First war of independence: 1857

[acharya]

1857 Uprising should be studied objectively and dispassionately, says Mushirul Hasan

Special Correspondent

Event basically viewed from perspective of victor and vanquished

# Neutral genuine voices must be recovered
# Calls for systematic analysis of Ghalib

NEW DELHI: Historian and Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia University Mushirul Hasan on Sunday described the 1857 Uprising as a dramatic milestone in India's history whose significance could never be belittled.

"There must be an objective and dispassionate study and analysis of the 1857 revolt, but the problem arises when the state tries to appropriate the whole discourse and legitimise whatever it has been doing over the years," he said at the concluding seminar of the Sahitya Akademi's Festival of Letters on "Rising 1857: Colonialism, Literature and March to Freedom."

Prof. Hasan said the histories of the 1857 revolt were basically viewed from the perspective of the victor and the vanquished. "We should move away from this perspective and recover those neutral genuine voices that have not been in the historical discourses." The French revolution was objectively and dispassionately studied and analysed by historians, but this had not been the fate of the histories of the 1857 revolt.

He also called for a systematic analysis of Ghalib and other Urdu poets and writers whose works were not so sympathetic to Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Gujarati writer Sitanshu Yashashchandra said: "1857 was a time when India first revolted against Hylomorphism [doctrine that production is imposition of formal order on chaotic or passive matter] of the West. To remember 1857 fully and truly is to remember and recognise its relation with the 1908 satyagraha. The composite memory should make us think and act today to ensure that no company sarkar, nor any multi-national company impose its architectonic designs on the Indian people mistaking it for a chaotic and passive object."

Writer and director of the Bhartiya Bhasha Parishad Indra Nath Choudhuri and poet and former bureaucrat Keki Daruwala presided over the seminar. They said historians and writers needed to be more accommodative and objective in their representations on the 1857 events.

Mr. Daruwala described 1857 as a chain of sporadic events that had several elements of religious bias and caste prejudice.

Speaking about the literary and scholarly works produced so far on Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi, Harish Trivedi, critic, observed how considerations of gender had entered and modulated the way she was viewed. "She is a larger figure outside history, than in history."

Maharashtra scholar Harishchandra Thorat believed that the 1857 events made a deep impact on the Maharashtrian psyche and captured the imagination of contemporary Maharashtra.

Urdu scholar Wahab Ashrafi, Punjabi critic Gurbhagat Singh, Tamil writer Vasanthi and Oriya critic Prafulla Kumar Mohanty also participated in the seminar.