Your magazine has been running two exciting series on India’s march
towards freedom. Still, much will remain hidden behind the clouds of
time.
However, old records and memoirs of the British officers working in
India show us glimpses of several forgotten episodes of the struggle by
different sections of our people to win freedom from the colonial
rulers. For example, two years before the great rebellion of 1857, the
tribal inhabitants of the Birbhum region, the Santhals, declared
themselves free! “We’re children of God and servants of none!” they
said. They had been oppressed and exploited mercilessly by the English
East India Company, which tried to take away even the last pie they
earned through their hard toil.
The Company men made fifty elephants drunk and let them loose on the
Santhal hamlets. The elephants trampled upon hundreds of men, women,
and children to death. Next, when thousands of them, armed with bows and
arrows, marched forward to face the Company, they were attacked with
guns and cannons. But they would not retreat. They stood like a well,
till the last man dropped dead!
By None Other than Founder: CHAKRAPANI Controlling Editor: NAGI REDDI
