K. Krishna Menon, later India’s defence minister, was on his defence team; a gurdwara in Stockton, California, helped pay for it. A prison doctor had found him sane and fit to plead. He never denied the shooting.

After the jury found him guilty, he was asked if he had anything to say. He took out prepared notes. He attacked British rule in India, said he had more English friends in England than in India, and drew a line between the British people and their empire.

I have great sympathy with the workers of England.Udham Singh at the Old Bailey, 5 June 1940

I am not afraid to die. I am proud to die.Udham Singh at the Old Bailey, 5 June 1940

The judge cut him off more than once and ordered that his speech must not be published, under wartime emergency powers. Udham’s last words in the dock, preserved in the prosecutors’ notes, ended with a cry for peace.

I say down with British imperialism in India and let us have peace.Udham Singh, before sentence

As he was led away he shouted ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ three times. He was sentenced to death. The Court of Criminal Appeal turned down his appeal. His speech stayed out of the papers for decades, until the files were opened, from the 1990s on.

Udham Singh was hanged at Pentonville prison in north London on 31 July 1940, and buried within the prison walls, as hanged prisoners were.

In India, almost nothing happened. The British kept the case quiet and censored the trial, and the hanging made little stir at the time. The Ghadarites in America were the exception: in September 1940 their paper wrote that 31 July would be remembered forever in Indian history.

It took Punjab a generation to agree.

Michael Francis O’Dwyer was born in 1864 in County Tipperary, Ireland, one of fourteen children, and spent his working life in the Indian Civil Service. He governed Punjab from 1913 to 1919. In the First World War he pushed recruiting hard and Punjab sent huge numbers of soldiers; he was knighted for it.

After Jallianwala Bagh he endorsed Dyer by telegram. His government imposed martial law, with public floggings and the crawling order, and aircraft bombed Gujranwala. For the rest of his life he argued that Punjab had been on the edge of rebellion and that firm action had saved it. Historians including Nick Lloyd, Kim Wagner and Anita Anand have found no evidence of a planned rising.

In 1924 he sued C. Sankaran Nair, a former member of the Viceroy’s council, in London for libel over a book that blamed him for the atrocities, and won £500. In 1925 he published a memoir, India as I Knew It.

In Parliament, both government and opposition expected Indians to share their horror. Some did. Many did not.

The first Indian reactions were cold. Gandhi, writing in Harijan, said the killing pained him and, in words widely quoted ever since, called it an act of insanity. A week later he wrote that the differences with O’Dwyer should not stop Indians grieving his death.

The accused is intoxicated with thought of bravery.Mahatma Gandhi, Harijan, March 1940

Jawaharlal Nehru also condemned it, calling the act senseless and regretting the killing, according to accounts of his statements that month. In Lahore, the Premier moved a motion in the Punjab Assembly condemning the assassination; the Congress members, led by Dewan Chaman Lal, would not vote for it, historian Sikander Singh writes. At the Congress session in April, young members put up slogans praising Udham Singh.

Then the tide turned. Years later, as prime minister, Nehru publicly saluted him as Shaheed-i-Azam, the greatest of martyrs, who had ‘kissed the noose so that we may be free’. Writers date that statement to 1952 or 1962; both were during his time in office. Udham Singh had moved from ‘insanity’ to the national pantheon within a generation.

After Punjab was reorganised in 1966, Udham Singh’s name was everywhere in the state. S. Sadhu Singh Thind, the MLA from Sultanpur Lodhi, campaigned to bring his remains home, and Chief Minister Giani Zail Singh took up the cause with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Britain agreed. The body was exhumed from Pentonville.

The casket landed in New Delhi on 19 July 1974 and was received with state honours. Zail Singh was at the airport, and Indira Gandhi laid a wreath at Kapurthala House. Critics said the Congress was using a martyr for votes. Zail Singh replied that Udham Singh had ‘avenged our national humiliation’.

The remains were taken around Punjab and cremated at Sunam on 31 July 1974, 34 years to the day after the hanging, with Zail Singh lighting the pyre. On 2 August a Hindu pandit, a Muslim maulvi and a Sikh granthi performed the last rites together, a fitting goodbye for Ram Mohammad Singh Azad. (Vinay Lal dates the return a year later, to 1975; most accounts say 1974.)

The ashes were split into seven urns: for Haridwar, Kiratpur Sahib, Rauza Sharif at Sirhind, Sunam, the Jallianwala Bagh museum, and two for the library of the Shaheed Udham Singh college in Sunam.

For most young Indians today, Udham Singh has Vicky Kaushal’s face. Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham, released on Amazon Prime Video on 16 October 2021, follows him from the orphanage to the noose, with Shaun Scott as O’Dwyer and Amol Parashar as Bhagat Singh.

Its long, quiet recreation of the night after the massacre, with Udham carrying the wounded through the Bagh, is the scene people remember. It follows the version in which he came to the garden after the firing, one of the competing accounts in Part 3. The film takes other liberties too, as biopics do.

It was shortlisted as India’s entry for the Oscars but lost to the Tamil film Koozhangal. Jury member Indraadip Dasgupta found it too long and said something that caused an uproar.

it again projects our hatred towards the BritishIndraadip Dasgupta, Oscar selection jury, October 2021

Sircar said the jury’s view was subjective and that he respected it. Two years later Sardar Udham won five National Film Awards, including Best Feature Film in Hindi.

Drive into Sunam today and you are in Sunam Udham Singh Wala, the town’s official name. 31 July is a public holiday in Punjab. In Uttarakhand a whole district, Udham Singh Nagar, carries his name, given in 1995.

On 13 March 2018, the 78th anniversary of the shooting, Home Minister Rajnath Singh unveiled a ten-foot marble statue of him at the entrance to Jallianwala Bagh, put up by a Kamboj organisation that had asked for it for four decades. On 31 July 2021, Chief Minister Amarinder Singh opened a Shaheed Udham Singh memorial in Sunam. In July 2025, on the 86th martyrdom day, the Sunam–Patiala road was renamed Shaheed Udham Singh Highway.

Not everything is tidy. In 2022 The Tribune found the urns had been moved to the new memorial and then back to the college, and residents complained that four statues of him in Sunam looked nothing alike. His pistol, knife, diaries and spent cartridges are still in the Metropolitan Police’s collection in London, which has refused India’s requests on the ground that they are case property. Punjab’s government has said it would take the matter up through the Ministry of External Affairs.

The legend is neat: a boy sees a massacre, swears an oath and keeps it for 21 years. The record is messier and, we think, more interesting. An orphan who lost everyone, a labourer who crossed four continents on borrowed names, a Ghadarite who did time for guns, a London carpenter with a police file, and finally a man who killed someone in a crowded room and then tried to turn his trial into a speech for his country.

Be honest about both sides of that. O’Dwyer was 75, unarmed and at a public meeting, and Udham Singh shot him dead and wounded three other men, one of whom, Zetland, had nothing to do with 1919. Gandhi was not wrong to call killing killing. But O’Dwyer had defended a massacre all his life and was never held to account for it, and to Punjab, Udham Singh did what the law would not.

Perhaps the best thing he left behind is the name. In a century that split Punjab by religion, a man about to hang asked to be called Ram Mohammad Singh Azad. Whatever you think of what he did at Caxton Hall, that is worth remembering.