Impressive explainer

Revolutionaries: the other story of how India won its freedom Sanjeev Sanyal Harper Collins Rs.599 Pages 351 To counter public amnesia the author uses the methodology of micro-history to intervene into the mainstream narrative of India’s freedom struggle as it has been ‘received’ since 1947 Reading this alternative history of how India won its freedom from British colonial rule, I was reminded of eminent British historian Prof. E.H. Carr’s pertinent monograph which posed the question What is History? And proceeded to opine that it “reflects one’s own position in time” and “what view we take of the society in which we live.” For economist Sanjeev Sanyal, “correcting” the mainstream narrative of India’s freedom movement is an important imperative. Several revolutionaries whose lives and activities are showcased are personalities that the generation described as midnight’s children, born in the independent Republic of India, are unfamiliar with. Some acquired national and international fame as iconic individuals who offered resistance to British imperial domination. A few were admired for their leadership and acts of exceptional courage in regional spaces. Unfortunately many others who suffered and sacrificed their lives for the country’s freedom, were marginalised or sidelined. Remarkably, Sanyal, to pen this alt history, visited sites of rebellion and underground activities countrywide and abroad, family homes, the Andaman Cellular Jail, prisons and sites of incarceration and torture. The author’s grievance is that “generations of Indians were sold a narrative where the contribution of these revolutionaries were shown to have been no more than random acts without coherent objectives, and, consequently, as having no impact on the course of events.” Post-independence school textbooks and national days he believes, exclusively highlight the role of Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology of non-violence and activities of Indian National Congress leaders. Other revolutionaries have been systematically marginalised, if not summarily dismissed by mainstream historians. Sanyal’s effort is to resurrect the heroic deeds of nationalists such as Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal. But why it should be at the cost of undermining the achievements of other leaders and freedom fighters is a moot question. To counter public amnesia, Sanyal uses the methodology of micro-history to intervene into the mainstream narrative of India’s freedom struggle as it has been ‘received’ since 1947. According to Sanyal, revolutionary resistance to British colonial administration, draconian repressive laws, physical torture, criminalisation and penalisation, was spread over at least three generations in the aftermath of the Sepoy Mutiny aka First War of Independence in 1857. But such often violent revolutionary resistance was by and large read as confined to regional areas and projected as individual acts of bravery linked to organised networks in Europe, America, Canada, Japan, even Russia. Japanese pan-asianism, Russian communism, German socialism, Italian facism and Irish nationalism are traced as influences on indigenous akhada culture represented by the Anushilan Samiti, Jugantar, Abhinav Bharat etc. Fragmented information about these revolutionary networks is pieced together alongside biographies of obscure as well as comparatively well-known revolutionaries including Aurobindo and Barin Ghosh, Vinayak Savarkar…