First war of independence: 1857

ramana · 05-10-2007, 09:35 PM

From The Telegraph, Kolkota, 10 May 2007

QUOTEKILL THE WHITE MAN
- The revolt of 1857 was too violent an event to celebrateÂ
Rudrangshu Mukherjee

<img src='http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070510/images/10top.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />

Mani Shankar Aiyar at the inauguration of the 150th anniversary celebrations of the âFirst War of Independenceâ, New Delhi, May 8Â

I must declare a vested interest in the revolt of 1857. Immediately after I finished my Masterâs in history, I decided, much to the surprise of all my teachers, save one, to write a doctoral dissertation on the revolt in the area the British called Oudh â a quaint anglicization of the name Awadh. The reason that all my teachers were surprised at my choice of subject was the belief, common among most historians in the Seventies, that there was nothing new to be said about the revolt. The subject was sterile and all that had to be said had been said in the centenary year and its immediate aftermath.

The lone voice of encouragement came from Barun De, who believed that 1857 was an event which had not really been worked upon. There was another source of inspiration. This was the famous Cambridge historian, Eric Stokes, whose essays on the subject I had read with excitement and profit. I was to get to know Eric later and learn an enormous amount from him, till cancer claimed him very untimely.

The point of this autobiographical sojourn is to set the context for my surprise at the sudden burst of enthusiasm among historians about the great uprising. There is nothing like a state-sponsored anniversary to stoke the interests of historians in a subject. The adjective, state-sponsored, is used advisedly. In a country with as rich and as diverse a history as Indiaâs, every year is an anniversary of something or the other. In June will come the 250th anniversary of the battle of Plassey. Is the Indian state celebrating that anniversary? The answer is no. The decision to celebrate the revolt of 1857 with some fanfare is based on the conclusion â put forward by some historians and accepted by the government of India â that the rebellion is worth celebrating because it represented Indiaâs first war of independence.

I hold a dissenting view, since I believe that 1857 should be remembered but not commemorated. Let me try and explain my reasons for holding this particular opinion. The reasons are embedded in the events themselves.

One hundred and fifty years ago today, the sepoys in the cantonment of Meerut mutinied. They killed their superior officers and every single British man, woman and child they could find. They burnt the bungalows in which the white people lived, and destroyed all government offices and buildings. âMaro firanghi ko [Kill the white man]â was the cry and the destruction was near total. A group of sepoys, after having cut the telegraph wires to Delhi, sped off towards the old Mughal capital. Arriving there on the morning of May 11, they entered the walled city and the Lal Qila. They asked the old Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, to accept the nominal leadership of the revolt. Outside the Red Fort, violence and destruction reigned and Delhi passed out of British control by May 12. In both Meerut and in Delhi, common people, peasants from the surrounding countryside, artisans and the poor joined the sepoys in the killing, looting and destruction. A mutiny of the soldiery, as soon as it occurred, acquired the character of a general uprising.

The fall of Delhi was followed by the spread of the uprising all over north India. In station after station and cantonment after cantonment, the soldiers mutinied and killed white men, women and children. In every place, common people joined the sepoys. All over north India â from Delhi to Patna and from the Terai to Jhansi, British rule, one British officer noted, had collapsed âlike a house made of cardsââ. The Britons who had escaped the wrath of the rebels cowered in fear within the walls of the Residency in Lucknow, behind the âentrenchmentââ in Kanpur and in the Ridge in Delhi.

British administration was quick to recover from the shock and to retaliate. The shock grew, in the words of John Kaye, who wrote in the 19th century a magisterial history of what he called the Sepoy War, from âthe degradation of fearing those whom we had taught to fear usââ. The retaliation was brutal. In the summer of 1857, through a series of Acts, individual Britons were given powers to judge and to execute any Indian they suspected of being a rebel. The result was devastating. Kaye wrote, âIt is on the records of our British Parliament, in papers sent home by the Governor-General of India in Council, that â the aged, women and children, are sacrificed, as well as those guilty of rebellionâ. They were not deliberately hanged, but burnt to death in their villages. Englishmen did not hesitate to boast that they had âspared no oneâ.ââ

The events of 1857 churned around a vicious cycle of violence. The rebels killed mercilessly without considerations of gender and age. Witness the massacre on the river in Kanpur where nearly the entire British population was killed in a spectacular show of rebel power. The British killed indiscriminately to punish a population that had transgressed the monopoly of violence that rulers have over the ruled.

The British won and, like all victors everywhere, they memorialized their triumph. In Kanpur, to take one example, they transformed the well into which the bodies of the victims of a massacre had been thrown into a shrine. A weeping angel carved in marble by Marochetti was placed over the well. The shrine was an exclusive preserve of the white man till August 15, 1947. On that day, people damaged the nose of the angel, which had to be removed. In its place, a statue of Tantia Topi was erected. One icon was replaced by another.

Today, as the celebrations begin to mark the 150th anniversary of the rebellion, some questions need to be asked: is 1857 an occasion to celebrate? Can the Indian state uphold the violence that is inextricably linked to that year? Can the Indian state say that it is loyal to the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence, and in the same breath celebrate 1857 when so many innocent people, on both sides, were brutally killed?

{Wow Wait a minute. How can you drag in MG in the discussion on 1857? Confine yourself to the fact that you as an intellectual abhor violence and were it not for the violence of 1857 you would not be able to tak and write about it.It was teh road of 1857 on whihc MG strode to help gather momentum to drive the British out. }

The questions are important because in India, there is no mode of remembering without celebrating. We commemorate to remember, sometimes even to forget. Eighteen fifty-seven is an event to remember, as all events of the past are; it is an event to comprehend and analyse because, as Jawaharlal Nehru wrote, it showed âman at his worstââ. That comprehension and analysis is best done outside the aegis of the State.



I think it is time to analyse the writers of 1857 to get an idea of what the elite are thinking. I submit that the inteelctuals want to deride the event while the politicians understanad its suicide to ignore it.

1957 had JLN at the helm does anyone have info on how it was commomerated/remembered?

This thread has collected the info from over three years and is the best online resource on 1857.

Highlighting acharya's post:

QUOTEDr D N Tripathi

The glorious example of the heroes of 1857

May 09, 2007

The country is celebrating the 150th anniversary of what is variously termed as the First War of Independence, War of Independence of 1857, Indian Mutiny, the Great Indian Mutiny, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Sepoy Rebellion, the Great Mutiny, the Rebellion of 1857 or the Revolt of 1857.

To understand the nature of the uprising of 1857, it is necessary to examine the historiography, divergent in opinion among the contemporary British historians and Indian historians as well as the present ones.

There have been nationalist, imperialist and Orientalist depictions of the 1857 uprising. But to really understand what happened in 1857, one has to study the 'native' sources and oral histories.

Barely 50 years ago, at the initiative of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the well-known work on 1857 was written by the then director of the National Archives, Dr Surendra Nath Sen. And with the publication of William Dalrymple's book, The Last Mughal, the controversy is very much alive even today.

Joseph Mazzini, an Italian patriot, described the uprising of 1857 in India as an insurrection of the first magnitude, which shook the foundation of British rule in India. Charles Raikes regarded it as primarily and essentially a mutiny of sepoys.

The same view was expressed by Kishori Chand Mitra, Sambhu Chandra Mukhopadhyaya, Harish Chandra Mukherjee and Sir Syed Ahmad. Some contemporary Englishmen viewed the uprising mainly as handiwork of the Muslims. Roberts, Coopland, Alexander Duff and many others regarded it as a long concocted Mohammedan conspiracy against the supremacy and rule of the English in India.

John William Kaye and C B Malleson were of the view that the rebellion as a joint endeavour of the two great communities -- Hindus and Muslims. John Bruce Norton regarded the uprising as a rebellion of the people rather than merely a mutiny of the soldiers. Many English writers, such as Malleson and Kaye, subscribed to this view and considered the uprising of 1857 as an organised campaign to drive away the English from India.

Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, while speaking in the House of Commons, recognised the real character of the upheaval and declared the movement as a national revolt. V D Savarkar and Pandit Sunder Lal were the first Indian writers who claimed the uprising of 1857 as the First War of Independence.

The two historians, Tara Chand and S N Sen described it as 'a war of independence'. Jawaharlal Nehru also wrote: 'It is much more than a military mutiny and it spread rapidly and assumed the character of a popular revolt and a war of Independence'.

However, R C Majumdar expressed a radically different view. He said that the 'so- called First National war of Independence in 1857 is neither First, nor National, nor a war of Independence'. He holds the view that a general revolt or a war of Independence necessarily involves a definite plan and organisation, broad in perspective. The uprising of 1857 was however limited only to a greater part of UP and a narrow zone of its east, west and south.

In October 2006, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Somnath Chatterjee, said: 'what the British sought to deride as a mere sepoy mutiny was India's First War of Independence in a very true sense, when people from all walks of life, irrespective of their caste, creed, religion and language, rose against the British rule'.

Historians remain divided on whether the rebellion can properly be considered a war of Indian independence. Arguments against this include the fact that a united India did not exist at the time in political terms or that the rebellion remained confined to the ranks of the Bengal army (which nonetheless was the largest of the armies in India) and in North-Central India.

Arguments in favour say that even though the rebellion had various causes (sepoy grievances, British high-handedness, the Doctrine of Lapse, etc), most of the rebel sepoys set out to revive the old Mughal Empire, which signified a national symbol for them, instead of heading home or joining services of their regional principalities, which would not have been unreasonable if their revolt were only inspired by grievances. However, it is clear that most of the Indian people accept the latter view and consider it as the First War of Independence.

After 1857, the British scaled down their programme of reform, increased the racial distance between Europeans and native Indians, and also sought to appease the gentry and princely families, especially Muslims, who had been major instigators of the 1857 revolt.

After 1857, the zamindars (regional feudal officials) became more oppressive, the caste system became more pronounced, and the communal divide between Hindus and Muslims became marked and visible. This as some historians argue, led to the policy of 'divide and rule'.

Marx's position is that the Indians were victims of both physical and economic forms of class oppression by the British. In his analysis, the clash between the soldiers and their officers was the inevitable conflict that resulted out of capitalism and imperialism. Local industry, specifically the famous weavers of Bengal and elsewhere, also suffered under British rule. Tariffs were kept low in accordance with the traditional British free market sentiments. Indigenous industry simply could not compete.

Whereas once India had produced much of England's luxury cloth, the country was now reduced to growing cotton for Britain's textile industry, the finished products of which were subsequently marketed back to India.

In conclusion I would say that the movement of 1857 was in expanse and significance greater than just a mutiny in the army. To my mind its most significant characteristic was the unity of the Hindu and Muslim communities in the struggle against foreign rule.

The last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah II himself in his proclamation emphasised the necessity for unity between Hindus and Muslims. Further, in the battleground in 1857, the sepoys of both the communities fought shoulder to shoulder. The ultimate defeat of the movement does not in any way detract from the significance of the united struggle.

Today, in particular, when some forces in our country tend to erode the very basis of unity of the Indian people and, in particular, the harmony between the two larger communities, it is necessary to bear in mind the glorious example set by the heroes of 1857.

Professor D N Tripathi is a former chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research. This article first appeared in the ICHR newsletter and appears with kind courtesy ICHR.


Interesting view of Sri Tripathi in above post. Looking for syncretic threads as can be seen in the last para.

However there was a difference. The Hindus were looking at the Mughal Emperor as a symbol of political unity for Hindusthan and the Muslims as Dalrymple and others wrote were looking at restoring the Muslim rule. And that is why they cooperated. The Brits understood that and sought to divide and rule by selective pandering.

The genius of Mahatma was that he was able to evoke the desire for freedom across the whole nation and not just in some regions and mane the IFM a truly national movement.

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