Every 15 August, India marks its independence with ceremony and remembrance. Largely absent from that national account are the thousands of people who took part in the freedom struggle at the district and village level and whose names never entered the official record. Chimnaramji Jodhaji Gehlot, born in 1921 in Sewari, a village in the Pali district of Rajasthan, was one of them.

The Quit India years

Gehlot took part in the Quit India Movement of 1942, according to his family. Launched by Mahatma Gandhi that August, the campaign demanded an immediate end to British rule and drew mass civil disobedience across the country.

He also joined the boycott of foreign goods and the promotion of Swadeshi — the economic arm of the independence campaign, which urged Indians to reject imported cloth and manufactured goods in favour of home-produced alternatives.

He was in his early twenties at the time.

After 1947

Independence did not end his involvement in public life. In the years that followed, Gehlot served as a Block/Tehsil President of the Congress Party — the local administrative tier at which the party's organisational work reached individual villages.

Known as 'Netaji'

In Sewari and the surrounding community, he was known simply as "Netaji" — a title of affection and respect rather than of office. According to his family, the name stayed with him for the rest of his life, and people who knew him still use it when they speak of him today.

He died in 2016.

The unrecorded majority

Gehlot's name appears in no standard history of the freedom movement, and that absence is not unusual. The struggle drew in participants across the country whose contributions were never catalogued, and whose records, where they survive at all, are held largely within families rather than archives.

For his family, his village and the community around it, that record is the account of a man who joined a national movement in his twenties and remained in public service for decades after it succeeded.

Born: 1921 · Died: 2016

Village: Sewari, Pali, Rajasthan

Known as: "Netaji"