A chapter that cannot be complete

The chapter opens with words from Sri Aurobindo (1909): "Our ideal is that of Swaraj or absolute autonomy free from foreign control." Then it asks you to imagine something remarkable: a land of hundreds of languages, many faiths and countless customs, all of it challenging the most powerful empire in the world.

That is the story of India's road to freedom, and the chapter says it is "not just of battles and protests, but of ideas, dreams, and the courage to imagine a new nation".

Then it does something unusual for a textbook: it admits what it cannot do.

The full story would fill many books. The Indian Council of Historical Research published a five-volume Dictionary of Martyrs listing some 14,000 heroes and heroines. A martyr is someone killed or tortured for their beliefs.

Fourteen thousand, in five volumes, and those are only the ones recorded. This chapter can mention a handful.

So it says plainly: "freedom fighters not mentioned here are no less important than the few who illustrate our story."

And it makes one more point before beginning, which shapes everything that follows.

All those who fought for India's freedom shared the same goal, but they often disagreed, sometimes sharply, on how to reach it. Historians study those different approaches, and this chapter will show several of them disagreeing with one another.