When the present is so tenuous it seems absurd to recall the past. As news of the Gorakhpur floods came in, with images of people struggling to get a foothold on rooftops, of marooned families being ferried on inflated tyres, of old men sobbing that they have lost everything they had ever possessed, I suddenly thought of Chauri Chaura. Was this little market town, that lay only 22 km from Gorakhpur, and which had wrested a place for itself in the nation's memory by burning down the local police station, also under water?Last August, I happened to be there working on one of those `Freedom Struggle Revisited' stories that the newspapers were so full of at that time. It was raining, which accounted for the unending green expanse of thickening sugarcane that met the eye. Fortunately, the Gomti was at peace and Chauri Chaura's numerous memorials still beckoned.But after talking to people in the local Mundera Bazar I realised how difficult it is, despite all the memorials that pockmarked this town, to keep history alive, even one as important as Chauri Chaura's. The incident itself can be narrated in a few sentences: The police of the British Raj fire on a group of Congress volunteers on February 4, 1922. Their provocative action infuriates the local people enough for them to ransack the local police station and set it on fire. Around 23 policemen die in an incident which leads Gandhi to suspend the civil disobedience movement. Gandhi, who later wrote that God had spoken clearly through Chauri Chaura, condemns the incident as not having been true to the spirit of non-violence.It was only many years later that the nation came to regard those 200-odd peasants who set fire to that police station as early fighters for national freedom, who should rightly be regarded as martyrs.But at Chauri Chaura, the memory of that short and bitter encounter with the might of the colonial administration was fast fading away. At the police station, rebuilt soon after the incident, the local constables displayed the same arrogance to the village folk who had gathered there as their colonial forbears no doubt did. Their brandished lathis and rough curses spoke the timeless language of state authority. They certainly didn't remember, care about or even understand the mass anger that had destroyed the earlier police station.A vendor of mangoes off the Gorakhpur-Deoria highway was philosophical about the relationship between history and real life: ``Saheb, we have enough problems eking out a living to bother about what had happened here so many years ago. History cannot put food into empty stomachs.''There was something to what he said, of course, even though his words would certainly have hurt 86-year-old Raghvendra Rai, a local vaid, freedom fighter and old-time Congressman. Over all these years, Rai considered it his duty to keep the memory of Chauri Chaura alive by holding public meetings every February 4 and getting the local schoolchildren to attend them. If any passing journalist, tourist or historian evinced even a passing interest in Chauri Chaura's background, he would be duly directed by the town's people to Rai's old ayurvedic shop at the heart of Mundhera Bazar.But what will happen to Chauri Chaura after Rai passes away? After the few old-timers who still claim to know at first hand the epic anger that marked the incident fade away?Today, as flood-waters encircle this little patch of history, one wonders whether Chauri Chaura will survive to tell its story to the world. Apart, that is, from the `official' and therefore lifeless monument in white marble that Rajiv Gandhi had once inaugurated to commemorate the event that had changed the destiny of this little trading town forever.
