Azadi, as in Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, is the word that our government has chosen to celebrate 75 years of our Independence. However, the preferred term for most of our great leaders during the freedom struggle was Swaraj. In the Bande Mataram of 31 December 1906, Sri Aurobindo himself describes how it came to be adopted by the Indian National Congress “in an inspired moment” by none other than its president, Dadabhai Naoroji.
Though the moderates had prevailed, Sri Aurobindo notes how the Congress had “recognised the Swadeshi movement in its entirety”, “the necessity of National Education”, as well as “the necessity of a Constitution”. Foreshadowing the split between the Extremists and the Moderates in the Surat session the following year, Sri Aurobindo said, “We were prepared to give the old weakness of the Congress plenty of time to die out.” But it is in the closing speech of Naoroji that he “declared self-government, Swaraj, as in an inspired moment he termed it, to be our one ideal and called upon the young men to achieve it.” Sri Aurobindo calls on the young men of India “to devote our lives and, if necessary, sacrifice them” to win Swaraj.
But the question arises who brought the ancient word Swaraj into the modern political vocabulary of India. That credit belongs to Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar (1869-1912). Deuskar, as his name suggests, was a Maharashtrian Brahmin, but his family had settled in the Bengal Presidency. He was born and educated in Deoghar, where he later began to teach. In fact, he taught history to Barindra, Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother. Barindra later became a famous revolutionary and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Andamans.
Sri Aurobindo says of Deuskar, “One of the ablest men in these revolutionary groups was an able writer in Bengali (his family had been long domiciled in Bengal)… He published a book entitled Desher Katha describing in exhaustive detail the British commercial and industrial exploitation of India. This book had an immense repercussion in Bengal, captured the mind of young Bengal and assisted more than anything else in the preparation of the Swadeshi movement.”
On its publication in 1904, Desher Katha became a sensational bestseller. It quickly went into four editions within the year and sold some ten thousand copies. The Bengal government banned the book in 1910, the same year it also banned Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909). But it was Deuskar who first brought the idea of Swaraj to Bengal in 1902 in a festival to celebrate the Maratha warrior-hero, Chhatrapati Shivaji. Deuskar revived the idea of “Hindavi Swarajya” attributed to Shivaji. Swaraj, its shortened form, thus became a household word in India.
Deuskar released a twenty-page pamphlet called Shivajir Mahattva for free distribution. Later, it was enlarged and republished as Shivajir Diksha (1905). The book carried an introduction and a poem by none other than Rabindranath Tagore. In the poem, “Pratinidhi,” Shivaji’s guru, Ramdas, exhorts him to follow Rajdharma: “Palibe je rajdharma/Jeno taha mor karma” (You will follow Rajdharma as though it were your Karma”), making the saffron cloth of the renunciate into his flag. Which is where the Bhagwa Jhenda of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) derives its inspiration from.
Shivaji had, of course, been popular in Bengal earlier, with Bhudev Mukhopadhyay writing a book, Anguriya Vinimoy as early as 1857, the year of the Great Revolt, on him. Again in Sapne Labder Bharato Itihas (1895), he returned to the Maratha Empire as a source of inspiration instead of seeing them merely as raiders or bargees. Others, such as Romesh Chandra Dutt, Nabin Chandra Sen, and Sarat Chandra Shastri by their well-received works had made Shivaji a household name in Bengal. In 1906 the Shivaji Utsav was celebrated on a grand scale in Calcutta with Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had pioneered the celebration of Shivaji Jayanti in Maharashtra the previous year, himself presiding over it.
Swaraj and Swadeshi became the magic words to overturn Lord Curzon’s highly unpopular partition of Bengal in 1905. Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya, who edited Sandhya, also became its champion. The question, however, remained as to what it really meant. Dominion Status or some other arrangement within the British Empire or complete independence. Even Gandhi did not go so far as asking for complete independence in Hind Swaraj. He translated the title in English himself as “Indian Home Rule.”
It was left to Sri Aurobindo in his two-part essay, “The Doctrine of Passive Resistance” (1907), to spell out how nothing less than complete political independence would suffice: “The object of all our political movements and therefore the sole object with which we advocate passive resistance is Swaraj or national freedom… The Congress has contented itself with demanding self-government as it exists in the Colonies. We of the new school would not pitch our ideal one inch lower than absolute Swaraj — self-government as it exists in the United Kingdom.”
It took the Congress another twenty-three years to adopt it as the official objective of its movement in its “Purna Swaraj Resolution” of 29 December 1929, but the Swaraj genie was out of the bottle. It could not be put back into it. The ideal of Swarajya is as old as the Vedas and the Upanishads. There it signifies spiritual mastery and self-illumination rather than political liberty and independence. We owe it to the forgotten nationalist, Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, that it became our most resonant word for freedom in all its ramifications and dimensions.
The author is a professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal.
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