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Join us for a discussion with acclaimed journalist P. Sainath, who will be discussing his new book, The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom.

About The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom

So who really spearheaded India's Freedom Struggle? Millions of ordinary people - farmers, labourers, homemakers, forest produce gatherers, artisans and others-stood up to the British. People who never went on to be ministers, governors, presidents, or hold other high public office.

They had this in common: their opposition to Empire was uncompromising.

In The Last Heroes, these footsoldiers of Indian freedom tell us their stories. The men, women and children featured in this book are Adivasis, Dalits, OBCs, Brahmins, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. They hail from different regions, speak different languages and include atheists and believers, Leftists, Gandhians and Ambedkarites.

The people featured pose the intriguing question: What is freedom? They saw that as going beyond Independence. And almost all of them continued their fight for freedoms long after 1947.

The post-1947 generations need their stories.

To learn what they understood. That freedom and independence are not the same thing. And to learn to make those come together.

About P. Sainath

P. Sainath is the Founder Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India. The archive is an outcome of his three decades-plus in journalism – including a quarter century of reporting from rural India. PARI aims to address the complete failure of the corporate media to cover two-thirds of the country’s population. Our aim is to report and record what is easily the most complex part of the planet.

Sainath, former Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, writer and journalism teacher, is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s most prestigious prize. He has also won the World Media Summit Global Award for Excellence 2014, in Public Welfare reporting. He was the first reporter in the world to win Amnesty International’s Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in its inaugural year in 2000. Sainath has taught at journalism schools in India and abroad, mentoring students as well as training media professionals.

His book Everybody Loves a Good Drought (Penguin India, 1996), now in its 43rd print, was declared a Penguin Classic in January 2013.  The book is being used in over a hundred universities in India and abroad. His photo archive of black and white images from rural India is being digitised. One part of that titled 'Visible Work, Invisible Women' is now on PARI as a fully curated online exhibition. For more on Sainath see www.psainath.org.