“Every Indian, no matter where he may be living at the present time, has a duty towards this country…” These words of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose inspired the diaspora to raise 50,000+ strong Azad Hind Fauz. More than half sacrificed their life for the country, many say that history has not done enough to aptly remember their contribution to the country’s freedom. Netaji’s birth anniversary is celebrated as Parakram Divas and Prime Minister Narendra Modi rightly said that, “Every Indian is proud of his monumental contribution to our nation”.
Post colonial history has been rewritten across the world, India’s position has been peculiar though. Rewriting has been both process and product, and is often associated with the theoretical approach toward the study of postcolonial literatures suggested by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in their seminal work “The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures” (1989). World over the post colonial rewriting has mainly been about canonical literature where the writer is seen as belonging to a culture on the margins of the imperial center, and the content is viewed as a western cultural production. The writers having completely adopted the colonial education system, pay homage to their western masters as well as attempt to refute their assumptions. India, though having very rich heritage of original texts of all kinds, seems to have followed the similar methodology so far as other parts of the world. Perhaps, the rewriting needs to happen again by completely abandoning the colonial overhang. A caution many countries have started to take.
The book “Promises to Keep” talks about extraordinary feat of Indian slaves on the Island nation of Mauritius where “The Bissoondoyal movement was breathtaking in what is encompassed in relation to the very limited resources that it had: it embraced social reform, political, economic and social emancipation, cultural revival and education both of the individual and of the people.” Yet, the author says it is not to be seen as a work of history.
Another important factor in rewriting biases is induced by the colonial mindset of normative and source-oriented mindset. The official versions of history that exist in the colonial archives often do not account for the versions of the victims of history, including women and natives. This has been the main issue in South Africa, where a Britisher by the name of Guy Butler played a key role in establishing the National English Literary Museum (NELM) and a reports says, “Given this indication of the inherent ideological power of the archive, and given that in previously colonized countries colonial rule was often asserted through assiduous record keeping, it becomes necessary to investigate critically the action of founding, adding to, or engaging with ‘archive’ in the way that Butler was consciously doing in the 1970s.”
On the 125th birth anniversary, questions regarding Netaji’s end days, whether they were in Taiwan or Siberia, are being asked again, and archives of India, Taiwan, Japan, UK, America and Russia need to be cautiously explored to find out the truth.
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