The following is an excerpt from Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper, by Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan.

India’s struggle for freedom is laced with tales – some heralded, others forgotten – of men and women who were still in the spring of their lives but courted danger like veterans.

One law student at Punjab University volunteered to shoot the governor while receiving her graduation degree at the annual convocation. Such was her belief in the cause that she not only helped revolutionaries financially but was prepared to train and shoot as well.

The decision to assign a man to the task didn’t go down well with her and she angrily confronted Virendra, one of the architects of the plot, ‘Do you think only men can be brave, and not women? You have a poor opinion about women.’ That plot unfolds later in the book.

History in its haste to ink the achievements of the known needs occasional prompting when it comes to the feats of those who chipped away quietly in the background. They were equally passionate, daring and non-compromising with their ideals and their chosen path. There was no glancing back at life.

These individuals epitomised the revolutionary camp and they had collectively sensed a weakness in the British Raj. The Ghadar Party – a coalition of expatriate Punjabis, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs active in America – capitalised on this by sending youth to galvanise Punjab. Its aim was singular: To be free of the British through an armed struggle. Lahore and Kapurthala became focal areas, and, in the next couple of years, contact was established with underground movements in both Punjab and Bengal. Notably, this was a phase when mass revolts and protests had not yet gained momentum and the Ghadar Party’s uprising was inspired by the 1857 war of independence.

Their outcomes were similar; both rebellions failed. In the first Lahore Conspiracy trial – not the same as the Lahore Conspiracy Case whose most famous undertrial was Bhagat Singh – in 1915, 42 revolutionaries were hanged and more than a hundred freedom fighters found themselves sentenced to the notorious Cellular Jail in the Andamans, known at the time as ‘Kala Pani’.

Amongst those executed was Kartar Singh Sarabha, whose popularity far exceeded his age. Sarabha joined the party when he was 15 and was executed four years later, while still a teenager. In deference to his tender age, the judge asked him to appeal. ‘Why should I?’ he responded. Folklore has it that Bhagat Singh was deeply inspired by Sarabha and kept a photo of the young man in his pocket.

A year after the teenager’s execution, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak announced, ‘Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it.’ This earned him the ire of the rulers who called him, ‘The father of the Indian unrest’. Under his and Annie Besant’s leadership, the ‘Home Rule’ agitation was in full swing, while, on the other hand, revolutionaries stepped up their activities, and, after Bengal and Maharashtra, Punjab took over the mantle as the revolutionary hotspot of the country.

The British remained unruffled. Instead of returning the favour for 1.5 million Indian soldiers who fought for the British Empire during World War I, the infamous Rowlatt Act was imposed in March 1919. Civil liberties were curtailed and several Indians, including Virendra, learned that arrest and jail did not need a trial anymore. This was also Mahatma Gandhi’s coming-of-age moment.

No longer content to watch from the sidelines, Mahashay Krishan struck. He presented Pratap, an Urdu newspaper that was to transform and dominate vernacular journalism for decades.

By the late 1800s and first two decades of the 20th century, several periodicals and newspapers came out in undivided India. They had a distinct nationalist tenor and stood out in their role of political awakening. In Punjab, if a report was not published in the Urdu press, it was not credible enough from an Indian nationalistic perspective. With Persian having transitioned to Urdu for administration during the Raj, the language itself was a composite cultural bridge of a people oppressed.

As Mahatma Gandhi extolled the press to express their opinion freely, Urdu journalists and editors did not disappoint him. The landscape of the Urdu press was divided between Hindu and Muslim owners when Pratap was born. Despite public perception – and more so now for vested reasons – Urdu as a language of Muslims alone has been a grandstanding fallacy.

Our passage to freedom is also the journey of Urdu literature, where poets, journalists and revolutionaries mobilised their angst into powerful words. Urdu became the voice; its poetic activism burying the romantic prose as it not only called out atrocities but also invigorated the masses.

The batwara was not kind to the language; it flickers, and, despite its cultural generosity, it burns predominantly in Muslim homes in India where Urdu adds to an identity already under question. 

In pre-independent India, Urdu was a distinctly inclusive language – uniting Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs under its umbrella. Subhas Chandra Bose inscribed ‘Ittehad, Itmad, Qurbani’ as his army’s motto, and from Bengal Renaissance writers to the Arya Samaj, Urdu’s influence was far-flung.

‘Inquilab Zindabad’, ‘long live the revolution’, coined by poet Hasrat Mohani, became the battle cry for freedom, and, as Virendra himself was to witness it, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev shouted the slogan while being taken to the gallows at Lahore Central Jail. A firsthand account of that evening forms a part of this book.

An American scholar of the Urdu language, C.M. Naim, says:

So much of Urdu prose writing was done by non-Muslims, essentially Hindus. There were Kashmiri Brahmins, Kayasthas, Hindus, Rajputs and those who belonged to the Arya Samaj, who were all integral to the language. The British replaced Persian with Urdu and it was a joke that Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs speak Punjabi when they met, but, in offices, they were all communicating in Urdu. Your great-grandfather and grandfather were writing and speaking Urdu not just from their hearts but also from their minds. The sad fact is that Urdu is no longer a language equally shared, with an equal commitment of emotion and talent by both communities. It is a Muslim enterprise, and that has its consequences, both linguistic and non-linguistic.

It was not just the Urdu press that showed a mirror to the Raj, the pens of revolutionaries were cutting, outspoken and uncaring. Bismil Azimabadi’s 1921 ghazal was a brazen ode to men with a singular calling: India’s freedom. There was one slogan on everyone’s lips after poet Ramprasad Bismil recited it audaciously before his hanging in the Kakori Conspiracy Case.

Sarfaroshi ki tammana ab hamare dil mein hai, dekhna hai zor kitna bazu-e-qatil mein hai

The desire for sacrifice is in our hearts, 

let us see how much strength there is in the arms of our killer

The words continue to have a life of their own.

Professor Mrinal Chatterjee, academic and author, says:

If you look at phases of Urdu literature, there are three to four distinct phases and we have to look at undivided India to find those phases. There was a romantic phase, and, gradually, a social consciousness came [into being], along with it came the idea of revolt through poetry and literature. The beauty of this language was used for the movement and rebellion was spoken about poetically, remember when Akbar Allahabadi says, ‘Jab top mukabil ho toh akhbar nikalo (When facing a gun bring out a newspaper).’

Pakistani scholar and poet Abdul Majeed Salik’s biography notes that not long after Lala Lajpat Rai took out the Urdu newspaper Bande Mataram, Krishan launched the daily, Pratap. ‘Zamindar, Inqilab and Siyasat, though each other’s rivals in many respects, forged a common front against Hindu hierarchy,’ says a Pakistani report on the layers of pre-partition Urdu press, while singling out Pratap, Bande Mataram, Kesari and Milap as Hindu contemporaries.

Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan are veteran journalists.

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