About the Talk 

Whose struggles and sacrifices brought India its independence? Where were the great battles for freedom really fought? Who were our freedom fighters? What qualifies as ​‘participation’ in the struggle? 

In the seventy-fifth year of Indian independence, most books, especially those for younger people, mainly focus on the names of a few select individuals as having brought this nation into being. There are still some fine books that do look at the history of the struggle in a sensible and explanatory way. But those are being rapidly replaced with appalling fabrications that don’t qualify as history, let alone as textbooks.

In the next five or six years, there will not be a single person alive who fought for this country’s freedom. Newer generations of young Indians will never get to meet, see, speak, or listen to India’s freedom fighters. Never be directly told who they were, what they fought for. Let’s try and learn something about them while we still can.

About the Speaker

P Sainath, former Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, writer and journalism teacher, is the 2007 winner of Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s most prestigious prize. His book, Everyone Loves a Good Drought (Penguin India 1996), now in its 43^rd print, was declared a Penguin Classic in January 2013. Sainath has taught at journalism schools in India and abroad, mentoring students as well as training media professionals. 

He is Founder Editor, People’s Archive of Rural India. The archive is an outcome of his three decades-plus years in journalism — including a quarter century of reporting from rural India. The People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) aims to address the complete failure of the corporate media to cover two-thirds of the country’s population.