A three-act fortitude

The histories of activists, reformers and political leaders who operated outside of the big presidencies of Madras, Bombay and Bengal have suffered from a great lack of attention. Their lives and work are often little known outside their home states.

A lot of writing on India’s freedom movement focuses on a small group of people who have also come to dominate the popular imagination; it is these men (and it is mostly men) who are memorialised in textbooks and have dozens of books, television shows and films made on their lives. On the other hand, the histories of activists, reformers and political leaders who operated primarily outside of the big presidencies of Madras, Bombay and Bengal and the capital city of Delhi tend to have suffered from a lack of attention. Their lives and work are often little known outside their home states, and sometimes not even within them.

This narrowness of focus is particularly regrettable because one of the most interesting things about the Indian independence movement is the fact that it involved thousands of people from a diversity of regional, caste, religious and class backgrounds. Across the country, ordinary people somehow found the courage to take action, protest against injustice and even go to jail for what they believed in. Often, these were young people who gave up financial stability and middle-class respectability in exchange for a peripatetic life with the threat of violence from the colonial state looming large over it. Here are the stories of three individuals who made that choice, and whose work in the independence movement brought them into each other’s ambits, most memorably at the historic Belgaum Session of the Congress in 1924.

Lion of Karnataka

The fact that the session was held at Belgaum at all was due in large part to the efforts of one man: Gangadharrao Deshpande. Popularly known as the ‘lion of Karnataka’, Deshpande was born in Hudali, in the then Belgaum district and trained as a lawyer in Bombay. As a young man, he became swept up in the Swadeshi movement, which began as a response to the partition of Bengal in 1905. Deeply inspired by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Deshpande held public meetings to drum up support in Belgaum and neighbouring districts for the movement. According to the newspaper Karnataka Vritta, dozens of ordinary folk agreed at these meetings to boycott foreign-made goods — textile dealers in Belgaum decided to stop importing cloth, while grocers in the region stopped purchasing foreign-made sugar, and even ‘hotel-keepers’ resolved to cease serving tea! Deshpande would eventually become one of the leading lights of the Congress organisation in Karnataka.

As chairman of the Reception Committee for the Belgaum session, Deshpande was involved in everything from fundraising to logistics. The details of the preparation involved — recounted, among other places, in a biography of Deshpande by Dr R S Narayan — are fascinating. In order to host the thousands of people who would descend on Belgaum, a ‘camp’ was built, complete with khadi-and-bamboo huts, a temporary hospital, kitchen and purpose-dug well (the well remains a landmark in Belgaum today). It was named Vijayanagar, a reference to the historical Vijayanagara, and a replica of the tower of the Virupaksha Temple in Hampi was put up at the entrance to the main venue. There was also a hall with over a hundred charkhas for the attendees to use, and arrangements were made for musical performances by local artists. Through it all, according to the future president of India Dr Rajendra Prasad, “Old Gangadharrao Deshpande moved about on horseback like a young man and supervised the work.”

A tale of valour

Managing such a large event depended then, as now, on the services of hundreds of volunteers, who did everything from cooking and cleaning to maintaining order. The majority of these volunteers came from the Hindustani Seva Dal, an organisation that the Dharwad-born Narayan Subbarao Hardiker had recently proposed and helped to set up.

Hardiker, who lost both his parents at a young age, grew up in difficult circumstances. After studying medicine in Calcutta, he was funded by a group of well-wishers to travel to the US to study medicine (with a focus on public health and sanitation) in 1913. As a boy, Hardiker had read Kesari, the Marathi newspaper run by Tilak, and become interested in the nationalist movement. While in the US, Hardiker began working closely with Lala Lajpat Rai (who lived there through World War I) to organise Indian students and gather support for the independence movement. Inspired by his mentor, Hardiker returned to India in 1921, eager to do more impactful work on the ground. In 1923, Hardiker was among a group that travelled to Nagpur to participate in a procession where they would carry the newly designed flag of India in defiance of British prohibitions against displaying it. Along with the other volunteers, Hardiker was arrested and imprisoned in terrible conditions. This prompted many of his colleagues to apologise to the government in exchange for being released.

Hardiker seemed to find his fellow colleagues’ inability to withstand harsh imprisonment disturbing, and he suggested that what was needed was a trained volunteer corps. In his own words, ‘Jail going will ever be incidental. A lot of hard and patient work stands between ourselves and real freedom … No nation which has worked for its freedom has been able to achieve notable success without disciplined volunteer organisations.’ This conviction led to the founding of the Hindustani Seva Dal in 1923. Hardiker invited a young Jawaharlal Nehru to be the Seva Dal’s first president, an office that Nehru accepted. But not everyone was happy about the Seva Dal. Hardiker had to overcome a surprising apprehension among several Congressmen that an organisation whose training programme included drills and a physical fitness regimen was not in keeping with the non-violent approach the Congress had adopted, thanks to Gandhi!

‘Well-meant’ excess

At Belgaum, it seems the Seva Dal managed to win people over. Seva Dal volunteers attracted special praise for taking up the unpleasant job of dealing with the large amounts of waste that are inevitably generated by any large gathering of people. According to an article that Gandhi wrote the following year for Young India, ‘There were 75 volunteers, mostly Brahmins, who were engaged in conservancy work in the Congress Camp … Kaka Kalelkar who was in charge of this corps tells me that this part of the work would not have been done as satisfactorily as it was if the corps had not been formed.’

Despite the efficiency of the Dal, however, the session did not go off without a couple of minor controversies. One of these is recounted in a biography of N S Hardiker by V S Narayana Rao. Some members of Deshpande’s Reception Committee reportedly made rude remarks about a few Seva Dal volunteers one night, prompting the latter to go on a hunger strike the next day. Hardiker, who had been away overseeing other business through the day, only heard of the issue late at night. At once, according to his biographer, he awoke the ‘lady volunteers’ who ran the kitchen to prepare a meal and sounded a bugle call to summon the rest of the volunteers to eat it despite the late hour.

The other was the ‘lavishness’ of the arrangements at the session, which Gandhi lamented upon in his Young India article. Instead of a khaddar hut, says Gandhi, he was given a ‘khaddar palace’, and there was too much food served, although he concedes that such excess was ‘well meant’.

Women-only volunteer force

One wonders what Umabai Kundapur, the woman in charge of the kitchen, made of this criticism. Like many of the women who were part of the independence movement, her story remains largely unknown but is worth recounting. Born in Mangalore, Umabai moved to Bombay as a child. She was married off at thirteen, which was not unusual at the time. However, her father-in-law, Anandrao Kundapur, appears to have been of a reformist bent and encouraged Umabai not only to finish her education but to take up social work focused on the welfare of women. In Bombay, Umabai helped promote the idea that women had the right to an education. Some years later, when she was widowed at 25, Umabai refused to remain in seclusion, instead moving to Hubli to continue working to educate women there. Umabai is credited with drawing women from conservative families all over northern Karnataka into the independence movement, and with helping to set up schools for girls in the region. Some of these women must have formed part of the 200-strong volunteer force that managed the kitchen during the Belgaum session.

Watershed moment

Deshpande’s, Hardiker’s and Umabai’s involvement in the independence movement would extend far beyond the Belgaum session, but their efforts to make it a success bore fruit. The Belgaum session would become special for several reasons: first, it was the only session ever chaired by Gandhi himself, and second, it took place just after the Congress had mended the rift between the Swarajists and the no-changers, two groups who had differed over the issue of boycotting the legislative councils. It was also undeniably a watershed moment in the history of the independence movement in Karnataka.

Belgaum was the first large Congress session held in the region, and the fact that it was attended by several ‘stars’, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Annie Besant and Sarojini Naidu as well as Gandhi attracted a large audience. There were several parallel conferences on a variety of subjects, from untouchability to the creation of linguistic states, including a united Karnataka. Deshpande, Hardiker and Umabai, as well as many other local leaders, toured a number of districts in the weeks before the session, holding public meetings on the issue of India’s freedom and how ordinary folk could be part of the independence movement. They encouraged people to attend the Belgaum session, an open invitation that many would accept. In subsequent years, many of the principles Gandhi articulated at the session would be energetically put into practice across the state, through the establishment of khadi spinning centres and schools for women, as well as anti-untouchability activism.

As for Deshpande, Hardiker and Umabai, this was not by any means the last time their stories would coincide. All three were involved in the salt march at the small town of Ankola in North Kanara (Uttara Kannada). It is yet another interesting episode in the history of Karnataka’s freedom story that deserves to be better known. But that is a tale for another time!

The author is a writer, history researcher and editor, who writes non-fiction for young readers on primarily medieval and modern Indian history. Her most recent book ‘Incredible Indians: 75 People Who Shaped Modern India’ was published by HarperCollins in 2022.