Cadell or Veer

‘Independence’

At the turn of the 20th century, when Indian politics was led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (the ‘Father of the Indian Unrest’), its raison d’etre shifted from achieving social reform as espoused by Phule, Sir Syed and Ranade, to achieving political reform. Achieving social reform as an objective, by completely cooperating with the imperial government, was replaced by the goal of attaining of self-rule or ‘Swaraj’ (according to Ambedkar at the cost of the former). Since then, ‘Swaraj’ would end up defining the country’s political trajectory. Subsequently, Gandhi and Nehru also made ‘Independence’ their life’s objective, so much so that Nehru, during his 1937 election campaign, called for people to vote for the Congress ‘only if they believed in Swaraj’. Tilak, Gandhi and Nehru were all convinced that British rule was the root of all evils plaguing the country, and that only in its removal lied the country’s salvation.

Then, as it happened, legislation after legislation, through Morley-Minto, Montague-Chelmsford and the Cabinet Mission, the colonial enterprise came to an end. Now that the ‘natives’ began to rule the roost, and every successive government with their complacency and ineptness ended up making the British look good, the need to demonize the European ruler was increasingly felt. Soon enough, the Congress Party propaganda machine with unabashed use of state machinery began eulogizing the ‘Independence Movement’ while idolizing its leaders. The country’s history textbooks in their anti-Anglo Saxon zeal not only erased pro-imperial narratives, but also the legacy of intensely patriotic yet pro-British leaders such as TB Sapru and MR Jayakar from public memory. An entire generation grew up believing that before the Battle of Plassey, India was a ‘Sone Ki Chidhiya’, some sort of celestial Dwarka, Atlantis, Neverland or Utopia; and that the British ‘looted it all’. And obviously, that the spectacular and immaculate representative governments since 1947 have only had their problems because of the ‘colonial past’.

Another evil to accompany the first

While the anti-British propaganda machine ran unabated for 70 long years, India witnessed the rise and then domination of another very similar rhetoric in the same timeframe: Hindu nationalism. They are indeed quite similar as they are both rooted in hatred, the former of the European, and the latter of anyone but the Hindu. The world got to see how comfortably they could work together in Maharashtra of the 1990’s, during the heyday of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena in the state politics. The first domino to fall was the name Bombay, to be replaced by the Marathi equivalent ‘Mumbai’. As Suketu Mehta points out in ‘Maximum City’, all major cities in the world are called differently in different languages. London is called so in English, while in French and Spanish it is Londres. Cairo is called so in English, while in Arabic it is Al Kahira. Bombay similarly was called so in English, in Hindi as Bambai, and in Marathi and Gujarati as Mumbai.

Yet, we saw the combination of anti-European and communal rhetoric trump common sense, and the city was renamed. Following this was the rampant renaming of streets earlier named after Europeans. The more prominent roads were renamed after Hindu or Marathi leaders, and the other smaller streets after the grandparents of the highest bidder. Never mind the historical or cultural significance that these old names bore. After all, Europeans are monsters; there is no question of them having done anything good for India.

Cadell vs Savarkar

The road outside my apartment in Mumbai is one of the city’s principal arteries since British times. When built during the first two decades after 1900, after the Bombay Municipal Corporation decided to commission the suburbs Dadar, Sion, Matunga and Wadala, the road was named after the British army officer Thomas Cadell. Cadell was a war veteran who had played a key role in suppressing the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. Now, the Sepoy Mutiny was a revolt waged against the British authorities of the time, not by the common populace, but by the princes, landed aristocracy and feudal families whose inheritance was threatened by a legal instrument called the Doctrine of Lapse. These rulers had no love for the populace, and they called off the revolt the moment Queen Victoria declared the safety of their fiefdoms in 1858. Social reformers of the time including Sir Syed Ahmed and Jyotiba Phule had thanked the country’s lucky stars that British rule was restored.

Then in 1909, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar wrote the book ‘The Indian War of Independence’, painting the rebellion as if it were something momentous like the Fall of Bastille or the Russian Revolution. The Sena government, which regarded Savarkar as one of its sources of inspiration, had found a golden opportunity to correct a ‘historical injustice’. 

And hence as fate would have it, Cadell Road was renamed Veer Savarkar Marg.

To pay homage to the imaginary ‘War of Independence’ perhaps. Also, never mind the fact that a large portion of the Cadell road houses the Kapad Bazar, a large Muslim ghetto, whose residents now are forced to write in their home address the name of a man who hated their existence. Oh, maybe that part was deliberate. (Savarkar fervently hated the British and the Muslims both; calling for the removal of Urdu, Farsi and English loan words from Marathi.)

It is a known fact that hatred is brilliant vote-catcher. But it is also unquestionably true that hatred as a public policy inflicts deep wounds on the society, which are very difficult to heal. Such anti-social ideologies must be countered for the good of the nation. But while in opposition, the true liberal must understand and accept that not all those who adhere to hatred in their lives or politics are essentially evil. The objective of the liberal movement should be to convince its opponents of the virtues of pluralism, equality, and tolerance, while exposing the ugly face of communalism. The true victory of liberal thought in India will be the day we as a country look at our experience with the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals and the British from a dispassionate standpoint, not through a jaundiced and partisan lens.