Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924

by Vikram Sampath

This inspired the founders to establish the Deccan Education Society in 1884 and by the end of the same year, Fergusson College.

The Congress had no intentions of seeking independence from British rule and instead pledged unswerving loyalty to the Crown.

were keen to eradicate the plague quickly as it adversely affected their commercial interests.

The Government of India passed the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, that empowered authorities to take drastic steps to contain the plague.

While Gandhi mentions that his ‘personal sympathies were all with the Boers’, his ‘loyalty to the British rule’ drove him ‘to participation with the British in that war’.

Addressing the native Africans by a derogatory term ‘Kaffir’, Gandhi had demanded separate entrances for whites and blacks at the Durban post office and had objected to Indians being classed with the South African black natives.

Gandhi was bitterly criticized for his role in aiding the suppression and massacre of the Zulu rebels.

Decades later, when Lloyd George explained to Winston Churchill his admiration for Dhingra’s patriotism, it is said that Churchill exclaimed: ‘Dhingra’s last words are the finest ever made in the name of patriotism’ and even compared him with Plutarch’s immortal heroes.

Sir Henry Cotton, one of the founding fathers of the INC and the president of its Bombay session of 1904.

the Times of India carried an article that said: ‘The rascal has at last met with his fate.’88

The widely held narrative is that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre led to the birth of the Non-cooperation movement. But as the facts present themselves above, in the Amritsar Congress held in 1919, barely five months after the genocide, Gandhi himself advocated complete cooperation with the British in the wake of the reforms initiated in the royal proclamation and the Government of India Act, 1919.

The seeds of Pakistan, it seemed, were sown three decades before it actually materialized.