In 1948, a year after Bharat gained Independence, R.C. Majumdar, the country’s foremost historian, submitted a proposal to the government to write an ‘authentic’ and ‘truthful’ history of the freedom struggle, starting with the Revolt of 1857. His letters to the Education Ministry of Bengal and also the Union Education Ministry went unheeded. A couple of years later, he wrote to Rajendra Prasad, the then President of the country, who “heartily took up the idea and wrote a very encouraging letter" to him. Maybe it was due to Dr Prasad’s intervention, the Ministry of Education, in 1952, appointed a Board of Editors.

Unfortunately, the Board of Editors was dissolved by the government on 31 December 1955. A year later, when the project was revived, Majumdar found himself removed from the Board without being informed and his place was given to a bureaucrat named Tara Chand.

Why was Bharat’s foremost historian treated so disdainfully? One finds the answer in Majumdar’s other book, History of the Freedom Movement in India, Volume 1. In its Preface, he writes: “The official history of the freedom movement starts with the premises that India lost independence only in the 18th century and had thus an experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries. Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely changed masters in the 18th century… Political exigencies gave rise to the slogan of Hindu–Muslim fraternity."

As we see, Majumdar had shown the moral courage and intellectual integrity to not just stand up against the Nehruvian bluff on Hindu–Muslim unity, but also write matter-offactly that the two communities ‘lived in two watertight compartments’, with their distinct cultures and different mental and moral characteristics. Even more importantly, the historian threatened to take the lid off the Nehruvian myth that Bharat’s Independence was predominantly, if not solely, the handiwork of Gandhian ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha.

Majumdar writes: “A number of revolutionaries had joined the Non-Cooperation Movement of Gandhi, but were disillusioned after its suspension. Many of them had rejoined the revolutionary groups whose main object was to keep alive the spirit of violence leading to armed rebellion against the British for achieving independence… As a matter of fact, Gandhi fully realised the growing influence of revolutionary ideas over young men, and it is not without good reason that the revolutionaries claimed that they practically, though indirectly, forced Gandhi to renew the struggle for freedom, in 1930 and again in 1942; for he feared that otherwise he would lose the leadership of the country and the initiative would pass into the hands of the revolutionary young men, Gandhi himself admitted that one of his motives in undertaking non-violent Satyagraha or Civil Disobedience was to ward off the evils he apprehended from the growing strength of the revolutionary ideas. In other words, he regarded his movement as a safety-valve for youthful energy and patriotic ardour which would otherwise flow through a different channel of a violent kind."

Majumdar makes three big points: one, the country’s Independence was not the handiwork of Gandhian ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha alone. Two, revolutionaries not just worked in their revolutionary silos but also under the overarching Gandhian cover to fight for freedom. The revolutionaries would form the backbone of a Gandhian movement, such as the Non-Cooperation Movement, and when Gandhi would call it off, they would do what they did best—openly go the revolutionary way! Three, more often than not, Gandhi would start a movement to contain the growth of revolutionary fervour—a sort of ‘safety-valve for youthful energy and patriotic ardour’ so that it didn’t ‘flow through a different channel of a violent kind’.

Also, those in the thick of things just before Independence saw Bharat’s freedom struggle differently. For them, Gandhi’s role in the freedom struggle was ‘m-i-n-i-m-a-l’, as former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee told Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court Justice P.B. Chakravartti, who was then Bengal’s acting governor as well, at the governor’s mansion in Kolkata in 1956, slowly chewing out the word to make an instant, dramatic impact. “The INA (Indian National Army) activities of Subhas Chandra Bose, which weakened the very foundation of the British empire in Bharat, and the RIN (Royal Indian Navy) mutiny which made the British realise that the armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British," Justice Chakravartti quoted Attlee as saying.

B.R. Ambedkar, too, reflected the same sentiment during his interview with BBC in 1955. He wondered, “I don’t know how Mr Attlee suddenly agreed to give Bharat Independence. That is a secret that he will disclose in his autobiography. None expected that he would do that?’ However, based on his ‘own analysis’, Ambedkar believed that the ‘national army… raised by Subhas Chandra Bose’ could be the reason.

Commander-in-Chief of British armed forces in the subcontinent, General Claude Auchinleck, too conceded on 24 November 1945, in his letter to........

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