The underlying theme of Sanjeev Sanyal’s book is simple. The troika of nationalists, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal were the real heroes of India’s freedom movement.
Much, much before the initial copies of his book, Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won its Freedom, hit the stands, I had heard Sanjeev Sanyal speaking at a cultural festival in the national capital. Sanyal is a brilliant speaker, and an erudite thinker, who shapes his words well. He used the platform to talk about his book.
He called it the other history, and made it clear that much of the textbook history Indians read in schools and colleges excludes the role revolutionaries played in India’s freedom movement. And that many felt India largely initiated a non-violent movement, thereby virtually negating the movement pushed by freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh, Bismil and the rest. “If you read the text books today you will get the impression that our freedom struggle was largely non-violent and that we very gently asked the British to leave India. And they politely left, that was not the case,” said Sanyal.
He was making a very strong, political statement. But a valid one. Sanyal went further: “India did have an arms movement and it was led by some remarkable people who were closely linked to each other.”
So let us return to the book, published by HarperCollins. Sanyal makes it clear that a reader gets a historical perspective of his nation and its freedom struggle only when the reader makes an effort to read the right kind of book and when the reader decides to junk the ones which have been in circulation for long. Honestly, you need not be ideologically motivated to grasp Sanyal’s book, you need not even ask him what his ideological motivations are. A simple read of this fascinatingly written book will help anyone under the right perspective of India’s freedom movement and why Sanyal argues that version of the freedom movement to be the official history.
The underlying theme of his book is simple: The troika of nationalists Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal—popular as Lal Bal Pal—who advocated the Swadeshi movement involving the boycott of all imported items and the use of Indian-made goods in 1907 during the anti-Partition agitation in Bengal were the real heroes of India’s freedom movement. Sanyal makes it clear that the final years of the 19th century saw a radical sensibility emerge among Indian intellectuals. The British rulers responded to this movement brutally, but eventually had to succumb to the pressures of these great nationalists, great revolutionaries.
I loved his thoughts about these leaders. A few months ago, I heard a Dastangoi speaker narrating stories of Bismil and how he lampooned the judge while he was being tried by the British rulers. Many in the crowd wept, and I wondered how come we—as Indians—have not read in detail about such great revolutionaries.
So, let me return to Sanyal’s book. The writer argues very strongly and successfully that the nation’s freedom movement had many layers to it but—for reasons unknown—historians have always followed a narrative that talks about a leadership offered by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others. Sanyal argues against it, he feels that is not the right history of India and historians should not have been biased. Sanyal calls them revolutionaries and writes these people were an essential part of the movement. He is not worried about the acts of violence, he calls it acts of courage and resistance to British rule. And the bottom line, according to Sanyal, was the fact that these violent acts eventually rattled the British rulers out of shape. The colonial masters realised that they could not continue to rule India forever.
And what pains Sanyal is that these revolutionaries are mentioned only as asides. History students across the world must read this as their main text. And if the schools and colleges do not allow such reading—anything can happen in a politically charged country—then institutions of higher learning must make the book a recommended reading for students keen to understand what really brought India its independence.
It is clear from the book that Sanyal does not like Mahatma Gandhi’s ahimsa warriors and the work they did to defy the British, he wants Indians to know of such brave-hearted revolutionaries who sacrificed their life and blood to get India its much-awaited freedom. The British decision to leave India was more because it could no longer trust the Indian Army, especially due to the increased military activities of Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army (INA).
Sanyal’s unique retelling of Indian history makes it clear why Prime Minister Narendra Modi got the statue of Netaji erected under the canopy on Delhi’s Kartavya Path, replacing the statue of King George V. The move was not liked by veteran admirers of Mahatma Gandhi, some of whom had severely criticised Bose for seeking the support of Germany and Japan to counter the British forces in India. Sanyal—in eight clear chapters—makes it clear that the Nehru-Gandhi narrative on the freedom struggle is not the right one, and not the ultimate one. He has substantially rewritten the Indian freedom struggle from a totally new perspective, pushing a strong narrative that explains the human side of such freedom fighters, turning them into idealistic characters who influenced hundreds of thousands of Indians.
But to assume that the inspiration was entirely from figures outside India would be a travesty. The revolutionaries were equally energised by the historical resistance to tyranny provided by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Maharana Pratap, Guru Govind Singh and Banda Bahadur, among others.
Nor were the revolutionaries just thinking of India like frogs in a well. As Sanyal notes, they created a network not only in India, but also “nodes in Britain, France, Thailand, Germany, Russia, Italy, Persia (now Iran), Ireland, the USA, Japan and Singapore.” These are not acts of purely idealistic revolutionaries.
Despite their varying emphasis and ideological differences—some were inspired by the Hindu Shakta traditions and warrior monks, others by socialist ideas, and yet others by a combination of the two—the revolutionaries drew inspiration from one another.
This is contrary to current “secular” narratives, which pit Hindutva against secularism and socialism and even Hinduism.
The intellectual and muscular strength of the revolutionaries came overwhelmingly from Bengal, Punjab and Maharashtra, with Savarkar and Aurobindo Ghosh (later to become Sri Aurobindo) leading the pack.
Chapters two and three deal with the thinker-revolutionaries, Sri Aurobindo and Veer Savarkar, and chapter four with the Ghadar movement and its offshoots.
The Other Story of How India Won its Freedom
Author: Sanjeev Sanyal
Publisher: Harper Collins
Chapter five deals with the Andamans Cellular Jail, where many revolutionaries were sent after conviction, the massacres of Jallianwala Bagh, Khilafat Movement and the bloody Moplah killings of Hindus and Christians in Kerala.
Chapter six is about the Hindustan Republican Association. The last two chapters deal with the Chittagong armoury raid, and Netaji’s fight against the British, among other things.
No chapter, though, is a standalone read, dealing with only issue.
Sanyal’s storytelling skills come out very well in the book when he weaves the larger narrative with the personal emotions and lives of the revolutionaries. The various revolutionary movements also get linked by people and the ideals they held in common.
The book is full of heart-rending, and yet endearing, tales of love, betrayal and the courageous spirit of the revolutionaries. I read one story about Lila, who was madly in love with Ullaskar Dutt, a revolutionary tortured brutally in the faraway Cellular Jail in the Andaman islands. Lila could not wait for her love, she married and when Dutt returned from the Andamans, he was crestfallen to see his college love married to another man. What is interesting is that post 1947, when Lila was bedridden and had lost her husband, Dutt traced her in Bombay and took care of her till the end. Why couldn’t our so-called historians find such stories?
Did the revolutionaries eventually get their due? No, says Sanyal. It’s been nearly 76 years.
Never mind the historians, why not offer the book to producers waiting for quality content on web portals? I have a feeling someone has already approached Sanyal.