Legends of the First War of Independence 150 years ago deserve to be recalled in these days of the global revival of Western-style neocolonialism.
Early British atrocity. Blowing away rebellious sepoys after tying them to cannons (May 21, 1857). From Sir Colin Campbell, `Narrative of the Indian Revolt from its Outbreak to the Capture of Lucknow', London, 1858.
ONE of the reasons why 1857 has endured in popular Indian memory is that a broad variety of people from all classes within the "nation in the making", a process going on till now, find some elements, and not necessarily the same ones, to empathise with. People's history, elite as well as folk, represents the rational analysis of the sedimentation of memory. This constructs a record of events that is passed on from one generation to another.
The Revolt started with Bengal Army sepoys, from the premier of the three Presidency British Indian armies, either leaving their cantonments for their homes in the middle Gangetic plains or when halted by their white officers, rising against them and their families in massacre and plunder before marching towards the traditional later Mughal capital of Delhi. Then segments of the civil population revolted in the towns and villages neighbouring the cantonments scattered from Bengal to the North West Frontier, Rajasthan and Central India. This escalated into brief mass wars of national liberation in 1857-1858, particularly in the then recently annexed Kingdom of Awadh, and also in some areas like Jhansi and Bhojpur, south of the Ganga in its middle reaches.
Depiction of `Native' barbarism against the colonialists. Images such as these - of British martyrdom at the hands of brutish `natives' who did not spare even women and children - deeply influenced public opinion in England.
The British Empire in India was rattled to its foundations. The war was certainly marked by gory events of anti-British violence. Many instances were also recorded of chivalrous Indian behaviour to fleeing `white' refugees. However, it was even more marked by draconic penal ordinances by the colonial authorities, suppression of press freedom, suspension of the rights of Indians to fair trials, summary hangings, blowing up of rebels from the mouths of cannons, and the infliction of inhuman torture on Indians for such trivial offences as turning their faces away from British troops marching in avenging columns down the roads.
This ferocity scoured deep into the colonial consciousness. Britons remembered 1857 for the massacre of a priest and women when Meerut mutineers captured the Red Fort. They recalled massacres in places like Bareilly or the agony of Sir Hugh Wheeler's group in Kanpur, or the murder of Britishers in Jhansi, all supposed to have been connived at by local notables who became leaders of the mutineers. Sob stories of first-hand experiences were followed by novelists rousing racist sentiments from the time of G.A. Henty's Illusion of Imperial Permanence until John Masters' Chronicles of the Crises of British Authority. Even today families seek a record of their great-grandparents' graves through the medium of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (Bacsa), which is said to be bringing a group of graveyard tourists this year on a trip down memory lane to 1857 sites.
Colonel Platt killed by mutineers at Mhow. (Charles Ball, `History of Indian Mutiny', Vol. I.)
The Indian nationalist reaction was initially mixed. Maulana Azad, the Education Minister in the centenary year, writing the introduction to Surendra Nath Sen's Eighteen Fifty-Seven, notes the terror inspired by imperialist repression, which stopped 19th century Indians from publishing their accounts. There were of course Indian loyalist accounts, most notably Syed Ahmed Khan's account. The young M.K. Gandhi studying law in London was asked by a Briton to read Kaye's History of the Sepoy War to understand the realities of British policy in India. Most members of the Bengali middle class (whether they joined the Indian Civil Service, like my own grandfather, Brajendranath De, or took a strongly anti-colonial position by the early 20th century such as the Brahmo journalist, Krishnakumar Mitra) recalled in their reminiscences how as children they had either been cooped up in an ancestral house in a narrow lane in Bhowanipur in south Calcutta, close to Fort William, or hidden in bushes behind a family house in Mymensingh district in East Bengal, fearing that sepoys might come to rampage through their towns. Average Bengalis, `Madrasis' or Punjabis before the Second World War disengaged themselves from lower class or petty feudal militancy.
NATIONALIST REVIVAL
By the early 20th century, critiques of imperialist actions that sought to recover the rebellious voice of 1857 began to appear. Its golden jubilee in 1907 was marked by a Maratha student in London, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who had grown up in Ratnagiri in the Konkan, close to the residence in exile of the last Burmese monarch Thibaw, seeking to enthuse feelings of patriotism against British oppression. His detailed counter-reading of Kaye and Forrest was entitled The Indian War of Independence, 1857. This presented only the point of view of the rebels, and lacked even Kaye's attempts, through footnoting, at magisterial impartiality. The book was promptly banned, Savarkar arrested on other counts of terrorism, and transported to the Andamans, like many Bengalis and Marathis implicated in anti-colonialism in those years. His subsequent shifts, already evident in the Hindu chauvinist tone of his book, towards propagating Hindutva fascism culminated in his involvement in the Gandhi murder trial.
However, read in many illegally published, different language translations, this book played a part in inspiring the generation of militant revolutionaries of the 1920s and the 1930s. Ultimately, Subhas Chandra Bose, the self-exiled Congress president, and his reorganised Azad Hind Fauj in South-East Asia during Japan's war against the British harped on these feelings in the anti-colonial aspect of Japan's war with the Anglo-American alliance, which was followed by the transfer of power and Independence.
1857 represents an entire gamut of legends in Indian national consciousness from which people have taken their pick. This variety of choice in historical memory represents inevitable contradiction in the processes of "Imagining India". Some points, however, are substantially correct. For one thing, the revolt was explicitly against alien authority, unprecedented in the subcontinental record. In the early 20th century, chauvinists conjured up fantasies of the early Mauryas and the early Guptas as leaders of revolt against Greek and Hun domination, on par with the revolts against British rule in different parts of India from Plassey in 1757 until 1947. The 1857 revolt was no such fantasy. The "Saka-Huna-dal Pathan-Mogol" who came to dominate India remained wedded to its body politic, and were not foreigners when civil revolts occurred against them on dynastic basis. The sepoy rebellions and local revolts spanned the subcontinent from the North West Frontier Province (with sepoys fleeing from their officers into the Pathan hills and even north to Yarkand in Xinjiang and Khokand in Ferghana, where a `Lahore Jemadar' was found leading an army), and places in the Punjab, all the way to Jalpaiguri, Dhaka and Chittagong, from where sepoys took refuge, and even in far-off Bhutan.
This Revolt is part of the heritage of Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as of India, in the same way as the Indian National Army and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment are part of their anti-colonial heritage as much as of ours.
Fear of Conversion
The British were the first to come to India for financial profit, to be enjoyed in pensioned old age back in their homes to the north-west of Europe. Their exploitation was economic, to the extent that India was immiserised in its finances, national income, and potentiality for development in the interest of England and Scotland. It was politically repressive - decision making until 1947 in its highest reaches vested with a herrenvolk (the English of which translates as `master race' and the Hindustani of which is `sahib log') who turned upper middle class Indians into modern imitations of Europeans, as Macaulay wanted, in all but the colour of their skins. And it was socially distorting to the extent that in the middle of the 19th century, the apogee of Christianisation of the globe by the Western bourgeoisie, the `white' ruling class proposed a strongly Christian culture of Protestant Evangelicalism through changes in the education and laws of the common people. This dismayed the traditional, customary allies of British rule.
It was noted at that time by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (acute contemporary observers from afar of British Indian policies) as well as by Sir J.W. Kaye, the British internal critic of Dalhousie's levelling administration, that it was the sepoys who keenly felt the loss of traditional privileges, such as in judicial immunity in cases within their native villages as well as in alien orders to leave India to fight Britain's wars in China, Burma (Myanmar) and Iran. On the other hand, the "Doctrine of Lapse" by which old Maratha sovereignties such as Nagpur, Satara, Kolhapur and Jhansi were subsumed into British dominion, and the last Peshwa's adopted son Nana Sahib's pension was forfeited, as well as the annexation of the British-allied territory of Awadh raised enemies for Dalhousie's successor Canning. Policies of modernisation and progress at the cost of tradition created the tinder that the cartridge controversy ignited. The cry took the shape of "customs and religion in danger". Muslims and Hindus alike felt endangered. The ones who took up arms were not just Muslim jehadis in Rohilkhand, Tonk or Hyderabad but many more with material and ideological interest at stake, the impoverished gentry and the old martial class.
Proclamation by Bakht Khan, the Commander-in-Chief of the rebel army in Delhi. He fears that the English may enter the town and exhorts Hindu and Muslim troops to fight the enemy with zeal. (National Archives of India, Collection No. 57, Serial No. 461, dated September 10, 1857.)
There were also working people, such as Muslim artisans, weavers and the like, Hindu archers (Pasis) who were traditional village guards, or the tumult-prone Gujjars in the north, who had little to lose but their chains. All listened to the call of dharma or deen. In this sense, Christians were the targets of those who rose in revolt. In a broader sense, Christianity was the symbol of intrusive colonialism, seen as a bourgeois crusade for market globalisation, much as it is being seen by neoconservatives today.
The Indian side cracked into a myriad of fractured interests. Where colonialism presented a united front, based on what the French historian Charles Moraze once called "bourgeois conquerance", the Indian aspect of the revolt represented lack of unity. The elements of unity represented by the ishiahars or proclamations, or the constitution of temporary councils set up by the rebel armies under the leadership of people like Bakht Khan or the Rohillas of Bareilly, are certainly worth studying, as scholars such as Iqbal Husain and Rajat Kanta Ray have emphasised recently. More important were the deep structures of patriotism represented by social forms of complementarity and symbiosis in the semi-feudal, proto-national sentiment in Awadh under the overlapping structures of village biradari, rural talukdari and Nawab-Wizarat, to which Rudrangshu Mukherjee had drawn attention as early as 1982. There was a certain primitive democratic format in these attempts to establish order within a world turned upside down.
Yet, these could not last, given the older traditions of clan dissension, caste differences, religious separation, despite all the grudging respect that the variety of sects of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had amongst each other. To these were added the geo-ethnic territorial variety of Indian political custom, which the first century of British imperialism had made no attempt to eradicate. Fighting as they did on fractured inner lines of communication to get to Delhi or to their own homes, the rebels were hemmed in by British-Indian control of the seaports and the hinterland whose middle classes remained supine.
Local Legends
The real significance of 1857 lies in spotlighting ways in which colonialism had impacted on different Indian regions in the previous century since Plassey. The Revolt of 1857 complemented the heritage of resistance to British aggrandisement, demonstrated by the Sikh Khalsa and the Talpur Mirs of Sindh in the 1840s, by the Afghans, the Burmese, and the Marathas in the previous 50 years, and by Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali in Mysore, and the Poligars further south, as well as by the tribal forces of Western Frontier Bengal in the 18th century. There were many uprisings in India in the 100 years from 1757. The sepoys were both their hammer and their ultimate anvil.
To say this is not to belittle the heroism and fortitude of the rebels themselves. Many images come to mind. Mangal Pandey, whether inflamed or not by midday bhang, rushing out singly at his masters on an open parade ground, calling on his laggard comrades "Bhenchodes, come out and fight" and refusing to crib on them before being hanged; the men, and indeed women, who fought before the walls of Delhi, in the face of adversaries pouring in from the Punjab, with even `hillmen' from the Himalayan foothills between Shimla and Nainital, who made the blood-crazed British sackers fight house-to-house for a week to retake old Delhi; the almost 80-year-old Bihari Thakur of Jagdishpur, Kunwar Singh, and his brother Amar Singh's remarkable expedition along the south bank of the Ganga, crossing over to Lucknow and Ayodhya, fighting their way back to their home for Kunwar Singh to die of his wounds while several British columns scoured and burnt down the villages in the jungles all around in search of him; and the almost mythical Lakshmi Bai leaving her fort on horseback with her adopted son strapped to her back and fighting three battles before being shot down outside Gwalior. These are the stuff of our modern legends; they deserve to be recalled in these days of the global revival of Western-style neocolonialism.
Barun De, vice-president, Asiatic Society, Kolkata, has recently published `Secularism at Bay: Uzbekistan at the turn of the Century" (Manohar, 2005). He was formerly founder-director, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, and Maulana Abul Kalam Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata.
