The Role of South India in the Freedom Movement

Introduction

This book presents the story of the freedom struggle that developed in South India and the ideals that inspired the national struggle for freedom in South India.

The presentation has two aspects; one, dealing with the events and incidents in which the freedom fighters were involved and two, the ideals and values that inspired the freedom fighters. The first represents the external side of the movement and the second the inner and deeper part.

It is evident that the inner part is more important as it portrays the lasting and abiding values and ideals that led and inspired this movement.

We shall therefore first trace and identify the source of the inspiring ideals that were at the root of the Indian nation.

The Psychological Unity of India

In the history of India, we shall note that India became a nation state only in recent times; in a sense, only after the conquest by the British. However, the psychological sense of unity was there from the most ancient times. India had a fundamental cultural and spiritual unity rather than a political and economical unity.

For in India the spiritual and cultural unity was made complete at a very early time and it became the very basis of life of all this great surge of humanity between the Himalayas and the two seas. The peoples of ancient India were not so much distinct nations, sharply divided by a separate political and economic life; rather, they were sub-peoples of a great spiritual and cultural nation, itself firmly separated physically from other countries by the seas and the mountains, and from other nations by its strong sense of difference, its peculiar common religion and culture.

The whole basis of the Indian mind is its spiritual and inward turn; its propensity has always been to seek the things of the spirit and the inner being first and foremost and to look at all else as secondary, dependent, to be handled and determined in the light of the higher knowledge; the outer world was seen as an expression, a preliminary field or aid to the deeper spiritual aim. In other words, this approach led to a tendency to create whatever it had to first on the inner plane and afterwards in its other and outer aspects. The early mind of India understood the essential character of this problem. The Vedic Rishis and their successors made it their chief work to found a spiritual basis of Indian life and to effect spiritual and cultural unity of the many races and peoples of the peninsula.

What were the methods adopted by the ancients to bring about this spiritual and cultural unity?

Observing the religious and spiritual tendency of the Indian people, the ancient seers adopted a combination of different psychological and practical methods to bring about spiritual and cultural unity. As a first step, they created sacred religious places and distributed them all over the country; some of the places are in Haridwar, Prayag near Allahabad, Gaya, Nasik, Dwarka, Puri, Kumbakonam and Rameswaram.

One may also note the great influence of temples all over India. Not only were they religious places of worship, but structures of grandeur and beauty. There can be no doubt that the temples of India were a very powerful unifying factor. Starting from the South in Madura and Rameswaram right up to the north in Kashmir, in the East from Dwarka to the great temples in Assam, they have been a powerful religious, cultural and aesthetic unifying force.

Another method they adopted was the repetition of the sacred text, which in ancient times Indians used every time they bathed:

Page 1

Gangecha Jamunechaiva Godavari Sarasvatee

Narmada Sindhu Kaveri jalesmin sannidhim kuru

And it means: May the Ganges, the Yamuna, the Godavari, the Sarasvatee, the Narmada, the Sindhu and the Kaveri enter into this water.

These are the great rivers of the Indian subcontinent and it is along the course of the great rivers that the sacred stream of Indian culture flowed all over the land.

 In addition, there were the legends of the gods and the two great epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata - which were read and moved people in every part of India. These legends were known by every Indian family and created a deep psychological bond among the people.

Finally, there was the universal reverence of the Vedas all over the country from the extreme North to the tip of South India.

Thus from a very early period of Indian history, the Indian subcontinent had fully realised a very deep, though complex form of organic unity behind all the apparent diversities and multiplicities of the land and the people.

All these created a feeling that India was not just a geographical entity or a collection of people merely having the same religion and language. The Indian nation became a living being with a distinct personality, a dynamic psychological entity.

It is this feeling that has been expressed by poets and writers throughout the ages. In modern times, this was the whole meaning of Bandemataram and the songs of Subramaniam Bharati. The same feeling is beautifully expressed in the following words of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

India - A Living Personality

'Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle, which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence. For by its virtue alone she has been one of the immortal nations; this alone has been the secret of her amazing persistence and perpetual force of survival and revival.' 1

'Even as the individual has a soul which is its true self, governing more or less openly his destiny, each nation too has its soul which is its true self moulding its destiny from behind the veil: it is the soul of the country, the national genius, the spirit of the people, the centre of national aspiration, the fountain-head of all that is beautiful, noble, great and generous in the life of a country. True patriots feel its presence as a tangible reality. It is this which has been made almost into a divine being and all who love their country call it "Mother India" (Bharat Mata), and it is to her that they daily address a prayer for the welfare of their country.'2

It was this feeling that was at the psychological root of most of the freedom fighters whether they came from the North or the South of India. The driving force behind all their actions was the Indian consciousness, which we have referred to above. Therefore, while presenting the role of South India in the freedom struggle we will take great care not to present it in a narrow parochial manner. It will rather be done is such a way that we can illustrate the tremendous diversity in unity that is the foundation of the Indian nation.

However, we must note that India never became politically united. There were many attempts to convert the psychological unity into a political unity, but there was no durable success. Here is an extract from Sri Aurobindo illustrating this:

Page 2

But the most striking example in history is the evolution of India. Nowhere else have the centrifugal forces been so strong, numerous, complex, obstinate. The mere time taken by the evolution has been prodigious; and yet through it all the inevitable tendency has worked constantly, pertinaciously, with the dull, obscure, indomitable, relentless obstinacy of Nature when she is opposed in her instinctive purposes by man, and finally, after a struggle enduring through millenniums, has triumphed. And, as usually happens when she is thus opposed by her own mental and human material, it is the most adverse circumstances that the subconscious worker has turned into her most successful instruments. The political history of India is the story of a succession of empires, indigenous and foreign, each of them destroyed by centrifugal forces, but each bringing the centripetal tendency nearer to its triumphant emergence. And it is a significant circumstance that the more foreign the rule, the greater has been its force for the unification of the subject people.

This is always a sure sign that the essential nation-unit is already there and that there is an indissoluble national vitality necessitating the inevitable emergence of the organised nation. In this instance, we see that the conversion of the psychological unity on which nationhood is based into the external organised unity by which it is perfectly realised, has taken a period of more than two thousand years and is not yet complete. And yet, since the essentiality of the thing was there, not even the most formidable difficulties and delays, not even the most persistent incapacity for union in the people, not even the most disintegrating shocks from outside have prevailed against the obstinate subconscious necessity. And this is only the extreme illustration of a general law.3

The British conquest took place because the centrifugal forces operating in India at that time were very powerful. We were so badly divided that they never had to face a united opposition.

There was no Indian national feeling at the beginning of the 18th century. In fact Indian rulers of that time more often allied themselves with the British against other Indian rulers, than come together to fight the common enemy.

The British conquest may therefore be seen as Nature's way of helping India in the process of nation building. For it was the British conquest that awakened the national consciousness in a gradual way leading ultimately to the Freedom Movement.

This national consciousness manifested itself in a tremendous diversity of which South India represented one unique facet.

 In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

India, shut into a separate existence by the Himalayas and the ocean, has always been the home of a peculiar people with characteristics of its own recognisably distinct from all others, with its own distinct civilisation, way of life, way of the spirit, a separate culture, arts, building of society. It has absorbed all that has entered into it, put upon all the Indian stamp, welded the most diverse elements into its fundamental unity. But it has also been throughout a congeries of diverse peoples, lands, kingdoms and, in earlier times, republics also, diverse races, sub-nations with a marked character of their own, developing different brands or forms of civilisation and culture, many schools of art and architecture which yet succeeded in fitting into the general Indian type of civilisation and culture. India's history throughout has been marked by a tendency, a constant effort to unite all this diversity of elements into a single political whole under a central imperial rule so that India might be politically as well as culturally one. 4

This book will therefore present the South Indian contribution not only to the external aspects of the Freedom Movement leading to the independence of India but also to the contribution to the deeper cultural and spiritual dimension which is the basis of Indian unity.

Page 3

HOME