Independence Day is celebrated in schools all over India on August 15, but teachers often struggle to infuse the formal observances with a spark of creativity and novelty. Even if teachers want their students to reflect on how their lives have benefited from the sacrifices of freedom fighters, they often wonder how to hold students’ attention and keep them engaged. This is a genuine concern, because a day like this is not meant to be a mere ritual.

P. Sainath’s book Unknown Heroes of India’s Freedom Struggle (2023), published by the Chennai-based Tulika Publishers, is a terrific resource to fill this gap. The author, who is a journalist and the founder-editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, has put together stories of freedom fighters whose contributions have not made it to history textbooks.

He writes, “…most books, especially those for younger people, mainly focus on the names of a few select individuals as having brought this nation into being.” Without meaning any disrespect to these national icons, he wants today’s children to know that freedom from British rule became possible in 1947 through the efforts of farmers, workers, landless labourers, homemakers, carpenters, leather workers, domestic help, couriers, forest produce gatherers, and people from several walks of life.

The book includes 16 stories. Most are devoted to a single freedom fighter; others are about a pair, a trio, or a group of freedom fighters. Over 20 years, the author visited these freedom fighters in villages in different states of India – Maharashtra, Odisha, West Bengal, Punjab, Rajasthan, Telangana, Tamil Nadu – to get to know them and record their stories. He also met their family members, their friends and colleagues, and local historians.

The book opens with the story of Hausabai, who was part of the Toofan Sena that harassed the British Raj by “attacking trains, looting armouries and setting fire to dak bungalows”. She was not only a rebel and a spy but also an actor. Once, she posed as the sister of a revolutionary who was jailed. When she met him in prison, her hair was tied in a bun and she hid a small chit of paper with an escape plan in it. She also tracked details regarding the transportation of postal bags containing money that the British had confiscated from locals. Using this information gathered by Hausabai, the Toofan Sena would board those trains and get hold of those bags.

Demati Dei Salihan, Bhagat Singh Jhuggian, Shobharam Gehervar, Mallu Swarajyam, Captain Bhau, N. Sankariah, Baji Mohammad, Laxmi Panda, and Ganpati Yadav are some of the other freedom fighters whose lives are chronicled in this book. Their stories were part of Sainath’s book for adults – called The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom – published by Penguin in 2021. Aditi Chandrasekhar, his colleague from the People’s Archive of Rural India, worked with the editors at Tulika to adapt these stories for younger readers.

Sainath writes, “In the next five or six years, there will not be a single person alive who fought for this country’s freedom. The youngest of those featured in this book is 92; the oldest 104. Newer generations of young Indians will never get to meet, see, speak or listen to India’s freedom fighters. Never be directly told who they were, what they fought for.” His labour of love is a gift to students and teachers, and would be a valuable addition to libraries.

The publisher has brought on board a different illustrator for each story. This is not an easy feat to pull off. With accomplished visual artists like Kripa, Antara Raman, Ikroop Sandhu, Bao, Satwik Gade, Sagar Kolwankar, Siddhesh Gautam, Niveditha Subramaniam, Madhuja Mukherjee, Kavitha Balakrishnan, Priyankar Gupta, Aindri C, Priya Kuriyan, Rajiv Eipe, Allen Shaw, and Anthoni Guruz working on these stories, the book is even more engrossing because of the stylistic choices that each one has made while working with the author’s text.