Memorials are not enough

Of course, over a period of time it was the former perspective that came to prevail. As if to underline this there’s a handsome stone memorial to honour the condemned men, with the names of those hanged highlighted. This is the official memorial, or the Shaheed Smarak, raised by latter day politicians, driven more by the need to further their own image than anything else.

Ironically, across the railway track from this site, the old memorial to the police killed in the incident still marks the site where the original Chauri Chaura police station once stood. It was built in 1924 as a recognition of the loyalty that the murdered policemen had shown the Crown. History sits lightly on Chauri Chaura’s present police station, housed in an area adjoining the original site. The local policemen know of that murderous clash that took place 75 years ago but seem quite bored with it. If you ask them about the memorial, they will not point to the Shaheed Smarak but to the one that rises in their own backyard. Suddenly it’s as if the murdered policemen are the heroes of the tale. Subaltern historian Shaheed Amin remarks on this quirky twist to the process of memorialisation that has taken place here, in his masterly work Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992: “This memorial unveiled 70 years ago to honour the dead policemen, has also been nationalized”.

There’s a third memorial, a more modest, brick-and-mortar affair, with the symbol of a hanged man fashioned roughly on it. But has this surfeit of memorials helped to keep the February 4 incident alive in public memory? Not really. If you ask the children who go by these structures every day about them on their way to school, they’ll tell you that they celebrate the valour of the martyrs, but their schoolbooks contain no special mention of Chauri Chaura.

“We try to keep the event alive by holding public meetings every February 4,” says 86-year-old Raghvendra Rai, freedom fighter and local vaid. His Ayurvedic shop is located in Chauri Chaura’s Mundera Bazaar, where the crowd of volunteers had first gathered on that fateful February day. But Rai admits that very little is done to involve children in the commemoration. “The children here, like children everywhere it seems, are very ill-informed about the freedom struggle,” says Rai, and adds, “one was recently asked to explain who Aruna Asaf Ali was, and replied that she was a Russian princess!” He laughs uproariously at this, as if convinced that the emerging generation is a lost cause.

Rai is one of the few “keepers” of local history here. His long acquaintance with this village-town (he first came here in 1942) gives him a special status as a narrator. Though he has been a loyal Congressman all his life, having spent a spell in a Gulbarga jail in the late 1930s, Rai is critical of Gandhi’s stand on the incident. He says: “In 1942, Gandhi gave his Quit India call. What the nation did in 1942, Chauri Chaura had done in 1922.”

There are other homespun historians of this village-town, but their voices are getting fainter as their bodies dull with age. Somebody’s dadaji, somebody’s mamaji can still be coaxed to narrate the story, but one can never be sure whether they were directly involved in it or are just passing off a local legend as their own. But everybody agrees that those men who were hanged or punished, were heroes and that the Angrez represented a tyranny that touched almost every life in the region.V.M.Tripathi, now in his sixties, remembers his parents telling him about how whole families, even those unconnected with the incident, fled their homes on the night of February 4 in fear of the Raj’s certain revenge. And it came. Within a few hours of the conflagration, police reinforcements from Gorakhpur tore through their habitations, looting and pillaging. People were systematically rounded up and thrown into jail. The mere fact of enrolment as a Congress worker was enough to damn a man in the eyes of law.

“Those people may have been unlettered but they were true freedom fighters. The nation’s biggest curse is that we don’t remember our history,” says Tripathi, slowly. His namesake, Ram Narayan Tripathi, another local resident, has even constituted a committee to seek State compensation for the families of those who suffered. “There are freedom fighters everywhere who have got compensation. The government has even built this martyrs’ memorial here but no one has received a paisa in compensation,” is his contention. So in this season when demands for apologies and compensations for historical wrongs of every description fill the air, Chauri Chaura also wishes to put its claim before the nation, lest it forgets.

From the files

Thus Gandhi spoke…