Everybody Loves a Good Drought by Palagummi Sainath

Like in most other things in society, our definitions exclude women and the marginalized. It was a question put to me very squarely by Lakshmi Panda back in 2007 that made me look at how we define freedom fighters. Why have the struggles and sacrifices of the women who fought for our freedom been largely forgotten? This is who they were: you’re looking at a bunch of people who identified with the masses, were themselves part of the masses, and therefore the empathy and identification was near total. They are still fighting those semi-feudal forces, for farmers, labourers, and workers. They were fighting feudal forces, which had been propped up by the British. R Nallakannu is a legend on the Kisan Front, N Sankariah on multiple fronts.

When I saw a Facebook post about it, I asked him, what were you doing out there? He said, then also we fought for farmers and labourers, now also we fight for farmers and labourers. I always say the Adivasis were the first to fight for freedom, the last to gain from it.Īt the age of 95, Captain Bhau came out one day, in 2017, on the street in his own village. All of them came from the rural areas and their first battles were in the rural areas.Īnd those battles are not over, the denial of the rights to the Adivasis is still going on.

And their common goal was fighting the British. They were fighting for their rights as human beings, for the survival of their occupations. We attained independence.” And every one of them had their own take on the freedom struggle, where not just Oxbridge return elites were setting the agenda. Isn’t it ironic that the fight is not over?Īs Captain Bhau says in the first line in the book, “We fought for freedom and for independence. Those struggles in fact essentialize the book. And yet some continue to struggle for the rights. It seems at one level as if on August 15th, 1947, every Indian was equally free and governed by the same set of laws.

Here, Sainath speaks about the process, the people and the purpose of this unusual book. Stirring, sad, hopeful, revelatory and unexpectedly funny, The Last Heroes is truly the “Ordinary People’s History of the Freedom Struggle”, as Professor Jagmohan Singh calls it in the foreword. Some made bombs, others stopped and looted trains, and a young woman used a slingshot with great precision. With lathis, type-writers and tiffin-carriers, they took on the might of the Raj. That diversity is mirrored in their individual struggles. They come from across India and speak many languages. The big names we are all familiar with make cameo and guest appearances. 26 years after P Sainath wrote Everybody Loves a Good Drought, he’s back with The Last Heroes: Footsoldiers of Indian Freedom, one that Gopalkrishna Gandhi says “redefines biography writing”.

Everybody Loves a Good Drought by Palagummi Sainath