Sainath’s Last Heroes gives a moving account of lesser known freedom fighters

The journalist, known for his reporting of rural India, brought out the book on the occasion of 75 years of India’s independence.
Freedom fighter Salihan
Freedom fighter Salihan
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The youngest freedom fighters of India, who must have been in their teens or early adulthood in 1947, the year the country got Independence, will be well into their 90s or closing in on their centenary if alive today. Unfortunately, quite a lot of them are not recognised by state or union governments for the parts they played in the freedom struggle. Perhaps they did not go to jail, did not pick up arms, and did not feature in the list of wanted persons the British went after. But it took several thousands like them to make it possible for the leaders of the time to put together the fight for independence. Picking 16 such stories of the lesser known freedom fighters who lived long and painful lives, journalist P Sainath, known for his exemplary work on rural India, brought out The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom.

Barely 16 years old in 1930, Demati Dei Sabar Salihan (photo above), an Adivasi girl from an Odisha village, had led 40 young women wielding the lathis they used for farming to chase away British men who had attacked her father and others. But Salihan does not figure in the official list of India’s freedom fighters. Sainath writes why —  “She did not go to jail. She was not a part of organised politics. She had no role in campaigns like the Civil Disobedience or Quit India movements. In the village of Saliha, where she led that death-defying charge, they still speak of her valour. In the same village, the names of 17 people are inscribed on a monument to the uprising. Her name is not among them.”

Sainath’s book starts with the stories of two women — Salihan and Hausabai Patil of Sangli in Maharashtra. Both women tell him that they did not do much, preferring not to make a big deal of the risks they took in their youth. Hausabai had once floated across the Mandovi river on a wooden box at midnight for a mission, while Salihan’s act had brought on a female force to take on a platoon of British police. To his horror, Sainath discovers that the only certificate of honour Salihan received from a functionary of the Odisha government was a eulogy of sorts for her father, which, avoiding mention of the women’s fight, suggested that her bravery came from him.

Sainath effortlessly pulls you into the unappreciated struggles of the women of the time who had cooked and toiled for the freedom fighters in hiding. In the process, it dawns on him how he had earlier written about Ganpati Yadav, a freedom fighter who acted as a courier carrying food for the underground workers in Satara, but not about his wife who cooked it. “In the struggle for freedom, all of them (women) fought and acquitted themselves as honourably as anyone else. But they were women. In societies awash in prejudices and stereotypes against women, their role was seldom valued,” he writes.

While speaking to them, Sainath becomes a humble observer, sometimes presenting himself as an ignorant man who asks silly questions. Centenarian Bhabani Mahato of Purulia, West Bengal, had to talk to him like to “dim-witted children who simply do not get it” as she repeated that she had no time to think about Gandhi or the freedom struggle because she had to do "everything" from harvesting to cooking for both her large family and the growing number of people that her freedom-fighter-husband brought home. It was a while before her son explained to Sainath that these "growing number of people" were revolutionaries of the underground resistance.

We sat there in silence for some moments. Completely overwhelmed by the sheer sacrifice of this woman who never had a moment to herself, for herself, in almost her entire life from age nine. If what she did in the 1930s and 1940s wasn’t participation in the freedom struggle, what was?

There were also the more known women, like Mallu Swarajyam of Telangana who had demonstrated the use of a slingshot as a weapon at a gathering in 2014 when Sainath asked if it was effective enough. The book’s description of her looking at him reproachfully brings in some wry humour. So do the chapters on the Badmash Gaon (rogue village) about a gang of men who “played court” as part of the Quit India movement. When the police tried to arrest them, freedom fighter Chamura Parida said that he was the magistrate. “You take orders from me. If you are Indians, obey me. If you are British, go back to your own country,” he told the police. They further refused to give their names so the police had to call them A, B, and C in the forms.


Left: Laxmi Panda in 1940s in INA camp, Right: Laxmi in 2000s in Odisha 

In most accounts, Sainath lets the voice of the aged freedom fighters take over, only to appear later to emphasise the situations they have all ended up in. Some of them lived in extremely poor conditions — 78-year-old Laxmi Panda lived in a tiny room in Odisha’s Koraput district when he first met her. The woman who had worked in the Indian National Army (INA) forest camps as a 13-year-old, was a domestic worker at three houses in her old age. A local journalist’s discovery of her story had brought her better living conditions. Laxmi died soon after in 2008.

The Gandhian traits in the freedom fighters come out through Sainath’s observation that none of them harbour any hard feelings nor have any complaints against anyone who has hurt them. Baji Mohammad of Odisha, who considers his meeting with Gandhi as his greatest reward, had taken beatings both from the British and from RSS men, decades after independence during the Babri Masjid demolition. He recounted it all without the slightest bitterness, Sainath notes.


Baji Mohammad in Odisha in 2007

Some of them had even refused the pensions that their roles in the struggle brought. “We fought for freedom, not pensions,” says N Sankariah, a well-known figure in Tamil Nadu politics, unlike the others he shares the pages with. Sankariah turned 101 this year and is still not the oldest to feature in the book.

Six of Sainath’s 16 freedom fighters have died since May 2021 and a few, like Laxmi, before that. HS Doreswamy, journalist and writer who fought for India’s freedom, was nearly 104 when Sainath interviewed him. Merely two weeks before his death, he had published a column on the 2021 Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal, criticising the BJP. This is the same man who was jailed during the Emergency in 1975 for writing to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi saying that she was acting like a dictator.

It is heartwarming to see how none of them ever stopped fighting for what they believed in. They didn’t consider their work as done after 1947 and retire to comfortable lives. They came out in protest every time they saw something unjust and fought against it in their own ways, or supported those who suffered. Sainath's writing also clearly brings out how they view the present state of the country. In the words of Captain Bhau, leader of the Toofan Sena Kundal in Maharashtra, “We fought for freedom and independence. We achieved independence.”

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