The Revolutionaries, Part I and II; Justice SN Aggarwal; Garuda Prakashan, Gurugram. Pages 600.
The British mortally feared the revolutionaries because of four factors; their patriotic fervour, blazing honesty, do or die spirit and disdain for personal safety. A breed of men willing to stake their very lives for a cause that subsumed and overrode every other consideration: that of liberating their beloved land from an oppressive colonial yoke. Justice SN Aggrawal has penned The Revolutionaries in two parts, rebuffing the mainstream narrative that negates their enormous contribution but invests the Gandhi-Nehru duo with the halo of winning freedom for India. The jurist, who has authored several tomes on various facets of the national movement, turns the spotlight even more intensely on the rebels who shook the foundations of the British Empire.
The author-historian salvages the forgotten chapters from the dusty shelves of official archives, where they had lain buried for decades, replete with acts of heroic resistance against colonial masters. His previous account of the notorious Cellular Jail is a fitting tribute to the fortitude of many of these tortured and wrecked but defiant souls, who died unsung. He undertook the present mission as a personal commitment to tell their story, based on painstaking research and scholarship, involving thousands of documents and case histories, boundless patience and long sojourns, besides jurisprudential acuity. His timely initiative reminds the present and future generations of the debt we owe to these selfless warriors, who kept the flag of freedom fluttering high.
The turn of the 20th century, the author writes, threw up many fiery leaders such as Aurobindo Ghosh, Savarkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal (Lal-Bal-Pal), Rash Behari Bose, etc, who took the movement to another level. Their acts roused thousands of youths, such as teenaged Khudiram Bose and not much older Bhagat Singh, to plunge headlong into the revolutionary upsurge. They cheerfully bore every privation in prison and fearlessly faced the gallows, following their conviction in the Alipore and Lahore Bomb Case, respectively. Khudiram and Prafulla Chaki, who made an abortive bid to bomb Kingsford, a notoriously brutal magistrate, brings into play the role of Aurobindo Ghosh, the father of the resistance movement.
Denouncing the Congress for its servility towards the Crown, Aurobindo noted in the Indu Prakash of August 1893, not long after his return from England: “If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into a ditch.” Later his stewardship of the party’s Radical Faction, along with Tilak, engendered its split with the Moderate Wing, inviting the ire of the colonial government. It clamped down on the ‘extremists,’ implicating him as the prime accused in the Alipore Bomb case in 1908, along with his sibling Barindra, besides 38 members of the Anushilan Samiti. It deported Tilak to Mandalay prison in Burma. Chittaranjan Das, a stalwart of the freedom struggle, ably defended Aurobindo and ensured his acquittal.
Midway into the trial, accused Kanailal Dutta and Satyendranath Bose shot dead Narendranath Goswami in the prison itself, nixing British plans of turning him an approver. The case marked a watershed in the pre-independence history. During Aurobindo’s leadership of the Anushilan Samiti, described as the nursery of rebels, Bagha Jatin, Barindra Ghosh, Surya Sen (Master Da), took centre-stage as the face of insurrection. The Crown dumped Barin into the notorious Cellular Jail, where he found himself beside another stalwart like Savarkar. Both underwent unspeakable tortures but made daring escapes from the prison, only to be caught. The police picked up Barin from Puri, especially after martyrdom of Bagha Jatin in the epic Balasore gun battle.
The history of revolution begins with the First War of Independence in 1857, a collective outrage against colonial oppression, led by Rani Lakshmibai, Tatya Tope, Nana Sahab and Mangal Pande, until the emergence of Netaji Bose and his INA, which practically drove the Empire out of India. Justice Aggarwal writes: “The supreme sacrifices of 1857 heroes inspired the relentless struggle against British atrocities led by the brilliant trio of Lal-Bal-Pal.” He covers momentous events like 1857, the Kuka Rebellion, fuelled by peasant pauperization in Punjab, Ghadar Movement, in which Rashbehari Bose played a significant role, Jallianwalla Bagh, Kakori, Delhi and Lahore Conspiracy cases, besides the role of stalwarts such as Baba Ram Singh, Vasudeo Balwant Phadke, Birsa Munda, Chapekar brothers, Shyamji Krishna Varma, Madan Lal Dhingra, Savarkar, Lala Har Dayal, Udham Singh, among others, in 17 chapters.
Book 2 embraces the second Lahore Conspiracy Case, the audacious Chittagong Armoury Raid led by Surya Sen, the role of Netaji Bose, his daring escape and his alleged death in air crash, the trial of INA officers and men. The Hindustan Republican Association (HRA), established by Sachindra Nath Sanyal, (Rashbehari’s second in command), Narendra Mohan Sen and Pratul Ganguly in East Bengal, 1924, also happened to be an offshoot of Anushilan Samiti, co-founded by Sri Aurobindo. Some of the prominent members were Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Sukhdev, Ram Prasad Bismil, Roshan Singh, Ashfaqulla Khan, Rajendra Lahiri. The HRA conducted the Kakori train robbery to loot cash chests and finance the purchase of weapons for the group.
Can one overlook the nefarious role of the East India Company? Justice Aggarwal rips the mask off the face of a vile and scheming entity, which systematically plundered the subcontinent’s vast wealth and left it penniless and in abject misery. “The bigoted, barbaric face of British imperialists,” he observes, especially in the wake of 1857, “stood exposed in all its nakedness before the entire world, when they killed hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women, the old and the infirm, not even sparing new born babies.” The vindictive rulers went on to engineer a series of horrific famines in the coming decades, causing tens of millions to die a slow, agonizing death, culminating with the one in undivided Bengal, for which Winston Churchill, as one of the most odious and racist British prime ministers, must squarely bear the responsibility.
Churchill described Indians as a “beastly people with a beastly religion.” He dismissed India Home Rule Bill as “a gigantic quilt of jumbled crotchet work” and as “a monstrous monument of shame built by pygmies.” Perhaps this was the attitude that underlay Gen Reginald Dyer’s butchery of hundreds of innocent men and women, who had gathered at the Jallianwalla Bagh on April 13, 1919, coinciding with the Baikashi Day. They were peacefully protesting the repressive Rowlatt Act, (necessitated by apprehensions of a second Ghadar revolt, in the wake of World War I) and arrest of Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal, for demanding independence, when the British army emptied thousands of rounds on an unarmed gathering. All escape routes were sealed. The injured outnumbered the dead in what will go down as one of the blackest chapters of its rule. The masses seethed with rage and indignation at the British perfidies.
Undaunted by repressive measures, revolutionary expatriates, largely from the United States and Canada, the author writes, made a concerted attempt to overthrow the colonial empire, by engineering a mutiny within the British-Indian army, initially in Punjab, then in Bengal, in 1915. These two regions, united by a common goal, were at the forefront of revolutionary and anti-colonial activities, which brought the respective administrations to a grinding halt. More than 80 nationalists, including Rash Behari Bose (among the 17 absconders), who had assembled secretly, were apprehended and charged with sedition, thanks to the betrayal by British lackeys who had infiltrated their ranks. They were tried between April 26 and September 13, 1915 and awarded death sentences or deported to the Cellular Jail, in what came to be known as the first Lahore Conspiracy Case.
The student of history cannot ignore the role of Nehru, whom circumstances placed at the heart of the national movement. Justice Agarwal is quite critical of the first prime minister who surprisingly “lacked the magnanimity to declare the martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh as freedom fighters though he chaired the trust created in their memory. (Nehru) did not pay a single visit to the cellular Jail . . . to honour the hallowed memories of thousands of revolutionaries who suffered unspeakable brutalities for the sake of the country. He should have converted the Cellular Jail into a national memorial.”
The reviewer is an author and strategic affairs columnist
Sudip Talukdar is an author, strategic affairs columnist and former senior editor
