Building A Free India- Defining Speeches of Our Independence Movement that Shaped the Nation

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An alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Rakesh Batabyal teaches the history, theory and philosophy of media at the Centre for Media Studies, INU. A scholar of modern history, his books, Communalism in Bengal: From Famine to Noakhali, 1943-47 (2005). JNU: The Making of a University (2015), and The Modern School (1920-2020): A Century of Schooling in India (2020), have provided a framework for the writing of the history of ideology and institutions in modern India. His The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches (2007) is widely accepted as the most important work in the genre. The Inaugural Indian Chair Professor at the School of Information Studies, Tokyo University, Batabyal is presently working on a book on the history of nationalism in India.

This book has been a long time coming since my previous work in the genre appeared in 2007. Where the latter intended to bring together the riches of the rhetorical tradition in India in modern times in one space. The present volume is rooted more in the articulation of the ideas of freedom which defined the historical and civilizational horizon of the people. The idea of freedom has been at the centre of modernity across the world. Likewise, in the Indian case, the speeches of the votaries of modernity, as one goes deeper into their content, embody a desire to be free from the chains of servitude, both the colonial and the local. And it is what gives the Indian national movement its enduring relevance. It would call for both an intuitive understanding and an empathetic access to past spaces, processes and institutions to even begin researching and recording them for a work like this. One wonders whether one's own past and surroundings provide one with inheritances, unconsciously instilling empathy for an era in the mind constructing it through historical narratives. Growing up in Bokaro Steel City, the articulation of the demand for the state of Jharkhand, the political expression of tribal identity and a vibrant trade unionism provided exposure to a variety of speeches and the various rhetorical strategies thus employed held one spellbound. It was the beginning of my fascination with public. Oratory and the place it occupied in political struggle. I would like to acknowledge several people who extended a helping hand while I was engaged with this work.

My thanks are due to the Librarian and the staff of the India International Centre for their help and support. The digital portal of the Parliamentary Library has also been of enormous help, and I thank the authorities for making it accessible to the larger public.

Since 1916, after a lull of almost a decade, the movement for freedom in India, in the form of the Home Rule Movement, began to gain momentum with leaders making efforts to find common ground. In 1917, at a meeting held at Kanpur to demand the release of the Ali brothers, Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, prominent Muslim leaders and key figures of what would become the Khilafat Movement, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the leader of the Home Rule Movement, who had come all the way from Poona, endearingly referred to the mother of the Ali brothers-Abadi Bano Begum, or Bi Amma-as 'revered mother. His speech was electrifying, and even a century later, reading it brings home the refreshing flavour of such beautiful moments from our national movement.

India's movement for independence has been hailed as one of the largest non-violent mass movements in human history where a poor, unarmed population fought a mighty empire and won its freedom. However, it was not merely a war to oust a colonial power, but a century and a half of the most intense intellectual and political struggles in which a new and modern nation was conceived and the unity of a people along a modern entity called India was forged, effectively defining the content of the freedom that was sought. This collection is an attempt to present a glimpse into the 'epic struggle', as historian Bipan Chandra had termed it, through speeches which work as so many windows to significant moments in that struggle and the founding ideas and dreams for the free country and the citizen of that enlightened society.

**Contents and Sample Pages**