The Hindu Business Line : The story of the Lahore Pandit

EVERY year around this time, as Punjab celebrates the harvest festival of Baisakhi, the nation also remembers the horror of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 13, 1919. But the one man who doggedly dug out details of the outrage to present them to the outside world is hardly ever remembered. Incredible as it may sound, that man was an Iyengar from Kumbakonam of the then Madras Province, and now in Tamil Nadu.

Pandit Santanam of Lahore, a self-effacing Tamilian, was the first to bring out the facts of the tragedy to the outside world from a blacked-out Punjab. But, unfortunately, his effort has not been adequately acknowledged. Orphaned at an early age, the boy from an orthodox Iyengar family was helped by his elder brothers to go to England for higher studies. The simple Tamilian met in London the Punjab Lion, Lala Lajpat Rai. On his return home in the early 1900s, K. Santanam was ostracised after he refused to undergo "purification ceremony" for having "crossed the seven seas".

The conservative society would not allow him to practise law nor would any parent give his daughter in marriage to the educated youth who dared to cross the seas. After spending some time 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 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. "Pandit Santanam was in the reception committee of the Lahore Congress," recalls the former Prime Minister, Mr I. K. Gujral, who was then a teenager.

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 near the Mall Road of Lahore and bears the same Hindu name. "My father was a tenant of Lakhsmi Building for a long time," remembers the Union Petroleum Minister, Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was born in Lahore.

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.

"Few are aware that the term Jallianwala Bagh is also used to describe the reign of terror unleashed by the British in large parts of Punjab which began on that date and continued till June 9," says Madhuri Santanam Sondhi, one of Pandit's four daughters. The facts concerning the draconian martial law regime and the horror of incidents between April 15 and June 9 had been kept away from the rest of India for a considerable time before Santanam secretly visited Amritsar and made a journey on the sly to Simla, giving the police the slip.

Punjab was cut off from the rest of the world. The local nationalist papers, including The Tribune, were closed down, and news reportage was strictly controlled by the authorities. Travel in and out of Punjab was restricted. The British-appointed Hunter's Committee report on the massacre was a eyewash.

The Indian National Congress set up its own committee to go into the tragedy. Its members included Gandhiji, 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. Published in 1920, its second volume contains 784 pages of direct evidence. It had been out of print till 1994 before being reissued by the National Book Trust. According to the evidence in the report, the authorities were deliberately provocative, seeking excuses to justify their barbarous reprisals.

At the time of Partition that broke his heart, an asthmatic Santanam was away in Kashmir to avoid the allergic dust of Lahore. Events that followed prevented him from ever returning to his adopted home, Lahore. Most reluctantly, he returned to Delhi, leaving friends and associates and property. He died on August 31, 1949 in Delhi.

(The author, a former Deputy Editor with PTI, is a New Delhi-based freelance writer. He is writing a biography of Pandit Santanam. Response may be sent to rajamani_rc@yahoo.co.uk)

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