The Book: Genesis, Politics, and the Baring of Facts in the Introduction and Appendix

It was not an easy book for Mazumdar.
In the introduction to his book, Mazumdar begins by saying,

“It may appear somewhat strange that having devoted myself for more than forty years exclusively to the study of ancient Indian history, I should have undertaken, at the fag-end of my life, to write the history of the freedom movement in India.”

He then proceeds to explain the genesis of the book.

He first proposed the project of writing the history of the freedom struggle and started off as the official historian of the project. The government of his day approved this project. Due to many factors, which he elaborates on in the introduction and appendix of the book, the government took him off the project and entrusted the work to Dr. Tara Chand, who in turn brought the official version in 1961. This, according to Mazumdar, gave an altogether different version of the history.

Two specific things in the official history book are jarring to Mazumdar. The first is the claim by Dr. Tara Chand in the preface that the idea of writing a history of the freedom movement emanated from the late Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the first Minister of Education of independent India.
The second is in the claim made by Humayun Kabir, Minister for Scientific Research and Cultural Affairs, in the foreword of the book. The second contradicts the first claim.
Humayun Kabir says,

“At the very first meeting of the Indian Historical Records Commission held after India became free, a resolution was passed for preparing an authentic and comprehensive history of the different phases of the Indian struggle for independence. This recommendation found an immediate response from the late Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.”

Humayun Kabir describes how the government proceeded with the project over a period of four years before finally setting up a Board of Editors in 1953.

Both Tara Chand and Humayun were inaccurate and misleading, according to Mazumdar. To set the record straight, Mazumdar brings together all the relevant facts in the appendix to his first of the three-volume series. He presents evidence that shows that it was Mazumdar himself who initiated the proposal first. He shows that he even produced a first draft of the first volume, which had an unceremonious rejection by the Government of India.

The government then decided to publish an official version under the authorship of Dr. Tara Chand. Mazumdar believed clearly that this would be a highly sanitised version. He then resolved to draft his own book. Mazumdar lost access to the materials compiled by the Board but fortunately most had been published by the different state governments, which originally supplied them as books and articles. However, it was mostly a one-man venture.

When Should History Begin?  

There is no confusion for Mazumdar about the question, “Where should the history of the freedom struggle for India begin?”  To him, India lost its independence with Islamic imperialism, and later, the colonials simply took over. But this book was about the achievement of independence and throwing off the British yoke. Mazumdar clarifies that it was not a history of British rule in India but only of the movement to put an end to it.

He writes,

“It is an ominous sign of the time that Indian history is being viewed in official circles in the perspective of recent politics. The official history of the freedom movement starts with the premises that India lost independence only in the eighteenth century and had thus an experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries. Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely changed masters in the eighteenth century.”

The Phases of Independence

Mazumdar places the struggle for independence into four distinct phases:

1. The first (1763–1863) was that of an impotent rage, on the part of certain classes and communities, against the imposition of British authority, which gained momentum gradually. The sporadic attempts and armed resistance culminated in the great outbreak of 1857. This, along with the rebellion of the Wahabis to restore Muslim supremacy (1850–1863), ended the first phase of the struggle. The drastic end made armed revolts against British authority impractical.
2. The second phase (1860–1905) was the growth of patriotic and national sentiments, chiefly due to English education and the contact with Western culture brought about by it. Hindu society, religion, literature, and politics underwent a major transformation. The ideal of the British democratic system of government and faith in the benevolence of the British replaced anger with devotion and loyalty to the British throne. Political organisation and constitutional agitation visualised a united India as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire.
3. The third phase (1905–1920) was the transformation of Indian political ideas from the second phase by the impact of nationalist ideas. The political goal was now Swaraj, or Self Rule, and the focus shifted to reliance on own efforts instead of fruitless appeals to the British. This began with the Swadeshi movement in Bengal in 1905 and ended with the death of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the emergence of Gandhi as the leader of the unarmed national revolt (1920).
4. Gandhi dominated the final phase wholly. This was the phase of Gandhi (1920–1947). The exception was during the last five years, when he lost leadership. Its principal characteristic was the new technique of Satyagraha struggle. Though previously known, it came with a wider application.

Mazumdar acknowledges that there was a possibility of subjectiveness being strongly associated with the last two phases. Yet he also has the advantage of first-hand knowledge and a deeper perspective on important events.
He writes,

“I have therefore tried to place before the reader all the relevant facts, leaving them to form their own conclusions.”

The Politics of the Book- The Jaipur Session of IHRC in 1948

In the appendix to the three-volume history, Mazumdar explains the backstory of the book itself in a glaring indictment of the education minister of that time, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He writes that the idea of authoring a book on independence had possessed him since August 15, 1947, when the records were all available and memories were fresh. He moved a resolution in the Jaipur Session of the Indian Historical Records Commission held in February 1948.

The Jaipur session in 1948 observed that Mahatma Gandhi was the foremost leader of the movement, and it was essential that all his papers should be placed in the custody of the National Archives of India. The National Archives of Washington had already begun a march by acquiring photographic copies of Mahatmaji’s writings and a record of his voice. There was also a request to the Government of India and the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Committee to transfer all the original writings of Mahatma Gandhi and records relating to him to the custody of the National Archives of India for preservation. There was a tardy response both from the government and the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Committee.

Mazumdar requests that an attempt be made to compile a list of important records, both published and unpublished, bearing upon the national struggle for freedom. Mazumdar proposed a scheme in an article entitled ‘History of India’s Struggle’ that New Democrat, a weekly journal of the Institute of Political Science, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Bombay, published in its May 7, 1948, issue.

Hence, categorically, with all evidence, Mazumdar shows that the idea came from him as early as 1948. Mazumdar writes,

“…the task of writing a proper history of the struggle is so great that it is not possible for any private individual to undertake it. It is the duty of the State to launch a scheme which would ensure the preservation and full utilization of all the materials.’’

The Prime Minister received a copy of the Jaipur Resolution and forwarded it to his secretary, who in turn advised Mazumdar to contact the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

Mazumdar then wrote to the Secretary of the Ministry of I and B on June 15, 1948, to consider the proposal. There was no reply. Mazumdar then wrote a letter to an old acquaintance, Dr. Rajendra Prasad (the President of India). The President, in a long reply, dated Camp Pilani, Jaipur, August 26, 1948, wholeheartedly approved the proposal. He wanted a scheme for this that he could push forward. On this encouragement, Mazumdar promptly sends his scheme.

On December 4, 1948, Mazumdar met N. B. Maiti, a minister, in a private party and impressed upon him the importance of publishing an authentic history of the national movement in Bengal. Maiti asks Mazumdar to submit a proposal to the Minister of Education. Mazumdar does send a letter to the Minister of Education but fails to get a response again. Continued efforts to influence Maiti also failed for Mazumdar. The inertia of the Ministry of Education would have probably continued, but fortunately, Dr. Rajendra Prasad intervened, says Mazumdar.

Progress on the Jaipur Recommendations

In August 1949, Mazumdar received an intimation that the government had decided to appoint a committee to collect material for the preparation of a history of the freedom movement. The opening paragraph of the government note (Note On The Progress Made In The Compilation Of The History Of Freedom Movement In India) placed before the I. H. R. C. Session at Nagpur in December 1950 plainly admits this. It reads:

“The scheme for writing an authentic and comprehensive history of the different phases of the struggle which culminated in the freedom of India in 1947, was originally recommended by the Indian Historical Records Commission at its Jaipur Session in 1948 ; and when the Hon’ble Dr. Rajendra Prasad invited the attention of the Government of India to the urgency of this work, the Ministry of Education was entrusted with the planning and execution of the project.” (Proceedings, p. 95)

This would make it amply clear whether the credit for launching the scheme belongs to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, as stated by Humayun Kabir, or to Dr. Rajendra Prasad. Mazumdar writes that he had to explain in detail to counter the official propaganda. Humayun Kabir and Dr. Tara Chand, the author of the official history, credited the planning of the history of the freedom movement in India to the late Abul Kalam Azad. It was unlikely that Kabir and Tarachand would be ignorant since they had clear access to the facts of the case.

Thus, Mazumdar says that the real credit for initiating the scheme for a history of the freedom movement belongs to Dr. Rajendra Prasad and nobody else. Dr. Rajendra Prasad initiated two important national schemes—one for writing a comprehensive history of India (in twenty volumes) and the other for compiling an authentic history of the freedom movement in India.

The Ministry of Education: Attempt to Outsource the Project

The government, however, altered the facts. It mentions in a note that an expert committee of seven members, first meeting on January 5, 1950, was appointed with Dr. Tara Chand as Chairman. The official note talks about several recommendations. One was that the projected history should be confined to the period 1870 A.D. to August 15, 1947, and that the movements prior to 1870 may be treated in an introductory chapter. It also wanted a central organisation with regional offices that could collect and collate all the material from authentic and original sources, both official and non-official.

The note continues that the Ministry of Education, however, felt unable to accept these recommendations due to many issues, primarily financial. Thus, this work should progress through the voluntary efforts of scholars and learned societies. Mazumdar says that the Ministry might have had good reasons to outsource the project but certainly does not substantiate Humayun Kabir’s remark that the recommendation of the I. H. R. C. made at the Jaipur session in February 1948 “found an immediate response from the late Moulana Abul Kalam Azad, who directed that steps should forthwith be taken to give effect to it.”

In its meeting held on September 18, 1951, the Chairman, Dr. Tara Chand, suggested that instead of the Ministry of Education undertaking the entire work itself, it might be entrusted to an academic body such as the Indian History Congress or a university. The committee concluded that Delhi University would be the most suitable agency for this project. Mazumdar did not attend this meeting, and apparently only two historians were present there: Dr. Tara Chand and Dr. Bisheshwar Prasad.

Mazumdar later discovers a prolonged negotiation between the Ministry of Education and the University of Delhi, but there is finally an abandonment of the project. More than a year later, after the Experts Committee recommendation on September 18, 1951, the Ministry of Education suddenly showed enthusiasm for rekindling the project. Mazumdar again sees the hand of Dr. Rajendra Prasad in this.

The Setting Up of the Board

On December 30, 1952, the Ministry of Education finally set up a Board of Editors for the compilation of the History of the Freedom Movement in India, consisting of nine members. Dr. R.C. Mazumdar was one of them, which also included Prof. M. Habib and Prof. Nilakantha Sastry. In its meeting on April 26, 1953, the Board appointed RC Mazumdar as the Director to organise the work of sifting and collecting materials and preparing the draft of the history. Mazumdar had major difficulties in the job. The executive powers of the Board were in the hands of a small committee consisting of the chairman, secretary, and senior official of the Government of India. None of them had any knowledge of history. The secretary exercised most of the powers. Mazumdar was assisted research workers, some of whom were appointed without his knowledge.

The Ministry dissolved the Board, however, at the end of 1955. The Board was a hindrance rather than help, writes Mazumdar, and it would have been better with a small body of two or three competent historians. In the two and a half years between the establishment and dissolution, local committees were set up in different states for collecting material. The Board was to complete its work within a period of three years: the first two years to be used for collecting materials and preparing drafts on different phases of the struggle, and the third year for the final text for publication.

Mazumdar prepared the first rough draft of Volume I before the end of 1954. A stencilled copy of it was circulated to all the members of the Board. The Board held a meeting in Ahmedabad between December 31, 1954, and January 2, 1955, to discuss this first draft. After a prolonged discussion, the Board generally approved its layout but suggested that each member return to the director the stencilled copy of the draft with marginal notes embodying his views regarding its final revision. No member cared to do this. The Board also recommended that the contents be kept strictly confidential. This also did not happen in a big way.

Confidentiality Broken

Mazumdar suspected the confidentiality was broken when the Minister for Education, Abul Kalam Azad, told Mazumdar that the draft appeared satisfactory but that he had received complaints about the exaggerated role of Bengal in the freedom movement. Since both Mazumdar and Kalam hail from Bengal, the book might evoke mischief, Azad told Mazumdar. Soon, a meeting of the Board of Editors happened on March 28, 1955. Humayun Kabir, Secretary, Ministry of Education, and Dr. Tara Chand, a former Secretary, attended the meeting by special invitation. In that meeting, Mazumdar reiterated that the history of the Freedom Movement was a general term with two connotations: (i) Freedom denotes freedom from the British yoke, and (ii) it refers to political freedom only.

Mazumdar however quotes a letter from the Government of India of 1950 that envisaged that the history should cover the period from 1870 to 1947 (15 August). He also quotes another letter from the Secretary in 1953 to trace the beginning to 1857. Mazumdar makes it clear that in the meeting of the Board of Editors held in January 1953, a draft outline had been unanimously approved. A detailed plan with division into chapters was circulated in 1954. The Board had approved it in January 1955 at the Ahmadabad meeting. Hence, Mazumdar felt that the plan should stay intact. Majumdar emphasised that the movement for political freedom should be treated as the central theme and that other factors contributing to it should be merely ancillary to it.

However, Dr. Tara Chand prepared and circulated, before the meeting itself, a note on the preparation of the history of the Freedom Movement. In Mazumdar’s view, Tara Chand’s note had some non-relevant points and was more of a general review of the political, cultural, and social history of India. The note had an entirely new approach to the subject. It began with the settlement of different primitive races in India and the evolution of cultures ‘from palaeolithic to modern Western’. Dr. Tara Chand also makes the startling claim that Mazumdar’s draft was not a historical text at all.

Surprisingly, some members assured Dr. Tara Chand that the approach in the note was in accordance with the plan of the work of the Board of Editors. A resolution agreed mysteriously to Tara Chand’s claim. Mazumdar was stumped as to why, at such a late stage, the Board invited Tara Chand to put forward his plan, completely sidelining the approved draft of Mazumdar. It was also strange that the Board approved an entirely different approach by saying that it was “according to the plan.” There was no directive to modify the draft volume of Mazumdar.

Finally, the Board, in turn, asks the Ministry of Education whether the Board of Editors is expected to present the Freedom Movement in its final form, ready for publication, or whether the Ministry contemplated appointing people to write the history in its final form based on the materials collected and collated by the Board. In the case of the former, it proposed a revised timetable where Volumes 1, 2, and 3 would be published by March 1956, March 1957, and March 1958, respectively. If, however, the Board is merely to collect and collate materials for the three volumes, the work would be completed by March 1957.

The resolution showed that some influence was at work to undo what Mazumdar had already done. There was also a new arrangement for writing the history. Already, only about a week ago, questions and answers were being raised in Parliament regarding the project. The resolution resulted in a complete change in the attitude of the government. It dissolved the Board of Editors by the end of 1955. Mazumdar cut off his connection in October itself. For more than a year after the dissolution, the government did not take any steps to compile the history. Subsequently, Dr. Tara Chand was entrusted with the work. The first volume of the officially mandated history was published on January 26, 1961.

Misinformation In the Preface and The Foreword of The Official Book: The Trigger for Mazumdar

In his preface to the official history, Dr. Tara Chand does not make even a casual reference to the Board and its work. He simply states that the idea of writing a history of the freedom movement emanated from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who asked Dr. Tara Chand to take up the work. This was a gross distortion of truth, says Mazumdar. Humayun Kabir’s foreword conveys the idea that the Board’s activities were confined to the mere collection of materials.

Even the reasons given by Humayun Kabir for the dissolution of the Board and the appointment of Dr. Tara Chand are curious. The reason given was that the Board, though rendering useful service in collecting material on an ad hoc and temporary basis, was not adequately qualified to prepare a unified history. Since both academic historians and active politicians with different approaches were involved in the project, the decision was to transfer further work on data collection to the National Archives. The interpretation and narration of history would be the task of one single scholar of distinction.

Thus, Dr. Tara Chand, Chairman of the Planning Committee at an earlier stage, having a special competence as a historian, came to be appointed as the editor of the book. Mazumdar writes that he (Mazumdar) related to the Board from its inception almost up to the end. There was never any serious difference among the members of the Board regarding the collection of material or the interpretation of material that had already been collected. There was general approval of the draft of the first volume too. The government never even remotely alluded to any such grounds for dissolving the Board.

Mazumdar signs by saying,

“It is a great pity that almost every statement made in the foreword and the preface regarding the history of preparing the History of Freedom Movement in India should be either half-truths or untruths, though the writers of both should have had a full knowledge of all the facts and at least had ample opportunity of knowing them.”

One of the reasons the government was against the draft prepared by Mazumdar was that he credits Bengal as the epicentre of the freedom movement. Mazumdar believes this to be true, as the ideas of nationalism, patriotism, and political organisation on Western lines were first developed in Bengal and then spread to the rest of India. He was critical of the Muslims and Gandhiji too. The political correctness of those times, the ideas of secularism, and a Muslim as an education minister perhaps would have been majorly responsible for rejecting Mazumdar’s efforts in depicting the true history of the freedom movement. Mazumdar finally embarks on authoring his own book in three volumes, giving a better version of the freedom movement.

Continued in Part 3