History, as we know it and taught by NCERT, has proved to be one of the biggest sham ever pulled by the Congress governments and their communist allies since Independence. The facts that leftist as well as AMU lobby dictated the course curriculum has long been established before the eyes of common populace, however, the clarion calls for amending the historical injustices still remains unanswered to this very date. While the textbook progress has been abysmally slow, the true historical fact based movies have gone through a remarkable transformation in the Hindi film industry. Now, even before the leftists and Islamists could guilt trip Hindus for remembering legendary warrior, Chhattrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, another untold saga of a patriotic Indian is around the corner to tormant their troubled soul. We are talking about the untold saga of a patriotic lawyer who shook the Colonial British Empire, Chettur Sankaran Nair.
With the trailer of Kesari Chapter 2 making waves online, Indians are getting reminded of the long-forgotten heroes of India’s freedom movement. This time, Akshay Kumar dons the robes of Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, a fiery nationalist and eminent lawyer who took the British Empire head-on in court after the horrific Jallianwala Bagh massacre. But the real question people are asking is: “Who was C. Sankaran Nair?” And perhaps more importantly, why have we heard so little about him in our history books?
The Untold Saga of Chettur Sankaran Nair
Chettur Sankaran Nair was born in 1857 in the Palakkad district of Kerala. A brilliant mind, he rose rapidly in legal and political circles. Starting his career as a lawyer in the Madras High Court in 1880, Nair quickly gained recognition for his intellect, integrity, and oratorical skills. In 1897, he became the youngest President of the Indian National Congress, a position held by only the most influential nationalists of that era. While the Congress was still finding its footing, Nair brought both legal gravitas and political sharpness to its leadership.
In 1904, he was awarded the Companion of the Indian Empire (CIE) and knighted in 1912—titles he carried with grace but never let dilute his sense of duty to India. From 1908 to 1915, he served as a permanent judge in the Madras High Court. Later, as the only Indian member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, he was entrusted with the Education portfolio. But the event that changed everything for Nair and arguably the course of Indian nationalism was the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.
On April 13, 1919, thousands of Indians were gunned down without warning by Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer in Amritsar. The massacre sent shockwaves throughout India and the world. While Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood in protest, Chettur Sankaran Nair went a step further: he resigned from the Viceroy’s Executive Council, calling out the British Empire’s brutal repression.
He didn’t stop there. In 1922, Chettur Sankaran Nair published a searing indictment of British rule titled “Gandhi and Anarchy.” In the book, he criticized both the colonial government and the limitations of Gandhian methods, but most powerfully, he held Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, responsible for the massacre.
That accusation led to a landmark libel case in London, O’Dwyer v. Nair which forms the central theme of Kesari Chapter 2. Despite knowing the odds were stacked against him in a biased British court, Chettur Sankaran Nair refused to apologize. He lost the case and paid £500 in damages, but stood tall, never compromising his dignity or principles.
The sidelining of figures like C. Sankaran Nair isn’t accidental, it is a result of decades of historical curation dominated by a particular ideological lens, that is Islamo-Marxist historiography. These intellectual gatekeepers ensured that India’s freedom struggle was painted in monochrome, spotlighting only a few “acceptable” icons—mainly Gandhi and Nehru while systematically erasing or minimizing contributions of others, especially those who didn’t fit into their sanitized narrative.
Why else do we know every detail about Motilal Nehru’s wardrobe but not the fact that C. Sankaran Nair risked everything to challenge the Raj in a foreign court? This isn’t just academic negligence, it’s cultural vandalism. By obscuring the roles of revolutionaries, legal crusaders, and constitutionalists like Chettur Sankaran Nair, we deny ourselves a richer, more accurate understanding of India’s path to independence.
This isn’t just academic negligence, it’s cultural vandalism.
The new film Kesari Chapter 2, directed by Karan Singh Tyagi and based on the book The Case That Shook the Empire by Nair’s great-grandson Raghu Palat, aims to correct that imbalance. With a stellar cast including Akshay Kumar, R Madhavan, and Ananya Panday, the film not only dramatizes the libel trial in London but also captures the moral force of a man who stood for justice, even when it meant standing alone.
Chettur Sankaran Nair passed away in 1934, six years before Udham Singh avenged the Jallianwala Bagh massacre by assassinating Michael O’Dwyer in London. Uddham Singh’s story was told in a film titled Sardar Udham but it was a horrible misrepresentation of History, to say the least. Now, Chettur Sankaran Nair’s story takes center stage and rightly so, and hopefully it doesn’t turn out to be a travesty.
As India grapples with rediscovering its own past, it is time to call out the selective memory of mainstream reddish-green historians, who presented a half-truth as the full story. C. Sankaran Nair’s legacy reminds us that India’s freedom was not won by a handful of elites, but by countless patriots some loud, others quietly defiant, like Nair. It’s high time we give them the recognition they deserve.
