A country approaching its centenary should be comfortable with a larger memory of itself and its diverse leaders.
For a long time, the popular telling of India’s freedom struggle revolved around a select leadership of Gandhi, Nehru and some others. Lately, we see discourse developing around Patel, Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose, Savarkar, and S.P. Mukherjee among others. Their place in our history is enduring and rightly deserves the attention it receives. However, there are still some questions worth asking as we celebrate the 80th Independence Day and look ahead to the centennial Independence Day in 2047: how many of the people who helped shape India do we actually remember?
The history is rarely comprehensive and inclusive. It takes conscious effort to make it so. There are still many leaders, intellectuals, and freedom fighters who remain less known, but were crucial to the story of India we know today. Take Tanguturi Prakasam, who needs no introduction for many people in Andhra Pradesh. He is, after all, immortalized as Andhra Kesari, the Lion of Andhra. However, outside the region, his name still fails to command the recognition it deserves.
His life was quite extraordinary, from his early training as a lawyer and his successful practice in Madras, which earned him enough to live comfortably, to his later years, when he walked away from the profession in 1921 after Gandhi called upon lawyers and other professionals to join the Non-Cooperation Movement. He entered politics, took up journalism through Swarajya, and became deeply involved in the Congress organization in the Andhra region. Six years later, when the Simon Commission arrived in Madras in 1928, protests broke out. The police confronted the demonstrators. Prakasam is remembered for walking towards the armed police and baring his chest, challenging them to shoot him. It was an extraordinary act of nerve, and the story stayed in public memory. The episode became central to the making of his public image as Andhra Kesari.
His story, much like many, is truly inspiring, and for good reason, it is tempting to leave it there, with courage, sacrifice, and nationalism. However, Prakasam’s political career was considerably larger and his engagement with India’s political life deeper. Prakasam was a freedom fighter, but he was also involved in administrative roles. He took up questions of land revenue and the position of cultivators and was associated with the movement towards the abolition of zamindari. His political engagement, therefore, extended beyond the struggle for freedom to questions of social and economic reform.
He was also among the important political figures in the Andhra movement, which culminated in the creation of Andhra State in 1953 as a Telugu-speaking state. He was one of many who contributed to that long political journey and went on to become its first Chief Minister.
Such aspects of his life, while less discussed, need more attention because the freedom movement to resist British rule was crucial, but for many freedom fighters like him, it was closely linked to the question of what came after. For these reasons, questions such as what kind of society would replace it, as well as those concerning land, education, social reform, local government, economic opportunity, and the rights of different communities, were being debated alongside the demand for independence. Prakasam’s career shows one version of that politics.
It also shows something else that tends to disappear when we tell Indian political history through a handful of national personalities: India’s political life has always been regional as well as national. Consider Biju Patnaik in Odisha. His career illustrates how the national movement also produced distinctive regional political leadership. He was a nationalist, an aviator, an organizer, and later a major political figure in Odisha, closely associated with the state’s industrial and economic development of the state. His political imagination was shaped by both the national movement and the particular circumstances of Odisha. Or look towards the Northeast as Gopinath Bordoloi’s politics emerged from Assam’s own concerns and from the complicated question of how the region would fit into independent India.
Rani Gaidinliu represents another strand altogether: a young Naga leader whose resistance grew out of the religious, social, and political world of the Zeliangrong communities.
These were not identical political traditions. And reading them tells us that India was always politically diverse and rich in traditions shaped by local realities. Its nationalism was expressed differently in different places. A lawyer in Madras, a peasant organizer in Andhra, a political leader in Assam, a tribal leader in the Northeast, or an industrial nationalist in Odisha could all be thinking about India’s future, but they did so from very different experiences.
In ways of our telling these stories, sometimes our textbooks and political conversations, can easily recede these differences into the background. Broadly speaking, we know the national stories in many of their contexts, but we don’t always know the regional stories that feed into these larger narratives. And here, the lesson emerges for us in how we want to think about India as it heads towards 100 years of independence. This also offers an interesting way of thinking about Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), which is often discussed through ancient texts, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and traditional knowledge. These are important parts of India’s intellectual inheritance. But the idea of knowledge can also be understood more broadly: as the accumulated experience of how people across India understood society, community, politics, and public life.
Seen in that broader sense, the political lives of people like Prakasam are also part of the knowledge India has accumulated about itself. Prakasam was not only a leader of the freedom movement but also took up the responsibilities of administration and public life. His career reflected a commitment to India that extended beyond the struggle for independence and into the task of shaping institutions, reform, and public life. And that is exactly why he is worth remembering.
As India moves towards 2047, we will naturally talk about the achievements of the Republic, economic growth, infrastructure, technology, education, science, and India’s growing place in the world. However, a country approaching its centenary should also be comfortable with a larger memory of itself and its diverse leaders because the India of 2047 cannot be built on a history populated by only a few familiar names. Nor should remembering lesser-known or regional leaders become an exercise in replacing one political pantheon with another. The purpose is not to decide whether Prakasam was more important than Nehru, or whether Biju Patnaik should be placed above or below another national leader. That is not a particularly useful comparison.
Instead, the point is that there was room in India’s political imagination for many kinds of leadership. Some led mass movements while others fought the colonial state directly. Some worked on reform, while some built institutions. Some defended the interests of particular regions or communities, while others contributed intellectually. Some succeeded in government, while others struggled to manage the challenges of post-independence India. Many worked in the national discourse, while some remained outside the national spotlight and worked for regional discourse.
However, when we look from above and through the convenience of hindsight, we must see that they tell us something important about the making of India. So, as we speak of Viksit Bharat and having celebrated the 80th year of our independence, perhaps we should broaden the historical conversation as well. A confident country does not have to remember only the most famous people. It can and must make room for figures and leaders like Prakasam from all parts of our Republic. India’s history is much older and larger than we often acknowledge, and therefore, the Bharat we imagine in 2047 must be cognisant of that history too.
*Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice-Chancellor of JNU.
