“Your book is the first one where I got a raw feel of the troubled and disturbed relationship that exists between Hindus and Muslims down the ages. It gave me an understanding of what it must have been to be a Hindu in the past and now. Thank you for writing this book. But will you explain to me why your great writers, poets have avoided the subject of describing slavery, its conditions and Indians as slaves? It is a subject which has been the core of your identity as a people, as a nation and yet one doesn’t read about it in literature? What stopped your writers from writing it?” A reader of my book was speaking to me.

“Your school or college curriculum doesn’t examine this issue or as much as mention slavery in textbooks. Ask an average Indian student and he will look blank if you tell him that the history of India and his ancestors is a history of invasions, of slavery wrought with genocidal violence on his ancestors and made them slaves for centuries. The mention of destruction of temples, of areas of India converted whether Kashmir or Nagaland through violence and allurement doesn’t find any mention. That the zealots of these religions tried to exterminate the Hindu civilization is not mentioned. Why is that you don’t teach this to your children?”

“Why are you running away from it and for how long will you escape from your true history?” he asked before putting down the phone. The anguish in his voice was unescapable.

I thought of some of the great writers of India of that period. Tagore, Premchand, Amrita Pritam to name a few. Tagore wrote on philosophical themes and none of his poems or writings inspired taking the freedom struggle forward or the thought processes of the revolutionaries. While beautiful and sublime, slavery of his countrymen was not a theme he felt tormented by, even though we declared him our national poet later on. Premchand mostly wrote about social ills and customs of his day. Amrita Pritam wrote on partition and gender giving it primacy over colonialism and slavery. None of them targeted colonialism and the British for how they were persecutors. As a result, none of the authors of the day could be called anti-establishment writers.

If one wants to know what Indians felt about the British persecution, there are hardly any books that touch the theme. The insult, the humiliation an average Indian faced everyday under the British rule hasn’t been documented. The authors of India wrote about their pet themes that gave them national and international recognition. They avoided writing about the victimization that Indians and especially Hindus faced in their daily life over centuries. Their writing wasn’t Hindu centric, on persecution of Hindus or how an average Hindu struggled to prevent his identity, his civilization from extermination. It is inconceivable that were they not aware of the important issue of that day?

Why did the above authors not write about Jalianwallah Bagh massacre? Why was there no protest literature that came out of their pen? Would it not have galvanized the nation?

Authors in every era have attempted to defy authority, spoken against oppression and become the voice of their age. Why there was such a deafening silence from our authors? Why is it that no great body of work of any author on colonialism and its impact came out in that period or even later? The irony is that it continues even seventy years after the British left and is a poignant reminder of an unfinished past and memory.

The author’s responsibility towards the period he lives in is to fire the imagination of the oppressed so that they can be aroused from the frozen sea within as said by Kafka. Many an uprising, revolution and social change has been caused by the provocation from the pen of an author angering the powers to be at great personal risks even to their selves. The author’s loyalty has been to write about the truth and to his people alone. That is the reason every fascist, colonialist has chosen to exterminate and punish authors for their continuity. Ironically the history of the colonial India during the freedom struggle shows that rarely any great writer of the day came forward to write anti-colonial literature or was punished for his writing. Is this only a coincidence?

Bhagat Singh, Azad, Savarkar and many great revolutionaries were inspired by literature from abroad and rarely from any home-grown author. Some of them went on to write in jail and wrote books, journals but those whose identities were of writers didn’t come forward.

Novelists in every age have picked up the most burning themes of the day, the issues that have been silenced and oppressed, to construct their plots, their characters. Tolstoy’s War and Peace was read by Generals and Soldiers alike to inspire and keep alive their hopes and defend their country when the Germans attacked Russia a century later. Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak picked up the different injustices of the day at great personal risk. Franz Fanon, Aime Cesare, Chinua Achebe, wrote about the burning issues of race, slavery and oppression of their people and didn’t shy away from naming the perpetrators. ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ ripped apart the hypocrisy of the narrative around slavery. No amount of threat, violence and terror could take them away from their writing.

No works by any of the major writers, poets of pre independence India were banned by the British except maybe a few smaller ones. In reading the works of these writers one doesn’t feel the anger of slavery or colonialism, the indignation or humiliation meted out to Indians as a race. On the contrary it is a writing that is often defensiveness, of self-blame as if the fault lies within us. Sadly enough, if Indian youth became revolutionaries and fought against the British, it was in spite of any writer and not because of them.

Why didn’t Tagore target against the injustice of the British rule and slavery? Not even in a single writing of his does he touch upon slavery, of freedom from it or throwing away the foreign rule? When young men and women around him went to gallows for freedom, why is it that he was not affected and none of his work picked up that issue?

Were he and others conditioned not to write anything against the Britishers, I wonder? His international celebrity status meant he would never be persecuted or arrested by them. He had an impunity that was even higher than that of Gandhi, albeit for different reason. Why then did he never touch upon the themes that could have taken the freedom struggle to greater heights?

Why is it that Indian writers of the day failed to reflect the times? Why is it that no Indian author wrote about how it felt to be a Hindu to see his temple destroyed, or missionaries humiliating his religion and converting whole villages like Chinua Achebe wrote in ‘Things Fall Apart’? We may blame the Nehruvian model for distorting history but who tied the hands of the authors and intellectuals from expressing themselves?

Why is there a disconnect between the lived reality of the people and the author’s pen? What stopped them from expressing the true aspirations of the people?

As a psychologist, I believe, the only explanation for that is a fear across generations that has bound us as people and stopped us from speaking our minds but blindly accept the status quo imposed by the perpetrators, internalizing it and never challenging it.

I would imagine that when the British conquered us, they already found in us a population terrorized into total submission where they had to do little for taking it any further. A race whose men would be beheaded for slightest disobedience, whose women and children were sold like cattle in millions on streets in the most inhumane way, didn’t need further subjugation for conformity into slavery. It is perhaps ironical that none of the great authors of that era could write about the centuries of Muslim atrocities and give them words even under British rule long after the Mughal period was over, so great was the terror even after centuries. They neither built any large temple or a university till the freedom struggle began to make us angry once again and give courage.

I pray that we question it sooner than later and reverse this process so that we don’t pass on a troubled legacy for our coming generations.

One clarification at the end. My goal is not to belittle our great writers and poets of the past. They wrote about several themes I am proud of. I only wonder why they avoided writing about the most important, pressing and burning themes of the day, the British and Mughal persecution of enslavement, a trauma so pervasive and omniscient that it could not be missed by any sensitive mind. I further wonder that if they had done so, wouldn’t the history of India, of our present have been vastly different? I leave the reader to wonder why they failed their own people in their struggle?

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are personal