The Independence Day That Stayed in 1947
In the Afterlife Civic Square, Lord Louis Mountbatten stood before a corkboard titled:
Grid of Swatantra
| Sanskrit Root | Symbolic Meaning | Ritual Possibility | Cultural Reclamation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swa (Self) | Inner sovereignty | Self-care as resistance | Reclaiming erased identities |
| Tantra (System) | Sacred architecture | Ritual frameworks | Decolonial storytelling |
| Swatantra | Self-woven freedom | Emotional mapping | Honoring erased communities |
| Swarajya | Self-rule | Local governance rituals | Vernacular memory practices |
| Acharaṇa (Practice) | Embodied observance | Flag hoisting with ancestral songs | Replacing colonial scripts |
He tapped the board with a polished cane.
“MKG,” he began, “celebrating Independence Day is the most colonial thing you could possibly do about decolonization. You’ve taken my ceremonial timetable, swapped the Union Jack for the tricolor, and left everything else — the speeches, the dawn flag-hoisting, the rehearsed solemnity — intact. Well done.”
Gandhi’s eyes twinkled. “We made them our own.”
“Your own? You’ve kept my choreography and even my geographic inaccuracies.”
A plump woman in a white sari and two long plaits stepped forward, holding her throat as though still protecting her voice.
“I’m Lata,” she said. “Born Mangeshkar. I sang.”
“Yes, the nation’s eternal alarm clock,” Mountbatten said with a faint bow.
She ignored him. “Do either of you remember the poets? Vijayi Vishwa Tiranga Pyara — Shyamlal Gupta ‘Parshad’, 1924, Kanpur, Jallianwala Bagh Martyrs’ Day. Sare Jahan Se Achcha — Allama Iqbal, 1904, Lahore. Songs once sung as living defiance. Now they’re background music for military parades.”
Gandhi nodded, but Mountbatten cut in. “And your anthem — Jana Gana Mana. Geographically absurd. Allow me, MKG.”
He produced a creased chart:
| Region Mentioned | % in Modern India | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sindh | 0% | Entirely in Pakistan |
| Punjab | ~32% | Majority in Pakistan |
| Bengal | ~36.5% | Split with Bangladesh |
| Dravida | Symbolic only | No explicit mention of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka,Andhra Pradesh, Puducherry, Telangana. |
| Orissa | Present | Fully in India |
| Gujarat | Present | Fully in India |
| Northeast India | 0% in the anthem | Entirely present in modern India. |
“You sing to territories you’ve lost. Sindh — gone. Two-thirds of Punjab — gone. More than half of Bengal — gone. And you’ve never bothered to add the Northeast. It’s a map from 1911, MKG. You might as well sing about Atlantis.”
Gandhi’s mouth twitched. “The sentiment is what matters.”
“Yes, well, the British were quite sentimental about India too.”
From the shadows, Shyamlal Gupta ‘Parshad’ emerged. “Speaking of sentiment — Surayya Tyabji?”
Gandhi brightened. “Hyderabad. Muslim. Designed the final tricolor with the Ashoka Chakra, replacing the charkha so it would belong to all Indians.”
“Indeed,” Mountbatten said, “and rewarded with invisibility — for being both a woman and a Muslim. Bravo. You’ve taken colonial erasure and given it a local franchise.”
Lata smirked. “At least she’s left in peace. I’m dragged out of the archives twice a year without fail.”
The Song Arc
The Afterlife gramophone began its annual sequence:
- Vijayi Vishwa Tiranga Pyara — Gupta’s 1924 Jhanda Geet, sung first at Kanpur’s Phool Bagh to honor the tricolor as a living emblem of resistance.
- Vande Mataram — Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s 1870s hymn from Anandamath, invoking the motherland as Durga. Revered and contested in equal measure.
- Sare Jahan Se Achcha — Iqbal’s 1904 ode to Hindustan’s unity, penned before his political turn toward Pakistan.
- Jana Gana Mana — Tagore’s 1911 anthem for King George V’s visit, later nationalized without editing its colonial-era geography.
Mountbatten tilted his head. “All four were once alive — protest, poetry, insurgent imagination. Now they’re embalmed. You haven’t renewed them; you’ve taxidermied them.”
Gandhi sighed. “True swatantra would mean weaving our own systems, not just inheriting yours. But we settled for swarajya — ruling ourselves in someone else’s frame.”
“Exactly,” Mountbatten said. “It’s self-rule with the imperial stage directions left in.”
From Partition to Present
Mountbatten looked past the banyan tree. “And in contemporary India, I daresay your quest for peace, MKG, may finally be achievable here in the afterlife.”
Gandhi tilted his head. “Why so?”
“Savarkar,” Mountbatten replied. “On the rise. The living are slowly inching you out of the frame. You’ll soon be a historical footnote, no longer dragged into every shouting match. Peace through irrelevance.”
They both chuckled — not kindly, but knowingly.
Lata crossed her arms. “And what’s the respite for me?”
Neither man answered. The gramophone needle returned to the start of Vijayi Vishwa Tiranga Pyara, and the square filled again with the sound of a nation still rehearsing the same independence, in the same key, on the same day, forever.
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