Ambedkar’s Courier Boy

HISTORY IS A STRANGE thing. Sometimes when someone is witness to it, sometimes when one is rubbing shoulders with those who make it, the significance of it appears ordinary. It is only when an outsider sees it in light of the hindsight that history affords later—that is when its extraordinariness comes alive.

In Ajmer’s Jawahar Jadugar colony, Shobharam Gehervar, who turned 98 in April this year, remembers the moment when he met Babasaheb Ambedkar in Baroda. He was carrying with him a letter that Ambedkar’s friends in the freedom movement did not wish the British censors in the postal department to see. “I told him where I had come from; he nodded and ran his hand over my head,” recalls Gehervar. But he recalls it with such nonchalance as if some ordinary passerby had done this with affection to some young boy.

Gehervar insists on giving a typed note to every visitor which he also signs before handing it over. The note urges people to remember the sacrifice of those who fought for India’s freedom, putting an end to British rule. Gehervar himself is one of the last few surviving freedom fighters. At this age the body may have slowed, but Gehervar’s memory and mental alertness are sharp. The only aberration in his re­counting of the past occurs due to mixing up of dates. But that is understandable; af­ter all, this is someone who at some point or the other met many prominent leaders of the Indian freedom movement, from moderates to extremists; just that these events took place 70-80 years ago.

Gehervar gets up early in the morning, reads newspapers and drinks coffee—he switched from tea when it did not suit him any longer. He takes a bath, shaves with precision, and is ready for anything that life brings him in the front room of his dilapi­dated house. He was born in a house next to this one, but due to some discrepancy in land records, which was detected after Ajmer was flooded on account of severe rainfall on July 18, 1975—750 mm rain was recorded in a matter of 10 hours—the fam­ily started living next door. The colony was where Ajmer’s poor people, mostly Dalit families like Gehervar’s, lived. They came from a family of weavers, but Gehervar’s father mostly worked as a labourer. Food was hard to come by; often the family ate once a day. In 1934, when he was eight, Mahatma Gandhi came to Ajmer; he was there as part of movement for the uplift of Dalits. On July 5, he visited the Jadugar Hari­jan Kanya Pathshala in Gehervar’s locality.

“We were dressed up in white clothes. As he arrived, I went forward and touched his feet. When he learnt that weavers lived here, he chuckled and remarked that he had come to the right place then,” recalls Gehervar.

A few years afterwards Gehervar came in touch with the veteran Gandhian, Ram Narayan Chaudhary. He had, with others, led the Bijolia peas­ant movement in the region against heavy land revenue cesses and forced labour. Since Gehervar was practi­cally a boy, he, like other chil­dren, was given the task of ferrying the letters of freedom fighters. The post was heavily censored by British authorities, hence confidential commu­nication was sent through human couri­ers like Gehervar. Gehervar remembers delivering these letters at least once to Jawaharlal Nehru, apart from Ambedkar.

By the time he gained a few more years, his services came to be used by another group of people—the revolutionaries who adopted extremist means to fight the British. In Ajmer, Gehervar recalls, this group had set up a bomb-making factory in a forest area on the outskirts of Ajmer town. “There was a big water body there which used to be frequented by wild animals, including tigers. So the po­lice hardly ventured there,” he says. It is from here that Gehervar and his other young comrades would collect these bombs and take them to far-flung areas like Varanasi and Baroda. Since they were young, nobody suspected them. “Sometimes the police would see us coming out of that forest. But we would tell them that we had gone there for a little picnic. We would have tiffin boxes in our hands, containing explo­sives. But they would assume these to be containing our food,” he says. Once, the police did enter. But upon spotting them from a distance, the extremists blasted some explosives. “The loud noise scared a tiger nearby and luckily it lunged to­wards the policemen, making them run for their lives,” recounts Gehervar.

The life of an untouchable was tough; Gehervar avoids getting into specific incidents but he says he has witnessed terrible atrocities by the upper castes. “Within the revolutionary fold, though, there was no such discrimination. We all felt one,” he says. Several times, when the revolutionaries, many of them upper-caste, ran short of food, they would ask the cou­rier boys to give them food. “They did not ask which community one came from,” he says.

When he was 16, Gandhi raised the slo­gan of ‘Karo ya Maro’ (Do or Die) as part of his Quit India Movement, demanding an end to British rule. Gehervar has fond memories of that time; he remembers how the slogan galvanised ordinary people. “We would just come out shout­ing this slogan, and in no time thousands of people would join us on their own. They would just leave whatever they were doing and come with us,” he says. Gehervar loses sight of the date here, but presumably around this time the police issued a warrant against him for his activities. Arrangements were made to send him out of Ajmer. He landed in Bombay where he first took refuge at the house of the actor Prithviraj Kapoor. It was a busy time for the actor. He had recently founded the Prithvi Theatre which, inspired by the Quit India Movement, would go on to stage sev­eral patriotic plays. After some time, owing to his commitments, Kapoor made Gehervar shift to his relative Trilok Kapoor’s house. Trilok Kapoor later played the role of Shiva in the 1950 film Har Har Mahadev. Gehervar lived in Bombay for seven months till the police warrant turned cold.

A time came when Gehervar was intro­duced to Sampurnanand, who was close to Madan Mohan Malviya and later turned to socialist ideology. Sampurnanand’s house was a meeting point for couriers like him. Once, he says, he was transport­ing bombs to Uttar Pradesh (the United Provinces then); he had been instructed to get off half-a-mile before the Mughal Sarai railway station to escape checking. “We pulled the chain of the train and got down. A bunch of horses was waiting for us which we then took to Kanpur to his [Sampurnanand’s] house,” he recalls. The bombs were collected by revolutionaries. Sampurnanand, whom Nehru later made chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, asked the tired young men to take a bath in the Ganges and then fed them at his house.

By this time, there was pressure on Gehervar to get married. But an incident around that time became a catalyst in his decision to remain unmarried. During a public event at Kaisar Ganj in Ajmer, a heated speech led the police to beat up those who had assembled there. Some among them hit the police back, upon which they opened fire. A bullet grazed Gehervar’s leg and he fell and lost con­sciousness. Somebody took him to the hospital where the doctor said he had had a lucky escape. The bullet might not have caused any serious injury, but it made him realise, he says, the futility of life. “Women came, but I just folded my hands and asked them to look elsewhere,” he says. But he did get a family. Gehervar’s sister became a widow after her husband, an alcoholic, died at a rather young age. So she returned home with her three children. They were raised by Gehervar like his own.

When India got independence, Gehervar had just turned 21. He remembers travelling to Delhi and then staying there for the first time. “Everywhere you looked, it was like Diwali,” he says, “the new Ram temple would not have as many lightings as people had put up when India became free.” He and his friends would make several trips to Ajmeri Gate on bicycles. “It was such a small city those days and not the mammoth it has become now,” he says.

With freedom, though, came other challenges. Gehervar had so far survived on the largesse of his mentor, Ram Narayan Chaudhary.

Now he also had a fam­ily to look after. Sustenance became tough. In between he was chosen twice as munici­pal councillor from his ward on a Congress ticket. But financially, things remained tough. Gehervar received the pension al­lotted to freedom fighters. He does not specify how much but says it was meagre. “Pension is okay, but no textbook tells chil­dren about people like us. It’s like people forget their parents and banish them to an old-age home—the same has been done to us,” he rues.

Gehervar does not have much hope in the way Dalit politics has evolved. He remembers meeting Mayawati, but says he was not impressed at all with her vision or commitment. “She turned all her ener­gies towards ghode-haathi,” he says, allud­ing to her penchant for commissioning statues of elephants, but perhaps also to her gravitation towards amassing wealth.

Two yearsago, the Ashok Gehlot govern­ment in Rajasthan allotted the family a little kiosk where Gehervar’s nephew Manoj and his wife sell milk and tea. Given the family’s difficult financial circumstances, he could not get a decent education. Manoj has two sons; the younger sells vegetables and some­times helps his parents run their small busi­ness. Manoj says he cannot meet expenses as the cost of living has risen in recent years. “I do not even have the money to put a little statue of Babuji (his uncle) at the kiosk once he passes away,” he says.

At 98, though, Gehervar’s mind is far away from the prospect of death. As he approaches 99, he looks back and rumi­nates about why he has lived for so long. “I think about it and the only answer I come up with is that I did not deny some­body his due. Maine kisi ka pet nahi maara,” he says. After Independence, most of his comrades carried on with their lives; some took government jobs, some turned to family businesses. But Gehervar still felt that he needed to do things for the country; at a time when he should have thought of doing something for his family, Gehervar was busy carrying to New Delhi petitions of people who wanted this or that work. “In those days one could just go seeking a favour with a packet of sweets wrapped with a string of jasmine flowers and peo­ple would oblige,” he says. At 98, though, Gehervar’s biggest regret is that he could not do much for his family. Even under financial constraints Gehervar refuses to compromise. A number of real-estate agents are interested in buying the struc­ture he maintains—it acted as the meet­ing place for freedom fighters in the ear­lier days. They keep urging him to sell it and earn some money, but he always disappoints them. But the regret of not providing much for his family continues to haunt him. “Finance. When I close my eyes I hear this word and it does not let me sleep.” Look at this house, he says, turning his face towards the damp, mould-ridden wall behind him where there is a picture of him with two presidents. “I deserved better,” he says.

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