Transcript: Gandhi, Godse & Nehru – Dr. Vikram Sampath on The Ranveer Show 273

Other than Raja Raja and Rajendra, these are the only two I know, honestly.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Because Ahoms I know the dynasties, names. You know, this is the issue. I’ve also grown up in the same India that you have, and we’ve had the same history textbooks. And if you want to truly learn about history, it’s all about doing the research yourself.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Correct.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Which is why I enjoy my job right now. I just keep getting to unpack aspects of things I’ve not learned and that I wish to learn.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah, yeah.

The 1946 Naval Mutiny: A Forgotten Chapter

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: But I’ve got to, I think let’s begin this conversation by talking about the 1946 mutiny. And the reason I ask you that is I was once in a room full of really well established CEOs, and they were asking me Bollywood gossip because they know I interact with Bollywood stars. So they’re like, okay, how’s this guy and how’s that guy?

I was like, that’s cool. But do you know that the history we’re taught in books is not complete? It’s extremely fragmented? And then those guys are like, what? So, you know, they don’t even believe that we’ve been taught fragmented history. And I brought up the 1946 mutiny because it was brought up on the show. And people were shocked. They were like, I can’t even believe this happened. This is the first time hearing about it. And these are established CEOs of multinationals.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Wow. Wow. There you go. Proved my point.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Let’s start there. Let’s start there.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah. Well, you know, I think the best proof of this is Clement Attlee, who was the Prime Minister of Britain when India got her independence in 1947. He comes to India after independence around 1952 or 53, and he goes to various places. He also goes to Bengal.

And there, there is the Governor of Bengal, who is also the acting Chief justice of the High Court there, Fanny Bhushan Chakraborty. Justice Chakraborty, he’s his host. And Chakraborty asks him, you know, why did you people leave us and give us freedom so quickly? Because no one expected at that time that India would become free so soon.

And so he asked him, what were the reasons for you to leave us and go away so quickly? And Chakraborty notes it in his memoirs, whatever Attlee talks about. And Attlee very clearly is supposed to have mentioned that it was the heroics of the Indian National Army, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, and ultimately all of it inspiring the mutiny, as they called it, in the navy, in the army units in different parts of India.

The British were petrified of a repeat of the 1857 episode that there’ll be an uprising or insurrection in the British Indian army. And so he said that was the reason we left the country.

And Chakraborty is supposed to have egged him on a little more and said what about the Quit India movement and the whole non violent movement of Gandhi and what was that impact on your final decision to leave this country and go. And Attlee is supposed to have smirked and said “minimal.”

Those were his words, not mine. So I’m just, Attlee, it’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth. There was no need for him to be so condescending or disparaging of anybody because India had already got freedom. It was a candid conversation that the two were having five, six years after India’s freedom.

So I think right from the British horse’s mouth we get to know that it was the heroics of the INA, the Naval mutiny where so many sailors decided to go in an uprising in this very city of Mumbai and that spread across to so many other units both in the British Indian army as well as the Navy.

Now mind you, when the second World War ended there were about two and a half million soldiers in the British Indian army out of which probably just 10,000 were British. The rest of them were Indians, Indian origin.

So the revolutionaries, their entire strategy Ranveer all through was to create this insurrection. Even if 10% of this huge number could be seduced to patriotism and they could switch over to the side of liberating your country, then the edifice of the Raj would collapse because they were standing here only on the might of the army, the British army.

So I think these people understood that and created that insurrection in the army which is what as I said, they did not want 1857 to repeat in Kanpur and all those other places you had mass massacres of Europeans, men, women and children.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Why didn’t this happen earlier?

The Revolutionary Movement: A Long Struggle

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Why didn’t this not happen earlier? I think that constantly they were all these attempts right from early 1900s, the Gadar movement, which was a transcontinental movement between Canada, San Francisco, you have the Komagata Maru episode there. All of this was exactly attempts to do this very thing.

So the idea was very clear in all these people’s minds that this is the only way to liberate the country because you know, the weak point of the British government and how to get them going. And if you actually see, very dispassionately, all the reforms or anything that the British did to give in more to the Indian demands were preceded by bloody revolutionary incidents, whether it was the Morley Minto reforms, the Montague Chelmsford reforms, the Government of India act, and eventually freedom.

All of that was preceded by, as I said, violent uprisings. So “laton ke bhoot baton se nahi mante.” So I think this was something that the revolutionaries understood. They tried several times, but for various reasons, it didn’t succeed.

I think Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, and the country owes all its gratitude to him because he was the catalyst who probably culminated the dreams of all these other revolutionaries who had slogged so hard for so many decades and failed, unfortunately.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: You want to highlight the actual incident a little bit?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Which one?

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: The 1946 incident.

The 1946 Naval Mutiny and Its Impact

So the 1946 mutiny, which started in Bombay – I’m saying Bombay because that’s what it was called then – there were lots of sailors who initially, for the ratings that they had and so on, they were denied that. So that is why there was a protest on the deck, in the ships here, which did, they went on hunger strike. They started protesting and so on.

But then slowly that entire thing grew into a larger demand for liberation. And carrying placards of “Long live Netaji” and photographs of Netaji Bose, these people went all over the city on marches. And people, common people, started joining them in large numbers.

As I said, the flame that was lit in Bombay spread to different places, even South India, Karachi, Jabalpur, different parts of India. And by then, the INA trials had begun in Delhi, the Red Fort. And that too had created a lot of sympathy for the soldiers who had fought in the INA. So I think it was like a bomb that was ticking at that time, and that’s what shocked the British and scared them beyond doubt.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: You know, what sucks is that in our history books, the event preceding Indian independence that’s written about is World War II. So this is 1945. The British army was tired. Britain itself was tired. And that’s why 1947, they decided to go. They don’t highlight immediate causes like this. I question why. Why is this not there in most history textbooks that we read in school?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: That’s a long answer to that. But I think after independence, the people who came to power, I think they wanted to ensure that a certain viewpoint about the freedom struggle itself was highlighted and anyone who is not part of that so-called mainstream of the non-violent movement, they would not get its due.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Nehru, yes, you can say this isn’t television.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yes, that’s why people are gravitating away from television and onto YouTube.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: From television and onto YouTube.

The Suppression of Alternative Narratives

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: No, I don’t want to bitch about him but I think some of these strategic and Machiavellian attempts that he made to kind of suppress all opposing viewpoints. He was called a great democrat and a liberal and all that. But then the stifling of voices, the freedom of expression, even a Majrooh Sultanpuri languishing in jail for one and a half years because he wrote a poem in which he called Nehru Hitler’s Chela or something like that, something as innocuous as that.

And we say he’s paragon of freedom of speech. I think that’s a little far-fetched but be it as it may. But the narrative that was set was that we need to highlight only the non-violent movement and the role of the Congress in it and anything that doesn’t come within this framework, that should not get its due in the history. It should be mentioned but it should be in passing.

So Ranveer, even now, in 2016, if you remember, there were people who are the descendants of Bhagat Singh who wrote to the HRD minister then, Smriti Irani, that the Delhi University textbooks and also I think the UPSC books or whatever written by this Bipin Chandra, Amalendu Mukherjee and all these people actually calls Bhagat Singh, Bhagat Jatin, Jatindas, all these people as revolutionary terrorists.

The word “terrorist” is used for Bhagat Singh in the books and the descendants of Bhagat Singh had protested saying this was a term that was coined by our colonial masters. And today after Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, we are still using “terrorists” for them. So imagine a young child who’s reading that and at the same time on television you are seeing what’s happening in Kashmir or what terrorism and terrorist has a connotation today. They’ll equate that to Bhagat Singh.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Do you think this is because people like Bipin Chandra and who’s the other name, they grew up in another version of India and they were probably kind of influenced a lot by the history written in our books probably in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Do you think that’s the reason?

Establishmentarian Historians and the Official Narrative

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: These were part of what I would call as establishmentarian historians who towed the line that the dispensation, the political dispensation of the time, wanted them to. Around the same time there was a big project to write immediately after freedom. A lot of these people were still alive, some of the freedom fighters. So interviewing them, capturing an entire history of the freedom struggle was something that historian, the celebrated historian, R.C. Majumdar wanted to do.

And the government had initially commissioned him that project as well. But he made it very clear that I am not going to do some Gandhi eulogy in this. I am going to be very critical of the man. And the man had lot of failures in the manner in which he conducted. We probably would have got freedom several years or decades before, but for his flip-flop policies that he did all the time.

And he was – R.C. Majumdar wanted to bring all this out. So from a commissioned role as the official chronicler of the freedom struggle, R.C. Majumdar was summarily thrown out and a bureaucrat who had nothing to do with history or modern Indian history – he was, I think, an expert of medieval Turkish history or whatever – that guy was put in charge of writing the official history of the freedom struggle by the government of India, Mr. Nehru’s government.

And so it became very clear to all the other historians that what line we need to toe. If we don’t toe the line, we will lose our jobs, we lose all the patronage, all the awards, all the fellowships, all these things that academics look for. So you tend to toe a certain line. There was no social media, there was no Ranveer then who could give them, give the alternate voices a platform like this. So I think that is why most of them followed this. And that has been subliminally, it’s, I think down in our consciousness after so many.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: You know, this is a problem all over the world when it comes to different histories that I think the older generations have been taught one version of it. And when it’s challenged by alternative viewpoints, it’s often met with a lot of criticism. Like they call these kind of viewpoints really false conspiracy theories. But I think you need to lay out all the information and see it extremely objectively, kind of emotionlessly.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah.

Geopolitics and Historical Narratives

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: And I’m asking you the next question from an objective perspective. I think we’ve had Abhijit Chavda on the show very often. Like we may have done 20, 30 episodes with him. The one pitch that he keeps making on the show is that the world of geopolitics, even historically, has affected our viewpoint on Indian history as well, which basically means that the world’s power was centered in the Western bloc during World War I, during World War II. After World War II, used to be Big Daddy Britain, which became Big Daddy America.

And he kind of pitched some very strong points, which makes you kind of think that maybe America and Britain at that time have affected the kind of narratives we’ve gotten about our history as well, and probably even now, in terms of even how the world looks at Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhiji’s branding, which has been a big part of our minds. And lots of people think of the Indian freedom struggle, they’ll visualize Mahatma Gandhi.

As I said, there are lots of people who visualize Veer Savarkar and Bhagat Singh as well. But it’s primarily Mahatma Gandhi. And this is very intense branding, which has been strengthened because of support from those geopolitical powers.

My question is, why? Is it because some kind of promises were made before India got independence. You know, did they promise Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi that you guys will be given the opportunity to be the leaders of this free country? What do you think?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: As a historian, because there isn’t any documented evidence around it. There are some secret files which a lot of people talk about, which are out of boundaries. Just to think of it, even all the Mountbatten papers are completely classified. We don’t even know the last viceroy and the role of Edwina Mountbatten. What happened, how did she negotiate or come into the entire conversation? We know how she came into the conversation. Everybody knows about Lady Mountbatten, but go on.

Well, that’s what. As I said, I’m unfortunately a historian who will sit and look at what is the evidence for this. And I don’t want to go with bazaar gossip or insinuations. But yeah, so there were a lot of things that were going on. And, I mean, Nehru is also infamously supposed to have said once that he’s the last Englishman, the Brown Sahib.

So I think a lot of people who also came to power, not only – I’m not talking of the political power, but the bureaucracy, the people who held the power immediately after freedom. Several of them were part of the larger collaborator gang when the British Raj was in part. So they themselves, or their children or grandchildren, and all of these people became historians, became bureaucrats, became intellectuals.

The Case of Yashpal

One example I can give is of this man called Yashpal, who very clearly – there was a paper that came out somewhere, an intelligence report. When the British were leaving the country, they very clearly said, “Yashpal is our man, so please take good care of him when we leave.” And Yashpal was the man who’s supposed to have betrayed the revolutionaries and also caused the leaked out the secret about Chandrasekhar Azad which got him to kill himself.

And the revolutionaries were so livid with him for being the mole amidst them that they wanted to have him killed. And so the British jailed him and put him in jail to save him from the revolutionaries. And he also got married in jail. Probably the few people who have a honeymoon in jail. So the British were very good with people who were on their side. They would take very good care of them.

That’s why when today people say Savarkar was a British stooge and this and that, that is the very fact that the British would take care of those who had sold themselves to them. That is documented part of history. And after independence, Yashpal becomes one of the most loved intellectuals of the country. He gets several awards, Sahitya Akademi Award, and he writes books in Hindi literature on his own, blowing his own trumpet about how great, you know, revolution he was and so on.

And that is something that gets perpetuated in the people’s minds too. And he has quite a few nasty things to say even about Savarkar and all that. So, as I said, a lot of collaborators who later became part of the new firmament ensured that a lot of truth was suppressed and kept under the carpet. And we’re facing the consequences of that today.

But today I think the time has changed. It’s an information age. Light is the best disinfectant. Now anybody who throws light on the suppressed facts, I think the youth really want to lap up to, what is it that has been hidden from us? And right from the time of Adam and Eve, I think the forbidden fruit has been the tastiest thing. Right? So everyone wants whatever is forbidden from you. That always is very tasty.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Welcome to the Ranveer Show. Got to ask you a little bit about Yashpal. What happened to him later on? Did he die peacefully?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah, yeah. A very celebrated author. Celebrated literature, as I said he won the Sahitya Akademi Award. His books were prescribed as textbooks and learning material and all of that. And I think he must have even got some Padma and all these different awards.

So, yeah, many people like that who wrote the narrative of free India. They decided what information comes to the next generation. How do we frame that? Who is to be excluded? Who is to be demonized, who is to be eulogized? Everything was choreographed.

And the western powers also were, you had to show the British in a nice way that they were, I mean peacefully. We kept asking, “Quit India. Quit India.” One day they just got bored and said, “Okay, I will quit India and go.” It was not so simple as that. So I think somewhere you needed to – this is a very nice, it’s a great, as I said, Oscar-winning movie, Attenborough’s movie which gets all the global eyeballs. It shows India in a nice image that we were very non-violent. We didn’t have – very peacefully we got our freedom.

And also it shows our colonial masters in good light. So it was a win-win situation for both. And that’s why in the process so many people who actually sacrificed their lives and everything by leading the armed struggle, their names till today will be dubbed as revolutionary terrorists and not as freedom fighters.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Like Sardar Udham Singh.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yes.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Have you seen the movie?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Of course.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: My God, what a movie, dude.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah, yeah. And how many of us knew about him?

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Yeah. I don’t even think too many people watched the film. It was a fantastic film. It’s Vicky Kaushal’s best film, Sujeet Sarkar’s best film. I met Sujeet Sarkar, the director of the film. I said that dude, thank you for making that. That’s how history should be shown in its darkest, truest form. And he said, thank you. He was grateful.

But there was a part of him which definitely, at least that’s what I sensed and that’s what I felt. I think somewhere he wanted more people to watch it. And I highly recommend that dark, kind of sad film to every viewer watching this. You’ll get a real emotional viewpoint on the Indian freedom struggle from the people who actually used or had to use violence as a means to help the Indian freedom struggle.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Right.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: I had never heard of Sardar Udham Singh till that movie came out.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Why?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Sure. You’re not alone. There are millions like you who didn’t know about him.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: And how many people have we not heard of like him?

The Forgotten Revolutionary Heroes of India

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Thousands of them, Ranveer. I think in the course of my own research on Veer Savarkar, the kind of names that came along right from Vasudev Balwant Phadke who was called the father of Indian revolution. Maharashtra produced so many of them, the Chapekar brothers, Veer Savarkar, his elder brother, Babarao Savarkar.

Bengal had all, I mean Aurobindo Ghosh, Bharen Ghosh, Prafulla Chaki, Khudiram Bose. All of them around the same time. And when Savarkar goes to London, the kind of people whom he associates with there, Shyamji Krishna Varma, Madam Bhikaji Cama. In Mumbai or in Delhi you have a Bhikaji Cama road or a Bhikaji Cama place. But those who are there also don’t know who the hell this Bhikaji Cama is. Is it a man, woman? Most often. But she was someone who went and unfurled the first flag of Indian independence in 1907 in the International Socialist Conference in Stuttgart in Germany. And the flag itself was designed by Savarkar and Hem Chandra Das Kanungo of the Anushilan Samiti.

So people like this whom we have zero clue of, M.P.T. Acharya, V.V.S. Iyer, lots of them like that. Senapati Bapat. You have a Senapati Bapat Road in Pune. But then how many even in Pune know the details of who this man is? Sachin Raj Sanyal, of course, Ramprasad Bismil. And then of the Kakori case. Then Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Rash Bihari Bose who formed the Indian National Army and later invited Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.

As I said, the culmination of this long train, the Ghadar movement itself which started with Punjab and the Sikhs there who joined then with this. And then it goes across continents, through Europe to Germany, then from there to California, San Francisco and then even Canada. And the long train where they were trying to ally with Germany to ensure Germany invades British India and liberates India. Of course, whether we would have become a German colony, that’s another question.

But a lot of these heroes who operated across countries and so on at a time when there was no communication channels of WhatsApp and all of that like we have today. But still the passion of wanting to liberate your country, just mind you. I mean, Poorna Swaraj was something that the Congress coined in 1930, right with the declaration for Poorna Swaraj. But the revolutionaries, including Savarkar, when he did his first student bonfire of foreign clothes in 1905, gave the call for complete liberation.

The revolutionaries were not asking for piecemeal negotiations like the Congress was. That, give us a little bit here and there. Dominion status. All they wanted complete freedom for the country as way back as 1905. Which I think says a lot about what the objectives of the two groups were as they were working.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: What did you think of the movie?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Oh, it was excellent movie. I think it really left me deeply moved. And I agree with you. It’s probably Vicky Kaushal’s best and Sujeet’s best as well. I wish more of these movies get done on many of them. There’s so much drama. There’s so much. All that Bollywood wants, I think is there in the stories of all these people.

The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: A Visual Truth

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: They’ve shown the Jallianwala Bagh massacre as it should be shown.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yes.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Which is deeply violent, deeply heartless.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: We’ve read about it in our books. But the way they’ve visually shown it.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: In that movie, it moves every man.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: It’ll stay with you forever.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Correct.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: They’ve shown people’s hands being blown off, kids dying. It really makes you think about the truth that sometimes words are not able to capture as well as visuals.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: True, very true. Very true.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Which is why we probably need a lot more movies about people like Veer Savarkar, Bhagat Singh.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Everyone’s seen the Ajay Devgan Bhagat Singh movie. And that’s my reference point as well. I remember in 1996 or 97 there was a Veer Savarkar movie also which my mum took me for. And it’s one of my earliest memories in life. I think it’s called, Anu Kapoor if I’m not mistaken. He plays Veer Savarkar. It’s a Malayalam film that’s dubbed in Hindi and I highly recommend people watch it because they’ve shown a very raw image of him.

They’ve shown him in Kalapani, which was the jail in the Andamans. They used to make the prisoners do an oil extraction punishment. I mean, I’d love for you to expand on it as well, but it’s basically like a sort of a torture technique where they make you extract oil from seeds. And then when he doesn’t comply and he doesn’t give them information about the Indian revolution, they actually tie him upside down on the extraction device and make sure his head rubs against the ground and he gets dragged along with the machine and his body is used to actually extract the oil from the seeds.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: And I saw this as a four year old man. Wow. I was just like, whoa, what has gone on in this country before I got here. But it gave you a very dark image of the Indian freedom struggle. And I’m sure there’s so many things that don’t even make it to the world of films.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Which is why now I need to bring you into the actual meat of this episode. You’ve written an entire book on Veer Savarkar. History books don’t mention very casual random mentions. You hear about him when you live in a city like Mumbai, but not as much as you should. There’s a lot of Gen Z’s we have watching the show. Teenagers who watch this show. What’s the truth about Veer Savarkar that Indians should know?

The Revolutionary Legacy of Veer Savarkar

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Well, here was a man who started India’s first organized secret society, which was called the Abhinav Bharat. Initially Mitra Mela, which later became Abhinav Bharat. He led the first ever student bonfire against foreign clothes. When we talk of bonfire, we only think of Gandhi and the bonfire of clothes. But in 1905, as a student of Ferguson College in Pune, this man had done that, for which he even got rusticated from college.

And then five years that he was in London as a law student, he led literally the revolutionary movement sitting there and got all these other people I mentioned earlier who were there with him, Shyamji Krishna Varma and all of them into this entire movement and wrote this seminal book on the, after researching British documents on the 1857 uprising, gave it a respectability by calling it the First War of Indian Independence.

And that book, Ranveer, became literally the Bhagavad Gita for all future revolutionaries. Whether it was Bhagat Singh who got the second edition of it published, or even Rash Bihari Bose and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose who got it translated into Tamil and Japanese and all kinds of languages. And how a revolution needs to be structured. The entire prescription was there in that book.

So someone who had contributed so much and 12 long years in Kalapani, two years in Indian mainland jail, so 14 years of imprisonment, and then 13 years after he comes out, he’s kept under captivity and house arrest in Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, where he could not even go out of the borders of Ratnagiri. So just imagine a young man who is wanting to become a barrister, goes to London, is caught by the British and unfairly tried, and 27 years of his life are snuffed out.

His degrees are snatched away from him, the law degree, the graduation degree from Ferguson. So on paper he was just a metric pass. His entire family property confiscated. And so when he and his elder brother go away to Kalapani, the women of the family, they literally had to beg to eke out a livelihood. They didn’t even, utensils were taken away and auctions literally brought to the streets.

So this is a sacrifice not only of him, but also his entire family. His wife, his sister-in-law and all of them, Yesubai and all these people. And so easily today, sitting in air-conditioned rooms, people pass judgment saying he was a traitor, he was a stooge and all of that, which I think is grossly unfair.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: What is their argument?

The Mercy Petition Controversy

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: I mean the fact that is mentioned that he wrote mercy petitions to buy out his liberty from jail and so on, which I think is a flawed argument because these were petitions that commonly a lot of political prisoners wrote those days. It was not something that exclusively he wrote. And in my book, the first volume of the two volume biography on Savarkar, I have mentioned all the petitions. In total, there were six or seven that he wrote.

So just like you can have a lawyer today, you can have a bail application. A lot of people used to file these petitions which were applications. And in those petitions your viewers can actually read those and there is nowhere an apology. In fact, the British records themselves say that when they came, one man called Reginald Craddock, who comes all the way to interview him, he in his official jotting says, “I interviewed Mr. Savarkar and he shows no regret or repentance or remorse for what he has done.”

So why would the British want to write that about him if he could have prostrated and said so, but he didn’t do that. And then most of these petitions he was also filing on behalf of other younger people, young revolutionaries who didn’t know English, who didn’t know the law. So this man was called Bada Babu, who had studied law and who knew English and he could be their spokesperson.

So in fact, in a 1917 petition he says, “If my name constitutes an obstacle in the release of all the other prisoners, then delete my name and release the others. And that would give me as much pleasure as my own release would secure.” So that clearly shows he was talking on behalf of all the other people. But this is constantly brought out to demonize him.

And you spoke about Kalapani, Ranveer, and the atrocities there, not only to Savarkar, but all the other, only the revolutionaries were housed in Kalapani. Mind you, no single Congressman was sent there.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Hold on, just hold this thought because I want to go back to this debate. Where does Veer Savarkar actually stand in the Indian history textbook? Basically, when I was doing my research for this episode, the word that repeatedly came up along with him was Hindutva. And I feel in the modern day Hindutva doesn’t mean what it actually meant back then.

Like, see, now that I even use the word Hindutva, there’s a lot of listeners who’ve probably switched off because they associate Hindutva with Hindus being against other religions like Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, etc. And honestly, to some degree, that is what Hindutva’s become for a lot of Hindus out there today who are against other religions, who want to have this whole Hindu nationalism thing going on in the country.

But back then, I believe Hindutva meant something very different. And he was inspired by the ideals of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. And at that time, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus were all fighting together. So I’m sure that there was no religious sentiment behind what he did. But I’d love to know this Hindutva angle on Veer Savarkar.

Savarkar’s Vision of Hindutva

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: I mean, Hindutva the way it was envisaged by him. He wrote this very slim booklet called “Essentials of Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?” while he was in jail. While all his other writings were in Marathi, this was one he wrote in English for a pan-India audience, because that was the time when a very dangerous movement was going on in the country called the Khilafat movement, which Gandhi had led with the idea of bringing Hindu-Muslim unity. But it had very dangerous ramifications.

The seeds of partition were almost, I think, crystallized around that time because of the way it was led. On a communal issue of who will sit as the Sultan or the Caliph of Turkey, which the British had won in war, you were bartering Muslim support for the freedom movement. A lot of Muslims did not participate till then in the freedom movement. There was very little membership of the Congress too.

So I think Gandhi’s idea was if you show them this little carrot saying it’s a cause that is very dear to some of you, so we will support you for that. In return, you participate in the non-cooperation movement now. And in return he had promised that within one year the country will become free and we will establish a caliphate, a pan-Islamist, a very Wahhabi kind of movement to establish a caliphate there. Why should we in India support something like that? But that was done.

And when both these things did not work—his promises—there were lots of Hindu genocides that happened in the 1920s, including the Moplah carnage in Malabar in different parts of India. And the Hindus were almost being led like a Pied Piper to their destruction, leading the rats to their doom.

And that’s when Savarkar comes up with this document of what Hindutva is, which right at the beginning, he says, this has nothing to do with the theological aspects of Hinduism as a religion or the matters of soul, super soul, all of that. This is more of a cultural and a national identity marker, so to say. You need to have your devotion, your affiliation to this nation, those who consider this landmass as their punya bhoomi, not by religion, but by your affiliation.

You don’t care whether Turkey may have a sultan. You’re thinking of this country, your punya bhoomi and your pitru bhoomi, or ancestral land, where your ancestors come from. That person is a Hindu. He or she can be Jain, Muslim, Parsi, Sikh, whatever else, but culturally and nationally, they would be termed as a Hindu according to Savarkar, because they’re from Hindustan. And the world saw Al Hind right from how the Persians and others saw us. This part of the world was called Hind. And so people from there were Hindu for him.

Of course, the very fact that there’s a religion by the same name complicates the matter. But that was Hindutva. Hindutva is Hinduism that resists all kinds of predatory moves on it. And also anything that looks at Hindu unification, because Savarkar’s role, even in Ratnagiri in the 13 years that I mentioned, was on caste eradication.

Very few people today—Hindutva is equated with Manuvaad and all of that—while in reality, here was a man who for 13 years stood for a complete elimination of caste, not just untouchability, as Gandhi was advocating, but removal of all kinds of caste and unifying the entire Hindu society as one strong unit. So I think the misunderstandings that we have of this term as it grew is very unfortunate. And we tag him with whatever, as you said, today’s agenda and today politics also enters that, so much so that it complicates things further.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Have to bring you back to truth and history.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yes.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Do you want to elaborate a little bit on Kalapani?

The Horrors of Kalapani

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Kalapani, to me, Ranveer, I think is one of the most horrific—it was the Indian Bastille, so to say—one of the most horrific aspects of our history, which unfortunately we don’t talk too much about. I remember going there for my research on Savarkar and just the energy of that place. And as someone who’s sensitive to energies, you can literally feel the kind of suffering that your ancestors who fought for the freedom of this country faced when they were held there.

There were more than 300, 400 revolutionaries. Largely the people who were held up in Kalapani, along with the hardcore criminals and rapists and murderers and all that, were the revolutionaries. Congress people never went to Kalapani. This was like the worst of the prisons and the inhuman tortures are unspeakable.

The basic human rights facilities of good food, good drinking water or toilet facilities—that also was not given to these people. There were punishments of standing handcuffs, your legs tied up for weeks and months. And most of the food that was given had pieces of reptiles and whatever in it. So eating most of that, most of the people would get diarrhea. But there were fixed timings to go to the loo. And so at any other point of the day, if you needed to ease yourself, you couldn’t go to the toilet.

And so most of the prisoners, they would defecate and urinate in their own cells. And you had to sit and sleep and even eat amidst your own squalor, which would have been a soul-sapping experience.

And then this kolhu ka bail punishment, as you mentioned earlier, where the bail that was there, the bullock that would be yoked to the oil grinding machine—instead of that, you would have the political prisoner who in the blazing heat of Port Blair would have to go round and round that and extract about 30 pounds of oil. And at the end of the day that would be measured and if it was even one ounce less than that, you would be whiplashed. You would not be given food.

They were given the worst of clothes which would cause skin rashes, leeches biting into their skin, but no medical treatment given to them. Many of these were young people who were in their teens, late teens, early twenties, not more than thirty. And the kind of tortures—many of them, lots of them actually committed suicide because they thought death was better than the kind of tortures that were meted to them.

In fact, the British had also started an entire asylum in this place called Haddo Island near Port Blair, because many of them went mad because they could not bear the kind of tortures that they gave them. They were not given newspapers to read initially. They were not given papers or pen or anything.

Even Savarkar—he was a prolific poet. From his nails and with charcoal, he would write on the cell walls his poetry in Marathi. And to spite him, the jailer would come and whitewash the wall in front of him. But this man had such a precocious memory that he had memorized all, not one or two, but 4,000 lines of poetry in Marathi called Kamala and Saptarshi and all that, which he memorized and came out and those books got published.

So the kind of tortures that these people faced—as I said earlier, it’s so easy today, ex post facto, to sit and pass judgments about all these people. But do we even know, in Port Blair, in the cellular jail, there are all these big walls on which the names of all the people and from which state each of these political prisoners came. A lot of them from Bengal, Maharashtra, and then the United Provinces, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, all these places.

When I just stood in front of that and just saw that, and as I said, I felt those energies of these walls and people who probably ended their lives in a miserable manner, I was deeply, deeply moved. And I remember coming back to my hotel room and breaking down, because it took me a lot of effort to get over what I had experienced by just going into that.

But I always say, I think the Kalapani should be a place of pilgrimage for all Indian students to go there. And the least we can do as a nation is to pay our gratitude to them, not forget their names. Can we list ten people who suffered in Kalapani? I don’t think our history books do justice to that.

In our growing up years, what else do we do? At least remember their names and pay them that tribute and gratitude. We are celebrating 75 years of independence today thanks to the blood, sweat and toil and life of several of these great men and several women. And I think we would be very ungrateful as a nation if we did not do that. And high time, maybe through your show, I hope many people who are watching this go to Kalapani, make it a regular part of the itinerary of some of their children or their students or whatever. And that’s so important.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Intense. Were women also a part of it?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: No, not in Kalapani. Very few. Most of them were men who were put there. But women revolutionaries had other kinds of—I mean they also, someone like a Durga Bhabhi or a Madam Bhikaji Cama who sacrificed—they left their families, everything to do what they did.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: But what was the logic behind creating such a place? It was to break people’s spirit?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Spirit, yes.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Probably the most intense place that the British had built.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yes. And the British talking about human rights and all of that. So while we asked them for an apology for Jallianwala Bagh, which half-heartedly I think some of them gave, including I think the Queen when she came here. But I think they owe an apology even to the tortures in Kalapani. They owe an apology for several things. But Kalapani too, and for the Bengal famine and all these kind of the worst of tortures.

And this is not some ancient history or medieval history we’re talking of. This was about 100 years ago or less than that. So I think just being aware, just—but imagine we’ve not been told about it in this kind of graphic detail. And so we don’t think it is a big deal. So information is power. So once that knowledge comes into our control, then I think change naturally follows.

Savarkar’s Association with Nathuram Godse

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: What is Veer Savarkar’s association with Nathuram Godse? That was the other name that came up in my research. I’d love to hear about Nathuram Godse as well. Let’s hear that side of the story. And again, this is not me supporting Nathuram Godse.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: What he did.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: I don’t think that death is the answer to anything, honestly.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Assassination.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Assassination, yeah. I don’t think someone else’s life is in your hands to take.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: So I’m kind of, I’m almost against Nathuram Godse, but I’d love to understand his motivations and how Veer Savarkar is associated with him or with his side of the story.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah, Godse is a very interesting character that way. I mean, did we know—even the name, it’s Nathuram. So his parents apparently had several male children who would be born in the family, and they would die. And they thought it was because of some curse or something of some god. And so they tried to conceal the gender of this child and they used to put a nath to him, the Maharashtrian nose ring. And so that’s how he got his name, Nathuram, which they thought because if you make him a girl then he won’t die. And he lived on to do what he did.

He came under the spell of Savarkar when he was in Ratnagiri and became his secretary, his confidant. And when Savarkar was with the Hindu Mahasabha as its president, he was a very, very ardent follower. There was a youth wing within the Hindu Mahasabha of which Nathuram and also this other guy called Apte, Narayan Apte, who together were executed for Gandhi’s murder. They were part of this youth wing, they were very trusted confidants.

But in his testimony in court, Godse himself mentioned that as we came closer to independence, Savarkar became almost a pacifist. He said, “We are now going to get freedom. And so we should support the new government. It’s now a government of and for and by Indians and not outsiders. And so we need to stop being against Gandhi and Nehru and all of these people,” which some of these hot-blooded young men within the Hindu Mahasabha were against. And Godse being one of them.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: How old was he at the time?

The Plot to Assassinate Gandhi

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: He must be in his 30s. Yeah, so that’s one reason they decided to break away from him. And in fact there’s this anecdote that he mentions saying, you know, when Gandhi was… and that was a peak of the partition and people were seeing the kind of refugees who were coming from their trains full of corpses and all of that, women being raped, and houses being plundered and now Khali and the direct action, what was happening in Bengal. All of that was something that a lot of people, including people like Godse, were seeing.

And they were blaming Gandhi for not taking enough action, rightly or wrongly. But then they were blaming him for letting things come to this pass where in front of you there is a massacre. I wish the partition had been planned better, but that’s because the British left in haste just as what they, you know, the Americans did in Afghanistan. And most colonizing powers are that they leave the country, they colonize to their, to the vultures and they go away. And what happens is bloodbath after they leave.

So something similar happened in the subcontinent and all these young men who were aroused by that, they were seeking revenge. And so in fact, in my research I came across that Godse, they were not professional killers or anything. They had all kinds of plans to take revenge. They wanted to cross over to Pakistan and bomb the Pakistan assembly when it was in session to kill Jinnah and all these people, you know, as a retribution. That was obviously it failed because how do you manage to cross over and get ammunition and all that.

Then they wanted to loot the Nizam’s treasury because Nizam wanted to affiliate with Pakistan and but for Sardar Patel we would not have had Hyderabad. Then around 12th of January 1948 when Gandhi made his call that if the Indian government does not give 50 crores or so to Pakistan as promised he will go on a fast unto death. At the same time when Pakistani forces were incur, they were incursions into Kashmir by the tribes and all those people.

That is when these people said this guy needs to be bumped off because he’s a national security threat because at a time when Pakistan is attacking us why do we need to be so virtuous saying we promised you 50 crores we will give you and they are going to use that money to arm themselves against us. So and for that this man is going on a hunger strike unto death.

And so these people, 12 January, just about 18 days before Gandhi was finally murdered was when they hatched the plot. And in my book I detail the entire thing based on about 11,000 pages of court documents that I found in the National Archives of India saying how these people went about it was a sham of an arrangement. They made an attempt on Gandhi’s life on 20 January almost 10 days before his murder. That was an aborted attempt.

The police of Delhi, of Bombay knew that Gandhi’s life was under threat but he was not given enough security which was again a big mystery as to why that happened. There was so much of information lapses and finally Gandhi was a sitting duck.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Emotions kicked in here of all these people.

The Charged Atmosphere and Savarkar’s Implication

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yes, it was largely a very charged atmosphere. It was charged not only Godse, I mean when Gandhi went on this fast there were refugees who were coming in from Pakistan side who were in Delhi living on footpaths and all of that and they were shouting protests when Gandhi was in Birla House saying let him die because we have lost our families, our, you know, everything, our property, everything and come here and this man is supporting the same people.

And so that sort of charged atmosphere that was there even in Delhi in the heart of the national capital was something that probably inspired many of these people to pick up the gun and do what they did which I don’t endorse at all. As you rightly said, a heinous crime like a murder is something that needs to be condemned.

But because he had this past affiliation with Savarkar, Savarkar got dragged into the entire case. And there was some police approvers called Digambar Badge who gave this, you know, sham of a story that Godse and Apte went to Savarkar’s house in Dadar in Mumbai where he’s supposed to have told them in Marathi that “Yashasvi hoan, yeah,” you know, “be successful and come back.” And that was a bunkum story, some, you know, gossip. There’s no way to corroborate that with any evidence.

And on the basis of all this, you know, fixed match that it was, Savarkar was implicated in the case. By then he suffered two heart attacks. He was almost, you know, half dead. There was no way that he would have done all this when as I said, he was pacifist. He was wanting to cooperate with the new government but he got implicated in it.

And there was a Red Fort trial that went on for one long year. And seeing all the evidence, the judge exonerated him. Among all the people other than the approver, most of them served 15, 16 years of sentence. Godse and Apte were hanged but Savarkar was honorably exonerated by the court.

Supreme Court Exoneration

And as recently as now, Ranveer, in 2018, there was someone who filed a PIL in the Supreme Court saying Savarkar’s name was implicated in the Kapoor Commission which was set up much later in the 60s to reinvestigate Gandhi’s murder. And this man called Pankaj Fadnis who filed this, he wanted the court to relook at it and exonerate Savarkar.

Now the Supreme Court appointed an amicus curiae to go over all the documents and after one and a half years, a bench headed by Justice Bobde who was the CJI later and Justice Nageshwar Rao, they gave a verdict in 2018, four years ago that the plaintiff’s petition that Savarkar’s name is part of the conspiracy is null and void. The High Court, the trial court in Delhi, what it exonerated him in 1948, that holds and this insinuation is wrong now.

Something like when the Supreme Court of the country exonerates someone, I think somewhere you should respect the court and the laws of the land and the matter should lie to rest. But then politics enters the whole thing and time and again you have these kind of insinuations made against him.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Is his image being cleaned up now as it rightfully should because of the current government?

Renewed Interest in Savarkar

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: To an extent, I think they’ve brought the focus back on him. You know, when you have that very powerful image of the Prime Minister of India going to Cellular Jail, walking through those scary, you know, ramparts where you can literally, if you are sensitive, you can hear the howls and screams of all those people. And to also sit in Savarkar’s cell and pay his tribute, just that one iconic symbol I think does a lot to make people curious at least saying who is this person, to whom the Prime Minister of India is going and paying obeisance to.

And I think those who are opposed to him by time and again raking up his issue or calumnizing him, they are further, you know, arousing curiosity, particularly about the in among the young people because as I said earlier, I think the forbidden fruit is always the tastiest. So the more you berate someone, the more the curiosity among people to know what is the truth. Is it really what is made out to be.

So I think there is a renewed interest in the man, his legacy, what he stood for. He had failings, lot of them. And in my books I’ve been quite brutal even about his failings. But an understanding of the person. The last biography Ranveer of his in English at least was written when he was alive in the 1960s by Dhananjay Kir.

From then till now, so many biographies of Gandhi, Nehru, all these people and rightly so, you must re-evaluate historical characters. But Savarkar was never open for re-evaluation and assessment. He was literally a persona non grata. Any talk about him, you would even lose your job.

The Mangeshkar Family and Savarkar’s Poetry

So someone of the eminence of Pandit Hridayanath Mangeshkar in the 1960s, you know, since Savarkar was a prolific poet in Marathi and the Mangeshkar family was very close to him. So some of Savarkar’s poems which are iconic in Marathi, you know, “Jayostute Sri Mahan Mangale Shivaspadeshubhade.” And there’s this other very moving poem, “Ne majasi ne paratha matru Bhumila Sagara pran tadmadala.”

So all these poems, you know, Hridayanath Mangeshkar ji had tuned and “Sagara pran tar malada” was particularly. It was sung by Lataji and Ashaji and all the sisters Mangeshkar sisters. And can you believe it? For that crime of actually picking up his poem and this was independent India in the 60s. He got a show cause notice from All India Radio where he was working saying, can you explain why you chose this?

So we had this conversation of someone being a persona non grata. So just an illustration saying, what is the level of demonization of a human being? So Hridayanath ji gets this show cause notice and in return, very nonchalantly, he says, good poem, great poet. And that should be reason enough to pick the poem, tune it and sing.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: What was the general emotion in the poem?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Well, that was, you know, Savarkar had written it while he was in London, you know, and he was on the seashore in Brighton. And he was so overwhelmed with emotion. And he chides the ocean, the Sagara, saying, you cheated me and brought me here, saying, I’ll get better education and I can be of some use to my matrubhoomi. But I am here, stuck here and not being able to do what I do. The revolutionary movement had unraveled by then. So there was a lot of frustration that was built up.

So his friend Niranjan Pal, Bipin Chandra Pal’s son, who was with him, he says that almost extemporaneously he broke into tears and he composed this poem extempore and started singing it in his own way. And that poem, Mangeshkar ji tuned in a different way. Now for that crime of doing that and for the show cause notice answer that he gave, he lost his job in less than a week. He was sacked from All India Radio.

And that is the freedom of expression, liberty, all of that that we talk of that, you know, in a democracy, as I said earlier, even for these historians and others, you can have differences of opinion, you can have a differing viewpoint. But even a discussion around that is not possible.

Today at least we are having a mainstream conversation on this. A publisher like Penguin has the, you know, gumption to publish a two volume biography on him. In the 60s, you know, I might be put in jail or the book would have been banned or anything like this would have happened. So obviously when the people who are in the creative space, they know the mind of the ruler, that you do anything, you are going to face the consequences with loss of livelihood, loss of job and all that, who would want to venture into that?

And that is why many of them, including Savarkar, became, you know, unsung heroes.

The 1948 Anti-Brahmin Riots in Maharashtra

And you know, several things that came out in the course of the research of this book. How do we even know, particularly in Maharashtra, just as we had the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. The horrific riots in Delhi in 1948, just flip the digits. You had an anti-Maharashtra Brahmin carnage across Maharashtra, really spearheaded by several goons of the Congress. And this was as a retaliation against Gandhi’s murder.

The same people who are singing songs of non-violence and Ahimsa when their leader is assassinated. And that is a horrible crime, no condoning of that. The crime is perpetrated against members of the caste to which Godse belonged, which was a Maharashtra Brahmin. And so several, you know, Maharashtra Brahmins were killed in different parts of Maharashtra. They lost their property. There was ethnic cleansing of several villages. No cases filed, none of it.

And so I put out on Twitter, in fact, you know, saying I’m doing something on this and if you have family stories, can you give to me? And I was deluged with information that came from everyone saying this happened to my grandmother, my grandfather, my uncle, my this and that. And I also interviewed a couple of people who were in their 90s who were eyewitnesses to what happened and horrific tales as to how in those three, two weeks or so of mayhem following Gandhi’s murder, so many of them lost everything that they had for no crime of theirs just because they belong to the same community and the police didn’t register FIRs. There was no justice to all these people.

And just think of it, history, they say, repeats itself if you are not listening for the first time. If I think we as a nation or as a government, if we had taken a strong stand against this, that if someone is a political leader is assassinated, members of the community of the assassin should not face, you know, this kind of music. Maybe the anti-Sikh riots would not have happened and many people would have been saved after what happened to Indira Gandhi. But then we’ve let all this under the table.

But interestingly, Ranveer, I mean, I asked the people whom I interviewed if I could put out their identity out in public. 90% of them said we’d prefer to be anonymous because the perpetrators of, you know, the crime, their descendants and their whatever, you know, associates are still in positions of a lot of power in Maharashtra and outside.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: These were obviously Maharashtrians themselves.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yes.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Maharashtrians killing other Maharashtrians.

Yes. But then their successors are still very politically powerful. So we’ve moved on, we’ve rebuilt our lives which were shattered in the aftermath of this. We don’t want to – we want to give you the information but please let us remain anonymous and let us be happy in our lives, which we have rebuilt.

So I think history also offers you that space to heal the wounds of the past. And we need to do that with our history. It’s not just recent history. All the other atrocities right from the ancient times, whatever. When we fabricate, when we do subterfuge, when we whitewash crimes, particularly of genocides, of murders, of all of that, I think that somewhere that unhealed energy keeps coming out and affecting future generations.

We need a truth and reconciliation with our history. It’s not revenge stories. It’s not retribution. It’s not demonizing somebody or a community or group. Just make peace with your past. Get done with it. And I think move on to build a better future. And history should give us that very important lesson as to how these mistakes of the past should never occur again.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: How long did the British rule over India?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Roughly 200 plus, 250 years.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: But yes, we weren’t independent for the last thousand years.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah, true, true.

The First Independent Indian Generation

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: So our generation is basically the first independent Indian generation, which is what a lot of young people fail to understand.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Maybe because we’ve not sensed, not perceiving freedom, what that feels like.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: True.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: You take freedom for granted. And I’ve learned about freedom through the Special Forces soldiers that I’ve seen on the show who served in places like Sudan, where freedom isn’t a thing for those people in everyday life. So you kind of start valuing what you have as an Indian.

And that’s made me think about what lessons we should learn from the past. This divide and rule situation has been used against us for a thousand years.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: True.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Not just by the British, by everyone who ever invaded. They turned one brother against the other. And we’re kind of seeing a repeat of that even now on places like Twitter with left wing versus right wing, that India’s biggest problem right now is probably happening from inside the country where two sides are fighting each other rather than understanding that we’re the fastest growing economy in the world, and we should be looking outward and figuring out how to sell Indian products and services and make money and become a richer country, which is actually what China has done.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: They’ve become rich first, then become powerful.

Making Peace With The Past

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Yeah. But China has managed to do that, Ranveer, because they’ve set the grand China narrative. And they’ve made peace with their past. They have told the stories of their past in the way it needs to be told. We did not do that.

That I think, even for an individual, if you’ve had a troubled past, growing up years, you have your inner child healing, all of that. That needs to happen, right? So it’s same with a nation and a civilization. Anything that is wounded needs healing. It needs to – only then you can move ahead with confidence, with closure.

If that doesn’t happen, then the ghosts of the past will keep hurting you, will keep coming by your backside, and there’s no way you can escape. You can push it away for some time, but it will come again.

So I think we have not done that. And as I said, when you cover up something and you think you put all the muck under the carpet and you put some deodorant on it and the smell, stench won’t raise – that is a wrong way of going about things. It will. Once the deodorant’s power comes down, the stench is going to show up.

And we need to have, as I said, an honest assessment of our past. Make complete peace with it. Tell the truth as it is. Don’t look at history as a tool for contemporary political correctness or think that this edifice of national unity as you see it, or social cohesion, it cannot rest on the faulty foundations of fabricated history.

So don’t think if you say the truth, some community today will get affected or they will feel bad. And so we need to cover up, we need to make stories up. That never helps. Say things as they are and move ahead.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Wow, you have a lot to share, man. I’d love to actually unpack a little more in our next conversation. I think you have stuff to share even beyond the British and beyond the Indian freedom struggle.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Struggle.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: You’re a fan of history, just like the watchers and listeners of this show. So any final message to the people who’ve listened till this point?

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: I thought I gave my farewell speech already.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: Maybe you can just tell people how to support you more. I’m probably assuming that you’re active on Twitter.

Knowledge Is Supreme Power

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: That’s your social platform. Instagram a little bit. Not so much of an Insta person, but more on Twitter.

And I think reading helps. “Jnanam Paramam Balam.” As you know, my alma mater, BITS Pilani had that as the tagline, and I truly believe in it. Knowledge is power supreme.

So the more you read, read every shade of opinion, keep the windows of your mind open, particularly when it comes to a subject like history. And those of the viewers who are interested in history, they should read left, right, center, whatever ideology the writer is and imbibe differing viewpoints and make up your own mind.

So I mean, I’m not evangelizing my book and say all of you should read my Savarkar book. You read them at the same time. You read also someone who’s written an inimical biography of his or a book of his and you make up your mind after reading all of that what you make of the person or of the other.

These Bravehearts of Bharat – you read other people who have written about the same person and make up your own mind. You can love to love somebody or love to hate someone. But let your love or hatred be informed. Let it not be based on rhetoric, on assumptions, on misnomers, political propaganda and what your relatives have told you, what your relatives and your peers have told you, or what social media informs you.

Use this important tool which God has given us to make up your own mind on the basis of information. Informed opinion is always powerful. And that is my only message to everyone who’s tuned in.

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: All right, thank you sir.

DR. VIKRAM SAMPATH: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Closing Thoughts

RANVEER ALLAHBADIA: That was the episode for today. Amongst a bunch of these history related topics, sir also spoke to me about his life in the modern day. How he’s criticized for a lot of his work, how he’s trolled, how he is subjected to a lot of online hate because he’s trying to really uncover aspects of history that aren’t out there yet.

I feel history all over the world is being rewritten. The Indian freedom movement should also be rewritten in some aspects. That’s the one thing I’ve got to learn through this podcast. Not just this episode, but this podcast in general. Talking to people like Abhijit Chavda, talking to people like Vikram Sampath. It’s been a re-education process for me, and through my re-education I hope that even you, the listener, the viewer gets re-educated because we’re in charge of this beautiful country now. We owe it to the people who helped us gain freedom.

Once again, let’s relearn history and let’s put forward the new proof-backed history that we’re learning through these great historians. For more episodes like this, make sure you follow us on Spotify. Every episode is available on Spotify 48 hours before it’s available anywhere else in the world. Until next time, guys. I’m Ranveer. The Ranveer Show will be back.

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