India just celebrated its 79th Independence Day with the usual fanfare on August 15th.
I always thought Independence Day belonged to the big leaders we read about in history books like 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 policeman’s 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 a missed opportunity. That remains a lifelong regret.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
Guneeta Singh Bhalla who started the 1947 Partition Archive out of tech incubator hub in Berkeley once told me what the horror stories her grandmother had told her about the 1947 Partition that created India and Pakistan.
GB1: Everybody used to sleep on rooftops in those days and how when the floods came that year the water was red because of the bloodshed that had happened in the streets.
Some years ago I asked my mother what she had done on Independence Day. 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.
NEHRU1: At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps India awakes to life and freedom
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. Her brother’s memories might well have been different but I never asked him either.
The problem I realize is the way we are taught history. Its about very important men (and a few women) taking very important decisions around round tables. There are Wavell Plans and Stafford-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, one of the dwindling Jewish community in Kolkata, told me about how she had come upon a mob attacking a pregnant woman in the heart of Kolkata.
FS1: I didn’t know if she was hindu muslim. It didn’t matter. I said stop. I am going to save this woman. They were about to cut her stomach open. And as we went there they said u stay out of this. This is not your problem. Its hindus and muslims you are neither.
Suddenly she realized that though she thought of herself as an Indian Jew, to many in the new India she wasn’t Indian at all.
Folk theatre artist Chapal Bhaduri remembered peering out of the window of his home in North Kolkata and seeing someone hold another person by the throat and hack off his head off with a chopper.
CB1:ei bhabe chopper chalalo. Murgir ton chhotphot horechhe
In his book The Last Heroes, P Sainath collects many such stories. The woman who was cooking food for revolutionaries hidden in the forests of West Bengal. The woman who at 13 was taking on the paramilitary of Hyderabad with a slingshot. The young student activist who could not give his final exam because he was in jail. Sainath said freedom wasn’t brought by just Oxbridge educated lawyers.
PS1: It was the whole point is that your freedom was not brought to you by a bunch of Oxbridge Brahmin bunnies, 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 the revolutionary Indian National Army thought she just a cook, not a freedom fighter. Years later when she was invited to hoist a flag she was embarrassed says Sainath.
PS2: Schools and colleges in Koraput were calling her to hoist the flag and she said, How can I go? I don't have a decent sari.
These people didn’t get roads named after them. There are no statues to them.
They 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.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW