With glimmer in their eyes, they tell tales of valour

By Shyam Parandhipande Aug 15, 2007, 5:39 GMT

Nagpur, Aug 15 (IANS) At 93, Babarao Durne remembers the tumultuous action of the late 1930s as though it happened yesterday.

'I was hurrying back home one late evening when I heard spirited slogans and saw flames leaping up at a distance. Nearing the road intersection in the main market, I saw crowds of men and women standing around a bonfire - I instantly realized it was the bonfire of European clothes. I threw my costly English cap in it as the people cheered and clapped...'

The oldest surviving freedom fighter of Nagpur, who spent his childhood in Amravati nearby, continues wearing khadi he adopted that day as a 14-year-old boy-and he has not missed a single Independence Day function since 1947.

The spirit of freedom struggle Babarao imbibed during those electrifying days motivated him to plunge into the Quit India movement of 1942, barely three months after his marriage and two years after he set up an edible oil shop in Nagpur.

'So fired were the people by Gandhiji's Civil Disobedience call - I remember he came twice to Amravati and addressed two largely attended meetings - that they were literally ready to do anything that the freedom struggle demanded,' Babarao told IANS.

'It was a measure of the effect that Mahatma Gandhi's call for the symbolic satyagraha had on people that a fistful of salt or a small bundle of hay would fetch a price of Rs.10,000 in the auction,' Durne says, recalling the salt and jungle struggles of 1929.

The three days of Aug 13-15, 1942, when Nagpur (then exactly the geographic centre of India) was on fire, are also etched in Babarao Durne's memory. 'Frenzied mobs set ablaze the Itwari police post, tried to burn the city Kotwali and ransacked a bank near the Tilak statue in the Mahal area resulting in the army being called... Several people died in firing; we had a tough time rushing the injured on upturned cots through narrow by-lanes to distant hospitals.'

The freedom fighter bears the marks of two bullet injuries on his legs and a deep scar of a lathi blow on his head as priceless ornaments. And he regrets the fact that he was put in jail only for six months. 'Resurrecting the folded oil shop and restarting the stalled married life was but a small price to pay for the freedom.'

If Babarao Durne recalls the freedom struggle of which he was a part, 86-year old Annaji Annewar 'relives' the magical moments in Nagpur and Bela village near it.

Oblivious of the present, the robust freedom fighter slips into a trance that transports him to the village that declared itself 'freed' Aug 13, 1942.

'A mob of over 6,000 people stormed into the police station and took control of it; then it marched to the government office and destroyed the office records even as one of us hoisted our flag atop it,' Annaji reminisces. He remembers how he broke the lock of the police station's strong room, took out two rifles and dozens of cartridges and deposited them inside an adjacent temple.

'On being caught by the police a few days later, I said, 'Yes, I did it and will keep doing it', he recalls.

'I gave the same answer to the magistrate and repeated it twice as he rebuked me for my 'arrogance' and multiplied the (prison) sentence from six months to 18 months.'

Another prominent surviving freedom fighter of Nagpur, 86-year old Hargovind Chourse is still active in public life. Chourse inherited patriotic fervour from his father Keshavram, who was president of the Beitul district Congress committee in old Madhya Pradesh.

Responding to Mahatma Gandhi's call in 1941, Hargovind, then 19, left his college in Hoshangabad - he resumed studies later, earning three masters degrees - and was jailed for participating in the satyagraha against the British.

Next year, a brave Hargovind was a cynosure of all eyes when he unfurled the tricolour in the midst of a 4,000-strong rally in Betul even as the far outnumbered gun-toting cops watched helplessly.

Such 'notoriety' had the daredevil and his young group earned in the eyes of the British rulers that they were trapped in a well-laid siege and taken to Nagpur, then capital of the old Madhya Pradesh, in a special military train.

Chourse has not forgotten the torture he and his friends were subjected to.

'We were made to sleep bare-bodied on sheets of ice and denied any clothes at all for demanding khadi garments. I was kept in solitary confinement and provided meagre food for presenting the jailer a garland of shoes,' he says with pride.

© 2007 Indo-Asian News Service