‘She is beautiful but she is Indian’: The student who became a Welsh bard at 19

An Indian student won acclaim in Wales as a bard and became the first woman to get a law degree from University College London.

And although racial prejudice brought a heartbreaking end to a three-year relationship she never went home, writes Andrew Whitehead.

Dorothy Bonarjee was Indian by birth, English by upbringing, French by marriage – and Welsh at heart.

To put it another way, she was the perpetual outsider, sometimes by chance, and at other times by choice.

Even the moment of her greatest achievement in 1914 – winning one of Wales’s most prestigious cultural…