India’s story of freedom told through pictures, cartoons and artefacts

By Jayanta Roy Chowdhury

New Delhi, August 14, 2026. How does one celebrate India’s Independence?

An exhibition of posters, pictures, cartoons, calendars, and memorabilia, celebrating India’s journey towards independence and after independence, including all the cataclysmic events that happened over the last couple of centuries.

That is precisely Neville Tuli’s idea behind the thoughtfully put together “Swaraj” at India Habitat Centre, an exhibition of posters, photographs, documents and memorabilia tracing India’s long journey towards independence and its remarkable, tumultuous journey after 1947.

“I have been using the visual, popular culture concepts to spark imagination among the young to try and fathom our struggle for independence  … our education system straight-jackets learning, this kind of public exhibit strives to trigger thinking and realisation,” Tuli told UNI as he walked through his exhibition of copper-plate etchings of French and Dutch settlements along India’s coast in the 16th century to posters from the freedom movement to adverts for movies like Subhas Chandra to political cartoons by film-maker Basu Chatterjee for the Blitz.

A snapshot of history that provokes and evokes questions and supplies answers without taking sides in the story that unfolds. The Congress, Communist, and militant revolutionary movements are all represented, as is the RSS.

The exhibition tries to look beyond the conventional printed narrative of the freedom struggle. It travels back across the last two centuries, bringing together the events, personalities and movements that transformed the subcontinent from colonial conquest and resistance; the Revolt of 1857; the rise of nationalism; the Bengal Renaissance; the Swadeshi movement; Gandhi and the mass movements; the revolutionary struggle; the two World Wars; Partition and Independence.

However, Swaraj does not end on August 15, 1947. The journey continues — The 1962 war with China, 1971’s liberation of Bangladesh, and Mrs Indira Gandhi’s and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassinations stare at you through newspaper pages of that era and through posters and cartoons.

India is shown as the country it was, chaotic, diverse, and yet travelling towards a common destiny. A nation confronting Partition, refugees, wars, the integration of princely states, the making of the Constitution, the linguistic reorganisation of states, political upheavals, economic transformation, the Emergency, liberalisation and the dramatic changes that have reshaped India in the decades since independence. ­

Forgotten political cartoonists and their brilliant satire on India’s economic woes, internal strife, and geopolitics afflicting the subcontinent are brought back to shed light on history.

Pop calendars which show Bose cutting off his head to offer Mother India the ultimate sacrifice, juxtaposed with calendar art of a pensive Jawaharlal Nehru, along with huge black-and-white pictures bringing to life the excitement of the steel mills and factories that were the “Temples of Modern India” of the 1950s, bring back forgotten memories or evoke new ones.

The music in the background plays old numbers softly, and viewers hum along with evocative songs like “Chodo kal ki batein  … Hum Hindustani” (Leave behind yesterday  … We are Indians) and “Aao baccho tumhe dikhau Jhanki Hindustan ki” (Come, my children, let me show you a glimpse of what India was), the ultimate in patriotic pop numbers of the 1950s and 1960s.

The posters, rare photographs, newspaper pages, political cartoons, letters, government documents, advertisements, personal memorabilia, and other historical artefacts, which Tuli has brought together to curate Swaraj, seek to recreate the atmosphere of each era.

In a sense, this is an unusual visual history of modern India, not a celebration of one political ideology or one version of the past, but an attempt to capture the extraordinary sweep of the Indian experience.

As the crowds swirl through the exhibits, posing for selfies, Tuli wipes his brow and says with a grin, “People resonate because the exhibits, the music, all bring together a sense of what India went through.”

For Neville Tuli, and those who have crowded to see his curated understanding of pop modern history, that is the meaning of celebrating Independence — to remember where we came from, to understand the upheavals that shaped us, and to reflect on the India that we have built since becoming free.

(UNI)