Click to play videoAllahabad: The quaint, small-town of Uttar Pradesh was once identified largely with the India’s freedom struggle and was abuzz with stories of the nationalists who lived and worked out of here.
But this now-neglected town of Allahabad has acquired an identity that has more to do with the annual Kumbh Mela and the Sangam than the historic significance.
The freedom fighters are gone and so is the fervour. What remains is just political din. It's a chapter forgotten.
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| All that remians of history in Anand Bhawan is this spinning wheel that belonged to Mahatma Gandhi |
What remains is a slice of history in form of a nearly dilapidated Anand Bhawan – the family home of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
Freedom fighters once walked the long, corridors of Anand Bhawan to meet Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru in Congress Working Committee hall. Those corridors of history are now deserted. All that remain are memories and the likes of Jagdish Prasad, a fourth generation domestic help at the Bhawan.
"We used to stand in one corner and greet him (Nehru) when he would be standing in the porch," Prasad recalls.
As nationalist leaders walked the crowded bazaars around Anand Bhawan raising slogans, finer details of the freedom struggle were being chalked out inside this building.
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| History was written here in Anand Bhawan and these documents hold testimony to that |
It was in Anand Bhawan that Pandit Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi scripted history when they decided to launch the Salt Satyagraha, the Non-Cooperation Movement and the Quit India Movement.
Bearing testimony of those days are diary notes, pens, documents, books, crockery, old photographs and the Gandhi’s charkha (spinning wheel) and his bhajanavali (collection of devotional songs).
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| Nationalists used to roam the corridors of Anand Bhawan and read in Pandit Nehru's library |
But the structure is in ruins and its condition is detonating. One look at the peeling plaster and cobwebs and it’s clear that the Rs 70-lakh annual maintenance budget hasn't helped much.
Swaraj Bhawan - home to Nehru's youth and Indira's birth - still evokes emotions. Except that now it is just an empty museum where history of the freedom struggle still echoes.
But these are only stories for those like 90-year-old Sursati Devi.
“Kamla Nehru was very careful with her food. She had employed panditayeen (a woman Brahmin) and would only eat food that had been cooked by her,'' the nonagenarian recalls.
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| Alfred Park in Allahabad bears testimony to the bravado of Chandrashekhar Azad |
Another landmark in Allahabad is the Alfred Park where Chandrashekhar Azad, one of India’s most radical freedom fighters, shot himself dead.
On February 27, 1931 surrounded by a British Brigade, Azad hid behind a tree to fight them, killing at least three and injuring many.
Finally when he ran out of survival options, he put his gun to his temple and shot himself dead, preferring martyrdom to surrender.
His gun may have fallen silent and the sound of the bullet shots may have been replaced with the sounds of blaring horns but the Alfred Park still symbolises the raw courage of the Independence movement.
Those were the heady days of the Independence movement, and sadly for a building where a heady feeling of nationalism was a constant, there isn't even a hangover.
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