Arise Free India (AFI), a US-based NGO, has recorded audiovisual interviews with 38 living Indian freedom fighters, with plans to turn them into a series of documentaries.
Arise Free India (AFI), a US-based NGO, has recorded audiovisual interviews with 38 living Indian freedom fighters, with plans to turn them into a series of documentaries.
The man behind the project, 45-year-old Deepak Parekh, the chair of the board of directors at AFI, believes many unsung heroes and heroines of the Indian freedom movement have never been archived. “What Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and other prominent leaders did is fairly well documented, but the stories of the common men and women are not,” said Parekh.
Among the interviewees is 83-year-old freedom fighter justice (retd) Chandrashekhar Dharmadhikari, the acting chief justice of the Bombay high court in 1989. “I was 14 years old when I participated in the Bharat Chhodo Andolan. The AFI initiative is a good platform for the voices of the few freedom fighters who are still alive to be heard,” said Dharmadhikari.
Industrialist BK Birla and his wife Sarla were the other prominent names who were interviewed in Kolkata for the initiative. The Birla family was closely associated with India’s freedom movement as GD Birla, BK Birla’s father, was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi.
For Parekh and his colleagues at AFI, tracking down the freedom fighters wasn’t an easy task, but rewarding nonetheless. Parekh remembers his interview with Dr Prabhat Kapadia, a freedom fighter who recently passed away. “His wife, Vidyut Kapadia, came with him and she kept referring to him as a ‘man without buttocks’. Apparently, he had received many lathis on his backside during the freedom struggle,” recollected Parekh.
Helping Parekh in his endeavour is Mumbai-based Smita Shah, editor of Sadbhavna Sadhana, a Gujarati and Hindi monthly magazine on Gandhian thoughts. “Every freedom fighter we interview has new insights to share, anecdotes which we will never find in history books,” she said, adding that she was surprised most of them never met Gandhiji and yet, were so influenced by his ideology.
The project, which began interviews with freedom fighters from January 26 this year in Mumbai, is to be completed by January 2012. Parekh and his team also plan to line up British interviewees who were involved in some way in the freedom struggle.
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