Family stories Indian independence
History remembers dates. Families remember moments.
For some, 15 August 1947 was the day a flag was raised. For others, it was the day they fled home forever. Some recall gathering around a crackling radio to hear Jawaharlal Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech. Others remember stories passed down of prison cells, boycotts, Partition trains and impossible choices.
As India marks another Independence Day, Indian Link asked readers one simple question: Where was your family on 15 August 1947? We also asked younger readers which stories of India’s freedom movement had stayed with them.
THOSE WHO WERE THERE AND THOSE WHO REMEMBER
Some of our readers lived through India’s Independence. Others grew up hearing first-hand accounts from parents and grandparents who witnessed history unfold.
“To see the British leave my homeland in 1947, my joy knew no bounds,” Kailash Bhatnagar, 101, of Ryde NSW told Indian Link.
As a student at Mahila College in Lucknow, she joined the freedom movement and was once arrested after leading 300 women in a protest.
“The police loaded us onto buses while the boys stood by watching. We threw our bangles at them – a symbolic challenge to stop being passive. At the police station, we created such chaos that the police eventually let us go.”
Her activism was especially risky because her father worked for the British. Yet she was inspired by leaders including Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose.
“I was most impressed by Bose,” she recalls. “Gandhi, on the other hand, seemed rather unremarkable!”
Adelaide’s LP (Laks) Ayer was 11 and living in the weaving village of Kallidaikurichi in Tamil Nadu, when India became independent.
“It was a public holiday,” he recalls. “We marched around the village waving flags and rejoicing. We were each given a bag of lollies – I’d never seen one before!”
That evening, the village gathered around the municipality’s radio to hear Jawaharlal Nehru’s historic speech.
“That memory is etched in my mind,” he says.
In the months before Independence, newspapers arriving a day late by train carried news that freedom was near. Even their small village had a diverse group of freedom fighters – Brahmins, Muslims and weavers – united in the cause. He vividly remembers boycott bonfires where British goods were burned. “Several local activists were jailed, and two later became Members of the Legislative Assembly”.
Hamida Parkar of Castle Hill NSW recalled her family’s defining choice at the time of Partition.
Her maternal grandfather, Prof. A.B. Dadarkar, a prominent Arabic scholar in Bombay, moved to Cape Town three months before Independence with his young family. Just prior, he had turned down a prestigious offer to relocate to Pakistan through an associate of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
“He believed in a united India,” Hamida said. Unhappy in South Africa, the family returned to Bombay a few years later, where he lived until his death in 1990.
Hamida’s father Saeed Daud Parkar was seven and remembered the Independence celebrations. Another relative, Advocate Wajihuddin Ahmed Parkar, who had worked with the All-India Muslim League, also chose to stay in India. He later joined the Indian National Congress and was elected to the Bombay State Legislative Assembly in 1952.
As midnight approached on 14 August 1947, Hamida’s family gathered around to hear Jawaharlal Nehru announce the birth of a new nation.
THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
Not every family gathered around a radio that night. In the north-west of the country, alongside the celebrations, the first tremors of Partition violence were already being felt.
Among them was my father, then 13.
The Anand family had lived in Talagang, near Rawalpindi, for generations. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were neighbours, bound by a shared Punjabi heritage. On 15 August 1947, there was uncertainty, but not fear. Crossing the newly drawn border seemed unthinkable. This was home.
It wasn’t until a few months later, that they were forced to leave.
The departure came without warning. My grandfather and uncle were away in Karachi when word spread that the entire street had to evacuate immediately. My grandmother gathered her three children and fled with relatives, not knowing how to tell her husband they were leaving.
They believed they were going into temporary shelter for a few days.
They would never return to their ancestral home.
In an overcrowded refugee camp in Jalandhar, my father arrived with only the clothes on his back, having lost his shoes somewhere in the chaos. The family spent three desperate months there – with rationed food and water – before my grandfather, who had searched camp after camp, finally found them.
He had secured what he thought was a three-bedroom house. On arrival, they discovered each bedroom had been allocated to a different family.
My grandfather quietly set about rebuilding their lives. My grandmother carried the trauma for the rest of hers.
Only later did my family fully appreciate that families travelling in the opposite direction had endured equally devastating losses.
By the standards of Partition, my family’s was one of the more fortunate stories. They survived. Countless others did not. Trains crossed the border carrying the dead, families disappeared forever, and millions were displaced in one of the largest and bloodiest migrations in human history.
WHEN FREEDOM CAME HOME
One of the most remarkable aspects of India’s freedom movement was that it wasn’t confined to rallies, legislatures, prisons or famous leaders. Nationalism had turned into everyday behaviour.
The movement shaped what people wore, bought, read, said – and even what they named their children. Khadi became a symbol of self-reliance. Buying local through the Swadeshi movement was a patriotic duty. Everyday language filled with words like Swaraj, Swadeshi, Vande Mataram and Jai Hind. And parents named their children Swadesh, Swaraj and Azad, carrying the dream of freedom into the next generation.
One of those children was my own mother.
Named Swadesh – literally “my country” – she was born in Jalandhar in 1940 to journalist Nandlal Dhand and his wife Agya. Her name was more than a label; it was a declaration of hope, embodying the ideal of swaraj, self-rule.
She spent part of her childhood in Lahore when her father moved there for work. At the time, it was no more remarkable than moving from Sydney to Melbourne, or Delhi to Bombay. No one imagined that, within a few years, those cities would belong to different countries.
Growing up in a newspaper editor’s household, she absorbed current affairs almost by osmosis. At 19, she landed her first job as a Punjabi newsreader on All India Radio. More than six decades later, she still relishes a spirited political debate – proof, perhaps, that when your name is Swadesh, the country’s story is never far from your own.
HISTORY AT THE DINNER TABLE
As the generation that witnessed Independence grows smaller, its memories are increasingly being preserved not in archives, but in family conversations.
Every time a grandparent tells a child about the train they boarded, the flag they watched rise, or the home they left behind, history begins again.
We asked younger readers about stories passed down in their families.
Torrsha Sen: Pakistan? Or India?
My father told me this story recently, prompted by a film he had watched on the Partition. It stayed with me long after our conversation ended.
In August 1947, his parents and extended family were living in Plassey (yes, the same Plassey from the famous Battle of Plassey), our native village. As the news of freedom broke, there was so much confusion with violence and a Muslim majority around. They raised the flag of Pakistan.
Nobody had told them otherwise. The border was still a line on a map somewhere, unconfirmed. Plassey sat close enough to the edge that its fate could have gone either way, and in that vacuum of information, the family made their best guess.
For three days, that flag flew over their home. Three days of believing they belonged to a nation that, as it turned out, they never would.
On 17 August, the Radcliffe Line was finally announced. Plassey fell on the Indian side. The flag came down, and with it, a strange, brief chapter of uncertainty that most official histories never bother to record.
What strikes me about this story isn’t just the confusion. It’s how ordinary people were left to interpret the biggest political decision of their lifetimes with almost no information at all, drawing borders in their own minds days before the men in Delhi and London drew them on paper.
Manan Luthra: Gandhi’s fasts as a form of protest
Growing up, I heard my family talk about Gandhi’s fasts. I couldn’t imagine fasting myself, but I learnt that it wasn’t simply about going without food – it was a form of nonviolent resistance.
For years I assumed hunger strikes belonged to history. Then, only weeks ago, I watched Sonam Wangchuk’s 26-day fast in New Delhi bring thousands of young Indians together. It told me that fasting still carries extraordinary moral force.
A hunger strike says, “I will endure hardship until you listen,” rather than “I will hurt you until you listen.”
That moral distinction is why fasting still holds such a unique place in India’s political culture.
Harsheni Maniarasan: India’s original “cancel culture”
Boycotting brands feels like a very Gen Z idea. Turns out, India was doing it over a century ago.
My Thatha taught me about the Swadeshi movement, when Indians rejected British goods after the 1905 Partition of Bengal, and instead bought local, wore khadi and backed Indian businesses.
It was economic protest before hashtags existed.
As a book lover, I also discovered that Rabindranath Tagore explored the movement’s moral dilemmas in Ghare Baire, later adapted into a film by Satyajit Ray.
Harini Sridhar: Finding my own freedom heroes
At school, the freedom movement often felt like the story of Gandhi, Nehru and Bhagat Singh. I asked my parents: where were the heroes from South India, our part of the country?
That question sent me down a rabbit hole.
I discovered Rani Velu Nachiyar, who defeated the British decades before 1857; Veerapandiya Kattabomman, who resisted the East India Company; V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, who challenged British trade; Subramania Bharati, whose poetry inspired a generation.
The freedom movement suddenly felt much bigger than the textbooks. Every region had its own heroes. I just had to find mine.
THE STORIES WE CARRY
My father’s memories of Independence were shaped by loss. My mother’s, by hope. The stories our readers shared show that every family carries its own version of 1947.
Every Independence Day, India raises the tricolour. But perhaps its most enduring act of remembrance happens far more quietly: when a grandparent tells a story, a parent explains a family tradition, or a child asks, “What happened in 1947?”
One generation witnessed history. The next inherited it. Now it is our turn to carry it forward.
As these stories travel across generations, oceans and continents, they remind us not only how India became free, but who we are now because it did.
Read Also: This Independence Day, let’s fix India’s broken ladder
Family stories Indian independence
