India Today – August 19, 2019

AUGUST 19, 2019 INDIA TODAY 25

nibalistic exultation, with the poor fellow looking

on helplessly...”.

E.M.S. Namboodiripad, joining much older

people at the incredible age of 25, founded the

Congress Socialist Party in 1934 and the peasant

movement called Tebhaga Andolan of 1946-47

Bengal, commemorated in sketches by the re-

markable Somnath Hore, one of them of a woman

and child, Mother India at her most real. It was

about a passionate commitment to India’s great-

ness in justice. As was the dedication of a young

man who would enter patriotism’s pages, as from a

corner, a shy smile lighting his face as he famously

escaped from prison in the pitch of night, to be

hailed in time with ‘andhere mein ek prakash,

Jayaprakash, Jayaprakash’.

Each time it is recited, Tagore’s opening

words in ‘Where the mind is without fear and

the head is held high...’ raise goose-bumps. But

nowhere nearly as much as his Bengali original

does: Chitto jaetha bhaya-shunno... followed by

uchcho jetha shir...

The voiding of fear of the Raj was part of the

love for India. It held India’s and Indians’ heads

loved their land, saw themselves as its hand. They loved their
freedom, which they saw as a slice of the freedom of India.
Like these braveheart freedom fighters of the 18th and
19th centuries before them, the autumnal Dadabhai Naoroji,
who wrote with measured pain about Poverty and Un-British
Rule in India; the defiant Aurobindo Ghose, who made Bande
Mataram newspaper the nation’s masthead beyond the song;
the cerebral Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who worked till his body
collapsed for India’s right to self-rule; and the impassioned
Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who said, in a brilliant mix of
Sanskrit and Urdu, that Swaraj was his janmasiddha haq—his
birthright; the intrepid Lala Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra
Pal, Tilak’s associates in the triumvirate of ‘Lal Bal Pal’, did
what they did because they loved India. Plain and simple. Each
of them loved fighting for her freedom. And were ready to die
fighting that fight.

“If I should die

By our Mother, let me die,

Fighting for my land...”

And then, with those friends, stopping near an armed
sentry, to hurl those lines with the greatest gusto at the man,
snapping tiny fingers at him and yelling and dancing in “can-

Illustration by

NILANJAN DAS