On 15th August, 2022, India entered its 75th year of ‘political’ independence, commemorating a journey of resilient struggle by Indians to achieve independence and sovereignty of land. The dominant popular narrative of the freedom struggle is structured around the life and times of well-known leaders and their aspirations, which is claimed to be representing those of the entire people of India. The representation and narration of popular history was based on the biases of the historiographer. It favored the ones who had a hegemony over the social, economic, and political spheres of Indian society. The already marginalized community such as Dalit, tribes, woman and religious minorities found little to no place among the literati of the nation, left to bear the brunt of being ignored and not visible. Thus, due to historiographic invisibility, the resistances of marginalized communities failed to feature on our history books and popular narratives on India’s struggle for freedom.

The exclusion of marginalized communities’ contribution in the narratives of India’s struggle for freedom impacted to limit the meaning of the terms such as nation, freedom and independence and therefore succumbed the archives of India.

The stories of their struggle for freedom provide organic ideas of nation and freedom referring to a multifaceted struggle for a self-definition, self-realisation in the presence of colonial administration and socially dominant classes. They viewed nationalism as a medium to achieve self-realisation as active subjects. They contributed to broaden the domain of nation and freedom by including social, economic, cultural and spiritual spheres along with the ‘political’.

With this backdrop, a two days’ national seminar, sought to bring together scholars, academicians and activists to reflect on the marginalized communities’ ideas of nation and their role in the Indian freedom struggle, was held in Delhi on 8th and 9th August 2022.