From Russia, with Love
- Independent Ink
- Dec 10, 2025
- 8 min read
“It would be impossible,” Vereshchagin wrote, “to achieve the aim I have set myself, to give society a picture of war as it really is, by observing battles through binoculars from a comfortable distance. I have to feel and go through it myself. I have to participate in the attacks, storms, victories and defeats, experience the cold, disease and wounds. I must not be afraid to sacrifice my flesh and my blood, otherwise my pictures will mean nothing.”
By Raju Mansukhani in Gurgaon
The just-concluded visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to India in December 2025 witnessed the signing of high-powered defence and trade deals, with celebratory state banquets and meetings reaffirming India's friendship with Russia. To further underscore these deep and inspirational bonds, we turn the pages of history to come face to face with writers, revolutionaries, thinkers, painters and rebels in India for whom Russia was a source of inspiration, a North Pole of ideological commitment and faith when they battled the might of British imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"Russia holds an important position as a bridge between Europe and Asia. Her struggles in the cause of moral and social reform deserve the sympathies of the friends of religion in England, and, above all of the friends of the ryot in India, who see in Russia, the advocate of the principle of peasant proprietary which is beginning to operate now so much in the promotion of education and Bible education.” This perspective was shared by Reverend James Long in ‘Hindu Patriot’ on 6 June, 1864, in the aftermath of the indigo revolt which had convulsed Bengal.
Rev. Long suffered at the hands of British government for publishing an English version of Nil Darpan, written by Dinabandhu Mitra, the dramatist who was his student at the Christian Missionary Society school on Amherst Street in Calcutta. The report in ‘Hindu Patriot’ drew attention to the global impact of Nil Darpan, a play written in Bangla depicting the plight of indigo cultivators and the upsurge across Bengal against the East India Company officials. The play's English title was simply translated as 'Indigo Planting Mirror'.
Rev. Long wrote, “I was surprised to find that the Nil Darpan case was known to many in St Petersburgh, and I was asked about it in various quarters. Full information about it had been given in the German missionary periodicals... I saw one of them in St Petersburgh which had devoted forty octavo pages to the subject. I was asked lately to the house of a Russian gentleman, member of the Council of State: he invited to meet me some of the leading Russian nobles, who had been appointed by the Emperor to frame the laws for serf emancipation. We had a long and interesting conversation on the comparative state of the peasants in India and Russia.”
Rev. Long was questioned about the legal case, his harassment and imprisonment in the Nil Darpan case; he gave a full account to his Russian hosts. “When I had finished, they said the condition of the Bengal peasants was in various cases almost as bad as that of Russian serfs,” he wrote. ‘Hindu Patriot’ and its senior journalist, Harish Chandra Mukherjee, not only courageously supported indigo peasants but, like Rev. Long, faced humiliation and financial ruin fighting cases against the planters.
In fact, Harish Chandra’s words made history: “Bengal might well be proud of its peasantry. In no other country in the world is to be found in the tillers of the soil the virtues which the ryots of Bengal have so prominently displayed ever since the indigo agitation began… they have brought about a revolution inferior to none, in magnitude and importance, to that which has happened in the social history of any other country.”
Words that still ring true in contemporary India, and several social-political battles have driven home this truth.
The Kuka movement
From Bengal to Punjab may seem a long distance along the Gangetic belt, but it is to the peasantry of Punjab, and its leader Guru Ram Singh, to whom we now turn. In the aftermath of the great mutiny of 1857, also called the first war of independence, the people of Punjab began a movement against the new political order initiated by the British, after they had divided and subjugated the Punjab rulers. Called the Namdhari or Kuka movement, it called for boycott of everything which bore the stamp of the British government.
When Guru Ram Singh became its chief, he established alternate administrative machinery, inspiring young men to be trained in arms and be ready for rebellion. He made people aware of their serfdom and bondage; they actively propagated civil disobedience, sowing the seeds of struggles which were reaped in early 20th century.
One of the Kuka heroes is Gurucharan Singh who managed to reach Tashkhand in Russia (or Tashkent), bearing a letter from Guru Ram Singh. They were seeking Russian help to throw off the yoke of British imperialism.
The journey of Gurcharan Singh from the heartland of Punjab to Tashkhand would have been a death-defying, perilous, and tortuous one. The possible route via Kabul and Samarkand, skirting high mountain ranges, or traversing them while braving the weather, demonstrated his determination and the Kukas’ will to fight British imperialism.
What is equally baffling is that the letter he was carrying, appealing to the Russian Emperor for military help, was written in Gurmukhi!
From a Government of West Bengal publication titled, India’s struggle for freedom -- An album (1987) are reproduced the sketches of these valiant men and the letter for the Russia Emperor.
The Kuka rebellion was mercilessly put down by the British in 1871-72; rebels were blown up by tying them in front of cannons. (As in 1957). British officers called this brutal murder ‘mercy killing’.
The Russian connection emerges once again as it was the Russian traveller-artist, Vasily Vereshchagin, who, in the 1870s and 1880s, painted these historical scenes for posterity. Vereshchagin, born into a privileged, landowning family of Novgorod province in Russia, spent years learning, working, painting and exhibiting his works on historical events and personalities in Paris, St. Petersburg, Munich and across the sub-continent.
He faced hostile reactions and controversies were raised about paintings depicting executions, especially ‘Suppression of the Indian Revolt by the English’. His detractors argued that such executions had only occurred in the past, but even in the 1880s, it was a prevailing practice. Because of its photographic style, the painting appeared to present itself as an impartial record of a real event.
In 1887, Vereshchagin defended himself in The Magazine of Art by saying that if there were another rebellion then the British would use this method again. In Germany, Austria and even homeland Russia, his exhibitions were banned or castigated.
“It would be impossible,” Vereshchagin wrote, “to achieve the aim I have set myself, to give society a picture of war as it really is, by observing battles through binoculars from a comfortable distance. I have to feel and go through it myself. I have to participate in the attacks, storms, victories and defeats, experience the cold, disease and wounds. I must not be afraid to sacrifice my flesh and my blood, otherwise my pictures will mean nothing.”
These heart-felt words are often quoted till date.
In modern-day exhibitions, when ‘Suppression of the Indian Revolt by the English’ is displayed, its caption reads, “People of Russia feel proud of the fact that Russia was perhaps the only country in Europe where the ‘right’ of the British to possess and rule India was called into question, where the ‘good deeds’ of the colonies were disputed.”
In Russia, there were a series of articles and essays by eminent intellectuals like N.G. Chernyshevsky, N.A Dobrolyubov and V.G Belinsky which condemned British atrocities in crushing the 1857 revolt. Their sense of responsibility, political commitment and moral vision played a critical role in the development of Russian literature; they are referred to as ‘revolutionary democrats’.
In fact, Vereshchagin’s ‘Suppression of the Indian Revolt by the English’ has acquired an iconic status, becoming a generic image of those times. When eminent historican Amar Farooqui’s work, ‘The Colonial Subjugation of India’ was published in 2022, the ‘Suppression of the Indian Revolt by the English’ was gracing the cover of the meticulously-researched book of the former professor of history, Delhi University.
Rao Tula Ram
The Russian connection now features in, what is today, Haryana where rebel jagirdar Rao Tula Ram showed his mettle not only during the revolt of 1857, but during the British orgy of destruction underway in later years. “Along with three comrades, Rao Tula Ram secretly started for Russia, Iran, and Afghanistan to secure arms and money. The long journey broke his health and on 8 September, 1862, he died at Kabul. The Afghan government gave him a state funeral.
There is a memorial column in his honour at Kabul, India’s struggle for freedom - An album records the historical event, probably a one-of-its-kind in the history of our sub-continent.
Along with Rani Lakshmi Bai, Tantia Tope, Jwala Prasad, Maulvi Ahmedullah of Fyzabad, Begum Hazrat Mahal and Kunwar Singh, Rao Tula Ram graces the large pantheon of rebel leaders and revolutionaries whose sacrifices are exemplary in the face of British imperial ruthlessness and political manoeuvrings.
In the thick of the 1857 battles, Rao Tula Ram and his family of braves not only raised forces to fight in Delhi for Emperor Bahadur Shah, they supplied necessary commodities and thousands of wheat sacks. He set up a workshop in Rewari (now in Haryana) for manufacturing guns and ammunition too.
Indeed, it is a challenge in modern knowledge systems to understand mid-19th century metallurgy, ballistics and forging techniques existing in the region of Rewari, Alwar, Narnaul, and Sikar.
The region, currently being archaeologically discovered and identified as later Harappan city-sites, has been renowned for mines, metal-work, armour-making and sword smithy; though venturing into muskets, rifles and ammunition is altogether another ball game. Rao Tula Ram, in his fiery quest for ousting the British, was probably putting traditional furnaces and ironsmiths to work; undoubtedly, he deserves more gun-salutes for his indomitable courage than the number of guns produced by his men.
Ties with Russia deepened in 1905 when the Swadeshi Movement brought together diverse social-political personalities and ideologies: Swami Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita, the entire Tagore family, Aurobindo Ghosh, the Anusilan Samiti and Jugantar revolutionaries in Bengal, who were well-informed about upheavals in Russia in 1905; but, then, that is another story, another chapter in India’s freedom struggle that has to be recounted again and again.
When Bal Gangadhar Tilak was sentenced for sedition in 1908, there was general hartal in Bombay for six days. In faraway Switzerland, V.I. Lenin wrote, “India’s working-class has already become conscious and have started political mass struggle, Since this is so, the days of the Russian type of British Government in India are rapidly coming to an end.”
The end came decades later.
The 20-year treaty with Soviet Russia, signed by then prime minister Indira Gandhi and Russian first deputy PM, Andrei Gromyko, was celebrated in every household in India. Russia and its allies in East Europe stood like a rock with India during the India-Pakistan war in 1971, which led to the creation of Bangladesh and the splitting of Pakistan, which was backed by the US. Thousands of Pakistani army officers and soldiers were compelled to surrender to the victorious Indian army led by General Sam Manekshaw.
Meanwhile, new generations of leaders built their ties with Russia when MiG aircraft became integral to India's air defence. In the globalized 21st century, it is defense, energy, trade, and regional security which is dominating the centuries-old Indo-Russian friendship, but the selfless contribution, the inspiration of these revolutionaries and rebels, painters, writers and leaders can never be forgotten: it continues to be celebrated generation after generation.
Raju Mansukhani is a researcher-writer on history and heritage
issues; contributing columns and features in leading Indian and foreign newspapers, portals.