As a child growing up in the Calcutta of the late 1960s and early 1970s, August 15 was the day to listen to tales of derring-do on part of sundry elderly relatives — some dead, some then still alive — who had played their part in what seemed to my untutored ears to have been an almost unending struggle for independence from British rule. Stories of how my father’s older cousin had smuggled armaments to armed revolutionaries when still a schoolboy; of my maternal grandmother learning to drive a car, ride a horse, and fire a revolver as a teenager; of how one of my father’s uncles, the redoubtable Pulin Behari Das (1877-1949), had waged a ceaseless battle against the colonial rulers, armed with little more than a lathi; of how one of my mother’s maternal uncles had so developed his physique that he could lie on his back with two wooden planks laid on his chest and have a jeep drive over him; and many more that combined the factual with the fantastical. My cousins and I would look on goggle-eyed and flappy-eared as aunts, uncles, grand-aunts, grand-uncles, and the occasional friend of one or more of them told us these stories, which often became impossibly heroic with each retelling. (For example, that Pulin Das could deflect bullets with his twirling lathi, or that our mother’s uncle of robust physique could hold back a steam locomotive using his bare hands, and so on — you get the idea.) Such reminiscences would be garnished with expressions of sorrow and lamentation at the mysterious ‘disappearance’ of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose — in the early 1970s, it was still possible to believe that the great leader would magically reappear and lead Indians in a new freedom struggle to rid society of divers ills — and the often twinned suspicion of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s championing of non-violence. One aunt, in particular, was fond of saying that the only reason Gandhiji was successful was because “the British allowed him to be so”, for the alternative to the Mahatma’s ahimsa was the way of the gun and the sword, which — the said aunt would emphasize — “would have won us a better freedom, you mark my words”. Of course, there were Gandhian freedom fighters in the family too, most notably on my mother’s side, including some who had abandoned the path of violence to set up ashrams and schools in rural parts — but, somehow, these pacific individuals never quite found pride of place in these storytelling sessions.

Curiously enough — or so it seemed to the young me then — such valorization of heroic freedom fighters (of both the violent and non-violent kind) was accompanied by a peculiar kind of respect for what I mentally labelled as ‘English’ values, chief among them being system, discipline, and fair play. In a strange way, the family heroes who were invoked in these meandering adda sessions were those who seemed to have best internalized such values — a distant cousin of my paternal grandfather was compared unfavourably to others because he had apparently attacked (without success) an English official and his family ‘sneakily’, from the rear, in the dead of night. Serves him right to have failed and been jailed to boot, seemed to be the consensus among those aged relatives. On the rare occasion the Mahatma was praised, it was inevitably for his immaculate punctuality — yet another ‘English’ virtue held up as an example, especially for the youngest members of the gathering.

As I grew older, one thing became gradually clear to me when I looked back on these cherished memories — the freedom we took for granted was not so simple a thing as our history books made it appear. Take, for example, an exchange I had with one of my uncles when I was about fifteen or so, who had made his home in the West for decades but steadfastly refused to part with his Indian passport, even though he’d had to face problems at the border checkpoints of various countries he had visited, or tried to, unsuccessfully. When I asked him why he hadn’t taken on the nationality of the country that was now his home, he said, “My father had a passport that said ‘Indian Empire’ on it. I’m no slave of Empire, I’m a free Indian citizen.” I didn’t dare point out to him that none of his children seemed to have inherited his sense of patriotism and loyalty to India since they were all citizens of the country in which my uncle lived.

According to some estimates, the number of Indians who were born before Independence makes up less than 3 per cent of our population now, but when I was young practically all the adults in the family had memories of British rule; memories they were happy to regale us young ’uns with. Almost all of them are dead now, but I sometimes wonder what they would have made of today’s free India that they, or their parents’ generation, had so ardently dreamt of and fought for. Would they be satisfied with the path we have traversed in these last three-quarters of a century? Would they be disappointed at the ways in which, to quote a beloved grand-uncle, India is free but so many Indians are still in shackles? Would they be happy with our present leaders and the directions in which they are taking the country? What would they make of what our generation (rapidly approaching senior-citizen status) has done with the freedom that can, without much exaggeration, be considered their gift to us? As I was musing on such matters this Independence Day, I was reminded of a poem by the great African-American poet, Langston Hughes (1901-1967) called “Freedom” which goes like this: “Freedom will not come/ Today, this year/ Nor ever/ Through compromise and fear.// I have as much right/ As the other fellow has/ To stand/ On my two feet/ And own the land.// I tire so of hearing people say,/ Let things take their course./ Tomorrow is another day./ I do not need my freedom when I’m dead./ I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread./ Freedom/ Is a strong seed/ Planted/ In a great need./ I live here, too./ I want my freedom/ Just as you.”

How have we watered and tended that strong seed of freedom that was bequeathed to us by those who came before and — perhaps more pertinently — how will those who come after us care for the tree that has sprung from that seed? Will its branches be sturdy, its leaves bright, and its fruit nourishing a quarter-century hence when the tree completes a hundred years of existence? Will all Indians be able to reap the harvest of freedom by then?

Samantak Das is professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, and has been working as a volunteer for a rural development NGO for the last 30 years