Dateline Independence- an Indian Memoir

by Indu Saraiya

My generation which grew up in the 1930s,40s,and 50s, saw and lived through history
being made. My own mother, and our lady neighbour joined Gandhiji’s legion of Desh-
Sevikas – until one day they were arrested and imprisoned by the Raj for picketing British
goods at the Mangaldas Market in Bombay. They sepnt nearly five months in jail, first in the
Arthur Road Prison, and later in the Yeravada Jail, Poona, until a general amnesty was
declared.

I was yet a child of four when this happened, and my brother was a youngster of fourteen.
Mother’s unexpected arrest shook everybody. Today, many many years later, and after 63
years of Independence, when I think back on those stirring, historic times, I am dismayed to
find revisionist historians like Swagato Ganguly who wrote ‘The God that Failed’ (2005) and
leaders like Jaswant Singh who wrote ‘Jinnah – India-Partion-Independence’ (2009) all too
ready to consign Gandhiji, Nehru, Patel, Jinnah and other stalwarts to the boon-docks. These
latter-day writers will never know how these leaders agonised over the smallest decision they
made, knowing it would make or mar the future of millions of our countrymen.

The commitment, and voluntary sacrifices made by the Desh-Sevikas – often women
comfortably ensconced in well-to-do homes – has spurred me to write this book. However,
History by itself, I felt, would not a good book make, which is why I invented new
characters, reinvented some already known to me, and interwove their ongoing stories with
India’s ongoing historical landmarks. So my brother became Gurav Bhimani, I his younger
sister Chitra, our neighbour’s daughter became Geeta Raichand, and so on.

To make sense of what was going on, young Gaurav and Geeta, neighbours and bosom
friends, decide to write down in diary form the landmark happenings they were themselves
witnessing in the 1930s,40s,and 50s – the call for Swaraj, Muslim separatism and Partition,
Bose’s INA and his quixotic life, the Cripps and Cabinet Missions, Mountbatten’s cavalier
decisions, Independence Day, and so on. Their researches take them back and forth in time –
to South Africa’s Boer War of 1899-1902; to Curzon’s Partiton of Bengal in 1905 along
communal lines; to the Khilafat Movement from 1919 to 1923; to the Dandi Salt March in
1930, and so on.

But while Geeta’s and Gaurav’s diary spans roughly 16 years from 1932 to 1948 in
historical time, their own ongoing lives in real time, grow evolve and change in different
ways. The characters acquire husbands, wives, suitors, friends and new relatives- with the
result that their own larger sphere of life contains within it their diarised milestones of India’s
freedom struggle.

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