JOIN USRebels of Isuru, Sept 1942, and their historians
It was sobering for professional historians to be once more reminded of their failings, this time by no less than the Prime Minister himself. Firing his salvo from the capable shoulders of no less than ‘Gurudev’, Narendra Modi said recently in Kolkata that in post-independence history writing, “it is not mentioned what the people of the country were doing. Didn’t they have any existence?”
Quite right, too: as students of history, we were all taught that recounting the deeds of Good Kings and Bad Queens did not amount to historical thinking. In 1930, two writers from the then Superpower (UK), WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman debunked dynastic history in their classic 1066 and All That. The only problem with citing Rabindranath Tagore’s 1902 (not 1903!) ‘Bharatbarsher Itihash’ (‘History of India’) today is that in the intervening century, dynastic history in India, too, has become just a small corner of a large and richly textured canvas. So, in turning the focus to a ‘people’s history,’ a history from below, the Prime Minister may have invited a bit of trouble for himself and all those who would like a ‘history to end all (other) histories.’
The turn to ‘history from below’ came from British social historians of the 1950s, most of whom were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. They included such stalwarts as Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson, but legions of other historians followed, in every corner of the world. In India, too, historians, largely but not only of Left persuasion, turned increasingly to all those ‘peoples without history’ such as the labouring and working classes, the tribals, women, lower castes, forgotten regions, sanyasis, bandits and imposters, to recreate a fuller account of our past. Historians’ shelves today are groaning under the weight of such lively retellings.
Even well-known moments of our past have been re-interpreted using the perspective of the ordinary people who heard, and even misunderstood, messages, but nevertheless participated in the great movement for Indian freedom. How could Gandhi’s non-cooperation, as Shahid Amin has shown (in his 1996 classic Event Metaphor Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992), have led ordinary peasants to burn down a police station in 1922? Gyanendra Pandey and several other scholars asked different questions about the Quit India movement of 1942: how did Gandhi’s call karenge ya marenge (‘Do or Die!) get fatefully interpreted as a call to kill on behalf of the nation?
Let us turn to one such ‘forgotten’ incident in Karnataka’s Shikaripura district, when the villagers of Isuru turned rebels, declared ‘independence’ and ran a parallel government under the leadership of a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old for three days, from September 25 to 28, 1942, before the rebellion ended in the killing of two government officials, Tahsildar Chennakrishnappa and Sub Inspector Kenchegowda.
In 2007, I too had asked and tried to answer the question of what led to the movement in Isuru, its violent climax, and most importantly, how the event was commemorated by the state and lives in people’s memory. To write that article, I had to ask questions about the social composition of the village and the movement, the old rivalries and new solidarities that became visible in the build-up to its fatal end, and how memories of the event have highlighted very different aspects of what the judges called an ‘act of savagery.’
The fulcrum of the movement in the village was the Veerabhadraswamy temple, which was emblazoned with such paradoxical slogans as “Let there be unity. Let government servants be cut to pieces, ryot brethren be united, give up communal differences.” Yet, the four principal Lingayat leaders of the movement, Sahukar Basavanappa, Sahukar Rudrappa, Patel Gurushantappa and Angadi Halappa, remained outside the police dragnet, while the death sentence was awarded to five men, life sentences to seven, including three women, and varying terms of imprisonment to a further 14, many of them from an array of lower castes.
The truth of the mob action at Isuru lay somewhere between the purely criminal and the purely political. To produce an understanding of this event, I relied not only on detailed court records, newspaper accounts and police files, but on the recorded memories of those who participated in the freedom struggle, (compiled by Suryanath Kamath in Swatantra Sangramada Smritigalu) as well as a touching personal memoir by C Lingappa Swatantra Sangramadalli Isuru.
Such people’s histories may have been more than what our Prime Minister bargained for in his breezy condemnation, but Tagore would certainly have been pleased (though he would have been pained that his ironic tone has been completely missed by the PM!) Still, let us grasp this change of recalling some words of that wonderful people’s poet Bertolt Brecht who wrote the “Questions from a worker who reads”:
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?/In the books you will read the names of kings/Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?..The young Alexander conquered India/Was he alone?
But the words that might make our PM pine nostalgically for heroic dynastic histories are Brecht’s concluding lines:
Every ten years a great man/Who paid the bill?/So many reports/So many questions.