Beyond the screen: The untold stories of India’s revolutionaries

The descendants of the revolutionaries portrayed in the recently released Amazon Prime series reveal the personal sacrifices, family struggles and transnational networks that sustained India’s armed freedom struggle.

The series explores lesser-known episodes of India’s militant nationalist movement, including the Delhi Conspiracy Case of 1912, the transnational Indo-German Conspiracy (1914-1917), the Battle of Buribalam (1915) and the Rodda Company arms heist (1914)

12 min readSep 18, 2026 10:21 AM IST First published on: Sep 18, 2026 at 10:21 AM IST

Written by Shriya Dasgupta and Oyeshi Ganguly

On September 11, Amazon Prime released The Revolutionaries, a web series based on economist and historian Sanjeev Sanyal’s 2023 bestseller, Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom. The series explores lesser-known episodes of India’s militant nationalist movement, including the Delhi Conspiracy Case of 1912, the transnational Indo-German Conspiracy (1914-1917), the Battle of Buribalam (1915) and the Rodda Company arms heist (1914), bringing some of the forgotten revolutionaries and episodes back into public conversation.

Although these events unfolded in different parts of the country, they were connected by a broader network of revolutionaries spread across cities including Lahore, Amritsar, Ambala, Delhi, Dehradun, Benaras, Calcutta, Chandernagore and Balasore.

In an interview with the oral history project Agnijug Archive, Sanyal spoke about how both sides of his family had been involved in the freedom struggle, and how his book was, in part, an effort to document his family’s lesser-known history.