Author: The Untaught Historian

Stamp #4: Stalin, Mao, Lenin and E.M.S. Namboodiripad on the Streets of Kochi

The Untaught Historian2 Comments

As we drove into Kochi, red flags with the hammer and sickle greeted us almost as soon as we entered the city. My son, whose energy and patience were flagging, suddenly perked up. “Wait!” he said. “Where are we?”

It was like we had entered another alternate universe. My son who had been studying about Indian democracy and who has been exposed to ample anti-communist, anti-China rhetoric through the media was surprised to see Mao smile benignly at him from behind parked vehicles.

Nearly every other lamp post and pillar had him exclaiming in delighted horror. “Isn’t that Hugo Chavez!” he cried, before he spotted Stalin standing guard outside the entrance of a Pay and Park lot. Karl Marx was expected, but Maradona’s smiling face confused all of us and demanded some quick googling to find the connection between Maradona and Communism. Turns out Maradona was an anti-American Leftist.

By the time we reached our hotel room, Kerala’s Communist party propoganda had been so successful that I myself was wondering if I had remembered history correctly. I mean, maybe Stalin wasn’t so bad… and I never knew Mao could look so gentle and kind. I may have misjudged the man.

Over our weekend in Kochi, we could not escape the hammer and sickle at all. And I began to wonder how Communism took hold in Kerala? And why has it survived? Afterall, history has not been kind to Communism. There are 5 nations that call themselves communist today: Cuba, North Korea, China, Laos and Vietnam and I wonder if any of them had Stalin staring sternly at cars entering a pay and park lot.

Communist leaders abroad have always concerned themselves with class struggle and the inequities of industrial economies. Yet despite typical Indian hero worship (parents even name their children after Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev – listen to this interesting podcast about why they do), political thinkers in Kerala were original thinkers. The founding fathers of Kerala’s Communist party, like EMS Namboodiripad, P. Krishna Pillai and A.K. Gopalan, saw socialism and communism as a possible solution to the social inequalities caused by caste, gender and religious discrimination.

EMS Namboodiripad (EMS) came from the highest landowning caste in Kerala. The Namboodiris are the Brahmins and at the time, they were a feudal elite who intermarried with the Nairs (the caste of the monarchs) to dominate society, art, culture, politics and even the economy. While EMS could have led a comfortable life, he was influenced by a rising political awakening across the nation in the 1920s. Like AK Gopalan, his comrade who came from the Nair class, and P. Krishna Pillai, he was inspired by Gandhi’s satyagrahas and joined the Indian National Congress.

But over time, like many other regional political thinkers and actors, EMS and others were increasingly disillusioned by Gandhi’s particular blend of politics and spirituality. While Gandhi might be what was needed to get national independence, Gandhi’s method did not feel practical to the issue of caste discrimination, gender inequality nor did it address the issues of landless peasants. EMS came to see Gandhi as a “Hindu fundamentalist” and yet he also recognised Gandhi as a complex person and had embraced his ideas of simple living.

In 1939, after leaning more and more to the left, first within the Congress party, and then out of it, EMS, Krishna Pillai and AK Gopalan formed the Communist Party in Kerala. In 1956, when Kerala became a state, EMS became its first Chief Minister – the first and only non-Congress chief minister in India at the time.

How had the Communist party become so successful? I think this is because of the grassroots efforts of the Communist party in Kerala. Krishna Pillai, still fondly remembered as a founding father of Communism, died at the age of 42 while hiding from authorities in a little hut. He was bitten by a snake. Although a leader of great repute, his premature death isn’t very surprising because he lived an action packed life. Coming from a poor family and having left home early to make his way in the world, Pillai was uniquely qualified to understand the suffering and the needs of the masses. Everywhere he went his emotional attachment to the cause and his personal interest in the people was evident, and so Pillai became an effective missionary of sorts. He brought Communism to all corners of his state and made an intellectual philosophy a meaningful cause. Of course, the British and the Indian government had concerns about Communists and all their talk of armed revolution, but it is important to note that apart from the Punappra Vayalar uprising against the Diwan of Travancore in 1946, Kerala’s Communists functioned within the India’s democratic multi-party framework and grew increasingly popular because were addressing specific social problems.

So when Kerala became a state in 1956, EMS became the chief minister, because the people in Kerala were familiar with the Communist Party. Those in power in Kerala society trembled because with his arrival came also terrible signs that things were about to change. EMS quickly set about making aggressive agrarian land reforms by capping the amount of land anyone could own and passing ownership of land to tenants who had been working that soil for generations. Although he could not immediately bring these land reform laws into action, eventually it went a long way in redistributing land and opportunity across Kerala.

Unfortunately, he perhaps tried to do too much too soon. His controversial attempts to reform private education to make it more accessible to all, led to vast, mostly peaceful protests led by the Syrian Catholic Church, Nairs and the Congress. In 1959, EMS was forced to resign and Kerala was under President’s rule for a while. He came back to power in the 1960s where he was able to pass more reform laws and today is credited for the state’s high literacy rates.

A curious thing I learnt as I read about EMS and other Communist thinkers in India was how international the Communist movement was. Indian Communist thinkers like M.N. Roy travelled outside India, even meeting Lenin, and helped other countries with their own movements. During the Sino-Indian war in 1962, Communists like EMS remained neutral – choosing to side with neither Mao-led China nor their own nation, India. Isn’t that curious? In the minds of the early Communists what came first – the political ideology or their nation? And what about Indian Communists today?

At any rate, today, nearly 75 years later, from the looks of things Communism is still going strong in Kerala. It bypasses religious differences by being vocally atheistic. Their gods were the faces we saw on the sides of Kochi’s street – Lenin, Maradona, Hugo Chavez, Engels, Marx, EMS, Krishna Pillai and others. Like the hundreds of Hindu gods who smile down at us from prints on the wall, in calendars, wedding invitations and car stickers, they are more or less forgotten in our daily busy-ness, and only remembered in times of crisis or when in need of inspiration.

Stamp Series #3 – Paradesi Synagogue, Kochi

The Untaught Historian4 Comments
Name: Cochin Synagogue (1568-1968)
Date of Issue: 15 Dec 1968
Denomination: 20 nP
Source: India Postage Stamps

Kochi is one of my favourite cities in India. It is just all kinds of beautiful. My son had wanted a city holiday after several holidays in national forests. He wanted people and traffic and shopping. We wanted greenery and water, history and culture. Kochi delivers on all those.

I was particularly interested in Kochi, because in my classes we had been talking about secularism and as I was reading about the subject for class, I learnt about the diverse religious and ethnic communities that formed along the Konkan and Kerala coastline thanks to trade from ancient times.

When I was in school, I always thought of the Muslims arriving in India on horseback, from Central Asia – raiders who became conquerors and eventually settlers. Similarly, I associated Christianity in India with the missionary zeal of 18th-century colonists. But Muslims, Christians and Jews were in India much before that. They had come on ships from the Middle East as merchants and traders interested in spices like pepper and cardamom and luxury goods like ivory, peacocks and teak. Then they stayed on, retaining their individual religious identities for centuries before the invading Central Asians and Europeans. While they were here, they adopted the local language, adopted elements of local cuisine and clothing and surprisingly, elements of social customs like casteism. But more on that later.

On this visit to Kochi, I was keen on visiting at least one of the several synagogues in the area. The Paradesi/Cochin Synagogue was closest to us and so that is where we went.

At the entrance of the synagogue was a little room with paintings that showed the history of the Cochin Jews. I thought the Jews arrived in India with the Europeans but I did a double take on the very first painting. According to the caption, the Jews first arrived in Kochi in 72 AD. 72 AD! (You can see the paintings here). That’s just 72 years after Christ! That is over 100 years before the great Guptas in Pataliputra! The Jews had arrived on trading ships after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Palestine. When they left India in the 1950s and 60s, they would have left this sanctuary of nearly 2000 years.

This is the entrance to the Paradesi Synagogue. The clock tower behind us was added to the synagogue in the 18th century.
In this picture, we see these beautiful white and blue hand painted porcelain tiles that were imported from China in the 18th century. The ceiling is crowded with elegant glass chandeliers imported from Belgium in the 19th century. Everything in the Paradesi Synagogue reminds you that this serviced a trader community that was part of a global marketplace. Source: Wikimedia Commons (photography isn’t allowed inside the temple, so we couldn’t take our own).

The 1968 stamp of Cochin Synagogue was issued to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Jewish temple. It had been built by the Jews who had sought a safe haven after escaping persecution during the Spanish Inquisition in Europe. They had come on Portuguese ships who followed Vasco Da Gama’s route to trade with India. The compound of the synagogue shares a wall with the Kochi royal family’s palace temple and a painting in the museum showed the Hindu Cochin king gifting a crown to the elders of the synagogue, indicating a friendly relationship between ruler and the Paradesi Jewish community. Unlike the Western world, in India, Jews – both Malabari and Paradesi Jews – did not suffer any sort of persecution from other religious groups. Yet, with the arrival of the Paradesi Jews came the pernicious practice of caste and the Paradesi synagogue became the centre stage of a struggle for equality within this tiny community.

I have always associated caste with religion – I thought caste was part of Hinduism, and so the resulting caste-ism was a Hindu problem. Perhaps it is. Perhaps Hinduism institutionalised it and the other religious communities in South Asia found it convenient to adopt it into their own cultures. Over time all religions in the subcontinent practiced a form of casteism within their own communities.

Lower caste converts to Islam, Sikhism and Christianity faced discrimination for centuries even though all three religions preach equality, and even though often people converted to these religions to escape caste discrimination in their Hindu society. The Jews have a long history of trying to escape discrimination. In fact that is why they first arrived in India – seeking refuge from discrimination overseas. But, no community seemed safe from caste and the Jews needed their own Jewish Gandhi to fix endemic discrimination in their community.

Abraham Barak Salem
Source: Jews of Malabar

Abraham Barak Salem was actually known as the Jewish Gandhi – that isn’t a name I made up for him. Born in 1882 in Kochi, Salem was the first Jew to be trained as a lawyer. Inspired by Gandhi’s non-violent methods, Salem joined the Indian nationalist movement. But today Salem is most remembered for his non violent efforts to reform the division within the Jewish community.

For centuries the Cochin Jewish community were split into three groups. The brown skinned Malabari Jews (called the Black Jews) who had come in 72 AD and who were no virtually indistinguishable from the local, the Paradesi Jews (White Jews) who were of European descent and who had come in the mid-15th century, and finally the freed slaves of the Paradesi Jews called the meshuchrarim. Meshuchrarim were slaves of mixed racial descent who had supposedly adopted the religion of their masters. While the Malabari and Paradesi Jews each claimed to be more Jewish than the other, both agreed that the meshuchrarim were not Jewish enough.

Each group was endogamous – which means they only married within their own communities. A Malabari Jew could not marry a Paradesi Jew. Worse, a Paradesi Jew could never marry a meshuchrarim Jew. That would be unthinkable.

Black Jewish Family in Kerala, around the early 20th century. Source: Academic
White Jewish Women around the same time period. Source: Wikimedia Commons

It was a strict unbending social hierarchy. The Paradesi/Cochin Synagogue was for the White Jews. The Malabari Jews had built other synagogues in other parts around Kochi . At the Paradesi Synagogue, the White Jews had rules that enforced the social hierarchy. Meshuchrarim were not allowed to sit on the chairs. They had to sit on the floor at the back, during prayer, and were not to interact with the White Jews. When they died, at first they were not allowed to be buried in the White Jewish Cemetery, but later they made concessions to allow meshuchrarim to be buried against the walls of the cemetery. Caste is simply a hereditary based social hierarchy. Although they arrived with the Paradesi Jews in the 16th century, the meshuchrarim were forever at the bottom of the social hierarchy because they were descendants of slaves. It was a fate they could not escape no matter how hard they tried.

Abraham Barak Salem objected to the discrimination he and his fellow meshuchrarim faced by protesting non-violently outside the temple much like lower caste Indians were doing all over India during the same time. Eventually, the elders in the Paradesi synagogue agreed to make concessions. Meshuchrarim were allowed into the synagogue and could sit on the chairs. Although they received these privileges, it turned out that they did not have very much time to enjoy it.

In 1933, Salem made a trip to Jerusalem. Here he was impressed with the idea of creating a nation state for the Jews. When Israel was created, they opened their doors to Jews from all parts of the world. Aliyah means immigration to Israel and it was the dream of most displaced Jewish communities. When he came back, Salem actively encouraged the local Jewish community to think of moving to Israel.

After Independence, during Partition driven mass migration of Hindus and Muslims, the Jews from across India were also getting ready to leave India. Salem played a key role in Jewish migration. During this time, the divisions between the Jews of Cochin blurred further because, once outside India, the Jews of Indian origin came together in Israel and live in the same neighbourhoods. Differences that seemed so important in Cochin, dissolved when it came to adapting to a new life. In India however, it seems those who stayed back held onto their age-old prejudices.

The Jewish migration from India was not fraught with violence and tragedy. Jewish communities from the Konkan coast, Kerala, and Bengal were excited to return to the homeland, Israel. But upon arrival, many were faced with racial discrimination. Darker-skinned and so long isolated from other Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East, they often had to prove their Jewishness. Some communities like the Bene Israelis were even sent back to India because Israel didn’t recognise them as being actual Jews. They were only allowed to stay if they re-converted to Judaism – an offensive suggestion to many who strongly identified as originally Jewish.

Whenever I dig deep into history I am always confronted by examples of one group of humans tries to clamber to the top at the expense of another group. The winning group tries to secure their position by making up reasons to justify their position and it is almost always linked to birth. “I was born better than you”. The observation depresses me.

Recently, in my classroom discussions on the Preamble and equality, we looked at caste and religious discrimination. We looked at news stories of sectarian violence or legal cases where the fundamental right to practice religion freely was challenged. Several 11-year-olds asked questions to understand both sides of the argument and then seemed confused about why this was even an issue. Children are a constant reminder to me that prejudice is learnt and not natural. Their constant bemusement when they hear stories of violence, prejudice, war and loss always fills me with happiness because their confusion tells me that we are fundamentally compassionate beings.

Some people grew up holding tightly onto childlike compassion. People like Salem are not in our textbook but they found other like-minded people to stand with and challenge the status quo. And while the intensity of activism always intimidates me, what would we do without the activist who points at something that is off and makes a big racket about it?

It is impossible to expect a textbook to be filled with stories of men and women like Abraham Barak Salem but it should pay some attention to the story of the Jews in India. It is a story instructive of how Indian society’s diversity was not just a result of invasion, violence and exploitation. People came to India for safety and found it here. They came to make money, not by looting, but by doing business. They have contributed to our culture, architecture, food and music in ways that we cannot keep track of.

Resources:

(I have hyperlinked most of my sources in the blog above. However, below are some links to videos and websites that I didn’t really use in the blog but I found gave me a rounder picture of the community and culture)

  1. Discover the world of Indian Jewish cuisine
  2. The Jews of Malabar blog
  3. On Aliyah and Life in Israel
  4. Museum of the Jewish People
  5. Biography of Abraham Barak Salem

The Stamp Series# 2 – Dr Rajendra Prasad Tests the Extent of Presidential Authority

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Name: Dr. Rajendra Prasad – President of India 1950-1962
Date of Issue: 13 May 1962
Denomination: 15 nP
Source: India Postage Stamps

The other week, I was introducing my Civics class to the Indian Parliamentary system. Everyone understood the idea of a bicameral legislature. They understood the role of the Prime Minister and his/her cabinet. But when we came to the President, there was general bemusement. One young boy said, “So, basically, the President is powerless, right?” He said disparagingly and I felt the spirits of all previous Presidents of India – dead and alive – flinch in unison. Dr Rajendra Prasad, our very first President of India, himself, struggled with coming to terms with the limited role of the President in the Indian polity.

Dr Rajendra Prasad was a well-respected lawyer, journalist, scholar, freedom fighter and member of the Constituent Assembly. Born in 1884 to a modest Kayastha family in Bihar, he had trained as a lawyer. In his thirties, he was recruited by Gandhi to work in the campaign to support indigo peasants in Bihar. Over time, he rose through the ranks of the party to become President of the Indian National Congress.

Photo Source: Anandabazar

Upon Independence, Rajendra Prasad and Nehru became an odd couple at the top of the new Indian government. Rajendra Prasad was a traditional Hindu and had spent much of his career campaigning for Hindi to be the official national language. He also suggested that all other Indian languages shift to the Devanagari script as nearly all Indian languages found their root in Sanskrit. He had grown up in a middle-class Indian family and had his early schooling in a traditional elementary school before moving to Patna and Calcutta to pursue higher education. In other words, Rajendra Prasad was more son of the soil than Eton and Cambridge educated Nehru. His upbringing and life experience coloured his perspective and philosophy on the role of the government just as much as Nehru’s Western education, privileged upbringing and life experience had influenced Nehru’s world view on the same subjects.

Naturally, Prasad and Nehru did not see eye to eye on things. Rajendra Prasad wanted Republic Day (26 January 1950) to be rescheduled because it was not an auspicious day. The rational and scientifically inclined Nehru was mortified at the suggestion. Their biggest differences were centred around each man’s understanding of secularism. To Prasad, the traditional Hindu, a secular government’s role was to allow each individual to enjoy the freedom to practice his/her religion without state interference. To Nehru, the secular government’s role was like a benevolent father figure who protected all communities, especially minorities, and who tried to repair inequities within communities.

These differences led to a small constitutional crisis when they faced off over the Hindu Code Bill. While everyone agreed Indian society had issues concerning women’s rights and caste discrimination, they all had different opinions on how these inequities should be addressed. Nehru, Prasad and other members of the Constituent Assembly had wanted to create a Uniform Civil Code, but practical issues of how to address minority concerns and preserve cultural identities of various religious groups crippled the process. In the end, Nehru narrowed his focus on the Hindu personal laws.

RK Laxman on Nehru and the Hindu Code Bill

At the time of Independence, nearly 80% of India considered themselves Hindu and yet it was hard to pinpoint what being Hindu really meant. Nehru intended for the Hindu Code Bill to unite this diverse religious community. With Ambedkar, he saw an urgent need for reform and standardisation of personal laws concerning marriage, divorce, adoption, and inheritance. Being a Hindu himself, he thought himself more entitled to reform Hindu personal laws than address the similar issues concerning the Muslim and Christian communities in India.

Rajendra Prasad, ever the traditional Hindu, was vocally opposed to government interference in Hindu personal laws. He wrote his objections in various long and detailed notes to Nehru. While both Prasad and Nehru were secular, Prasad felt that the government should support all religions equally but should not interfere with any single communities’ laws and practices. If Nehru did want to reform Hindu society, then why not extend that reform to all communities within India through a Unified Civil Code? Why single out Hindu society?

His other objection was that the Constituent Assembly that would have passed the Hindu Code Bill into law, had been elected to write the Constitution. They were not there to reform a religious community’s social problems. If Nehru and Ambedkar wanted to do this the right way, senior members of traditional Hindu communities should be included in the process. (Of course, Nehru and Ambedkar could not do that because it would have led nowhere. Traditional Hindus were against several proposed laws including a Hindu woman’s right to inherit her father’s property, or preventing Hindu men from having more than one wife) Nehru had no qualms about being utterly undemocratic about the process because he felt the ends justified the means in this case. And so, they engaged in a wonderfully polite but serious struggle for power. Rajendra Prasad felt that as President he was duty-bound to do something. And as first President, he was going to have to figure out just what a President could do when he disagreed with the Government.

When he realised Nehru was not going to change his mind, Rajendra Prasad threatened to send the bill back to Parliament and take actions “with the dictates of [his] own conscience” as he wrote to Nehru. Nehru was alarmed. He wrote back telling Rajendra Prasad that his actions would raise uncomfortable questions about the “President’s authority and powers to challenge the decisions of the Government and the Parliament” – uncomfortable questions whose answers might disappoint the President.

As they went back and forth, debating whether a President had the right to interfere in the work of the legislature, Prasad and Nehru asked the Attorney General to share his opinion. India’s first Attorney General, M.C. Setalvad referred to Article 74 in the Constitution that stated that “there shall be a Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at the head to aid and advise the President in the exercise of his functions”. Based on his optimistic interpretation of the Article, Rajendra Prasad felt that he had the right to stop legislation even without referring to the Council of Ministers. But Setalvad pointed out that the role of the President was equivalent to the role of the King or Queen in Britain. They were just figureheads and “the President was bound to act in accordance with the aid and advice tendered to him by the Council of Ministers.” In short, Rajendra Prasad could not act independently and block the Hindu Code Bill because he lacked the support of the Council of Ministers. The President soon realised he only had the power to express his objections but not actually do anything about them.

And so, after his futile attempts to exercise some power, Rajendra Prasad receded into the background, signing the dotted line when needed, and playing the role of dignified state elder, figurehead and rubber stamp. In 1977 and ‘ 79, Amendments 42 and 44 clarified that the President could only act on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers and that the President can send the advice back for reconsideration only once. If the Council of Ministers sends the same advice back again, then the President was obliged to accept it.

Photo Source: The Print

It turned out that my student was right. Presidents in India do not have very much power when it comes to legislation. Of course, throughout our short history post Independence, Presidents have tried to push and expand their power and ability to affect change when they felt they needed to with varying degrees of success.

Two years before leaving office, Rajendra Prasad gave a speech at the inauguration of the Indian Law College where he said “It is generally believed (that) like the Sovereign of Great Britain, the President of India is also a constitutional head… I should like, to be studied and investigated, the extent to which the powers and functions of the President differ from those of the Sovereign of Great Britain…” This exhortation to the students came before Indira Gandhi pushed for Amendments 42 and 44 that strictly defined the powers and functions of the President. Rajendra Prasad, who died in 1964, was spared seeing the final nail in the coffin of Presidential power and independence. But, Rajendra Prasad set an example for future Presidents to act according to their conscience, push back against the Government and honour their oath “to protect, preserve and defend the Constitution” and for that, in addition to all his contributions as a founding father of the nation, he is remembered and honoured by history.

Resources:

About Rajendra Prasad:

  1. Rajendra Prasad on Wikipedia
  2. Eminent Parliamentarian Series: Rajendra Prasad (A Collection of essays on Rajendra Prasad)

About Nehru vs Rajendra Prasad and Hindu Code Bill and Article 74:

  1. Kaun Banayega Rashtrapati, by Ramchandra Guha in the Indian Express Archives
  2. Clash between President Dr Prasad and PM Nehru over Hindu Code Bill most serious, by Prabhu Chawla in India Today (1987)
  3. Disagreement between Rajendra Prasad and Nehru over Hindu code bills, India Today
  4. Letters to the Editor: Difference between Nehru and Rajendra Prasad, Anandabazaar (Translate to English)
  5. Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code: A Victory of Symbol over Substance? by Reba Som, Modern Asian Studies (on Jstor)
  6. Why We Need An Executive President, Rajinder Puri in The Outlook
  7. Whether the aid and advice theory has any relevance in the Constitution of India? by Mahitha Reddy in Judicere
  8. Mr Badal’s Blunder in Uday India

The Stamp Series #1: The National Flag

The Untaught Historian2 Comments
Name: Jai Hind 15 Aug 1947, National Flag
Date of Issue: 21 Nov 1947
Denomination: 3.5 Annas
Source: India Postage Stamps

The first stamp issued by Independent India, quite unsurprisingly, commemorated the Indian National Flag or Tiranga. The flag had been formally adopted on July 22, 1947 – just weeks before India’s Independence Day.

It comprised of three colours: saffron for strength and courage, white with a blue Dharma Chakra for peace and truth, and green for fertility, growth and auspiciousness, I know this from my primary school days. But what I did not know was that the flag that we see now has its own story of evolution.

Name: Pingali Venkaiah
Date of Issue: 12 Aug 2009
Denomination: Rs 5
Source: India Postage Stamps

The story of the flag begins with Pingala Venkaiah, the designer of the Indian flag and freedom fighter. In the early decades of the 20th century, Pingala had realised that the Indian freedom struggle needed to unite around a flag for a united and free India. Jhanda Pingala, as he was called, collated 30 potential designs for the Indian flag and published these in a book. In 1921, Gandhi accepted one of Pingala’s designs, and with a some minor alterations, India had a national flag.

Originally Pingala’s flag had only two colours – saffron to represent the Hindus, and green to represent the Muslim community. It also included Gandhi’s charkha (or spinning wheel) that served as a symbol for self-reliance, determination and perseverance. Later a third stripe – white – was added for both aesthetic and symbolic reasons.

Pingala’s design with some alterations (c.1921)
Source: Wikipedia

Once adopted by the Congress, the flag began to be used everywhere. It became so popular, apparently, C. Rajagopalachari, close friend and colleague of Gandhi, wrote to Gandhi complaining that Congress workers were forcing temples and mosques to replace their traditional flags and decorations with the new tricolour flag. Gandhi promptly addressed the issue in his magazine. He wrote that “as the author of the idea of a national flag and its makeup… I have felt grieved how the flag has been often abused.”. He made it clear that the flag had “no place [in] religious processions, or temples or religious gatherings”.

Gandhi and thoughtful leaders like Rajaji understood the need for balance and the dangers of being overly nationalistic, but in his response, Gandhi also claimed authorship over the very idea of a national flag and its makeup.

Given his personal interest in the flag, I was surprised to read that Gandhi had been unhappy with the National flag post Independence. He had two complaints – one, the new design replaced the heavily symbolic charkha with Ashoka’s Dharma Chakra. and second, the new flag did not include the Union Jack.

Gandhi’s vision for
the Indian flag for Independent India. Source: Wikipedia

Nehru and other members of the Constituent Assembly could not agree with Gandhi’s point of view. The charkha had been on the Indian National Congress flag. India was going to become a multi-party democracy. Shouldn’t the national flag be independent of political affiliation?

Gandhi could not get over it. “I must say that, if the Flag of the Indian Union will not embody the emblem of the Charkha, I will refuse to salute that flag. ” he said in 1947.

Gandhi’s second complaint had been that the Constituent Assembly had not granted Mountbatten’s request to include the Union Jack in the National Flag. Gandhi felt that not giving into Mountbatten’s request was ungenerous and unfriendly to the British. After all, he argued, we had achieved our independence, and including the Union Jack in the corner of the flag “would be no betrayal of India”.

This episode reminded me of how ordinarily human Gandhi could be. We all have experienced this sort of crankiness – when you have worked hard on something and are pleased with the outcome but then someone comes in with an uninvited piece of “constructive” feedback, or worse, hijacks your entire project!

Nehru and the Constituent Assembly were firm. The Union Jack on the national flag seemed too deferential a tone for a fully independent nation. And so, despite Gandhi’s voluble objections, we ended up with our current national flag.

Flag hoisting on Indian Independence Day, Aug 15 1947.
Source: News Nation

The symbolism of the flag is significant. It has the power to unite an immensely diverse people. Somehow, knowing the story of the flag has led me to hold it in higher regard because it was the product of sincere and thoughtful deliberation and debate. There was an element of sacred idealism in its creation. May that idealism represented by our flag keep our nation on the right path through the years.

Resources:

  1. Pingali Venkayya: Visit Bhatlapenumarru to know about the Flag Designer of India. Pendown – Art, Travel and Culture Blog
  2. The National Flag as Symbol and Substance, as Gandhi Saw it. The Hindustan Times
  3. Mahatma Gandhi wanted the Union Jack on India’s national flag, said he will not salute it if Charkha is replaced by Ashoka Chakra. OpIndia

New Project: Indian History Through Stamps

The Untaught Historian3 Comments

Recently, while on holiday, we saw a small little post office operating out of a garage in a village near B.R. Hills. My son wanted to see if they sold post cards, like they used to during my childhood but the postal worker was amused. No one came by asking for postcards any more. He pulled out an envelope from his drawer and laid out strips of colourful stamps. You can choose a stamp, he said. No one I know uses the postal system to communicate personal messages anymore. Most of these stamps that the postman in B.R. Hills showed us will probably go unused. It is a real pity.

Lal Pratap Singh was a leader in the Indian
Rebellion in 1857.He is forgotten by most
people, but not by the Indian Postal Service.
P.C – India Post

Independent India’s postal service began issuing stamps from 1947. Since then, India has produced stamps covering a marvellous range of themes. We have stamps celebrating institutions, art, architecture and music, flora and fauna as well as accomplished individuals throughout our country’s history. This year, I would like to go through the catalogue of stamps and write stories inspired by these stamps.

I will write stories inspired by stamps released every year by the India Post, starting from 1947. But since I cannot cover every single stamp released, I will focus on the ones that catch my eye or that have a story that I hadn’t known earlier. I am excited to see where it will lead us.

The first set of pieces will be on the very first stamp released by Independent India – The National Flag.

Orchha – The Hidden Kingdom

The Untaught Historian7 Comments
Orchha lies tucked away in the Vindyas, often overlooked by the average tourist. The shikhara of the Chaturbhuja Temple dominates the skyline in this tiny town that is packed with places to see and admire. (PC – District Administration of Niwari’s official website)

Driving through Orchha is like driving through the set of an Indiana Jones movie. Overgrown forests, ancient buildings, and then suddenly you are in a typical Indian small town, where a man on a motorcycle and a comically large bundle of mats behind him tries to squeeze past you at top speed while also confidently driving head-on into a large delivery van. The van and our SUV both came to a respectful halt, to let this brave Orchha warrior through.

This small inconspicuous sign on a largely deserted single-lane highway assured us that we were not lost.

We had not heard of Orchha till a few hours before we actually got there. It had come on our way from Nagpur to Jhansi and we stopped after quickly googling for places worth seeing en route. While overlooked now, Orchha used to be an important Bundela kingdom. While Orchha itself had been established in the mid 16th century by Raja Rudra Pratap, the most famous Orchha king was Raja Bir Singh Deo.

Since we hadn’t really planned the visit, we didn’t have the time the town truly deserves. In the hour or two that we spent there, we took a guided tour around Jahangir Mahal and the Raja Mahal, within the fort. Jahangir Mahal is a beautiful haveli style palace; a fusion of Rajput and Islamic architecture. The guide told us that Bir Singh Deo had built it as a gesture of friendship and loyalty towards the emperor. When it was complete, he invited him for a sleepover. Jahangir spent one night and never returned. And since then, the palace had remained vacant in honor of Jahangir (and perhaps subsequent Mughal rulers).

Lest you think that Raja Bir Singh was simply a vacant sycophant trying to curry favour with his Mughal overlord, our guide pointed out the subtle symbols of Rajput pride and resistance that lay hidden in the design of the palace. “Look”, he said, as we entered the palace through a narrow door. “Our backs are to the West. Jahangir and his men had to turn their backs on Mecca in order to come in. That was a great insult” At another point, he showed us a Ganesha carved into the tall doorway. “Jahangir and his men had to walk under Ganeshji to come into the palace.” According to the guide, Jahangir noted these insults and refused to stay more than a night. “This was the most expensive and elaborately planned insult in the world,” my son said wryly on our way out. According to the guide, the whole palace with its lapiz lazuli stone work, beautiful murals, trellises, hanging balconies and fountains cost a whopping 700 crore rupees in those days.

While we didn’t have a chance to visit her palace, Parveen Rai’s palace has murals of the famed courtesan and her dasis entertaining their patron and shows how much respect and power a courtesan wielded in court, given the proximity of her palace to the king’s own abode as well as the size and splendour of the place. (PC – Heritage India Magazine)

Outside Jahangir palace, our guide pointed out a large mahal in the valley below. It was the home of the famous courtesan Praveen Rai. She lived during Akbar’s time and was famous for her beauty and wit. When Akbar heard about her, he ordered the then chief of Orchha Raja Indrajit Singh to send his favourite courtesan over to him. Our guide said that Indrajit loved Praveen Rai and did not intend to obey the order, but Praveen insisted on going. When Akbar asked her to perform, Praveen Rai said very prettily, “Vinit Rai Praveen ki, suniye sah sujan. Juthi patar bhakat hain, bari, bayas, swan” or ‘Oh you great and wise! Hear this plea of Rai Praveen. Only someone from a low caste, barber or scavengers would eat from another person’s used plate.’ Ouch! Poor Akbar sent her back to dear Indrajit.

While we were there, the guide and my family were the only people in Jahangir Palace, till a short while later a small group of college boys tumbled in and spent much of their time posing for selfies. The guide told me that prior to Covid, Orchha was very popular and was mostly visited by foreign tourists. Covid had changed all that. Most domestic travellers don’t know very much about Orchha, which is overshadowed by her neighbours Gwalior and Jhansi.

Today, the settlements just outside of Orchha are empty and look worn out. The fields looked uncared for and the sides of the roads still seemed to be used as open toilets for young children. Time has not been kind to the region. We realised that kings and queens of little kingdoms such as this had played a major role to sustain local economies. While my son might view the extravagance of such kings as wasteful, such kings had created thousands and thousands of jobs. Orchha is scattered with temples, chhattris, mansions and palaces. Each had employed thousands of artisans during their construction. Think of the entire supply chain involved in the building and maintenance of such places! Aristocrats and royalty must have provided business and employment to thousands of farmers, florists, weavers, tailors, blacksmiths, jewellers, cooks, maids and manservants, caretakers of horses and camels, etc. I remember reading that in yesteryears kings would start massive public works projects during famines to provide employment and serve meals to labourers who might have starved otherwise, a practice that the British did not take up and which led to disastrous famines in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

This visit also helped me understand Mughal’s governance system better. Akbar had centralised Mughal government and had created a coherent and solid framework for governance that allowed Mughals to stay in power for 150 years. Apart from Afghan, Persian and Indo-Islamic members of his court, Akbar had wanted to include Hindu Rajput kings into Mughal nobility. He allowed Rajput chiefs and their families to receive a high rank, pay and the promise that they could continue their customs, rituals and beliefs. They continued to have control over their ancestral lands and were rewarded with more land if they pleased the emperor with their services. In exchange, Rajput chiefs had to publicly pledge their allegiance to the emperor. They had to offer active military service when called upon and willingly give their daughters in marriage to the emperor or his princes when asked to. The Mughal emperor was paramount, and he rewarded loyalty. It completely explains Bir Singh Deo’s desire to curry favour with Jahangir.

Here is a portrait of Raja Bir Singh, armed with shield and dagger, painted in the early 17th century. (P.C. Christie’s)

Bir Singh Deo occupied a prestigious position in Jahangir’s court because of the services he had provided the emperor. Before Jahangir became emperor, he once decided to flex his muscles and got into a conflict with his father. According the Jahangir’s memoirs, he hired a man to kill Abu Fazl. The man he hired was Orchha’s Bir Singh Deo. Bir Singh cut off Abu Fazl’s head and brought it to the young prince. When he came to the throne, Jahangir gave Bir Singh the title Maharaja and must have bestowed many other gifts of land and wealth. In the political world at that time, Bir Singh Deo and other ambitious Rajputs could only safeguard their positions by betting on the right guy in a conflict and then expressing loyalty through grand gestures like enormous palaces or gifts of women or personally chopping off someone’s head for their boss. What a tough, complicated world that was!

Orchha is beautiful. The murals are fading and many bits of lapis lazuli are missing from the walls. Lovers and friends have etched their names into door frames and walls and some floors are covered with a mosaic of bat droppings, and yet it remains beautiful despite the neglect. I have not given it justice and would highly recommend checking out some of these blogs if you plan on visiting.

Resources:

Rediscovering Bhagat Singh (Part 2): The Hunger Strike

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Jatindra Nath Das (1904-1929) Source: Wikimedia Commons

On September 13, 1929, 25 year old Jatindra Nath Das died after an epic 61 day fast. He had joined Bhagat Singh’s hunger strike against the unequal treatment of Indian political prisoners compared to European prisoners. Jatin Das had built bombs for the HSRA and had been arrested with the rest of his revolutionary comrades in the Lahore Conspiracy Case (regarding the assassination of Saunders). When he had first heard of Bhagat Singh’s idea of a hunger strike, he had been doubtful about the strategy. He had warned other enthusiastic strikers that “inching toward death in a hunger strike is far more difficult than death in a gun fight or on the gallows,” It wasn’t that Jatin Das lacked commitment. He was practical. “It is better not to join the strike than suffer a premature withdrawal,” he had warned. But when his comrades assured him of their determination to see this through, Jatin Das joined the hunger strike demanding that Indian political prisoners receive the same dignity and rights that are afforded to a petty European criminal in Indian jails. As his health declined and the public grew increasingly concerned about his well being, the British panicked. They tried all kinds of tricks to force the hunger strikers to break their fast. They filled the drinking water pots with milk, hoping to trick thirsty strikers into drinking milk. They placed tasty foods outside their cells and tried to tempt the strikers to give in. And eventually they tried to force feed these men, phyiscally holding them down and pushing food into them. Jatin Das struggled all of these torments. He fell sick when food that they had tried to force into him got lodged in his lungs. When he died, 61 days after he first started his fast, an entire nation stirred and the British quaked.

The archival video below shows a river of men in white flowing through the streets of Lahore as part of Jatin Das’s funeral procession. Subhash Chandra Bose had sent train fare to transport Jatin’s body from Lahore, where he had died, to his home in Bengal. The revolutionaries who had hoped to make the British tremble through planned violence, had achieved greater success through their adoption of Gandhi’s weapon of choice – fasting.

The video shows “fanatical hordes” (as the video calls them) peacefully and respectfully accompany Jatindranath Das’s body to the railway station for his final journey home. Source: British Pathe

This hunger strike that captured the attention of a nation had been Bhagat Singh’s idea. During his brief stint in prison in 1927, Bhagat Singh had noticed petty European criminals received better food and treatment in jails compared to Indian political prisoners. Surely there was a difference in quality between a European thief or murderer and an Indian political prisoner who was in prison for upholding their ideals and values.

But how do you protest effectively in prison? Bhagat Singh took a page out of Gandhi’s handbook. He decided on going on a hunger strike until changes were made. He found a way to sneak the message across to his comrade B.K. Dutt before he was sent to another jails. Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt spread the word in their respective jails. Word spread rapidly and political prisoners across the nation began to join the strike. Some like Jatin Das lost their lives. Some, like Baba Sohan Singh who was close to being released after serving a sentence of 15 years, joined the strike and were punished by having their sentences extended.

Bhagat Singh, as usual, put pen to paper. He wrote to the home member of the Government of India explaining why the strikers were protesting and what their demands were.

We, as political prisoners, should be given better diet and the standard of our diet should at least be the same as that of European prisoners… We shall not be forced to do any hard and undignified labour at all… books… along with writing materials should be allowed to us without restriction. Toilet necessities… better clothing… at least one standard daily paper should be supplied to every political prisoner.

from Without Fear by Kuldip Nayar

Bhagat Singh’s demands had been simple and clear. He was asking for dignity, respect and fairness. According to Nayar, Bhagat Singh had been concerned that the message of revolution was being misunderstood by the youth of India. He did not want revolution to be linked to the romance of guns, bombs and dramatic acts of violence. It was about sacrifice for a greater purpose. Bhagat Singh showed through his choices that if violence did not do the trick, then revolutionaries should change their ways and choose whatever path would lead them most expediently to their goal. Like Jatin Das, Bhagat Singh seemed aware that hunger strikes were far more difficult than dashing around with guns and bombs. But his body and voice were the only tools available to him in jail. He and all his fellow hunger strikers reminded India that even though Indians were trapped in circumstance – either in an actual jail or in a society ruled by outsiders – every individual was not only capable of bringing change but had a duty to try.

This message was not lost on Indians across the subcontinent. The efforts of Bhagat Singh, Jatin Das and so many other men and women in jails across India captured the interest of Indian media. Regional language newspapers like Sandhya, Bande Matram, Karma Yogin, Sanjibani, etc and English language papers like The Tribune reported the story and got the revolutionaries message to the common man. The strikers had gained so much sympathy from the public that the whole nation celebrated 21 June, 1929 as Bhagat Singh Day. He had achieved celebrity status during his own life time using methods that had made Gandhi, a man whom he felt was constantly chasing a Utopia at the cost of the present realities of the land, a household name.

Credit: The Tribune

It wasn’t just public sympathy and admiration that Bhagat Singh received. Mainstream names like Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah were openly ackowledging their support for the revolutionaries while carefully adding a disclaimer that while they did not support their violent methods, they admired the dedication, devotion and courage that these young men were displaying.

In his autobiography, Nehru who had visited the strikers in Lahore Central Jail described Bhagat Singh as having an “attractive, intellectual face, remarkably calm and peaceful.” He noticed that his faced did not seem to have “any anger in it” and that he spoke very gently. However, Nehru admits that anyone who had been fasting for over a month “will look spiritual and gentle”.

Despite frequent criticisms of Gandhi’s apparently weak efforts to save Bhagat Singh and his comrades, Gandhi would state his disagreement with the revolutionaries’ methods while also openly acknowledging their sincerity and courage. He did try to convince Viceroy Irwing to commute the sentence but obviously failed. Later, he published Sukhdev’s open letter to Gandhi that he had sent before his execution and wrote a gentle and reasonable response giving Sukhdev’s words the due respect they deserved. This attitude of mutual respect that all these various freedom fighters had for each other makes me marvel at the quality of people who were leading our country at that time. Something we can all learn from – how to respectfully disagree.

When we look at the details of Bhagat Singh’s short life, I realised that school textbooks have done Bhagat Singh and his fellow revolutionaries a great disservice. While it is certainly true that the revolutionaries took to political assassinations and violence, there was more to their story than that. Perhaps they were misguided in their methods. Yet, they were not attached to violence. They were attached to their cause – a free India. When violence did not help, they turned to non-violence. It is true that they did not turn to it for the idealistic reasons that led Gandhi. They turned to it for more practical reasons. Yet, in that change in tactic, what I realised was that they were devoid of ego and blind and violent hatred for the enemy.

In his statement during the Legislative Assembly Bombing case, Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt had said the following:

We hold human life sacred beyond words, and would sooner lay down our own lives in the service of humanity than injure anyone else.

They had meant it when they spoke of their willingness to lay down their lives in the service of humanity. Leaders say it all the time; very few actually mean it. These young men in their early twenties lived by their words. There is good reason why Bhagat Singh features in our textbooks. But he is not there because he was willing to pick up a gun for his country. He is part of the narrative because he and his revolutionary brothers sincerely loved their country and are an example of how even when all freedoms were stripped from them, so many Indians showed the rest of us that we always have a choice.

Resources:

  1. Without Fear: The Life and Trial of Bhagat Singh by Kuldip Nayar
  2. ‘The Tribune photo on Jatin Das shook British empire‘ by Vishav Bharti for The Tribune, September 12, 2019.
  3. ‘Bhagat Singh respected Gandhi for his impact on masses, but thought his ideas couldn’t bring a social change for equality’ Interview of historian Chaman Lal for the Times of India, September 27, 2019
  4. ‘Modi Says No Congress Leader Visited Bhagat Singh in Jail, but That’s Not True’ by Arjun Siddharth for The Wire, May 10, 2018
  5. ‘The Hunger Strike of Revolutionary Jatin Das’ from Prashant’s Blogworld posted on January 2, 2017
  6. What Mahatma Gandhi did to Save Bhagat Singh by Chander Pal Singh for MKGandhi.org

My Re-Introduction to Bhagat Singh: The Bombing of Central Legislative Assembly

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Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The picture above was taken by the police during Bhagat Singh’s first stint in jail in 1927. At the time of the picture he was only 19. His hands were bound in chains and he was in conversation with Gopal Singh Pannu, DSP, CID who was interrogating him on his role in the Lahore Dasehra Bombing Case. One year later, Rajguru and Bhagat Singh would kill Saunders, an Assistant Police Commissioner in Lahore. They had meant to kill Scott, the policeman who had beaten Lala Lajpat Rai brutally and that led to the legendary leader’s death. But when this picture was taken, Bhagat Singh had no idea that he was going to commit a political assassination. He did not know that two years later he would lob bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly Chamber and then wait patiently for the police to arrest him. Nor did he know that he and his comrades, Sukhdev and Rajguru, would be remembered in Indian history as martyrs and heroes.

My own introduction to Bhagat Singh had been through a paragraph, like the one below, in my history textbook. As a student, I could not understand Bhagat Singh’s place in the story of Indian Independence. In a struggle made famous for its non-violent approach, here was a man who seemed unafraid of violence. He killed a man, bombed the Legislative Assembly when it was in session, and was executed for his actions. How were his actions any different from that of a modern terrorist? Why do we include him in a textbook? Why do we still remember him?

Credit: Our Pasts III, NCERT Grade 8 Textbook

My husband did not like that I compared Bhagat Singh to a common terrorist. “Absolutely not,” he had said fiercely. “Bhagat Singh was an intellectual, not just a revolutionary.” His defense of Bhagat Singh spurred me to do my own reading on the subject. I started with Kuldip Nayar’s book Without Fear: The Life and Trial of Bhagat Singh, followed by Bhagat Singh’s own writings. In the process my own attitude towards Bhagat Singh changed. While I agree with my husband that Bhagat Singh was absolutely not a terrorist, I think what makes Bhagat Singh extraordinary is that his life was his message or, as Sukhdev called it, ‘propoganda by action’.

In the following blog posts, I will focus on two events that made me change my mind about Bhagat Singh. The first (and the focus of this blog) was his role in the Central Legislative Assembly Bombing. The second was his protest against the treatment of Indian political prisoners compared to Europeans (which I will cover in the next blog). I wish I had heard these stories when I was in school because it would have highlighted the various paths Indians took to achieve the same desired outcome of Independence and might have allowed us to reflect on how grey a lot of these approaches really were.

Bhagat Singh’s Role in the Central Legislative Assembly Bombing

Credit: India Today

Bhagat Singh belonged to a communist group called the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA). Although Bhagat Singh was not a founding member, he joined the party when he was still in his teens and became an active member. After Saunder’s assassination, the HSRA had been disappointed with the response. The mainstream leaders of the freedom struggle had clearly disavowed the actions of the young revolutionaries and the British seemed unfazed. The public had also seemed unimpressed. If they wanted to make any serious impact on the British and the public, this clearly had not been the way. HSRA also realised that “mobilising public opinion and making people believe in their ideology was the real necessity, not random bombs and killings.” (Nayar, Without Fear).

So, how do you create a splash? The HSRA decided to toss a few low intensity bombs into a crowded Legislative Assembly Chamber when it had assembled to discuss two bills that they were against – the Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill. After throwing the bombs and propaganda fliers in an emptier part of the hall, to avoid killing anyone, the two chosen HSRA members were supposed to wait for the police to come and find them. The idea was to use their time in court to explain their philosophy, bring attention to the faults of the British and to inspire the Indian youth to join the freedom movement.

There had been some debate over who the two sacrificial lambs should be. Bhagat Singh desperately wanted to be one of them. He would have been a good option because they needed someone articulate and confident to highlight the problems with the British, defend the revolutionaries’ ideals and inspire the public. But, they did not originally select him because they all knew that if the British had Bhagat Singh they would not let him go alive. They would have to hang him for the killing of Saunders. He would have to be made an example of.

Yet, even with full knowledge of this inevitable end, Bhagat Singh pushed for his inclusion in the plan and finally won out. On the day of the bombing, as the smoke cleared, the police finally mustered up enough courage to confront the two men in the balcony above the Assembly who were shouting Inquilab Zindabad. Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt stood there waiting. Bhagat Singh handed the policeman the gun he had used to kill Saunders. And later, as the two had hoped, they used the court as a platform to get the common man in India to pay attention to the revolutionary agenda.

In court, their lawyer Asaf Ali read out a statement that Bhagat Singh and BK Dutt wrote together. They explained the intention behind their most recent act as follows:

It was necessary to awaken England from her dreams… We dropped the bomb on the floor of the Assembly Chamber to register our protests on behalf of those who had no other means left to give expression to their heartrending agony. Our sole purpose was to make the deaf hear and give the headless a timely warning.

“We are neither perpetrators nor lunatics: Full text of Bhagat Singh and BK Dutta’s argument in 1929 Assembly Bomb case”, DNA India

They also addressed their disagreement with the nonviolent approach to freedom head on. They said:

The elimination of force at all costs is Utopian, and the new movement which has arisen in the country, and of that dawn we have given a warning, is inspired by the ideals which guided Guru Govind Singh, Shivaji, Kamal Pasha, Riza Khan, Washington, Garibaldi, Lafayette and Lenin.

“We are neither perpetrators nor lunatics: Full text of Bhagat Singh and BK Dutta’s argument in 1929 Assembly Bomb case”, DNA India

By tracing their movement’s lineage to such famous predecessors as Guru Govind Singh, Shivaji, etc, the revolutionaries were trying to point out that their ideas were neither new nor too radical since great heroes in history also resorted to the same methods. If you have a chance and sufficient interest, it is worth reading in its entirety. As I read it after having read Bhagat Singh’s other writing, I could see his hand in this as well. He is an emotive writer; it is hard to walk away from his work without some response. I did not always agree with him, and yet I did not walk away feeling that this was a rash and unthinking trigger-happy young man. He was, in fact, a person who was thinking and feeling deeply for his country and doing what he felt was right for her. He and his comrades felt so strongly about it that they were willing to suffer the torments of imprisonment (it was certainly torturous because they were frequently beaten brutally and suffered several humiliations and discomforts) and death for their ideals. Every time I read his words, I think back to the picture at the top of this article.

We are lucky that the photo of Bhagat Singh sitting on the charpoy in conversation with an investigator (that you can see at the top of this article) exists because that picture highlights two things – one is just how young Bhagat Singh was. At the time of his death he was only 23. The other is how confident Bhagat Singh appears. He looks comfortable in his shackles and relaxed in his conversation with the policeman. I could not find any sign of fear or apprehension in the collection of his personal correspondence and articles that I could find online. He seemed to overflow with conviction and dedication to his cause. Before, he died, he was visited by his grieving family. He was particularly affected by his younger brother who could not stop crying. He wrote him a particularly tender letter and included some couplets to console him. It ended as follows:

Meri hawa mein rahegi khayal ki khushboo,
Yeh musht-e-khak hai, fani rahe rahe na rahe.

(Our faith and ideas will fill the air.
What harm if this handful of dust is destroyed?)

Without Fear, Kuldip Nayar

Those who are willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause must have to view themselves with tremendous humility in the face of their faith and ideals. Through many of Bhagat Singh’s letters to his friends and family, Bhagat Singh seems to repeatedly come back to this point of how he as an individual does not matter as much as the cause.

Bhagat Singh expresses this sentiment through word and action over and over again in his short life. This is why we remember him. Not for having killed Saunders or for having bombed the Legislative Assembly as the textbooks imply. We remember him as being one of many men and women who viewed themselves as a handful of dust in the wind. They dedicated themselves to their principles and ideals regardless of the cost. Whether they chose revolution or non-violence, the love, dedication and sacrifice for their nation was the same.

India’s Spy-Explorers

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When I think of explorers, I think of tall blonde men in khaki shorts and Shikari Shambu style hats, coming out tents with a notebook and a pair of binoculars around their necks. It turns out that Google also imagined explorers in a similar manner because when I searched for “British explorers in the 19th century” I found this fascinating advertisement for explorer hats for men and women. I suppose, you cannot go out exploring without just the right hat or helmet for the occasion!

Pith helmet style options in the late 19th century/early 20th century. (Source: Pinterest)

Nain Singh Rawat did not fit this rather specific image we all seem to have of explorers. He was a thin brown man, with narrow eyes. During his explorations through the forbidden lands of Tibet, he was dressed as a Buddhist pilgrim. In spite of not being dressed for the part, in 1877, when he was being considered for a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society for his expeditions through Tibet, Col. Henry Yule (a well known Scottish geographer of the time) wrote that Nain Singh Rawat accomplished something that “no European but the first rank of travelers like Livingstone or Grant [could] have done.” Yule was writing to the Society to persuade them that Nain Singh was truly deserving of the medal instead of his British supervisor, Capt. Trotter who had planned the expedition, interpreted the results and published them. Yule argued that Nain Singh’s “great journeys in Tibet would have brought this reward to any European explorer”. In the end, this school teacher from Kumaon Valley in Uttarakhand won the prestigious Gold Medal in 1877 for having “added a larger amount of important knowledge to the map of Asia than those of any other living man.”‘

Nain Singh Rawat, one of the first Indian spies to explore Tibet (Source: Wikipedia)
Source: PBS

Nain Singh was just one of several Indian spies recruited by the British as agents in the Great Game that was being played between the British and Russian Empires. In the second half of the 19th century, the two European empires were eyeing each other’s growing power in Asia with suspicion and some envy. The Russians raced through Central Europe, trying to consolidate their influence in the region, while the British felt particularly protective of their South Asian colonies. When Russia showed interest in Afghanistan, the British got worried. That was far too close for comfort. What if, after Afghanistan, the great Russian bear turned their attention on the precious Indian subcontinent?

So, poor Afghanistan fell victim to its own geography. The British and Russians had diplomatic and actual battles over the country. Afghanistan became the centre of two wars and it is in this time I see the roots of the Afghani resentment of foreign powers in their domestic affairs that drives the Taliban. It is true that for a large part of their modern history, Afghanistan has been manipulated and toyed with by foreign powers for their own selfish reasons. With these same selfish motivations, both also started to wonder about the mysterious state of Tibet. Tibetans had a long standing suspicion of foreigners and unhesitatingly killed any foreigners found within their borders.

The Russian bear and the English lion, each claiming to be friends of the Emir of Afghanistan, also began to be menacing forces in the state. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Worried about an impending Russian invasion, the British wanted to know what exactly lay on the other side of the Himalayas. Could the British Raj be extended to include this land? Was it a natural barrier between India and the Russians in Central Asia?

The British employed a bunch of Indian spies to do this exploring for them. Nain Singh and his cousin, Kishen SIngh are the most famous but there were at least 20 others. They were recruited by British surveyors who then sent them to a type of spy school where they learnt not just how to be surveyors, but also how to measure distance using Buddhist malas (prayer beads) with 100 instead of 108 beads in them. Every 2000 paces was equal to 1 mile. They dropped a bead every 100 paces. Therefore, when they had finished counting 1 full string of beads they had covered half a mile. I would have failed miserably at this mission because I would have constantly lost track of my paces! The Tibetans would have been suspicious of a pilgrim shaking her head and constantly muttering about having to start over.

In their surveyor/spy school Nain Singh and the other pundits (that was the code name given to these Indian explorer-spies), learnt the art of disguise, how to write observations in code and hide them in their prayer wheels instead of buddhist mantras, or make up little poems of their observations that they would recite regularly so that they did not forget what they were noting down. Were these explorer-spies (code named pundits) aware of their role in this game? Did they know why they were disguising themselves as pilgrims and risking their lives to wander the Tibetan plateau taking careful measurements and recording their observations in code?

Some of these explorers were truly committed to their missions. Kinthup, a Lepcha man from Sikkim. He had been hired as an assistant to a Chinese explorer lama. Their mission was to investigate whether the river Tsangpo in Tibet was the same as the river Brahmaputra in India. Kinthup’s mission was to send around 500 specially marked logs down the river Tsangpo. If his British supervisor spotted them floating down the Brahmaputra then they would know that Tsangpo and Brahmaputra were the same.

Unfortunately Kinthup was in for a really rough ride. First, the Chinese lama/spy sold him as a slave to a Tibetan lama who confiscated all his surveyor equipment. After four years as a slave, Kinthup managed to escape. You would think that he would have just turned around and come back to Sikkim, but no. Kinthup found a way to send those logs down the Tsangpo. Of course, by this time his British supervisor had returned to England and there was no one on the Indian end looking out for these logs. Kinthup ended up spending 2 and a half years trekking the length of the Tsangpo, recording his observations while pretending to be a Buddhist pilgrim. Eventually he proved their hypothesis that Tsangpo and Brahmaputra were the same river.

Kinthup, Sarat Chandra Das, Abdul Hamid, Kishen Singh, Nain Singh and the other pundits were as much adventurers as their khaki clad European counterparts. Yet, I imagine them as being different in their attitude. As I browse through images of the explorers of yesteryear, like this one of an European explorer posing with a pygmy couple, I wonder if these pundits would have struck such similar confident, condescending poses on similar explorations. Were they more aware that they were just a small part of a greater and somewhat more sinister game of imperialistic ambitions?

A European Explorer posing with a pygmy couple and their baby circa 1921. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

At any rate, the Indian pundit explorers seem always to escape the notice of the average school child. While they know of Vasco Da Gama, Magellan and Columbus, Nain Singh and his cousins, the brave Kinthup and other pundits remain unknown to the average Indian.

Resources:

Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal
The Great Game and Afghanistan, The Library of Congress website (this is such an excellent resource, so please check it out if you have the time)
Nain Singh’s Last Exploration, PBS Frontline
The Pundits: Spies, Explorers and Scholars during the Great Game by Parag Sayta

Aurangzeb vs. the East India Company

The Untaught Historian1 Comment

According to my middle school textbook, the British first arrived in India in 1605 and then 6 pages later were declaring Victoria Empress of India. It gave me the impression that the British rose to power overnight, and that Indians had simply given way to them – accepting them as militarily and culturally superior from the get-go. This is, of course, so far from the truth that it made me wonder what I had been doing during history class all those years ago.

For nearly 2 decades I had thought that Indians had just handed our country over to the English. It isn’t true, of course. (Photo credit: Royal Collections Trust)

It was only recently, as I prepared a lesson plan for my history class, did I realize that those six pages covered nearly two hundred and fifty years worth of history. During those two and a half centuries, I found it hard to believe that the British always had the upper hand. But apart from the Rebellion of 1857, the narrative of the East India Company never really includes stories of serious threats posed to its rise and continued success in the subcontinent.

One evening, as I was doing the dishes and listening to William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy audiobook, I heard of an incident when Aurangzeb nearly changed history when he came close to kicking the British out of India. Why? Because he didn’t care to do business with pirates.

So, I did a little extra reading that night, and here is the story:

In 1695, the Mughal’s largest ship, the Ganj-I Sawa’I, was carrying things that would make a pirate’s mouth water. The ship was carrying Rs 52 lakhs worth of gold, 80 cannons, 400 muskets and pilgrims returning to Indian from Mecca. Also on board were relatives of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb.

During this time, pirates were not uncommon. Unfortunately the Ganj-i-Sawa’i came across a particularly nasty one – the dreaded Henry Avery. Avery and his crew captured and boarded the Ganj-I Sawa’I, looted the ship, and killed most of the men on board. Many women flung themselves into the sea to save their honour.

Woodcut of Avery loading his ship with treasure (Image credit: History.com)

When the few survivors made their way back to Surat and reported their tale of horror to the locals, the news spread quickly. A mob gathered around the East India Company’s trading factory, seeking revenge. Around the same time, courtiers informed Aurangzeb of the ship’s fate. When he heard the news, Aurangzeb was understandably outraged. Under his orders, officials of the British East India Company were rounded up and thrown into dark Mughal dungeons.

The Emperor Aurangzeb Carried on a Palanquin (c. 1705-1720) Picture Credit: The Met

“It wasn’t us!” the company men pleaded, but Aurangzeb and his courtiers had their doubts. The officials in the port of Bombay were inexplicably well to do. The East India Company’s trading business could not possibly explain the wealth that they displayed. There had to be another source of income, and the Mughals suspected that it was piracy.

Eventually, Aurangzeb said he would allow the East India Company to resume trade if they found Avery and his crew. Clearly, the English took his threat very seriously.

A Proclamation for apprehending Henry Avery (Photo credit: Pinterest(

Fortunately for Avery, he managed to escape capture. However, most of his crew were caught and held accountable. This seemed to satisfy Aurangzeb and the English picked up where they left off.

It was only close to 100 years later, that Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey and laying the groundwork for what would later become the British Empire. But there was this moment when the East India Company had very nearly lost India.

Three things strike me about this story. One is that Indians weren’t always subservient to the Europeans. We weren’t always afraid, lacking in confidence, or being outwitted by the English.

Second, is that there was this precarious moment when world history might have turned out to be very different. Had Aurangzeb thrown the East India Company out of his empire, what would the world look like today? History is full of moments of decision, moments pregnant with possibility that no one in that time could have foreseen. What does that tell us about our present moment and the significance of our own decisions right now?

Aurangzeb (Photo credit: Pinterest)

Finally, it takes time, patience and good fortune to become history’s super villain (a role that the British Empire played with great finesse – note the legacy of discord in the Middle East, Indian Subcontinent, Ireland). It is an oddly reassuring thought.

Resources:

  1. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple
  2. The highjacking of the Ganj-i Sawaʼi: A major diplomatic incident in 1695 British Library Blogs
  3. The Real Thugs of Inglistan Live History India
  4. How an English pirate nearly sunk the fortunes of the East India Company The Hindu