3 days ago
Forgotten witness
I always thought Independence Day belonged to the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel.
My father was a young man when India gained Independence. I heard my great-aunt had tasted the police lathi and then become a politician. Our neighbour had been to jail as a freedom-fighter. But I never asked any of them, 'What did you do on August 15?'
In retrospect, that seems like such an obvious question. But it ended up being a missed opportunity. That remains a lifelong regret.
Some years ago, I asked my mother what she had done on August 15, 1947. But she didn't have clear memories of doing anything special that day. She didn't remember any feasts being cooked at home, or the family huddled around the radio set listening to Nehru's famous speech at midnight. Instead, she remembered drawing the curtains and huddling around the radio to listen to Subhas Chandra Bose's Aami Subhas Bolchi broadcasts from Singapore in years earlier. It puzzled me. Independence was such a seminal moment in the history of the country. I would have thought it would be engraved in her memory.
But Kolkata was in a state of violent unrest in those days with Hindu-Muslim killings. It's likely that as a young girl, my mother was not allowed to go anywhere. Independence probably felt very different to her than it did to her brother. I can imagine my uncle and his friends running down the streets on Independence Day. But I never asked him. Our generation took independence for granted. And then one day it was too late to ask those who had witnessed it about it.
An incredible spectrum
The problem I realise is the way we are taught history. It's about very important men (and a few women) taking very important decisions around round tables. There are Wavell Plans and Cripps Missions and Dandi Marches. But the ordinary people are always the extras. Never at school did someone tell us, 'Go interview your grandparents about living through this period in history'. Their stories somehow never mattered.
But what stories they had. Flower Silliman, who passed away last year, was one of the last members of the dwindling Jewish community in Kolkata. She once told me about how she had come upon a mob killing a man in the heart of Kolkata. When she tried to intervene, the mob politely told her this was not her fight. As a memsahib (white woman), she needed to stay out of it. Suddenly she realised that though she thought of herself as an Indian Jew, to many in the new India, she wasn't Indian at all.
Jatra artist Chapal Bhaduri remembers peering out of the window of his home in North Kolkata and seeing someone hold another person by the throat and hack his head off with a chopper.
In his book The Last Heroes, veteran journalist P. Sainath collects many such stories. The woman who cooked food for revolutionaries hiding in the forests of Purulia in West Bengal. The woman who at 13 was taking on the Razakars of Hyderabad with a slingshot. The student activist who could not give his final exam because he was in jail. 'Freedom was not brought to you by a bunch of Oxbridge Brahmin baniyas,' says Sainath. 'But by an incredible spectrum of diverse peoples — Dalits, Adivasis, women, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, OBCs, Brahmins, you name it. They participated.' The woman who cooked for Bose's INA thought she was just a cook, not a freedom fighter. Years later, when she was invited to hoist the flag, she was embarrassed. She worked as a domestic help and didn't have a decent sari.
These people didn't get roads named after them. There are no statues to them.
Memories on postcards
It took Aanchal Malhotra finding objects like a peacock-shaped bracelet, a maang tika, a pocket knife, to realise they carried in them stories about her ancestors as they fled across the new border that separated India and Pakistan. That led to her book Remnants of Separation, an alternative history of Partition told through material memory.
These stories were not really deemed worth of history books. But history needs to be freed from textbooks. DAG once organised an exhibit called March to Freedom at the Indian Museum in Kolkata. In it were dozens of handwritten postcards with people's memories of Independence. 'My grandmother's father was in the police but he still took part in the Swadeshi movement,' said one. Another said, 'My late grandfather's account of 15th August is rather funny. A bunch of village kids with no money or resources stole gamchas [cotton towels] and hoisted them on a bunch of sticks and ran through the rice fields overjoyed about a free India.'
The letter writers (or their grandparents) had never met Gandhi or Nehru. But they too were part of the story of Indian Independence. The people's history of Independence needs to be preserved before it's too late.
Sandip Roy, the author of Don't Let Him Know, likes to let everyone know about his opinions, whether asked or not.
