Introduction:

P Sainath is a veteran journalist with more than forty years of experience. A Ramon Magsaysay Award winner, he has written extensively on agrarian distress and failure of the state in rural India in his famous book Everybody Loves a Good Drought’ (1996). In The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom (2022), he takes us on the journey of understanding the role of unsung heroes of the freedom struggle – those who in their everyday resistance, tactics and subversions challenged and undermined a mighty colonial rule.

The book is an attempt to record the subaltern history of India’s Independence Movement. It is divided into 16 chapters each devoted to a freedom fighter or a community and an annexure which is a poem on a brave tribal woman who defied colonial police with her primitive weapon and unparalleled valour. For their bravery and sacrifice, each deserves a book of their own, but for now, this is the finest recorded first-hand account to understand the history of freedom struggle from a marginal position in society.

Who is a freedom fighter?

This book challenges the popular imagination of who constitutes a freedom fighter. Are only the ones who died in a confrontation with the police or those imprisoned freedom fighters? What about those who fought underground actively in mobilising resources, acting as couriers or spies, endangering their lives to smuggle weapons to the revolutionaries? What about women who took care of families and communities while the men were away fighting for our freedom – are they freedom fighters, too? Some freedom fighters in this book have not seen the insides of the jail and yet played a crucial role in sustaining the Independence Movement with or without being aware of their contribution.

Independence and Freedom are not the same thing

The book begins with a quote by ‘Captain Bhau’, a freedom fighter and a leader of a military force in a parallel government in pre-independence Maharashtra. He says “We fought for two things – for freedom and Independence. We attained Independence”. This line stays with us for the rest of the book. As we hear story after story, we are made aware of the dire social conditions some of the freedom fighters continued to suffer for the better part of their lives even post-independence. Their sacrifice was largely erased from the popular narrative, and they were denied the respect, honour, dignity and rewards that must be bestowed on them. The ‘many unfreedoms’ in terms of social, political and economic inequalities mark Independent India which motivated some of them to continue their work of social reform in the face of sustained challenges to communal harmony, agrarian crisis and social deprivation of tribals and Dalits.

Everyday resistance, subversion and tactics

The heart of the book lies in the many interesting ways the common folks resisted the suppression of British rule. Be it ‘Salihan’ who avenged the atrocities on her father with her lathi, or the ‘Social Bandits’ of Puruliya in West Bengal and ‘Prati Sarkar’ (parallel government) in Sangli Maharashtra who redistributed their ‘loot’ confiscated from British power to the poorest and the most vulnerable. While some used violence, others chose the path of non-violence. Singing folksongs with social messages, using social practices signalling bad omen as decoy cover for underground meetings, changing titles of newspapers to circumvent censorship, etc. are countless ways in which people sustained resistance movements.

Women’s presence in sustaining the movement

One of the strongest sections of the book is ‘Annexure I’ devoted to Demati Sabar ‘Salihan’. She is one of the countless indigenous women who vehemently fought the British, but failed to get any recognition. She amongst others lived a life of scarcity, poverty and absence from public image as a freedom fighter. Even the meagre ‘Certificate of Honour’ given to her by the local government describes her father’s contribution rather than her own!

Five of the sixteen chapters deal directly with women freedom fighters, while other chapters critically examine the role of women for their role in sustaining the movement for the men in their family and community. Be it Bhabhani Mahato, a tribal woman who was unwittingly cooking for her husband and his accompanying underground revolutionaries or Kalpana Lad who took on the responsibility of the entire family in her husband’s absence.  

The active role of women in Telangana’s anti-colonial, anti-Nizam and anti-feudal forces is described by the awe-inspiring Mallu Swarajyam. Her presence in politics even after successfully overthrowing the British rule is an indication of women freedom fighters’ contribution to the progress of the country.   

The author makes a poignant remark on the subject of women’s role in the freedom struggle in the following lines:

“Bhabhani, like Lakshmi Panda, Salihan, Hausabai Patil and Vatsala Yadav, never received the honours and recognition she truly deserved. In the struggle for India’s freedom, all of them fought and acquitted themselves as honourably as anyone else. But they were women. In societies awash in prejudices and stereotypes against women, their roles were seldom valued” (pp. 181).

Absence of state recognition

The introductory chapter breaks down the legal and provisional grounds on which freedom fighters were denied recognition for their contribution in formal government records. At present, an important source of names of freedom fighters is from a government pension scheme, but the record may be incomplete because some chose not to claim the pension, while others did not qualify because there was no formal record of their arrest by British police. Many suffered police brutality without ever being imprisoned, and their suffering has been discounted through this process.

Lessons for the socially conscious

Despite the persistent political and social issues, the foot soldiers of freedom struggle encourage us to build broad unity across ideological and political leanings and live by the example that accepting principles based on the merits of the argument is the way forward for a better future.

This book may be the very first of its kind, and certainly the last that has recorded personal histories of the common people who participated in freedom struggle. It does an excellent work of describing the context of our ‘Last Heroes’ in the social positions with respect to caste, gender, and tribal identity while explaining the local history and geopolitics of the time. It leaves the reader grateful for those who came before us and shows us the work left for us to pick up.

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Krithika Narayanswamy is a PhD research scholar in Sociology at the University of Hyderabad.