The Diary from Aden
Vasudev Balwant Phadke gave up a clerk's desk in Pune, raised three hundred men in 1879, and wrote the notebook that both convicted and preserved him
Vasudev Balwant Phadke left the military accounts office at Pune after the famine of 1876 to 1878 and swore in an armed band of Ramoshi, Koli, Bhil and Dhangar men outside Loni on 20 February 1879. For five months they raided moneylenders and treasuries to fund a rising, until his best commander was shot and a bounty brought an informer. Taken on 20 July 1879 and transported to Aden, he died there on 17 February 1883, and the autobiography he wrote on the run became both the evidence against him and the first Marathi account of an armed rising.
The Second Part, Finished 25 April 1879
It is late April 1879, somewhere in the hills south of Pune. A man of thirty-three is sitting with a notebook on his knee. He has a price on his head. Police parties are working the villages around Shirur and Purandar looking for him, and he has slept in a different house almost every night for two months.
He is not writing orders. He is writing his life story. He finishes the second part of it on 25 April 1879, and in those pages he asks the people of India to forgive him, because he thinks he has failed.
His name is Vasudev Balwant Phadke. Not long before this he was a clerk in the military accounts office at Pune, a man with a salary, a desk and about fifteen years of service. He has given all of that up to raise an armed band in the Deccan, and he is now the most wanted man in the Bombay Presidency.
The notebook is the reason we know so much about him. It is also the reason he was sentenced. When the police finally took him, they took his writing too, and the Crown read his own account of his own rising aloud in court.
The Clerk Who Was Refused Leave
Phadke was born on 4 November 1845 at Shirdhon, a village in Panvel taluka of what is now Raigad district. He had little patience for school and a great deal for wrestling and horses. He came to Pune as a young man and took a clerk's job in the military accounts office, where he stayed about fifteen years.
Two things worked on him in those years, and both are documented.
The first was learning. He heard Mahadev Govind Ranade lecture on what British rule was doing to the Indian economy, the drain of money out of the country and the ruin of the countryside. He took lessons in wrestling and arms from Lahuji Salve, a Pune teacher of the martial arts. He helped start schools. He was one of the founders of the Poona Native Institution in 1860, the body that grew into the Maharashtra Education Society. He also ran a society in Pune for the education of young men.