But what was it like on that first Independence Day when dawn was still breaking and a fledgling songbird was trying to sing its first song? My mother Indira was just 17, when she was asked to sing the National Anthem at a flag-hoisting in Lucknow
PRAVASISAMWAD.COM
The incomparable joy mothers experience at childbirth is so overwhelming that everything else recedes into the background. All trauma, agony and pain are quickly replaced by a whirlwind rush of emotions that greet the coming of new life: New hopes, new expectations – new beginnings.
Perhaps the birth of a nation does evoke a similar flood of emotions for India and its countrymen wherever they are. But the common histories of two nations – India and Pakistan – and their collective cultural psyche before Independence are also steeped deeply in a dark abyss of a horrific bloodbaths and genocide on both sides of the divide.
And yet, the unbounded euphoria that accompanied the birth of a new India with its freedom and liberty dwarfed everything else into insignificance – Independence Day, August 15, 1947 was here at last.
Seventy-five years on, India relives and celebrates Independence Day every year with equal fervour perhaps: Everywhere the national tri-colour is hoisted amidst a rain of flower petals as the National Anthem reverberates across the land, together with a profusion of festivities – and lots of speeches, of course.
But what was it like on that first Independence Day when dawn was still breaking, and a fledgling songbird was trying to sing its first song? Surely it must have been a totally different kind of experience.
Most people must have heard the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s iconic ‘freedom at midnight’ speech, more than once without a doubt. Or watched grainy documentaries of the freedom struggle.
But hearing ordinary people recount those first moments of freedom is something else altogether. Some of us, like myself, have had to rely on the first-person accounts of our parents.
My mother, Indira, was just 17 then. She lived with her paternal uncle, the late Rev. O. Joshua (her deceased father’s younger brother) and their family in Lucknow, where he was head of the Lucknow Christian College.
She would tell me years later, when I was seven or eight, that she had an inkling of what was to come a few weeks earlier. A family friend had sought the Joshua’s permission for something ‘very, very special.”
“I was chosen to be a part of a select group of girls and boys to sing the country’s national anthem for the first time and at one
of the many venues selected for Lucknow’s first flag-hoisting”, Mother would recall with a note of pride.
Even after all these years, I too, can’t help but swell up with pride whenever I think about what she told me.
“Accordingly, we used to be taken for rehearsals. Of course, we first had to learn the words and music of our national anthem. And then after that there were a lot more rehearsals just to make sure everyone was singing our national anthem perfectly”.
“I was chosen to be a part of a select group of girls and boys to sing the country’s national anthem for the first time at one of the many venues selected for Lucknow’s first flag-hoisting,” my mother would recall with a note of pride.
So mother had the historic privilege of knowing beforehand about the first Independence Day celebrations to come. And over and above that the joy of being among the first to sing the sacred ‘Jana Gana Mana’ at the first Flag-hoisting ceremony in the city.
So many firsts coming all at once on the nation’s celebration of freedom must have been an overwhelming experience indeed for a teenager.
Mother would say that on the actual day, nobody could believe that it was actually happening. “As the flag was unfurled for the first time, we sang our hearts out, trying very hard not to let our tears spill out. We wanted to make sure the National Anthem was perfect; tremors in our voices would have spoiled the overall effect.”
What an extraordinary way for someone to welcome the dawning of Independence and freedom. That’s how my mother celebrated the first Independence Day.