Monday Cup Of Links #68 - Amrit Mahotsav Edition

Happy 75th Independence Day! 

I feel this Independence Day much more strongly than I ever have. Researching and writing my novel India House is a primary factor (It is now at 78,000 words). Writing this novel relatively publicly means so many of you wonderful people share with me tidbits that you have collected about Indian history and the Independence struggle. Several of you share your own family history on this topic. I’ve dug up out-of-print books and primary sources to learn about what people have said about a tiny boarding house in London 115 years ago.  

A lot of the things I have learned in this process have been unfortunately obscure. That’s not entirely unexpected, because I’m the kind of person who thrives on knowing things not many people do. But even so, I find so many little stories and many real characters who did such brilliant, self-sacrificing things, but who are unknown outside of their home state at best, and known only to history enthusiasts usually. 

Today let’s round up some of the people I’ve discovered over the past couple of years, who contributed in their own way to the Indian freedom struggle. 

• First off, the government has put out Bharat Ki Kahaani, an audio series of 75 lesser-known heroes of the freedom struggle. Totally recommend. It has Madame Cama in it, one of the people I’m writing a lot about, and Lala Hardayal, someone I hoped would be a pivotal character in this book, but isn’t. He’ll be a big part of the next one, though. That said, it’s crazy the long span of the timeline of this heroism. It makes you realize Indians lived through British rule for several generations, enough that memories of pre-British rule would be effectively and completely erased. And what of the loot of wealth and artifacts for that long? Instead of calling them astronomical numbers, we ought to call them colonial numbers. 

• Now onto our guys. Hemachandra Kanungo Das.
  I’m only really able to obtain sketchy details about this remarkable man, who occupies several chapters of my book. His autobiography is in Bengali, a language I cannot read, let alone from a scanned library copy of an old, old book.
  But what I do know is he was born in 1872, in Midnapore, and joined the Anushilan Samiti at some point. He was incensed, like many Bengalis, after the 1905 Partition of Bengal. When the Carlyle Circular was passed, holding colleges accountable for revolutionary activities of their students, he led a protest along with Sachin Bose, and they designed one of the first flags of India, the Calcutta Flag.
  He then went on to attempt assassinating the Governor of East Bengal, Bampfylde Fuller, along with Barin Ghosh (brother of Aurobindo Ghosh) and several others. All their attempts failed. He realized the technology they had wasn’t sufficient, and sold his property and went to Europe to learn how to conduct a revolution.
  He was mentored by well-known anarchists in Paris, who sponsored his education, and helped him connect with exiles from the Russian Revolution of 1905, who gave him manuals for bomb manufacture.
  He returned a year later, and set up a bomb factory and widely taught revolutionaries all over India what he knew. Bombs he made were used in the failed attempt at assassinating Magistrate Kingsford, a man known for his cruel judgements. This case became known as the famous Alipore Bomb Case, which had major ripples across the revolutionary movement. He along with others received a life term in Kalapani. He was released in 1921. He lived to see India become a free republic, and passed away in 1951, at the ripe old age of 79.
  If you can read Bengali, and like reading old books, please get in touch. 

• VVS Aiyar is another major character in my book who I rarely see mentioned anywhere. He was Savarkar’s trusted deputy in India House (though to be fair, according to everyone’s biography, they were Savarkar’s deputy… but all sources say this guy was it). I hold a special place for him in my heart. He is from Trichy district, where part of my family is from, and so many parts of his story make him seem like a long-lost uncle of mine.
  He was an imposing bear of a man, skilled in martial arts, and who organized children in his village to be physically and mentally skilled. He studied law and then went to Burma for a lucrative job. Eventually he found himself in London, studying for a barristership. And that’s where he came across India House.
  Aiyar was hooked from the get-go and became a very important character. He learned to shoot, translated proscribed material and helped smuggle it illegally into India, unmasked Scotland Yard spies, and finally, when Savarkar was jailed, he worked to get him released, and when that failed, tried to help him escape imprisonment. It didn’t work either. When Savarkar’s family’s property was sealed, his own family feared they would be next.
  His mother, giving in to gossip and public opinion, killed herself. At this point, he was in hiding, and his own family didn’t know where he was. His wife and young daughter moved to Bangalore to keep safe, but when the daughter fell ill, they couldn’t seek treatment out of fear of being found out. The daughter passed away, and her father could not be there, because he was still trying to come to India undetected.
  At this point, he was evading capture by donning various disguises and taking circuitous paths to India. He had given various letters to his friends to send to his family at different times. Each letter had differing information about where he was and what his plans were. He was going to stay in Paris and call his wife to join him soon. No, Paris isn’t right, I’m going to Germany, but you stay home. No no, in Brazil they are offering free land to settlers, please find me a 100 families and I will arrange transport by ship for all of us. And so on.
  What he eventually did was to go to Italy disguised as a Sikh, then became a Parsee businessman who found his way to Aden. In Aden, he became a Turk, and went to Bombay. In Bombay, he switched to the disguise of an Imam and went to Colombo. From Colombo, he took a ship to Calcutta, talking loudly about his various businesses in Bengal. When the ship paused near Cuddalore, he jumped off the ship and went to shore in a fisherman’s dinghy, and then took a bullock cart to Pondicherry, which was then under the French, and joined his other exiled friends, like Subramanya Bharati. Once he was there, he informed the Madras Presidency of his presence in Pondicherry, and finally called his wife to join him. His father came immediately and asked him to waive his right to the family property, so that the British wouldn’t seal it.
  There, he mentored Vanchinathan, who went on to assassinate Collector Arthur Ashe.
  Over time, he became a Gandhian and translated the Thirukkural into English. He remained stuck in Pondicherry, unable to go into English territory for fear of arrest. In 1925, he drowned while trying to save his daughter. 

• When I was looking up the Alipore Bomb Case, I found that the revolutionaries had sustained injuries at different times when experimenting with the bombs. They obviously couldn’t go to the hospital to be treated. Instead, they went to Indumadhab Mallick. Please read the link there, it has great details on his life.
  But the short version: He had degrees in philosophy and physics, and became a lawyer. He then studied medicine and became a qualified doctor. He also invented the icmic cooker, a precursor to the pressure cooker, which graces nearly every Indian household today. And he was also the go-to doctor for the revolutionaries. He unfortunately passed away at the early age of 47, from an infection he contracted during surgery. 

Thoughts on the Independence Movement 75 years after it succeeded, one way or another

Writing fiction about the independence struggle is quite something. It forces you to try imagining things as they were, and that has made me realize all the gaps in our collective image of our freedom fighters

First off, we imagine our fighters as all being old, serious, and unimaginably boring, and somehow strangely godlike. Stop doing that. Imagine them as whole people whose opinions changed over time. Gandhi was nearly fifty when he returned to India and joined the Congress. Savarkar however was 26 when he went to prison. Nehru was just a few years younger. Tilak was ten years older than Gandhi. And Dadabhai Naoroji was 30 years older than Tilak. Subhas Bose was barely a teenager when Savarkar went to prison. Then throw in class differences. Your picture of everyone just changes dramatically. Think about that the next time you say Gandhi and Nehru in the same breath. 

Secondly, back then, being a freedom fighter was not considered a good thing by the general population. The families of Savarkar and VVS Aiyar I’ve mentioned above had to undergo untold miseries from their communities because they went against the British. No one would allow their children to marry a freedom fighter. Imagine the kind of work that had to be done to raise the consciousness of the people against the British. Even the “extremist” leaders like Bipin Pal distanced themselves from people like Savarkar. So if you were a revolutionary who chose violence, you pretty much took it in your stride that you didn’t have too long to live. 

Thirdly…. We’ve come such a long way since then. Just a small example: People would be thrown in jail or kicked out of college for saying Vande Mataram. Now we all say it, sing pop songs with that phrase in it, and even fight about how some people don’t want to say it. 

So say it loud, say it clear, say it as frequently as you want - Vande Mataram!