About the Book
What this book covers
"Badaun Zile Ke Swatantrata Sangram Ka Itihas" ("History of the Freedom Struggle of Badaun District") documents how the national movement for independence played out at the district level in Badaun, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, between 1919 and 1947 — from the Non-Cooperation Movement through the Salt Satyagraha, Civil Disobedience, Quit India, and up to Partition and independence.
India under British rule, briefly
By the time this book's story begins, India had been under direct British Crown rule — the "Raj" — since 1858, after the Crown took over from the East India Company. A small number of British officials, backed by the colonial administration and army, governed a subcontinent of hundreds of millions of people.
Colonial rule reshaped everyday life: land revenue systems that could push farmers into debt and famine, restrictions on Indian industry that favoured British manufacturing, and a legal and administrative system designed to serve colonial interests first. These conditions, felt in villages and small towns like Badaun as much as in big cities, are the backdrop against which the freedom movement grew.
The freedom movement, briefly
The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, became the main platform for the independence movement. Mahatma Gandhi's return to India in 1915 and his adoption of non-violent civil disobedience (satyagraha) reshaped the movement into one with genuinely mass participation — reaching far beyond the political class into towns and villages across the country.
Major national milestones — the Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–22), the Salt Satyagraha (1930), the Civil Disobedience Movement, the Quit India Movement (1942), and finally independence and Partition in 1947 — form the national timeline. What makes this book unusual is that it traces how each of these moments was actually experienced in one specific district: who marched, who was jailed, who organised locally, and what happened in Badaun's own villages and towns.
The sections above on British rule and the freedom movement are original context written for this website, not text from the 1974 book.
How this book came to be written
The idea began at a Silver Jubilee of Independence event on 15 August 1972 in Badaun, where the district's surviving freedom fighters had gathered. The District Magistrate at the time, Farhat Ali, proposed that a history of the district's freedom struggle be prepared. The Zila Nagrik Parishad (District Citizens' Council), Badaun, took up the task and entrusted it to Raghuveer Sahay — himself a participant in the movement.
Sahay drew on his personal involvement in the Congress movement, his own contemporaneous writings published in newspapers of the time (including Leader, The Independent, Amrit Bazar Patrika, National Herald, Indian Daily Telegraph, and Hindustan Times), published histories of the Congress and of Gandhi, the district gazetteer, and information gathered from fellow freedom fighters and residents. The book was published in 1974.
Only a small number of physical copies of the original 1974 edition are known to have survived. This site is being built from the family's preserved copy — scanned page by page — so that the book's account of Badaun's freedom struggle remains accessible for future readers, researchers, and descendants of the people it names.