The Institute for Asian Studies, the Office of Global Diversity and Inclusion, and the Department of Politics and Global Affairs invite you to a lecture by the award-winning journalist P. Sainath on his new book The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom.
Lecture title: India and the Three Pandemics: COVID, Inequality, and the Criminalization of Dissent
The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom tells the stories of the ordinary men, women and children - farmers, labourers, homemakers, forest produce gatherers, artisans and others who stood up to the British. They hail from different regions, speak different languages and include atheists and believers, Leftists, Gandhians and Ambedkarites. They saw freedom 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. Especially at a time in India when the great anti-colonial movements that made up India's freedom struggle are being hijacked, distorted, even erased and fake freedom fighters are being promoted.
About the Speaker: Palagummi Sainath is founder-editor of the Peopleʼs Archive of Rural India (PARI), and a journalist and reporter covering rural India for over 30 years. His new book, The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom, is about the last fighters in Indiaʼs struggle for Independence. Sainath has won over 60 national and international reporting awards and fellowships. These include the Fukuoka Grand Prize 2021, the World Media Summit award 2014, the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007, UNFAOʼs Boerma Prize, Amnesty Internationalʼs Global Human Rights Reporting Prize, the European Commissionʼs Lorenzo Natali Media Prize, and the Ramnath Goenka Journalist of the Year award. He is deeply involved in the training of journalists and has been teaching journalism at the social communications media department of the Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, for over three decades, and also at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, since 2000. He was McGraw Professor of Writing in Princeton in 2012. In December 2014, Sainath launched the Peopleʼs Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online site on rural India. Publishing in 15 languages, PARI is an independent multimedia digital platform, whose reporting mandate is to cover every region and section of rural people.