Dusk of that night 60 years ago saw people pouring in from nearby village clusters, from textile mills, businesses and homes on bullock carts, cars, trucks, tongas and on foot.
Enthusiastically, they made their way to Bhadra Fort. By nightfall, the crowd had thickened. All 13 gates of the city were chocked. Still, the influx of people just would not cease. In all, two-three lakh people gathered outside the fort.
When the clock struck 12, a prominent Congress leader, pulled down the Union Jack, which had been fluttering there for 130 years, and unfurled the Tricolour in its place. The tempestuous mob started screaming, shouting and crying hysterically - this was the moment they had been fighting for."The chant Vande Mataram burst out from the hearts of the people and reverberated in the air. People were speechless with emotion at seeing the Tricolour atop the fort. We were finally free.
This was our country now - our India - never to be taken away again. It was the glorious moment of reckoning we had been waiting for. As I turned around, I saw my countrymen, each of us now a free citizen of an independent nation. We looked at each other and wept out of happiness all night," recalls Amba Lal Sriman, a freedom fighter, who was jailed for one-and-half-years from 1942, for hiding the Indian flag from the British police.
"On August 15, 1947, the sun finally set on the British empire in India. It was a heady and tumultuous day in Ahmedabad, then part of Bombay Province. We were delirious with joy. The whole city was illuminated as fireworks lit up the sky. It was like Diwali had come early upon the city," remembers Dhirubhai Thakar, a freedom fighter who was a professor at Gujarat College before Independence, and is now chairman and founder-member of the Gujarat Vishwa Kosh Trust. It was Thakar who had tried to stop police from firing at the student procession in 1942, in which Vinod Kinariwala died for the cause of Independence.
"There was no space to so much as move around the fort. Finally, the long night of suppression was relegated to the past. It was the end of British rule. People went to both Temples and Masjids to pray. In the morning, processions were taken out across the city," Sriman reminisces.
Even today, 60 years on from the defining events of 1947, these powerful memories do not fail to bring tears to his eyes. "It was a moment that caused happiness and shock in equal measure. The country had been divided, and grief was writ large across faces. Mixed feelings prevailed in the city, since people had not come to terms with Partition, which was still a very fresh wound," recalls Thakar.
Published on August 15, 2007 in DNA
Sumit Kumar Singh
Ahmedabad
