The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir by Appu Esthose Suresh

It was under Principal Rudra’s roof that Gandhi shaped the Khilafat movement and the non-cooperation movement. When Gandhi arrived in Delhi, it was Rudra’s home that offered him shelter, despite the misgivings of and warnings by the imperial government. Andrews spent six months there, eventually succeeding in his mission. Andrews to South Africa to persuade Gandhi to return to India. It was only after joining the college that I began to realize the enormous significance of this. Andrews, also known as Deenabandhu, was instrumental in bringing Gandhi from South Africa to India was just another interesting but incomplete factoid from our textbooks. What I didn’t realize then was that these silly rites of passage had brought me closer to knowing Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi than ever before. Possession of these historical facts guaranteed my safe passage into the college brotherhood. As a fresher (or fuchcha in university parlance), the initiation process involved me getting to know everything about the college, my dorm, its previous occupants, even the number of trees on the campus.

Suddenly, history became part and parcel of everyday life. I was a resident of the Rudra North Block residence hall, which was named after the first Indian principal of the college-and perhaps the first Indian principal of a missionary college anywhere-Sushil Kumar Rudra. Stephen’s college in New Delhi for my graduation. Despite its rather anodyne presentation in our texts, history fascinated me in fact, it still does. We learned dates, events and names of people, and hardly anything else. History, for me at least, was taught as a collection of bald facts. These lines from the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbook were the closest I got to understanding a pivotal moment in India’s history. ‘ON 30 January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a fanatic, Nathuram Godse, because he disagreed with Gandhiji’s conviction that Hindus and Muslims should live together in harmony ¹.’Īrguably modern India’s biggest political development, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi finds a desultory mention in our school history textbooks.

The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir by Appu Esthose Suresh