Coffee table book on Freedom Fighters’ Descendants launched in Mumbai

A pictorial coffee table book which depicts the misery and poverty of descendants as well as families of India’s freedom fighters was launched on 24 June 2013 in Mumbai by former Bombay High Court chief justice C S Dharmadhikari.

The book titled, 1857-1947: Forgotten Heroes and Martyrs of India’s Freedom Movement’, is written by journalist Shivnath Jha and is fifth in the series of Andolan Ek Pustak Se.

The book will act as a campaign to highlight the miserable conditions of descendants and families of freedom fighters as well as an attempt to bring about a change. The book basically talks about the families as well as descendants of martyrs like Rajguru, Sukhdev, Uddham Singh and Tatya Tope.

The idea to come up with book was perceived by Shivnath Jha after seeing the miserable condition of descendents of the martyr of freedom movement.

Vinayak Rao Tope (54), a third generation descendant of Tatya Tope, martyr of the 1857 uprisingwere living in penury in Uttar Pradesh’s Bithoor village.

Sultana Begum, the great grand daughter-in-law of emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar is living in a Howrah slum and ran a tea stall to make ends meet.

Jeet Singh, the grandson of Udham Singh, the freedom fighter who shot dead Michael O’Dwyer, the British Lieutenant Governor of colonial Punjab works as a labourer at a construction site in Punjab.