Talk by P. Sainath (Founding Editor, People’s Archive of Rural India)

The 2022 celebrations around the 75th year of India’s Independence seemed devoid of any recall of who and what it was the Indian people fought against to win Freedom and Independence. Official websites dedicated to the subject tell young readers nothing about it. Nor was there any debate on who won India its Independence. A bunch of returning Oxbridge elites? Or, as Gandhi observed, ‘the people themselves’? India’s official website commemorating 75 years of Independence (Azadi ki Amrut Mahotsav) has many thousands of entries on what the government considers vital around that period. It has no single story on, by, or about, nor even a single photo or video of a living freedom fighter – and there are still some, as my book The Last Heroes (Penguin November 2022) would show you. No less importantly, the official site has nothing on the British Raj and its impact on Indians. Two vital questions, then, remain unanswered: what did British colonialism actually do to Indians? And secondly – the question my recent book deals with – who, really, were our freedom fighters? The book records the life stories of 15 very ordinary Indians – representative of tens of millions of others – and how they took on the British Raj. Farmers, labourers, cooks, couriers, homemakers, artisans, students, and others played astonishingly courageous roles without personal gain. They came from a diverse social spectrum: Dalits, Adivasis, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, OBCs, Brahmins, atheists… What motivated these freedom fighters? Why do they tell us that freedom and independence are two different things?

Magsaysay Prize -winner P. Sainath is an Indian journalist focusing on social and economic inequality, deprivation, and poverty, particularly in rural India. Despite receiving over 60 national and global awards for journalism, Sainath has also declined several – including the Padma Bhushan, as he believes “journalists should never accept prizes and rewards from the governments they cover and critique.” Sainath was McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University in the Fall of 2012 and has been conferred doctorates by three other Universities. In India, he has taught journalism for 37 years. His first book, Everybody Loves A Good Drought, was declared a Penguin Classic in 2013 and is in its 61st printing. His latest book, The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom, is already in its 5th edition. A journalist since 1980, Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since then spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions, writing from there for India’s largest newspapers, including The Times of India and for The Hindu (of which he was Rural Editor for a decade). More recently, his path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides – over 400,000 in two decades since 1995 – on the national agenda. In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online project on rural India, with its 833 million people speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture, and a lot more. In less than ten years, PARI has won 70 journalism awards, including every single major prize in that field in India.