What Was Azadi? The Muslim Story of Resistance to Empire

Azadi means freedom. In the history of British India, it names the long refusal to accept that the subcontinent belonged to anyone but its own people. The collection that carries the name takes a clear position, and the record supports it.

The early stand

Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, fought the East India Company through four wars and died on the walls of his capital in 1799 rather than surrender it. The Company that killed him was not a government. It was a corporation with a private army and shareholders to satisfy.

1857 and after

In 1857 much of northern India rose against Company rule in what its participants understood as a war for the country. The rebellion was crushed, and the reprisals that followed were deliberate and severe. Villages were burned, prisoners were executed without trial, and the last Mughal emperor was tried and exiled to die abroad. The Crown took direct control, and the language of improvement was used to describe a system built on extraction.

The famine

The cost of that system is recorded most starkly in the Bengal Famine of 1943, in which around three million people died while food was exported from the province and relief was refused at the highest levels of the wartime government. The famine was not a failure of harvest alone. The documents show decisions, and the decisions had authors.

What the collection holds

The Azadi collection foregrounds the people these events were done to, rather than the men who ordered them. Tipu Sultan's Last Stand and the prints alongside it belong to that account.