Small Acts of Amazing Courage takes place in a river town in southeastern India. It is 1919 and World War I has been over for six months. During the war, more than a million Indian men fought alongside the British. Rosalind’s father led a battalion of Indian soldiers, the Gurkha Rifles. Now that the war is over, the British in India have returned to their comfortable lives of servants and clubs.
The Indian people want their independence from Great Britain, and all across India there are demonstrations for freedom led by the Indian National Congress. The leader of the Congress is Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was trained as a lawyer and was outraged when the British passed legislation that allowed an Indian accused of a political act to be imprisoned without a jury trial.
He organized demonstrations against that law, but when British soldiers killed hundreds of the protesters, Gandhi chose to end the demonstrations and turned instead to the tactic of nonviolence as a means of fighting the British. He said, “Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind.”
Gandhi’s stubborn determination would be the banner under which the Indian people would finally gain their freedom.
Two things came together to make me want to write this book. The first thing is that during the years of struggle in the civil rights movement I participated in the nonviolent marches inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was a great admirer of Gandhi.
The second thing was a wonderful book by Vyvyen Brendon, Children of the Raj. It tells the story of the children of the British civil servants and army officers stationed in India. Many of those children were sent away to school in England at a very tender age. There they stayed for years with grandparents, aunts and uncles, or sometimes families that were strangers. I had just left a part of the country I loved, and I identified with their feelings of displacement and their longing for home.
I don’t know how it is for other writers, but for me two things had to come together for this story to become possible—to become dimensional. It’s as if I couldn’t trust just one thing, but I needed the reinforcement of the second thing; as if someone was looking over my shoulder and saying, “Now will you believe me?” When I read about the children of the Raj, I knew I had to write Small Acts of Amazing Courage.