Traditional Games

Kashmiri kids playing traditional games in old times.

Maharaja of Patiala

Maharaja of Patiala, had helped the East India Company to defeat  the King Bhimsen Thapa of Nepal. So Maharaja of Patiala was given the land surrounding the present-day Shimla as a reward. The agreement is signed in a British Governament diary entry dated 30 August 1817

Holy Cow

Two men touching a cow in a busy Calcutta (now Kolkata) street - 1946

Dhyan Chand and Hitler

After India defeated Germany 8-1 in 1936 Berlin Olympic, Hitler expressed his desire to meet Dhyan Chand. When Dhyan Chand came to know about this, he was numb with fear as he had heard about Adolf Hitler.

This conversation took place:

Hitler (while casting a glance at the sub-standard canvas shoes of Dhyan Chand): “what else do you do, when not playing hockey ?”

Dhyan Chand: ”I am in the Indian Army.”

Hitler: ”What is your rank?”

Dhyan Chand: ”I am Lance Nayak.”

Hitler: ”Come over to Germany. I will make you a Field Marshal.”

(Dhyan Chand couldn’t understand what happened in a fleeting second. he was confused if this was a command or a request).

Dhyan Chand: ”India is my country and I am fine there.”

Hitler: ”As you like it.”

Did you notice how he politely declined the offer? This just goes on to say that he was an incredible and revered player, but he never compromised on his beliefs and his love for India.

You were truly a Hockey wizard, Major Dhyan Chand. May you rest in peace.

Today is his birth Anniversary.

Indo-Pak War 1965

Indian Soldiers flying the Tri Colour at the Hajipir Pass , 28 Aug 1965

Temple's granary

Medieval temples were granted villages, the resources from which sustained it. The grains collected were stored in granaries, redistributed to the dependant communities in form of Prasadam & charity. This granary at Krishnadeva Raya’s Krishna temple stands out at Hampi. – at Krishna Temple

Jahangir's coin

Jahangir, with the name of Noorjahan - gold Mohur, Ahmedabad mint, AH1035/RY2X.

"By the order of king Jahangir, gold attained a hundred beauties, from the name of Noorjahan, the king's wife"

From the British Museum Collection.

A Kashmiri 'Zenana

Circa 1940: An Kashmiri 'Zenana' house with intricately carved balconies in Srinagar, the region's capital on the shores of the Jhelum river.
(Photo by Alice Schalek/Three Lions/Getty Images)

Queue for water

Muslims queue for water
#1947Partition

Pic - BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Bina Das

Bina Das was a member of Chhatri Sangha, a semi-revolutionary organisation for women in Calcutta (now Kolkata).
On 6 February 1932, she attempted to assassinate the Bengal Governor Stanley Jackson, in the Convocation Hall of the University of Calcutta. The revolver was supplied by another freedom fighter Kamala Das Gupta. She fired five shots but failed and was sentenced to nine years of rigorous imprisonment.
After the death of her husband, she led a lonely life in Rishikesh and died in anonymity. Her dead body was recovered from the roadside in December 26, 1986 in a partially decomposed state. It was found by the passing crowd. The police was informed and it took them a month to determine her identity.

She was born this day i.e. on 24 August in 1911.

News clip on Bina Das’ attempt to assassinate governor.
Published in Glasgow Herald.
Source: Wikipedia

Rabindranath Tagore’s letter to CF Andrews asking him to exert his influence to save Bina Das from being transported to Kalaapani; 

Image source: Jayabrata Bhattacharjee, nephew of Bina Das

Mahatma Gandhi greets a crowd of Muslims

Mahatma Gandhi greets a crowd of Muslims in a camp where 50,000 refugees were waiting for transport to Pakistan.
#1947Partition

Pic - BETTMANN

From Kapurthala to Lahore

To Shabbir Bhatti, his childhood memories from 1944 are as vivid as the colours of the Holi celebrations in his neighbourhood in Kapurthala. He remembers how the excited neighbourhood children, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, all caked in bright colours would celebrate the festival just as they all enjoyed Eid mithai together at the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

While Shabbir was born in Lahore, in keeping with the family tradition, his parents sent him to be educated in the nearby royal city of Kapurthala when he turned five. He would live with his uncle, a wealthy landowner, while he attended primary school in the city. His new hometown, with its beautiful French and Indo-Saracenic architecture, had quite an impact on young Shabbir. Kapurthala was the capital of erstwhile princely Kapurthala State and the seat of power of the Sikh Ahluwalia Dynasty. “It was a beautiful city full of gardens and royal palaces,” he remembers. “And one of my cousins worked as the private assistant to the tikka (ruler) of the state so he used to take me in to work with him all the time and so I had almost unfettered access to these beautiful palaces.”

India and Pakistan were still three years away from their painful birth as independent nation states. In five-year-old Shabbir’s neighbourhood in Kapurthala, there was no indication of the turmoil to come. “Most of our neighbours were Hindu and Sikh and I never remember any feeling animosity between anyone. In fact, one of my closest friends was Sikh and I distinctly remember how close we were and how we used to go to the beautiful royal palace grounds together to play badminton,” says Shabbir. He remembers his ‘mohalla’ (neighbourhood) like it was yesterday. “Our mohalla, Loha Mandi, was a very well planned part of town. Proper drainage and paved streets. And my uncle’s beautiful house. He was a wealthy man. And my school was so close to his house that I could walk there and back. I could hear the school clock tower ringing from home.”

Shabbir’s memories of the harmony of his mohalla are in stark contrast to the horrors that the communal tensions preceding and following the partition of the country would bring. Maybe it was a child’s innocence to what was happening around him but to Shabbir the horrors of partition came swiftly and without any warning. “All of a sudden one day I remember I had to leave with my mother and go to one of the villages where my uncle owned land. The city, my home until yesterday, had apparently become too dangerous for us,” says Shabbir. “I did not really understand why or what was happening but the family elders told me we were going to this new country called Pakistan.” That was November, 1947.

Independence had finally come after a long, protracted struggle. But for Shabbir and his family it wasn’t a time for celebration. All of a sudden they found themselves on the wrong side of this new international border. Punjab had been split and Lahore, Shabbir’s family home, was now in Pakistan. Fearing religious persecution, millions of people were routinely crossing this new border. In Lahore, Shabbir’s father was waiting anxiously for his family to make the crossing. Shabbir and his mother left with a huge group of people and started walking towards the new border crossing at Wagah. From their life in India they only took what they could carry on their backs. “It was a huge sea of people walking towards Wagah. Conditions were dire, we didn’t have any food or drinking water and people had resorted to drinking from dirty ponds just to keep themselves going. Death was everywhere and people had almost hardened to it. Scores of people died en route and their family members would just bury them in makeshift graves and keep moving on,” he says. “This horror was the opposite of my life in my mohalla in Kapurthala. I had experienced the best and now the absolute worst within those three years of my life and nothing in between.”

1947 - A convoy of Muslims passes the remains of an earlier caravan
#1947Partition
Pic clicked by - Margaret Bourke-White

A Muslim convoy

A band of only 20,000 Indian Army troops formed by the departing British to police the chaos, the soldiers found themselves trying to cover an area that had a population of 14.5 million spread over 17,932 villages and was 55 per cent Muslim, 25 per cent Hindu and 20 per cent Sikh.
#1947Partition

Pic - A Muslim convoy from Faridkot in 1947
Source - GETTY IMAGES

Old Darjeeling

1874 : Band Stand, Darjeeling.
Pic taken by-Samuel Bourne

A Sikh tea merchant

Niranjan Singh, a Sikh tea merchant, had served a brew to his friend, a Muslim leather worker, for decades. However, the week after he found his shop part of a new country the man came running in one morning with a gang shouting, “Kill him! Kill him!”.

One cut Singh’s leg with his sword; others killed his 90-year-old father and only son. The last thing Singh could recall was his teenage daughter being abducted and carried off on the back of “a man to whom he’d been serving tea for 15 years”.
#1947Partition

Pic - A Sikh man carrying his wife
Source-GETTY IMAGES

Young Maharaja

Young Maharajah of Jodhpur playing with a toy house. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) (Date Unknown)

Simon Commission sent by London

This 1928 poster condemns the Simon Commission sent by London to look at India's future because it had no Indian members.
(Pic-BBC)

Woman burnt to death

"I saw a man throw kerosene over a woman feeding her child. She was burned to death in the same position." Bhagwanti Babbar shares this horrific memory of #Partition to Mohit Gupta.
Pic- Babbar Couple. With thanks to Mohit Gupta.

Samuel aka Satyananda Stokes

Do You Know: The Story of American Who was Part of Indian Independence Struggle

Though the Indian independence struggle was spearheaded by the founding fathers, there are hordes of common people who made a significant contribution to the movement. Samuel Stokes, popularly known as ‘Satyananda Stokes’, was the only American who participated in the Indian freedom struggle. He was born into a family of businessmen in Philadelphia. His father owned an elevator manufacturing company and expected his son to take over the business. But Stokes had a different plan to travel to India to help the needy. At the age of 22, he left his home to serve leprosy patients residing in the Himalayas regions like Shimla. Once he reached India and started serving the patients, he realized that they didn’t think of him as one of their own. But Stokes wanted the locals to see him as one among them. In an attempt to reach out to the locals, he learned the Pahari dialect of Hindi and put on Indian outfits. Gradually, the locals started accepting him. In 1912, Stokes found his love of life, Benjamin Agnes, a daughter of a first-generation Rajput Christian. During his time in India, the unjust rule of the British was self-evident to him. He protested against the colonial government and asked them to give up the unjust practice of coercing Indians into forced labor - either as soldiers or as porters of the British luggage. He joined the Indian National Movement after the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. He was also the only foreigner to sign the Congress manifesto that called upon Indians to give up government services and join the freedom movement. After the tragic death of his son, he adopted Hinduism and became Satyananda Stokes from Samuel Stokes. In 1946, Satyananda Stokes breathed his last in Shimla.

Today is his Birth Anniversary.

A letter by Winston Churchill

Handwritten letter from Conservative leader Winston Churchill to Prime Minister Clement Attlee agreeing to support Indian independence

Transcript
Secret

21 May 1947
House of Commons
London S.W.1

My dear Prime Minister,

I have now had the opportunity of consulting my colleagues upon the terms of a possible settlement in India which you and the Viceroy put before us last night. As a result I am in a position to assure you that if those terms are made good, so that there is an effective acceptance of Dominion status for the several parts of a divided India, the Conservative Party will agree to facilitate the passage this session of the legislation necessary to confer Dominion status upon such several parts of India.

Believe me,
Yours sincerely,

Winston Churchill.

Lord and Lady with Gandhi

Lord Louis Mountbatten, Edwina Mountbatten, Mahatma Gandhi (Date Unknown)

India Wins Freedom

Front Page of Newspapers on India's Independence.

Tryst with Destiny

Just before midnight of August 15, 1947 : Nehru delivers his famous "Tryst with Destiny" speech and declares India's independence in the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi.
#HappyIndependenceDay

Division of India

June, 1947 : Nehru, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Mountbatten's Chief of Staff Lord Ismay and Jinnah negotiate the division of India in New Delhi.

Female members of the Muslim League

May, 1946 : Leading female members of the Muslim League attend a meeting on plans for India's independence

Last Indian Army Order

The Last Indian Army Order, printed at New Delhi on 14 August 1947 by Britishers

(Pic-National Army Museum, UK)

Calcutta Riots

Rioters armed with iron rods and lathis on the streets of Calcutta, August 1946.

A postcard to a PoW

A postcard sent to ‘LIEUT For Officer Commanding depot 33rd Punjabis by Sepoy Manga Khan, 33rd Punjabis, who was a prisoner of war at Halbmondlager in Zossen, Germany.
Image courtesy: National Army Museum/British Muslim Heritage Centre

Nanavati Case

K.M. Nanavati vs State of Maharashtra (1959)
This case was the last time there was a jury trial in India. KM Nanavati, a naval officer, murdered his wife's lover, Prem Ahuja. A jury trial was held to decide whether it was a crime of passion (carrying a ten year sentence) or pre-meditated murder (life imprisonment) to which Nanavati plead 'not guilty'. The jury ruled in favour of him but the verdict was dismissed by the Bombay High Court and the case was retried as a bench trial.

R.K. Dhawan dies

R.K. Dhawan, on the back of Indira Gandhi.
#RIP

National Register of Citizens

The first National Register of Citizens was compiled in Assam in 1951.
Photo-Asom Gana Parishad.

Dadasaheb Phalke and his son

Dadasaheb Phalke gets his son ready for the shooting of Raja Harishchandra -1913.
Dadasaheb's son, Bhalachandra D. Phalke essayed the role of Rohtash son of Raja Harischandra. Raja Harishchandra was India's first feature film.
(pic : hindustantimes.com)

The Dalai Lama

In the early 1960s, His Holiness the Dalai Lama occasionally used to meet young Tibetan children in the afternoon at Swarg Ashram, his old residence in Dharamsala

Calcutta in August 1946

Calcutta in August 1946, a year before the British left, a spiral of violence kicked off between Muslims and Hindus whose tensions are felt to this day (Image- Getty )

Infamous trial of Raja Nand Kumar

Raja Nand Kumar was hanged today i.e. on 5th August in 1775.

Raja Nand Kumar, a Hindu Brahmin was a big Zamindar and a very influential person of Bengal. He was loyal to the English company ever since the days of Clive and was popularly known as “black colonel” by the company. Three out of four members of the council were opponents of Hastings, the Governor-General and thus the council consisted of two distinct rival groups, the majority group being opposed to Hastings. The majority group comprising Francis, Clavering and Monson instigated Nand Kumar to bring certain charges of bribery and corruption against warren Hastings before the council whereupon Nand Kumar in march, 1775 gave a latter to Francis, one of the members of the council complaining that in 1772, Hastings accepted from him bribery of more than one Lakh for appointing his son Gurudas, as Diwan. The letter also contained an allegation against Hastings that he accepted rupees two and a half lakh from Munni begum as bribe for appointing her as the guardian of the minor Nawab Mubarak-ud-Daulah. Francis placed his letter before the council in his meeting and other supporter, monsoon moved a motion that Nand Kumar should be summoned to appear before the Council.
Warren Hastings who was presiding the meeting in the capacity of Governor-General, opposed Monson’s motion on the ground that he shall not sit in the meeting to hear accusation s against himself nor shall he acknowledge the members of his council to be his judges. Mr. Barwell ,the alone supporter member of Hastings ,put forth a suggestion that Nand Kumar should file his complaint in the supreme court because it was the court and not the council ,which was competent to hear the case. But Monson’s motion was supported by the majority hence Hastings dissolved the meeting. Thereupon majority of the members objected to this action of Hastings and elected Clavering to preside over the meeting in place of Hastings .
Nand Kumar was called before the council to prove his charges against Hastings. The majority members of the council examined Nand Kumar briefly and declared that the charges leveled against Hastings were proved and directed Hastings to deposit an amount of Rs.3, 54,105 in treasury of the company, which he had accepted as a bribe from Nand Kumar and Munni Begum. Hastings genuinely believed that the council had no authority to inquire into Nand Kumar’s charges against him.
This event made Hastings a bitter enemy of Nand Kumar and he looked for an opportunity to show him down. 

Facts of the case:-   Soon after, Nand Kumar was along with Fawkes and Radha Charan were charged and arrested for conspiracy at the instance of Hastings and barwell. 
In order to bring further disgrace to Raja Nand Kumar, Hastings manipulated another case of forgery against him at the instance of one Mohan Prasad in the conspiracy case. The Supreme Court in its decision of July 1775 fined Fawkes but reserved its judgment against Nand Kumar on the grounds of pending fraud case. The charge against Nand Kumar in the forgery case was that he had forged a bond in 1770. The council protested against Nand Kumar’s charge in the Supreme Court but the Supreme Court proceeded with the case unheeded.
Finally, Nand Kumar was tried by the jury of twelve Englishmen who returned a verdict of ‘guilty’ and consequently, the supreme court sentenced him to death under an act of the British parliament called the Forgery Act which was passed as early as 1728.   Serious efforts were made to save the life of Nand Kumar and an application for granting leave to appeal to the king-in-council was moved in the Supreme Court but the same was rejected. Another petition for recommending the case for mercy to the British council was also turned down by the Supreme Court. The sentence passed by the Supreme Court was duly executed by hanging Nand Kumar to death on August 5, 1775.
In this way, Hastings succeeded in getting rid of Nand Kumar.

With thanks to: http://www.lawyersclubindia.com

Dara Shikoh with his bride

An 18 yr old Dara Shikoh with his bride, Nadira Banu. 1633,

Now at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston⁩

Pic with thanks from Ira Mukhoty Writer of "Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire"