Major Events Pre-1950

Arvind Kolhatkar spent his childhood in Satara, and later studied at Fergusson College, Pune and the University of Pune. After getting his MA in Mathematics, he joined the Indian Revenue Service, served in the Income Tax Department for about 30 years, rose to the rank of Commissioner, and retired voluntarily. He was an Executive Director of the Bombay Stock Exchange for 3 years. He and his wife Aruna currently live in Toronto.His email address is kolhatkar@hotmail.com.

I have a vivid memory of August 15, 1947, even though I was only four years old!

At that time, we lived in Satara, Maharashtra. I attended a Montessori school, which was located in the backyard of the local girls' high school called Kanyashala.

Our school had organized a celebration, in which a small tricolour Indian flag was hoisted. More importantly, the school had prepared sooji halwa, a sweet dish traditionally eaten at celebrations. In my excitement, I was jumping around, and tripped on a wooden box. My knee got a scratch, and I started crying. My Bindu aatya (aunt, my father's youngest sister) was a Matriculation (Class XI) student in Kanyashala. My teacher called in Bindu aatya, who took me home. They remembered to give me a tin medal of the tricolour and my share of the sooji halwa!

Official account as recorded in Fauji Akhbar, August 1947

In a note (pib.nic.in/archieve/others/2007/aug07/r2007080701.pdf ) dated August 13, 2007, the Press Information Bureau (Defence Wing) Government Of India wrote:

"As we celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of the Indian Independence Day, it will be interesting to recall the scene from the first Independence Day celebrations 60 years ago.

On August 14, 1947 at the stroke of midnight hour, power transferred from the British empire to the government of independent India. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was sworn in as the first Prime Minister and the Constituent Assembly headed by its president Dr. Rajendra Prasad appointed Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of British India, as the first Governor General of independent India.

I was a little more than seven years old on August 15th, 1947. At that time, my family lived in Daryaganj in Delhi. My memory of India’s Independence Day is of sheer euphoria. I remember a feeling of great joy. Even at that age, I could sense that some very important event was taking place.

I remember walking with my family and neighbours to the grounds of Lal Kila (Red Fort), a fifteen minute walk just before midnight on 14^th August to hear Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru address the nation. I found it difficult to keep pace with our group of eleven as they seemed to be floating not walking. All of us were talking and laughing at the same time. I remember hearing of freedom, Ram Raj and how ancient Indian glory will be restored. All around us I could feel sheer elation as our group was jostled by an increasingly larger numbers of almost raucous crowds. Our group sat down on grass nearly 1,000 yards from the rampart where we could see and hear Pandit Ji.

I was a little more than seven years old on August 15^th, 1947. At that time, my family lived in Daryaganj in Delhi. My memory of India's Independence Day is of sheer euphoria. I remember a feeling of great joy. Even at that age, I could sense that some very important event was taking place.

R C Mody is a postgraduate in Economics and a Certificated Associate of the Indian Institute of Bankers. He studied at Raj Rishi College (Alwar), Agra College (Agra), and Forman Christian College (Lahore). For over 35 years, he worked for the Reserve Bank of India, where he headed several all-India departments, and was also Principal of the Staff College. Now 81 years old, he is busy in social work, reading, writing, and travelling. He lives in New Delhi with his wife.

In January 1948, I was living in Alwar, now a part of Rajasthan, which at that time was a quasi-independent Princely State – the Maharaja had signed the Instrument of Accession, but not the Instrument of Merger. Alwar had more than its normal share of the post-Partition riots and unrest, which, for months, had disrupted rail travel to and from Delhi, a distance of about one hundred miles.

I needed to go to Delhi urgently, but had to wait until I could get a seat in a Government vehicle going there – the only safe way to travel. I managed to get to Delhi on January 28th.

In Delhi, I attended Mahatma Gandhi’s prayer meeting at the Birla House on the evening of January 29th. I left there my autograph book there for the Mahatma's signature, for which I had to pay his prescribed fee was Rs. 5 for his Harijan Fund. Next morning, on January 30th, I returned to Birla House and collected my book, which now had his valuable signature.

Surjit was brought up in many different places in India, went from Delhi University into the Indian Foreign Service, and subsequently joined her husband in academics, shuttling between India and the United States. Now a semi-retired professor with two grown-up sons, she lives with her Himalayan cat, music, books, and walks in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

By early 1947, the British had realized that they could not stay on in India much longer and decided, as the eminent civil servant Penderel Moon put it, to “divide and quit.” No one, perhaps not even the new Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, knew exactly what would happen and historians continue to argue over the causes of Partition. Its tragic and traumatic consequences for the Indian subcontinent remain obvious to this day.

My personal experience as a ten-year old child was neither tragic nor traumatic, but left me with vivid memories of those critical months that I can recount even to this day.

y mother and I had lived in the charming town of Dehra Dun (present day capital of Uttaranchal) since 1942 when my father went abroad with the Indian Medical Service. He was commanding a military hospital in Palestine in 1946-47 and had been home for the wedding of my sister to a cavalry officer in October 1946.

T.S. Nagarajan (b.1932) is a noted photojournalist whose works have been exhibited and published widely in India and abroad. After a stint with the Government of India as Director of the Photo Division in the Ministry of Information, for well over a decade Nagarajan devoted his life to photographing interiors of century-old homes in India, a self-funded project. This foray into what constitutes the Indianness of homes is, perhaps, his major work as a photojournalist.

Chikkanayakanahalli is a small town about 130 km from Bangalore. I still remember vividly that a group of people – volunteers for the Independence movement – stopped my friends and me as we were walking to our school. They snatched the felt hat I was wearing and threw it on a bonfire of clothes. As the rising flames swallowed my hat, I felt a sense of shock at losing my precious possession and walked back home, crying all the way. It was the Quit India year, 1942.

On the day India became independent, I was a schoolboy in a small town called Doddaballapur in Karnataka. My father was the doctor in charge of the government hospital there. We lived in a small ‘out house’, a two-room block, behind a local jeweller’s mansion. My mother and the rest of the family were in Mysore, about 180 km away.

15 August 1947, the day India gained real freedom, after centuries of alien rule. At that time, I was in my early teens, and a first year student of Maharaja’s High School, Mysore. Mysore was a Princely State, the third largest after Jammu &amp\; Kashmir and Hyderabad.

What was I doing? Do I remember how the day passed for me? I have tried my best to recollect I still cannot come up with anything significant. Still, there is one thing I am certain of. Not only I, but our entire household, consisting of my maternal grandfather, my mother, my brother and my two younger sisters, was sound asleep on the night of August 14-15, 1947. Sorry, I am not sure whether my grandfather was asleep or was merely lying down. Whichever, he had no enthusiasm for Independence.

y grandfather hailed from Bantwal, a small town in South Kanara, then a district of the old Madras Presidency (state). Bantwal was backward on all counts.

y grandfather lived in Bantwal but came to Mysore every summer, and stayed until the end of monsoons. Bantwal was hot and humid in summer. During the monsoon, Bantwal had heavy rains, and it would have been an isolated life for my grandfather in the company of, crickets, lizards, snakes and huge mosquitoes. Grandfather used to tell everyone that he came to Mysore to visit his widowed daughter, find about the welfare of her family, and set right the financial affairs of the family. But, I think he had some other reasons to visit Mysore. He was fond of the Bioscope, and Mysore had seven theatres, while Bantwal had none. Besides, life in the Mysore house was comfortable with electricity, running water and piped sewerage – all absent in Bantwal.

I was in the first year of my BA class at the Maharaja’s College in Mysore, when Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement in 1942. Students boycotted classes, poured into the streets and went in procession shouting patriotic slogans. They were in the forefront of the struggle.

Those who led and inspired us then were my college mates – H.Y. Sharada Prasad (who went on to become a well-known journalist and Information Advisor to the Prime Minister) and M.V. Krishnappa (who became a minister in the central government).

I also remember my affable friend, Abdul Gaffar, whose inspiring speeches in Kannada are still ringing in my ears. Our English teachers, J.C. Rollo and W.G. Eagleton, were surprised that their favourite student, the suave and brilliant Sharada Prasad (then the Secretary of the University Union), had been chosen as our undisputed leader in the Quit India agitation.

“Showrie”, as we affectionately called him, was a soft-spoken, frail and mild-mannered young man and no one credited him even with an iota of aggressiveness. The compulsions of any occasion, it is said, throw up a leader and Showrie was one such. He came from a family that valued Gandhian ideals. Always dressed in khaddar, he was self-reliant and an idealist, qualities he inherited from his parents.

Sharada Prasad’s speeches electrified the students who willingly courted arrest, and filled the only jail in Mysore. Talking about those days, he says: “There were not many to advice us to device plans and programmes. Some elderly lawyers told us that it was the turn of the young to show the way to the old.”

Veena is a scholar in African studies, in which she has a PhD from JNU, Delhi, and Vedanta, in which she is self-taught. She retired as the Head of All-India Radio's Swahili Service, broadcasting every day in Swahili for 22 years. For over 15 years, she has taught the philosophy of leisure at the International Centre of Excellence, Wageningen, Netherlands. She is the author of Kailash Manasarovar: A Saced Journey (Roli Books 2004). In recent years she has given talks on the Upanishads in many countries. At present, she is the Chairperson of Prajna Foundation, an NGO dedicated to educational and cultural activities, and the development of economically non-privileged youth and children

In 1947, I was six, getting on to seven. My parents, elder brother, a younger sister and I were living in Balloki, a small township in western part of undivided Punjab, located on the site of a headworks from where the Bari Doab canal emerged from the Ravi River. My father, the Executive Engineer in charge of the headworks, had been posted there three years earlier.

Apart from my parents and siblings, there were a lot of people around in our household, all of whom seemed to be like members of our extended family. Called by different names or designations like chowkidars, malis, beldars, orderlies, mates and so on, they were in and out of the house at all times of day and night.