India’s ‘foreign’ freedom fighters
RAMACHANDRA GUHA’S BOOK FEATURES MEN AND WOMEN WHO OPPOSED IMPERIAL RULE
‘They made a bigger sacrifice’
TO COINCIDE with the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, the historian Ramachandra Guha has written a remarkable book, Rebels against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom, which could just as easily have been called The Magnificent Seven.
Guha is usually described in western media as “India’s foremost historian”. He is probably also its most readable, and has done a signal service by reminding everyone that it wasn’t just Indians who fought for Swaraj (self-rule) – there were foreigners, too, who joined the struggle.
None were more dedicated than the seven white foreigners who figure in Rebels against the Raj, for they either went to prison or were thrown out of India for their campaign for the country’s freedom.
Of the seven, four were British, two American and one Irish: four men, three women. Six out the seven died in India.
Indians may have heard of a couple of them – “Annie Besant because of her theosophy and also because she was the first female president of Congress” and Mira Behn, an admiral’s daughter who had changed her name from Madeleine Slade. She was played by Geraldine James in Richard Attenborough’s 1982 Oscar-winning film Gandhi.
But the book has other heroes – for example, Samuel Stokes, an American Quaker who changed his first name to Satyanand, took an Indian wife, Agnes, and more or less became a Hindu.
Then there was the campaigning journalist Benjamin Guy Horniman, who outraged the colonial masters by supporting Indian independence; Philip Spratt, a Cambridge graduate who helped establish the Communist Party of India; and Richard Ralph Keithahn, an American missionary who worked to educate and provide healthcare for villagers in south India.
British-born Catherine Mary Heilemann – renamed Sarala Behn – set up a girls’ school and was a pioneering environmentalist campaigner in north India.
Guha summed up their mostly unheralded stories for Eastern Eye: “These were seven distinct, singular lives. They lived in different parts of India, engaged in different kinds of things, but were united by a passion for Indian independence. They were willing to spend time in jail or suffer the consequences of deportation.”
As for the British rulers, “they saw them as traitors to their race”.
Meanwhile, back in England, there were also people who opposed imperial rule – not everyone was like [prime minister] Winston Churchill.
Guha’s comments reveal just how much the current Labour party has changed in its relationship with India when compared with the past. Some of those who went to India shared that ideology.
“There is a strong moral core to at least some elements in the British Labour party,” he said. “Closer to England, there was the Irish independence movement. And there was a lot of violence, partly by the Irish side, but also a lot of brutality by the British suppressing the Irish. Conscience-stricken Englishmen were aware that here are the Irish wanting their own freedom.
“Some things that happened in India, Jallianwala Bagh and so on, also stirred the conscience of these people.”
In France, in marked contrast, Guha said he was not aware of intellectuals “who criticised the French for what they were doing in Algeria and Vietnam”.
But in Britain, George Lansbury and Fenner Brockway “belonged to the radical wing of the Labour party and were passionately committed to Indian independence while living in England”.
Guha spoke admiringly of The Trouble Makers by historian AJP Taylor, which featured “19th-century MPs like John Bright and Charles Bradlaugh who opposed imperialism in the House of Commons.”
But Rebels against the Raj focuses on those who made a bigger sacrifice by living – and dying – in India. The men and women featured in Guha’s book “exchanged their homeland for their new one unreservedly, and unequivocally – once in India, they knew they would almost certainly die in India too.”
The book makes a wider political point. “The lives and doings of these individuals constitute a morality tale for the world we currently live in. This is a world governed by paranoia and nationalist xenophobia, with the rise of jingoism in country after country, and a corresponding contempt for ideas and individuals that emanate from outside the borders of one’s nation.
“Narendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in India, Donald Trump and the white supremacists in America, Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers in England, Xi Jinping and his Confucian Community Party in China – all see themselves as uniquely blessed by history and by God. No foreigner, they believe, can teach them anything. This book tells us that they can.
“The focus of this book is on individuals who decisively changed sides, identifying completely with India, meeting Indians on absolutely equal terms as friends and lovers, and as comrades on the street and in prison too.”
Guha recalled the achievements of his chosen seven, who were all close to Mahatma Gandhi.
“Annie Besant promoted the emancipation of women in a deeply patriarchal society. She cofounded one of the country’s best-known universities.
As editor of The Bombay Chronicle, “BG Horniman ran one of the finest and bravest newspapers in India; promoted and encouraged young journalists; and campaigned tirelessly for freedom.
“Madeleine Slade, later Mira Behn, wrote pioneering environmental tracts, and, by influencing the making of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, made the Mahatma’s ideas of non-violence and interfaith harmony once more known around the world.
“Samuel, later Satyanand, Stokes helped abolish forced labour in the hills before laying the foundations of a horticultural industry.
“Philip Spratt fought for the rights of workers before campaigning against the licence-permit-Raj that strangulated the Indian economy.
“Richard Ralph Keithahn helped found a rural university as well as a charitable hospital, and cultivated dignity and self-reliance among the oppressed.
“Catherine Mary Heilemann, later Sarala Behn, established a pioneering girls’ school in one of the most backward regions of India, training and nurturing several generations of social workers.”
The author said: “Of my seven rebels, two, Besant and Stokes, died when the British still ruled India, while a third, Horniman, died shortly after the British left.”
Even after she left for Austria in 1959, Mira Behn “spoke out against the sweeping centralisation of political power and the Indian state’s denial of freedom to entrepreneurs, its curbs on individual liberty and its attacks on the federal structure of the union”.
Meanwhile, “through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Sarala devoted her energies and intellect to empowering village women. All through these decades, Keithahn, in deepest south India, was working as tirelessly as Sarala in the Himalayas. Had Besant, Stokes and Horniman lived in independent India, they would surely have followed the same sort of trajectory too.”
Asked by Eastern Eye what his seven would feel if they were to return to India today, Guha shook his head: “I think they will be quite disappointed by many things that have happened. They were also opposed to Hindu fundamentalism. They would be concerned about the rights of minorities, the discrimination against women, maybe the lopsided growth process. I’m sure they would have had many things to criticise and oppose and fight against.”
He added: “This book is a story of seven remarkable individuals but it’s also a caution against xenophobia.”
Rebels against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom by Ramachandra Guha is published by William Collins.