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I Shall Never Ask for Pardon
In between his many decades abroad, where he eventually took on Mexican citizenship, Pandurang roamed the world from Japan to San Francisco to Germany to Persia and then to Russia, waging a war of his own for India’s freedom, as Sawhney painstakingly tells us in her lengthy and heavily complimentary account. Pandurang’s own original writings and notes translated into English, which could have thrown some light for a discerning reader of the man and his self-proclaimed mission, would have embellished the book, and the few photographs that appear have more to do with the growth of maize and agriculture in Mexico than any revolutionary journey or work. His role in the setting up of the Ghadar movement in the early 20th century initially at 436 Hill Street (later shifted to Wood Street in San Francisco), where this reviewer saw in present times a none to well maintained museum in place, is also peripheral. And Savitri does say that "Khankhoje attended the meeting but insisted on maintaining his role as a secret military leader", whatever that might mean. It were actually the Punjabis, mostly Sikhs from the rural area of Punjab, who had formed the mainstay of this revolutionary body in Canada and North America, especially in California, and who suffered immensely in jail and many faced death on return to India. It is ironical that most of the advisers who had earlier guided these simple peasants and presided over their action plans seemed to disappear all too suddenly on one pretext or the other when it came to the crunch of taking the war to Indian soil, and which involved a physical return to India and facing British bullets. Regrettably, had there been more of Sohan Singh Bakhnas and Gurdit Singhs of the Komagata Maru fame and less of the passive theory makers like Har Dayal, possibly the Ghadar movement would have achieved much more than actually it did. What role did Pandurang play in India’s liberation from the British yoke in the early1900s can be gauged from his daughter’s account: "Entering India via Baluchistan with his small army had become an obsession with Khankhoje, unaware as he was of the changes in India and the fate of his friends". A little later Pandurang’s account says, "We were carrying a copy of the Jihad, a proclamation by the Sultan of Turkey, and a copy of the proclamation of the independence of India as declared by the Provisional Government set up by the Ghadar in Afghanistan". In quite a few years of stay in Afghanistan, I did not, however, find a shred of evidence either at our Embassy or elsewhere of this provisional government or even of any Afghani interest or influence that could have helped the movement for India’s independence, and neither did Pandurang it would appear have an ‘army’ small or big accompanying him through the Persian deserts en route to Baluchistan. Actually, all the time Pandurang besides an odd companion or two who he ran into was mostly alone, wandering about in desolate lands without any resources, and definitely without any game plan, infrastructure or support to liberate India, a mission he says he had always in mind when from the days of his youth he ran away from his country and left heart broken his father who had wished him to marry here and settle down for good. There is a clear two phasing of Pandurang’s life evident in the narrative—the first part being his revolutionary zest in his mission abroad and the second phase, his settling down to research and domestic living after his marriage to a Belgian lady in Mexico. His letter to his father in 1924 does indicate that he tried his best to return to India from Mexico, but without a passport that was not possible. "To resolve this I thought that you should go to the district officials and tell them that I left to study in 1906 and nobody needed a passport then." Clearly Pandurang’s mission abroad did not appear to be taking off. The issue after reading the book is that it becomes extremely difficult to quantify as to who Pandurang actually was, a revolutionary or just plain agriculture scientist. Life in Mexico interacting with high dignitaries like Vice-President S. Radhakrishnan, Ambassador Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and painter Satish Gujral who was picked up in 1952 to study with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera is all very well, but somehow does not centre stage the potent zeal and burning desire that Pandurang had, to see the last of the British leave Indian soil soonest possible. Pandurang living alone all by himself, passed away at Nagpur in 1967 at the age of 81.
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THIS
memoir of Pandurang Khankhoje, originally written in Marathi and now
shaped in a book by his daughter Savitri Sawhney, is a tale of what the
blurb calls a ‘proud nationalist’ who fled India during British rule
because of his subversive activities, only to return after Independence
to work as an agriculture scientist for the new Indian government,
headed by Jawaharlal Nehru.