In 1932, a youth was standing in front of a textile store at Flower Bazaar in Madras, dissuading customers from buying foreign clothes. He would be beaten up mercilessly by the police. But nothing could stop B. Srinivasa Rao, the freedom fighter-turned-communist leader, popularly known as BSR, from propagating Mahatma Gandhi’s call to boycott foreign clothes.
One day, the police beat him until he lost consciousness. They threw him in a gutter, assuming that he was dead. But a woman, living nearby, found him alive and nursed him. Thus Rao was reborn, and built a strong working class and agrarian movement.
Rao could not believe the scene that had changed completely on August 15, 1947, when the country achieved Independence. Only on the night of August 14 had he emerged from underground. “The same textile stores were illuminated with strings of lights. Huge tricolour flags, made of silk, flutter atop the stores. How times have changed?” Rao writes to his friend and comrade Sharma, referred to as Sagar.
