Tarnished Rays of 1947

Anniversaries are useful occasions as a way to remind us of the values that are enshrined in our history. The golden jubilee year of Indian and Pakistani independence, 1997, is an opportunity to remember those whose sacrifices ended colonial rule. This year also serves to highlight the values of hope and patriotism which infused the struggle for independence. The national struggle for control of the state was one which allowed the oppressed to experience the powerful consequences of organised social action. While current historical scholarship correctly demonstrates the fissures within the national movement in British India, it misses the mighty sense of belonging engendered by the movement. A dalit man in the 1930s spoke of donning a Gandhi cap and feeling at that moment, in the crowd, during a demonstration, like an Indian, like all those around him who constituted themselves in opposition to the authoritarian state. Those who came into the orbit of the national movement found their sense of self in struggle and in fellowship.

For this reason, our celebration of 1947 must not degenerate into the glorification of Great Men – those heroes (as Gandhi liked to call them) could only become so because of the immense sacrifice of the masses. Freedom ought to be remembered as the collective struggle which possessed within itself the possibility not only for the creation of bourgeois republics, but also, in time, of socialist societies.