Features
Western Rebels in the Indian Independence Struggle
A friend in Australia sent me this article from the Daily Telegraph of 15 June by Amit Roy, which I wish to share with the readers
The introductory first paragraph in the article runs thus: “Modern Britons have honoured historian Ramachandra Guha for a rather unusual book that is mainly about white people who were severely punished for going against the British establishment of their day to give their all for Indian independence.”
Over lunch with friends after reading the article, I mentioned it and added that Leonard Woolf gave up his civil service appointment in colonial Sri Lanka around 1911 once he went on furlough to Britain because he was disappointed and disapproving of the method of British government in Ceylon. Leelananda de Silva corrected me. He said Woolf gave up his career in Ceylon because he wished to marry Virginia Stephen and bring her to Ceylon and thus asked for an extension of home leave. This was refused, precipitating his leaving the Civil Service.
Leelananda added that at that time Woolf was an imperialist but disillusionment grew in him as the years passed. All at the lunch I mentioned agreed however, that reading his autobiography of that period of his life: Growing: autobiography of the years 1904-1911 and discerning the underlying theme of his Village in the Jungle, written some years later, his disappointment with British rule in its empire was a given.
Guha received the highly regarded Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography in its 20th anniversary year for his most recent book – Rebels against the Raj: Western fighters for India’s Freedom – pub. William Collins. The prize was 5,000 pounds sterling. He also received a bound copy of Longford’s autobiography, The Pebbled Shore (1986)
First a note about the prize. Countess Elizabeth Pakenham Longford CBE (1906-2002), was an acclaimed British historical biographer, whose best known book was Victoria RI (1964). She was the mother and grandmother respectively of biographer-writers Antonia and Flora Fraser. Lady Antonia was equally talked about because of her long standing love affair with playwright Harold Pinter, and subsequent second marriages for both once his wife died.
The rebels
Guha’s book features seven Westerners who worked for independence from the British Raj alongside Indians. Many were staunch followers of Gandhi and rallied round him. Those featured in Guha’s biography are Annie Besant, B G Horniman, Phillip Spratt, Richard Ralph Keithahn, Samuel (later Satyanand) Stokes, Madeline Slade (later Mira Behn), and Catherine Mary Heilemann (later Sarala Behn). They were from Britain, America and Ireland
“They adopted India’s struggle for independence and in doing so found their own destinies. The experience of India changed their ideologies, their spirituality and often their names.” Six of them died in India. Besant, theosophist, was the first female President of Congress. Mira Behn was an admiral’s daughter who was featured in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar winning film Gandhi. Stokes was a Quaker, became a Hindu and married an Indian woman. Phillip Spratt, a Cambridge graduate, helped establish the Communist Party of India. American Missionary Keithahn worked to improve health care in Indian villages, while Heilemann – Salara Behn – set up a girls’ school and was a pioneering environmentalist campaigner in North India.
At the prize awarding in London, the chairman of the judging panel said: “In tracing their relationships revolving around the magnetic figure of Gandhi, Guha adds a new perspective to the Mahatma’s life, on which he has already focused so rewardingly in his multi volume biography.” The judges stressed that the book has particular relevance to contemporary India. As Guha points out: “Oppression does not disappear with the ending of colonial rule, and the ideas and priorities incisively drawn out in this book deserve urgent attention in today’s India.”
When the book was published Guha elaborated to The Telegraph where he was a columnist: “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.” He mentioned Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Brexiteers in England, Xi Jinping and even Narendra Modi. “The focus of my 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.”
The prize winner
Ramachandra ‘Ram’ Guha, a Brahmin, was born to a forestry officer father and teacher mother in Dehradun on April 29, 1958. He is a historian, environmentalist, writer and public intellectual whose research interests include social, political, contemporary and cricket history. He is an authority on the history of modern India. He attended Doon School then graduated in economics from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and Masters from the Delhi School of Economics. His PhD is from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
He has taught at the universities of Stanford, Yale, LSE and Indian Institute of Sciences. He is the distinguished recipient of many awards and honours and is the third Indian historian to be recognised by the American Historical Association, with Romila Thapar and Jadunath Sarka. Among his several publications are three major books on modern India’s socio-political history; Gandhi before India (2013); Gandhi: the years that changed the world (2018); and two volumes of biography of the Mahatma.
India After Gandhi records the history of India from 1947- to 2017. He is married to a graphic designer and has two children; the young son already a recognised novelist. They live in Bengalaru, Bangalore, and Guha now never stays long overseas as his mother, 94, lives with them.
He has paid tribute to Verrier Elwin (1902-1961) “A maverick British anthropologist who worked with Indian Adivasis,” who inspired him when he was an MA student at the Delhi University. Elwin was an Oxford scholar who was a priest, came to India, met Gandhi and left the church. He became an expert on tribes and the Adivasis of Central India; Adivasi being a name coined in the 1930s by political activists to give tribal people in the Indian Subcontinent an indigenous identity. Nehru sent him to the Northeast India where he spent his last ten years.
Guha said he moved to sociology and history being inspired by Elwin. “I was charmed by his work and his writing and decided economics is not for me and I did a PhD in sociology and moved to history because of Elwin…. Without Elwin I would not have written this book, without Elvin I would not have become a biographer, without Elwin I would not have done a PhD, I would have become a boxwallah. Like most Indians of my generation, I might have joined the IAS or something rather mundane. So reading Elwin changed my life.”
(The term boxwallah has two distinct and opposite meanings. One denotes a street peddler in British India and the other is a name for an elite corporate executive, chiefly in the city of Calcutta, in early postcolonial India).