TEARS Behind Triumph

Sudhir Vidyarthi's Bidai De Ma! is not about martyrs, but the women who made them. Through their letters, memories, and silence, he rebuilds the emotional architecture of India's revolution

- SANJEEV CHOPRA

Sudhir Vidyarthi's poignant offering of the stories in Bidai De Ma! (Bid me Farewell, Mother) is a recollection of the mothers and sisters of 13 revolutionaries who smiled their way to the gallows or to the dreadful panopticon in the Andaman Islands in the 1920s.

While the history of the noncooperation movement led by the Mahatma has been documented - in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), Towards Freedom (Publications Division, GoI), and Transfer of Power (His Majesty's Stationery Office) - the equally important struggle of the revolutionaries who believed in a violent confrontation with the Empire has not received its due attention. Folk history and popular imagination have helped resurrect only some martyrs of the freedom movement. Subhadra Kumari Chauhan created her famous ballad 'Jhansi Ki Rani' based on the bards of Bundelkhand, much before it appeared in school textbooks, which itself parallels a Bundeli saying about Rani Jhalkari Bai’s bravery.

In recent years, many political dispensations have understood that electoral capital can be made by invoking the names of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaq Ullah Khan, Shachindranath Sanyal, Manindra Nath Banerjee, Sohan Singh Bakhana, Pratap Singh Barhad, Chandrashekhar Azad, Subhash Bose and Khudiram Bose. Their photographs and busts can now be seen in party offices and ministerial residences.

However, Vidyarthi has gone beyond this to delve into the lives of their mothers, many of whom had to struggle to make both ends meet in the sunset boulevard of their lives. We, who are so sanctimonious about wanting a public apology from the UK for the firing at Jallianwala Bagh, must also, in all fairness, ask our own countrymen — why did we turn our backs on these mothers when all they needed from us was some dignity and self-respect?