A BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE INDIAN AWAKENING CULMINATING IN FREEDOM

A BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE INDIAN AWAKENING CULMINATING IN FREEDOM

Subhas Chandra Bose followed in the footsteps of the great revolutionary Rash Behari Bose to create conditions for the freedom of India. Earlier Gandhiji had transformed the elitist Congress movement for freedom into a mass movement which shook the foundations of the British Raj. And what was Gandhiji but the echo of Swamiji? Swamiji had breathed life into a dead nation. Gandhiji quickened it into life and action. But his methods were passive. What was needed was a militancy that would 'shake off the sterile curse' of the colonists, and this was provided by the Bose duo who organised mass militancy, that is, an armed struggle for freedom.

This militancy, however, was not initiated by the Bengal revolutionaries as such but was the legacy of the Revolt of 1857 when the native kings in conjunction with the revolting sepoys nearly overthrew the East India Company's reign in India. The revolt was brutally suppressed with over 100,000 casualties post-war by way of British retribution. But the scars were left behind and a simmering revolutionary movement was in the air with Maharashtra boiling as Phadke raised rebellion which was crushed and the hero sent into exile to die there in oblivion.

The air was rife with revolution to quell which the British set up the safety valve in the form of the Indian National Congress in 1885 where aggrieved Indians could voice their grievances against the Raj along constitutional means instead of taking recourse to violent attempts at overthrowing it.

But we are fast-forwarding events. Let us rewind then a bit. The East India Company had established its stranglehold first in the Bengal Presidency and it was but natural that Bengal, the cultural confluence of the East and the West, should provide India with her resistive powerhouse to free her of colonial consequence.

And so the resistance to colonial conquest came in the form of the Bengal Renaissance with the advent of Rammohan Roy in 1872. The first signs of the national awakening were evident as Roy strode like a colossus across the socioreligious firmament and ushered in the New Age which was the best fusion of the East and the West that he could conceive of and bring into fruition.

Thomas Babbington Macaulay had wished to culturally colonise India by instituting a system of British education which would create a race of Babus or clerks conversant with British modes and mores who would loyally serve their British masters and perpetuate their colonial hold on India. But this western education proved to be the enlightenment that colonised Indians were in need of to shake off the British rule. Ideas of the Enlightenment, of western democracy and human rights, and the emergence of European nation states stirred up the minds of the Indian intelligentsia into seeking greater freedom and autonomy of self-governance. This coupled with religious revival fostered nationalistic feelings among the educated and led to the first rumblings of what later metamorphosed into the freedom movement.

After Vasudev Balwant Phadke's brief aborted rebellion Maharashtra did awake to the call of another tiger, the redoubtable Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who spurred the Marathis into aggressive activity against the British Raj. When plague broke out in Maharashtra the British officers under command overdid their job of sanitisation of the local communities, violating the modesty of women folk in the process, which brought forth the ire of Tilak. His fiery articles in the Kesari and the Maratha ignited minds, foremost among which were those of the three Chapekar brothers who assassinated the dreaded officer Rand for which they were subsequently executed.

The fire of freedom ignited in Maharashtra soon spread to the Bengal Presidency where Aurobindo Ghosh carried the torch and ushered in the 'Agni Yug'. Swami Vivekananda's body lay prostrate at Belur Math on 4 July, 1902 and from the flames of his funeral pyre was lit the torch of freedom. Swamiji's revolutionary message implicit in his speeches and writings carried the day as the ignited youth of Bengal read into the seer's mind as to what was expected of them---nothing short of the resurrection of the motherland beginning with the political freedom of the country. And in plunged the fairest flowers of Bengal's youth to carrying out the Master's orders. Bagha Jatin and Hemchandra Ghosh had in person received orders to the effect, and now was the hour of action. Curzon's Partition of Bengal further fuelled the fire and secret societies like the Anushilan Samity and the Jugantar became rife with revolutionary activity.

In the North Swami Dayananda Saraswati had set alight the hearts and minds of the youth with his revolutionary socioreligious campaign and set afoot a movement for the spiritual and social revival of the Hindus. His clarion call 'Back to the Vedas' instilled pride into drooping souls and hearkened to the glorious days of India's antiquity. His educational and socioreligious programmes brought forth many an eminent leader of the future freedom movement, prominent among which were the fearless Lala Lajpat Rai and the Hindu activist Swami Shraddhanand. Bhai Parmanand and Lala Hardayal were two other prominent members of the Arya Samaj. The Arya Samaj captured the imagination of the masses in the Punjab and in effect consolidated them for India's future political movement. Likewise in Bengal sprang up the Brahmo Samaj and the Prarthana Samaj in Maharashtra, socioreligious movements which were the precursors to the great mass movement in the Gandhian era to follow. These were not specifically oriented towards the political emancipation of India but were religious reform movements that strengthened the polity, that nourished its adolescent years before it emerged into full-scale adult struggle for political independence under Gandhi in its non-violent phase and the revolutionaries in its armed phase, at first sporadic, then the full-blown assault of the INA.

Maharashtra was followed by Bengal in the wake of Swamiji's death and the arrival of Aurobindo in 1903 from Baroda to take charge of the extremist movement. Curzon's Partition of Bengal in 1905 further exacerbated things and secret societies Anushilan Samity and Jugantar struck terror in the hearts of the British by their daring acts of assassination of British high-ranked officials. The Swadeshi and the Boycott Movements coming as response to the Partition consolidated Bengali response to British imperialism and the Aurobindo-Barin-led armed revolutionary movement that culminated in the Alipore Bomb Case made Kolkata a hot-bed of anti-British activity forcing the Crown to shift colonial capital city from Kolkata to New Delhi in 1912. Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki's attempted assassination of Kingsford in Muzaffarpur followed by the discovery of the bomb-making factory at Manicktola resulted in the implication of Aurobindo Ghosh in anti-Crown conspiracy, and with his year-long incarceration in Alipore Jail in 1908-09 the tide of the revolutionary movement began to turn. Aurobindo in solitary confinement had spiritual realisations which convinced him that his career of the soul lay elsewhere and he quit politics to go into ascetic seclusion in Pondicherry where he served thenceforth the larger cause of the spiritual emancipation of humanity, its evolution from the mental phase to the supramental phase. Thus was Aurobindo lost to the freedom movement and the armed revolutionary movement which he had fathered fell into a lull but not for long.

Meanwhile, in 1907 the Congress had split at Surat amidst acrimonious circumstances into the Moderate faction and the Extremist faction with Aurobindo Ghosh and Tilak having led the charge of the latter.

The Punjab had become another hotbed of revolution with the US-based Ghadar Party with local operatives in the state sowing seeds of an impending insurrection in India. So was the India House in London rife with clandestine revolutionary activity. These two external agencies attempted to overthrow British rule in India during the Great War of 1914-18.

Now emerged the dangerous duo of Bagha Jatin and Rash Behari Bose who conducted the actual operation of armed insurrection. With German arms' assistance Bagha Jatin managed to stage a near-coup which through internal betrayal was aborted, although the revolutionary along with his comrades-in-arms redeemed himself at the Battle of Balasore in 1915. The shipment carrying German arms supply was intercepted by the British and a golden opportunity was lost to oust the colonists at a time when they were at their weakest.

Written by Sugata Bose