Independence Day: A book of speeches that moved a nation

At the risk of sounding dramatic, I will say this: A good speech can change the world. The recent Speaking Tiger anthology Building A Free India, edited and with an introductory essay by Rakesh Batabyal is an admirable project that documents the nation-building role played by some of the greatest speeches delivered in India in the first half of the 20th century. Batabyal describes this process during his introductory essay: “Gandhi’s speeches, relayed through his organs, Harijan and Young India, or through other newspapers he wrote for, provided people with a programme, both social and political. When, for example, in the 1940s widespread communal polarization for Pakistan was beginning to take shape, Maulana Azad in his presidential speech at the Ramgarh Congress in December 1940 brilliantly spoke on how there was no contradiction between his Muslim and Indian inheritances whereby he also countered the two-nation theory which had come to be officially adopted by the League recently.” Some of the highlights of this section include Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s “On the Official Secrets Act of 1903”, Manu Subedar’s “On India Joining the IMF and the World Bank” and Dadabhai Naoroji’s “The Poverty of India”. I urge this plea because I feel that we are arriving at a stage when the lower orders of society are just getting into the high schools, middle schools and colleges, and the policy of this department therefore ought to be to make higher education as cheap to the lower classes as it can possibly be made.” Today, as school and college fees skyrocket in every Indian city, Ambedkar’s cautionary note feels more prescient than ever.