First war of independence: 1857

[ramana]

We now have fiction to mirror the truht of the war.
From The Telegraph, 22 june 2007

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>GORY TALES
- 1857 as a moment of savage cruelty  </b>
 
<b>THE MUTINY By Julian Rathbone,
Penguin, Rs 695</b>

Aristotle calls the poet a ‘maker’ because he deals not with what has happened, as a historian does, but constructs what might happen according to the laws of probability and possibility. Even if the poet deals with historical events, he will not limit himself like a historian to the particulars of the episodes but will glean the universal truths inherent in them. <b>In The Mutiny, Julian Rathbone brings to life the fateful days leading to and following what has been variously called the Sepoy Mutiny, the revolt of 1857 or the first war of Indian independence. By imaginatively living the lives of the characters fractured by the uprising and compelling readers to do the same, Rathbone is able to bring out the waste, rather than the glory of the revolt.</b> For those eager to project the mutiny as a remarkable instance of the awakening of the Indian nationalist sensibility, reading the The Mutiny would be a chastening exercise.

The novel begins on May 12, 1853, with the newly married Sophie Hardcastle — wife of Tom Hardcastle, the assistant attorney general of the Meerut Contingent — trying to accustom herself to life in Simla while her heart aches for her native Dorset. As Sophie makes her way to the gathering hosted by Lady Blackstock, she encounters the voluble Catherine Dixon, who will prove to be her closest friend in India. Most of the English characters Sophie gets acquainted with in Lady Blackstock’s party will be dead by the time the novel ends, in May, 1858. The list of the dead will include not only Sophie’s husband but also Catherine and her four children, who are butchered in the infamous Bibigarh massacre.

Although Sophie is one of the chief protagonists in the novel and she is left bereft in the aftermath of the mutiny, <b>the reader is hardly encouraged to sympathize exclusively with her, or, by extension, with the English side in the revolt. The injustices perpetrated on the natives by the English merchants of the Company are put forward in terms too unequivocal to enable the Englishmen to have claims on the readers’ compassion. But, in the final analysis, what emerges as more important than measuring the guilt of the respective parties, is the number of innocent lives lost in the skirmish. Considered in that light, if the revolt of 1857 is to be deemed momentous at all, it will be because of the unbelievable level of cruelty demonstrated by both the natives and the English. Each side outdid the other in unleashing a series of arbitrary killings. </b>The only creatures that benefited from the revolt were perhaps the carrion-feeders — the vultures, jackals and kites that sated themselves on the innumerable corpses strewn all over from Meerut to Delhi. There is a brilliant section in which the reader follows a kite as she takes stock of the feast led out before her. Through her eyes we see a Muslim butcher being shot at by a British “squaddie” for no other reason but because he wanted to test whether his “firelock would go off all right after being loaded so long....”

Although the scale of violence was unprecedented, the atrocities were but the natural outcome of, on the one hand, the pent-up irritation of the British with the recalcitrant natives who refused to fall in line, and of the rage that had long been simmering inside the colonized masses on the other. The natives resented the fact that the English, who understood nothing of their culture, were trying to replace it by their own. The colonizers, who were in many ways as prejudiced or as enlightened as the natives, nevertheless imposed their might on the colonized after stripping them of the power to protest. <b>Rathbone underlines the fact that the British in India were merchants, who were trying to give a pious aura to their mercenary motives by attempting to convert the ‘barbaric’ natives to an alien faith. The false assumption of superiority and the resultant coercion were tantamount to “a psychic rape and the response of many was hate, a hate that could drive a sword edge through muscle and bone, deep into the living flesh and organ of a person you know nothing about, save that she or he represented for you those who had raped you.”</b>

<b>An interesting parallel emerges in the novel between the way the English behaved with the natives and the way the average Victorian gentleman treated the angel of his hearth.</b> Sophie finds herself married to a man of an intellect inferior to hers. Tom Hardcastle almost becomes a figure of farce with his bungling ways, which contrast sharply with the measured steps of his wife. Yet he is the master of the Victorian household over which he presides, and Sophie cannot protest when he exerts his power over her, physically and emotionally. Trapped in a loveless relationship, Sophie feels herself raped every time Hardcastle forces himself upon her body. The Reverend John Rotton, trying to instil the fear of rape by natives in Sophie as the mutiny breaks, makes her reflect that he must be “sadly unaware of how often it occurred in the bedrooms of his congregation.”

Interestingly, all the memorable characters in the novel are women — be it Sophie, her native ayah, Lavanya, the mysterious Uma Blackstock or the singular Ranee of Jhansi. The Ranee, seen mostly through the eyes of the besotted British lieutenant, Bruce Farquhar, dazzles by the displays of her power, cunning and wit. The other leaders of the revolt, Nana Saheb or Bahadur Shah, seem pale by contrast, pathetic in their laziness and self-indulgence. The shrewd but loving Lavanya becomes the pivotal figure in the novel as she rescues her daughter and the children of her employers from the onslaught and survives the horrors with them. As a native ‘sub-altern’, social morality, which constricts the lives of women like Sophie, means nothing to her. She allows herself the pleasures of the flesh when offered the opportunity — unlike Sophie, who, in spite of bristling with desire, has to content herself with just staring at the naked Farquhar. The novel ends with Lavanya finding herself a mate as she reaches the end of her journey with the children.

It is significant that Lavanya alone finds the fulfilment that eludes every other character in the novel. <b>In her position of complete powerlessness — as a woman in a patriarchal society, and as a servant in a colonized world — Lavanya has nothing to lose. But she has much to give — whether in the form of her milk with which she feeds Sophie’s son, Stephen, because social custom would not allow Sophie to give suck to her child, or by way of the selfless love that enables her to save and protect not only her own child but also those of her white masters. Lavanya later gives Stephen not only a home, but, in a startling reversal of the master-slave dialectic, also her language. Her success in The Mutiny is also the triumph of the novelist/poet over the historian.</b>

ANUSUA MUKHERJEE
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In other words Lavanya is the common Indian who eventually emerged stronger after the ordeal.