IN SEARCH OF FREEDOM
Journeys through India and South-East Asia
Sagari Chhabra
HarperCollins Publishers India
344 pages; Rs 499
As a child, I often heard stories of the exploits of Masterda Surya Sen and his merry band from my maternal grandmother. Her father was Sen's younger brother, and the tales of the Chittagong uprising were a part of family history. By the time my grandmother was born in 1937, the uprising was over and Sen had been hanged. As it often happens with martyrs in our country, Sen was thoroughly mythologised and made into a larger-than-life character in the tales that came down to me. But neither in my grandmother's tales, nor in the passing reference to the uprising in school history text books did I find any reference to Sen's comrades Kalpana Datta or Pritilata Waddedar. It was only on reading Manini Chatterjee's Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising, 1930-34 that I learnt of the women participants in the "armoury raid".
Filmmaker and writer Sagari Chhabra's In Search of Freedom: Journeys through India and South Asia attempts, with a great degree of success, to correct this historic wrong of confining women freedom fighters' contributions to vaults of forgetfulness. Early in the book, she recalls a startling anecdote: "I started by making a film about women freedom fighters.…As I went about recording oral testimonies, I met a group of women who had raised the tricolour inside (sic) the Lahore Women's Jail on 9 August 1942. Their astounding heroism seemed to have gone unnoticed, even by their own (sic) families, who revealed at the premier of the film (Asli Aazaadi, 1998) that they had not even been aware of it." This is one of the many, many stories that Ms Chhabra records in her book, as she tracks down forgotten freedom fighters - both women and men - in India, as well as Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Myanmar. In the process, the book transcends the limitations of only a revisionist history and becomes a travelogue and a filmmaker's memoir of sorts.
In the Introduction to her book, Ms Chhabra records the motivation for her project: "…in 1997, the fiftieth year of Independence, I witnessed another India.…I desperately needed to know my own roots amidst the shifting vision and cacophony of consumerism that now surrounded me. During the hype of the Independence Day celebrations, I felt that our freedom fighters had stories, and perhaps within those stories one could find the secret of how to fight an empire." Eighteen years hence, the motivation is truer, not just for Ms Chhabra but for everyone concerned with the unenlightened, mercantile me-first ethics that seems to have gained wide currency in contemporary India, in a divorce from the ideals of the generations that fought for freedom, sacrificing the best years of their lives.
Having declared that she is disinterested in linear historiography, Ms Chhabra interviews both Gandhians and former armed revolutionaries, who have often been thought to be two unique stands of the freedom movement, antagonistic to each other. This perception has been reinforced by films such as Ajay Devgan-starrer The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002), where Mahatma Gandhi is depicted to be a scheming politician allowing the young revolutionaries to hang. But during interviews with numerous freedom fighters she learns of the close links between both groups. Kanpur resident Rajkumari Gupta, who served jail terms in 1930, '32 and '42, reveals how she had close connections with Chandra Shekhar Azad's group in Allahabad, the same group which would be later led by Bhagat Singh. "Hum upar se Gandhivaadi the, neeche se krantivaadi. (We were Gandhians from above; underneath we were revolutionaries," she tells Ms Chhabra. (Surya Sen, too, was a member of the Chittagong branch of the Congress.)
From Gandhians such as Subhadra Joshi, who defeated former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the 1962 Lok Sabha elections, and Sushila Nayar, Gandhi's companion at Aga Khan Palace where he was imprisoned during the Quit India Movement, to Lakshmi Sehgal, a Cabinet member of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's Azad Hind government, and Janaky Thevar, the second in command of the Rani Jhansi Regiment of the Indian National Army - a reader will meet and listen to the testimonies of all freedom fighters Ms Chhabra has been able to track down. At times, the personal tales can sound a little repetitive but it is never less than startling to hear of the commitment of the young men and women who answered the calls of Gandhi or Bose, putting their lives on hold, even in the line of danger and death. Ms Chhabra keeps authorial commentary to a minimum, allowing the force of personal recollections to percolate through the essentially archival endeavour.
The book also has a lesson or two for aspiring filmmakers and archivists. Ms Chhabra records in meticulous detail her dealing with the incorrigible bureaucracy, not only in India, but also Malaysia and Myanmar; the frustrations of research; the travails of travelling and the sheer chaos that filmmaking can often be. The details can get a tad distracting at times. For instance, an entire chapter on the ethnic and gender discrimination rampant in Malaysia seems unnecessary because none of the facts are really unknown. Having said that, one cannot deny that Ms Chhabra's narrative is never trite, and at best, can be quite cathartic.
For instance, while recording the testimonies of former INA members such as Lieutenant Perumal and Chinnaya who are now "stateless", having been denied citizenship by both India and Myanmar, living in acute penury, Ms Chhabra writes: "…my eyes brimmed over…(with) tears of shame and anger streaming down my face." This book is not only a poignant reminder of the epidemic of forgetfulness that afflicts all of us, allowing us to spend millions from the national exchequer to construct enormous statues of a certain freedom fighter, while forgetting many others.
