“The Adivasis were the first to die for freedom and last to benefit from it” says Sainath

Picture Credits: @dhinesh_ch

N Ram launched the PARI founder’s second book about unsung heroes of our freedom struggle

Annie Louis

“Our ideas of freedom came from Oxford Brahmin Banyas who went abroad and read Rousseau” said award-winning journalist and author P Sainath, at the launch of his new book The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom at the Music Academy, Chennai on Friday. 

Sainath said that often the writings of history mirror as though independence came from Europe. His years of reporting led him to interesting stories and personalities who fought for our freedom and this pushed him to bring out the struggle for freedom as a pan India movement. 

He said, “The Adivasis were the first to die for freedom and last to benefit from it,” when asked about why he dealt with the caste identity of certain freedom fighters in the book. 

The book release by N Ram, the former editor of The Hindu was followed by a panel discussion on the book’s attempt to retell the history of the freedom struggle, that often denied ordinary people their part in the fight for freedom. 

The panel including N Ram and Sainath also saw young voices like Senthalir, a journalist with the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), Shalini Dungdung a MA history student from Loyola college and T Samseer Ahemed, an SFI student activist. 

To Senthalir this is an important book because it introduces us to extraordinary citizens who have been systematically erased from our public memory.

“These unrecognised contributions  take us into the homes, hamlets, streets, and villages that rebelled against British imperialism with the bare minimal resources”, she said.

While talking about how and why these stories go untold, Sainath said that the telling of the history of ancient India by communal forces and imperialist historians coincides now because they both have a tendency to show the Mughal era in a negative light. In academia, there is a serious domination of upper-caste academics and we see inaccessible material with regional and caste bias, he further added. 

India is ruled by a coalition, notes Sainath, a coalition of social religious fundamentalists and economic market fundamentalists and in bed with this union is corporate media. This he says is making the lives of Dalits,Adivasis and other minorities in the country a lot worse. He cites the Hathras case and the arrest of the journalist Siddique Kappan to further elaborate his point. 

The panellists also held a discussion around the current state of political democracy in India, critiquing the country’s grand celebration of its 75th year of independence for its lack of acknowledgement to a large number of people who helped India win its independence. 

With a number of question and answer from the crowd, the event ended with Sainath distributing the signed copies of his book to the panellist and N Ram astutely suggesting the crowd to buy the book.