India@75: The seven Westerners who fought for India's Independence

History shows that there have always been people driven to embrace others’ struggles as their own and become part of another nation’s narrative. While some have taken up weapons to fight wars in distant lands, others chose the path of non-violence.

As India marks its 75 years of Independence, noted historian Ramchandra Guha to mark this auspicious moment has traversed back in time to bring to life the tale of seven such heroes, who were appalled by British colonialism and driven by a desire to support India’s freedom struggle, in his book — Rebels against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom.

They became welcomed foreigners in India and embodied what Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi once said, “A foreigner deserves to be welcomed only when he mixes with the indigenous people as sugar does with milk.”

These foreigners are so entrenched in India’s history that even landmarks named after them have escaped the naming purge (the lovely shaded park in south Mumbai, opposite the gorgeous building built in the early 19th century that houses the Asiatic Society, and which is still known as the Horniman Circle). Their presence in the freedom struggle can’t be overlooked, as they needled the conscience of Britain.

Annie Besant

Perhaps, one of the most popular foreigners whose name crops up in the freedom struggle is Annie Besant.

Three-quarters Irish, Besant moved to India in 1893, coincidentally the year Mahatma Gandhi left for South Africa, owing to her embrace of Theosophy. Her move to India saw her establishing girls’ schools and a major university, Banaras Hindu University, before she took the plunge into the freedom struggle.

She helped set up the Indian Home Rule League, modeled after her Irish experience and even became the first woman to serve as the president of the Indian National Congress in 1917.

In the years of the freedom struggle, Besant and Gandhi developed a rapport, which saw both of them arguing quite often.

She had the nerve to once write to Gandhi, saying that only time would tell which of the two (Besant and Gandhi) had been more faithful to India and freedom.

Noted historian Ramchandra Guha in the book writes of Annie Besant, “Once she had chosen to become an Indian, she would be an Indian all the way through.”

Her enthusiasm for India’s independence invited the wrath of Englishmen. Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times of London, described Annie Besant as an “obstreperous old harridan”, and Sir Richard Craddock, Home Member of the Government of India, referred to her as “a vain old lady influenced by a passionate desire to be a leader of movements”.

But, she remain unfazed in her quest for India’s Independence and stood strong on her ideals. Today, she may not be remembered much, but she serves as a constant reminder that gender and geography play no importance in the fight for one’s ideals.

Madeleine Slade

When talking about foreigners who helped India attain independence, Madeleine Slade can’t be ignored.

A daughter of a British Admiral, her life took an unimaginable turn when she read French novelist and essayist Romain Rolland’s 1924 biography of Gandhi, in which he described Gandhi as the greatest personality of the 20th century.

Slade became fascinated by the principles of non-violence and contacted Gandhi himself, asking if she could become his disciple and live in Sabarmati Ashram. Slade reached India in November 1925 and made India her home for the next 34 years.

She came to his ashram in 1925, where Gandhi told her she would be like his daughter. She was 32 then (and Gandhi 56). After giving her the name Mira Behn, she adopted an ascetic life, but also joined Gandhi in London when he went there seeking India’s independence.

She was arrested multiple times, including during a period of civil disobedience in 1932–33, when she was detained on the charge of supplying information to Europe and America regarding conditions prevailing in India; and in 1942, when she was imprisoned in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune along with Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba (the latter died there in 1944).

In the late 1940s, she founded the Kisan Ashram on a five-hectare site between Roorkee and Haridwar where she took on the fight against deforestation.

In the later years, she left India, partly out of her dismay when she saw India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru embracing a policy of industrialisation, moving away from the Gandhian ideal of making the village and rural economy central to Indian identity. In 1981, a year before her death, the Government of India conferred on her the Padma Vibhushan medal — the country’s second highest civilian honour.

Samuel Stokes

An American born in a wealthy Quaker family, Samuel Evans Stokes came to India to work for a home for the leprosy-afflicted in 1904.

The brutality of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in April 1919 drew him into the freedom movement.

Stokes worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi and took part in the Non-Cooperation Movement. He was imprisoned for six months for sedition in the Lahore jail and refused bail, the only American to be jailed in India’s struggle for Independence.

In fact, Asha Sharma, Stokes’ granddaughter wrote in a book, that when arrested he refused to be treated like a European. “You know in those days, there was a separate ward for the Europeans and a separate ward for the Indians. But he said, ‘I don’t want to have special treatment.’ He did that six months of jail sentence in Lahore, and I think that was a highlight of his life, something he was very proud of.”

Such was his love for India that he wore khadi, married an Indian, learnt Sanskrit, became a Hindu (renaming himself Satyanand), set up a school and introduced apples to Himachal Pradesh. He even brought up his Anglo-Indian children speaking only Hindi and Pahari and not a word of English.

BG Horniman

Today, when the name Horniman is mentioned only a park nestled in south Bombay comes to mind. However, this park is named after Benjamin Guy Horniman — a witty newspaper editor of Bombay Chronicle, which routinely questioned the colonial government.

It was also Horniman, who defied the British gag order on the reporting of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919. He published an eyewitness account of Lala Govardhan Das, describing the horrors that transpired on the evening of 13 April, courtesy Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer.

Horniman also managed to smuggle out shocking photos from the massacre, which were published in the London-based newspaper The Daily Herald, causing international uproar and changing the course of India’s freedom struggle.

When the Hunter Committee gave Dyer a clean chit in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, Horniman furiously wrote, “It is impossible to believe that the people of England could ever be persuaded that a British General was justified in, or could be excused for, marching up to a great crowd of unarmed and wholly defenceless people and, without a word of warning or order to disperse, shooting them down until his ammunition was exhausted and then leaving them without medical aid.”

His coverage of the Jallianwala tragedy, however, irked the colonial authorities and he was deported back to Britain.

For years, he was not allowed to leave Britain. However, in 1925, he outwitted the Raj and returned to India in a rather cleverly manner via Ceylon. Horniman also founded the Press Association of India.

Philip Spratt

Born to English parents, Philip Spratt was a Cambridge University Communist who came to India in 1926 to report on the foundation of the Communist Party of India, which was in the early stages of its establishment.

He plunged headlong into organising the working class in India. In 1927, he was charged with sedition for writing a pamphlet titled ‘India and China’. It was BR Ambedkar who took on the case and won.

Spratt, today, is remembered the most for his involvement in the notorious Meerut Conspiracy Case — where about 30 Communist Party of India members, Congress members and others were arrested for organising a series of worker strikes in 1929. This was considered an offence under Section 121 A of the Indian Penal Code — an attempt at depriving the King of his sovereignty over British India.

The indictment claimed that the prisoners were linked to the Russian organisation Communist International, whose aim was the “creation of armed revolution, to overthrow all the existing forms of government throughout the world and to replace them by Soviet Republics subordinate to, and controlled by the central Soviet administration in Moscow”.

Spratt was originally sentenced to 12 years in prison, but his sentence was mitigated to two years and he was released in 1934.

In later years, Spratt became an ardent anti-communist, editing a pro-capitalist journal from Madras. He would later say that the extreme left and extreme right were closer to one another in curbing freedoms than they realised.

Catherine Mary Heilemann

Known as Mahatma Gandhi’s other adopted daughter, Catherine, who later came to be known as Sarala, came to India in the early 1930s to teach in a school in Udaipur.

Inspired by Gandhi, she went suffered two terms of imprisonment during the Quit India movement of the 1940s.

After her release, in the subsequent years, she established the Kasturba Mahila Utthan Mandal at Kausani, an institution designed to help the poor, ignorant, backward and oppressed women of the Kumaon, Garhwal and other mountain districts of Uttar Pradesh.

Her students at the school became social workers in their own right and a few played a leading role in the most celebrated environmental protest of India — the Chipko movement.

Sarala died in 1982, but her teachings and her legacy lives on.

Dick (Ralph Richard) Keithahn

Ralph Richard or RR Keithahn is not a name that most people will know, but his work during the freedom struggle can’t be discounted.

Originally from Fairmont, Minnesota in America, Keithahn came to India in the 1920s as a missionary. In India, he felt the Church was insulating itself from the problems of real Indians and chose to find his own way.

He grew inspired by Gandhi and even adopted khadi. His proximity to Gandhi saw him being deported twice. However, he returned each time with a renewed commitment to land reform, sustainable agriculture, and the abolition of caste and gender distinctions.

Keithahn also wrote insightfully about the parallels between caste and race, and even briefly corresponded with Martin Luther King. He worked most of his life in the state of Tamil Nadu; he died there in 1984, in a fellowship hospital that he helped found in the small town of Oddanchatram.

The tales of these heroes need to be known around India and the world too. It’s because of people like Besant, Horniman and company that reaffirm that the ideals of freedom and justice aren’t restricted by any sort of boundaries — geographical or else.

With inputs from agencies

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