In this extract from a 1987 radio programme, Aruna Asaf Ali explains her attitude towards what she sees as British values. She emphasises that she never felt hatred towards the British, and talks about how the British education she received actually helped her to understand her own oppression and her need to rebel against colonial rule.

Who was Aruna Asaf Ali?

Aruna Asaf Ali was an Indian political activist and educator. She participated in the satyagrahas of the 1920s and the famous salt march led by Ghandi in 1930, when she was arrested and kept in solitary confinement. She is best known for hoisting the tricolour Indian flag on 9 May 1942, after the Indian National Congress had ratified the ‘Quit India’ resolution and most Congress leaders had been arrested. After this she remained politically active, for example editing the Congress’s monthly magazine Inquilab, but stayed in hiding to avoid being imprisoned again.

After independence, Aruna Asaf Ali campaigned for social reforms, fighting for women’s rights, environmental issues, workers’ rights and the rights of Dalits in India. She was mayor of Delhi from 1958 to 1960.

Indian Tales of the Raj

This clip is an extract from the third episode of a five-part BBC Radio Four programme, Indian Tales of the Raj, which was broadcast in 1987. In this episode, former nationalists reflect on the British education and values with which they set out to challenge the Raj, particularly commenting on how the schools and colleges of the Raj inadvertently gave students a new language of protest. As many of the socialist leaders had received a British education like Gandhi, contributors suggest that they themselves had adopted British ideas and turned them against the colonial power.

ARUNA ASAF ALI:

We were angered. Something angered us. And that was the sense of humiliation. But there was never any hatred. Culturally one was so attuned to the British culture, because of our education. All of us, all the leadership including Gandhi, Nehru, in England they spent their early years. They were all influenced by British thought, British ideology, British revolutionary ideas and therefore European also. The French revolution, all those exciting books, literature classics about the French revolution, so it really was the French revolution and the British struggle, from Cromwell’s period and subsequently. That they in their country have fought tyranny in their own way. So we will do the same, and that is why our leaders were telling the British that you can’t just do these things, because they are against your own basic values. We had no hatred, in fact it is the other way round, it is their values that made us revolt.