FIRST of all, we sincerely regret our undue delay in talking out Monograph-2, second of the series of six, as proposed at the outset.
In Monograph-1, our attempt was to clear some of the major confusions existing in popular perception on various communist posers, in a dialogic form and to reiterate, in course, basic Marxist positions on issues involved. Here we dare take a little unorthodox recourse to arrive at Marxist understanding on some other issues, mostly uncovered in its precursor and we have retained the same dialogic form.
The questions selected may not always correspond with the usual queries in popular mind, but they are thought provoking, nevertheless. The way the answers arc structured may be somewhat non-traditional, but they are definitely in consonance with the lexicon used in contemporary Marxist studies. The discourse at times may appear to be not so simple; that is perhaps the price one has to pay to make way for newer approaches and idioms. Commitment for new idiom may have weighed heavier than that for simplicity and it may take rather heavier toll of die readers' concentration, but once you take this pain, you are sure to be refreshed with a gush of new light and newer arenas are thrown open. That is what is extremely important for the new generations of students of Marxism.
“WE do not set ourselves up against the world in doctrinaire fashion with a new principle : Here is the truth! Here you must knee! ... we do not seek to anticipate the new world dogmatically, but rather to discover it in the criticism of the old. ... It is not our task to build up the future in advance and to settle all problems for all time; our task is ruthless criticism of everything that exists, ruthless in the sense that the criticism will not shrink either from its own conclusions or from conflict with the powers that be …”
-- KARL MARX
India’s anti-colonial struggle or, freedom movement, is a prolonged and diverse chapter in the history of India. It is a rich tapestry woven by myriad struggles that deepened and enriched the quest for a modern India. Immediate issues and contexts varied in different periods and different regions – struggles against landlordism and usury, against local kings, against caste and gender oppression and injustice, and for linguistic rights and cultural diversity, all added to the momentum and canvas of the freedom movement. Multiple modes of mobilisation and methods of struggle guided by a broad spectrum of ideologies from Gandhian and Ambedkarite to communist and socialist of various shades – all should be recognised as diverse strands of the grand narrative of India’s freedom movement. Ironically, the one stream which was conspicuously absent in the freedom movement and busy with its own project of defining Indian nationalism on the basis of Hindu supremacy now rules India as India observes the seventy-fifth anniversary of independence.
The rise and domination of British colonial power over India itself had a history of more than three centuries – first in the form of the expanding commercial operation and network of the East India Company from the early seventeenth century to the Battle of Palashi (1757), followed by the rule of the Company for a period of hundred years (1757-1858) and the final leg of direct rule of the British Crown from 1858 to 1947. From cruel loot and plunder to an institutional reign of repression and manipulation, this trajectory of colonial rule evoked continuous resistance and periodic revolts since the first recorded Adivasi revolt led by Tilka Manjhi in 1784. This entire history of resistance should be recognised as the history of India’s freedom movement.
The battle of Palashi in 1757 and the battle of Buxar in 1764 led to a major consolidation of the Company rule in north India and the rulers sought to reinforce it by creating a class of loyal landlords through what came to be known as the Permanent Settlement or the Cornwallis Code. But this coercive colonialism and landlordism, and the allied element of cruel usury, was deeply resented by the overwhelming majority of rural population, the peasants and Adivasis in particular. Revolts kept breaking out and reached a new high with the Santhal Hool of 1855 and the great rebellion of 1857, following which the British crown not only established its direct rule but also brought about considerable change in its strategy.
The rebellion of 1857 had highlighted two major threats to the British rulers. Contrary to the British expectations of a Hindu-Muslim divide and a fragmented Indian polity, 1857 showcased the great potential of a national awakening where Hindu and Muslim soldiers, farmers, traders and even aristocracies joined hands against the foreign rulers. Post 1857, the British rulers therefore adopted ‘divide and rule’ as their declared blueprint and cultivated the princely states as their trusted allies. The freedom movement of course tried to evolve a policy of ‘unite and resist’ to counter the ‘divide and rule’ strategy, but could not stop the eventual denouement of a traumatic Partition accompanied by a massive bloodbath, forced migration, destruction and loss. The ‘divide and rule’ strategy culminated in ‘partition and quit’.
The RSS which now rules India through the BJP and is desperately trying to impose its own ideology and outlook as the ruling ideology seeks to reduce the history of India’s freedom movement to the trauma of Partition even as the Modi regime is busy appropriating a whole range of leaders of the freedom movement while distorting and denigrating a few others. This is a clever ploy to cover up the sordid reality of the actual role played by the RSS and other Hindutva protagonists during the freedom movement. The Hindutva lobby stood away from the freedom movement, its biggest icon Savarkar is now best remembered for his half a dozen mercy petitions to the British rulers, while the RSS was in awe of Mussolini and Hitler. Golwalkar wrote about how India should profit by emulating Hitler’s Nazi Germany model based on ‘race purity and pride’ while Savarkar posited the model of a Hindu India where Hindus, defined broadly as people who are born in India and who also follow a religion born in India, will wield all political and military power.
The RSS answer to India’s partition is the reconstruction of an Akhand Bharat which will include not just India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the three countries that have been formed in the wake of 1947, but also Afghanistan in the North-West, Myanmar in the North-East, Sri Lanka in the South and Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet in the North. This is not to be confused with a desire for reunification (like the reunification of Germany or the desire for reunification of Korea), it is clearly an expansionist imperial dream (like Putin’s talk of a Greater Russia that will be at the heart of a Eurasian empire). The Akhand Bharat advocated by the RSS had no historical existence, it is the projection of an imaginary past of mythical glory that is being peddled as a toxic dream to divert the attention of the people from the problems and miseries of the present.
India and Pakistan have been existing as separate countries for seventy-five years, Bangladesh has been in existence for more than fifty years. Keeping in view the shared past and common interests of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the three countries can of course contemplate a confederation and a more vibrant and energetic framework of cooperation in South Asia than the currently dormant and nearly defunct SAARC, but the RSS vision of an Akhand Bharat can only be a prescription for a state of permanent conflict in South Asia and greater alienation of India from all its neighbours. Forget about restoring the old undivided India, any attempt to define Indian nationalism on the basis of a homogenised and regimented political Hinduism will only jeopardise India’s current national unity.
Even though the constitution fell short in terms of securing the extent of rights, depth of democracy and consistency of liberty, equality, fraternity and comprehensive justice it promised, the preamble proclaimed the basic spirit of a modern democratic republic.
In the wake of the First World War and the victorious Russian Revolution and more organically during the Second World War and its aftermath, India’s freedom movement had become part of the international anti-colonial anti-fascist awakening. The exit of British colonialism from India in 1947 and the rise of new China in 1949 dramatically changed the global political landscape in the second half of the twentieth century. Modern India’s journey as a democratic republic had begun against this changed international backdrop.
Today, seventy-five years after that historic ‘tryst with destiny’ the Indian journey is headed in a totally different and retrograde direction. It is now quite clear that the ascendance of Narendra Modi to power in 2014 and his renewed victory in 2019 have emboldened the Sangh-BJP establishment to rewrite the fundamentals of India’s statecraft where the executive now brazenly dominates the legislature and the judiciary and the tenets of the Constitution are being openly flouted. The separation of the state and citizenship from religion is being discarded, and with a new parliament building, democracy is being pushed into a new era of regimentation where basic expressions of criticism and opposition are being declared ‘unparliamentary’. If the Emergency was India’s previous recorded experience with suppression and suspension of democracy, we now find ourselves in a state of permanent emergency. The old Emergency only had a repressive state, its new avatar comes with a cheerleading media and killer squads revelling in street violence.
For the Modi regime, the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence is an opportunity to distort and rewrite history in the service of its own agenda. We the people of India must revisit the history of the freedom movement to reignite the dreams of liberty and equality so we can rebuff the growing fascist offensive.
The Modi government has turned the seventy fifth anniversary of India’s independence into a massive exercise of rewriting and hijacking India’s history. The ideological and organisational predecessors of today’s BJP hardly played any role in India’s anti-colonial national awakening, busy as they were collaborating with the colonial rulers and assisting them in executing their ‘divide and rule’ strategy by dividing and derailing secular Indian nationalism with their politics of Hindutva or Hindu supremacist communal nationalism. Today, their successors are busy rewriting history and redefining India on those disastrous lines.
The Modi government is celebrating the 75th anniversary as Amrit Mahotsav of India’s independence, poisoning the air with lies and hate in the name of Amrit or nectar. The declared focus seems to be on celebrating unsung heroes of India’s freedom movement. There can be little objection to this stated objective except that the greatest unsung hero in the BJP’s history of freedom movement is VD Savarkar, the first theorist of Hindutva who had laid the ideological foundation of India’s eventual partition apart from tarnishing the glorious tradition of India’s freedom fighters with his repeated petitions seeking mercy for the ‘prodigal son’ and promising to serve the interests of the colonial masters. Many in the Sangh Parivar also openly celebrate the ‘legacy’ of Nathuram Godse, the Hindutva terrorist who had killed Gandhi soon after independence.
Apart from rehabilitating Sangh Parivar icons as ‘unsung heroes’ and projecting the Parivar itself as an ‘unsung stream’ of freedom movement, and distorting and misappropriating various episodes and icons of struggle, the BJP’s war on history seeks to devalue and discredit the goals and gains of the freedom movement, virtually reducing freedom to the ‘horrors of Partition’. Significantly enough, the government has now proclaimed August 14, the day of formation of Pakistan as ‘horrors of Partition remembrance day’. Muslims as a community are demonised as villains who walked away with parts of India as their own land while Hindus are projected as victims who suffered the trauma of Partition – denying the shared trauma across communities which characterised Partition.
While celebrating the seventy fifth anniversary of India’s independence we must therefore not just revisit the major events and turning points in the history of freedom movement and the heroic struggles and sacrifices by countless freedom fighters, but also grasp the ideological battle and conceptual evolution that marked the freedom movement and constitutes its radical legacy that resonates even today after more than seven decades of freedom. As the Modi government tramples upon the constitutional democratic framework of our republic and rules like the descendants of the erstwhile colonial rulers, the ‘bhure Angrez’ or brown sahibs Bhagat Singh had warned us about, we must invoke the radical legacy of our freedom movement to wage our ongoing battle for freedom from fascism.
During the colonial era, freedom was first of all freedom from colonial subjugation. It was our national liberation struggle, and this vision of national liberation was anchored around the people of India as the arbiters of the nation. Much before the Indian National Congress formally adopted the Purna Swaraj resolution, anti-colonial fighters in India had begun to articulate the notion of freedom and popular sovereignty. The 1857 anthem declared the people of India as the owners of the country: ‘hum hain iske malik, Hindostan hamara’ (we are the owners of this land, Hindostan/India belongs to us). The Ulgulan of Birsa Munda issued the clarion call “Abua Dishum, Abua Raj” (our state, our rule). This spirit of popular sovereignty or power to the people found its constitutional recognition in the preamble to the Constitution with “We, the people of India” solemnly resolving to constitute India into a sovereign republic. The people are thus central to the idea of India and Indian nationalism.
The people of India have always been a diverse lot. Diversity – ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious – is the foundational principle of India’s unity. Improved communication and increased migration certainly led to closer bonding and greater national unification in the course of the freedom movement, but this unity must not be mistaken for a quest for uniformity or homogeneity. Attempts to bring about uniformity or homogeneity have always weakened unity and been strongly rebuffed by adversely affected regions or communities. The unfortunate eventual partition did diminish diversity to an extent, but even post-partition India is by far the world’s most diverse country. The freedom movement developed a healthy understanding and mutual respect and recognition for India’s diversity which alone can explain the resilience of India’s national unity and the quick integration of hundreds of princely states (under Hindu and Muslim rulers) with the Indian nation-state.
The Constitution gave us a commitment to non-discriminatory and equal citizenship, it kept the state relatively free from religion and even though it did not recognise India as an explicitly federal country, the states had a degree of autonomy on many subjects. The need was to carry forward the process of secularisation, federal restructuring and greater recognition for India’s essential diversity and pluralism. The BJP government under Modi is moving rapidly in the opposite direction – CAA has introduced discrimination among citizens, and immigrants applying for citizenship, on the basis of religion; the state is increasingly behaving like a Hindu state; the centre is arrogating all powers to itself reducing states virtually to the status of glorified municipalities; and plurality is being increasingly demonised and subordinated to uniformity.
Apart from Azaadi or freedom, the other keyword of our freedom movement was inquilab or revolution, immortalised in the slogan ‘inquilab zindabad’ or ‘long live the revolution’. Coined by the Urdu poet and freedom fighter Maulana Hasrat Mohani and immortalised by Bhagat Singh and his comrades, this slogan drew our attention to the revolutionary significance of freedom and to the centrality of continued struggle and eternal vigilance for progressive changes and rights. And this revolution saw itself as part of an international anti-imperialist mass awakening.
Indeed, the other slogan which Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutta raised in the Central Assembly was ‘down with imperialism’. India’s freedom movement was not an isolated and exclusive fight against British colonialism, it grew as an integral part of international anti-imperialist resistance. And after the 1917 Russian revolution when Europe witnessed the rise of fascist reaction, the progressive stream of India’s freedom movement supported the anti-fascist resistance in Europe. Six Indians – writer Mulk Raj Anand, journalist Gopal Mukund Huddar, doctors Atal Menhanlal, Ayub Ahmed Khan Naqshbandi and Manuel Pinto, and student Ramasamy Veerapan – had joined the International Brigade to fight against the fascist troops led by General Franco. Indians based in London raised funds and Jawaharlal Nehru paid a solidarity visit to Spain in 1938. While the RSS in India drew inspiration from Mussolini and Hitler, India’s progressive freedom fighters joined forces with the anti-fascist resistance in Europe.
The freedom movement was not just about ending the British rule in India, it was about building a modern democratic progressive India. Adivasis and other peasant communities who constituted the biggest mass base of the freedom movement were fighting relentlessly for freedom from landlords and money-lenders. After the Adivasi revolts and the 1857 war of independence, British colonial rule consolidated itself not just through military control and repressive laws, but also by the strengthening of feudal power exercised by the class of landlords created through ‘permanent settlement’ and other revenue systems, perpetuation of the power of princely states and vigorous application of divide and rule between Hindus and Muslims. In the revealing words of a senior British military official of that period, “Our endeavour should be to uphold in full force the (for us fortunate) separation which exists between the different religions and races...Divide et impera should be the principle of Indian government’ (Lt. Col. Coker, Commandant of Moradabad, cited by Rajani Palme Dutt in India Today, 1940). The landlords and the puppet rulers of princely states, with a few honourable exceptions, constituted the social foundation of colonial rule and hence the anti-colonial struggle drew its strength from peasant struggles against landlords and money-lenders.
Abolition of landlordism and usury emerged as the central slogan of the peasant movement in colonial India. With the Gandhian satyagraha movement not according due emphasis on this core agenda and moving away from all signs of peasant militancy, the peasant movement founded its own militant platform in the shape of All India Kisan Sabha. The All India Kisan Sabha was formed in April 1936 with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati as its first President and it released a Kisan Manifesto in August 1936 demanding abolition of the zamindari system and cancellation of rural debts. Powerful peasant struggles not only weakened feudal-colonial power in rural India but also created a powerful narrative and countervailing force against communal polarisation and violence. After independence, the old form of landlordism was legally abolished, but beyond that land reforms remained largely unaccomplished and of late we are seeing a reversal of land reforms. Replace colonial with corporate and we will see the peasant movement grappling with the new threat of corporate landlordism and debt crisis.
The battle for working class rights including the right to organise and fight for better working and living conditions constitutes another important part of the radical legacy of India’s freedom movement. These struggles led to the passage of several legislations concerning workers’ rights during the colonial period itself. From the Factories Act and Trade Unions Act 1926 to Payment of Wages Act and Minimum Wages Act, many of India’s core labour laws were passed before Independence. Apart from the All India Trade Union Congress founded in 1920 and the organised Communist movement since the 1920s, the Independent Labour Party formed by Dr. Ambedkar in 1936 also made major contributions to the securing of working class rights in colonial India. The ILP which identified both Brahminism and capitalism as enemies of the working class emerged as a significant trend in Bombay Presidency, secured major electoral victories and played a key role in the legislative arena as well as broader worker-peasant struggles.
1936 was indeed a year that gave rise to two radical calls. While the Kisan Sabha called for abolition of landlordism, Ambedkar came out with his clarion call for annihilation of caste. The call for annihilation of caste effectively raised the agenda of social justice to the higher plane of social transformation. Departing from the limited Gandhian theme of abolition of untouchability, Ambedkar drew India’s attention to the need for doing away with the entire caste system. Rebutting the attempts to justify caste in the name of division of labour, Ambedkar exposed caste as division of labourers. The answer would clearly lie in unification of labourers on an anti-caste basis whereby caste would dissolve into class. A convergence of these radical ideas – abolition of landlordism, annihilation of caste and unification of labourers – had the potential of taking class unity and class struggle to a much bigger scale and higher level, but unfortunately this potential could not be realised at that juncture. This is precisely where we need to explore this unfulfilled potential and legacy of the freedom movement in today’s India.
The freedom movement also meant increasing participation of women in public protests which in turn led to widespread questioning of patriarchal practices and controls and strengthening of the battle for equal rights and dignity and freedom for women. The participation of women was not limited to a few specific forms of struggle – from the Santhal Hul and 1857 war of independence to Chattagram armoury raid and militant peasant uprisings like Tebhaga and Telangana, women were in the forefront of almost all major phases and forms of struggle. There were struggles where women played the leading role as in the less well-known Nupi Lan struggles of Manipur (1904 and 1939). Nupi Lan in Manipuri literally means ‘women’s war’ and the Nupi Lan waged by Manipur’s women against the local king and rich traders as well as the colonial power was fought in defence of women’s relatively high status in Manipur which patriarchal colonial forces sought to undermine, but also secured freedom for Manipur’s male workers from bondage and oppression. It was truly the forerunner of today’s Shaheen Bagh protests against the discriminatory and divisive CAA or the powerful protests against AFSPA and state repression and terror by women in Manipur and Kashmir valley.
For the BJP, nationalism means Hindutva, and celebration of the Amrit Mahotsav of Azaadi is an exercise in hijacking of history to serve the Sangh brigade’s unfinished project of transforming secular democratic India into a fascist Hindu Rashtra. For us, the legacy of the freedom movement remains a powerful warning against the perils of communal polarisation and colonial survivals, and a lasting inspiration to harness the untapped potentials and fulfil the unrealised promises of the journey of “we, the people of India” towards the goal of modern India as a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic. The people of India defeated the fascist conspiracy in the course of the freedom movement, they will defeat it again after seven decades of independence.
The RSS and the entire Hindu-supremacist faction in India remained aloof from India’s freedom struggle, instead choosing to collaborate with the colonial British rule’s “Divide and Rule” mission by breaking the unity of the people on Hindu-Muslim lines.
That Divide and Rule policy resulted in the bloody partition and the creation of India and Pakistan. Bangladesh broke from Pakistan later.
Now the Modi regime – implementing an RSS agenda – has announced that 14 August (Pakistan Independence Day) will be observed in India as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day”. This is a move intended to perpetuate the divisive tragedy of partition inside India and between India and Pakistan.
Why does the Modi regime wish to reduce 74 years of India’s freedom to the blood-soaked chapter of Partition (in which on both sides of the border, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs participated in mass killings and rapes)? How is it seeking to rewrite the history India’s freedom struggle, inserting the RSS and Hindu-supremacists into the story where they never had a part?
RSS’ is a Hindu-supremacist ideology and project, which dreams of turning India into a nation free of Opposition politics, where the RSS rules in the name of Hindus, and non-Hindus have to live as second-class citizens or as non-citizens. This vision of India goes against the entire spirit of the freedom struggle. Indians of all communities fought and sacrificed equally for freedom, and so all communities have an equal claim over India.
This self-serving claim by RSS leaders could not be more false.
The nation state emerged in Europe as an “imagined” identity with the emergence of capitalism to fulfil capitalism’s historical needs – for creating a unified home market for capitalism, and as a binding force for new form of governance by replacing the ‘loyalty’ to a monarch by ‘loyalty’ to a ‘nation-state’. Language, religion were among the factors invoked as bases for nationalism. So the economic and political aspirations of emergent capitalism constituted the essence of nationalism in this first phase in the 16th-18th centuries.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, a new phase of nationalism emerged: as a battle cry that united diverse people in colonised countries for liberation from the colonial subjugation of first generation of capitalist nations. So, anti-imperialism and the quest for sovereignty are the essence of nationalism in colonised countries this phase. Indian nationalism was not based on a unifying sense of shared religious beliefs, but a shared purpose of fighting the colonial oppressor.
India’s first war of independence in 1857 against Company Raj (the rule of the British East India Company) marks the first expressions of anti-colonial nationalism and a sense of belonging to one country. Following close on the heels of the great santhal hool led by Sido and Kanhu, the ‘peasants in uniform’ rose above religious narrow-mindedness and challenged the British Raj as Indians, as ‘Hindostanis’ in the sense of being legitimate owners of Hindostan: “Ham hain iske malik, Hindostan hamara” (We are its owner, Hindustan is ours)— in the words of the 1857 Anthem penned by Azimullah Khan. 1857 – with its diverse set of fighters hailing not only from princely feudal backgrounds, but also from the oppressed castes and women, thus announced the birth of popular, militant anti-imperialism some thirty years ahead of the birth of the Indian National Congress.
Prior to 1857 there had been a host of peasant and tribal uprisings against British rule. 1857 was the first such uprising that began to speak the language of belonging to one country – Hindustan – and defending it from the “firangi” (foreigner) who came to plunder it.
The British were frustrated at the firm unity among diverse communities displayed in the 1857 uprising: a senior British officer Thomas Lowe observed: “the cow-killer and the cow-worshipper, the pig-hater and the pig-eater, the cries of Allah is God and Mohammad his prophet and the mumbler of the mysteries of Brahma, they are all joined together in the cause.” (Quoted by William Russell, in his diary for The Times, London, March 2, 1858, cited by Shamsul Islam, Indian Express, May 12, 2020)
The command of the revolutionary army was in the hands of Bakht Khan, Sirdhari Lal, Ghaus Mohammed and Heera Singh – Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs all together. The artillery commander in Rani Lakshmi Bai’s army was Ghulam Ghaus Khan, and her infantry commander, Khuda Bakhsh. Her personal security officer who fought and died alongside her was Mundar – a Muslim woman.
There are any number of examples of Hindu-Muslim unity and sacrifice from 1857. After the brutal suppression of the uprising, the British formulated their “Divide and Rule” policy, which was especially venomous against the Muslim community.
The RSS narrative claims that Mughal rule was “foreign” to India and resented and resisted by Hindus. So Indian nationalism, they claim, was Hindu in character since primordial times and must remain so now. RSS ideologue Golwalkar was keen to supplant anti-colonial nationalism with a Hindu “nationalism” that was hateful towards Muslims. He had written: “Anti-Britishism was equated with patriotism and nationalism. This reactionary view has had disastrous effects upon the entire course of the freedom struggle, its leaders and the common people.” (Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts)
And no wonder that this RSS narrative is as “Britishist” as it can get. It was James Mill who periodised Indian history into “Hindu Period, Muslim Period and British period” (Our Pasts-III, NCERT, 2022-23). When Yogi Adityanath, the CM of Uttar Pradesh says that “remembering Mughals is a symbol of slave mentality” he is actually echoing a colonial lie.
Even the historian RC Majumdar who follows Mill’s classification and shares a Hindu-nationalist ideology with the RSS, admits that an idea of “India” or Bharat as a nation “had no application to actual politics till the sixties or the seventies of the nineteenth century.” So the “Hindu” rulers and soldiers were not champions of “India”, and Muslim rulers and soldiers were not “invaders” or “occupiers”. (RC Majumdar, Three Phases of India’s Struggle for Freedom, p 5, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 196)
The facts show us that battles of the Mughal period were battles between rulers not religions; between kings not communities.
Take a few examples.
At the Battle of Haldighati in 1576, Akbar’s forces were led by his commander-in-chief, Man Singh I of Amber – a Hindu. They clashed with Maharana Pratap’s army which was led by a Muslim named Hakim Khan Sur.
What about Shivaji’s defeat of Afzal Khan? We hear the story that Shivaji was going to meet Khan without any weapons, but his bodyguard persuaded him to carry the famous ‘iron claws’ which he used to kill Khan when the latter attacked. Who was the bodyguard? Rustam Zawan – a Muslim. After Shivaji killed Khan, Khan’s assistant, Krishnaji Bhaskar Kulkarni, a Hindu, tried to kill Shivaji to avenge his master’s death.
The third example is that of Tipu Sultan the ruler of Mysore in the 1700s against the Maratha Army that the British had recruited against Tipu. After the ‘Hindu’ Maratha army ransacked the Sringeri monastery in Mysore at the behest of the British, Tipu Sultan offered his resources for the consecration of the Goddess, and sent gifts for the idol. A Hindu army destroyed a temple, and a Muslim ruler sent money and resources to rebuild it.
Indian nationalism was born against colonial oppression and plunder – against Company Raj not Mughal Raj, and was defined by the unity of diverse religious and caste communities.
Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s assessment of Mughal rule is worth remembering for its accuracy: “With the advent of the Mohammedans, a new synthesis was gradually worked out. Though they did not accept the religion of the Hindus, they made India their home and shared in the common social life of the people – their joys and their sorrows. Through mutual co-operation, a new art and a new culture was (sic) evolved ….” (Subhas Chandra Bose, An Indian Pilgrim: An Unfinished Autobiography, ed. Sisir K Bose, Sugata Bose, Oxford India, 1997, p 15.)
The RSS ideologue Golwalkar in a chapter titled ‘Martyr, Great But Not Ideal’ in his book Bunch Of Thoughts, expressed contempt for the martyrs of India’s freedom struggle, calling them “failures”. He wrote that “such persons are not held up as ideals in our society. We have not looked upon their martyrdom as the highest point of greatness to which men should aspire. For, after all, they failed in achieving their ideal, and failure implies some fatal flaw in them.” And he advised Indians that the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the cause of the country’s freedom was not in the “complete national interest.”
Nor was Golwalkar’s attitude towards freedom fighters and martyrs an aberration – it was the norm among the Hindu-supremacist ideologues. The attitude of Hindutva ideologue Savarkar in the face of a life sentence contrasted with that of the revolutionary Bhagat Singh in the face of a death sentence tells us a lot.
Savarkar, imprisoned in the Cellular Jail in the Andamans in 1911, first petitioned the British for early release within months of beginning his 50 year sentence. Then again in 1913 and several times till he was finally transferred to a mainland prison in 1921 before his final release in 1924. His petitions begged the British rulers to let him go in exchange for his loyalty. He promised not only to give up the fight for independence but to work to persuade “misled” young freedom fighters back towards loyalty to the British. While inside jail he also complained that he was not given “better food” and “special treatment” compared to “ordinary prisoners” even though he was categorised as a “D” category prisoner. He declared, “I for one cannot but be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English government which is the foremost condition of that progress.” (AG Noorani, ‘Savarkar’s Mercy Petition, Frontline, April 08, 2005)
In contrast, Bhagat Singh and his comrades on death row for “waging war” on the colonial state, declared boldly “Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist so long as the Indian toiling masses and the natural resources are being exploited by a handful of parasites.” Moreover they demanded that as they were war prisoners, they must be treated as “war prisoners” and thus “we claim to be shot dead instead of to be hanged.” They concluded, “We request and hope that you will very kindly order the military department to send its detachment to perform our execution.” (Bhagat Singh, Lahore Jail, 1931, www.shahidbhagatsingh.org)
It is widely documented that RSS and Hindu Mahasabha did not participate in the freedom struggle and actively collaborated with the British. The RSS and BJP leaders now attempt to slyly “insert” RSS into the freedom struggle canvas.
One such attempt is a recent piece by RSS representative Rakesh Sinha. In his article 'The many socio-cultural and political processes that led to India’s freedom’ published in Indian Express, August 14, 2021, he starts, strangely, with a warning against “the exaggerated glorification of the icons and incidents from the freedom struggle” during the celebrations of the 75th year of Indian independence. Who in fact are these icons and incidents whose “exaggerated glorification” Sinha resents? Knowing the Sangh’s record, including its past hatred for Gandhi and current hatred for Nehru, one can easily guess.
Rakesh Sinha argues that there were many differences among freedom fighters – about violent and non-violent tactics or the use of religious symbolism and imagery in the movement. That is a point many have made before him.
India’s March To Freedom: The Other Dimension, authored Dipankar Bhattacharya and published by the CPIML in July 1997, for instance, observes that “If the ordinary people, workers and peasants, figure in this story of how India won her freedom, they do so only as numbers. Faceless, nameless numbers. ...But they are never shown in action as men and women fighting their own battle with their own vision, dynamism and initiative and trying to become arbiters of their own collective destiny. The working people are thus not only denied their due in the present. They are also denied their role in the past.”
But Rakesh Sinha’s claim that the RSS too was some kind of contrarian stream within the freedom movement, which has been hitherto neglected, is bogus. He writes that “forces like the Forward Bloc and the Indian National Army (INA), both formed by Subhas Chandra Bose, and the RSS, along with the revolutionaries, despite their differences in socio-economic perspectives, campaigned and acted to dethrone the British regime and made violence moral. At the same time, there was counter indoctrination of the masses against their ideology and programmes by the mainstream leadership.” So Sinha tries to slip RSS past our eyes, quietly and without any citations, in the company of those forces like Bose’ INA and Forward Bloc, and Bhagat Singh’s HSRA, as proponents of “violence” as opposed to the mainstream ideology of “non-violence.” This is thoroughly laughable, since the RSS’ only displays of violence were against the Muslims, never against the British! Never did an RSS leader advocate dethroning the British; instead they dissed “anti-Britishism” and advocated anti-Muslim hate and violence instead. And Bose and Bhagat Singh were one with Gandhi and Nehru and Azad on one thing – the absolute, forthright, unequivocal rejection of Hindu-supremacist nationalism and communal politics.
Violence/Non-Violence is in fact a jaded and outdated way of classifying the diverse actors of the freedom struggle. Studying their specific ideological inspirations and their strategies makes more sense than this lazy labelling. And the fault line that matters is not whether they advocated “violence” or “non-violence” – it is whether or not they rejected communal, Hindu-supremacist “nationalism”, and to what extent. There, Bose and Bhagat Singh stand alongside Gandhi and Nehru and Maulana Azad, uncompromisingly secular, with the likes of Tilak and Lajpat Rai flirting with Hindu supremacist ideologies without however giving up their determination to resist British rule. The RSS is quite distinct in its collaboration with the British and its never-flinching anti-Muslim hatred. That is why RSS is the proverbial stone in the lentils – it may hide but even if your eyes miss it, your teeth cannot let you swallow it unnoticed. It is quite indigestible.
Communists In The Freedom Struggle
In the 1921 Ahmedabad Session of Congress, Maulana Hasrat Mohani was the first to introduce a resolution for Purna Swaraj – complete independence. Gandhi and the Congress as a whole did not come to endorse this demand till 1929.
What other significant developments happened in the decade of the 1920s? The Communist Party of India and the RSS both came into being in 1925.
The CPI came into being on the heels of a spurt of working class struggles and emergence of four early communist groups in 1922-23. The enormous galvanising impact of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the immediate factor of Gandhi’s controversial decision to call back the Non Cooperation movement in the wake of the Chauri Chaura incident, together formed the backdrop to the rise of the communist movement.
To quote Arindam Sen from ‘Indian Communists in Freedom Movement: Yesterday and Today’, Arindam Sen, Liberation, October 2005, a popular primer on the role of communists in the freedom struggle:
That the British rulers recognised communists as their most dangerous enemies was evident from a series of conspiracy cases - Peshawar , Kanpur , Meerut and others - hatched against them during 1920s and early 1930s. The most famous was the last named. Panicked at the high tide in workers’ struggles, rapid spread of WPPs, (see below) the revival of mass anti- imperialist movement provoked by the Simon Commission, the revolutionary activities of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, and the coming closer of communists and a section of the nationalist leadership, the government struck back in 1929 with a chain of repressive measures. Most important among these were: the Meerut conspiracy case, the Public Safety Bill and Trade Disputes Bill, and the prosecution of and death sentences to Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. In March 1929, 31 labour leaders (including 3 Englishmen) from Calcutta , Bombay , and other parts of the country were rounded up. They were brought to Meerut for the conspiracy case. The accused communists made very good use of the courtroom for the spread of their ideology, aims and objectives. The British move to drive a wedge between communists and nationalist leaders also proved futile. Nehru, Gandhi and many others visited the Meerut jail while the accused communists also sent messages to the satyagrahis in different jails supporting their just struggles for political status. From the dock communists vigorously exposed the bankruptcy and hypocrisy of British rule in India and their ‘civilised’ legal system. Not only did workers all over the world launch agitations against the trial and conviction, even men like Romain Rolland and Prof. Albert Einstein raised their voices in protest against the trial.
In contrast to those within Congress pushing for Purna Swaraj, and the communists and other revolutionaries pushing for liberation from colonial rule as well as socio-economic transformation, the RSS has nothing whatsoever to show in terms of participation in the freedom struggle.
The Kakori Martyrs – Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, Rajender Lahiri and Roshan Singh – were deeply distressed while on death row by the attempts to spread communal poison by the “Shuddhi” movement run by Hindus to “purify” Muslims and reconvert them to Hinduism, and the “Tableegh” movement to propagate Islam in competition with Shuddhi. Three days prior to his hanging on December 19, 1927, Ashfaq’s last letter was smuggled out of Faizabad prison. In that letter, he appealed to Hindus and Muslims, “Live harmoniously and be united. Otherwise, you will be responsible for the plight of the country and you will be held responsible for the slavery of India.” He penned a couplet: “Yeh jhagre aur bakhere metkar aa-pass mein mil jaao/Abas tafreeq hai tum-me ye Hindu aur Musalman ki” – Leave these quarrels behind, close your ranks/Strange are your distinctions of Hindu and Muslim”. (Source: http://revolutionarybhagatsingh.blogspot.com)
It is well known that Netaji Bose set up the Azad Hind Fauj to offer an armed challenge to the British colonial rule. While Bose can be criticised for allying with Japan and fascist Germany, it is undeniable that he was secular and against Hindu-supremacist politics.
In a speech he gave as Congress president on 14 June, 1938, Bose specifically opposed the idea of turning India into a “Hindu Raj”: “We hear voices of Hindu Raj, these are useless thoughts. Do the communal organisations solve any of the problems confronted by the working class? Do any such organisations have any answer to unemployment and poverty?” (Sugata Bose in interview with Karan Thapar, ‘‘If Netaji Had Been Alive No One Would Have Dared to Issue Calls for Genocide’, The Wire)
In his essay ‘Free India and Her Problems’ (August 1942), Bose wrote that it was the British who had set Hindus against Muslims, and that communal tension would go when the British went. He envisioned a state where “religious and cultural freedom for individuals and groups” should be guaranteed and no “state-religion” would be adopted.
The trial of the Azad Hind Fauj leaders Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurubaksh Singh Dhillon, Abdul Rashid, Shinghara Singh, Fateh Khan and Captain Malik Munawar Khan Awan (Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs who led the resistance army together) itself proved to be a great inspiration for anti-colonial unity and a rebuff to communal politics.
In contrast, Savarkar as Hindu Mahasabha President recruited for the British Army during World War II:
“So far as India’s defence is concerned, Hindudom must ally unhesitatingly, in a spirit of responsive co-operation, with the war effort of the Indian government in so far as it is consistent with the Hindu interests, by joining the Army, Navy and the Aerial forces in as large a number as possible and by securing an entry into all ordnance, ammunition and war craft factories…Hindu Mahasabhaites must, therefore, rouse Hindus especially in the provinces of Bengal and Assam as effectively as possible to enter the military forces of all arms without losing a single minute.” (V.D. Savarkar, Samagra Savarkar Wangmaya: Hindu Rashtra Darshan, vol. 6, Maharashtra Prantik Hindusabha, Poona, 1963, p. 460.)
Another Hindu Mahasabha bigot and current Sangh hero Syama Prasad Mookerjee was the Finance Minister of Bengal and the second most senior minister in the government after Bengal’s Prime Minister, Fazlul Haq from the Muslim League. Both the League and Mahasabha – fierce rivals playing communal politics – participated in the British war effort. When Congress elected representatives resigned in support of the Quit India movement, representatives from Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League refused to resign. Mookerjee on July 26, 1942, wrote to the British governor of Bengal, John Herbert, promised to act sternly against “Anybody who, during the war, plans to stir up mass feelings, resulting in internal disturbances or insecurity, must be resisted by any government that may function for the time being.” (Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Leaves from a Dairy, Oxford University Press, p. 179)
On 14 August 1947, the RSS English organ Organiser denigrated the national tricolour in the following words: “The people who have come to power by the kick of fate may give in our hands the Tricolour but it will never be respected and owned by Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country.”
An extremely interesting story lies behind the designing of the national tricolour on the same day, the eve of independence, by 28-year-old Surayya Tyabji and her husband Badruddin Tyabji.
Their daughter Laila Tyabji writes that a couple of months before independence, at Nehru’s request, her father Badruddin Tyabji “set up a Flag Committee headed by Rajendra Prasad, and sent letters to all the art schools asking them to prepare designs. Hundreds came in, all quite ghastly. Most of them heavily influenced by the British national emblem, except that elephants and tigers, or deer and swans replaced the lion and unicorn on either side of the British crown. The crown itself was replaced by a lotus or kalash or something similar.” As Nehru and everyone for desperate and time flew by, her “parents had this brainwave of the lions and chakra on top of the Ashoka column. (They both loved the sculpture and ethos of that period). So, my mother drew a graphic version and the printing press at the Viceregal Lodge (now Rashtrapati Niwas) made some impressions and everyone loved it. Of course, the four lions (Lion Capital of Ashoka) have been our emblem ever since.” (‘How the Tricolour and Lion Emblem Really Came to Be: A first-hand account of how the national emblem was designed’, Laila Tyabji, The Wire) Now, sadly, the Modi regime has chosen to adorn the new Parliament building with a version of the emblem that replaces Ashoka’s majestic and peaceful lions with snarling lions with bared fangs.
Soon after they designed the national emblem, Surayya and Badruddin together came up with the design for what is today India’s flag: modifying Pingali Venkayya’s design of the Congress tricolour flag, replacing the charkha with the same Ashoka chakra.
Laila writes, “My father watched that first flag – sewn under my mother’s supervision by Edde Tailors & Drapers in Connaught Place – go up over Raisina Hill.” This loving personal involvement and attention to detail is what makes the national tricolour special. In Laila’s words, “Despite the scars of Partition, there was a unity and sharing. The struggle for freedom had bound very diverse people together. People connected then to a broader identity – Indianness rather than caste or community.”
Modi had declared 14 August as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day in a blatant attempt to blame Pakistan and Muslim for “partition horrors” and incite a hateful urge amongst Hindus to reenact those horrors on Muslims today. Evidence of these hateful preparations can be seen in the manner in which large rallies are being allowed in Haryana and Delhi unchecked, in which leaders of BJP and allied radical Hindu-supremacist outfits call for genocide of Muslims; and Hindu-supremacist online gangs “auction” Muslim women journalists online.
In the wake of partition and independence, the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha stoked hatred towards Gandhi, blaming him for partition – it is this hatred that radicalised Godse and led him to shoot Gandhi dead. Now under Modi, Gandhi is reduced to an icon for “Swacch” toilets, and it is Nehru who is hated and vilified for partition, falsely claiming that Patel was not in favour of partition. In fact, it was Patel who first agreed to Mountbatten’s proposal of Partition.
In his presidential address at the All India Hindu Mahasabha convention in Karnavati (Ahmedabad) in 1937, Savarkar declared, “India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogeneous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main; the Hindus and the Moslems, in India.” (Samagra Savarkar Vangmay- Volume 6, Maharashtra Prantik Hindusabha Publication, 1963-65, Page 296)
Jinnah mooted Pakistan and the Two-Nation Theory only in 1940.
In a secret letter to Viceroy Mountbatten, Mookerjee wrote demanding the partition of Bengal on Hindu-Muslim lines, arguing that “the same logic and arguments applicable to Pakistan apply also to the partition of Bengal.” (Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, S. P. Mookerjee Papers, Subject File No. 139, Mookerjee to Mountbatten, 2 May 1947)
While the Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League drove a wedge between Hindu and Muslim communities, there were many prominent progressive Muslims who passionately campaigned against the Partition proposal.
Foremost among them was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who tried in vain to persuade Patel not to accept the proposal. In India Wins Freedom Azad wrote, “I was also convinced that if the Constitution for free India was framed on this basis and worked honestly for some time, communal doubts and misgivings would soon disappear. The real problems of the country were economic, not communal. The differences related to classes, not to groups. Once the country became free, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs would all realise the real nature of the problems that faced them and communal differences would be resolved. found that Patel was so much in favour of partition that he was hardly prepared even to listen to any other point of view. For over two hours I argued with him. I pointed out that if we accepted partition, we could create a permanent problem for India. Partition would not solve the communal problem but would make it a permanent feature of the country.”
How prescient Maulana Azad was – the RSS, BJP and Modi regime now do indeed seek to make Partition a permanent wound. The foreboding expressed by Azad on July 17 1946 is today dangerously close to coming true: “Muslims would awaken overnight and discover that they have become aliens and foreigners, backward industrially, educationally and economically; they will be left to the mercies of what would become an unadulterated Hindu Raj.”
At the historic All India Independent (Azad) Muslims Conference which began on April 27 1940 in Delhi, newspapers recorded a gathering of not less than 75000 Muslims. Allah Baksh, a prominent leader from Sind, inspired the gathering to reject the Muslim League proposal of Partition. He told a reporter that day, “It is better to put the communalists in a cage so that they may not spread the hymn of hatred between the Hindus and the Muslims.” (Shamsul Islam, Muslims Against Partition, Pharos Media and Publishing Ltd, 2015)
The great Shibli Nomani, founder of the Shibli College at Azamgarh, was a dedicated campaigner for a united India, exposing the politics of the Muslim League. In a poem titled ‘Muslim League’, he satirised the party thus:
It is patronised by the government and popular with the rich
It is the patron of the community - and subservient to the rulers
I asked the League to tell the rulers of our plight
About police high-handedness and court cases
About the sorrow-filled life of the peasants
After listening, League said -
It is my nature to say only nice things to the rulers.
The selfsame could well have been said of the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS!
A host of poems were written in Urdu by Muslims, appealing to Hindus and Muslims against Partition. Shamim Karhani’s ‘To those who want Pakistan’ asked, “Tell me what does ‘Pakistan’ (land of the holy) mean? Is this land, where we Muslims are, unholy?”
Karhani’s ‘Indian Warriors’ called for a war against communal hatred: “Let the fights over cow and loudspeaker go to hell”. In “hamara Hindostan” Karhani declared “If someone asks the traveler where I’m from; I will proudly say it is Hindostan.” Several of these poems have been collected by Shamsul Islam in his book Muslims Against Partition.
In the 75th year of India’s independence, it is important to collect the writings and documents from both sides of the border, which expressed the pain and anguish and guilt of Partition, so that the people of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh can vow to learn from Partition never to allow communal violence and discrimination and war-mongering to sully the subcontinent again.
(Today, Hindu-supremacist fascists are in power in India, and are busy trying to write themselves into the history of India’s freedom movement; while distorting the role of the movement’s actual key actors. In this feature we examine the trajectory of the two foremost Hindu-supremacist organisations, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, from their birth until India’s freedom and soon after.
The Punjab Hindu Mahasabha was formed in 1909, and the Hindu Mahasabha was formed in 1915. The RSS was formed in 1925. What did these respective formations and their leaders do, when India fought for freedom; when freedom fighters spent long years in prison and sacrificed their lives?
The leaders of the HM and RSS stated their aims quite clearly. So we will rely on their own writings, as well as the assessments of these outfits by other participants in the freedom struggle. - ed/-)
Leaders of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha repeatedly displayed their contempt for the anti-British freedom movement.
Golwalkar Condemning The Freedom Struggle As “Disastrous”
“Anti-Britishism was equated with patriotism and nationalism. This reactionary view has had disastrous effects upon the entire course of the freedom movement, its leaders and the common people”.
- M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts,1996, p. 138
“There are bad results of struggle. The boys became militant after the 1920-21 movement…After 1942, people often started thinking that there was no need to think of the law…”
- Golwalkar on the impact of the Non Co-operation Movement of 1920-21 and Quit India Movement of 1942, Shri Guruji Samagra Darshan, (S.G.S.D.), Vol. IV, p.41
“In 1942 also there was a strong sentiment in the hearts of many. At that time too the routine work of Sangh continued. Sangh decided not to do anything directly.”
- Golwalkar on the Quit India Movement of 1942,
S.G.S.D.,Vol. IV, p.40
Mookerjee refused to resign from the Ministry in Bengal during the Quit India Movement. Not only that, as a Minister in the Bengal Government in 1942, he actively offered help and advice to the British administrators to crush the Quit India Movement. In 1942, he wrote:
“The question is how to combat this movement in Bengal? The administration of the province should be carried out in such a manner that in spite of the best efforts ... this movement will fail to take root in the province.”
“As regards India’s attitude towards England, the struggle between them, if any, should not take place at this juncture. ...Anybody who plans to stir up mass feelings resulting in internal disturbances or insecurity, must be resisted by any Government...” (Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Leaves from a Diary, OUP, 1993, pp 175-190)
Golwalkar wrote that the martyrs were “failures” and asked us to question “whether complete national interest is accomplished by that (martyrdom)?” (Bunch of Thoughts, p. 61-62)
Golwalkar wrote: “there is no doubt that such man who embrace martyrdom are great heroes ...All the same, such persons are not held up as ideals in our society. We have not looked upon their martyrdom as the highest point of greatness to which men should aspire. For, after all, they failed in achieving their ideal, and failure implies some fatal flaw in them…” (Bunch of Thoughts, p. 283.)
VD Savarkar resisted the British long before he joined the Hindu Mahasabha and before was imprisoned. Soon after his re-arrest and trial, when he was taken to the Andamans in 1911, he began pledging loyalty to the British and begging for release in a series of “mercy petitions”. He has the shameful record of writing no less than seven mercy petitions promising to serve the British loyally in exchange for his release.
In a letter dated November 24, 1913, he repeated this petition pleading for release, promising to mend his ways, and become “the staunchest advocate … of loyalty to the Government … where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the Government?”
To obtain his release in January 1924, Savarkar accepted without any compunction the conditions set out in his release order “that he will not engage publicly or privately in any manner of political activities without the consent of Government.”
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said that Savarkar wrote his mercy petitions only because Gandhi advised him to do so. Is this true?
The facts are as follows:
Savarkar submitted seven mercy petitions, the first one in 1911. At the time Gandhi was in South Africa. Gandhi returned to India only in 1915. So he had no contact with Savarkar when the latter wrote his mercy petitions.
In 1920, Gandhiji responded to Savarkar’s younger brother Narayan Rao who had asked for his advice. Gandhiji wrote a letter saying, “It is difficult to advise you. I suggest, however, framing a brief petition setting forth facts of the case, bringing out in clear relief that the fact that the offence committed by your brother was purely political.” ('Absurd to Claim Gandhi Advised Savarkar to Plead for Mercy': Rajmohan Gandhi, Interview with Karan Thapar, The Wire, 19 October 2021) So Gandhiji advised Savarkar to accept his offence but point out that its motive was political rather than criminal. He did not advise Savarkar to beg for mercy!
Historian Rajmohan Gandhi, who is also Gandhiji’s grandson, says, “Rajnath Singh is asking us to believe that a letter that Gandhi writes in January 1920 to a request from the Savarkar brothers should be interpreted as advice given by Gandhi nine years earlier that Savarkar should send a mercy petition. The suggestion is absurd beyond description. It is laughable.” (ibid)
Gandhiji did write in Young India in May 1920 seeking the release of the Savarkar brothers as well as the Ali brothers – Maulana Shaukat Ali and Maulana Mohammed Ali. But he is not “begging for mercy” for them – he is demanding the release of all political prisoners including those with whose ideas and methods he disagreed.
Here, let us consider what opinion two freedom fighters - Gandhiji and Subhash Bose – had about Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha.
In his May 1920 Young India piece, Gandhiji made it clear that while he felt the Savarkar brothers’ imprisonment was unjust, they were not freedom fighters. He wrote, “The Savarkar brothers state unequivocally that they do not desire independence from the British connection. On the contrary, they feel that India’s destiny can be best worked out in association with the British.”
Subhash Bose met Savarkar in June 1940. He wrote about the meeting: “Mr Savarkar seemed to be oblivious of the international situation and was only thinking how Hindus could ...secure military training by entering Britain’s army in India.” He also found that neither Jinnah and Savarkar were interested in the freedom struggle, writing “nothing could be expected either from either the Muslim League or the Hindu Mahasabha.” (Netaji Collected Works, Vol 2, The Indian Struggle)
Syama Prasad Mookerjee, writing in his diary, noted that Subhash Bose told him that if the Hindu Mahasabha tried to build itself as a political body in Bengal, “He [Bose] would see to it, by force if need be, that it was broken before it was really born.” (Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Leaves from a Diary, OUP, 1993)
Journalist Ayush Tiwari tried to verify a quote attributed by Savarkar’s latest biographer Vikram Sampath to Subhash Bose, containing fulsome praise for Savarkar. He traced the quote to Dhananjay Keer’s biography of Savarkar – but Keer provides no source for his quote. As Tiwari adds, “In fact, there is no primary source than can be attributed to this quote.” So Sampath uses an unsourced quote from Keer’s hagiographic account without making any attempt to verify it! As we saw above, Netaji’s own writings carry a very negative assessment of Savarkar and of the Hindu Mahasabha.
Tiwari adds that “It has been a quite old trend to credit Netaji’s struggle to Savarkar. In fact the trend was started by Savarkar himself as he wrote in his ‘Tajasvi Tare’ book, published after independence.” (Ayush Tiwari on Twitter https://twitter.com/sighyush/status/1185427762728718337?s=20&t=hLXS6rSbMxqvQrkAjS1o1A)
Journalist Ashutosh Bharadwaj did a fact check on a sensational quote attributed by Sampath to C Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), claiming to have “penned” Savarkar’s 1926 “biography” which had been published under the pseudonym “Chitragupta.” (Ashutosh Bharadwaj, Twitter, https://twitter.com/ashubh/status/ 1449966103992537096?s=20&t=IDP4BnPBVbOdDZzNjd0fpQ)
But this quote was nowhere to be found in Rajaji’s collected works. Bharadwaj finds that Sampath’s “source” for this quote is Hindu Mahabhasha Parva, a book by Savarkar’s brother Babarao Savarkar. There is no primary source for that quote either.
Note that the 1986 reprint of the 1926 biography, published by Veer Savarkar Prakashan, has a preface that clearly states, “Chitragupta is none other than Veer Savarkar.”
Vikram Sampath and Rajnath Singh now seek to somehow manufacture credibility for Savarkar, tainted by his multiple mercy petitions and his communal, pro-British politics. So they claim Gandhi advised him to beg for mercy; that Bose praised him and Rajaji wrote his biography. But the quotes or sentiments attributed to these leaders seem to be fake news produced by Savarkar himself or his brother!
From the time he was freed from prison to the end of his life, it is clear that Savarkar kept the promises he made to the British in his mercy petitions. He never participated in the freedom struggle in any capacity. He wrote his hateful Hindu-supremacist manifesto Hindutva in 1923, and spent his life working solely for Hindu-supremacist politics.
As Bose noted, Savarkar was not interested in supporting the Quit India movement or building any armed resistance to the British (Netaji Collected Works). He was obsessed only with how Hindus could get into the British Army and get training that would help in fighting Muslims!
And can we forget that Savarkar was the mastermind behind the assassination of Gandhi?
While Nathuram Godse was hanged for killing Gandhiji and his brother was jailed for his part in the conspiracy, the mastermind Savarkar escaped punishment, even though a Hindu Mahasabha member Badge turned informer and testified that Apte and Godse met Savarkar, came away with weapons, and that Savarkar blessed the duo telling them “Yashasvi houn ya” (May you be successful and return). Badge added that Apte told him that Savarkar was sure that “Gandhi’s 100 years are up” and so the assassination attempt would be successful. But in the absence of independent corroboration, Savarkar got the benefit of doubt and escaped punishment.
However, Home Minister Sardar Patel was sure of Savarkar’s guilt. In a letter to PM Nehru, dated 27 February 1948, Patel wrote, “It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that [hatched] the conspiracy and saw it through.”
After Savarkar’s death, the Justice Kapur Commission enquiry found additional proof corroborating Badge’s account and confirming that Savarkar was the kingpin of the assassination conspiracy. In its 1969 report the Kapur Commission concluded that “people who were subsequently involved in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi were all congregating sometime or the other at Savarkar Sadan and sometimes had long interviews with Savarkar….All these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group.”
In a letter to Hindu Mahasabha leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee on July 18, 1948, Patel wrote:
“There is no doubt in my mind that the extreme section of the Hindu Mahasabha was involved in the conspiracy [to kill Gandhi]. The activities of the RSS constituted a clear threat to the existence of Government and the State. Our reports show that those activities, despite the ban, have not died down. Indeed, as time has marched on, the RSS circles are becoming more defiant and are indulging in their subversive activities in an increasing measure.” (Letter 64 in Sardar Patel: Select Correspondence1945-1950, volume 2, Navjivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1977, pp. 276-77)
In a letter to Golwalkar in September 1948, Patel reiterated the reason for his decision to ban the RSS:
“All their speeches were full of communal poison. ...As a final result of the poison, the country had to suffer the sacrifice of the invaluable life of Gandhiji. Even an iota of the sympathy of the Government, or of the people, no more remained for the RSS. ...Opposition turned more severe, when the RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji’s death.”
The RSS and BJP venerate Savarkar while their top leaders maintain “physical distance” from Godse. However that distance is narrowing, as the BJP gets more and more brazen and confident. Modi’s decision to field Pragya Thakur as an MP from Bhopal, declaring that “No Hindu can ever be a terrorist” is a case in point. Pragya Thakur was part of the terrorist plots by the Abhinav Bharat (run by Savarkar’s descendants). She openly and repeatedly declares that Godse – the terrorist who assassinated Gandhiji - was a patriot! And while Savarkar may have claimed that he did not bless Godse’s assassination attempt, today the Hindu Mahasabha declares its intention to build Godse temples!
It is clear enough, though, that the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha collaborated with the British and had nothing to do with the Indian freedom struggle. Instead they were involved in communal and terrorist conspiracies – the worst being the assassination of Gandhiji. And today, the same forces collaborate with imperialism and are involved in communal violence and conspiracies to assassinate people like Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh.
On the 10th of May, 1857, the soldiers of the British East India Company at Meerut began the historic uprising against colonial rule. The Company Raj called it the “sepoy mutiny”, but history remembers it as India’s first war of Independence. Indeed, it was the first dawn of an Indian national consciousness: where people in the Indian subcontinent united for the very first time across the divides of religion, caste, community, and language against a common enemy – the colonial Company Raj. It was the wide participation in the Revolt by the peasantry and the artisans which gave it real strength as well as the character of a popular revolt. The peasant rebels attacked moneylenders and some pro-British zamindars, the British-established law courts, revenue offices (tehsils) and police stations.
Today, the Indian PM Modi, true to the Hindu supremacist vision of his organisation the RSS, uses the occasion of the 75th year of Indian Independence to peddle the false notion of thousands of years of Hindu enslavement to “Muslim rule”. The 1857 rupture challenges that false narrative: why, after all, was there never that kind of uprising against Mughal rule?
1857 happened precisely because British rule was so qualitatively different from that of the Mughals or any other previous rulers. The Mughals may have arrived from a different geographical terrain and culture, but their rule was simply not perceived as ‘foreign’. Mughal rule did not involve a huge drain of wealth to other shores; it was no more or less oppressive than that of various Hindu rulers before them. Further, there was no major difference in the lives of ordinary Hindus and converts to Islam. And above all, there simply was no sense of ‘national’ identity – not even a sense of ‘Hindu’ identity. True, some kings who happened to be Hindu, did war with the Mughals, but so did Hindu kings do war with other Hindu kings. There were Hindu generals in the Mughal armies and Muslim generals in Hindu armies. Nowhere in the wars between various rulers was there any evidence that these wars were perceived as wars between nations, let alone religions-as-nations.
In sharp contrast, we find the intellectuals of the 1857 uprising sharply articulating a collective national sense of belonging and ownership over the land – and the need to free the land from the plunderer from afar. The best instance of this, is what can well be called India’s first national song – penned the 1857 revolutionary Azimulla Khan:
This song, sounding fresh and modern even today, identifies the enemy clearly as the colonial ruler who ransacked and plundered the land. The “We” who are declared to be the “owners” of the “beloved Hindostan” are “Hindu-Muslim-Sikh, all our beloved brothers.”
No wonder this clear anti-colonial national consciousness, free from sectarian and communal sentiment, haunted British colonialists throughout their rule over India. Historian Kim A Wagner, author of a book on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre published this year (Jallianwala Bagh: An Empire Of Fear And The Making Of The Amritsar Massacre, Penguin Random House, 2019), observes in his very first chapter that “In the British colonial imagination, the ‘Mutiny’ never ended and in India, the ruling class were surrounded by constant reminders of the potential dangers of ‘native rebellion….the very notion of the ‘Mutiny’ did not refer simply to a historical event as much as a particular colonial outlook - a cause of persistent panic but also a blueprint for maintenance of colonial control in the form of exemplary punishment and indiscriminate violence.”
Just the presence of Muslims distributing sherbet or dancing alongside Hindus in Ram Navami processions in Amritsar in April 1919 were enough to call up the spectre of 1857 where Hindu-Muslim unity had first manifest itself into national anti-colonial sentiment, and cause British administrators of the city to demand military resources like machine guns and troops ready to repeat the slaughter of Indians that followed 1857. How important to remember this in these times when Ram Navami processions have become demonstrations of Hindu-supremacist hate and violence against Muslim homes and mosques!
In May 2022, at Meerut University, wall murals of some of the Muslim leaders of the 1857 uprising – Khan Bahadur Khan Rohilla and Bahadur Shah Zafar – were blackened by Hindu supremacists with the lettering “Not a freedom fighter”.
It was the Rohilla chieftain Khan Bahadur Khan who established Bareilly as a leading centre of the uprising, where Nana Saheb and other leaders could take refuge after the British recaptured Lucknow. After Bareilly, too, was captured by the British, Khan Bahadur Khan escaped to Nepal where the King of Nepal had him captured and turned over to the British. He was sentenced to death and hanged in the Kotwali (Police Station, Dhaka) on 24 February 1860. It is a shame that the followers of the RSS which never participated in the freedom struggle, can insult his memory because of his Muslim identity.
The legacy of 1857 is something that Hindu supremacist politics would like to erase from public memory – a feat that is not so easy to achieve since the legacy survived the ruthless and brutal British attempts to stamp out its memory through oral history narratives, where every village has its own specific memories of that first battle for freedom. Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s poem immortalised how the oral storytellers/singers of Bundelkhand passed on the story of how Rani Lakshmibai died leading the freedom fighters’ army: “bundele harbolon ke munh hamne suni kahani thi – ki khoob ladi mardani vo to jhansi vali rani thi.”
And it is impossible to erase Muslims from the story of 1857: they are to be found among every layer of the freedom fighters – from kings to commoners to the intellectuals.
The 1857 uprising had forged a strong unity amongst Hindus and Muslims alike, and it took more than 7 decades of British machinations to disrupt that unity. The rebels of 1857 established a Court of Administration consisting of ten members six from the army and four civilians with equal representation of Hindus and Muslims. The rebel government abolished taxes on articles of common consumption, and penalized hoarding. Amongst the provisions of its charter was the liquidation of the hated Zamindari system imposed by the British and a call for land to the tiller. All proclamations were issued in popular languages. Hindi and Urdu texts were provided simultaneously. Proclamations were issued jointly in the name of both Hindus and Muslims.
Savarkar’s place in history is, of course, tainted by his advocacy of the two-nation theory, his communal fascist view of Hindu Rashtra, his craven apologies to the British and his role in the murder of Gandhi. This is why even Lal Krishna Advani, writing about Savarkar on 10 May 2007 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the 1857 war of independence, (LK Advani ‘150 yrs of Heroism, via Kala Pani’, Indian Express, May 10, 2007), conceded that “Savarkar’s views on several issues in the latter half of his life were problematic.” However, Advani argued that Savarkar stood redeemed by his 1907 publication - The Indian War of Independence 1857.
Marx and Engels had already chronicled the 1857 uprising as a war for ‘national independence’. Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–98) was the first Indian who wrote a tract (Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind, 1858) recognising 1857 as an “Indian rebellion” not a “mutiny”; however he later wrote another tract seeking to allay the British rage which was concentrated against the Muslims, by showing them that there were “loyal Muslims” in 1857. But, as Biswamoy Pati notes, “Khan’s was perhaps the first Indian viewpoint to be presented that critiqued imperialism and its policies as constituting causes of the Rebellion, and most importantly, locating 1857 as a ‘Rebellion’ (viz. Baghawat).” (The Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: Exploring transgressions, contests and diversities, ed Biswamoy Pati, Routledge 2010).
After Khan, Savarkar’s tract was perhaps the first Indian to reject the term ‘mutiny’ and call 1857 a ‘war of Independence’, and as such, for the Gadar Party, for Bhagat Singh and Madame Cama, and others, it was a source of great information and inspiration.
But even in this early avatar, we can see Savarkar struggling to reconcile his Hindu supremacist view of history with the actual facts of history, and specifically with the Hindu-Muslim unity that suffused the 1857 uprising.
It is true that the book devotes several pages to recounting the deeds of heroic Muslim patriots and warriors – any book on 1857 could hardly avoid doing so. But Savarkar, in his attempts to reconcile the facts of Hindu-Muslim unity against the British in 1857 with his vision of Indian history as a long saga of Indian (Hindu) resistance to ‘outsiders’ and against ‘foreign Muslim rule’, comes up with tortuous, forced explanations. This is a pervasive thread that runs throughout the whole book. In his Author’s Introduction, he writes, “The feeling of hatred against the Mahomedans was just and necessary in the times of Shivaji, but such a feeling would be unjust and foolish if nursed now…” (The Indian War of Independence: 1857, Rajdhani Granthagar, New Delhi 1970, p IX-X)
Here is yet another passage where Savarkar ties himself in knots over the question of Hindus’ relationship with Muslims and Muslims’ place in the nation: “He (Nana Sahib) also felt that the meaning of “Hindusthan” was thereafter the united nation of the adherents of Islam as well as Hinduism. As long as the Mahomedans lived in India in the capacity of alien rulers, so long, to be willing to live with them like brothers was to acknowledge national weakness…..after a struggle of centuries, Hindu sovereignty had defeated the rulership of the Mahomedans…It was no national shame to join hands with Mahomedans then, but it would, on the contrary, be an act of generosity….Their present relation was one not of rulers and ruled, foreigner and native, but simply that of brothers with the one difference between them of religion alone….” (1857, p 75-76)
None of the leaders of 1857, even the Hindu ones, seem to have needed to offer such defensive explanations for Hindu-Muslim unity. It is Savarkar, not the leaders of 1857, whose imagination is obsessed with a mythical ‘past hatred’, and who therefore is hard put to reconcile it with the historical fact of 1857’s anti-colonial unity.
What is the source of Savarkar’s discomfort? It arises from a theoretical confusion – from a tendency to conflate religion with nation. His first chapter title says it all – “Swadharma and Swaraj”, in which he asks, “In what other history is the principle of love of one’s religion and love of one’s country manifested more nobly than in ours?” He makes no mention whatsoever of colonialism and its impact on the lives of peasantry or common people; the horrors of British rule, for him were all about the humiliation of “foreign” rule.
And foreignness is also much to do with religion - he asserts that for “orientals”, “Swaraj without Swadharma is despicable and Swadharma without Swaraj is powerless.” (1857, p 9-10). Savarkar strives to read back his theory of religious nationalism into 1857, and that is what blinds him from perceiving the true significance and content of 1857. Savarkar’s comment that to live like brothers with Muslims was “national weakness” shows that he bought into the orientalist theory that the Hindus were “weak and effeminate” because they did for the most part live like brothers with Muslims. Full of his imaginary vision of “Hindu-sthan” (a term he uses in this early work well as the later ones), Savarkar is unable to see the Hindostan envisioned by Azimullah and the warriors of 1857.
Savarkar is able to accommodate 1857 in his Hindu-supremacist historic schema by making it seem like a temporary truce, fancifully decreed by the motherland. Describing five days of the 1857 war, he writes, “These five days will be ever memorable in the history of Hindusthan for yet another reason. Because these five days proclaimed…the end for the time being at any rate of the continuous fight between Hindus and Mahomedans, dating from the invasion of Mahmud of Ghazni. …Bharatmata who was, in times past, freed from Mahomedan yoke by Shivaji, Pratap Singh, Chhatrasal, Pratapaditya, Guru Gobind Singh and Mahadaji Scindia – that Bharatmata gave the sacred mandate that day, ‘Henceforward you are equal and brothers; I am equally mother of you both.’…” (1857, p 126)
He also feels compelled to offer a contorted apologia for the restoration of Bahadur Shah Zafar to the throne of Delhi: “…the Mogul dynasty of old was not chosen by the people of the land. It was thrust upon India by sheer force…by a powerful pack of alien adventurers and native self-seekers…It was not this throne that was restored to Bahadur Shah Zafar today…it would have been in vain that the blood of hundreds of Hindu martys had been shed in the three or four centuries preceding. …For more than five centuries the Hindu civilization had been fighting a defensive war against foreign encroachment on its birthrights. …the conqueror was conquered and India was again free, the blot of slavery and defeat being wiped off. Hindus again were masters of the land of the Hindus…” (1857, p 283-84)
Savarkar in his work on 1857 documented the heroic battles and sacrifices of Muslims. Yet, he went on later to argue for an India purged of Muslims just as Hitler had purged Germany of Jews. In 1944 Savarkar told American journalist Tom Treanor that Muslims in India should be treated “as Negroes are in the US” – i.e segregated, prevented from access to ‘white’ spaces on buses, schools and other public spaces, deprived of voting rights, and other civil rights.
The vision of the 1857 warriors was as far removed from Sarvarkar’s as can be. They were not fighting merely for a restoration of the old order of kings and princes: they were drawing up a blueprint of a new society in which peasants and people from the various oppressed and marginalised castes would have dignity and recognition.
When the 1857 fighters held power, what did their rule look like? Talmiz Khaldun, in his essay ‘The Great Rebellion’, (The 1857 Rebellion, ed Biswamoy Pati, New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2007), writes that the Mughal ruler was in essence a constitutional monarch alone. The revolutionary democratic nature of the uprising is clear from the measures adopted by its Court (its highest decision making body in Delhi). Khaldun observed: “Necessity forced the Court to heavy and arbitrary taxation. This cannot be denied, though, that the incidence of taxation fell almost entirely on the classes which could pay. Tax measures left the man-in-the-street untouched. On the contrary, the Court tried to give him relief. It passed orders for liquidating the zamindari system and giving proprietory right to the actual tiller. It is evident from the orders passed by the Court that it had intended to overhaul the system of revenue assessment. Its authority was, however, too short-lived to accomplish the task.”
Kunwar Singh was born in Jagdispur of the Shahabad (now Bhojpur) District of Bihar to a landed family. Remarkably, he led the armed uprising of 1857 at the age of 80, not caring for his failing health. Oral history maintains that he said he had been waiting for the uprising, and was sorry only that it had come when he was so old. He was an expert in guerilla warfare, baffling the British forces with his military tactics and expelling them from Shahabad on 23 April 1858. He died a few days after – but only after having routed the East India Company troops.
Bhojpuri folk songs commemorate him thus:
Ab chhod re firangiya hamar deswa ! Lutpat kaile tuhun, majwa udaile kailas, des par julum jor. sahar gaon luti, phunki, dihiat firangiya, suni suni Kunwar ke hridaya me lagal agiya! Ab chhod re firangiya hamar deswa!
(Now quit our country oh Britisher! For you have looted us, enjoyed the luxuries of our country and oppressed our countrymen. You have looted, destroyed and burnt our cities and villages. Kunwar’s heart burns to know all this. Now quit our country oh Britisher!)
Kunwar Singh’s correspondence with 1857 leader from Jehanabad Qazi Zulfikar Ali show clearly that they were comrades and the best of friends. In these letters dated 1856 they discuss plans to march to Meerut – even before the uprising broke out in 1857. In the letters, they plan to divide the freedom fighters’ army into two wings, one under the command of Kunwar Singh while the other under Zulfiqar’s command. (https://www.heritagetimes.in/in-1856-babu-kunwar-singh-)
On 23 April 2022 however, Home Minister Amit Shah attended an event organised by the BJP at Jagdishpur, with the clear intention of pushing a communal rather than an anti-colonial narrative. The same BJP is erecting a statue of 1857 traitor Dumraon Maharaj to whom the British gave a large portion of Babu Kunwar Singh’s property as a reward after the latter’s death! BJP cannot claim to revere both traitors and martyrs of the freedom struggle: both Dumraon Maharaj and Kunwar Singh; both Godse and Gandhi!
Ironically, on the same day that Amit Shah was garlanding a statue of Kunwar Singh, the district administration had locked Kunwar Singh’s grand daughter-in-law into her home to prevent her being able to raise the issue of the police and administration’s complicity in the cover-up of the recent murder of Kunwar Singh’s great grandson Bablu Singh.
Maulvi Ahmadullah of Faizabad was an outstanding leader of the 1857 uprising. British officer Thomas Seaton described him as “A man of great abilities, of undaunted courage, of stern determination, and by far the best soldier among the rebels.” G. B. Malleson, another British officer who wrote a history of the 1857 uprising, wrote that “The Maulvi was a remarkable person. His name was Ahmadullah and his native place was Faizabad in Oudh. In person, he was tall, lean and muscular, with large deep eyes, beetle brows, a high aquiline nose, and lantern jaws. It is beyond doubt that behind the conspiracy of 1857 revolt, the Maulvi’s brain and efforts were significant. Distribution of bread during the campaigns, Chapati Movement, was actually his brainchild.”
Malleson paid this tribute to the Maulvi Ahmadullah on recording his death in battle: “If a patriot is a man who plots and fights for independence, wrongfully destroyed, for his native country, then most certainly, the Maulvi was a true patriot.”
It is fitting that in Ayodhya where the RSS and BJP fascists demolished the 16th century Babri Masjid, the five acres of land allotted by the Supreme Court to the Muslims is being used to build a complex named after Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah Faizabadi, comprising a mosque, hospital, museum, research centre and community kitchen for the poor. The Muslims have wisely chosen to answer an act of hate and a verdict that benefited the hateful and violent aggressor with a decision to create structures that will serve all the people of Faizabad and Ayodhya, and honour the memory of the first war of independence in which Muslims and Hindus unitedly laid the foundations of India.
Historian Shashank Sinha notes that “While the creation of a new district of Santhal Parganas (after the brutal suppression of the Santhal Hul or rebellion of 1855–56) did give some respite to the Santhals of the immediate region, their brethren in Hazaribagh and Manbhum (which also formed a part of the Hul) did not get any ameliorative benefits.” As a result the Santhals in these regions joined the 1857 uprising to settle accounts with moneylenders, and acted jointly with the soldiers to attack feudal forces who were collaborators of the British.
Sinha notes that “The Santhals continued their activities even after the defeat of the sepoys at the Battle of Chatra. Around 10,000 people burnt a thana (police station), looted Esmea Chatti (at Hazaribagh) and attempted to cut off communications between Hazaribagh and Ranchi.14 Later, a group plundered Gomea and burnt government build- ings and records. Like the Santhals, the dispossessed Bhuiya Tikaits, in the north of Hazaribagh district, saw in the 1857 disturbances an opportunity to recover their lands from old purchasers.”
Sinha cautions: “In areas such as Hazaribagh, Singhbhum and Palamau where tribals participated, they defied stereotypical imagings. Besides being mobile, one witnesses adivasis uniting with non-adi- vasis and regional elites to fight against their local enemies and/or imperialist forces.”
(‘1857 and the adivasis of Chotanagpur’, Shashank S Sinha, The Great Rebellion, pp 16-31)
(Excerpted from the chapter by B. Rama Chandra Reddy in The Great Rebellion).
It is often mistakenly assumed that the 1857 uprising was confined to North India. In fact, the fire spread all the way to Southern India.
Reddy notes that “The immediate precursor to the Great Uprising was a mutiny on 28 February 1857 of the ‘native’ sepoys of Vizianagaram belonging to the First Regiment ‘native’ Infantry.”
On 17 July 1857, two rebels, Turabaz Khan and Moulvi Allauddin, led an attack on the British residency at Hyderabad. They were supported by a ‘crowd’ of 5,000 people, including the Rohillas and the civil population. Then again, about a month later in Cuddapah, on 28 August 1857, one Sheik Peer Shah tried to ‘incite’ the ‘native’ officers and men of the 30th Regiment ‘native’ Infantry.
Korukonda Subba Reddy, who belonged to the Konda Reddy tribe and was the hill chief of Koratur village situated on the banks of the River Godavari led a protracted guerilla war, forcing the British troops to follow them into the malaria-prone hill regions. On 7 October 1858, the tribal rebel leaders Korukonda Subba Reddy and Korla Setharamaiah were finally hanged at the village of Buttaya Gudem. Korla Venkata Subba Reddy and Guruguntla Kommi Reddy suffered a similar fate at the village of Polavaram; and Korukonda Tummi Reddy was hanged at Tudigunta.
According to oral tradition, the dead body of Korukonda Subba Reddy was kept on display in an iron cage, later termed the ‘Subba Reddy Sanchi’ (bag), and was left hanging for a long time by the British for public viewing in order to create terror in the people’s minds about the fate of a rebel.
Uprisings were also seen in the Gudem tribal area (Vizagapatnam district).
(The sections on Azeezun Bai and Begum Hazrat Mahal are excerpted from the chapter by Lata Singh in The Great Rebellion).
Most of the accounts mention how Azeezun used to be on horseback in male attire decorated with medals, armed with a brace of pistols as she joined the Rebellion.
Azeezun lived in the Lurkee Mahil, in Oomrao Begum’s house in Kanpur. Her mother was a courtesan in Lucknow. Azeezun’s mother died when she was very young and she was brought up by a courtesan in Lucknow.So Azeezun must have left the city of Lucknow and settled in Kanpur. ...one of the probable reasons for Azeezun going to Kanpur may have been her strong passion for independence. She probably did not want to stay under someone’s patronage, being the kind of person that she was, as is reflected in her role in the 1857 Rebellion.
Azeezun was very close to the sepoys of the 2nd Cavalry, who visited her house. She was particularly close to the sepoy Shamsuddin Khan of the 2nd Cavalry. Shamsuddin played a very active role in the 1857 Rebellion in Kanpur. Meetings of rebels would take place in his house to work out plans for the Rebellion. Shamsuddin visited Azeezun frequently.
Besides the fact that Azeezun, who had been known to both Nana Sahib and Azimullah Khan, and whose house had been the meeting point of sepoys, she was looked upon as one of the key conspirators in the 1857 Rebellion. It seems that she was aware that the Rebellion in Kanpur was planned for 4 June 1857. Her role is seen as that of informer and messenger. Some accounts also mention that Azeezun had formed a group of women, who fearlessly went around cheering the men in arms, attending to their wounds and distributing arms and ammunition.
According to Nanak Chand, ‘it shows great daring in Azeezun that she is always armed and present in the batteries owing to her attachment to the cavalry, and she takes her favourites among them aside and entertains them with milk etc. on the public road’. Another eyewitness wrote that ‘it was always possible to see her, armed with pistols in spite of the heavy fire, in the battery, amongst her friends, the cavalrymen of the 2nd regiment, for whom she cooked and sang’.
Although this chapter discusses the role of Azeezun in the 1857 Rebellion, there are bound to be hundreds of stories about the role of these women in the Rebellion, but most of them seem to have gone unrecorded. There are unsubstantiated accounts of girls taking to the streets in a battle with British soldiers. Kothas (houses of courtesans) became centres of conspiracy, and many of these women joined in the Rebellion of 1857. Their role is documented as covert but generous financiers of the action. These women, although patently non-combatants, were penalized for their alleged instigation of and pecuniary assistance to the rebels. The British officials were aware that their kothas were meeting points for the rebels, which were looked upon with suspicion as places of political conspiracy. In fact, their role in the Rebellion can best be judged from the ferocity of the British retribution that was directed against them. There was large-scale appropriation of their property. In Lucknow, the centre of courtesans, the British, after quelling the Rebellion of 1857, had turned their fury against the powerful elite. Their names were on the lists of property confiscated by British officials for their proven involvement in the siege and the Rebellion against colonial rule in 1857.
Begum Hazrat Mahal emerged as an important political figures who began her profession as a courtesan. She married the Awadh Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, and when the latter was exiled, she agreed to the suggestion by the freedom fighters that she crown her minor son Birjis Qadr and name herself as regent. Interestingly, the other Begums were approached before her, but none agreed to crown their sons as king, fearing the repercussions of such an action. After a long siege, Lucknow was recaptured by the British, forcing Hazrat Mahal to retreat in 1858. She refused to accept any kind of favours and allowances offered by the British rulers. She spent the remaining years of her life in Nepal.
(Excerpted from ‘Upsurge In South’, N Rajendran, Frontline, June 2007)
In what is now Tamil Nadu, as in other parts of India, the earliest expressions of opposition to British rule took the form of localised rebellions and uprisings. Chief among these was the revolt of the Palayakkarars (Poligars) against the East India Company. The notable Poligars who raised the banner of revolt deep south in the Madras Presidency were Puli Thevar, Veera Pandiya Kattabomman and the Marudu brothers of Sivaganga. There were two major campaigns undertaken by the British against the Poligars in the late 18th century.
Ghulam Ghouse and Sheikh Mannu, two activists, were arrested in February 1858 for pasting wall posters “of a highly treasonable character”, that is, in favour of the 1857 Revolt, and urging the people of Madras to rise against the British.
Coastal regions such as Madras and Chingleput (Chengelpet) and interior areas such as Coimbatore were considered “disturbed” during the 1857 Revolt, according to reports of the period. In Thanjavur in southern Tamil Nadu, a revolutionary by name Sheikh Ibraham was apprehended in March 1858 and convicted on charges of sedition.
Similarly, in North Arcot, in anticipation of the Revolt of 1857, plans and secret meetings were held for organising a war against the British, from as early as January 1857. It is on record that one Syed Kussa Mahomed Augurzah Hussain held talks in this connection with the zamindars of Punganur (in Chittoor district, now in Andhra Pradesh) and Vellore. Syed Kussa was apprehended by the British in March 1857 and a security was demanded of him.
In 1857, the 18th Regiment of the British army was quartered at Vellore. Some sepoys of the Regiment revolted in November 1858. In the armed struggle, Captain Hart and Jailor Stafford were killed. The Sessions Judge of Chittoor tried a sepoy of the Regiment on charges of wilful killing and sentenced him to death.
In Salem, the news of the start of the 1857 Revolt was met with much commotion as it was rumoured that the patriotic army would march to the area soon. On the evening of Saturday, August 1, 1857, a crowd consisting of a large number of weavers assembled on Putnul Street near the house of one Ayyam Permala Chary, saying that the Indian soldiers would be coming and that the British flag would fall. Hyder, a thana peon, told the assembled people that “about this time of the day, a flag (of India) will have been hoisted at Madras”.
During the revolt, a sanyasi called Mulbagalu Swamy in Bhavani, an industrial town near Coimbatore, started preaching that British rule should be brought to an end. “Let all the Europeans be destroyed and the rule of Nanasahib Peshwa prevail,” he would tell his devotees during his daily puja. He was finally apprehended at Bhavani by the British and brought to Coimbatore.
Chengelpet became a hotbed of secret gatherings and revolutionary activities in the early period of the outbreak of the Revolt. Sultan Bakhsh went from Madras to Chengelpet in July 1857 to help organise the anti-British uprising there in cooperation with his local associates, Aruanagiry and Krishna, two leaders who were already leading a revolt in the area.
On July 31, an uprising took place in the Chengelpet area. The movement started spreading. On August 8, 1857, the Magistrate of Chengelpet informed the Government of Madras about this serious insurgency.
(Excerpted from ‘Impact Of The Revolt Of 1857 In South India’, Shumais U, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 77 (2016), pp. 410-417)
Hindu and Muslim religious leaders also played important role in the revolt in the Madras Presidency. Gulam Ghose and Sheikh Mannu arrested from Madras city were sentenced to transportation, Sheikh Ibrahim from Thanjavur in March 1858, three Bengali fakirs, Narasimha Das, Damodar Das, and Nirguna Das in August 1857, Baldev Rao from Salem in October 1857, Mulbagu Swami arrested near Coimbatore were some of the religious leaders arrested from different parts of Madras Presidency in connection with the revolt.
K N Panikar argues the Mappilas of Malabar resisted against the landlords and British through out the colonial period and the main reason was agrarian greivences and the religion played as inspiration for oppressed Mappila peasantry. Eight Mappilas were arrested at Ponmalla Village in Ernad Taluk for singing a ballad praising the martyrs of 1843 outbreak and calling for the overthrow of British rule in India.
In September 1857 at Thalassery or Tellichery, another Mappila named Vanji Kadavath Kunji Mayan was arrested for giving a speech on the revolt in North India and the scarcity of rice in Malabar. Kunji Mayan died of diarrhoea at a Trichinopoly Jail hospital.
The colonial rulers in the Malabar used laws like the ‘Moplah Outrages Act’ or ‘Moplah War Knifes Act’ of 1854 to racially profile the Mappila community as a particularly criminal and dangerous one. They tried to show that these Mappila rebels were not really political rebels at all, but were ‘fanatics’ or madmen due to their community background.
