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93 pages

English

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Police batons, prison sentences or the hangman's noose-nothing could stop them. They stood up against the biggest colonial empire in the world and all they had was their courage and passion for freedom. Relive the exciting story of our struggle for freedom through the lives of our greatest freedom fighters as they carried the defiantly fluttering tricolor towards a dream called India.

Sujets

Lettres et linguistique

Terrorism

History of Asia

India

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	01 août 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351180821
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Subhadra Sen Gupta

A Flag, a Song and a Pinch of Salt
Freedom Fighters of India
Illustrations by Ravi Ranjan
PUFFIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Foreword: Mission Freedom
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
Abul Kalam Azad
Annie Besant
Subhas Chandra Bose
Bhikaiji Cama
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Aurobindo Ghose
Gopal Krishna Gokhale
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Birsa Munda
Sarojini Naidu
Dadabhai Naoroji
Jawaharlal Nehru
Vallabhbhai Patel
V.O. Chidambaram Pillai
Lajpat Rai
Chakravarti Rajagopalachari
Bhagat Singh
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
Afterword: Mohammed Ali Jinnah & the Partition of India
What Happened and When
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PUFFIN BOOKS
A FLAG, A SONG AND A PINCH OF SALT
Subhadra Sen Gupta was born in Delhi and holds a Masters degree in History. She has been writing since college and has worked as a copywriter in many advertising agencies.
She specializes in historical fiction and non-fiction, travel writing, detective and ghost stories as well as comic strips. She has published over twenty-five books for children and adults, with Puffin, Rupa, Scholastic, HarperCollins, Pratham, India Book House and Ratna Sagar. Three of her books- A Clown for Tenali Rama, Jodh Bai and Twelve O Clock Ghost Stories (Scholastic) have won the White Raven Award at the Bologna Children s Book Fair.
For Ian Baker, the kind of Englishman Indians will always admire. And if you are lucky, he joins your family. Here s to many more arguments over nimbu pani With love.
Mission Freedom
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action-
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
- Rabindranath Tagore
They were all pilgrims who had chosen the long and rocky path towards a dream called freedom. They were ordinary men and women-schoolteachers, lawyers, traders, students, housewives, peasants and craftsmen.
When they marched along the dusty and narrow streets of India s towns and villages, they faced policemen armed with sticks and guns and men on horses carrying spears. They had no protection against the lathi blows or the bullets and their only armour was their spirit of determination and raw courage. They did not fight back or run away. They did not pick up stones or guns, set fires or destroy other people s property. There was no uncontrolled rage and no wish to harm innocent people. They just marched on.
India s long march to independence is the story of these people and their leaders who fought a prolonged battle against the might of the biggest empire in the world. The freedom fighters were able to mobilize millions to join the biggest mass movement the world has ever seen. And what made it one of the greatest freedom struggles in the history of the world was that it was, for the most part, a resolutely non-violent one. It was as if the will power of India s quiet millions finally defeated the empire over which the sun never set.
Our greatest freedom fighters are these forgotten men and women because they put their trust in Mahatma Gandhi s Satyagraha and put their lives on the line for India s freedom. Kazi Nazrul Islam once sang to them:
Battle-weary rebel, I shall embrace peace Only when the wailing of the tortured Is heard no more. Only when the oppressor lays down his sword In the battlefield. Battle-weary rebel, Only then shall I embrace peace.
T HE S EPOYS OF 1857
Ninety years before India finally became independent, the people had risen in a violent uprising that had shaken the hold of the East India Company over its Indian colony. The Great Uprising of 1857 was very different from the nationalist freedom movement. It was an armed uprising and was met with an armed response; the superiority of the British army in arms and organization had finally won them the war. It began with the uprising of the sepoys in the army of the East India Company and drew into it all the people who had grievances against the British. The sepoys were protesting the introduction of a new rifle that was greased with the fat of cows and pigs. The deposed Indian rulers were making a final attempt to reclaim their kingdoms. The zamindars who had lost their ancestral rights to the land wanted them back. Each group had a different motive for joining the uprising.
On 11 May 1857, when the sepoys from Meerut swept into the Red Fort and declared the old Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar their king, no one really knew what they would do next. All they had was their fear that the British were trying to attack their religion and an unclear resentment of their officers. As the rebellion spread across the many army battalions stationed across the Indo-Gangetic plain, it gathered into this whirlwind people making a desperate, final attempt to get back the privileges they had lost to the British.
All the leaders were fighting for their own demands. Begum Hazrat Mahal, wife of the deposed Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh, wanted the kingdom for her son Birjis Qadr. Nana Saheb, the adopted son of the last Maratha Peshwa Baji Rao II, wanted the pension that the British were refusing to give him. Rani Lakshmi Bai wanted the kingdom of Jhansi for her adopted son. There was no common national goal; no one was thinking of the welfare of the common people.
This was the last stand of the moth-eaten, feudal past, distrustful of change, hankering for the old days. Men like Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, suspicious of western civilization, were leading a campaign against the influence of modern education and technology-everything from schools to the railways and telegraphs made them nervous. Zamindars like Kunwar Singh and Beni Madho wanted the return of the old feudal system where they, not the British, could exploit the peasants. Khan Bahadur Khan and Prince Firuz Shah dreamed of the revival of the Mughal Empire. Poor Bahadur Shah, an old pensioner of the British, was probably only trying to stay alive.
Still, they fought with remarkable courage against an opponent better armed and organized. Even the British spoke in admiration of the indomitable spirit of Rani Lakshmi Bai. The sepoys often lacked experienced leaders or a proper battle strategy, but even then for months held on to a large chunk of north India. Sadly, there was no clear vision of the future, and as the objectives of the various leaders were not the same, there was no central leadership with a common plan. One wonders what would have happened if this ragtag force of disorganized warriors had actually managed to defeat the British.
The war of 1857 was not a national revolt as most of India did not join the rebels. The Sikhs, fearful of the revival of the Mughal Empire, stayed loyal to their British officers and Sikh soldiers were inside the Residency in Lucknow facing the siege by the sepoys. Most of the Indian princes offered their help to the East India Company and the land south of the Vindhyas remained peaceful. After the first shock of quick defeats the British reorganized quickly, and with the death of Lakshmi Bai on 17 June 1858, the rebellion was effectively over. It was a cruel, ruthless war with vicious attacks by both sides and the reprisals of the British afterwards were even more brutal.
In the long struggle for independence, the greatest achievement of the Uprising of 1857 lay in opening the minds of people to the idea of freedom. For long Indians had believed the British to be invincible but the sepoys proved them wrong. For the first time Indians realized that the mighty Company Bahadur could be defeated and that the god-like gora sahibs were human, after all. The people who led the uprising became heroes and would inspire freedom fighters in the future, making later leaders like V.D. Savarkar call it India s First War of Independence , despite the lack of the concept of a nation or of what could be called independence .
G ENTLEMEN OF THE C ONGRESS
All that would come with the struggle for freedom that began with the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and a band of freedom fighters who were secular, democratic humanists. The poet Subramania Bharati captured the soul of these freedom fighters the best when he wrote:
All human beings are equal Joy will abound if we but see That we are all one humankind Sound the drum, the message of unity; Proclaim, flourish in love, Proclaim welfare to all mankind on this Our vast and variegated planet.
The biggest difference between the leaders in 1857 and the people who met in Bombay to form the Congress was that these were modern, western educated men-lawyers, teachers, businessmen and social reformers. Many of them like Dadabhai Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale were equally involved in education and social reform. They were not only seeking political progress but were equally keen to modernize society. Over the years the issues that would be taken up included opening schools and colleges with a modern curriculum for both boys and girls; the emancipation of women; a fight against the caste system and untouchability; the rights of peasants and artisans; and religious tolerance. What was being sought was a transformation of society because the leaders understood well that India could not be a truly independent nation without equality, education and freedom from traditions that kept them from thinking as one people.
For the first two decades the Congress was a constitutional organization that met once a year to discuss political reform and the ways in which they could gain more rights for Indians. Their petitions to the government were usually about Indi