+- Forums (http://india-forum.com)
+-- Forum: Indian History & Culture (http://india-forum.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=3)
+--- Forum: Indian History (http://india-forum.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=10)
+--- Thread: First war of independence: 1857 (/showthread.php?tid=811)
First war of independence: 1857 - Guest - 08-05-2007
http://tinyurl.com/2k748t
Did Moscow play fraud on Marx?
Pre-1957 Left perspective on 1857 by Prof. Devendra Swarup
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 08-24-2007
The untold secret of THE GREAT INDIAN HOLOCAUST!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2155324,00.html
1857 mutiny revisited
L'Estaffette, French newspaper: "Intervene in favour of the Indians, launch all our squadrons on the seas, join our efforts with those of Russia against British India ...such is the only policy truly worthy of the glorious traditions of France."
India's secret history: 'A holocaust, one where millions disappeared...'
<span style='color:red'>
Author says British reprisals involved the killing of 10m, spread over 10 years</span>
Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi
Friday August 24, 2007
The Guardian
The battle of Cawnpore - the entire British garrison died at Cawnpore (now Kanpur), either in the battle or later massacred with women and children. Their deaths became a war cry for the British. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty
A controversial new history of the Indian Mutiny, which broke out 150 years ago and is acknowledged to have been the greatest challenge to any European power in the 19th century, claims that the British pursued a murderous decade-long campaign to wipe out millions of people who dared rise up against them.
In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an "untold holocaust" which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857. Britain was then the world's superpower but, says Misra, came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India.
Conventional histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order, claims Misra.
The author says he was surprised to find that the "balance book of history" could not say how many Indians were killed in the aftermath of 1857. This is remarkable, he says, given that in an age of empires, nothing less than the fate of the world hung in the balance.
"It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple and brutal. Indians who stood in their way were killed. But its scale has been kept a secret," Misra told the Guardian.
His calculations rest on three principal sources. Two are records pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed - either Islamic mujahideen or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving out the British.
The third source involves British labour force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a fifth and a third across vast swaths of India, which as one British official records was "on account of the undisputed display of British power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days - millions of wretches seemed to have died."
There is a macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. In one incident Misra recounts how 2m letters lay unopened in government warehouses, which, according to civil servants, showed "the kind of vengeance our boys must have wreaked on the abject Hindoos and Mohammadens, who killed our women and children."
Misra's casualty claims have been challenged in India and Britain. "It is very difficult to assess the extent of the reprisals simply because we cannot say for sure if some of these populations did not just leave a conflict zone rather than being killed," said Shabi Ahmad, head of the 1857 project at the Indian Council of Historical Research. "It could have been migration rather than murder that depopulated areas."
Many view exaggeration rather than deceit in Misra's calculations. A British historian, Saul David, author of The Indian Mutiny, said it was valid to count the death toll but reckoned that it ran into "hundreds of thousands".
"It looks like an overestimate. There were definitely famines that cost millions of lives, which were exacerbated by British ruthlessness. You don't need these figures or talk of holocausts to hammer imperialism. It has a pretty bad track record."
Others say Misra has done well to unearth anything in that period, when the British assiduously snuffed out Indian versions of history. "There appears a prolonged silence between 1860 and the end of the century where no native voices are heard. It is only now that these stories are being found and there is another side to the story," said Amar Farooqui, history professor at Delhi University. "In many ways books like Misra's and those of [William] Dalrymple show there is lots of material around. But you have to look for it."
What is not in doubt is that in 1857 Britain ruled much of the subcontinent in the name of the Bahadur Shah Zafar, the powerless poet-king improbably descended from Genghis Khan.
Neither is there much dispute over how events began: on May 10 Indian soldiers, both Muslim and Hindu, who were stationed in the central Indian town of Meerut revolted and killed their British officers before marching south to Delhi. The rebels proclaimed Zafar, then 82, emperor of Hindustan and hoisted a saffron flag above the Red Fort.
What follows in Misra's view was nothing short of the first war of Indian independence, a story of a people rising to throw off the imperial yoke. Critics say the intentions and motives were more muddled: a few sepoys misled into thinking the officers were threatening their religious traditions. In the end British rule prevailed for another 90 years.
Misra's analysis breaks new ground by claiming the fighting stretched across India rather than accepting it was localised around northern India. Misra says there were outbreaks of anti-British violence in southern Tamil Nadu, near the Himalayas, and bordering Burma. "It was a pan-Indian thing. No doubt."
Misra also claims that the uprisings did not die out until years after the original mutiny had fizzled away, countering the widely held view that the recapture of Delhi was the last important battle.
For many the fact that Indian historians debate 1857 from all angles is in itself a sign of a historical maturity. "You have to see this in the context of a new, more confident India," said Jon E Wilson, lecturer in south Asian history at King's College London. "India has a new relationship with 1857. In the 40s and 50s the rebellions were seen as an embarrassment. All that fighting, when Nehru and Gandhi preached nonviolence. But today 1857 is becoming part of the Indian national story. That is a big change."
What they said
Charles Dickens: "I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race."
Karl Marx: "The question is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton."
L'Estaffette, French newspaper: "Intervene in favour of the Indians, launch all our squadrons on the seas, join our efforts with those of Russia against British India ...such is the only policy truly worthy of the glorious traditions of France."
The Guardian: "We sincerely hope that the terrible lesson thus taught will never be forgotten ... We may rely on native bayonets, but they must be officered by Europeans."
First war of independence: 1857 - ramana - 08-25-2007
In the book Hyderbad by Narendre Luther, IAS, it is written that Salar jung the Prime Minster suppressed an uprising in the area of Sultan bazar at the Resdinecy(modern day Women's college).
For keeping the Nizam out of the war he got him the title of HEH and restored two provinces back to the Nizam.
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 08-29-2007
Correct north Indian bias in tourism, history books, says Durai Murugan
http://www.hindu.com/2007/08/28/stories/2007082851660300.htm
Special Correspondent
Minister releases âVellore Revolt 1806â at VIT University
â Photo: D. Gopalakrishnan
Chronicling history: PWD Minister Durai Murugan (fourth from right) releasing the book âVellore Revolt 1806â at a function at VIT University in Vellore on Monday. VITU Chancellor G. Viswanathan receives the first copy. (From left) V. Shamugasundaram, former Vice-Chancellor of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Sekar Viswanathan, Pro-Chancellor-1, VITU, book author K.A. Manikumar, G.V. Selvam, Pro-Chancellor-2, C. Gnanasekharan, Vellore ,MLA and R. Gandhi, Ranipet MLA, are in the picture.
VELLORE: Historians and authors of books on tourism should correct the north Indian bias and the neglect of Tamil Nadu and other south Indian states in books relating to history and tourism, Durai Murugan, Minister for Public Works Department and Law said on Monday.
Releasing the book, âVellore Revolt 1806â written by K.A. Manikumar, and published by VIT University, at a function held on the university campus here, Mr. Murugan was referring to the book â1,000 places to see in India before you dieâ, written by a foreigner, which he happened to read while travelling by flight from Madurai to Chennai recently. The book did not mention even one place in Tamil Nadu.
âAre not the Chithannavasal cave paintings in Pudukottai district, the Mamallapuram stone sculptures in Kancheepuram district and the Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur places worth seeing in India?â he asked.
The Minister said the total omission of Tamil Nadu in this book could be attributed to one or more of the following factors: âthat the author did not know anything about Tamil Nadu, that we had not projected Tamil Nadu adequately through books or other media, or due to some reason, the author had not done full justice to his effortâ.
He said a perusal of the book showed that it contained more information about places in north India than about south India.
Mr. Murugan said authorsof books on India had not gone south of the Ganges, with the result that most books on Indian history and tourism neglected south India.
He, therefore, requested historians and writers to correct this north Indian bias in books on history and tourism by adequately projecting the historically and culturally important places in Tamil Nadu.
He said the people of Vellore district themselves did not know about the historical significance of many places in the district. âHow many people know that the Chola king Raja Raja Cholan died in Brammadesam near Cheyyar in Tiruvannamalai district?â he asked.
Referring to the Vellore Revolt of 1806, he said a book published by the Tamil Nadu Textbook Society on the event had not properly projected the brave spirit of the native Indian soldiers when they revolted against the British Army officers of that time during the famous revolt that took place inside the fort.
He congratulated the VIT University, a technical university, on having brought out the book which dealt with history, with the objective of educating people about the historical event.
Translated version
G. Viswanathan, VITU Chancellor, who presided, said the University would get the book translated in Tamil by Mr. Manikumar. The university itself would release the book.
V. Shanmugasundaram, former Vice-Chancellor of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, and C. Gnanasekharan, Vellore MLA, urged the minister to take steps to get history rewritten in such a way that the Vellore Revolt of 1806 and not the Meerut Revolt of 1857 was recorded as the âFirst War of Independenceâ against the British rule in India. A.R. Venkatachalapathy, Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, and R. Gandhi, Ranipet MLA, spoke. G.V. Selvam, Pro-Chancellor-2, VITU, welcomed the gathering. Anand A. Samuel, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of VITU, proposed the vote of thanks.
First war of independence: 1857 - ramana - 08-30-2007
Two links:
1) 1857 and New Identity of Siklhs
2) Conference on New Prespectives of the Indian upRising of 1857
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 08-30-2007
MUTINY AT THE MARGINS:
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE INDIAN UPRISING OF 1857
Conference at Edinburgh University, 23rd-26th July 2007
ABSTRACTS
Seema Alavi [Jamia Milia Islamia] 'Travel and the nation: Maulana Jafer Thanesri as a mutiny convict'
This paper argues that the history of the mutiny has been largely written within the contours of the anti-colonial, secular-nation state. This has resulted in the marginalization of the histories of people who culled their sense of proto-nationalism from both a colonial as well as an Islamic discursive frame. Such omissions in the historiography of the mutiny and the struggle for freedom from British rule that followed have created the binaries of revivalist and reformist, cosmopolitan and religious, progressive and jihadi, communal and nationalist in the historical studies of the later period that was marked by high nationalism. This paper focuses on a mujahid- Maulana Jafer Thanesri- who was locked in the penal colony at the Andaman island for his activities during 1857. It discusses his writings to understand how his sense of belonging changed as a consequence of his movement from Thanesar, in Punjab, to the island, and his subsequent long stint at the penal colony. Thanesri¹s sense of Self was transformed as a consequence of his 1857 experience. Indeed 1857 concretised both his Islamic imaginary as well as defined more clearly the territorial contours of his proto-nation. This paper locates mujahids like Thanesri at the cusp of the Islamic and the Western colonial global to offer some rethink on the binaries of Ånationalist¹ and Åcommunalist¹ that color our understanding of nation and nationalism.
Clare Anderson [University of Warwick]: 'Sites of Provocation and Coalescence: jails as spaces of rebellion in 1857-8'
During the uprisings that swept across north India during 1857-8, rebels broke open over forty jails, often leaving them badly damaged or completely destroyed, and set loose over twenty thousand prisoners, most of whom subsequently slipped out of the purview of the colonial state. This paper will examine jail breaking during the mutiny-rebellion in order to probe the relationship between incarceration and the revolt. Drawing on hitherto untapped vernacular sources, I will argue that the mutiny-rebellion was a decisive moment in the history of Indian imprisonment, for it consolidated the colonial jail as a crucial site of provocation and coalescence concerning British interventions into cultural affairs. In examining closely Indian understandings of the relationship between the colonial jail and Indian society, the paper brings a new dimension to historiographical understandings of the nature, meaning and even trajectory of the revolt.
Jill Bender [Boston College]: 'Sir George Grey and the 1857 Indian Rebellion: the unmaking and making of an imperial career'
The Indian Revolt of 1857 has a central place in the history of the British Empire . Discussions of its impact have been largely confined to Britain and India , however, and its ramifications for other areas of the empire remain relatively unexplored. This paper examines the career of Sir George Grey between 1857 and 1868 and shows that the events of 1857 had a profound impact on imperial policy in the white settler colonies. As governor of the Cape Colony during the Indian uprising, Grey contributed regiments, horses, and artillery to British efforts in India . Additionally, he mobilized volunteers from the German Legion stationed in South Africa to serve in India , and sent 32 officers and 1,028 men without consulting London . In response to his independent actions, Grey was promptly recalled to England . In 1861, however, he was appointed governor of New Zealand , with the remit to improve relations between the Maori and the British settlers. Exploiting the fears that the events of 1857 had generated among the British and drawing on the supposed lessons of the Indian Rebellion, Grey responded to the Maori King movement with great force. Grey's career provides a window into the ways in which 1857 shaped imperial relations and governance.
Gautam Bhadra [Centre for Studies in Social Science, Calcutta]: 'What Constitutes a Margins or Margins? The politics of perception and the representation of power: the insurrection of 1857 in Kolhan' The essay would focus on an insurrectionary experience of 1857 in a âmarginal' area. It is necessary to define the very notion of âmargin' in historical writing; it ought to be contextual. A âmargin' may mean a sense of peripheral experience to a âcentre' of power evolving over time and space. A âmargin' also, at times, overlaps with boundary, pointing a space between a culture, a political formation and a geographical region. How Kolehan has been envisaged as a marginal area by the Company since the days of Wilkinson and been treated as border-region among the contending chiefdoms in Bengal and Bihar would be treated historically in a few introductory pages.
Margin stands in contrast with the center and at the same time interacts with it. One exists with the other. The paper would bring out this issue in the narrative of the insurrection in Kolehan. The chronology and the sequence of events would be an entry point to the analysis. The very battalions which crushed a mighty tribal revolt of the Santals between 1855 and 1857 began to be defiant as soon as the news of the rebellion of the 8 th and 7 th infantry reached their detachments at Hazaribagh 27 July, 1857. The onward march of Ramgarh Regiment had, however, different impacts on different tribal communities in Chotanagpur proper, Singbhum, Palamau and Sambalpur. The detachment at Chaibasa revolted as late as December 3 and opened up the dynastic politics at Chakradharpur. The Kols as a body revolted and disarmed the moving army but refused to hand them over to Dalton , the commissioner of Palamau. The whole edifice of the Wilkinson system, based on the chieftain-military alliance was at stake. Arjun Singh, the nominal leader, surrendered in 1859, but the local tribes continued their war as late as middle of 1861.
The narrative would show the shifting focus of the rebellion's center from Ranchi to Chaibasa. Again, the civil rebels had fought against the marching military insurgents; but, the popular upsurge, in a momentary political vacuum, totally rejected the system imposed by the Company since 1830s.
There was also assertion of community under the hierarchy of the Rajas, the Diwans and the Mankis. Wilkinson's definition of the community had been reworked in two definitive acts by the assertion of autonomy: (a) modification of village boundary and (b) the right to burn witches. Witch burning became, as if, the assertive power of the community over hierarchical politics. The ordinary villagers and landless tribes could sense their power only through such tales of violence and vengeance.
Finally, the restoration of authority by E.T. Dalton, narrated in the form of his great anthropological treatise, encapsulated all these fragments in a reconstruction of âmargin' firmly appended to an emerging administrative structure of a core area. The structure is going to be beneficial but, distant, confident in acquiring a distinct body of knowledge through counter-insurgency and counter-diplomacy. Both of them - a sense of triumph by the Centre and a defeat by the margins make â1857' just a year of an event in making the agency of Chotanagpur.
Shailendra Bhandare [Ashmolean Museum, Oxford:]'Rethinking the Revolt: Coinage in 1857-59'
The paper addresses instances of independent coinage by the rebels at Delhi , Lucknow and Jhansi (amongst a few other places) during the Mutiny years. It draws upon worthwhile numismatic material and complements it with hitherto unpublished archival material. It is a well-established fact that the 'Indian' side of historical evidence for the Mutiny years is often under-represented. Coins struck by the rebels are thus a welcome adjunct. Moreover, the coins shed important light on some aspects of the Mutiny which are historically debated upon.
Tithi Bhattacharya [Purdue University]: 'Haunting History: ghost Stories of and about 1857'
The events of 1857, like all major historical events, were both immediately historicized and left to the interpretative mercies of posterity. Chronological time played an important role in constituting winners and losers, to the extent that appellations  mutiny, war of independence- were as important as historical narratives. In real historical time 1857 was a defeat for the Indian side, a conclusive end. For the future nationalist historian, however, 1857 was a mere beginning. The telling of the events of
1857, then, raises iconic historiographic questions for the scholar about endings and beginnings. Does the rebellion end in 1858 or in 1947? Does 1857 reassert itself throughout the nationalist period? In other words does 1857 'haunt' the narrative of Indian nationalism?
This paper will look at this question in its most literal sense. We shall look at four ghost stories, all set in the context of the mutiny, two by British authors and the other two by Indians. If the mutiny is seen by later nationalists and historians as beyond temporal completion then ghosts are perhaps the best representatives of such a moment. Unfettered by spatial or chronological location ghosts can continually revisit the historic narrative till they are accorded a conclusion, a resting, of their choosing. Ghost stories of the mutiny thus play an important historiographic role. They signpost 'unrest' that go beyond the moment of the actual event. In this paper we will revisit the meaning and constitution of that unrest and try and understand ghosts as political visitations from an unfinished project that did not rest till it acquired narrative and historical peace.
Marina Carter & Crispin Bates [University of Edinburgh]: '1857, migration and the South Asian diaspora'
While there have been a number of studies of the native armies during British rule, particularly around the time of the uprising, few have devoted much space to a consideration of the prospects and predicament of âdisbanded' and âmutineer' sepoys in the aftermath of the revolt, aside from those leaders and convicted murderers who were killed or transported. The present paper assesses the responses of British Indian officials to the âproblem' of dealing with rebel sepoys, and considers the contrasting attitudes of a number of representatives of colonial interest groups to the question of reception of potential transportees. For many disbanded sepoys, and villagers in regions affected by the uprising, socio-economic dislocation resulting from the protracted struggles surrounding the insurgency may well have played as important a role as considerations of disaffection and fear of punishment, in the decision of unprecedented numbers of individuals and families to leave India for employment in the sugar producing colonies. Any consideration of the role of the uprising in fostering the marked increase in indentured migration is complicated, however, by the issue of overlapping geographies, in particular correlations between traditional regions of recruitment for overseas labour, and those severely affected by the military actions. This paper will suggest some avenues of further research for the elucidation of the role of migration in the 1857 uprising.
Gautam Chakravarty [Delhi University] 'Mutiny or War? Revisiting an old debate'
The problem of naming the events of 1857-59 is almost a commonplace in historical writings and not without reason, for the choice of a name implied an explanation of those events, and explanations were usually tied to political positions. By the early twentieth century, the debate had taken a form that endures to this day, as radical nationalists discovered a general state of âwar' in the events of 1857-59, while the apologists of empire preferred the suggestion of a local disturbance that the term âmutiny' evoked.
But this debate conceals more than it reveals. For one, the origins of the âmutiny or war' quarrel considerably antedates the nationalist and imperialist points of view, and may indeed be found within the terms of colonial governmentality. As I hope to show by drawing on several texts from 1857 to 1862, the rebellion brought into the open certain long-standing fissures within British policy on the nature and function of the East India Company's rule; fissures that would re-appear with certain modifications in the âmutiny or war' debate that began in the early twentieth century.
Secondly, the debate has tended to obscure the moot question: that of the constitutional relation between the two principals in the case: the Mughal emperor and the East India Company. Words such as âmutiny' or âwar' are not very helpful unless their legal context is first established; and, as I hope to show, once that context is established, the terms may acquire new, unexpected meanings.
Finally, the âmutiny or war' debate has tended to isolate the events of 1857-59 from other instances of the nineteenth-century colonial âsmall war', whether in China, Afghanistan, New Zealand, Jamaica or North Africa, all of which were moments of resistance against colonial domination, and shared certain tactical and strategic similarities. Theories of the âsmall war', which have appeared in recent decades in several guises, may perhaps yield some new tools for reviewing the rebellion.
Sudhir Chandra: '1857 and the Indian intelligentsia'
Indian public opinion in the later 19th century was significantly affected by 1857. Focusing on contemporary and near-contemporary educated Indian responses to that great happening, my presentation will highlight the underlying ambivalence of those responses. In the process, it will question the received historiographic view that until Savarkar's celebration of it as the first âWar of Indian Independence', 1857 was viewed, and condemned, by educated Indians - English-educated Indians, to be precise - as a mere mutiny/revolt cobbled together by disgruntled, backward-looking, vested interests.
Covering roughly three decades from the outbreak of 1857 to the early, supposedly âmendicancy' years of the Indian National Congress, the presentation will examine a few periodicals, political speeches and literary works to show that wide internal divergence characterised the immediate and near-immediate educated Indian response to 1857. Representing the best informed Indian opinion in the Bengal and Bombay Presidencies respectively, the Hindoo Patriot and the Rast Goftar covered those cataclysmic events in a way that made them the focal points of Anglo-Indian ire. So much so that the Friend of India , a prominent Anglo-Indian weekly, frenziedly described the Hindoo Patriot as âthe organ of the sepoys' and demanded stern action against it. At the same time, we have Surendranath Banerji who invoked the shade of Deo Narain Singh âto bear witness to his trials and sufferings, his gigantic exertions to crush out the seeds of rebellion and restore peace and order.'
Contemporary literature in different Indian languages bears testimony to the same divergence. There is, for instance, a poignant description in Sarasvatichandra , the foremost Gujarati novel of the period. âRajputi' is here shown to have been âwidowed' following the defeat of 1858. As against this, Radhacharan Goswami's Yamlok ki Yatra (Hindi) consigns the mutineers to a particularly horrifying hell.
These are complementary, not mutually opposed, responses. Hence their underlying ambivalence. This presentation will work out that ambivalence in the afterlife of 1857 as a factor in the making of Indian public opinion
Chhanda Chatterjee [Vishva Bharati University]: 'The Great Rebellion of 1857 and the Birth of a New Identity of the Sikhs of the Punjab'
The celebration of the hundred and fiftieth year of the outbreak of 1857 in India is bringing out many tales of Indian valour and heroism from all parts of India . Although strangulated and blown out of existence before long by the superior organization and judicious use of power by the English rulers, the Mutiny of 1857 has been canonized by the later generation of Indian historians as the first spark of a consciousness of nationalism. However, the Sikhs, who had indeed been the flower of the Indian military aristocracy and whose unflinching courage and heroic sacrifice at the altar of Muslim persecution adorned the annals of northern India immediately before the annexation of these regions by the British, are unable to join in this chorus. There is on the other hand, an unspoken assumption among later day historians that the Sikhs were the âquislings' who had actually helped the British to put out the uprising of the heartland of India and extend their rule on this land for another century. The response of the Sikhs to this allegation has so far been meek and subdued. In my paper therefore I have tried to take a fresh look at the turn of events in the Punjab during the fateful days of 1857 and the reaction of the Sikhs to this outbreak. The reverses of 1845-46 and 1849 in the hands of the âpurbiahs' (easterners) had not been taken kindly by the large and powerful army of the Sikhs. In 1857 they probably saw an opportunity to avenge this wrong. They must have resented the âsub-imperialism' of the heartland of India (spoken of by Andrew Major in his âReturn to Empire') on this last outpost of native freedom in the sub-continent. They therefore did not consider it unbecoming of themselves to respond positively to the twin opportunity of returning to their military glory and sagging finance (since the disbandment of 1849-50) by recruiting in large numbers to the British regiments. This drive for enlistment in the army gave rise to a renewed emphasis on their earlier military ethic and heroic tradition of martyrdom laid down by the Sikh Gurus. With the patronage of the ruling class, the Sikh reformist associations or Singh Sabhas later sophisticated these historical incidents to a cult of religion. Martial âsymbols' were made a part of Sikh identity and with the encouragement of the British military authorities Khalsa were encouraged to isolate themselves from the syncretist tendencies of Hinduism. Great interest was developed by ritualists in the Sikh past and Max Arthur Macauliffe claimed to have found several prophesies of the Sikh Gurus regarding the liberating role to be performed by the British on Sikh society and Sikh politics in days to come. 1857 in Sikh history thus stands for a reversal of the set back of 1849 and an opportunity to make a name for themselves as a great martial race once again in the theatre of history and to stamp the course of subsequent history with the mark of their strength and intelligence inspite of the slenderness of their numbers.
Vinayak Chaturvedi [University of California, Irvine]: "Long Live the Book, The Book is Dead!": The Life of V.D. Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence, 1857.
This paper will examine the international impact and reception of V.D. Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence , 1857. Savarkar originally wrote the book in Marathi to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1857 rebellions in India . Members of his political organization in London and Paris translated parts of the book into English and several vernacular languages. The original Marathi manuscript was lost in transit and only the translations remained. The book was first published in English in 1909 in Britain and was immediately banned by the government. Most copies of the first edition of the book were destroyed. Yet the book circulated widely in India and Europe as new editions and translations were published throughout the twentieth century. This paper will examine the impact of Savarkar's writings on 1857 on intellectuals across the political spectrum and the ways it inspired nationalists in the struggle for India 's independence. It will also discuss the transnational reception of Savarkar's writings, especially considering the German translation of the book in the 1940s. Finally, the paper will address the influence of Savarkar's history in present day India .
Mahmood Farooqui 'The Police in Delhi in 1857'
Urdu loota dariba loota loota maliwara
Gurwalon ki kothi luti, luta mandir sara
The Mutiny Documents, stored in the National Archives in India were were extricated and extracted from various sources in the city by the occupying English army â from the kotwali (police station), the secretariat, homes, spies, each one diligently marked and copied, sometimes in triplicate, stored as a monument for posterity, one of the great founding moments of the colonial archive. There are thousands of these documents stored in the National Archives, indexed in a published catalogue called the âMutiny Papers'. Most of them are in Shikasteh Urdu, some in Persian and a few in Urdu. For all the colonial intentionality motivating this extensive, meticulous and arduous classification, they provide one of the densest descriptions of a city at war and at work, of administration and anarchy, of deceit and desperation. Many of these documents have never even been seen by anyone.
The documents describe in great detail the functioning of the city during the siege. Petitions from ordinary citizens, shopkeepers, tenants, soldiers, sepoys and correspondence to and from the Kotwal form the mainstay of these documents. They allow us, then, to get a glimpse into the day to day functioning of the city, of administration, of the order and chaos during the period of the siege.
In a manner that is very familiar to contemporary Indians, we find the Delhi police being used as the strong arm of the state even as the fragile administrative authority is forced to acknowledge the power of public opinion. They are asked to commandeer labor and resources, to make forcible searches and arrests but without offending anyone! Overall the Police emerge as the lynchpin of the administrative system formed by the native army, in tow with the court and the Princes. The paper assesses the role of the police as it emerges through these documents.
Michael H. Fisher [Oberlin University] 'The Multiple Meanings of '1857' for Indians in Britain'
Some of the larger meanings of the conflict of 1857 were its effects on Indians in Britain . For those thousands of Indians of all classes already present there, the news of this conflict profoundly altered their positions in British society. Working class Indian servants and seamen found themselves assaulted verbally and otherwise by passers-by on the street as "Johnny Sepoy." Their hitherto relatively easy relationships with British men and women of their own economic class became charged with racial and sexual tensions as lurid rumors and reports flooded London about sepoy atrocities against British men, women, and children. Similarly, Indian elites in Britain found their loyalty to the British Queen questioned. For example, the huge delegation from the deposed King of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah-which included his mother, a brother, and a son, having come to plead for his restoration-had to alter their mission fundamentally. As the news of the fighting began to shape British policies, this Awadh delegation suddenly proposed that Wajid Ali Shah be released from prison in Calcutta and put in charge of a British army that would reconquer north India in the name of Queen Victoria.
From 1857 onward, indeed, British attitudes toward Indians generally, including toward Indians in Britain , shifted. British racial theory altered, based on 1857 and other colonial conflicts in New Zealand and Jamaica . Hence, both immediately and subsequently, the events of 1857 reshaped and continue to affect the meaning of being South Asian in Britain .
Charu Gupta [NML Research Fellow]: 'Condemnation And Commemoration: (En)Gendering Dalit Narratives Of 1857'
The aim of this paper is two-fold. The first is to examine ways in which contemporary debates and popular Hindi Dalit literature of north India has dealt with the role of Dalits in the freedom struggles of the colonial period, particularly the revolt of 1857. And the second is to relate it specifically to the role of feudal patriarchies in 1857 on the one hand, and the representation and participation of Dalit women in the revolt on the other. In the process, the paper wishes to interrogate conventional and historical writings on 1857, mainstream portrayals of Dalit women, and the contradictory Dalit perceptions of the revolt.
The recent festivities around 1857 have invoked heated debates regarding the participation and role of Dalits in it. We mainly get two responses. On the one hand, there is deep condemnation of 1857 from a Dalit perspective, and on the other, there is an assertion and commemoration of Dalit participation in it. However, both these versions of 1857 signify the genealogies of ambiguous nationalisms, where the Dalits, from their own standpoint, play with the restrictive lineages of historical pasts. Their politics of exclusion and inclusion, censure and celebration shows that they wish to be a part of the nation and yet cannot be. They also construct their present positions depending on existing structures and needs. While differing in their readings, they together represent alternative accounts of 1857, converging histories, myths, realities and retelling of the pasts.
These literatures are crucial also to examine 1857 from a gendered lens. While there is an attack on feudal patriarchy, recognised as a critical characteristic of 1857, there are also Dalit female heroic icons -- some constructed, some exaggerated, some discovered -- like Jhalkari Bai of the Kori caste, Uda Devi, a Pasi, Avanti Bai, a Lodhi, Mahabiri Devi, a Bhangi, and Asha Devi, a Gurjari, who have become the symbols of bravery of particular Dalit castes and ultimately of all Dalits in 1857.
These condemnatory and inspirational Dalit histories of 1857 are not just reinventions/appropriations of the past. They also reveal how Dalit standpoints can challenge partial/prejudiced textual and academic narratives of 1857. They also provided gendered accounts of histories from below, which reach towards their own âreality'. Together they represent counter-histories of 1857.
Hasan, Farhat [Aligarh University]: 'The Mutiny As A Clash Of Civilizations: Representation Of The English (Angrez) In Vernacular Press'
Awaiting abstract
Jan Peter Hartung [University of Bonn]: 'Abused Rationality? â On the Role of ma?quli -Scholars in the Events of 1857/8'
This paper investigates the involvement of the famed philosophers and logicians of the so-called â School of Khayrabad â in the uprising of 1857/8 in Delhi and Awadh. It will challenge to prevailing perception that the rational Islamic sciences ( ma?qulat ), centred on philosophy and dialectical theology and based on a solid adoption of the Aristotelian logic, essentially worked for social and political integration. From the examples of leading representatives of the Khayrabadi-tradition, namely Fadl-i Imam Khayrabadi, his son Fadl-i Haqq, and the former's pupil Sadr ad-Din Dihlawi Azurda, it will be shown that the rationalist inclination of these scholars helped to serve both ends, depending on the respective political circumstances. Thus, their positions before and after the uprising cannot be separated from their perspective on legitimate political sovereignty which, as it will be shown in the paper, contradicted the perception of the EIC on that matter.
Carol Henderson [Rutgers University]: 'Spatial Memorialising of Atrocity in 1857: Memories, Traces and Silences in Ethnography'
The memorialization of conflict in landscape seen as a social process incorporates multiple and often competing discourses of events, the silencing and reconstitution of memory. British spatial memorial practices of the war of 1857, while drawing on familiar idioms of the metropole, faced their colonial subjects in the colonial setting and the-then highly contested meanings of these events . Over time, this discourse of memory assumes its hegemonic posture of glorification of imperial rule, of narratives of âgoodâ colonial subjects, and of an event largely recalled as a mutiny of troops rather than as a far-ranging and complex event.
The spatial memorial practices of their Indian opponents, in contrast, produce a counter-discourse. Memorial practices drew on Indianâoften specifically localâidioms and, as such, appear to have been largely invisible to their colonial rulers. Although historical evidence on the trajectories of social meaning associated with these memorials is scant, owing to their rural and non-elite settings, these discourses of memory focus upon defense of homeland, remembrance of atrocity, andâdare one suggest?âa pan-Indian identity.
Aziz Husain [Jamia Milia Islamia]: '1857 as reflected in Persian and Urdu documents'
A collection of Mutiny papers in Persian and Urdu is available in National Archives of India, New Delhi and Bhopal , U.P. State Archives, Lucknow and Allahabad , Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner , M.P. State Archives, Bhopal , Bihar State Archives, Patna , Maulana Azad Library, AMU, Aligarh . These documents are written in shikasta and nastaliq script. These documents may be around sixty thousand. Out of these I have consulted few documents because medieval Indian historians who know Persian considered the 1857 period beyond the realm of their specialization and post â 1857, historians of modern Indian history have little or no knowledge of Persian. This is a limitation in our historiography in the 21 st century.
The Sindhia of Gwalior, the Holkar of Indore, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Raja of Jodhpur and Mewar, Nawab of Bhopal, Rampur and Tonk, Raja of Patiala, Nabha, and Jind and other Sikh chieftains of Punjab , the Maharaja of Kashmir, and many other Hindu and Muslim taluqdars and zamindars supported British. But it appears from the Persian and Urdu documents that people of Rajasthan, Punjab, Malwa, Bhopal , Rampur , Jammu , Rampur Aligarh, Najibabad opposed the imperial authority. There are instances where they did not carry out the orders of their respective Rajas and the Nawabs.
Persian and Urdu poetry also played an important role in the revolt of 1857. Verses of contemporary Persian and Urdu poets and their letters are an important source to study various aspects of 1857. Ghazi Muhammed Amin Amrohvi wrote a masnavi relating to 1857 and about the atrocities of British army on Indians. When British officials received reports that some poets also encouraged Indians through their poetry, those poets were arrested and hanged. Shaikh Ghulam Nabi a resident of Amroha submitted an application dated 12 th July, 1857 to Bahadur Shah that he was serving in British army at Benaras but he had left the service and wanted to serve him. Similar application was also submitted by Ghulam Abbas a resident of Muzaffar Nagar and there is a document dated 12 th Zilhijja, is having a list of thirty eight Muslim residents of Amroha, who joined the service of Bahadur Shah. That is why, we see that even when Bahadur Shah left the Red fort and British army became successful in demolishing Kashmiri gate, so Jiwan Lal, an eye witness to the events writes in his Roznamcha that âa distance of six farlang from Kashmiri gate to Red fort was covered by the British forces after a gap of five days.â I am going to examine Mutiny papers in Persian and Urdu languages in this paper because it provides new information on Mutiny.
Dirk Kolff [Leiden University (NIAS)]: ' Rumours of the Company's collapse: the mood of Dasahra 1824 in the Panjab and Hindustan'
The paper attempts to understand a number of activist movements in Northern and Western India that were triggered, in September/October 1824, by the news of the recent defeat of the Company at Ramu in Burma and the, partly correct, rumour that all its North Indian troops were retreating to Calcutta to ward off a Burtmese attack on that city. The generally held conviction that the end of the Company's military occupation was imminent, rendered visible a series of political and cultural aspirations, especially in the region that would later be the scene of the 1857 uprising. Labelled either as "incredible follies" or "insurrections" by the British, these movements, it is argued, should be perceived as measures, not illogical in the circumstances, taken to cope with the emergency of the sudden evaporation of British power. Some of the initiatives taken were in the nature of state formation, the restoration of a ruling Gujar lineage or of Jat regional clan dominance, whereas others had to do with the prevention of cow slaughter in the service of the vorqacity of the British barracks, or took the form of millenarian revivalism, for instance inspired by a sadhu in the Panjab "who would be king" or a dakoit sardar in the Doab who announced that he would soon seat himself on the throne at Delhi.
The episode offers a rare window on the various scenarios that asserted themselves in North India as soon as the collapse of the colonial state appeared to call for a return to normal political and cultural entrepreneurship.
Rosie Llewellyn Jones: The âOther' Victims of 1857
Among the avalanche of books and memoirs produced after the Mutiny by British survivors caught up in it, are clues to those who did not, or could not, express their own views. The wife of the Chaplain at Lucknow , describing the cheerful behaviour of British sergeants' wives wrote: 'It is wonderful how little that class of people seem to feel things that would almost kill a lady.' Voices of the 'other ranks' are largely silent. Yet there are accounts by Government-employed Indians, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, Armenians, and poor Britons which are buried in the Political Consultations and Home Department records in the National Archives, Delhi and the British Library, London . This is not where we would expect to find them, because the statements or narratives of such people are not, in themselves, political. They were recorded because they threw light on particular events during the mutiny, or because the writers needed assistance from Government officials. Using these records, this paper will attempt to reconstruct how the mutiny and its aftermath affected people whose stories are not part of mainstream mutiny history. The role of the Prize Agents will be described, and 'Rewards and Punishments' by the British Government considered.
Thomas Lloyd [University of Edinburgh]: âThuggee' and the Margins of the State in Early Nineteenth-Century Colonial India
The central concern of this paper is the âthuggee' phenomenon of early nineteenth-century colonial India . British officials initially understood âthuggee' to be a peculiar form of brigandage confined to the Ceded and Conquered Provinces of the north-western Gangetic plain. They distinguished it from other forms of banditry by its practitioners' combined use of eloquent deception to lure, and swift strangulation, to dispatch, travellers passing through the region. Around two decades after these initial colonial encounters, an ambitious but unfulfilled district officer, William Sleeman, and his immediate superior in the Company's political department, Francis Smith, launched a wide-ranging, quasi-military campaign to suppress âthuggee' in India, emanating from the non-regulation Sagar and Narmada Territories in western central India. It was in the process of garnering support for this initiative from senior administratorsâmost notably George Swinton, the Company's chief secretaryâthat âthuggee' first took shape in colonial imaginations as the fanatical murder-cult that has become the stuff of colonial lore. By the early 1830s, âthuggee' had been re-figured as an ancient practice that perpetuated itself through the careful induction of young initiates into a sociology of devotional bloodlust, practiced to appease the goddess Kali. It was no longer believed to be rooted in one particular locality, let alone connected to specific social, economic or political conditions. âThugs' were now thought to be ruthless, unrepentant serial killers with a unique subculture that included ritual rites and a private language, and valorised their lifestyle as both seductively footloose and gloriously sanctimonious. For Sleeman, writing in 1830, the suppression of âthuggee' was nothing less than the âduty of the supreme Government', which intimated not only his confidence in the solidity and moral authority of British rule, but also his sense of the haplessness of the indigenous population. To introduce a recurrent theme in the colonial discourse on âthuggee', this reflected a double glory onto Sleeman and the staff of his subsequently created âThuggee Department': first, as the élite corps of officers who had successfully unravelled the âthuggee' conspiracy and brought its perpetrators to âjustice'; second, as the saviours of hitherto prone indigenes, now liberated from the spectral depredations of this lurking menace.
From the prevailing colonial perspective of the early-nineteenth-century then, the âthugs' can be viewed as the marginal mutineers par excellence of pre-1857 â India '. Geographically, they were encountered on the western periphery of the Company's northern territorial possessions and administrative jurisdictions. Politically, socially and economically, they defied categorization (even though âtribe' and âcaste' were then used with far more fluidity and trepidation than in subsequent colonial ethnography and policy), evidently enjoying disturbingly wide-ranging mobility, apparently capable of enacting a kaleidoscopic array of identities in order to dupe their victims, and operating with impunity thanks to shady deals with corrupt landowners. Culturally, they were eclectic and idiosyncratic: to Sleeman's fascination and astonishment, âboth' Hindus and Muslims were known to have belonged to âthug' gangs; their âgoddess', Kali, appeared to be interchangeable with other, less-known indigenous deities (both âpopular' and âHindu'); and they conversed with one another in a secret cant called Ramasee . For the triumvirate of Sleeman, Smith, and Swinton, formulating plans to suppress âthuggee' in 1830, these marginal characteristics amounted to both an unprecedented challenge to existing colonial âpolicing' and a formidable affront to British authority: âthug' attacks rarely, if ever, left behind the requisite forensic evidence or witnesses needed to secure individual convictions for specific criminal acts of robbery and murder, while the existence of the phenomenon in British-administered territory exposed the limitations of colonial control over both civil society and revenue management. Accordingly, âthuggee' was treated as an exceptional case in respect to the extant colonial criminal law and trial procedure. Concomitantly, the campaign to suppress it extended the boundaries of colonial legal power in the subcontinent. The âexceptions' made to prosecute âthugs' tested and came to shape new rules: the catch-all legal innovations used were retained beyond the 1830s and were reformed and redeployed throughout the nineteenth century as weapons against analogous âcollective' acts of criminality.
The anti-thuggee campaign therefore revealed both fractures in British rule in India and the lengths that the Company's state-builders were prepared to go to heal them. Colonial administrators' priority of maintaining order even if it compromised the âdue' process of law, conviction that British legal practice could not be translated onto the terrain of âIndian' criminality, inclination to de-legitimize unrest or âcriminality' as the fomenting of a minority's religiously-inspired, a-political urges, and trumpeting of the righteousness of British-led suppression of them, were not new to India in 1857; neither were desperate manifestations of indigenous attempts to overcome the structural hardship generated by the Company's land-revenue settlements and enforcement of rent collection, nor the novel alliances formed in rural societies to circumvent or alleviate the pressures brought about by them. The margins of peripheral Indian societies, economies and polities, and of the British colonial state-building, law-making and policing concerns therefore yield rich histories for this conference's reconsideration of the 1857 âmutiny'.
Andrea Major [University of Edinburgh]: 'The Hazards of Interference: British fears of rebellion and sati as a potential site of conflict, 1829-1857'
Despite warnings by revisionist historians such as Eric Stokes that attempts to understand popular unrest in 1857 must âtouch upon a deeper level than the vague disturbance of the popular mind by fears for religion and caste, springing from British interference with customs like widow burning and widow remarriage or British enforcement of the intermingling of castes through common messing in gaols and the common carriage of passengers by the railway' [1] British explanations of 1857 have continued to rely heavily on Victorian assumptions about the hazards of British interference with Indian âsuperstition'. Such interpretations are deeply embedded within pre-existing orientalist discourses about the centrality of religion in Indian life, as well as a post 1857 agenda that sought to delegitimise the uprising by presenting it as âirrational' religious fanaticism. Such an approach not only obfuscates the complex and diverse social, economic and political concerns that prompted the uprising, it obscures the real patterns of causality between specific religious issues and unrest.
This paper will explore British fears of rebellion that surrounded the prohibition of sati in 1829, arguing that the assumptions about the dangers of religious interference that solidified during the sati debate had a major impact on determining how the uprising of 1857 was interpreted. The prohibition of sati is frequently portrayed as one of the causes of Indian discontent in 1857 in British historiography, despite glaring contradictions and disjunctures between the two events. By exploring British experiences of sati as a site of contest between 1829 and 1857, this paper will suggest that sati was at best a marginal issue in the unrest of 1857 and the British appropriation of it a major causal factor reveals more about the assumptions and agendas that informed the construction of colonial discourses on 1857 than it does about the reality of the event.
[1] Stokes, E., The Peasant Armed: Indian Revolt of 1857 , (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Devadas Moodley [Greenwich University]: 'A Tale of Two Mutinies: Vellore, 1806 and Madras, 1809'
In studying mutiny and disorder in the early nineteenth century Madras army I have collected material on the sepoy mutiny at Vellore in 1806. Here I want to make a comparison with another mutiny, this time of British officers serving in Madras three years later. This would enable me to highlight issues of race, class and power which the previous publication left in abeyance. I will be examining the rhetoric of the officers and their supporters. Contemporary controversy highlighted the conciliatory actions of John Malcolm in reasoning with the officers as compared to the harsher treatment required by Sir George Barlow, Governor of Madras. Both these men were closely associated with Wellesley 's expansionist policies: their difference here was over discipline. How far can this be illuminated by applying Foucauldian concepts to the military sociology of the incipient Raj ? There is also some scope for examining gentry/middle class ideology and the corporate consciousness of the officer corps in India in this 1809 âwhite mutiny' which should prove instructive for the wider debates on empire in this period.
Projit B Mukharji [University of Southampton]: âDinna Ye Hear it?' Mutiny in the Voice of the British Subalterns
While a rich vein of scholarship has developed in the wake of Edward Said's intervention, which seeks to disaggregate the homogenised representations of colonised peoples, comparatively little has been done along similar lines for the colonizer. Colonial narratives after all are notorious for their homogenised depictions of both.
Nowhere is this trend towards homogenisation starker than in narratives of the âMutiny'. Yet, theoretically sophisticated recent scholarship on the subject continues mostly to speak of the âBritish imagination', as a unified, homogenous entity.
By relying mostly on Broadsheet Ballads held in the collections of the National Library of Scotland and the Bodelian Library, we intend to show that distinctions of class and nationality made significant differences to the way the Mutiny was memorialised and narrated. Pre-eminently it was not the sort of unabashed occasion for the articulation of a British nationalism, as is often thought. Instead Scottish and Irish ballads of the Mutiny often used it as an occasion for evoking Scottish and Irish nationalist sentiments. One such ballad for instance, started by recalling the Battle of Culloden, thus opening up ambiguities in its commitment to the British imperial project.
Gender too was articulated in a number of different ways and did not always conform to the depiction in the polite narratives studied by Jenny Sharpe, wherein women were persistently depicted as hapless victims designed to inspire outrage amongst the metropolitan public. Especially significant in this regard are the several âcross-dressing' ballads about the Mutiny. Not only do they depict women in active military roles, some folklore scholars such as Pauline Greenhill have also contended that cross-dressing ballads may have been a cipher for the depicting homosexual relations.
Much of these differences in depiction arise from the actual lived experiences of the balladeers. Coming from lower down the social scale than the authors of polite novels studied by Gautam Chakravarty, these balladeers often reflected the hardship of the white subalterns who fought in 1857. Poorly paid and without any pensions unless they were permanently maimed, they returned to poverty and humiliation at home. Many of the ballads directly raise these issues. Moreover the world of the white subaltern soldiery often included closer social contact with Indians, especially Indian women, with whom they often formed pseudo-marital alliances. Both the tragic circumstances of their return as well as the closer social contact with Indians thus combined to produce a perspective on the Mutiny that exhibited sufficient distance from the narratives of imperial war-mongering that are to be seen in the polite registers of the time.
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 08-30-2007
Rudolf Muhs [Royal Holloway London]: 'German views on the Indian mutiny'
Awaiting Abstract
Veena Naregal [IEG, New Delhi]: 'Merchant Networks and the Mutiny '
It has been argued that the political turmoil of 1857 did not remain confined to discontent in the British Indian Army, in fact, the uprising against the British enjoyed larger support,and even amounted to civil rebellion. The major events of 1857 in North India found an echo in various parts of Central,Western India and the Southern Maratha country.However, it is equally clear that the pattern of events outside of the Ganagetic plain differed significantly both in terms of scale and the response of ruling native princes. Evidence shows that two major regiments in the Bombay Army mutinied. Further information also suggests that merchant networks in the Bombay region as well as in Central India came under significant political pressure during this period for being suspected of transferring funds to Nanasaheb's camp. In this context, this paper will explore the available archival evidence to examine the role of important native groups such as merchant networks in Western and Central India, particularly as financial agents and purveyors of information about the Mutiny .
Alex Padamsee [University of Kent]: 'Muslim conspiracy and the state in the British colonial imagination in 1857'
This paper presents a revisionist account of the genesis and evolution of the British perception of Muslim âconspiracyâ in 1857. Based on the detailed study of Anglo-Indian memoirs, fiction, journalism, correspondence, and official accounts, I locate this perception among, initially, Indian Civil Service officers. I argue that it was not simply the result of a generalised and predictable âIslamophobia', but rather a profound and specific crisis over the British ruling ideology of secular neutrality. Using recent psychoanalytic and sociological theories on the formation and maintenance of ideologies, I suggest that conflicts within the predominantly Anglican Indian Civil Service over the proper relations of church and government in the colonial state engendered during the rebellion of 1857 a corporate social fantasy centred on Muslim âconspiracy'. The particular contours of this fantasy resulted in Anglo-Indian writings over the next fifty years in a complex and disturbing process of representational stigmatisation and segregation - a process that would play an important role in the development of the British predisposition towards accepting the principle of separate electorates.
Vijay Pinch [Wesleyan College]: 'Prostituting the Mutiny '
Prostitutes are believed to have taken an active role in prompting the mutinies of the 3rd Light Cavalry and the 20th Native Infantry at Meerut . They also were reported to have offered their services to the rebellions at Lucknow and Delhi . Depositions taken later in 1857-58 paint a different picture however: that prostitutes knew of the imminent uprising in Meerut and even took steps to warn those in authority -- though their warnings were not heeded. In order to shed light on the conflicting political trajectories of prostitutes during the Mutiny/Rebellion, and to probe the conflicted meanings ascribed to sex-work in Company north India , I examine criminal court records in the years leading up to 1857. The picture of prostitution and policing that emerges from these records, I argue, is one in which officials, police, and prostitutes were bound to one another through what may be termed a benevolent paternalism, but a benevolent paternalism that only makes sense in the context of changing attitudes toward the moral economy of enslavement and the rise of a modern discourse of freedom. These conclusions afford, as well, a glimpse of the social, economic, and cultural mechanisms by which late-Mughal 'courtesanship' evolved into Company 'common prostitution' by the mid nineteenth century.
Avril Powell [SOAS. London]: 'Marginal Muslims: maulawis , munsifs , munshis and others '
The paper will examine patterns of response to the events of 1857-58 among some Muslim civil servants employed in the subordinate services in the North-Western Provinces in positions such as munsif , sadr amin and deputy collector, and also as professors and teachers in the Anglo-Oriental colleges of the region, notably in Delhi, Agra and Bareilly. Many were of maulawi background and education, but unlike those âulama more directly associated with mosque and madrassa functions, whose involvements in 1857 have been examined previously, the responses of the âservice' category, with the exception of some well known figures such as Saiyid Ahmad Khan, have had little critical attention so far. The object will be to disaggregate this service class to chart and evaluate some specific perceptions of events and decisions on stances and involvement, before, during and in the aftermath of rebellion.
Satadru Sen [Queens College , City University of New York]: 'Mutiny's Children: Race, Childhood and Authority after Eighteen Fifty-Seven'
This paper examines the impact of the 1857 rebellion on âorphans' in British India . The war seriously altered the relationship between the British-Indian state and colonial children, triggering an interest (and an ideological investment) by the governing elites in institutions such as orphanages and reformatories. The children who entered these institutions were marginal twice over: once because they came from the margins of colonial society (as the children of subaltern whites, Eurasians, criminalized Indians, and aboriginal populations), and again because the spaces to which they were consigned were themselves located on a productive margin. The focus of the paper is on white and Eurasian children. The 'white narrative' of 1857 is remarkable for its obsession with the threatened Anglo-Indian family, including children in danger. It is not coincidental that the war was followed by a new visibility for white orphans, and eventually by Kim: the unparented white child gone native in the colony. This paper seeks to tie together the real, metaphorical and literary orphans that surfaced after 1857, and to ground them in the anxieties and mechanisms that were generated by the Mutiny.
Badri Tiwari Narayan [GB Pant Social Science Institute, Allahbad]: 'Identity and Narratives: Dalits and Memories of 1857'
A major project of inventing their own histories is going on among the various dalit communities of north India . These histories are helping the dalits demarginalize themselves and become a part of mainstream contemporary Indian life, strengthening their own identities, inculcating self-confidence, improving their present and carving out a future. They are circulated through popular booklets that are read and disseminated by the neo-literate dalit population. Political parties, especially the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is using them for mobilizing grass root dalits, helping them to demand social, economic and political privileged based on the history of injustice done to them cast as an alternative history. It subverts dominant political discourses by providing a strong basis for an alternative.
This alternative history is an existential necessity for the dalits to combat the everyday humiliation encountered through dominant Brahminical cultural narratives. It is created by weaving together stories found in religious Brahminical popular texts about dissenting lower caste characters, who are glorified as dalit heroes who fought against upper caste oppression and injustice. The stories of unsung dalit freedom fighters who have been transformed into local myths, are also included. The language used is also different from Standard Hindi since folk proverbs, idioms, and symbols, and also the grammar and vocabulary of local dialects, are used. These new histories may prove to be histories of the future of subaltern communities of South Asia .
Kim Wagner [University of Edinburgh]: 'The Protocols of Nena Sahib: the 1857-fantasy of Hermann Goedsche'
The Prussian author of historical romantic fiction, Hermann Goedsche (1815-1878), is today best known for having written the source for the anti-Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , which allegedly proved the existence of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy. Goedsche's mammoth novel Nena Sahib, oder: Die Empörung in Indien (â Nana Sahib, or: The Uprising in India ') written in 1858-59 under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe, is, however, entirely unknown outside the German-speaking world. This paper seeks to introduce this unique and fascinating work to a broader audience and to examine the context of Western fears of indigenous conspiracies as expressed in connection with the events of 1857. Written during the events, Nena Sahib offers a rare example of a Continental European perspective on 1857, which completely inverts the British literary representations while at the same borrowing heavily from the conventional repertoire of Orientalist stereotypes. In Goedsche's re-imagining of 1857, it is the British, described as the âTyrants of the Earth', who are the villains and the righteous uprising is instigated by the noble German, Greek and Irish protagonists of the novel who have all suffered at the hands of the British. The narrative framework and political worldview presented in the Protocols is also to be found in Nena Sahib with only minor alterations: The 1857 Uprising is a conspiracy partly instigated by the European agents of Louis Napoleon III of France , and partly by the thugs and despotic Indian rulers. Yet Nena Sahib is just the most extreme example of the manner in which the events of 1857 have been associated with an entire host of outlandish themes, such as religious conspiracies, thugs, secret oaths, human sacrifice, rape and torture. Taking Goedsche's novel as a point of departure it is thus possible to examine the colonial nightmares of the Western imagination in relation to 1857 more generally.
Benjamin Zachariah [University of Sheffield]: '1857 in the Nationalist Imagination'
This is a paper not on event-history, but of readings of a set of events that loomed large in the imagination of empire and colony alike. It is about that awkward space in the intersection of history and collective memory that is the setting up of national lieux de memoire, in Pierre Nora's phrase. The problem of how to read the Revolt of 1857 has been a long-standing one in the historiography of India . We recognise that 1857 in various forms of collective imagination has come to overshadow 1857 in 1857. The sparseness of event-centred literature could be because it is difficult to interpret 1857 with any degree of comfort if one is committed to the values of a modernising or a secular state. Events are embarrassing: was the British atrocity literature based even on the semblance of a hint of actual event-history? (British brutality, of course, is well documented and even celebrated as the appropriately and truly manly response to the cowardly natives.) And then there is the problem of placing 1857 in a narrative of national progress. The trouble with 1857 is that it inhabits inappropriable ground: a coalition of âbackward' elements drawn from the lower ranks of an army, elitist leaders, landowners and world-historically obsolete kings and princes were difficult to celebrate among âprogressives'. And Indian nationalists of various types all wished to see themselves as progressives, even those nationalists we now see as somewhat backward. Further problems surround the rebels' use of religious rhetoric to cement solidarity with their cause. The paper seeks to explore some of these questions with a view to highlighting some of the problems of the development of a historiography whose habitual alliances and allegiances must relate to some form of ânational' belonging.
Workshop:
âReporting 1857': the Indian Uprising and the British Media
Monday 23rd July, 2007, William Robertson Building,
George Square, University of Edinburgh
Esther Breitenbach [University of Edinburgh] Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in India : perspectives on the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Scottish Presbyterian missionary activity in India was initiated in the late 1820s with the establishment of Scottish Missionary Society and Church of Scotland missions in Bombay and Calcutta . The field of Scottish Presbyterian missionary endeavour in India continued to expand throughout the 19 th and into the 20 th century, with, after the Disruption of 1843, all three main Presbyterian denominations developing missionary work in a range of locations across the Indian sub-continent. In terms of numbers of Scottish missionaries India consistently attracted the biggest share, even though in the later 19 th century missionary activities in Central Africa had a higher public profile in Scotland . While overall numbers of missionaries were not large, the impact that they had in shaping perceptions of the experience of empire at home was considerable.
This paper will briefly outline the development of Scottish Presbyterian missionary activities in India from their inception in the late 1820s up to the period immediatedly following the events of the Mutiny of 1857. The paper will provide an account of the involvement in the events of the Mutiny of Scots missionaries and examine accounts of the Mutiny provided by missionaries, such as the reports by Alexander Duff published in the Edinburgh Witness. The paper will also examine contemporary debates about the role of missionaries in India and of religion in giving rise to the Mutiny. For example, a notable feature of the reaction of missionaries and missionary supporters to the Mutiny was the representation of the uprising as a sign of divine displeasure at the weakness of Christian evangelising in India , and at the exploitation of Indian wealth by the British administration in India . While at the time of the Mutiny itself there was a questioning of the role of missionaries and a recognition of the danger of offending the religious beliefs of Indian peoples, such doubts soon faded, and with the ending of the power of the East India Company following the Mutiny, resistance to the expansion of missionary activity was overcome. The paper will therefore also assess the impact of the Mutiny on subsequent Scottish Presbyterian missionary work, for example, attitudes towards the expansion of missionary work, modes of working, and the growing emphasis on work with women.
Andrea Major [University of Edinburgh] 'The Crescent Versus the Cross'? Missionary Experiences and Religious Interpretations of the Indian Uprising of 1857'
From the moment that insurrection swept across north India in the summer of 1857 until the present day, popular British accounts have sought to explain the uprising as a clash of religions. Proselytising activity, religious insensitivity, the curtailing of some religious practices and apprehensions of forced conversion have all been blamed for the revolt in British historiography. The reality of religious feeling in 1857 has, however, become entangled with justificatory colonial discourses that seek to transfer culpability for the uprising away from the central structures of British imperialism and represent it as irrational, fanatical and unfounded, in order to legitimise its brutal suppression and the eventual re-imposition of British rule. The assumption that fears about conversion underpinned the uprising, for example, led some to blame missionary activity for provoking unrest. Always marginal to the main infrastructure of the colonial state, the ambivalent relationship between missionaries and colonial authority meant that they represented a convenient scapegoat in 1857. This kind of hostility, combined with the challenges invoked by the widespread vilification of the Indian character that accompanied the atrocities of 1857-8, necessitated the reassertion and reconfiguration of the rationale for proselytising activity, as the missionary societies sought to both defend their presence in India and reconstruct an image of the âheathen' that made him culpable but ultimately redeemable.
This paper will use published and unpublished material from the London Missionary Society archive to explore the lived experiences of missionaries during 1857, the impact that this had on their conception of mission in India and the way in which their experience was reconstructed into a justificatory discourse for missionary activity by the LMS in Britain . In particular it will look at the extensive unpublished correspondence of missionaries on the field and compare this with the tightly edited extracts published for public consumption in the Missionary Magazine. A close reading of what was included and what was excluded from the public discourse will then be used to elucidate the processes and strategies by which the London Missionary Society sought to mediate public understanding of 1857 and its relation to mission activity and the impact that this had for future proselytising activity in the subcontinent.
Workshop:
The Military Aspects of 1857
Monday 23rd July, 2007, William Robertson Building,
George Square, University of Edinburgh
Gavin Rand [University of Greenwich] "Learning the Lessons of '57: reconstructing the imperial military after the rebellion"
The proposed paper examines the impacts of 1857 by exploring the various ways in which the imperial military responded to the rebellion. While 1857 is (quite properly) identified as a seminal moment for the imperial state, the impacts of the uprising on the Indian Army and its officers and men remain relatively obscure. Much of the extant historiography assumes that the pragmatic and reactive nature of post-1857 imperial policy was reflected in the apparently piecemeal reconstruction of the military - a process which is seen to have been determined largely by financial and strategic expediency. Only after the 1870s, in the face of the 'Russian threat', is the imperial military seen to adopt a more proactive administrative strategy. However, though the process of reconstruction was undoubtedly constrained - by, amongst other factors, pressures on the colonial exchequer, local strategic concerns, as well as contradictory readings of the rebellion itself - it is clear that the events of 1857 dominated imperial military practice in the two decades which follow the uprising. The imperative to understand the rebellion and thereby insulate the imperial state from another such uprising underscores a proliferation of official and non-official discourse on 1857. Charting colonial responses to the rebellion through official documents, military journals and private papers, I argue that the historiographical tendency to interpret this period as one of consolidation disguises the numerous transmissions between 1857 and the latter, more familiar policies of Roberts et al. While responses to the rebellion were often anodyne and contradictory, the increasingly technocratic terms in which military strategy was formulated in the final quarter of the century can be traced through the varied responses proffered in the aftermath of 1857. If the rebellion demonstrated the strategic utility of the railways and telegraph, it also served, in this sense, to bolster a 'techno-political' rendering of military administration. Although it was not until Roberts' administration that this shift was manifested in military policy, it is clear that 1857 was a key moment in the genesis of such practice. Locating the impacts of the uprising in this way not only revises our understandings of the rebellion (and its influence on the imperial military) but also helps to throw light upon the wider shifts which transformed colonial rule in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Dr. Kaushik Roy [Presidency College , Kolkata] Combat, Combat Motivation and the Construction of Identity
Combat, rightly says Carl Von Clausewitz, constitute the central component of warfare. However, the New Military History under the impact of social history and cultural studies ignore combat and construct warfare as a continuation of social discourse by other means. This paper tries to mesh the New Military History with the traditional approach of studying combat by making a case study of the Great Mutiny of 1857-58 in India . Modern scholarship on 1857 revolves round the debate whether the uprising was a nationalist or a popular movement or merely a military mutiny. One thing is clear. The British had to deploy a large military force which engaged the rebels both in conventional and low intensity conflicts for two and half years before Pax Britannica was established in north and central India . Modern scholarship seems oblivious of this issue. Colonial officers poured a lot of ink over the theme of British victory over the rebels but came up with racial-biological explanations. Several accounts of the participants also highlight the stereotypes about themselves and the negative images they had about the ânatives'. And these in the long run shaped construction of identities about both the colonizers and different communities among the colonized.
This paper is divided into three sections. The first section shows the brutalizing effect of warfare on both the British and different groups among the ârebels'. The next section deals with combat psychology. The million dollar question is why they fought? The essay deals with the âwill to combat' of the British, Sikhs and the Gurkhas allied with the East India Company. An attempt will be made to analyze the pre-combat and in-combat motivations of the âPandies', the ghazis , and the construction of negative stereotypes about them by their opponents. The role played by the inter-linked issues of religion and caste, the incentive of plunder and ideas of masculinity in motivating different groups to join the combat shall also be probed. This will also throw light on the nature of uprising. And the last section takes up the issue of self perception and identity creation of both the sahibs and the sepoys. The rise of gentlemen officers imbued with muscular Christianity and the âmartial races' from the periphery who replaced the high caste Hindu warriors of the plain are the principal themes that will be addressed. The British mobilization of the low castes in Awadh and Rajasthan will be looked into. Despite construction of a positive image about the marginal groups, why the Martial Race theorists refused to induct them into the post-Mutiny army is an issue that will be delved into. Since the sepoys and the sowars were mostly illiterate, they have left us with no memoirs or private papers. We have to depend on autobiographies of the British officers, their private papers at National Army Museum , London , military department files at Oriental and India Office Collection, unpublished regimental records and Foreign Secret Consultations at National Archives of India.
Gajendra Singh, [University of Edinburgh] Conceptualizing martialness: the ascription and re-ascription of martial identities in India from the mutinies of 1857 to the last days of the Raj
My PhD research is concerned with investigating the soldiering identities that were constructed by military and civil institutions in India , and how roles given definition to by pukka sahibs were actuated by ânative' Indian sipahis (soldiers) in unforeseen and often unwanted ways. Yet, although my research is focused largely on unravelling the means by which these identities were renegotiated by Indian soldiers and the dissent that accrued as a result, the paper I propose for this conference is concerned with charting the substance of what martialized identities were in colonial India from the perspective of the military establishment. For in much history written to date, the situation in colonial India is portrayed as one in which Indians were totally objectified by many Britishers in accordance with a static binarism of favoured martial races and condemned non-martial peoples, with there being no interchange between the two. I will argue, however, that this view can only be sustained if one relies solely on a reading of the high colonial literature of the period written for a lay British public, such as George MacMunn's The Martial Races of India , and Frederick Roberts' Forty-One Years in India , and that if one moves beyond these writings one is confronted with a far greater dynamism and fluctuation of the terms of who was and who wasn't of a soldierly class in India.
Thus, I will show that Sikh Jats once lauded for their stolidity in the face of the enemy, came to be condemned for their susceptibility to sedition; Pathans, once seen as a noble frontiersman, was looked upon in disgust for their sexual ambiguity; and how Dalit and Adivasi soldiers, previously viewed as an âuntouchable rabble', came in 1946 to be viewed as stalwarts of the British Raj. Moreover, I will show that these re-ascriptions of martialized identities in India were situated in the material realities of recruiters finding it difficult to obtain certain types of recruits and with instances of soldierly dissent and resistance.
Pritam Singh [Oxford Brooks University] Contesting Interpretation of the Sikh role in 1857
The argument of this paper is that the Indian nationalist historiography has wrongly portrayed Sikhs as collaborators of the British during the 1857 uprising. This paper attempts to show that the Sikh role during the uprising was determined by their perception of the role of the north Indians (Purbias) in the British annexation of Punjab in 1849. The paper will also discuss how 1849 and 1857 played an important role in the Sikh relationship with the colonial rule and with the Indian nationalist movement
Workshop:
Muslims and the State
Monday 23rd July, 2007, Conference Room,
David Hume Tower, George Square, University of Edinburgh
Ruby Lal [Emory University] In the Wake of Colonial Ascendancy: Rethinking Muslim Respectability
This paper considers questions of social reform and family in nineteenth century India . In the writing on these themes, so far, the category of reform, like that of woman (as in women's education), seems to float in a historically and sociologically empty space. It is the placement of these concepts within particular ideological and cultural discourses that I want to foreground in this presentation.
In the wake of colonial ascendancy, I shall argue, the reform we so insistently invoke was not for the transformation, but rather for the preservation of the family. This was a reform in which inherited notions of the family now get constituted, institutionalized, and remembered in new ways. I shall suggest that such ideas were being articulated not to conform to some âmodern' standard, but to refashion and to finesse what were thought of as being long established ways of life for continued sustenance and vibrancy in a new economic and political context. With all the earnest re-thinking and re-articulation, however, the self-conscious object of the âreformers' was to reproduce the family, the values and respectability that were supposedly handed down through the ages.
By taking illustrations from a couple of well known books of Muslim publicist Nazir Ahmad, among other âreformers', I shall argue that although the sharif woman appears to be the axis of the âreformist' debates, the object of the reformers was not to transform her, but to preserve the sharif family through her. To achieve this, the reformers bring the âliterate' woman at the center of the respectable patriarchal family. Thus the figure of the woman (the educator) and that of a girl child (being educated) become preparatory figures to ensure that the honor and respectability of the family was preserved.
Workshop:
Historiography, pedagogy and future histories of 1857
Royal Asiatic Society, London, July 27th 2007
Bhagwan Josh V.D.Savarkar's â The Indian War Of Independenceâ: The First Nationalist Re-Construction of 1857
In India , History invariably evokes political passions in the public domain. One of the reasons for this is that the popular conception of history in the mass imagination continues to be an act of recognition and celebration of the spirit of selfless service, bravery and sacrifice on the part of individuals, families, castes, communities and political parties. History writing is considered as an important mode of appropriating, accumulating and constantly renewing âthe cultural capitalâ, the durable stuff that goes into the making of contemporary political discourses in India . Savarkar's âThe Indian War of Independenceâ was an important book written in this tradition.
In March, 2003, when a portrait of the Hindutva Hero, Veer Savarkar, was unveiled in Parliament's Central Hall, the public opinion was sharply polarized between those who sang his praises and others who denounced him for his role in the Indian national movement. For his followers, Veer Savarkar(1883-1966) continues to be a figure of great reverence despite the fact that he was included as a co-conspirator in the assassination of Gandhi. For them he is a patriot, prolific writer, historian, motivator, and above all an individual with a commitment to the idea of a âMotherlandâ. The book was written originally in Marathi, in 1908, when Savarkar was about twenty-five years of age and was living in London . The English translation of the book was printed in Holland and a large number of copies were smuggled into India . It has been claimed that so far six editions of the book have been published and it was widely read in the revolutionary circles of the nationalist movement. According to the Publisher's preface (London, May 10, 1909) Savarkar's objective in writing this book was to let the Indians know âhow their nation fought for its Independence and how their ancestors died.â
This genre of âinspirational history' writing should not be confused with academic history and perhaps, should be judged on its own terms. A deep fault line continues to divide this sort of history from the multiple genres of academic history writing in India.
John Pincince V.D. Savarkar and the Indian War of Independence: contrasting perspectives on an emerging composite state
In the Indian War of Independence (1909), Savarkar described the important link between the nation and its historical narrative this way:
The Nation that has no consciousness of its past has no future. Equally true it is that a nation must develop its capacity not only claiming a past, but also of knowing how to use it for the furtherance of its future. (1)
Savarkar's inscription of the 1857 âmutinyâ as a âwar of independenceâ was not simply a nationalist reading of the past. Savarkar's Indian War of Independence served as an historical allegory for the present: it was to serve as an instrument through which to raise the national consciousness of Indians. Furthermore, the text was an attempt to reclaim the recent history of the Indian ânationâ from the British. But, rather then serving as a means to increase Indian self-nationhood, Savarkar's book was a precursor to later writings that interpreted India's past in more excusive terms: as a Hindu nation re-awakening. This is evident in Savarkar's Hindutva (1923) and Hindu Pad Padshahi (1925). In this paper, I intend to examine Savarkar's seminal work on the âMutiny of 1857â in terms of a historical narrative that reveals Hindu and Maratha exclusivity rather than as a text that celebrates a unified and composite past, present, and future Indian nation.
Gautam Bhadra 'How to write a patriotic history of the Rebellion of 1857? Rajanikanta Gupta's âSipahi Juddher Itihas' and multiple faces of loyalty, anxiety and dissatisfaction
Rajanikanta Gupta (1849 â 1900) had hardly any formal college education. Coming from a poor Vaidya or traditional family of indigenous medicine practitioners, he suffered from a congenital deafness, barring him from pursuing any lucrative profession. He started his career as an assistant to Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, the great educationist. He gradually wrote a number of textbooks on Indian History and learnt English on his own. He wrote a biography of Panini, following and revising the work of Theodor Goldstucker (Panini: his place in Sanskrit Literature). His lifetime project was, however, to write a history of the Sepoy Mutiny in vernacular. It is one of the earliest comprehensive, formal history of the Mutiny in any vernacular language, covering all the regions of India . Hr started collecting materials from 1870s. The first volume had been published in 1879; the fifth or the last volume was completed just before his death. The five volumes consisted of more than one thousand printed pages. He spent all his meagre savings in purchasing books, reports as well as in traveling all over northern India to collect oral evidence.
If edition is any index of reader's acceptance, no work, published either in Bengali or English, can match the popularity of this book written by any Bengali historian. His work has run up to twelve editions, the last being issued in 1990s. But much more than its popularity, even cursory perusal of the book would show its importance in evolving vernacular historiography as well as literary consciousness in this subcontinent during the 19 th century. My discussion would focus on this theme along three axes.
The narrative depends heavily upon the history of Kaye, supported by Holmes, official despatches and published trial papers. He has also gathered oral interviews for writing up the account of Nana Saheb, Amar Singh and Rani Lakshmi. It is interesting to note that through numerous narrative practices and deft use of sources he has written up an âaffective' history. One may compare a passage taken from Kaye and its vernacular representation by Gupta; one may wonder how Liaqat Ali Khan's trial paper has been used in a dramatic and mysterious way; one may also wonder at his placement of suitable passages from Sanskrit classical literature and anecdotes to underline hidden grand schemes unfolded in ordinary events. All these literary techniques with exact reference to the sources, would unfold the narrative practices pursued in a great text of vernacular history. It would also raise a moot question, is there anything special in the âvernacularity' of history?
Ramendrasundar Trivedi, a great literary critic and a friend of Rajanikanta Gupta, would search this speciality in the language itself. He pointed out the literary credence of Bengali language used by Rajanikanta - its âojo gun' or inspirational virtue, the use of metaphors, arrangement of paragraphs, placement of pauses has added a quality of orality to his literary exercise. This makes the narrative unique. Rajanikanta has written many chapters in his textbooks as a draft exercise before his book on the Mutiny. Comparing these chapters with the final versions of the book, may probe into the problem of âstyle' in vernacular history.
The book is full of distinct moves, a desire to transcend and an effort to restrain and limit. The over-arching imperial rule is beneficial, modernity under queen Victoria, is ultimate end of civilization to the subjects like Rajanikanta. But, the sepoys were tragic heroes, misguided and violent, yet honest to their beliefs. Everything cannot be judged in the scale of enlightenment and benefits of civilization. These two scales, split and employed at tandem in his narrative, makes it an interesting historiographical exercise.
The sources are Rajanikanta Gupta's multiple volumes as well as various textbooks and contemporary critical reviews.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee ' Sen and Chaudhuri as Historians of 1857'
This paper looks at two of the most significant books to have been written on the uprising of 1857 in the years following India's independence. Sen's book was sponsored and promoted by the Government of India to mark the centenary of the revolt. The assumption was that all previous accounts since they had been written by Britons had contained biases. Sen's brief was to write an objective history. This paper will look at the problems that this created for Sen, and the tensions that can be detected in his narrative and his analysis. Sen, in fact, was heavily influenced in his approach by the one that had been adopted by British writers of the 19th century, especially Kaye. Chaudhuri, writing also in 1957 but after the publication of Sen's book, decided to take a different and a new approach. He had written a previous monograph on Civil Disturbances During British Rule in India , and he chose to follow the theme in the studying the uprising. He believed that enough had been written about the mutinies and the military aspects of the revolt. He wanted to look at the actions of the civil population, and to trace how a mutiny had become an uprising. This paper will contrast the two approaches.
Rajat Ray & Nupur Chaudhuri '1857: A Historiography'
After Independence and Partition, historians in the sub-continent and beyond re-addressed the question : What was the place of the Mutiny in the evolution of the struggle against colonial rule? Two points were of specific concern :
i) The social basis of the uprising and
ii) The mentality of 1857.
For some time, the Mutiny debate proceeded along the old channel : was it a Mutiny or was it a Civil Uprising, until Eric Stokes authoritatively demonstrated that it was a popular uprising with the mutiny of the sepoys at its very core. After this, the debate moved on to the participation of the lower orders in the uprising. Most recently the Mutiny debate has focused on the aspirations, mentality and organization in 1857. cannot be. They also construct their present positions depending on existing structures and needs. While differing in their readings, they together represent alternative accounts of 1857, converging histories, myths, realities and retelling of the pasts.
Vinayak Chaturvedi "Long Live the Book, The Book is Dead!": The Life of V.D. Savarkar's The
Indian War of Independence , 1857.
This paper will examine the international impact and reception of V.D. Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence , 1857. Savarkar originally wrote the book in Marathi to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1857 rebellions in India . Members of his political organization in London and Paris translated parts of the book into English and several vernacular languages. The original Marathi manuscript was lost in transit and only the translations remained. The book was first published in English in 1909 in Britain and was immediately banned by the government. Most copies of the first edition of the book were destroyed. Yet the book circulated widely in India and Europe as new editions and translations were published throughout the twentieth century. This paper will examine the impact of Savarkar's writings on 1857 on intellectuals across the political spectrum and the ways it inspired nationalists in the struggle for India 's independence. It will also discuss the transnational reception of Savarkar's writings, especially considering the German translation of the book in the 1940s. Finally, the paper will address the influence of Savarkar's history in present day India .
Public Lecture
National Library of Scotland, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh,
Tuesday 24th July, 7pm
Professor Rajat Ray (Vice Chancellor, Vishva Bharati University) and Nupur Chaudhuri (Presidency College Calcutta): 'We and They in 1857: The Mutiny from the Mutineers Mouths'<b>
What would the Mutiny look like of we look at it from the point of view of the mutineers? What did they call it â âthe Mutiny'? âThe First War of Independence '? Neither. Nor did they conceive it as an inversion as the latter day Subalternists have done. They usually called it a war ( jung ), and conceived it as a restoration of the sovereignty of the Mughal Empire. Their ideas and institutions reflected this old world mentality. But more than mentality, it is the emotions that provided the dynamism behind the uprising. These emotions may be summed up in two words â race and religion, in that order.</b> This essay will seek to explore the mentality, the aspirations and emotions of 1857, and do so in the words of the indigenous participants themselves. To this end, both speech and the written word will be utilized, especially unguarded utterances and the reflective proclamations. The first reflects the sentiment of race the second reflects the sentiment of religion. There is a sense of the entire country and its legitimate Mughal sovereignty, but no sense of nationalism.
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 08-30-2007
Commemorating the Indian Uprising of 1857
The 10th of May â the occasion when Indian soldiers (or sepoys) in the service of the East Indian Company at Meerut attacked and killed their commanding officers and ransacked the European bungalows in the town before marching to Delhi - has been widely celebrated across India as marking the beginning of the great Indian uprising of 1857. The march has even been re-enacted by thousands of volunteers following in the footsteps of the mutinous sepoys. However, Meerut was not the only beginning nor the end of the uprising, and events to commemorate the 150th anniversary of 1857 are continuing throughout the year, with most state governments in India taking their own initiatives, in addition to a succession of local conferences and events in the capital New Delhi being organised by the Indian Council of Historical Research. In the UK as well efforts are underway to commemorate the 150 th anniversary of 1857, being co-ordinated by the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the Royal Asiatic Society and other institutions.
Being the city where so many Indian civil servants were educated and still home to the private papers of Scotsmen such as Lord Dalhousie (the governor-general whom many hold responsible for the uprising) and Lord Linlithgow (one of the last Viceroys), Edinburgh has obvious long-standing connections with India. However, the commemoration of 1857 in Edinburgh has most of all to do with the efforts of the University's Centre for South Asian Studies (one of the largest in the UK) and the University's School of History (SHCA), which is host to research and networking grants from various UK academic bodies, including the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the British Academy, all of them focussed on promoting research and inter-continental academic exchanges relating to the Great Indian Uprising, or 'Mutiny' as it is sometimes called.
1857 not only saw the destruction of the Timurid dynasty of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor. It also brought about the end of the East India Company and entirely transformed Britain's relationship with India, as well as with much of the rest of the British empire. It is widely seen therefore as an event of equal importance in British as it is in modern Indian history. The concept of 'shared histories' thus lies at the centre of Edinburgh's initiative, whilst more specific avenues of research have been commissioned which aim to highlight the marginal aspects of the event and its legacies that have not been addressed in conventional histories. A major highlight is an international conference to be held in Edinburgh on July 23 rd -26 th 2007, which will be organised in parallel with a series of exhibitions, workshops and public events aimed at commemorating not only 1857 but also the 60th anniversary of Indian and Pakistani independence. The theme of the Edinburgh conference is 'Mutiny at the Margins' and will involve the expertise of academics from around the world who will meet to exchange ideas and new source materials â ultimately to be published â which will shed fresh light on the Uprising. The culmination of these activities will be a learned workshop and a public lecture (given by Professor Mushirul Hasan of Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi) to be held at the Royal Asiatic Society in London, where the historiography and novel approaches to the teaching (ie pedagogy) of 1857 will be addressed. Not long after the Edinburgh conference there will then be a parallel conference held at Jamia Milia Islamia in New Delhi in early September, at which British and Indian academics will again meet to discuss the legacies on the event and to (hopefully) agree on new perspectives and directions for future research.
One of the great dilemmas of historians faced by historians studying 1857 is how to escape from the prevailing orthodoxies of both nationalist and colonial historians on this subject. Such original departures have been made possible in other areas, such as the history of Partition, the nationalist movement, and of the eighteenth century in India, due to the pioneering efforts of so-called 'subaltern' historians in India and many others. Up until now, however, 1857 has remained stubbornly resistant to re-appraisal. For the British (the 'victors', if they can be so described) 1857 has long featured in British school textbooks as 'the Mutiny' â an essentially illegal act in which there was little or no civilian participation worth serious consideration. Even during the uprising itself the British often tried to convince themselves, even as their houses burned and their women and children were slaughtered, that the majority of Indians were still 'loyal' and that it was solely the rebelliousness of a few thousand (actually 139,000) Indian sepoys that was the cause of the problem. This idea made the restoration of British rule post-1857 a far simpler matter than might otherwise have been, but it flew in the face of the reality that was experienced, with the army of General Neil having to fight almost hand-to-hand and from village to village across Awadh from the autumn of 1857 into 1858. Peace was not finally restored here until a general amnesty was declared by Governor-General Canning in January 1859. Many British accounts of 1857 therefore ignore or dismiss non-military or civilian aspects of 1857 as simple 'lawlessness', effectively suppressed by violent and arbitrary retaliation from the British military, when in reality there was a far wider disaffection than anyone cared to admit.
Ironically, many of the same aspects ignored by British colonial historians are absent also in Indian nationalist accounts of 1857, which focus especially on heroic leaders such as Tatia Tope, Nana Saheb and the Rani of Jhansi, but pay little attention to the activities of ordinary sepoy rebels (the majority of whom marched to Delhi and fought at the side of aged Mughal emperor) or the many smaller and local level revolts, which threw up their own leaders and did not rely upon the established (or recently deposed) aristocracy of the country for leadership. So dominant have been both the colonialist and nationalist accounts of 1857, that until now most historians have been reluctant to embark upon new and inevitably controversial research in this area. The 150 th anniversary has, however, provided the necessary stimulus for such research to begin and has already produced some spectacular results, beginning with the publication early in 2007 of William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal â which sheds fresh light on the Uprising in Delhi by drawing upon (amongst other things) the vast collection of little used Urdu documents from the Mughal court itself, which are held in the National Archives in New Delhi. Similar treasure troves of under-used material are being highlighted elsewhere. One of the largest is the collection of mutiny papers held in the UP government's historical archives in Allahabad, which amounts to tens of thousands of local level reports, written in Urdu and Persian, describing the revolt in towns and villages all across the Indo-Gangetic plain. New work is slowly being commissioned from this resource, although a great deal will remain here for a very long time to be done.
The Madhya Pradesh government has been quicker than most to respond to the anniversary (thanks to the efforts of Drs. Pankaj Rag and Gita Saberwal), by publishing a series of four volumes of material relating to 1857 from the Bhopal archives, the first a collection of English papers, the second a collection of Urdu and Persian papers (transliterated into Devanagri), and the third, an extremely rare collection of papers in Bundeli script, which have been transliterated for the very first time. These all relate to the activities of the 'rebel' general Tatia Tope as he marched south from Kanpur in 1858 in an effort to raise the peoples Maharashtra and central India into revolt. These documents reveal how widespread were the involvement of local people to the immediate south of the Indo-gangetic plain, including the tribals or adivasis of the Satpura hills: an aspect revealed also in a wonderful exhibition of adivasi paintings of revolt (including but not exclusively concerning1857) displayed at the Swaraj Bhavan in Bhopal. The fourth volume (although possibly not the last) is to be a collection of folk tales concerning 1857. These are proving to be one of the most interesting and previously under-utilised resources, telling us not only more about 1857 itself, but its place in the imagination of a wide variety of peoples. Badri Narayan Tiwari, for example, has published in this anniversary year a path-breaking study of dalit involvement in 1857 and of the ways in which activists and others make use of folk memories of the event to raise dalit consciousness in the present day ( Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics , New Delhi: Sage). There is more work of this sort going on in elsewhere in UP and Bihar.
In the UK, researchers are inquiring into under-explored issues such as the immediately post-1857 Indian migration and diaspora. Unusual sources such as cartoons, novels and ballads are also being examined and new research is highlighting the involvement of women, missionaries and the ordinary British soldier, as well as the impact upon the media, literature and press, and the longer-term political and cultural legacies in the UK of events in India.
An over-arching concern of all those involved in both Britain and India is to ask not only what happened, but what is the meaning of 1857 today, what new questions we should be asking, what new lessons can be learned from these events, and how we should be describing them to future generations of students. In the process, most academics are cautiously expressing a long-felt desire to escape from the old dichotomy of 1950s historiography â was it a 'Mutiny' or the 'First National War of Independence' â and to explore new and original areas of enquiry which bring the involvement of the ordinary citizen and both social and cultural aspects much more to the fore.
For this reason 1857 is becoming a effective platform upon which British and Indian historians can share ideas and attempt to arrive at common perspectives. It is also providing a tremendous stimulation to a younger generation of history students to embark upon innovative research using under-exploited resources in areas where their predecessors were reluctant to tread and, it is to be hoped, cannot yet begin to imagine.
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 08-30-2007
Outline History of events leading up to and the Uprising of 1857
[from C. Bates, Subalterns & Raj: South Asia since 1600 (London: Routledge 2007)]
On land in India as in other parts of the Empire, the British had to face continual uprisings of one sort or another, and these were especially commonplace in India in the early nineteenth century. The so-called Pax Britannica in India was thus very much a myth; indeed it was a myth in all parts of the empire and probably only applicable at sea where British naval power was pre-eminent. It is for this reason that one historian has described the events of 1857 as 'unique only in their scale' [Bayly 1988]. The uprising of that year began with a mutiny amongst Indian sepoys in regiments of the East India Company's Bengal army based in the plains of north India. It was made worse by the incompetence of those in command, and the fact that no wholly British-recruited regiments were available in north India to restore order. They had been despatched to fight on the north-west frontier in support of the Afghanis against the Persians in their struggle for control of the principality of Herat, under the threat of Russian intervention. The uprising spread outwards from Meerut to become a widespread civil and urban insurrection, affecting all of the towns, villages and cities of north India. The rule of the East India Company was only restored after a bloody nine-month campaign, spear-headed by Sikh troops recruited from the Punjab and reinforcements sent up the Ganges from Calcutta. Unravelling exactly what happened, and why, has been complicated by partisan accounts on both sides. Contemporary and later British historians have sought to minimise the Company's responsibility, whilst Indian historians have tended to depict the events of that year as in some sense an anticipation of the Indian nationalist movement that later on was to successfully challenge colonial rule in the early twentieth century. In both versions of events, the exceptionality of 1857 and its leaders is emphasised, and the struggles of ordinary Indians before, during and after that year have been neglected.
Indian Resistance movements in the early nineteenth century
After the final defeat of the Marathas in 1818, the authority of the East India Company in the newly ceded and conquered territories in central and northern India was challenged on many fronts. Dacoity, or banditry was endemic, of which the so-called thugs were the most notorious example. The word 'thug' is of Indian origin, thagi meaning 'to deceive'. Although terms like it could be found in generic use in previous periods, 'thag' was first used as a specific category by a British district officer named William Sleeman, in application to a variety of groups of marauding bandits in central India in the 1820s. The suppression of the thugs thereafter became part of the great civilising mission of the British in India, along with the abolition of sati, infanticide, human sacrifice and other supposed social evils. Work on these fronts was faithfully reported to the Board of Control in London and the annual Statement Exhibiting on Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India from 1859 onwards.
The thug phenomenon was paralleled by another and more serious law and order problem in the early nineteenth century, which was similar in causation: the Pindaris. They were bandits who raided whole villages on horseback, principally in the newly ceded territories in central and northern India [Anon 1818; Ghosh 1966]. The Pindaris were mostly unemployed mercenary cavalrymen who had served in the armies of the Maratha Princes and others, before being disbanded in 1818. The threat that they posed was so considerable that an entire sepoy army had to be sent to suppress them.
The thugs and the Pindaris occupied a great deal of British military manpower, but there were numerous other uprisings in the same period to occupy them, many in adivasi or tribal areas. For example in the 1820s, a succession of revolts occurred amongst the Bhil tribes in Gujarat, and the Kol in Bihar between 1829 and 1833. Most serious of all was a revolt by the Santhals in 1855, just two years before the uprising of 1857, following which more than 10,000 tribals were killed in British reprisals in an attempt to pacify the territory [Guha 1983]. Nomadic and 'wandering' communities had good cause to resent the British, by whom they had been systematically persecuted. In the early 19th century huge areas of grazing lands around Delhi, used by the Gujars, Rangars and Bhattis were cleared and given by the British to Jat peasant farmers to cultivate. These communities were therefore amongst the first to resort to arson and banditry as soon as British control collapsed in 1857. They all had one thing in common, being in one way or another losers in the land revenue settlements of the early nineteenth century. The Gujars and Bhattis lost land because the British did not recognise pastoralists to have proprietary right of access or occupancy. Tribals, who practised shifting forms of cultivation, were also frequently denied rights to the land and expelled from large areas of forest which were taken over by the government. It can be conjectured that many so-called thugs may have been Gond adivasis from the highlands of Central India who had been forced out of the forests in which they had traditionally hunted and foraged. From a life of banditry and petty thieving, it was but a small step to join in open rebellion.
The thugs and the Pindaris occupied a great deal of British military manpower, but there were numerous other uprisings in the same period to occupy them, many in adivasi or tribal areas. For example in the 1820s, a succession of revolts occurred amongst the Bhil tribes in Gujarat, and the Kol in Bihar between 1829 and 1833. Most serious of all was a revolt by the Santhals in 1855, just two years before the uprising of 1857, following which more than 10,000 tribals were killed in British reprisals in an attempt to pacify the territory [Guha 1983]. Nomadic and 'wandering' communities had good cause to resent the British, by whom they had been systematically persecuted. In the early 19th century huge areas of grazing lands around Delhi, used by the Gujars, Rangars and Bhattis were cleared and given by the British to Jat peasant farmers to cultivate. These communities were therefore amongst the first to resort to arson and banditry as soon as British control collapsed in 1857. They all had one thing in common, being in one way or another losers in the land revenue settlements of the early nineteenth century. The Gujars and Bhattis lost land because the British did not recognise pastoralists to have proprietary right of access or occupancy. Tribals, who practised shifting forms of cultivation, were also frequently denied rights to the land and expelled from large areas of forest which were taken over by the government. It can be conjectured that many so-called thugs may have been Gond adivasis from the highlands of Central India who had been forced out of the forests in which they had traditionally hunted and foraged. From a life of banditry and petty thieving, it was but a small step to join in open rebellion.
Uprisings of more substantial rural elites as well as of peasants occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Bundela Rajputs, for example, were relatively prosperous landowners in Central India who rebelled in 1842, in reaction to tax increases and oppressive court proceedings which had deprived some of them of land. The mere arrival of a British land survey team, whose task was to measure the fields and decide how much tax should be paid, could provoke a riot, as occurred in Khandesh in 1852. The were also violent outbreaks among the peasantry on the Malabar Coast, where Muslim Mappila tenants were almost continuously in revolt against Hindu landlords appointed by the British.
Finally, in urban areas, unrest was often communal, characterised by the rioting of unemployed Muslim artisans against the Hindu moneylenders who were prospering under colonial rule. The replacement of the law officers of the old Mughal cities (such as the Kotwal, Qazi, and Mufti) by brusque colonial officials added further to the prevailing sense of unease. Dissent and unrest were therefore widespread during the early part of the nineteenth century, but the inadequate intelligence of the East India Company meant that the seriousness of this opposition was not appreciated until events overtook them. When the general insurrection occurred in 1857, the company was therefore taken completely by surprise. The sudden collapse of British power merely provided the opportunity for many of these dissenting groups to rise up at the same time. This was what was unique about 1857.
http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/mutiny/history.html
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 08-30-2007
The General Causes of Insurrection in 1857
In order to ensure the renewal of its charter, the East India Company worked hard to create the impression that the early nineteenth century was a period of slow but progressive improvement for India, but the truth was far removed from this. It was in reality a time of radical experimentation and desperate contingency in the development of a British system of government, which created widespread resentment. Apart from the administrative reforms described in the previous chapters, a host of other petty interventions by the Company's officials, such as the rounding up and incarceration of prostitutes whenever there was an outbreak of venereal disease among the troops, had promoted disaffection [Ballhatchet 1957, 1980]. One of the most widespread grievances concerned the increase in land tax, imposed in all of the newly ceded and conquered territories. This might have been bearable at a time of agricultural prosperity, but the early nineteenth century was a period of profound economic depression. British methods of collecting these taxes were also unpopular, involving as they did the introduction a European system of courts, whereby defaulters were arraigned before a magistrate and summarily deprived of their lands for failing to meet revenue payments. Such measures were novel, confusing, and illegitimate in the eyes of many Indians. The courts also greatly increased the powers of the sahukar or bania money lenders to whom many were indebted: a further cause of resentment [Hardiman 1996]. Most large land controllers, and many smaller ones, at this time, had acquired their positions because they were aristocrats or ulema (Muslim scholars), the educated elite who ruled the Mughal Empire, and had been appointed by the Emperor or one of his Governors or deshmukhs . But in the territories under Company rule, their authority was superseded by law courts, presided over by men in black frock coats and pants: the British who did not sit in judgement by right of descent, as aristocrats, or as kazis or pundits. They occupied posts in court because they had completed an examination in London and had been appointed to the East India Company's Indian Civil Service. To many Indians this was a strange way to govern a country. Above all, the decisions of the courts were resented because they were final. Tax collection had always been a matter for negotiation under the Mughals: those who could not pay might be threatened, but ultimately a compromise was often possible. Indian governors and zamindars also often made generous gifts of land, so-called inam lands, for the maintenance of temples and pilgrimage centres and as pensions to former public servants. But, imbued with Utilitarian ideals, and particularly David Ricardo's theories concerning agricultural rent, the Company's officials were taught that a rental charge imposed on the land, no matter how high, was not likely to undermine agricultural production and that the government's land tax was a form of rent. They did not see the surplus on agricultural production either as a form of subsistence or a reward for enterprise; they saw it as an unearned surplus, of which they could take as much as they pleased [Stokes 1959]; whilst the grants of inam land were regarded as a drain on the state's resources, to be curtailed. For this reason, the British were extremely inflexible in their revenue assessments, and were inclined to suspend privileged land holdings granted by former rulers [Stokes 1978, ch2]. Zamindars were expected to pay their dues to the government, and if they did not, lost their position. Furthermore, the success of British District Collectors and their promotion, depended on close accounting and their ability to raise yields. This was an entirely different logic from that of the traditional structure of landholding in India which was bound up with aristocratic right, and religious and social status [Cohn 1983].
The general uprising of 1857 has been characterised as anti-colonial because the changes from which people were suffering, in general were those effected by the colonial ruler, the East India Company. The problem was that there were many other causes for rebellion, and not all of those who took up arms were directly fighting against the colonial regime. Many rebels were hoping to restore a pre-colonial social order. They did not know who or what was responsible for the changes going on around them, but what they did want was to revive some form of traditional authority. With the collapse of British military power in North India in that year, others had no alternative but to turn to traditional leaders of one sort or another. Unfortunately, anyone who took to arms, even with the aim of self-defence, or restoring some sort of local order, was often regarded as a rebel by the British and ultimately pilloried, tried and executed [Brodkin 1972].
The Indian army mutineers themselves, who signalled the commencement of the wider insurrection, had mixed motives. Some wanted to revive the authority of the ailing Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, and the units of the British Army which mutinied at Meerut in May 1857 determined their fate at an early stage by deciding to march on Delhi to reinstall the Emperor rather than march, as they might alternatively have done, towards the British seat of power in Calcutta. In doing so, they immediately alienated the large number of Indians who had never recognised the authority of the Mughals, or who, like the Sikhs in the Punjab, had spent many generations struggling against the Mughal Empire. They also alienated Hindu rulers who were prospering under the East India Company's rule. Naturally, they did win the support of Mughal aristocrats in the North of India. A further advantage of marching to Delhi was that it gave the rebels a concrete aim, which was very needed for the obvious reason that India, at this time, lacked a truly powerful nationalist ethos. Those who took up arms were often fighting for their country against the British, but that country might be Gwalior, Bengal, Awadh, Indore &c. â it was not in the name of India itself. They were fighting, very often, for the reinstatement of kingdoms, patrimonies, and chiefdoms that had existed in the pre-British period, or for the revival of an empire which covered part of the subcontinent. They were by no means united in struggling for a single political alternative, and this is one of the reasons why the uprising of 1857 was ultimately successfully suppressed by the British. There was no overall strategy; though to say this is something of a truism, since it is absurd to suggest that there could easily have been one.
Unravelling the events of the Uprising in 1857
Most of the accounts of 1857 that have survived are unreliable as historical sources. To begin with, it is always the victor's version of events that tends to take precedence, and since the British ultimately overwhelmed the insurrectionists, it is the British view that has generally held sway. The uprising was a clear sign that the East India Company had seriously misruled the Indo-gangetic plain but they were reluctant to admit this, which is why in many subsequent British accounts, 1857 is usually referred to as the 'mutiny'. By this it is implied that the insurrection was simply an act of treason by a group of soldiers which was dealt with appropriately. British descriptions of the 'mutiny' were also typically accompanied by accounts of various barbarities and horrors committed by the Indians as if to justify the violent means by which the restoration of colonial rule was accomplished. But this is not, of course, how Indians regarded the matter, then or now. Neither was the insurrection of that year confined to the ranks of the military, nor the atrocities committed as one-sided as the British implied.
Reacting against British misrepresentations many Indian authors, most famously the radical nationalist V.D. Savarkar writing in 1908 [i] , have described the events of 1857 as 'the first national war of Indian Independence'. However, this is clearly a misnomer since, as one historian, R. C. Majumdar [1963], has commented, 'on the whole, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the so-called First National War of Independence of 1857 is neither first, nor national, nor a war of independence'. More detailed assessments published following the centenary commemoration of 1857 have tended to focus less on the activities of the Bengal sepoys, and more on the associated uprisings of the civil population in urban and rural areas. Some authors, such as Eric Stokes [1978], have argued that the rebels of 1857 were fighting for not one, but a variety of causes and nationalisms.
There remains a problem with source materials, which exacerbates the difficulties of interpretation. The Urdu records of the Lucknow and Delhi courts are preserved in the Allahabad and National Archives, but they are written in shekastah, a very difficult form of Persian calligraphy. By contrast, there are extremely voluminous English-language historical records of 1857 that have survived, but they are largely derived from the subsequent attempts made by the British to pacify the country. They are thus part of a project to restore order, rather than a dispassionate, legal investigation into what occurred. Essays by E.I. Brodkin [1972] and Ranajit Guha [1983] have explained why it is so difficult to deduce what really happened from such sources. A great many of these are the accounts of soldiers who were engaged in pacification exercises, and the trial documents of those they believed, often mistakenly, to be responsible for the uprising. The authors and protagonists were keen to convince themselves that they were in control of the situation and that this was not a popular insurrection. They sought to identify and punish alleged agitators and ringleaders who had misled the supposedly naive masses into insurrection: a more realistic exercise than attempting to punish the population as a whole. The documents are thus filled with fabricated conspiracy theories, and attempts to pin the blame for what had happened on somebody, anybody in fact other than the colonial regime itself.
Grievances of the Military
The 19th Native Infantry, stationed at Barrackpore just west of Calcutta, was the first regiment to rebel against its officers, following the now notorious distribution of greased cartridges to be used with newly issued Lee Enfield rifles. These cartridges were greased with fat alleged to be that of cows, revered by Hindus, or of pigs, which was defiling for Muslims, and were believed to be part of an attempt to forcibly convert the Sepoys to Christianity. Those involved in the rebellion were arrested and a Court of Inquiry recommended that the regiment be disbanded. On the day following the initial rebellion - March 29 th 1857 - Mangal Pande of the 34th regiment, which had been barracked alongside the 19th, fired at his commanding officer Sir John Hearsey but was overpowered. He and another sepoy, Iswar Pande, were tried and executed. The name âPande' was thereafter immortalised as the nickname given by the British to the rebel sepoys. [ii] . After the 34th was also disbanded, rumours about the greased cartridges rapidly spread. Six weeks later, a thousand miles away, a native regiment at Meerut was publicly humiliated for refusing to use the cartridges by being marched in shackles to the jail. The next evening, on Sunday 10 th May, the duty officer at Meerut was shot, and the sepoys rallied around the guns of the regiment, forced open the armoury to seize supplies of the supposed polluting cartridges, and attacked and killed their British officers. The next day they marched to Delhi behind their regimental flag.
Given the unanticipated nature of the military mutiny, and keen to avert blame from themselves, officials made much of the sepoys' objections to the distribution of cartridges for use with the Lee Enfield rifle. However, although the cartridges may have provided a rallying point for a few of the mutineers, it was only one of the issues that concerned them. And interestingly, once they had rebelled, the mutinous regiments showed no compunction at all about using these same rifles and cartridges against the British. The cartridge issue nonetheless underscored the weakness of the military's control over the lower ranks of the Bengal army, highlighting the very small number of British officers, and their poor relationship with the troops. Above all, it symbolised the widespread resentment and distrust of the East India Company's policies. This mistrust revolved, among other things, around a perceived threat to Indian religion. Missionary activities had been permitted in India since 1813 lending credence to the fear that the principal reason why the British were in India was to in order to Christianise the population. Such fears had exhibited themselves on previous occasions, as in 1806, when a sepoy regiment at Vellore in the Madras Presidency had mutinied after the issue of a new form of leather headgear, also considered polluting. [iii] There were other fears of course, but British historiographies have tended to stress the cartridge issue because it could be used to demonstrate the irrationality and fanaticism of the natives, and the unreasonableness of their conduct. That they should take up arms over an issue as trivial and superstitious as the greasing of a cartridge, neatly diverted attention from other aspects of the Company's maladministration that provided more contingent and pressing causes for rebellion.
The other concerns of the military were more specific [Stokes 1986]. Indian troops were at that time organised into armies based in the three Presidencies of Madras, Bombay and Bengal. If these armies fought beyond their frontiers they received an additional allowance. In 1856 the Governor General decided that since the British controlled two thirds of the subcontinent, these additional allowances were no longer legitimate, and they were removed. The troops of the Bengal army based in Awadh at this time thus immediately received a cut in pay. The General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 also committed the sepoys to sign a declaration that they would be willing to fight overseas if necessary in the service of the East India Company, and this was resented by the majority who had no desire to travel so far. Another cause of resentment was the British policy of garnering recruits from a wide cross section of the population. Until 1856 a large proportion of soldiers in the Bengal Army were Brahmins and Rajputs from the north-west of Bengal. Villagers in this region were becoming accustomed to the income derived from sending recruits to the army. The kingdom of Awadh, independent but allied to the British by treaty since the late eighteenth century, had also become an important source of recruits to the army. The Company offended these groups by stating their intention to recruit more widely across the subcontinent. The sense of grievance had therefore spread to the main army recruiting villages, and a further discordant note was added to this when the disbanded Meerut mutineers returned home.
The decision by the British to seize control of the kingdom of Awadh had also fostered resentment. Awadh had been a loyal ally of the British. Under the notorious policy of lapse, announced in 1850 by the Viceroy Dalhousie, the British stated their intention to seize control of any princely state in which there might be a disputed succession. This they did, rapidly taking over the Nagpur kingdom in 1854 (the largest of all), along with Jhansi, Satara, Udaipur, Balaghat, Sambalpur, Jaitpur, Carnatic and Tanjore. They justified their actions by claiming that 'Indian despotism' was thereby ended, frontiers were consolidated, that it was administratively convenient, and that it was expressly desired by the people themselves [Fisher 1993]. In the case of Awadh, they did not trouble to wait for a disputed succession. The British Resident (the Company's representative at court) alleged that the Rajah was misruling his country, and this alone was used as a pretext to seize control of the kingdom in 1856 [Fisher 1987; Mukherjee 1984].
Arguably therefore it was not the peasants and sepoys who were the rebels in 1857, but the British themselves. In the view of many Muslim political commentators, since the British were merely the revenue collectors of Bengal, they were vastly exceeding their authority, and since the Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, was the Vizier, or guardian, of the Mughal Empire, the seizure of his kingdom was an attack on Mughal sovereignty itself. Following annexation, the Nawab was taken to Calcutta along with members of his family, and the British then made matters worse by sending in a highhanded settlement officer, Martin Gubbins, who in the process of fixing the revenue demand dispossessed a great many local aristocrats, known as taluqdars, from their ancestral estates. These taluqdars , led by the Rajah of Mahmudabad, were among the first aristocratic leaders to raise arms against the British and were strongly supported by their rural populations.
Other factors played a part in the Uprising of 1857. The Sikh regiments of Ranjit Singh who had been defeated in 1840, had been incorporated into the British army. There were some 15,000 of these troops and they were the first and largest force available to the British to move into the Northern plains and retake the areas which had risen in revolt. One of the major failings of the British prior to 1857 was that when they had taken over the kingdom of Awadh they did not recruit the army of the king in a similar manner. They disbanded all 50,000 of the king's troops, effectively dispersing large numbers of aggrieved trained soldiers over the entire region. Once similarly large numbers of men serving in the Bengal army had been alienated the basis was laid for what became a widespread civil as well as military insurrection.
NOTES
[i] Vinaya k Damodar (commonly Veer) Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence, 1857 was originally written in Marathi, published in 1908, and immediately banned by the British. The author, having taken part in terrorist conspiracies in London and Nasik was later sentenced to transporation to the Andaman islands (where he wrote about the concept of Hindutva or 'Hinduness'). He returned following a personal amnesty and was president of the Hindu Mahasabha for seven years in the 1930s and 40s. Savarkar's Indian War of Independence was finally published (in English) and distributed for the first time in 1947.
[ii] This name Pandey was in turn inherited by an English children's toy â a stuffed doll wearing pyjama pants â known as âAndy Pandey'.
[iii] Maya Gupta, âThe Vellore Mutiny' in M.&A.K. Gupta (eds.), Defying Death: struggles against imperialism and feudalism (New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2001): 18-38.
The Course of the Insurrection
By its nature, the East India Company's rule was a military occupation. The company was staffed by military men holding military titles. Military bases, or cantonments, were positioned so as to overawe the principal towns and cities, and sepoy units were based in all of the Princely States, as well as in the coastal trading zones. Because the Company's rule was a military regime, the state itself was imperilled as soon as the military mutinied. As Karl Marx had commented: âit is evident that the allegiance of the Indian people rests on the fidelity of the native army, in creating which the British rule simultaneously organised the first general centre of resistance⦠[to colonial rule]'. [i]
The events at Meerut demonstrated that the cartridge issue, emotive as it may have been, was still merely an excuse for revolt. Many have argued that it had indeed been planned for some time, citing evidence that for months before, lotus flowers and chapatis (flat breads) were mysteriously circulating around the villages of north India, it being rumoured that the planned date for insurrection was the 31 st of May. However, Ranajit Guha has put a slightly different twist on these events, arguing that, rather than an orgnaised conspiracy, this was merely evidence of widespread rural unrest. He traces the exchange of chapatis to the traditional technique of disease prevention through transference, a practice in northern India described in detail by William Crooke, which involved 'the symbolic use of a ritually consecrated object or animal to act as the carrier of an epidemic which had broken out in a locality or was about to do so, and push it beyond its boundaries' . Amongst the transmitters that could be used for the transfer of cholera were âimages of the cholera goddess, doles of rice collected from the local residents, filth and sweepings picked up from the affected villages, domestic animals such as goats, buffaloes and fowl, or in the case of an exceptionally cruel custom reported from Punjab, Chamars âbranded on the buttocks and turned out of the villageâ.' The circulating chapati was thus a transference sign of this type which acquired new meaning, becoming the predictive sign or omen of an imminent upheaval [Guha, 1983: 243-5] Whatever the circumstances, it must have been very obvious to the earliest mutineers that Meerut had to be involved as it was one of the strongest cantonments in the north, but by imprisoning soldiers on the 10 th of May, the British seem to have forced the hands of those involved at Meerut into an early commencement of the revolt. According to eye witnesses, the Meerut regiments were clearly expected when they arrived at the gates of Delhi, as they were greeted with lotus flowers and chapatis and urged to clear Delhi of the British, which they did, slaughtering not only British soldiers and officers but all Christians converts wherever the could be found. Immediately afterwards they sought an audience with the Emperor and King of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, whom they urged to lead them. To this the frail and aged Emperor (he was 82 years of age) reluctantly and hesitatingly agreed. [ii] Thereafter, mutinous sepoy regiments steadily flowed into the capital (the ultimate destination of some 100,000 out of the 139,000 who mutinied), and proclamations were circulated calling for Muslim and Hindu to unite in a struggle for din (Islamic faith) and dharma : a central characteristic of the revolt [Ray 2003; Dalrymple 2006]. Many of these proclamations were written by Mirza Mughal (Zafar's fifth son), who endeavoured to take charge and unite the chaotic rebel force in Delhi. Others were written by outlying mansabdhars and supporters of the revolt who endeavoured to rally supplies and troops by invoking the authority and name of the emperor. The document known as the Azamgarh proclamation (reproduced under 'Texts') calls for support from all classes and lists the very specific and practical grievances of the rebels. It is interesting to read, not least for its clarity of purpose. [See Azamgarh Proclamation]
Whilst the mutinous sepoys and a growing number of self-proclaimed volunteer jihadis who joined them consolidated their hold on Delhi, preparations went ahead for revolt in Awadh. In the capital Lucknow, the commanding British officer, Sir Henry Lawrence, was warned that a shot would be the signal for the commencement of insurrection on the 30 th May. The story has it that whilst dining that evening he commented on the inactivity of the supposed mutineers, saying âyour friends are not punctual!', at which point a shot rang out. The next day, 34 miles west of Agra, Indian troops at Bharatpur in eastern Rajasthan revolted, and at Shahjahanpur, in north-central U.P. the British were attacked whilst attending morning service. At this point the insurrection might still have been contained, but responsibility for its escalation must lie partly in the hands of General James George Neill, commanding the 1 st Madras Fusiliers. Upon hearing of the events in Awadh, Neill marched to Varanasi, on what he thought was a pre-emptive mission. As soon as he arrived, he disbanded the local native regiment, lined up the sepoys, and shot them. Upon seeing this, a regiment of Sikhs stationed at Varanasi, normally considered âloyal', revolted and were also shot. General Neill then embarked upon a general campaign of terrorism, hanging every able-bodied man he could lay his hands on who aroused the least suspicion. News of these atrocities caused two native regiments at Kanpur, hitherto loyal, to revolt, and march to Bithur, where they met up with Nana Saheb, the deposed Maratha Peshwa, whom they persuaded to lead them to Delhi.
The British garrison at Kanpur was commanded by General Wheeler, who moved his men to the entrenchment surrounding the residency, from where they fired on the 53 rd and 56 th native infantry battalions who had not up until then mutinied, thus immediately prompting them to do so. At this point Nana Saheb's forces turned back to Kanpur and laid siege to the entrenchment. General Neill was ordered by telegraph from Calcutta to move to Allahabad and Kanpur, but he delayed, claiming that he was too busy with operations to âpacify' the country around Benares, which mostly involved burning villages. However, in terror at the prospect of his approach, the 6 th Native infantry at Allahabad mutinied on the 6 th of June, killing their officer and six cadets. Meanwhile, further north, troops under Generals Wilson and Barnard attempted to relieve Delhi. Meeting up on the 7 th of June, after fierce fighting they managed to regain control of the ridge overlooking Delhi. This they then clung on to for the next three and a half months, despite some 22 attacks by rebel forces from Delhi and an outbreak of cholera.
On the 8 th of June, native troops of the formerly independent princely state of Jhansi rebelled and attacked the Europeans in the fort. General Neill reached Allahabad on June 11 th , but this was too late for General Wheeler and the residents at Kanpur who surrendered to the forces of Nana Saheb and Tatya Tope in exchange for an offer of safe passage to Calcutta. In the now infamous massacre, as they were embarking on boats on the Ganges on June 27 th at Satichaura Ghat, they were set upon by sepoys and city residents, angered (according to Mukherjee [1990]) at news of General Neill's outrages and by rumours that the daughter of Nana Saheb had been captured and burnt alive by the British. When he heard what was happening, Nana Saheb gave orders that the women and children be spared. Seventy British officers in all survived, but they were imprisoned at a house called Bibighar, where they were massacred the next day. The bodies were thrown down a well, where a British memorial was subsequently erected. This was replaced after independence by a statue of Tatya Tope, widely regarded today as a great Indian hero.
At Lucknow, the British retreated to the residency. Foolishly, Sir Henry Lawrence then decided to attack the rebels amassing just outside the city at a small village called Chinhut. There they found themselves out manoeuvred and outnumbered, and retreated in a panic, blowing up their ammunition dump at Machchi Bhavan on the way back into the residency. The siege of Lucknow continued for many months thereafter. The strength of support for the rebels was due to the involvement of the mass of the population of Awadh at an early stage, as revealed in the following proclamation, seized by the British, and which reads like a fiery, populist rendition of the Azamgarh proclamation.
It has become the bounden duty of all the people, whether women or men, slave girls or slaves, to come forward and put the English to death. â¦. by firing guns, carbines and pistols, from the terraces, shooting arrows and pelting them with stones, bricksâ¦and all other things which may come into their hands. ⦠The sepoys, the nobles, the shopkeepers, the oil men etc. and all other people of the city, being of one accord, should make a simultaneous attack upon them . [iii]
Such was the popularity of the revolt in Awadh, that whilst the Europeans in the residency died at the rate of ten per day, the rebel forces surrounding them grew in number to more than 10,000. [iv]
General Neill delayed advancing from Allahabad, claiming he was too busy âmopping up', which meant a continuation of his policy of indiscriminate hanging. Soon there was not a single able-bodied man to be found capable of assisting in the transport of military equipment. A force under General Havelock was sent up from Calcutta on July 7 th to aid in the relief of Kanpur, arriving too late to be of assistance, although they were able to defeat Nana Sahib's forces in an engagement on July 27 th . Soon after this Havelock's forces won a decisive victory at Bithur, forcing Nana Saheb to retreat to Gwalior.
At about this time Bakht Khan, a former gunner from Bareili and a devout Muslim, arrived at Delhi with a large force and treasure and was made Commander in Chief of the rebel forces by the Emperor (despite Bakht Khan's disdain for him) displacing Mirza Mughal who was made Adjutant General and therefore effective head of the administration. Bakht Khan did an effective job of rallying the rebel forces and attacking the British on the ridge. On August 14 th , however, John Nicholson finally arrived at Delhi with a large column of troops, consisting of north-west frontier tribesmen and Sikhs from the Punjab. Soon after this, perhaps sensing the danger, renewed proclamations were published in the Emperor's name calling for supplies and support from the Delhi hinterland.
NOTES
[i] Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, 1857, reprinted in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The First Indian War of Independence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 36. Marx went further, stating his belief that the wars in Persia, India and China were connected events.
[ii] The scenes in Delhi, and particularly the role of the Mughal court during the course of the Mutiny are brilliantly evoked in William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal (Penguin: 2006). Chapter five describes Bhahdur Shah Zafar reluctant acquiescence to the demands of his effective captors â the sepoy mutineers
[iii] Proclamation enclosed with a translation of a pamphlet entitled Fateh Islam: For. Dept. Political Proc., 30 Dec. 1859, Suppl. No. 1135-1139: cited in R. Mukherjee (1984), p. 148.
[iv] This and many other aspects of the siege are effectively parodied in J.G. Farrell's comic historical novel The Siege of Krishnapur (London, 1978). A detailed blow-by-blow account of the Uprising is available in P.J.O. Taylor (1997).
The British Regain Control
On the 14 th of September, Delhi was finally attacked by the reinforcements from the Punjab: the massive Kashmiri gate was partly blown up, and the British rushed in and recaptured the city. On the 20th of September, the last of the Delhi strongholds was taken, and on the 21st William Hodson captured the Emperor, who was hiding in Humayun's tomb and surrendered in exchange for the guarantee of his life The emperor was taken back to the Red Fort, now under British control. The next day Hodson seized from the tomb the princes Mirza Mughal, Khizr Sultan, and Abu Bakr, the three princes who had commanded the Mughal forces in Delhi. Accompanied by an escort of sawars (cavalry troopers) he took them out on the road to Delhi, then stopped, stripped the three princes naked and shot them dead at point blank range with his revolver. For several weeks after its recapture, Delhi resounded to the sounds of gunfire as the British looted and wreaked revenge with a series of horrific executions of mutinous sepoys, hundreds of whom were shot or hanged each day on a gallows especially constructed in Chandni Chowk or occasionally (in imitation of a Muslim style of execution) blown from the mouths of cannons. Thereafter, in a mirror image of the slaughter when the city was first captured by the sepoys, able-bodied male civilians were dragged from their houses and killed upon the word of informers, who then shared in the loot of their property. The Urdu poet Ghalib, one of the few notables to survive the ordeal, described the scene in his inimitable fashion in a poem, the opening lines of which are reproduced at the beginning of this chapter. The destruction within the city, which reduced the buildings of the Red Fort alone to one fifth of their former area, brought to a complete end not only a dynasty but the dominance of Muslim, Urdu culture in north India.
On the 25 th of September Generals Outram and Havelock reached Lucknow, and the British soldiers embarked upon an orgy of looting, vividly described by The Times correspondent W.H. Russell.
It was one of the strangest and most distressing sights that could be seen; but it was also most exciting .... Discipline may hold soldiers together till the fight is won; but it assuredly does not exist for a moment after an assault has been delivered, or a storm has taken place... Through all these hither and thither, with loud cries, dart European and native soldiery firing at the windows, from which come now and then dropping shots or hisses of a musket ball. At every door there is an eager crowd, smashing the panels with the stocks of their firelocks, or breaking the fastenings by discharges of their weapons... you hear the musketry rattling inside; the crash of glass, the shouts and yells of the combatants, and little jets of smoke curl out of closed lattices. Lying amid the orange-groves are dead and dying sepoys; and the white statues are reddened with blood... From the broken portals issue soldiers laden with loot or plunder: shawls, rich tapestry, gold and silver brocade, caskets of jewels, arms and splendid dresses. The men are wild with fury and lust of gold - literally drunk with plunder. [Russell, 1859]
However, the mutineers had only strategically withdrawn and these same British soldiers soon after found themselves trapped within the city walls, forcing the Commander in Chief, Sir Colin Campbell, to set out from Calcutta to relieve them with troops sent from London. He arrived at Lucknow on the 17 th October and on the night of the 23 rd the besieged Britishers sneaked through the lines of the insurgents to safety. Five days later Nana Saheb's army, led by Tatya Tope, took revenge by engaging and defeating the army of Lt. Gen. Windham and retaking Kanpur. This victory was short-lived, however, as the army of Sir Colin Campbell took the city back again on December 6 th , forcing Tatya Tope into retreat. On the 21 st March 1858, the forces of Colin Campbell finally recaptured Lucknow, the capital of Awadh, engaging in an orgy of looting and plunder in the process.
After the defeat at Kanpur, Nana Saheb allegedly fled to Nepal while Tatya Tope marched to Kalpi to aid the Rani Lakshmi of Jhansi against the forces of General Walpole. Walpole was defeated, and Tatya continued south. However on the 23 rd April 1858 General Hugh Rose arrived, and engaged and captured the remainder of the Rani's forces at Kopatti Serai. The Rani led her forces into battle on horseback, was shot and wounded, then rode to Gwalior, where she died. Indefatigable, Tatya Tope marched on through central India, Rajasthan, and Gujarat in an attempt to raise the Marathas in revolt. Only a few Gond chiefs in the highlands of central India agreed to lend support, and he was finally betrayed and captured in Khandesh. Tope was executed in Jaipur in January 1859.
Tatya Tope, whose real name was Ramchandra Pandurang, was one of the more strategically minded, ruthless and efficient of the rebel leaders. Originally just a Maratha gunner, he rose to be the commander in chief of the forces led by Nana Saheb. Others were less clear-sighted. The siege of the British residency in Lucknow was prioritised by the rebels because of its royal associations - as the former capital of the kingdom of Awadh - at the expense of advancing on Calcutta, crossing the Ganges river, and cutting one of the means of communication available to the British. This lapse enabled the British to marshal troops in the East and in the Western part of India and to retake the Northern plains.
The Extent of Popular Support
Although the Uprising was confined to the northern part of India, other parts of the country had similar cause to resent British rule. Nonetheless, despite the fact that many Mughal aristocrats had been supplanted by Hindu traders, who had profited from their relationship with the British, the Company's rule had failed to penetrate much towards the village level in zamindari areas such as Bihar, where it could even be described as superficial [Yang 1988]. There were rulers in other parts of India who had been dispossessed, and local populations with serious grievances. But the fact that the insurrection was confined largely to the Indo-Gangetic plain demonstrates that India was far from being a homogeneous polity at this time. Indians living in Hyderabad thought that yet another war between the Marathas and the British was in progress. Others had little idea of the scale of insurrection, believing it was merely a zamindari uprising of the sort that had occurred frequently under the Mughals. Although there are clearly the seeds here of later patriotic nationalism [Bayly 1998], the insurrection was arguably a purely regional affair. Two areas - Bengal and the Punjab - remained at least superficially loyal despite their proximity to the rebellion's heartland of North India. There was a large British force based in Bengal, and another in the Punjab, which had been recently conquered; British troops were also massed on the borders of Afghanistan.
The desire for a restitution of the old system, and for the conjunction once again of civil and moral law, caused many insurrectionists to turn to traditional leaders to achieve this end. To this extent 1857 was a reactionary movement, intended and tending to revive former privileges. So it was that the revolt centred around aristocrats such as Khan Bahadur Khan, the last independent Muslim ruler of Rohilhkand before it was annexed by the British in 1801; whilst in Awadh, the revolt was led by ex-military leaders and focussed around the capital, Lucknow.
Subaltern historians have very convincingly demonstrated, using available evidence, that there were many opportunists as well as established local leaders, and numerous individuals took up arms on their own initiative without waiting for the Emperor's appeal, or for feudal aristocrats to tell them what to do. Gautam Bhadra [1985] assesses four localities involved in the Uprising and describes the concerns which motivated the insurrectionists. Depicted in detail are characters such as Shah Mal, a Jat resident of the village of Bijraul in the pargana of Barout, which had suffered from over-taxation by the British in the months before the uprising. Shah Mahal put together a combined force of Jat and Gujar peasants, and attacked and plundered the tahsil of Barout and the bazaar at Baghpat.
Devi Singh was perhaps the quitessential subaltern insurgent, acting entirely on his own without any contact with outsiders. He came from a Jat dominated region centred around the small rural town of Raya in Mathura district. When zamindars and villagers in the locality heard of the King of Delhi's proclamation, they rose up against the moneylenders and attacked the town. Devi Singh, otherwise a man of no distinction, was dressed in yellow, the traditional symbol of royalty, and declared by popular acclaim to be the jat âpeasant king' of the 14 villages in the locality. Upon entering the town, he set up a Government upon the English model â thus simultaneously demonstrating the limits of insurgent consciousness at this time, and tried the moneylenders [Bhadra 1985: 254]. Unfortunately, Devi Singh thought that having driven away the police he had destroyed the British raj. When Mark Thornhill, the Collector of Muttra arrived in mid June with a contingent of troops from Kotah, Devi Singh was quickly captured and executed.
Bhadra also details the story of Gonoo, a Kol adivasi and cultivator from the Singhbhum district of Chotanagpur, who led the Larkha Kol insurrection in reaction to attempts by the British to interfere with traditional institutions. The arrow of war was circulated, and the insurrection kicked off with a mutiny by the sepoys at Ramgarh but then escalated into a wholesale Kol insurrection with the Rajah of Porahat forced to assume the customary role as their head. Bhadra's final example is the Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, an itinerant preacher who advocated jehad against the English across north India. In Fyzabad he was imprisoned, but then freed by mutinous sepoys of the irregular cavalry and 22 nd Native Infantry who acclaimed him their leader. These he then led to Lucknow, where he took part in the crucial battle of Chinhat, alongside the sepoys and lumpen elements from the city population who took part. [Bhadra 1985: 267].
What all of these rebels shared was a high level of purpose and a common goal. Much as with the insurrectionists in Awadh, they were organised, usually in defence of a territory, as wells as through networks of kinship, religion, or political adherence. Caste did not necessarily divide them, they received no instructions from higher authorities, and they were united in their opposition to outside, primarily British, interference. This pattern of organisation was both feasible and commonplace [Guha 1983], and was at least as common as the more feudal forms of insurrection in support of local elites, emphasised in the accounts of Stokes [1979] and others.
Counting the Cost of War
In times of warfare, acts of brutality are commonly committed on both sides and the 1857 uprising proved no exception. The British practice of executing rebel soldiers and officers by tying them to the mouths of cannons, so that the crowds of onlookers would be spattered with blood and the corpses dispersed over a wide area, was intended to shock. It was furthermore a deliberate offence, because blasting the body to pieces in this manner prevented either cremation or a proper burial. The British also carried out hundreds of arbitrary hangings in Northern India as the fighting progressed almost hand to hand through the villages, until they were finally retaken.
By his own account, Frederick Cooper, the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, shot to death no less than 237 captured sepoys at the end of July 1857, a further forty-five suffocating in cells - in a grisly re-enactment of Zephaniah Holwell's âBlack Hole' - before he had a chance to execute them. On the Indian side, there was likewise a systematic use of violence, quite apart from incidents such as the massacre in Kanpur at Satichaura Ghat. During his march through central India, Tatya Tope, for his part, ordered that village officials who had collaborated and collected taxes for the British should have their ears and noses cut off as an example to others. In short, this was a time of bloody savagery on both sides because both were desperate to win, and believed violence to be the only language their enemy understood.
The Uprising was finally quashed when the Governor General and later the first Viceroy, George Canning, amidst howls of protest from the civilians of Calcutta (who petitioned for the removal of 'clemency Canning' as he was called) offered an amnesty to all who gave themselves up after the recapture of Lucknow. This proposal was then published in a General Proclamation made in the name of Queen Victoria in Allahabad on November 1 st 1858, which promised to ârespect the rights of Indian Princes as our own'. By promising the non-confiscation of their lands, Canning was able to persuade fourteen taluqdars in Awadh alone to immediately surrender. Despite summary executions continuing thereafter, the amnesty greatly helped in the pacification of the population, all effective opposition coming to an end with the arrest and execution of Tatya Tope early in 1859. The Emperor Bahadur Shah was tried for treason at the age of 83, by his concessionaries for trade and the holders of the Diwani of Bengal (the East India Company), and was sentenced to transportation. Carried through north India in a bullock cart on his way to Calcutta, he was then exiled to Rangoon where he died and was buried in an unmarked grave four years later in November 1862.
Despite all that has been written on the topic, 1857 will probably remain forever clouded by confusion precisely because it has been used as a political tool both by the British, to justify their actions and their continuing rule in India, despite their unpopularity, and also by the rulers of independent India, who sought to construct a nationalist historiography which down-played (amongst other things) the centrality of the Delhi court in the events of the insurrection. India as the nation, we know now, was created in the twentieth century, and it would be folly to attempt to trace its origins to the events of one hundred years before. Likewise it would be a mistake uncritically to accept colonial British explanations for the uprising.
The most serious consequence of the Uprising was the vacating of the throne in Delhi, which paved the way for the creation of a new British Imperium in India. At the same time, however, the Uprising helped create a mythology of resistance which became a powerful ideological weapon in the hands of later Nationalists during the freedom struggle of the 1930's and 1940's. This was perhaps to prove to be one of its more important legacies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF 1857
(Sources referred to in the text are highlighted in blue)
Alavi, Seema
The Company and the Sepoy (New Delhi; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Anon. (probably William Robson)
Origin of the Pindaris, preceded by historical notices on the rise of the different Mahratta States, (London: 1818)
Arnold, David
Police Power and Colonial Rule; Madras, 1859-1947 (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)
Ballhatchet, K.A.
Social policy and social change in western India, 1817-1830 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957)
Ballhatchet, K.A.
Race, Sex & Class under the Raj : imperial attitudes and policies and their critics, 1793-1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980)
Bayly, C.A.
Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 8
Bayly, C.A.
Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 6
Bayly, C.A.
Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Bayly, C.A.
Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Bhadra, G.
âFour rebels of 1857' in R. Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV (New Delhi: Oxford University Press , 1985)
Brodkin, E.I .
âThe struggle for succession: rebels and loyalists in the Indian mutiny of 1857' in Modern Asian Studies , 6, 3 (1972), pp. 277-290
Broehl, W.G.
Crisis of the Raj: the revolt of 1857 (Hanover, USA; London: University of New England, 1986)
Chatterji, B.
âThe Darogah and the Countryside; The Imposition of Police Control in Bengal and its Impact, 1793-1837', Indian Economic & Social History Review , 18, 1 (1981), pp. 19-42
Chaudhuri, S.B.
Civil disturbances during the British rule in India, 1765-1857 (Calcutta: World Press, 1955)
Cohn, B.
âRepresenting Authority in Victorian India' in T. Ranger and E. Hobsbawm (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) also in B. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Embree, A.T. (ed.)
India in 1857: the revolt against foreign rule (New Delhi: Chanakya, 1987).
Farooqui, Amar
Smuggling as Subversion, Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of Opium, 1790-1843 (New Delhi, New Age International Publishers, 1998; USA: Lexington, 2005)
Fisher, Michael H. (ed.)
The Politics of the British Annexation of India, 1757-1857 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993)
Ghosh, B.B.
British policy towards the Pathans and the Pindaris in Central India, 1805-1818 (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1966)
Gordon, S.N.
âScarf and sword: thugs, marauders, and state-formation in 18 th century Malwa', Indian Economic & Social History Review, 6, 4 (1969), pp. 403-429
Gordon, S.N.
The Marathas (New Cambridge History of India) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Guha, Ranajit
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (New Delhi; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)
Guha, Ranajit
âThe prose of counter-insurgency', in R.Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983)
Hardiman, David
Feeding the Baniya; Peasants and Usurers in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996)
Majumdar, R.C.
The Sepoy Mutiny and the revolt of 1857 (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963)
Marx, K. & Engels, F.
The First Indian War of Independence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959)
Metcalf, Thomas R.
The Aftermath of Revolt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), chs. 4,5,8
Metcalf, Thomas R.
Land, Landlords and the British Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), ch. on Awadh
Metcalfe, C.T. (ed.)
Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny of Delhi (Westminster: A Constable and Co., 1898)
Mohan, Surendra
Awadh under the Nawabs, Politics, Culture and Communal Relations 1722-1856 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997)
Mukherjee, R.
Awadh In Revolt (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984)
Mukherjee, R.
ââSatan Let Loose upon Earthâ: the Kanpur Massacres in the revolt of 1857', Past and Present, 128 (1990), pp. 92-116
Pandey, Gyanendra
âA view of the observable: a positivist understanding of agrarian society and political protest in colonial India' Review of Eric Stokes, Journal of Peasant Studies , 7, 3 (1980), pp. 375-383
Roy, Tapti
The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994
Russell, W.H.
My Indian Mutiny Diary: a diary of the Sepoy rebellion (London: Routledge, 1859. repr. London: Cassell, 1957)
Sleeman, W.
Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language used by the Thugs, with an Introduction and Appendix descriptive of the system pursued by that fraternity, and of the measures adopted for its suppression, (Calcutta: G. H. Hattman, Military Orphanage Press, 1836)
Stokes, Eric
English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).
Stokes, Eric
The Peasant and the Raj: studies in agrarian society and peasant rebellion in colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), chs 1 and 5-8
Stokes, Eric
The Peasant Armed: the Indian revolt of 1857 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986)
Taylor, Meadows Philip
Confessions of a Thug, (1 st ed., in 3 vols., London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1906; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Taylor, P.J.O.
What Really Happened During The Mutiny: a day-by-day account of the major events of 1857-1859 in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Van Woerkens, Martine
The Strangled Traveller: colonial imaginings and the Thugs of India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Yang, A.
The Limited Raj: agrarian relations in colonial India, Saran District, 1793-1920 (Berkeley: University of California 1988)
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 08-30-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-"surinder"+-->QUOTE("surinder")<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteBegin-"Raju"+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE("Raju")<!--QuoteEBegin-->India's secret history: 'A holocaust, one where millions disappeared...'
Author says British reprisals involved the killing of 10m, spread over 10 years
Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi
Friday August 24, 2007
The Guardian
... British pursued a murderous decade-long campaign to wipe out millions of people who dared rise up against them.
In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an "untold holocaust" which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857. Britain was then the world's superpower but, says Misra, came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India.
...
For many the fact that Indian historians debate 1857 from all angles is in itself a sign of a historical maturity. "You have to see this in the context of a new, more confident India," said Jon E Wilson, lecturer in south Asian history at King's College London. "India has a new relationship with 1857. In the 40s and 50s the rebellions were seen as an embarrassment. All that fighting, when Nehru and Gandhi preached nonviolence. But today 1857 is becoming part of the Indian national story. That is a big change."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0%2C...55324%2C00.html
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Misra must be applauded for this outstanding work. Has he written a book on this topic?
All the people who hail the British for ruling India must read this. All this sham of rule of law, justice, Christian values, White man's burden.
It is interesting also to note that the new found confidence of India is being noted, probably with some regret. Which also means that the absence of Indian confidence might have been noted too, but not commented for the sake of not waking up India. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Few BR members with their reading had independently came to the conclusion that Coonial British had systematically either subdued local zamindars, chieftains and leadership with land(making them farmers/agriculturists) or killed them off by execution. This is the deep impact of the colonialism more than the famines and economic looting of India. How large was the campaign in being confirmed by Misra.
This removed many generations of leadership of India which could rally and get large scale support for nationwide resistance against the Colonial Rule.
Hence the Colonial Rule could extend to another 90 years after 1857.
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 08-30-2007
1857 mutiny revisited
India's secret history: 'A holocaust, one where millions disappeared...'
Author says British reprisals involved the killing of 10m, spread over 10 years
Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi
Friday August 24, 2007
The Guardian
The battle of Cawnpore, India
The battle of Cawnpore - the entire British garrison died at Cawnpore (now Kanpur), either in the battle or later massacred with women and children. Their deaths became a war cry for the British. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty
A controversial new history of the Indian Mutiny, which broke out 150 years ago and is acknowledged to have been the greatest challenge to any European power in the 19th century, claims that the British pursued a murderous decade-long campaign to wipe out millions of people who dared rise up against them.
In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an "untold holocaust" which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857. Britain was then the world's superpower but, says Misra, came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India.
Article continues
Conventional histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order, claims Misra.
The author says he was surprised to find that the "balance book of history" could not say how many Indians were killed in the aftermath of 1857. This is remarkable, he says, given that in an age of empires, nothing less than the fate of the world hung in the balance.
"It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple and brutal. Indians who stood in their way were killed. But its scale has been kept a secret," Misra told the Guardian.
His calculations rest on three principal sources. Two are records pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed - either Islamic mujahideen or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving out the British.
The third source involves British labour force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a fifth and a third across vast swaths of India, which as one British official records was "on account of the undisputed display of British power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days - millions of wretches seemed to have died."
There is a macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. In one incident Misra recounts how 2m letters lay unopened in government warehouses, which, according to civil servants, showed "the kind of vengeance our boys must have wreaked on the abject Hindoos and Mohammadens, who killed our women and children."
Misra's casualty claims have been challenged in India and Britain. "It is very difficult to assess the extent of the reprisals simply because we cannot say for sure if some of these populations did not just leave a conflict zone rather than being killed," said Shabi Ahmad, head of the 1857 project at the Indian Council of Historical Research. "It could have been migration rather than murder that depopulated areas."
Many view exaggeration rather than deceit in Misra's calculations. A British historian, Saul David, author of The Indian Mutiny, said it was valid to count the death toll but reckoned that it ran into "hundreds of thousands".
"It looks like an overestimate. There were definitely famines that cost millions of lives, which were exacerbated by British ruthlessness. You don't need these figures or talk of holocausts to hammer imperialism. It has a pretty bad track record."
<b>
Others say Misra has done well to unearth anything in that period, when the British assiduously snuffed out Indian versions of history. "There appears a prolonged silence between 1860 and the end of the century where no native voices are heard. It is only now that these stories are being found and there is another side to the story," said Amar Farooqui, history professor at Delhi University. "In many ways books like Misra's and those of [William] Dalrymple show there is lots of material around. But you have to look for it."</b>
<b>
What is not in doubt is that in 1857 Britain ruled much of the subcontinent in the name of the Bahadur Shah Zafar, the powerless poet-king improbably descended from Genghis Khan.</b>
Neither is there much dispute over how events began: on May 10 Indian soldiers, both Muslim and Hindu, who were stationed in the central Indian town of Meerut revolted and killed their British officers before marching south to Delhi. The rebels proclaimed Zafar, then 82, emperor of Hindustan and hoisted a saffron flag above the Red Fort.
What follows in Misra's view was nothing short of the first war of Indian independence, a story of a people rising to throw off the imperial yoke. Critics say the intentions and motives were more muddled: a few sepoys misled into thinking the officers were threatening their religious traditions. In the end British rule prevailed for another 90 years.
Misra's analysis breaks new ground by claiming the fighting stretched across India rather than accepting it was localised around northern India. Misra says there were outbreaks of anti-British violence in southern Tamil Nadu, near the Himalayas, and bordering Burma. "It was a pan-Indian thing. No doubt."
Misra also claims that the uprisings did not die out until years after the original mutiny had fizzled away, countering the widely held view that the recapture of Delhi was the last important battle.
For many the fact that Indian historians debate 1857 from all angles is in itself a sign of a historical maturity. "You have to see this in the context of a new, more confident India," said Jon E Wilson, lecturer in south Asian history at King's College London. "India has a new relationship with 1857. In the 40s and 50s the rebellions were seen as an embarrassment. All that fighting, when Nehru and Gandhi preached nonviolence. But today 1857 is becoming part of the Indian national story. That is a big change."
What they said
Charles Dickens: "I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race."
Karl Marx: "The question is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton."
L'Estaffette, French newspaper: "Intervene in favour of the Indians, launch all our squadrons on the seas, join our efforts with those of Russia against British India ...such is the only policy truly worthy of the glorious traditions of France."
The Guardian: "We sincerely hope that the terrible lesson thus taught will never be forgotten ... We may rely on native bayonets, but they must be officered by Europeans."
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 09-14-2007
Counting the Cost of War
In times of warfare, acts of brutality are commonly committed on both sides and the 1857 uprising proved no exception. The British practice of executing rebel soldiers and officers by tying them to the mouths of cannons, so that the crowds of onlookers would be spattered with blood and the corpses dispersed over a wide area, was intended to shock. It was furthermore a deliberate offence, because blasting the body to pieces in this manner prevented either cremation or a proper burial. The British also carried out hundreds of arbitrary hangings in Northern India as the fighting progressed almost hand to hand through the villages, until they were finally retaken.
By his own account, Frederick Cooper, the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, shot to death no less than 237 captured sepoys at the end of July 1857, a further forty-five suffocating in cells - in a grisly re-enactment of Zephaniah Holwell's âBlack Hole' - before he had a chance to execute them. On the Indian side, there was likewise a systematic use of violence, quite apart from incidents such as the massacre in Kanpur at Satichaura Ghat. During his march through central India, Tatya Tope, for his part, ordered that village officials who had collaborated and collected taxes for the British should have their ears and noses cut off as an example to others. In short, this was a time of bloody savagery on both sides because both were desperate to win, and believed violence to be the only language their enemy understood.
The Uprising was finally quashed when the Governor General and later the first Viceroy, George Canning, amidst howls of protest from the civilians of Calcutta (who petitioned for the removal of 'clemency Canning' as he was called) offered an amnesty to all who gave themselves up after the recapture of Lucknow. This proposal was then published in a General Proclamation made in the name of Queen Victoria in Allahabad on November 1 st 1858, which promised to ârespect the rights of Indian Princes as our own'. By promising the non-confiscation of their lands, Canning was able to persuade fourteen taluqdars in Awadh alone to immediately surrender. Despite summary executions continuing thereafter, the amnesty greatly helped in the pacification of the population, all effective opposition coming to an end with the arrest and execution of Tatya Tope early in 1859. The Emperor Bahadur Shah was tried for treason at the age of 83, by his concessionaries for trade and the holders of the Diwani of Bengal (the East India Company), and was sentenced to transportation. Carried through north India in a bullock cart on his way to Calcutta, he was then exiled to Rangoon where he died and was buried in an unmarked grave four years later in November 1862.
Despite all that has been written on the topic, 1857 will probably remain forever clouded by confusion precisely because it has been used as a political tool both by the British, to justify their actions and their continuing rule in India, despite their unpopularity, and also by the rulers of independent India, who sought to construct a nationalist historiography which down-played (amongst other things) the centrality of the Delhi court in the events of the insurrection. India as the nation, we know now, was created in the twentieth century, and it would be folly to attempt to trace its origins to the events of one hundred years before. Likewise it would be a mistake uncritically to accept colonial British explanations for the uprising.
The most serious consequence of the Uprising was the vacating of the throne in Delhi, which paved the way for the creation of a new British Imperium in India. At the same time, however, the Uprising helped create a mythology of resistance which became a powerful ideological weapon in the hands of later Nationalists during the freedom struggle of the 1930's and 1940's. This was perhaps to prove to be one of its more important legacies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF 1857
(Sources referred to in the text are highlighted in blue)
http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/mutiny/history6.html
First war of independence: 1857 - acharya - 09-14-2007
British colonial Rule in India
[c]
British conquest of India and consolidation of rule
C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the making of the British Empire
I.J. Catanach, âAgrarian Disturbance in Nineteenth-Century Indiaâ, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.3, no.1, March 1966. reprinted in D. Hardiman, Peasant resistance in India.
Neil Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule (Cambridge 1984).
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi 1983).
Ranajit Guha, âThe Prose of Counter-Insurgencyâ, in Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II (New Delhi 1983).
David Hardiman, Peasant Resistance in India 1858-1914, New Delhi 1992.
R. Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century (London 1968).
Roy Moxham, The Great Hedge of India, London 2001. A popular account of the colonial tax on salt.
Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj (Cambridge 1978). For a review of the latter book, see * G. Pandey, âView of the observableâ, Journal of Peasant Studies, 7:3, 1980.
D.A. Washbrook, âProgress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c.1720-1860â, Modern Asian Studies, Vol.22, no.1, February 1988.
Ideologies of the Raj: Racism, Social Darwinism, Orientalism
S.H. Alatas, Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London 1977) Not on India, but deals with racist theory in an Asian colonial context.
Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (1977).
Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge 1987)
Crispin Bates, âRace, Caste and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of Indian Anthometryâ, in P. Robb, The Concept of Race (New Delhi 1995)
Susan Bayly, âCaste and Race in the Colonial Ethnography of Indiaâ, in P.Robb, The Concept of Race (New Delhi 1995)
J. Breman, âReturn of Social Inequality,â Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.39, No.35, 28 August 2004.
C. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London 1971).
C. Bolt, âRace and the Victoriansâ, in C.C. Eldridge (ed.), British Imperialism in the Nineteenth century (Basingstoke 1984).
D.F. Bratchell, The Impact of Darwinism: Texts and Commentary Illustrating Nineteenth Century Religious, Scientific and Literary Attitudes, (1981).
Paul Crook, âSocial Darwinism: the Conceptâ, in History of European Ideas, Vol.22, 1996.
David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (New Delhi 1987), Chapter 1, âIntroductionâ, pp.11-17
C. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence, chapter on âConcepts of Indian Character.â
R. Inden, Imagining India. Argues for a fundamental similarity between Orientalist and Anglicanist approaches.
Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory (Brighton 1980).
Howard L. Kaye, The Social Meaning of Modern Biology: From Social Darwinism to Sociobiology (Yale 1986).
V. Kiernan, Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age.
David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernisation 1773-1835 (California 1969).
David Kopf, âHermeneutics versus Historyâ, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.39, 1980. A critique of Edward Said.
Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (London 1988)
John Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester 1995). Another critique of Said.
Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke 1996).
Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge 1994).
George Moss, Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York 1978).
R. Numbers and D. Amundsen, Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion and Gender (Cambridge 1999).
P.B.Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge 1986).
Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race (New Delhi 1995)
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York 1978). The classic work on Orientalism, though more about Islamic areas of western Asia and North Africa than India.
Sumit Sarkar, âOrientalism Revisited: Saidian Frameworks in the Writing of Modern Indian Historyâ, The Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 16, nos. 1-2, 1994. Critique of Said.
Ajay Skaria, âShades of Wildness: Tribe, Caste and Gender in Western Indiaâ, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 56, no.3, August 1997.
Herbert Spencer, Herbert Spencer on Social Evolution: Selected Writings (Chicago 1972) * N.b. Spencer wrote the important Social Darwinist text Survival of the Fittest in 1864.
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960 , (London 1982).
Siep Stuurman, âFrancois Bernier and the Intervention of Racial Classificationâ, History Workshop Journal, 50, Autumn 2000.
G. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule In India (New York 1989). On Anglicanism in education in British India.
Raymond Williams, âSocial Darwinismâ, in Problems in Materialism and Culture, (London 1980), pp.86-102.
Colonial masculinities
Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics 1793-1905 (London 1980).
I. Chowdhury-Sengupta, âThe Effeminate and the Masculine,â in P. Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia, Delhi 1997.
Anne Mc Clintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York 1995).
John M. Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (1988). Excellent on the psychology of the colonial hunt. Chapter 7 is on India and in SRC.
M.S.S. Pandian, âGendered Negotiations: Hunting and Colonialism in the Late Nineteenth Century Nilgirisâ, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Volume 29, nos. 1 and 2, January-December 1995. In SRC.
M.S.S. Pandian, âHunting and Colonialism in the Nineteenth-Century Nilgiri Hills of South Indiaâ, in R. Grove, V. Damodaran & S. Sangwan, Nature and the Orient.
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The âManly Englishmanâ and the âEffeminate Bengaliâ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester 1995).
Economic effects of British colonialism â Was India impoverished?
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, Vol I, chapter 10, and Vol. II, chapter 8. Lucidly-written overview of the topic, taking the line that the British decided to leave India in 1947 because India was no longer profitable to Britain after World War II.
I. Chakraborty, âTeaching Economic History: Towards a Reorientation,â Economic and political Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 35, 28 August 2004.
Bipin Chandra, The Rise and Growth Of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership 1880-1905 (New Delhi 1966). Book written from an Indian nationalist perspective, arguing for a âdrain of wealthâ.
Neil Charlesworth, British Rule and the Indian Economy 1800-1914 (London 1982). A good introduction to the subject.
I.D. Derbyshire, âEconomic Change and the Railways in North India, 1860-1914â, in Modern Asian Studies, 1987.
R.C. Dutt, Economic History of India in the Victorian Age, (London 1950).
R.P. Dutt, India Today (London 1940), chapter 2, âThe Wealth and Poverty of Indiaâ. Written from a Marxian perspective, this argues that there was a âdrain of wealthâ.
H.M. Hyndman, The Bankruptcy of India (London 1886). One of the first to argue for the âdrain of wealthâ.
Dharma Kumar, The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol.II, c.1757-c.1970 (Cambridge1982), especially articles by Hurd, Morris and Whitcombe.
Modern Asian Studies , 1985, special edition edited by Gordon Johnson (ed.). See especially articles by Habib and Kumar.
D. Rothermund, Economic History of India, (Delhi 1988).
T. Roy, âEconomic History: An Endangered Discipline,â Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 29, 17 July 2004. *
Karl de Schweinitz, The Rise and Fall of British India: Imperialism as Inequality (London 1983). Takes the Indian nationalist side in the debate.*
V. Shanmugasundram, The Drain Theory (Bombay 1968).
B.R. Tomlinson, âIndia and the British Empire, 1880-1935â, Indian Economic and Social History Review, volume 12, number 4, 1975.
B.R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj: The Economics of Decolonisation in India (London 1979). Tomlinson argues that the British left India when it became economically unviable.
B.R. Tomlinson, âColonial Firms and the Decline of Colonialism in Eastern India, 1914-1947â, Modern Asian Studies, volume 15, number 3, 1981.
B.R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, 1860-1970 (Cambridge 1993).
David Washbrook, âLaw, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial Indiaâ, Modern Asian Studies, Vol.15, no.3, July 1981.
First war of independence: 1857 - ramana - 09-21-2007
From Ind Express, 20 Sept., 2007
Delhi's LAst stand
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Delhiâs last stand: September scenes</b>
Amaresh MisraPosted online: Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 0000 hrs Print Email
The old city of Delhi, Shahajahanabad, saw the final phase of the four-month British versus Sepoy battle rage from September 14 to 21,1857. Today, some observers perceive it as a veritable Stalingrad of the 19th century.<b> Modern India is yet to recognise its full significance</b>. The coup of May 11,1857 that was staged by the sepoys took the British by surprise. It transformed overnight the âSepoy Mutinyâ into what both British radicals and conservatives now term a ânational war of independenceâ.
<b>How the Delhi struggle affected the rest of India is revealed by one major episode</b>. In June 1857, a big, China-bound British expeditionary force was diverted to India. Assembled at Bombay under Colonel Woodburn, it was to march through western India and intercept the formidable Neemuch Sepoys who, after ending their allegiance to the British on June 3, were marching towards Delhi via Agra.
The Agra Fort was still in British hands. In fact the British United Provinces Government ran effectively from Agra as Lt Governor Colvin was stationed there. A few hundred miles away was <b>Delhi, surrounded by dainty gates and pavilions and adorned with gardens and markets. It was an aesthetic, modern city at that point in time. However, it was not designed to withstand a siege. </b>
The British knew that intercepting the Neemuch Sepoys was critical. On June 19, the Nasirabad Brigade had demoralised the British force, besieging Delhi from the ridge. The ridge stood on an elevated plain and the British located there were in a better position. Yet in a night-long skirmish, the Nasirabad men climbed the ridge and reached the British camp, and unnerved their opponents. Woodburn, too, was unable to intercept the Neemuch Sepoys.
<b>Throughout the Delhi siege, Indian morale was high. The sturdy sepoys of peasant stock from UP and Bihar, known as the âpoorabiasâ, ruled the roost. The âpoorabiasâ were soon joined by âpashchamiyasâ, or Jat-Gujjar-Mewati peasants and nomads from Haryana and western UP. The diaries of Munshi Jiwan Lal and Mainoddin Hussein, two British spies, reveal an extraordinary picture of a city warring against the British but also at war with itself. </b>Bahadur Shah Zafarâs attitude was pro-peasant. In fact Zafar, a Sufi, inaugurated what can be called the worldâs first revolutionary Sufi state. Here, as per Sufi precepts, neither atheism nor religion but justice was meant to prevail. <b>The sepoys turned Zafarâs Sufi state into a constitutional monarchy. Charters, promising land to the tiller and capital to merchants were issued in a plebian spirit that would mark the Paris Commune in 1871.</b>
<b>Whether Hindu or Muslim, most of Delhiâs urban elite had emerged in the post-1803 period, after the British wrested Delhi from the Marathas. They had a vested interest in maintaining British rule.</b> During the battle, several of them acted as British spies and were often arrested by the sepoys and Mughal princes. It was such subversion that led to the blowing up of the sepoy magazine on August 8. By September, several sepoy units had left Delhi to fight in other theatres and not because, as some British historians have argued, their morale was sinking. British troops equalled that of the Indians.<b> Bakht Khan, Sirdhari Singh and Bhageerath Misra, the three main sepoy leaders representing respectively the Bareilly, Neemuch and Nasirabad/City Brigades, had decided to defend Delhi to the last while keeping their options to fight on, should Delhi fall.</b>
<b>On September 14, the Brit</b>ish, with numbers comparable to those of the sepoys (roughly 10,000), and bolstered by better artillery, <b>breached Delhiâs Kashmiri Gate.</b> Hoping for a rout, the British troops were dismayed to find sepoy detachments fanning out, forming an irregular curve and threatening the British camp. By September 15, the British were halted. <b>Hodson, Nicholson, Reid, all legendary British officers, went on record to state that they had never seen European infantry in such dire straits. The fighting on September 14 and 15 alone cost the British over 2,000 men.</b>
A sepoy counter-attack would have ended the battle. <b>At that crucial moment Bhageerath Misra was assassinated, leading to confusion in the Nasirabad/City Brigade. Bakht Khan leading the Bareilly Brigade on Delhiâs outskirts also received faulty intelligence. The Indians then ran out of ammunition.</b> This was the chief reason why the British âearned a victory by defaultâ. Still, it took the British seven days to cover the few kilometres that separated Kashmiri Gate from the Red Fort. <b>The 10,000-strong British force lost more than 6,000 men. When the Union Jack went up on the Red Fort on September 21, the British âwere a shattered and a demoralised forceâ.</b> They could not even spare 2,000 soldiers to pursue the sepoys who had melted into the countryside to fight for another day.
Misra has authored âWar of Civilisations: India 1857 ADâ
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
First war of independence: 1857 - ramana - 09-24-2007
Google Cache on protests against a British tour to commomerate the 1857
First war of independence: 1857 - Guest - 09-28-2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIVsG8VKTVU
First war of independence: 1857 - dhu - 09-30-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->from the google cache: link
They were met with black-flag protests in Agra and rowdy demonstrations in Gwalior. In Lucknow, scene of a pivotal battle between rebels and British forces, they were pelted with plastic bottles, pebbles and cow dung.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It seems that the blimey britishers never get stoned; rather they get pebbled. Or maybe Indians are incapable of stoning.
No comment about the cow dung, which seem to be ever present in these type of articles.
First war of independence: 1857 - Guest - 09-30-2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Google Cache on protests against a British tour to commomerate the 1857<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Why they are doing this year? I can very well recall, British group visiting old graves, my school in Agra was next to "Gora Kabristan", common wall, it was inside Agra Cantt, School was between Graveyard and Army officerâs bachelor mess. Every year Britishers used to visit grave and they were paying for maintenance. These graves are full of huge nice statues.
link
In this picture KV No 2, Next are three blocks parallel, 1857 graves and next is battle practice ground
First war of independence: 1857 - dhu - 09-30-2007
They even got pic of native polishing the monument, which is on the same wavelength as their usual World War 2 dramas.
<img src='http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/09_04/LucknowG_228x396.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' /><i>
A man polishes the memorial at Lucknow</i> thisislondon.co.uk
<i>"Chanting anti-British slogans, an angry mob pelted their tour bus with <b>rubbish and dirty water </b>before laying siege to the group's hotel."</i>