প্রবন্ধ - শেখর বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়

India achieved freedom on the midnight of 14-15 August 1947. As Jawaharlal Nehru famously put it, when the world was asleep, India woke up to life and freedom. This meant the end of nearly two hundred years of British rule, for which the Indian National Congress and various other political groups have been fighting for about half a century. So naturally there was euphoria on the streets of capital New Delhi, as well as in the provinces. The celebrations started from 11 PM on 14 August when the Constituent Assembly met under the chairmanship of Rajendra Prasad, and Nehru delivered his emotionally charged ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech. This was followed by the presentation of the emblems of the new nation – the flag and the anthem. The Constituent Assembly had accepted the new flag, which was the Congress flag since 1930, with a minor change – the charkha being replaced with chakra. The nation, as Nehru argued, could now stand under the same flag with which they had fought against foreign rule. As for the anthem, the Constituent Assembly preferred Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana-gana-mana over the familiar Bande mataram, which offended the Muslims. Thus, at the moment of arrival the founding fathers carefully chose the emblems of the new nation which they expected to be secular and democratic, as well as closely associated with the legacy of the Congress.

On the streets people were ecstatic that night and the following day. More than a million people came to watch the evening parade at Kings Way, where the national flag was hoisted and the government buildings were illuminated. A million people marched on the streets of Bombay that morning and some of them even took possession of the Secretariat Building. In Calcutta about 200,000 people broke the police cordon and rushed into the Governor House and later the Assembly House, in a bid to reclaim what was once the most sacred space of the Raj. There were numerous other functions all over the country, where national flag was unfurled, national anthem was sung and patriotic speeches were delivered.

But not everyone was in a mood to rejoice, as freedom also arrived with the pain of partition. Mahatma Gandhi, then in Calcutta trying to stop communal riots, spent the day in prayer as an act of penance. The Hindu Mahasabha did not participate in the celebrations as a protest against partition. The Muslim League decided to join, but the minority Muslims – like their Hindu counterparts in Pakistan - lived in a state of anxiety about an uncertain future.

Freedom at the moment of arrival thus evoked mixed emotions, and the partition was not the only cause of concern. The idea of freedom in India had developed as a result of a productive encounter with the colonial modernity, which transformed the older idea of mukti or an abstract spiritual notion of emancipation in the other world, into more worldly concerns for individual freedom of choice on the one hand and collective freedom on the other. However, as the freedom struggle progressed, the issue of individual freedom came to be subordinated by the concept of collective freedom; and of all collective identities, the nation took precedence over others, like class, caste or gender.

However, there was also tension in the ways national freedom was being conceptualised by myriad groups of people who constituted the grand nationalist coalition which wanted to see the end of British rule. While some saw in the attainment of political sovereignty for the nation-state the immediate fulfilment of the goal of the freedom struggle, others preferred to expand the meaning of freedom to incorporate also the notions of economic and social freedom for the people. As Nehru reminded his countrymen in his opening speech, in 1947 the immediate goal of political freedom had been achieved, but the greater challenge was to ensure for every citizen the freedom from poverty, ignorance, disease and inequality. And it was this challenge which caused anxiety, as there was no agreement yet on how to overcome it.

So freedom in 1947 did not mean a clinical break with the colonial past. In the initial years, continuities could be seen in the institutional structure, in the rituals and pageantry of the state, even in the modes of governance. Mahatma Gandhi had warned in Hind Swaraj (1909) that India might end up with English rule without the Englishmen. It is doubtful whether any complete reversal of the colonial past has ever occurred in any history of decolonisation. For India freedom was not certainly a moment of rupture, but symbolised a process of transference and adaptation – a process of hybridization through which the meanings of freedom would be expanded exponentially.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay : Professor, Emeritus of History at Te Herenga Waka – Wellington University