Q1.
As we said at the beginning, this chapter can only mention very few of those who fought for India’s liberation from colonial rule. Many more names would have deserved a mention. […] You need not memorise this list. However, see if you can add any other name to the list. Besides, the support and sacrifice made by the women belonging to the families of the freedom fighters also needs to be acknowledged with gratitude.
Answer
Yes — start with the people the chapter itself describes but leaves off the list. Every name below appears somewhere in this chapter, so you can defend each one from the book.
| Name | What they did (from this chapter) |
|---|---|
| Baba Ram Singh | Led the Kuka (Namdhari) movement in Punjab — boycott of foreign goods, own postal system and courts, long before these became national strategies; exiled to Burma, died in captivity |
| Birsa Munda | Led the Ulgulaan of 1899–1900; died in jail at 24 |
| The Chapekar brothers | Shot the Plague Commissioner of Poona in 1897; betrayed, arrested and hanged |
| Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki | The 1908 attempt on Judge Kingsford; Khudiram hanged at 18, calm and smiling |
| Bagha Jatin (Jatin Mukherjee) | Anushilan Samiti leader; killed after the 75-minute gunbattle at Balasore, 1915 |
| Rash Behari Bose, Sachindra Nath Sanyal, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Lala Hardayal, Sohan Singh Bhakna | The Ghadar Movement of 1914–15; Kartar Singh executed at 19 |
| Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Chandrashekhar Azad | The Kakori train robbery of 1925 and the HRA/HSRA |
| Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev Thapar | Hanged in 1931 at 22–23; “a symbol of the resistance against the colonial oppressor” |
| Suniti Chowdhury, Shanti Ghosh, Bina Das | Schoolgirls and a university student who took up arms in 1931–32 |
| Udham Singh | Tracked O’Dwyer to London twenty-one years after Jallianwala Bagh; hanged, and asserted the legitimacy of his action at his trial |
| Aruna Asaf Ali | Hoisted the flag at Gowalia Tank Maidan in 1942 and ran the underground for nearly four years |
| Sarojini Naidu | Poet and orator; first Indian woman president of the Congress (1925); advocate of women’s voting rights; jailed repeatedly |
| Kanaklata Barua | Shot at 17 leading a flag procession at Gohpur, 1942 |
| Chandra Singh Garhwali | Led two platoons of the Royal Garhwal Rifles who refused to fire on the unarmed crowd at Peshawar in 1930, “choosing jail over hurting their fellow Indians” |
| Vanchinathan, Anant Kanhere, V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, Subramania Bharati | The southern strand — Swadeshi shipping, revolutionary action and Tamil nationalist poetry |
| Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Maulana Hasrat Mohani | Muslim leaders who opposed the Two-Nation idea; Ghaffar Khan built a nonviolent movement in the North-West Frontier Province |
| Tirot Sing, Maniram Dewan, Piyali Baruah | The North-East, from the Khasi revolt of 1829 to the hangings of 1857 |
How to add names of your own, properly. Do not simply copy a list from the internet. For each name write: where they were from, what exactly they did, in which year, and where you found it. Good places to look are the ICHR’s Dictionary of Martyrs, your state archives, district gazetteers, and the memorials and street names in your own town — most of which commemorate someone local.
On the second half of the box — the women in freedom fighters’ families. The chapter asks for this deliberately, and it is the hardest kind of history to write, because these women rarely left records. When a man went to prison for two years, someone kept the household alive, raised the children, faced the police at the door, and sold what little there was to pay a fine. Kasturba Gandhi is on the chapter’s list; the overwhelming majority are not, and never will be, because no register recorded them. That absence is itself a historical fact worth stating in your answer, rather than a gap to be filled with invented names.