The Pickle Slice in a Stale History Book

Was our freedom movement as free as we think it to be? He had thought along these lines many times. As a lecturer in history his soul would feel the prick of these off-beat ideas about the most important event in modern Indian history: the Indian freedom movement. But then his spirit was always shackled by the carefully crafted history, the subject, with its list of personalities who shaped the destiny of the country during the struggle. He had given countless lectures, telling the same bits of facts to changing batches, but the subject and its players never changed. While he told them the conventional bits of history, there were nagging bits that revolted inside him, tugging at his conscience that as a teacher he has to expose the students, even as a historian, to a new angle of thinking, to a new perspective, not to misguide the students, but to guide them to a path, where competent liberty of thought and opinions took one to unchartered heights of creativity and interesting unfolding of destinies, to envision new paths, to dream afresh, to explore more.

Unfortunately his subject was almost stagnant. The India of his teaching days was changing fast, but it was doing it in a common way, almost uneventfully, so the history books ended with tomes of theories and opinions about the freedom struggle and concluded the post-independence decades in just a little summary having development statistics and majorly wars with Pakistan and China. During his three decades of teaching career, he thought he just did a rote repetition of the same things. He himself changed, the types and calibres of the students changed, he even earned more under the revised pay scale under the new pay commission, even India changed to have more literate people and the resurgent more-moneyed middle class, but the history books were almost the same that he taught when he started his career.

It was his farewell lecture today, the conclusion of an innings. Instead of spending it in celebratory bonhomie with the staff, colleagues and students, he decided to put out his thoughts today. There was hardly any chance of being misinterpreted on this final day, at the most it would be dubbed as an emotion-laced farewell speech, more from the heart, and less of a mindful academic talk. To the mixed gathering of the staff, colleagues and students, he tried to speak as a history teacher, just this last time. He took them to be the biggest class he ever had and spoke with firm academic conviction, giving a free leeway to the off-beat historical hatchlings that had always zoomed with subtle force in him. Today he was telling his own history, entitling himself to have his own judgments born of the historical sense of three decades after repeatedly reading the famed historical lines, almost etched in stone to be meant to be the absolutist version of reality. To him history meant beyond the question-answer routine to get maximum marks by writing the expected answers. After giving a good brief about the events that sound important to our independent struggle, he was heard telling the audience now getting a totally new dose of historical pill:  

The colonists who had the power and efficiency to rule and exploit the lands thousands of miles away from their homes cannot be supposed not to possess anything about the exit strategies. With the beginning of the 20th century, it was written on the wall that the coming decades of the century will see the cascading effects of freedom movements. As great managers they started planning exit strategies. This strategy was meant to minimize the losses at their end and leaving the least ill-will. So amidst all the freedom movements that were naturally evolving, they facilitated the platforms that best suited their interests in the post-independence scenario. They were ruthless against the true nationalists who were branded as terrorists. They were wiped out literally. Thousands were sent to Kala Pani in India in this context. Now do you understand why Bhagat Singh was allowed to be hanged? Why was Subhas Chander Bose kicked out of the mainstream freedom movement even though his confidante was legitimately elected Congress president? Why more nationalistic sounding Congressites like Sardar Patel remained in the shadow of Nehru? Simple fact is that the Britishers were cleverly facilitating a Western-educated class of leaders who were 75 percent Westerners and would be the safest options during the critical decades before and after the Independence. It was a well-managed transfer of power. It was a well-managed first ring of Western-educated leadership that did not allow the real black, native nationalists of India to take the hot seat of the freedom movement and the chair after independence. Just see the decades before independence and you will realize the great undercurrent of British in particular (and Western in general) facilitation profitably flowing under the so called native black river of independence.

He was serving a differently-tasting slice of history. The pickled history, tastier, not so stale. It appeared the glamorised version of the stale history lessons. He was retiring on 31^st of March. The audience was clapping vigorously. The disastrous second innings of the UPA government had shown what it means to run a coalition government, how different political parties can be kept quiet just to retain their support, how public offices can be allowed to be blatantly misused to appease the ruffled feathers in coalition partners. Anna and team were voicing the mass angst against Sonia’s proxy rule, the office of the Prime Minister had lost all dignity as media buzzed with unending jokes about the puppet prime minister. Parliamentary elections were a couple of years away.

His intents and intentions were now carrying him to be an off-track historian. His head was throbbing with revolt against the stale history books that he had taught in rote repetition under the compulsion of bread and butter:

I draw a certain constitutional right—A logical and self-derived right of an educated Indian to reinterpret Indian history within logical limits. I just do the same and do not mean anything derogatory to the characters who as per conventional interpretations managed to fetch the centre-stage in the Indian freedom movement. Definitely, the Britishers had far more control over Congress affairs than average Indian believes because for him it symbolises the very epitome of human urge for freedom. But could it be possible that the Congress leadership in pre-independent India was well controlled by the Britishers with an acceptance that since ultimately they have to go out of this country, it is best to have a buffer zone of leadership drawn from English-educated, foreign-returned gentry who will both save them from a revolutionary outpour as well as provide a controlled leadership to the ignorant Indian masses. Beginning with the first decade of 20th century, revolutionary terrorism was becoming a force to reckon with. Lok Manya Tilak was proudly claiming, 'Swarajya is my birth right!' Then the First World War came. The Britishers were just not in a position to afford non-cooperation at the Indian front. See Mahatma Gandhi arrived swiftly on the scene and very soon all questions of Indian cooperation in British war efforts were settled. In a short span of time Indian soldiers were fighting at the North African front. The Britishers had scores of reasons for facilitating Gandhi-Nehru as they had for brutally suppressing and exterminating heroes like Bhagat Singh and sidelining Subhash Chander Bose. The prevailing philosophy of non-violence during the freedom movement was more helpful to the Britishers in every sense of the term. The ideal just minimized the chances of a popular upsurge (of the 1857 kind) against the White regime. This ideology however failed in stopping the bloodshed among the Indians. See the farce: Two million Indians died among themselves and the casualties to the outgoing regime were negligent (almost non-existent)! It was a smart move. Analyse the sprouts of those seeds of Western facilitation sown during those times and you will see the Colonial strains still blossoming in the skewed political stream of so called ‘Free India’.

Well, he might have been within his rights. After all in a democracy we have the freedom of thought and expression within the limits of decency. People seemed to listen to him with casual attention, the kind that is apparently serious at this moment but will go off the moment he stopped speaking. The conditioning of minds over the decades is too strong to be rubbed off to think differently by such mini-storms. All in all these are the storm-in-the-tea-cup type outpours, but if these give solace and succour to a ruffled soul then what is wrong with the audience allowing it to be spoken out in rapt attention with a serious expression. The students cannot afford to revise their syllabus to facilitate the out-going teacher’s opinions. They will fail if they do it. These things serve well only at the level of debates and arguments. Everybody seemed to know it.

Among the farewell applauds, one of his critical colleagues was saying in his friend’s ears, ‘It’s a political speech. Bullshit, why the hell he never spoke like that all these years. He is preparing a political stage. He will definitely join the BJP, I bet!’