Book Review: 'History That India Ignored' — Prem Prakash's Bold Rewriting Of The Freedom Struggle
Prem Prakash’s 'History That India Ignored' revisits forgotten rebellions, unsung heroes, and challenges the dominant narrative of India’s freedom struggle.
In History That India Ignored, Prem Prakash, India's oldest working journalist and an eyewitness to some of the subcontinent's most defining moments, mounts a frontal challenge to the official, sanitised, and overly moralistic version of India's freedom struggle. This book is not just a chronicle of overlooked uprisings or forgotten patriots; it is a counter-history, an impassioned reclamation of a past that has long remained suppressed under the weight of institutionalised narratives.
The Long Roots of Resistance: Vellore to Barrackpore
Prakash's central argument is stark and uncompromising: India was not set free by the moral pressure of Gandhi's satyagraha alone, but by the cumulative, violent, and ultimately disruptive resistance led by revolutionaries, mutineers, and soldiers. To drive this point home, he begins not in 1857, but with the Vellore Mutiny of 1806. Here, sepoys revolted against colonial cultural intrusions, forehead markings and beards, and were met with barbaric punishment. The brutality of this suppression, rather than fostering conciliation, convinced the British that only force could sustain their empire.
The rebellion in Barrackpore (1824), led by Bindee Tewari, follows in a similar vein, ignored by mainstream history but crucial to the author's effort to recast the early century as one of smouldering unrest.
Ranjit Singh and the Reclamation of National Symbols
Prakash also draws attention to a rarely told episode: Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Khalsa army's march to Kabul and its return with the gates of the Somnath temple, relics from the Golden Temple, and treasures from the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. This, the author suggests, was more than a military expedition; it was a symbolic reassertion of civilizational pride long before India became a nation-state.
The Forgotten Martyrs: From Chandni Chowk to Pune
A major strength of this work lies in its recovery of unsung heroes. Seth Ramji Das Gurwale, the banker who supported Bahadur Shah Zafar and was publicly executed, finds a deserved place alongside the more storied figures. So do the Chapekar brothers of Pune, who resisted the indignities inflicted under the guise of plague control and paid for it with their lives. These stories, far from being peripheral, are at the emotional core of the book.
Agrarian Dissent and the Punjab Ferment
The narrative moves with fluidity into early 20th-century Punjab, where the 1906 Colonisation Bill, an effort to reverse land entitlements, sparked a deep backlash. Prakash details how Ajit Singh and Lala Lajpat Rai resisted the Bill and connected with the global revolutionary movement, notably the Ghadar Party in the US. Figures like Lala Hardyal and Kartar Singh Sarabha appear not as exiles but as visionaries trying to weaponise transnational solidarity against imperialism.
Who Really Made the British Leave?
In the book's most polemical yet powerfully argued section, Prakash challenges the orthodox belief that Gandhi's Quit India movement in 1942 was the tipping point. Drawing on Clement Attlee's private admissions and public sentiment surrounding the INA trials, Prakash suggests that Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army and the naval mutinies of 1946 struck deeper fear into British hearts than any non-violent campaign.
The trial of INA officers Shah Nawaz Khan, GS Dhillon, and Prem Sehgal under Section 121 IPC, and their subsequent release by Claude Auchinleck in response to public outrage, is portrayed as a seismic moment. In Prakash's telling, this was not just judicial drama; it was a political awakening.
Liberation Beyond 1947: The Goa Chapter
The final chapter underscores that the journey to independence did not end in 1947. Goa's liberation in 1961, achieved through a swift military operation after years of Portuguese intransigence, is recounted with clarity. Unlike the diplomatic settlement with the French for Puducherry, the Goa operation, supported by figures like Dr Ram Manohar Lohia and Tristao de Braganza Cunha, was a last assertion of India's postcolonial sovereignty.
A Polemic with Purpose
Yes, History That India Ignored is polemical, but so is every nationalist history ever written. Prakash is not coy about this. He wears his convictions proudly, choosing to foreground stories of defiance that the mainstream often considers too violent, too regional, or too ideologically inconvenient.
What sets the book apart is the author's ability to pair a reporter's eye for detail with a nationalist's heart. The result is an alternative history that is both passionate and well-documented.
The Final Provocation: Can History Ever Be Balanced?
As the book closes, Prakash offers not certainty but a provocation: Can there ever be a neutral history? Is not every narrative shaped by the hand that records it? In asking this, he doesn't just critique the colonial or Congress histories—he invites readers to question their own assumptions about the past.
An Intervention We Need
History That India Ignored is more than a book. It is an act of historical dissent. It forces us to re-evaluate the architecture of our collective memory and to honour those who bled for freedom but never found space in our textbooks.
In a time where history is too often reduced to slogans or silences, Prem Prakash offers something rare: the uncomfortable truth. And for that, this book deserves to be read, debated, and remembered.
Book: History That India Ignored
Writer: Prem Prakash
Publisher: Vitasta
Price: Rs 695
(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bengaluru-based management professional, literary critic, translator, and curator.)
[Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs, and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs, and views of ABP News Network Pvt Ltd.]
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