First war of independence: 1857

[ramana]

1857 doesnt go away!



Book Review Besieged:Voices from Delhi 1857 in Telegraph, Kplkata, 15 Oct., 2010.

OTHER AGENCIES



Bahadur Shah Zafar

Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857

Compiled by Mahmood Farooqui, Penguin, Rs 699



This has been a much-awaited book ever since the publication of William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the Mutiny, livened up what would have otherwise been a monotonous sarkari exercise. A substantial part of Dalrymple’s book was based on the Mutiny Papers, which had been found lying unnoticed in the National Archives.



Two factors — the difficulty of reading the shikastah or cursive Urdu in which they were written and the fact that they seemingly formed an “unwieldy mountain” of pleas, petitions, orders, letters and so on — seem to have discouraged the use of the material (even by subaltern historians, as Dalrymple had once lamented). But by the time The Last Mughal was published in late 2006, a major part of the translation must have been over. Dalrymple culled the meat from the Mutiny Papers to produce his scintillating study of Bahadur Shah Zafar and a city under a crisis that was not of their own making. Many of the voices from 1857 Delhi that Mahmood Farooqui reproduces in Besieged, therefore, seem to have been heard before. Many, in fact, have featured in The Last Mughal.



The voices, however, have sounded different to Dalrymple and Farooqui in turn. The latter conjures up a picture of Delhi under siege that varies fundamentally from that drawn up by Dalrymple. In The Last Mughal, Zafar is a tragic figure, captive to the ambitions of the royal household and that of the soldiers, and the city of Delhi is a picture of unmitigated disaster given the inescapable realities the rebellion imposes on it. But Farooqui takes a contrary view. To him, the Mughal king is not a man completely without agency. Zafar, he says, need not have given in to the soldiers and assumed leadership of the movement. But by doing all that he did, Zafar showed his “partisanship with the rebel cause as well as he could”.



The story of Delhi in those crucial months was, again, not one of a steady progression to its eventual fall in September 1857. Farooqui says that what merits attention is not the defeat of the city, but how it held on in the face of tremendous odds. In saying so, he echoes Ranajit Guha’s emphasis on looking at not why the rebels did what they did, but on how they did it.



The usual story about 1857 is about lack —of leadership, military strategy, unity, command and so on. Farooqui wants us to look away from this “settled truth” and instead look at the less-recognized facets of the ghadr (turbulence) — the organization that was set up to meet the needs of the city in times of war. Through selective adoption of both pre-modern and colonial administrative techniques, the mutineers had set up an administrative structure that worked reasonably well till the day the city fell. What is most remarkable is that this structure was not a throwback to the pre-colonial monarchy, but a constitutional monarchy of sorts.



Farooqui fleshes out the details of the mutineers’ ingenuity by bunching together correspondence between various authorities that show how this structure worked. The petitions, complaints, commands, queries also bring into view how the ghadr touched the lives of the people of the city — the plight of the shepherd who finds himself robbed by soldiers, of potters who find themselves conscripted as coolies without pay, of shopkeepers who cannot open shops because soldiers demand free provisions, of the moneyed who are forced to pay for the battle which they know will be lost, and of householders who find soldiers gaping at the women of the house.



Farooqui says that despite the hardship, no one in Delhi is without agency. Even the city poor can turn to an authority to lodge their complaints. That might have been true. But the existence of an administrative infrastructure does not necessarily mean it delivered the goods. Farooqui seems to deliberately obfuscate this fact by following no definite chronology while putting together the correspondence. The lack of chronology makes it difficult to assess the efficiency of governance.



Farooqui, however, posits the image of order with that of disorder and shows how the ghadr encompassed both. The dateline shows that while the city’s walls were crumbling on September 11, three days before the final assault on September 14, Khair, a widow, was being released from jail by the authorities after being cleared of allegations levelled against her by her brother-in-law. In other words, even at the height of trouble, the law courts functioned “normally”.



The most undeniable sign of disorder or abnormality was the city’s problems with its women, many of whom eloped with their lovers or refused to abide by their husbands’ diktats. Prostitutes and female entertainers, meanwhile, had a field day and often took the help of soldiers to settle old scores, much to the discomfiture of ordinary denizens.



{Shades of Umrao Jaan!}



Farooqui casts a keen eye on the emotional turmoil within the city, whose citizens were being egged on to fight the war in the name of their deen and dharma despite their reluctance to accept the plundering soldiers in their midst. On the other hand were the soldiers, many of whom had left behind everything they had to take up a public cause which suddenly seemed to have no public support. And there, of course, was the king himself, who could never reconcile the interests of his subjects with those of the ones who had come to fight in his name.



Many of the path-breaking recent studies on the revolt have concentrated on looking at it from the rural perspective — the motivations of the peasant army, their methods of mobilization and so on. Farooqui relocates attention to an urban centre, where the equations played out very differently between the rebels — mostly outsiders — and the indifferent, and even resentful, city population which supposedly consisted of their backers. The remapping of the dimensions of the conflict will require sustained work on the vignettes of information that Farooqui has painstakingly unearthed in his translations.



CHIROSREE BASU