Digital Freedom Museum
India@1947
The Journey to Freedom
Discover the People, Events, Movements and Sacrifices that Shaped Independent India.
Independence Day Special
Hoist the flag, take the pledge, and meet today's freedom fighter.
National Anthem
Jana Gana Mana — written by Rabindranath Tagore, adopted 24 January 1950. Standing duration: 52 seconds.
Public-domain recording, 52 seconds — the prescribed full rendition.
Jana-gana-mana-adhinayaka, jaya he
Bharata-bhagya-vidhata
Punjab-Sindhu-Gujarat-Maratha
Dravida-Utkala-Banga…
The Freedom Pledge
India is my country. All Indians are my brothers and sisters.
I love my country and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage. I shall always strive to be worthy of it.
I shall give my parents, teachers and all elders respect, and treat everyone with courtesy.
To my country and my people, I pledge my devotion. In their well-being and prosperity alone lies my happiness.
Countdown to Independence Day
Freedom Fighter of the Day
Faces of the Freedom Struggle
Eight among the many whose lives made 15 August 1947 possible.
Explore the Museum
Eleven galleries covering two centuries of resistance.
Interactive Independence Timeline
From the mango field at Plassey in 1757 to the midnight hour of 15 August 1947 — the events that carried India to freedom.
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Freedom Fighters Digital Museum
Profiles of the leaders, revolutionaries, women and tribal chiefs who fought for India's independence — and, at the foot of this page, a tribute to the millions whose names were never written down.
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Freedom Movements
Eight great currents of resistance — their objectives, leaders, key events and outcomes.
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State Contributions & Regional Struggles
Every part of India resisted, and each resisted differently. Select a state on the map, or explore the six regions.
Schematic tile map of India. Each tile is positioned by approximate geography — select one to read its story.
Historic Document Archive
The acts, resolutions, letters, trial records and speeches that carried the freedom struggle into law.
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Freedom Quiz
Four levels, five question types, and a badge for every milestone. Progress is saved in your browser.
This Day in Freedom History
Coming up in the calendar
Ask Freedom AI
An offline research assistant for the archive. Everything runs in your browser — no server, no tracking.
Independence Dashboard
What this archive holds, and what you have explored so far.
Fighters by category
Events by phase of the struggle
Fighters by region
Timeline density, 1750–1950
About India — How Freedom Was Won
The whole arc of the struggle in four phases, plus the symbols of the republic it created.
The National Flag
Adopted 22 July 1947. India saffron for renunciation and courage, white for truth and peace, India green for the soil and the life it carries, and the navy-blue Ashoka Chakra of twenty-four spokes for the wheel of dharma — because there is death in stagnation. Ratio 2:3. Design derived from Pingali Venkayya's Swaraj flag.
The Ashoka Chakra
Taken from the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath, third century BCE. Its twenty-four spokes are read as the twenty-four hours of the day — a nation that must keep moving. The Lion Capital itself became the State Emblem of India on 26 January 1950, with the motto Satyameva Jayate, truth alone triumphs.
Jana Gana Mana
Written by Rabindranath Tagore and first sung at the Calcutta Congress on 27 December 1911. The Constituent Assembly adopted its first stanza as the national anthem on 24 January 1950. Formal rendition: fifty-two seconds.
Vande Mataram
Written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1875 and published in Anandamath in 1882, it became the mobilising song of the Swadeshi movement — the words people shouted while being arrested. Adopted as the national song with status equal to the anthem.
How this archive was built
India@1947 is a static web application — HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript, with all content in JSON files under /data. There is no backend. It can be served from GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel or any static host, and it works offline once loaded.
Design constraint
The entire interface uses only the four colours of the Indian national flag: India saffron #FF9933, white #FFFFFF, India green #138808 and the navy blue of the Ashoka Chakra #000080. Depth is created with opacity of these same four colours rather than with greys.
Sources
- National Archives of India — Transfer of Power papers, AICC papers, INA records
- Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Publications Division, Government of India
- Constituent Assembly of India Debates, Parliament of India digital library
- UK Legislation Archive — Indian Independence Act 1947
- Wikimedia Commons and public-domain photographic collections for portraits and event images
Image attribution
All 39 freedom fighter images are real and licence-checked — public domain, Creative Commons or GODL-India — with the licence, credited author and source page recorded for each in assets/images/ATTRIBUTION.md and shown beneath every portrait.
They are not all photographs, and the archive says which is which. Twelve of these people died before photography was usable in India — Velu Nachiyar in 1796, Kittur Chennamma in 1829, Tirot Sing in 1835, the Murmu brothers, Mangal Pandey, Rani Lakshmibai, Tatya Tope. For them no authentic photograph exists, so an India Post commemorative stamp, a painting or a sculpture stands in its place and is captioned as such rather than presented as a likeness taken from life.
Images for events, documents, states and monuments are still generated tricolour plates, captioned INDIA@1947 · PLACEHOLDER — clearly a graphic, never a claimed historical image.
Disputed figures
Casualty estimates for 1857, Jallianwala Bagh, the Bengal famine and Partition are contested. This archive gives ranges and names the source of the count rather than asserting a single number.