1947 Devadasi Abolition Act
WITHIN two months of Independence, the Madras Presidency passed the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act, known as the Devadasi Abolition Act, 1947. Former colonists and the Indian elite saw the system as immoral, a social evil. The legislation’s goal was to prevent young girls from being exploited by being dedicated to temples and to help older Devadasis integrate into mainstream society. The community, however, strongly opposed the legislation, saying they were respectable and learned artistes and that laws such as these would put them out of work as well as give a negative connotation to their profession.
As the dance of the traditional practitioners was sanitised, the modern version of Bharatanatyam was born—a dance suited to a newly independent nation anxious about its morals. Rukmini Devi Arundale (along with E. Krishna Iyer) was credited with removing the eroticism from Sadir and making it “respectable”.
As dance became acceptable for upper-caste maidens to practise, Bharatanatyam became hugely popular. In parallel, the original dancers lost their craft and were forced to seek alternative means to support themselves. Between the anti-nautch movement of the early 1900s and the Devadasi Abolition Act, the community was crushed. And, as some scholars have pointed out, the Act spelt the death knell for a host of knowledge systems of music and dance, equivalent to the shutting down of several universities.
Balasaraswati, who came from a family of traditional artistes, is widely regarded as the greatest exponent of Bharatanatyam in post-independence India. Although the Act prevented public performances, Balasaraswati took advantage of the revivalist movement to perform and teach Bharatanatyam in its pure form for nearly five decades.
The Madras Act paved the way for the Andhra Pradesh Devadasi (Prevention of Dedication Act) in 1947, the Karnataka Devadasi (Prevention of Dedication) Act in 1982, and the Maharashtra System Abolition Act, 2005. In spite of the laws and rehabilitation schemes in place, reports filed as recently as 2016 with the National Commission for Women and media reports indicate that there are numerous cases of former Devadasis who have become destitute and, worse, that the practice continues in a tragically exploitative form.
1948 Mahatma falls to assassin’s bullets
INDIA had not been independent for even six months and was still in the midst of vicious communal violence following Partition when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse. Godse was a radical Hindu who blamed him for his “constant and consistent pandering of Muslims”. Godse, a Brahmin from Poona (now Pune) and a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, stated later that he was also provoked by Gandhi’s “last pro-muslim fast”, [which] “at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately”. Gandhi undertook this fast on January 13, 1948, insisting that the newly formed Government of India release the money owed to Pakistan. He ended it on January 18.
According to a report in The Hindu announcing Gandhi’s death, the “Father of the Nation” was shot at 5:12 pm and he died 15 minutes later. Gandhi was at Birla House (subsequently converted into a museum) in Delhi and was on his way to his scheduled prayer meeting which was slated to begin at 5 pm. As Gandhi walked to the prayer mandap leaning on the shoulders
of Ava Gandhi and Manu Gandhi, his grand daughter-in-law and grandniece, respectively, Godse walked up to him, bowed his head and said, “You are late today for prayer.” Gandhi replied, “Yes, I am.” At that moment Godse pumped three bullets into the frail body of the 79-year-old leader, considered almost a saint by millions of followers.
Gandhi, who had survived five assassination attempts prior to Godse’s fatal action, had said two days earlier: “If I’m to die by the bullet of a mad man, I must do so smiling. God must be in my heart and on my lips. And if anything happens, you are not to shed a single tear.” After the assassination, an overwhelmed Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the nation by radio: “Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more.”
Nathuram Godse was hanged to death along with his accomplice Narayan Apte while six others were sentenced to life imprisonment. After Gandhi’s death, India lost a certain pact with tolerance, truth, and non-violence that he had coaxed it to accept.
NEHRU ASKED BUDHNI MEJHAN, 15, a worker on the dam site to press the button to signal the start of operations at Panchet. (Right) The upstream face of the Tilaiya dam, the DVC’S first dam, which was built in 1953.
IN a sense, “the noble mansion of free India”, as Jawaharlal Nehru described it in his “A Tryst with Destiny” speech, was built in steel and cement too. The Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), established on July 7, 1948 by an Act of Parliament and the first of the “multipurpose projects”, was envisioned as one of the institutions that would lay the groundwork for modern India.
The Damodar river flowing through Jharkhand (previously part of Bihar) and West Bengal frequently caused floods. A catastrophic flood in 1943 prompted the Bengal government to appoint the Damodar Flood Enquiry Committee, which proposed the formation of an authority similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the US and the construction of dams and reservoirs.
DVC has a network of four dams—tilaiya and Maithon on the Barakar, Panchet on the Damodar, and Konar on the Konar—and the Durgapur barrage. The first dam on the Barakar was built in 1953.
According to its 2020–21 annual report, DVC’S command area is 24,235 sq. km, and its total installed capacity from thermal, hydel, and solar power is 7,107.2 MW. It provides power to eight States, with transmission lines extending to 8,390 circuit kilometres. In terms of water management, DVC has 2,494 km of canals and a flood reserve capacity of 1,172 million cubic metres and an irrigation potential of 3.64 lakh hectares.
“Temples of modern India” such as these, as Nehru called them in his speech at the inauguration of the Bhakra Nangal dam on the border of Punjab and Himachal Pradesh in 1954, may have been central to nation-building in the early days of Independence to “leap across the mighty moat of poverty”, but many were sacrificed at the altar of development. Budhni Mejhan represents them.
On December 6, 1959, at the inauguration of DVC’S fourth dam (Panchet), Nehru asked a worker on the site, the 15-year-old Budhni to press the button to signal the start of operations. She also garlanded him, for which act she was excommunicated from her village, for in their eyes she had effectively married Nehru. In 1962, she also lost her job at DVC. The displacement and impoverishment of tribal populations such as Budhni’s has largely gone unnoticed. Was Nehru, as is widely assumed, an ardent supporter of large projects? Actually, he critically evaluated the impact of modern engineering structures on river valleys and later labelled them “a disease of gigantism”.
1948 Films Division
THE Films Division of India was independent and pre-television India’s window on itself. The successor to the Film Advisory Board (1940), Films Division made documentaries, newsreels, shorts and animation films that recorded the steps the fledgling nation was taking.
Its archives are a treasure trove of the initial decades of independence when there was no other agency recording these. Its short films and newsreels used to be shown at movie halls before the film started playing.
Although Films Division was primarily a propaganda machine, its animated shorts such as Ek Chidiya, Anek Chidiyan were classics. It also produced several extraordinary documentaries such as Mani Kaul’s Siddheshwari and M.F. Husain’s Through the Eyes of a Painter.
On March 30, 2022, the government announced the merger of India’s four film media units into the National Film Development Corporation. Now, Films Division, Directorate of Film Festivals, National Film Archive of India, and Children’s Film Society of India are all under one umbrella, causing some concerns about quality and invisible censorship.