Mamta Kalia

the forests, or the discovery of language
and culture, behind everything was also
this inspiring power of the national
movement. The upper caste, upper class
intellectuals of Uttarakhand, by
dedicating themselves to the service of
the people, to an extent rose above their
class and caste limitations and became
servants of the nation, of Uttarakhand
and of the people of Uttarakhand.
In this way there is a very close
relation between the national awakening
and that at the regional level. The two
had been tied so inextricably with each
other and continue to be so tied, that
be it in the field of culture, or that
of technology, a small region like
Uttarakhand produced personalities who
attained the peaks of national leadership.
Pandit Gobind Ballabh Pant and Hemvati
Nandan Bahuguna in the National
Congress, Comrade Puran Chandra Joshi
in the communist and the left movement,
Mukundilal, Sumitranandan Pant,
Pitamber Datt Barthwal and Chandra
Kunwar Barthwal in art and literature,
Dr. Nilambar Joshi in medical science,
Bhairav Datt Pande in administration,
all these luminaries shone on the national
firmament as representatives of
Uttarakhand. At the same time, hundreds
of patriots who were the gift of the national
movement aroused radical, national and
social consciousness in the villages in
the hills.
Not only this, in the national and
cultural leadership, which in the
beginning was confined to high castes
and classes, representatives of the toiling
sections also began to emerge as leaders.
Just as the discovery of India under
Gandhiji’s leadership in the form of
discovery of the villages and the toilers
got transformed into the discovery of
the sources of India’s real strength, in
the same way the discovery of
Uttarakhand by its educated classes drew
them into discovery of its village
communities, toilers and their folk
culture. The high caste and upper class
people who, through the study first of
Sanskrit and later of English and through
the medium of classical Sanskrit or
subsequently that of English had regarded
Indian classical or western culture to
be the only real cultures, by their contact
with the people began to get acquainted
with the people’s cultural tradition and
also began to try to understand the
people’s contribution in the cultural field.
As a result, parallel to national
development and reconstruction, a
programme for development and
reconstruction of Uttarakhand also began
to take shape. The effort reached its
peak when side by side with Gandhi’s
“India of my dreams” an outline of
“Uttarakhand of my dreams” began to
emerge not only among the intelligentsia
but al the popular level.
Here, two mutually contradictory
tendencies in the process of awakening
of the national and Uttarakhand’s levels
need to be acknowledged. On one plane,
this awakening compelled one enlightened
section of the privileged class to join
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