Not very long ago, we made a tryst with thuggery. Ever since, the people of India have relinquished much they hold dear, not wholly or in full measure, but still very substantially. As a result, like many Independence and Republic Days in the recent past, there’s nothing worthy of celebration even this year. The country’s political and elite classes continue to crush the joy and life out of hundreds of millions of us, and the so-called middle class continues to turn a blind eye to this or even encourage it, mostly in the detestable hope that they might also some day get to perform the crushing. Every night at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, much of India lies awake of despair and hunger.While hunger and despair are not new to the country, in the past there was regular acknowledgement of that misery in the mainstream discourse. There were even times when people found reasons for hope in the political-economic system. Indeed in that humble, pre-thuggery era, when the country celebrated its 50th Independence Day in 1997, there was even a Union government-funded television programme which highlighted the Indian public’s poor standards of living, implicitly calling into question the national climate of celebration. This was the 16-episode documentary series A Tryst with the People of India, hosted by Saeed Akhtar Mirza. Mirza and his team travelled the length and breadth of India for several months, asking people what – if at all – independence meant to them, and the result was this brilliant series which remains refreshing and eye-opening even today.As the first episode begins, we hear Mirza express these thoughts, standing pensively by the sea in Mumbai (from where the team began its all-India tour some time in April 1997): “It’s been 50 years, M. Nehru.. Fifty years. Where do your dreams, our dreams, stand today?… I made a resolve to travel all across India, to talk to ordinary Indians [aam hindustani], and to ask what 50 years of freedom means to them.”A mere two minutes into the episode, we meet the very first people the team interacted with: a group of city-based young folks vacationing in Khandala. Here’s a sampling of the off-hand remarks we hear those youngsters making in their brief interaction with Mirza’s team: In this country, we need a dictatorship, democracy won’t work. We need a Hitler in India. It should be like Saudi Arabia.. if anyone is doing something wrong, cut off his hand. Mirza later says of the interaction: “The opinions of these youthful individuals were truly frightening.. Somewhere behind their cheerful laughter and giggles there was a void, a barrenness.”The episode then leaps to Bijapur, Karnataka. At the shrine of a Sufi saint [here’s some more on the history of Sufis and Bijapur], we are shown a very young child being already burdened with responsibilities and work, and in the moment being compelled to take care of her own mother who is ill and apparently unable to move around. Mirza’s tender commentary later informs us: “In our travels, in every corner of India, we would constantly run into innumerable such elderly children (bujurg bacchhe).” That heart-rending phrase – elderly children – moved me immensely, and I instantly fell in love with the series, and with Mirza’s humanist commentary that does a stellar job of holding the whole series together.A 2018 The Indian Express article quotes Mirza saying that he “censored none of” what people told him during the shooting of the documentary. Perhaps the best example of this absence of censorship, of transparency and faithfulness to the Indian people and their beliefs, is when the series shows interviews of people living in places where Naxalite-Maoist groups were active. Mirza doesn’t tell us what he himself thought of Maoist groups, but we see that he was open to hearing from the villagers, and from people who did not share the disdain for these groups that urban elites had. At one point he wonders why mainstream media used the term “Naxal-infested” for those regions – mostly inhabited by Adivasi communities – but refrained from employing the word “infested” when speaking of communalism (which festered not in impoverished villages but in elite urban spaces).Then we hear a villager claim that “if the Naxalites hadn’t been there, we would have perished from hunger”. This lived experience, perhaps too dangerous to even think about in the thuggery-infested India of today, is faithfully conveyed by Mirza in the state-funded documentary program, and commendably was, it seems, broadcast uncensored on the government’s TV channel Doordarshan. It certainly now lives on, unfiltered, in the state broadcaster’s YouTube channel Prasar Bharati Archives, though perhaps not for long.One of the most refreshing aspects of A Tryst is how Saeed Mirza is non-judgemental and genuinely open in his interactions with the countless people he meets throughout India, and how his reflections and commentaries are measured, thoughtful, and mostly in the form of questions to the viewer instead of rigid pronouncements. This intellectual openness and humility is most clearly on display in a segment wherein we hear a northern Indian youth sitting comfortably in Kanyakumari and expressing nauseating assertions of Hindi language supremacy. Referring to the choice of many in southern India to speak with him either in English or in their own languages, we hear this person boldly proposing that everyone in India must speak Hindi, and that “apart from this language problem, the people here are very nice”. I was infuriated just listening to this blatant display of chauvinism on my screen, but Mirza, as well as others on his team, continue to be kind and friendly, propose their own counter-views, and move on.Unfortunately, throughout the series Saeed Mirza’s reflections, and a lot of the conversations, are in that regional language of Hindi interspersed with Urdu, without any English or other subtitles. So a lot of Indians will have to wait for subtitled episodes to be able to fully understand and enjoy the series. Besides, even though apparently Mirza and his team were not well-versed in the ways that caste and caste-based privilege work in India, the series still showcases the lives of and conversations with a large number of individuals and communities of Bahujan backgrounds: fisher-people, migrant labourers, farmers, forest-homed Adivasi people, factory workers, truck-drivers, tailors, etc. So we see Bahujans a lot in A Tryst, and also often hear from them. Nevertheless, when it comes to the central questions of the documentary – what national independence means to people and what people think about how India is doing – Bahujan voices do not make as much a mark as elite voices like those of government officers, army officers, Brahman pandits, professors, architects, IIM students, MBBS students, etc. This disparity comes out most starkly when on the one hand we see elite individuals provide lengthy commentaries on the state of the nation, and on the other hand Bahujan labourers and farmers plainly tell the film crew that they are unable to take even a few minutes off their backbreaking work to talk to them.All in all, A Tryst With the People of India is an excellent snapshot of the state of the nation (so to speak) in the late 1990s, together with its extraordinary, unapologetic diversity. The 16 remarkable episodes – in addition to a lot of raw footage deposited on the website pad dot ma – remain a phenomenal archive of the lives of Bahujan Indians and of the ideas of elite Indians. Lastly, the series is a refreshingly honest reflection on the Indian state and the powers that be, boldly relayed on national television to millions of Indians in the fiftieth year of independence.This Independence Day, then, is as good a day as any to re-acquaint ourselves with the dizzyingly numerous people, communities, and ways of life that form this great amalgam of a country. A Tryst offers us the hugely significant reminder that there was a time, just some years ago, when as a country we were super-comfortable with our multi-hued existence: a time when there existed a large number of Indians who subscribed to the commonsense belief that it would be plain awful and harmful to destroy a rainbow for the sake of One Nation One Colour.Kiran Kumbhar is a historian, teacher and former physician, currently affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.In his column ‘Past Forward’, Kumbhar provides us with a rear-view mirror that ensures we drive straight ahead.