The story of Independence, and the parts that never made it into the forty minutes
When we were younger, we were patriotic, but only for two days in a year. We would stand in rows at assembly, sing the national anthem, then the national song, then salute the flag, then wait in line for our samosa and jalebi. Then back to class, sitting and talking to friends because the teachers weren’t around that day. Then home, and sleep.
But how much of the real story do we know, even today? Or are we just doing the same thing every year?
A Company, Not a Crown
The biggest misconception everybody has is that India was ruled by the British Empire. Part of that is true, but it isn’t the full story. For most of it, India was not ruled by the Crown in Britain at all. It was ruled by a trading company by the name of the East India Company, which was given a charter by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600. And there is the first gap in our knowledge, right there. The Company, as it was called, was a trading company. Not a government.
It started with factories at Surat in 1613, Madras in 1639, Bombay in 1668, Calcutta in 1690. The beginning of the occupation is the part nobody really talks about.
The Battle of Plassey in 1757 is the one we were taught to remember, and it barely deserves the word. Clive beat Siraj-ud-Daulah in a few hours, and he won it mostly by buying off Mir Jafar beforehand. A bribe, dressed up as a victory. The one that actually mattered came seven years later at the Battle of Buxar, where the Company defeated the combined forces of Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Awadh, and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II.
Then came 1765 and the Treaty of Allahabad, which is where the whole thing quietly turns. The Company was granted the Diwani, which is the right to collect revenue across Bengal, Bihar and Odisha. A trading firm became the tax collector for tens of millions of people. Five years later, an estimated ten million died in the Bengal famine, close to a third of the province, and the revenue collection carried on through it.
That arrangement lasted a century. It ended in 1857, when the revolt at Meerut, Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow and Jhansi frightened London badly enough that Parliament dissolved the Company altogether. The Government of India Act of 1858 handed India directly to the Crown, and Victoria was declared Empress in 1877.
So the British Empire did rule us. Just for the last eighty-nine years of it. Before that, we belonged to a corporation.
Asking Nicely
After this is where India starts fighting back. Though at first, India started asking. Nicely, politely. The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, and for its first twenty years it mostly wrote petitions. Asked, appealed, waited, hoping someone would listen and help.
What changed that was Curzon splitting Bengal in 1905, and the Swadeshi movement that answered it. Foreign cloth burnt in the streets, boycott as an actual weapon.
Then 1919 broke something. The Rowlatt Act let the government jail Indians without trial. And on 13 April, Baisakhi day, a day of joy, a day of celebration, people gathered in a walled garden in Amritsar with one narrow way out. Dyer blocked it and ordered his men to fire. The official count was 379. The Congress put it above a thousand. Either way, the idea that this was a government you could reason with died in that garden.
Thirty Years of Trying Different Answers
Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation movement from 1920. Surrender the titles, the schools, the courts. And then he called the whole thing off in 1922, after a mob at Chauri Chaura burnt a police station with the policemen still inside. Many in his own party never forgave him for it.
The Salt March in 1930. Walking 240 miles to the sea to pick up a handful of salt.
Quit India in August 1942. “Do or die,” and the entire leadership in jail within hours of the words leaving his mouth.
And then the part they skipped in our textbooks. Bose refused the whole method. He raised the INA abroad, and in 1945 three of his officers were put on trial at the Red Fort. A Hindu, Colonel Prem Kumar Sehgal. A Muslim, Major General Shah Nawaz Khan. A Sikh, Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon. Tried together in the same courtroom, which turned the trial into a recruitment drive for the other side.
Many of us remember many things about the independence movement. But how many of us remember “Lal Qile se uthi aawaz: Sehgal, Dhillon, Shahnawaz!”?
In February 1946, twenty thousand sailors of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in Bombay. That’s when the British understood the army wasn’t theirs any more.
Freedom wasn’t one man and one date. It was a fifty-year argument, with many authors, and they didn’t agree with each other.
The Line Nobody Saw
And then it happened, and it happened fast.
The British announced in February 1947 that they were leaving by June 1948, and Mountbatten pulled that forward to August. A lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe, who had never set foot in India, was given about five weeks to draw a line through Punjab and Bengal. The line was finished before independence and published on 17 August, two days after.
So on the night of 14 August, when Nehru stood up and said we had made a tryst with destiny, there were millions of people who did not yet know which country they had woken up in. They found out in the days that followed. On foot, on trains, in columns that stretched for miles. The estimates of how many died vary enormously depending on who is counting, and that itself tells you something about how little anyone was keeping track.
And Gandhi was not in Delhi that night. No ceremony, no speech, no flag. He was in Calcutta, fasting, trying to stop Hindus and Muslims from killing each other. The man we put on the currency spent the first night of freedom trying to stop the country from tearing itself apart
Back to the Assembly Ground
That’s the story nobody handed us at assembly. We got the anthem, the salute, the samosa and the jalebi, and then a free afternoon.
Not the bribe at Plassey. Not the ten million in Bengal. Not the garden in Amritsar with one narrow way out. Not Sehgal, Dhillon and Shahnawaz. Not a lawyer with a pencil and five weeks.
It isn’t that anyone lied to us. It’s that a story this heavy doesn’t fit into forty minutes, so we were given the shape of it and sent back to class.
The trouble is that most of us never went back for the rest.
The Echo
Seventy-nine years on, we have inherited something none of us paid for.
The least we can do is find out what it cost.
Echos Of My Mind
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