Remembering Pandit K. Santanam of Lahore
WHO is Pandit
K. Santanam of Lahore? Few Indians and Pakistanis will probably know the answer
today 58 years after the death of the Tamilian Congress Leader, who made Lahore
in the undivided Punjab his home in the early 1900’s and lived there. He was a
close associate of Lala Lajpat Rai and had worked with both Hindu and Muslim leaders
of the freedom movement. Pandit Santanam’s life and times are all the more relevant
in the context of current efforts at improving relations between India and Pakistan
and the ever-increasing people-to-people contact.
Every year
on April 13, as Punjab celebrates its festival of Baisaki, the nation remembers
the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 13, 1919. But the one man who dug out details
of the massacre to present them to the outside world is hardly ever remembered.
He was Pandit Santanam of Lahore, originally a native of Kumbakonam, a
temple town on the banks of Cauvery in Tamil Nadu.
Born into
a conservative Tamil Brahmin family on August 25, 1885, Santanam lost his parents
in childhood. He was helped by his elder
brothers to go to England for higher studies. Santanam studied Economics and Law
in Cambridge. A meeting with Lala Lajpat Rai in London resulted in a life-long
association.
On his return home in the mid 1900’s, Santanam was ostracised
by the conservative Brahmins after he refused to undergo “purification ceremony”
for having “crossed the seven seas”. After spending a brief period with the Self-Respect
Movement, spearheaded by the Justice Party, a dejected, but determined Santanam
remembered his meeting with Lajpat Rai and journeyed to Lahore with virtually
no resources and made it his permanent home. Santanam joined the Indian National
Congress, the party that was born in 1885, the year of his own birth. The bustling
Lahore, some 5000 miles away from the placid Kumbakonam, became his new home.
Because of his cosmopolitan life in England, it was not too difficult for the
Tamil youth to adjust to the new environs of Lahore with a different clime, culture
and cuisine. Santanam soon became a great hit with the people of Lahore,
the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike. He could speak fluent Urdu and Punjabi apart
from English and Tamil. It was not long before the Lahorians began calling him
Pandit Santanam, for his erudition, not for his Brahaminical background. Lajpat
Rai, impressed by Santanam’s knowledge of finance and law, made him the chief
of Lakshmi Insurance Company that he founded. “The Lakshmi Building” which housed
the offices of the company is still there on the Mall Road of Lahore and bears
the same Hindu name. “My father, who ran a firm of chartered accountants, was
a tenant of Lakhsmi Building for a long time,” remembers Panchayat Raj Minister
Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was born in Lahore.
Santanam
married Krishna Ved from Delhi. His father in law was a well-known Arya Samaji,
Atma Ram Ved. Four daughters were born to the Santanams of whom one is alive,
his youngest daughter Madhuri who married Prof. M. L. Sondhi.
About Santanam, former Indian Prime Minister I. K. Gujral,
himself a Lahorian, says: “I had watched him (Santanam) as a young boy in the
presence of other Congress leaders like Nehru and others. I distinctly remember
him during the Lahore Congress (1929). I was 10 years old then. Pandit Santanam
was an eminent lawyer and a leading light of the Congress. Many activists of the
freedom struggle who were being tried by the British looked up to Pandit Santanam
for their defence. I used to hear that he did not take fee in the cases of freedom
fighters.
Santanam
made a dramatic journey out of Lahore stealthily to Simla, hiding under a bunk
in a railway carriage where an Englishman happened to seat himself. His plea before
a higher authority was, of course, refused, but he was able to apprise the Indian
member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, of the events that were occurring in
Punjab, and thus much information was able to leak out to other concerned citizens
of India.
The government-appointed
Hunter’s Committee report on the massacre was a white wash. The Indian National
Congress set up its own committee to go into the tragedy. Its members included
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), C.R. Das, Abbas S. Tyabji, and M.R.
Jayakar. Its secretary was K.Santanam, who painstakingly compiled a two-volume
report after touring Punjab and talking to hundreds of survivors of the massacre
and the families of those killed.
The Partition
broke Santanam’s heart. He was most reluctant to leave Lahore. But he was a sad
man who was completely shaken by the Partition and the accompanying holocaust.
He was away in Kashmir when riots broke out and never returned to his “sweet home
Lahore”. He died on August 31, 1949 in Delhi. His life was a saga of struggle
against the tyranny of conservatism from which he had emerged as an apostle of
national unity and communal integration.
(August 25 is Pt. Santanam’s 122nd
birth anniversary and August 31 his 58th death anniversary)
Disclaimer:- The view expressed by
the author in this feature are entirely his own and not necessarily reflect the
views of PIB.
SRK/RTS/RS
SS-174/SF-174/24.08.2007
(Release ID :30473)