One scholar writes that our history has been distorted in many places:

1. Distortion of ancient history by the postulation of Aryans and Dravidians
2. Distortion of mediaeval history by whitewashing the Islamic record
3. Distortion of Freedom Struggle by showing only a few members in a positive light while obliterating many dissenting voices.

A few generations of Indians after independence grew up with a specific story of our freedom from the British. The general story that most have internalised is that Gandhiji, Nehruji, and the Congress gave us independence while Pakistan was because of the British ‘divide and rule’ policy. The villain of the partition was Jinnah, of course. Apart from all that, it was the Quit India movement and the non-violence struggle initiated by Gandhiji that drove out the British. There may be some truths in the story, but the freedom struggle was far more complex.

There were many personalities such as Sri Aurobindo, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Subash Bose, to name a few, along with other movements like the Revolutionary movements both here and abroad, which were an intricate part of the freedom struggle. The freedom story had many other factors: the second world war; the Indian National Army and Netaji Bose; the economic condition of Britain after the war; the new world order led by the USA post-war; and the installation of a Labour government replacing Churchill. These were generally glossed over in our history textbooks.

Secularism and History Writing

Secularism was a poor solution to achieve ‘communal harmony’ in India, but it became a consistent policy after independence. The leftist-Marxists achieved, through political machinations, complete control over historical narratives and added further to the damage. Germany traded peace with its past when Nazi history became a part of its textbooks. The philosophy of secularism allowed the Islamic invaders to become benign and benevolent when all the invasions were brutal, inflicting great physical, cultural, and intellectual damage on India.

Sadly, the solutions for preventing ‘communal strife,’ not offending minorities, and encouraging ‘national integration’ were to dilute Hindu history and glorify or whitewash Islamic history. To please or protect, our thinkers in all relevant fields inappropriately associated the present-day Muslims with past Islamic invaders, when it was quite unnecessary. The textbooks went against a huge body of contemporary descriptions of the invasions by chroniclers and historians.

Our thinkers could have set a narrative by detaching the present Muslims from the crimes of the past Islamic invaders. With this far better method, there would have been no need to falsify our history and, at the same time, carry the country forward with better harmony. The dishonest approach caused immense damage to both Indian Hindus and Muslims. Muslim intellectuals, especially the Aligarh school of historians, played a key role in this exercise. India had an Islamic scholar as an education minister for ten long years after independence. This unique event in the history of any country would have certainly helped the implementation of these policies. Inappropriate ideas of secularism could not have the maturity to deal with the problem between two communities whose frictions date back centuries.

The Story of Freedom Struggle

The victors write history. In the case of independence, the Congress were the victors who gave us a specific narrative of the movement. Gandhiji, Nehruji, and the Congress were the great heroes. Sardar Patel, as an individual, was too important to ignore. Subash Bose grudgingly became a hero, but the stress was always on his taking help from fascist Germany and Japan. European countries had complex power struggles that sucked other countries into their wars.

Hitler initially had good relations with Stalinist Russia and England. Later, he turned to attack Russia, and the second world war polarised countries with the Axis powers on one side and the Allied powers on the other. The fluctuating relations between countries were also reflected in the volte-faces in India. The Communists, for example, fought the British initially; later, they became friends with the British as Germany invaded Russia. England was an ally of Russia, and thus a friend of a friend became a friend too.

In another manifestation of the victors writing history and colonized minds, the losers (specifically Hitler) became extremely bad. The Nazi rule under Hitler was cruel and brutal. The Nazi regime murdered six million Jews and more than five million non-Jews (Gipsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay people, blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, political opponents, Slavics, dissenting artists, the resisting clergy, and so on). Hitler was undoubtedly bad; however, Winston Churchill and the British were equally cruel and brutal. But our colonised minds exonerate the latter.

To gain perspective, there were 31 famines in the 120 years of British rule. In just 10 years (1891–1900), 19 million people died in India due to famines alone. The famines, the biggest colonial holocausts, are at the top of some of the most severe inhumanities in modern times. Under the British Raj, India suffered countless famines. The first of these was in 1770 (10 million deaths). The later ones were in 1783, 1866, 1873, 1892, 1897, and lastly, 1943–44.

The regular Bengal famines were the result of careless planning, Malthusian ideas, and highly racist leaders sitting in England looking the other way. Churchill hated the Indians and thought that they bred like animals. He also wondered why Gandhi did not die in the famine. In the Bengal Holocaust during the second world war, the British starved to death up to 3 million Indians for strategic reasons with Australian complicity. There were approximately 62,000 and 87,000 Indian soldiers who died during the first and second world wars without any stake or honour, except for the fact that we were a colony of the British.

Subhash Bose had an equal role, arguably even more than Gandhi, in gaining our independence through the Indian National Army, the INA trials, and the subsequent Naval Mutinies. He was a great patriot and was playing Chanakya Neeti in the art of warfare by approaching the ‘enemy of the enemy’ to gain what he desired from the core of his heart—the independence of India. It is possible that Bose, in seeking Nazi support, was expressing our experience of colonialism; as colonial subjects, there was no difference between the British and Nazis in terms of their cruelties.

The Tragedy of Independent India

History writing in India took a peculiar form in the name of secularism, and it is indeed unfortunate that a few generations grew up absorbing a distorted form of history. We lost pride in our own culture, and many Indians became acutely deracinated. Generating pride would perhaps be a greater step, but we failed in the sense that many grew up being ashamed of their history, heritage, and culture. This was the biggest problem with the education system of post-independent India, but were the choices of the ministers coherent with the idea of building a new India?

All of them were great people, undoubtedly, but the first Prime Minister, Nehru, was disconnected from traditional India. The first Law Minister (on the insistence of Gandhi in the “forgive-and-forget” mode of his staunchest critic), Dr. Ambedkar, had strong antithetical views on Hindus and especially the Brahmins. Finally, the first education minister (for ten long years in fact) was an Islamic scholar, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. It would be naïve to believe that they did not carry their intellectual moorings while doing their job.

We had all the materials for the renaissance and rejuvenation of the country in the writings of Sri Aurobindo and Ananda Coomaraswamy. But they committed the cardinal sin of criticising the Kings. Completely obliterated from our school texts and historical narratives, we grew up with stories of social, cultural, and scientific India as the colonials understood them. The result is that today, very few are even aware of the names of Aurobindo or Coomaraswamy. We had all the blueprints for a golden future. Sadly, the academic, political, and intellectual world of New India ignored them.

At no point, did we turn back to question whether colonial narratives could be false too. The English were devastatingly brutal to India, and this is a non-negotiable stand. Yet the apologists, even today, make the case for the importance of British rule in India. If we believe books such as Freedom at Midnight, the only hero worth remembering for the independence of India was Lord Mountbatten. Winston Churchill was pure evil, and he stands right up at the top along with the likes of Hitler. Madhusree Mukherjee’s book on Churchill makes this abundantly clear.

Biases in Historical Narratives- the Examples of Gandhiji and Pakistan

Gandhiji had many contradictory strands, causing disruptions to the movements whenever they peaked. As George Orwell says,

“The British were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence, which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever, he could be regarded as ‘our man’.”

The Quit India movement was a colossal failure, and it collapsed within a few months after initiation. Gandhiji had become irrelevant after the Quit India movement collapsed in 1942, and the five years around 1942 saw a very important world war that changed many dynamics, culminating in our independence from colonial rule.

Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, in their book The South African Gandhi, deal with the life of Gandhiji before he came back to India in 1915. His period in South Africa was one of inconsistencies and contradictions, and there were hardly any wins for Gandhi when it came to the dealings of the South African government with the Indians. In India, his non-cooperation movement in 1920 ended suddenly with the Chauri-Chaura incident; his Civil Disobedience movement in 1930 dissolved in just under four years; his 1940 Civil disobedience movement dissolved in a few months; and finally, the famous 1942 Quit India movement collapsed within no time. It was only the activity of the revolutionaries that gave the 1942 movement some prominence.

Gandhiji was undoubtedly a great man, and he could mobilise the masses and stir the conscience of the nation like no other could. He was proud of his Hindu status and his major crusades against untouchability, his mobilisation of masses, and his almost divine status, prevented the nefarious communists from gaining a major foothold in India. The communists considered him the foremost public enemy. This prevention of communists from entering India was arguably his greatest contribution. Regarding untouchability, people like Sri Aurobindo spoke vehemently against it, while Savarkar carried out major campaigns against the practice. Our history books, however, will not reveal that.

But, he had a woolly romanticism while dealing with the Muslims and the British. Sri Aurobindo was critical of Gandhian ahimsa. It is a powerful tool for inner spiritual transformation, but it cannot be the ideal of a nation facing many troubles, Sri Aurobindo said. Ahimsa could not have any relevance in the hard world outside while dealing with politicians and the Muslim League. This was all too evident in the failure of Gandhiji at the second-round table conference in London.

Gandhi’s repeated fasts mostly against his own followers but never against the Muslim League; support of Ali Brothers; support of Khilafat movement; support to the Amir of Afghanistan when the latter was contemplating to attack British India; asking Hindu refugees to go back to Pakistan even at the risk of death; attempting to appease Jinnah by excessive concessions; allowing Sindh and North-West Frontier Province to split away from Mumbai Presidency in 1925; befriending Suhrawardy, who as a Chief Minister of Bengal remained inactive on the Direct Action Day (August 16, 1946); the opposition to Arya Samaj and his silence on the killing of Swami Shraddhananda; forcing the Indian government to pay 550 million rupees to Pakistan, who in turn, in all probabilities, used it to attack India; stopping Vande Mataram singing because it displeased Muslims; avoiding references to Shivaji; getting a green stripe instead of pure saffron in the Indian flag; and a continuing retreat to the extent of proposing a 100% Muslim cabinet were all hard-core Muslim appeasement politics.

Similarly, a letter to Hitler as a ‘friend’ in a naïve bid to change his heart and asking Jews to peacefully accept killing as an example of supreme non-violence were dents in his image of peace. Koenraad Elst says that Gandhi made a grave mistake in thinking that one can make the enemy disarm by first disarming oneself. The most mysterious move by Gandhi was perhaps asking Patel to step down in favour of Nehru as the leader and future PM of the country. Nehru did not have a single vote in his favour. It was only the Hindus who always supported him and were the object of his blackmailing fasts. Ironically again, Hindus and Hindu thought became objects of ridicule and to charges of ‘fundamentalism’ after his death. It made permanent villains out of any platform related to the Hindu cause.

Did the Congress and Gandhi, with his Satyagraha, give independence to India? It may have generated mass awareness, but the actual independence was mainly due to the events that happened after the 1942 Quit India movement, and this primarily meant the dynamics of the Second World War and Bose. Our independence had a lot more reasons equally important, if not more, than mere non-violence: Subhash Bose, the INA trials in Delhi, the Naval mutinies, World War 2, the Labour Government in England, and the post-war economic hardships of England. The British wanted an honourable exit, perhaps, and they got it in ample measure. Clement Atlee once said that the contribution of Gandhiji to their decision to grant independence was ‘minimal.’

Pakistan Creation- Complex Story

For Indians, Jinnah is undoubtedly the villain of Pakistan’s creation, but as Mazumdar shows, it was almost an evil necessity, and many Congress leaders accepted it much before the actual split. The Communists of India were only second to the Muslim League in helping create Pakistan. Venkat Dhulipala deals with this elegantly in his book, Creating a New Medina. The Muslims and Muslim League were clear in their aims and objectives. The Congress was in a state of denial and romanticism regarding the actual relations between the two distinct segments of the Indian population. Venkat Dhulipala and Saumya Dey (The Seedbed of Pakistan) show this with clarity.

One of the prime reasons for Hindu consolidation was the excessive appeasement of the Muslims, despite a hard stance from their side. In the crucial elections before independence, which were almost a referendum for Pakistan, the Muslim League won with a thumping majority. The Aligarh Muslim University faculty and students played a crucial role in gathering support for the Muslim League, even sacrificing their regular studies. The majority of Muslims in the United Provinces (despite being aware that they will likely stay back in India) and Muslim intellectuals and poets (including a few like Majrooh Sultanpuri who stayed back to carry a different agenda in the garb of Marxism), rooted strongly for Pakistan.

But the most duplicitous must be the Communists. They shifted positions as their masters in Russia told them to do so. They were initially against the British. When Hitler invaded Russia and the latter became an ally of England, the Communists, on orders from their Russian masters, became friends and allies of the British. They started working against their Congress colleagues. EMS Namboodaripad stated that ‘the CPI would wholeheartedly support ML candidates in the forthcoming elections and put up communist candidates in general constituencies against the Congress.’ Communist intellectuals blueprinted the case for Pakistan with academic arguments.

History of the Freedom Movement in India by RC Mazumdar

The three-volume History of the Freedom Movement in India by RC Mazumdar, the first of which was published in 1962, is an intellectual tour de force giving a far clearer version of our independence struggle. The books open to us a far different version of the freedom struggle, while the mainstream story comes into question. The histories we have internalised are half-truths, and for a better understanding, we must read the works of RC Mazumdar. The three-volume history is the full version; there is an abbreviated version, which is the 11^th volume of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan series on the entire history of India. For those who are shortest on time, the best is the chapter on freedom struggle in the comprehensive resource, An Advanced History of India.

Mazumdar was clear in placing Bengal as the epicentre of the freedom movement; was harsh on Gandhi despite being respectful to him; and consistently exposed the fallacies of the Congress policies in dealing with both the British and the Muslims. This was the main reason for rejecting RC Mazumdar’s history as the official version, as it was plainly uncomfortable. Jinnah was the obvious villain for splitting the country in our textbooks, but the seeds of Pakistan started immediately after the 1857 mutiny, and it was Syed Ahmed Khan in the latter part of the nineteenth century who laid the foundations of a separate country. It was doubtful whether the Muslims, who always saw themselves as different from the Hindus, were ever fighting for independence from the British. Their sense of identity was always separate from the Hindus. Their sole fight was the creation of a nation for themselves based on a religious identity. The Hindu leaders, according to Mazumdar, never realised this and soaked themselves in denial.

The rest of this series is a summary and paraphrasing from mainly the 11^th Volume of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan series by RC Mazumdar. A very important disclaimer: The essays are taken directly from the book without indication as such in all cases. The first-person component of the essays also belongs to Mazumdar. There are no extra elements or comments added to the text of Mazumdar except for some editing and slight additions to give clarity to the background context and to give a smoother flow to the topic under discussion. The aim is to give an overview of the freedom struggle from a different perspective. It is by no means exhaustive and complete, and there are many other uncovered topics, like the Ghadar movement. It is a humble effort on the part of the author to bring the main aspects of Mazumdar’s history to the fore and mainly stimulate the interested reader to go for the whole book.