In India, the ‘Lost Generation’ was actually a generation that found its voice
The giants of the freedom struggle were older. But their successors - young Indians born between 1883 and 1900, including Nehru - shaped the newly free nation.
The defining event of the Lost Generation in Europe and the Americas was the Great War.
It is harder to pinpoint a single event that served the same function for that cohort in India.
Most of the giants who led the freedom movement — Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Sarojini Naidu — belonged to previous generations. But their influence on those who followed saw the struggle for independence become truly national, with the Indian equivalent of the Lost Generation eventually becoming the architects of a new, independent nation.
The battles of this younger cohort were different from those that shaped Ernest Hemingway, JRR Tolkien and Ezra Pound in the West.
Was the new political awareness in India the result of George Curzon’s Partition of Bengal and the Swadeshi movement that began in 1905, partly as a result of it?
Was it furthered when India’s dead soldiers and wounded veterans were met with the thanks of the Rowlatt Act of 1919, which gave the police the continued right to arrest without warrants, hold detainees indefinitely and imprison without trial or judicial review?
Was it shaped by the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh (also 1919)? Or the rise of Gandhi as a national leader, after his return to India in 1915?
As these events, one after another, reinforced the idea of a new “India”, a generation of young leaders emerged: BR Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad, Mahadev Desai, Acharya Kripalani, Subhas Chandra Bose and, vitally, Jawaharlal Nehru.
In India, this wasn’t a Lost Generation at all. It was a generation finding its voice.
In the words of the freedom fighter Rambriksh Benipuri, no stranger to the pen: “When I recall Non-Cooperation era of 1921, the image of a storm confronts my eyes… no other movement upturned the foundations of Indian society to the extent… From the most humble huts to the high places, from villages to cities, everywhere there was a ferment, a loud echo.”
When Independence was won, it was this storm of young people that began the business of building the nation. In the fields and hospitals, the offices and transport systems. In the courts beginning to uphold a new Constitution.
It was at the hands of this generation that an India as old as the Indus Valley and the Vedas was reborn as a new country, and emerged blinking from the shadow of the Raj and the bloody birthing of Partition.
Look at free India’s first cabinet and you see them. With the exceptions of Patel and C Rajagopalachari, every minister, starting with Nehru, came from the generation born between 1883 and 1900. A generation, in India, of pathfinders. Dreamers. Doers of the impossible.
Looking back, it can be hard to believe what they pulled off.
In their gentle way, they shook the world.
(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
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