Many historians have argued that the role of Ghadar Party in India’s freedom movement has not received the kind of recognition that it deserves. The argument is not without merit. Ghadar Party was unlike many other revolutionary outfits that laid emphasis on armed struggle as the preferred option to gain India’s independence from British rule. Though the Ghadar revolutionaries drew their basic inspiration from homegrown freedom fighters in India, their party grew its roots not on Indian soil. It was launched from the western coast in the United States in early twentieth century.
Ghadar Party’s limited success lay in its ability to have fired the imagination of a group of young Indians in far-away America with ideas of an armed revolution that they believed would eventually free their motherland from British rule. That, of course, did not win independence for India. But there is a growing belief that Ghadar Party and its ideas did influence the course of India’s independence struggle in ways that deserve closer scrutiny and assessment in a proper historical context.
The idea of the book under review has emanated from this belief that Ghadar Party has not got its due from our historians or even from the official chroniclers of India’s freedom movement. The author, Savitri Sawhney, is the daughter of Pandurang Khankhoje, one of the co-founders of Ghadar Party. Her basic premise is that the “aspirations of the Ghadar revolutionaries and their heroism rarely find a mention in popular history of India’s freedom struggle” and she is “deeply grieved” by such distortion. The book, she claims in the preface, tells the story of Khankhoje and through him the story of the Ghadar movement.
Expectations, therefore, are quite high when one starts reading the book. However, the 300-odd pages that recount Khankhoje’s activities before and after the Ghadar movement are a huge disappointment. Sawhney seems to have been caught between two stools. Should she tell the story as she saw and understood from her research or should she rely on the autobiographical account her father left behind? She chose to use both — materials from her own research and what her father wrote about his days before he left India and his stay in Japan, the US, Mexico and a few other countries.
Thus, Sawhney’s book has extensive quotes from Khankhoje’s autobiography. In fact, Sawhney’s own narrative is largely guided by Khankhoje’s account of the way the events unfolded. There is no doubt that such a structure has made the book a difficult read as one makes considerable efforts to move from Khankhoje’s account of an event to Sawhney’s narration or occasional interpretation of the same event. What should have been a strength of the book has ironically become its major weakness. If only Sawhney had used the facts contained in Khankhoje’s autobiography to reconstruct the story of the Ghadar movement and one of its founders, the book would have been able to achieve the goals the author set out for herself.
Khankhoje led no ordinary life. He left his family to work for his country’s freedom. Once he was convinced that he could no longer stay in the country, with the British chasing him wherever he went, Khankhoje decided to leave for Japan and then to the US. His adventures in the US and Persia were all aimed at gaining freedom for India through an armed struggle. He was always on the run as the British government had issued a warrant of arrest against him. While in the US, he had a brief alliance with the Indian Communist leaders and in the process had two meetings with Lenin.
There are also occasions when Khankhoje felt let down by his Indian leaders. Eventually, he decided to settle down in Mexico and contributed immensely to the development of agriculture in that country. A revolutionary who refused to seek pardon from the British, Khankhoje decided to come to India after independence. He settled down in Maharashtra and wrote his autobiography — in Marathi because he felt he must recount his life in his own language.
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It is a story that needs to be told to every Indian. But neither Khankhoje nor Sawhney knows how to make a memoir interesting. Researchers delving into the lives and works of Indian freedom fighters may find the book useful. Others may find the book failing to deliver on the promise the author made in the preface.
I SHALL NEVER ASK FOR PARDON
A Memoir Of Pandurang Khankhoje
Author: Savitri Sawhney
Publisher: Penguin Books
Price: Rs 399
Pages: XVI + 342