Author: Anurupa

Forget Not Your Freedom Fighters . . . !

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My salute to all the freedom fighters of India on this auspicious day of India’s Independence!

I make it a point to stress the ‘all’ for I salute everyone: the revolutionaries, the soldiers and officers of the Indian National Army (INA), and indeed every heart that panted for freedom, every soul who shed his or her blood that Mother India be free of her shackles.

Unfortunately, the Indian multitude has been largely brainwashed into considering almost all of the above freedom fighters beyond the pale. Those who did not follow the dictate of Gandhi and Congress, those who spilled their blood for their motherland, are the ones to suffer this fate particularly.

There is one glaring exception: The rioters of the Moplah

Rebellion.

One will be hard put to it to find a more gruesome rioting. They did spill blood; not their own, but that of the Hindus and the Europeans; they fought, not for the freedom of India, but for Khilafat and “Muslim Raj”—yet the Government of Kerala graciously allowed them into the officially recognized “freedom fighters” clique in 1971.

I have sworn to find out why, one of these days.

I had a very telling conversation with one whom we shall call A.

“Oh, anyway, there was no struggle for freedom after the Quit India Movement in ’42, as such! So how many freedom fighters can still be around?” says A.

What a shocker! Quit India Movement was an ineffective, unorganized, badly-timed Congress Movement which did not even have United India as a goal. I gobbled like a turkey—metaphorically speaking—at this preposterous statement, but did manage to blurt out:

“Do you not count the INA . . .! Those soldiers were freedom fighters!”

He managed to crown his previous gaffe:

“Oh, the INA soldiers are not mentioned as freedom fighters.”

They who went to war fighting for India’s freedom, whom the Indians adored as their Symbol of Freedom, whom the British quote as a reason for getting out of India for good—they are not to be mentioned as freedom fighters—by whom?

The Congress?—the same Congress who came to power in free India by championing these patriots to win the elections and then stabbed them in the back when freedom was won? By that Congress?

It was obvious to me that A was supremely unaware of belonging to the “brainwashed multitude” of India.

“You,” I cried, “are making the grave error of assuming that the history of the Congress is the history of India!”

Fact of the matter is that he is not alone in making this error. This “error” has been insidiously percolated in the national and international psyche.

How does one counteract such brainwashing? A feeling of helplessness was washing over me. It was at that time I connected with Mr. Vishnu Pandya. And I realized that as long as there are people like him around, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Vishnuji is an eminent personality of Gujarat, India. He is a noted journalist, biographer, poet, novelist, historian—really, you name any facet of writing and he has a command of it! He is an author of an astounding 92 books . . . ! Fifteen of those are biographies of Revolutionaries of Gujarat.

On Independence Day Eve, there was a mega-show in Junagadh, Gujarat, especially honoring those freedom fighters who are in danger of being lost in obscurity. He has written the script for it.

Dr. Shreerang Godbole is another eminent personality. He boldly and forthrightly champions the cause of the Revolutionaries. Doread his gripping article on them on this link:

Hats off to them both!

I do hope there are many more people like Vishnuji and Shreerang, that every freedom fighter of India will get deserved recognition and be evergreen in the Indian memory.

Vande Mataram!

Anurupa Cinar

My Keshu

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Hi, Everyone! Keshu, my fictional hero, has an unusual, even unexpected, background. I had to traverse quite a meandering path to evolve it.
I had determined that my fictional hero had to be from Cochin in the Malabar area (for how else was I going to write about the Moplah riots). I picked Pune as the city where he would become a revolutionary. Since I loved Pune, I felt I could write comfortably on it. This was also my opportunity to record some of the fond memories of my childhood for posterity, and that is exactly what I have done in the prequel. Chingi, the cat, is one of them.
My fictional hero’s mother had to be a widow, for I wanted to write about the plight of widows in India too. I also wanted his parents to have had an inter-caste marriage (but still be Brahmins, for I didn’t want to get tangled up in a complex love story for them). This way I could give him ties to two places very disconnected from each other which too was essential for my plot.
Chitpavan Brahmin caste was an almost natural choice for Mohini with her Pune background, and one I was very familiar with. The father, I decided, would be a Nayar. I was aware that Nayar’s came from the Malabar area. I called my hero Keshavan; the name is a South Indian one, I believe.
Keshu, as I called him, became alive in my eyes even before I started to write. (Wo)manfully, I jumped into the writing foray, deciding to research as I went along. Originally, my novel was to contain Keshu’s story too (now a prequel) so I started with that.
I struggled through the prologue and was ready to venture forward when something niggled at the back of my mind—had I done enough research on the Nayar community?
No. I had just brushed the surface, perhaps. I had made a pact with myself: if even the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind on any aspect, sentence, or even word in my novel, I would check it out from all angles.
So I went back to Google and realized that the Nayars were Kshatriyas, not Brahmins, and a matriarchal society to boot; something quite, quite alien to me. Horrors! What was I to do now? Keshu’s background was critical to the novel.
After some hectic research I discovered that the Gaud Saraswat Brahmins (GSB) had settled in Cochin centuries ago. I went down on my bended knees and thanked God (this was the first instance of Divine Intervention). This I could handle, my father being from the same caste. I even studied the photograph of my grandparents to get the feel of the 1913 era. The nickname “Keshu” was by this time cast in stone for me, so I just removed the ‘an’ from his name and made him “Keshav” to turn it into a GSB name (for his last name I went through several gyrations for many months before I settled on Wadkar). Now I carried on writing swimmingly.
And then came another niggle.
Was Cochin the correct place for the Moplah riots to occur? Was it…? Back to Google again! To my horror (once more) it most certainly was not! It was a Princely State. I poured over the map of the Malabar area for cities where the Moplah riots took place. And after going dizzy I came up with a place—something unpronounceable from ‘M.’ Every two nights I would jerk awake in horror and switch the name of Keshu’s hometown from the “M something” to Calicut and then back again. This mental seesaw was harrowing, to say the least. I felt very much like the hamster running furiously in his wheel and getting nowhere.
Other questions whirled in my mind too: How was Keshu going to survive (in 1921) in a place utterly devastated by riots? What was I going to do about his being a GSB, now that he could not be from Cochin? What, what, what…?
After going from pillar to post in my mind, I called a halt to it by making some ‘executive’ decisions.
  • Keshu would come from a small (fictional) village on the outskirts of Calicut. The name ‘Pongur’ just popped in my mind and I liked it.
  • An offshoot of the Moplah riots would take place in Pongur.
  • Keshu would continue to be a GSB.
The readers would just have to forgive the liberty I took of transplanting some of the GSB community from Cochin to Calicut!
Phew! Now Keshu’s background was settled.
Or was it?
More on that day after tomorrow. For tomorrow’s post is going to be an Independence Day special.
Toodle-oo!

And The Dream Was Born . . .

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The day has finally arrived. I have climbed the Mount Everest, metaphorically speaking, and have taken the first step on my next climb—up Mount K2 (marketing and publicity). My novel Burning for Freedom is now—yoo-hoo!!—available!

Notice the double punctuation. It is strictly forbidden (along with using too much of italics), a no-no-no-no, by the Gods of Grammar and Punctuation rules. But I love them; they seem to express so much. Just this once, to celebrate the publishing of my novel, so to speak, I thought I would indulge myself. Throughout the writing/editing process I had my eyes peeled on the laptop screen lest a beloved double-punctuation typed itself unbeknownst to me. It was agonizing, I can tell you.

With that, it occurred to me that I could kick off my first post with some of the comic (though at the time I believe I could have cried) moments of my first venture into writing.

It is really impossible to put in words the extent to which I was moved by Savarkar: his life-story; his unconditional love for his motherland, Hindustan; his amazing character; his unswerving dedication in following the path of Duty. The injustice heaped upon him in his lifetime, and continuing till today was insupportable. I was a raging mass of emotions at this abomination; I could have screamed like a banshee, ranted and raved—but that would have served no purpose.

Instead, I woke up one morning with the firm resolve to write, publish, and publicize a novel channelizing all what I felt—and knew to be the truth—in it. I refused to acknowledge the difficulty, the impossibility, the improbability of it. Any mountain that blocked my path was going to be razed to the ground, for sure. I was going to do it, that’s it!

The next morning, I had my plot ready. And with that two other things happened simultaneously: A new Avatar—one quite like the Queen of Jhansi charging fearlessly on, sword slashing—took over my body and the Quivering Jelly that was within me followed recklessly willy-nilly.

To add to the complications—in addition to the chains of the Gods of Punctuation that were choking me—I threw chains of restrictions around my feet: all incidents that would make up the story would be real life ones. I don’t believe I quite realized at the time what a challenge that would be! I also needed a fictional character who would be devoted to Savarkar—who would essentially be me—and would carry the story forward. This character, of necessity, would have to be male. “But … but … how? … Can I …? I am a woman …!” spluttered the Quivering Jelly. Could I really write from the point of view of a young boy and a forty-five plus man? It seemed preposterous. “Forward march! Hup 1-2-3!” cried the new Avatar, relentless. And on I marched, without a backward glance.

This was the first of the Moments of Realization that crashed upon me several times throughout the writing of the novel.

The next one followed almost immediately. The perfect entry for Savarkar in my novel would be when he rescued my fictional hero from molestation (a true incident in Savarkar’s life) in the Cellular Jail. I can tell you I was one big “ULP!” Just how was I going to write a molestation scene? And a gay molestation at that …! I didn’t know—I only knew I would do it, somehow. There wasn’t any choice. Even the Quivering Jelly knew better than to voice any protests. I would write what was the best thing for my novel, even if it was the most difficult scene in the world.

But I have to confess, it is the only scene in the entire novel that I have written without any research whatsoever. I even did a lot of research on how to behead someone and what happens to the body afterward for Mohini’s death scene (readers will be happy to know that not much is available on this topic.) But this scene—no.

This is how I began the climb of my Mount Everest. Establishing the background of my fictional character came next —more in the second post!

Toodle-oo.