Independence Came Seventy Years Ago

I belong to the generation born just before World War II, who arrived at the age of awareness around the time of India’s Independence. I was in the school bus being ferried to San Thome Convent when I first heard the word ‘Dominion Status’ applied to India (it was splashed in huge font on the front page of the newspaper a teacher was holding). The term conveyed little to me beyond the sense of a new era beginning. I didn’t know yet that I had been living in a subjugated country all my life. Lord Mountbatten, and then C. Rajagopalachari, were to be the Governors General before India became a Republic.

Lord & Lady Mountbatten with Gandhi

Chakravarti Rajagopalachari

Uncle Louis, in whose house we stayed in Madras, had spent time in Alipore jail in Calcutta as a political prisoner after he was a student at Scottish Church College. The morning routine for the warders was to call out to the inmates, “Sarkar ko salaam bolo!” to which they would defiantly respond in unison “Jail ka darwaza kholo!”

From his house we all bundled into his cream Chevrolet to go to the Island Grounds in Madras, because Gandhiji was coming to speak. There wasn’t enough seating for my uncle, and aunt Kuttiamma, my mother and sister, my portly ayah, Dhanammal, our man Friday, Munuswamy, and our erudite driver, Damodaran. 

Uncle Louis in 1946

So my sister and I sat on stools at the back. I remember nothing of the speech or the voice, but can see the posts on which the loudspeakers were mounted, and the bamboo partitions to corral the crowds. It was a sea of vermilion and green, with white Gandhi caps on nearly every head. I don’t remember what songs were played, but there was music relayed to the furthest expanse of the grounds.

When Independence actually arrived there was a celebration at school. I was clad in white shorts, a collarless shirt and Gandhi cap and stood somewhere along the West Coast of the outline of India painted white on the long sloping flight of black granite steps rising from the playground to the Form classes (Forms I to VI) above. We had little paper flags pinned to our chest and a rousing chant of the Jana-Gana-Mana arose as we held candles in our hand — there on the steps, we enclosed the virtual extent of Bharat, that is India, metaphorically uniting the whole country.

Deep in the south we knew nothing as children of what went on at the borders. The vast population migration, and the towns and villages being cleansed of the people who had been living there for centuries was unimagined, unknown. Being children we were insulated from the savage surgical pain by which two countries came into being, cast adrift by a feckless colonial power.

Of all that I came to know only later when we transited to Calcutta in the summer of 1948 and witnessed the tail-end of the bloody riots in that city. The internecine killings were only doused when the army came out in flag marches with infantry and armoured cars. Periodically there would be an eruption, but never again on a thousandth of the scale that happened at Partition.

Much literature has been contributed by those who experienced the birth pangs of India (and Pakistan) — from Pakistani writers like Manto and Indian writers like Khushwant Singh. Later, others who grew up with no consciousness of Independence have brilliantly imagined aspects of it: Salman Rushdie, for example.

In South India there was joy and a blissful distance from the tragedy up North and in the East. Independence was only good news for the millions south of the Vindhyas. There was a rebellion by the razakars in Hyderabad (Deccan) attempting to make the province accede to Pakistan. It was quickly put down by a ‘police action.’ But we heard nothing of the massacres, and I do not recall any shadow cast on Independence Day by the hatred and pogroms that convulsed the Punjab and Bengal. Later in my youth I learned Partition caused the largest migration known to humans in recent times, perhaps ever.

But even in the South we experienced loss, the terrible loss which came so soon after freedom, when Gandhi was assassinated. At this distance of sixty-nine years in time I can see Uncle Louis sitting forlorn, head bowed, hand over forehead, in the living room of our Mowbrays Road house. All India Radio was announcing the death of Bapu, as he was called. From Nehru’s lips, in words more moving even than his Tryst with Destiny speech, issued the words: “The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere.”

The difficult days of Independence lay ahead.