[Reader-list] Shahid Amin on 1857

[Ravikant]

It addresses issues of history, memory and memory management in the context of 
the Indian state's plans for commemorating the event in a big way. Apologies 
for X-posting

ravikant


http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060713/asp/opinion/story_6461478.asp

OF MANY PASTS 
 - The 1857 celebrations raise questions Indians must confront 
  SHAHID AMIN
  (The author is professor of history, University of Delhi)

Such are the pulls of appropriating History for the Nation that amidst a busy 
July schedule - interim report of the oversight committee, negotiations with 
the IAEA, keeping the allies and tomato prices from going over the top - the 
prime minister will find time on July 13 to chair a 68-member committee to 
commemorate 150 years of 1857. That's a lot of Indians - former prime 
ministers, politicians, satraps, bureaucrats, and some historians to boot. 
One may be proven wrong, but most of them, including the two historians who 
have declined, would not be entirely comfortable distinguishing a barkandaz 
from a tilanga sepoy, or be familiar with say the ballad of Kunwar Singh of 
Shahabad or the shikasta script of rebel communication. One could even wager 
that some of them might even falter reciting little more than the 
refrain "Khub lari mardani… Jhansi wali rani…" Yet a group of ministers has 
gone ahead and cleared Rs 150 crore of public money for a major 
commemoration, beginning, we are told, August 2007. And there lies the rub, 
for what dreams have propelled the August inauguration… we know.
It is the dream of annexing the events of 1857 to our freedom from Britain 
almost to the month. But though crucial for 1942 and again 1947, August was 
not a particularly good month for us Indians in 1857, especially in Delhi, 
which fell to the vengeful firangis soon afterwards. If true, the August 
inauguration to the celebrations of 1857 raises an important question that we 
who people this nation - historians, politicians, public - face about our 
pasts. As elsewhere, so in India, school books, street-names, and jubilee 
celebrations - all seek to construct a sense of an uncluttered national past. 
Opposition to the idea of a national-plural is common to most nationalists, 
for it disorders a national past which is simultaneously considered 
historical and singular. Swimming against the tide enables us to ask a 
different set of questions: is there something inherent in the ways of 
nation-states that makes it difficult for citizens to relate to history 
outside a mainstream, accredited version of the past - the national past? Can 
we at all remember without commemorating? Can we recollect without 
celebrating, recall without avenging? Why are national histories thought of 
invariably as time-resistant capsules buried for ever, and in constant play 
at the same time?

San-sattavan! In northern India, this incomplete chronological slice, sans the 
century, encapsulates in its pithiness the many things that went into the 
making of that Great Event. San-sattavan can only be 1857; it can not be 
1957, or even 1757, though in some contemporary prophesies, British rule was 
to end within a hundred years of the battle of Plassey. Be that as it 
may, 'san sattavan' stands resplendent in perhaps the most well-known poem on 
the Ghadar by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan: "Chamak uthi san sattavan mein, woh 
talwar purani thi." The sword unleashed to push out the firangis, had not 
been moulded in or wrested from colonial armouries; it was the very old sword 
of an 'aged Bharat' which, rejuvenated, had now stood up to claim this 
equally old land for itself ("burhe Bharat mein aayi phir-se nai jawani 
thi").
Let's stay a bit longer with the stirring opening stanza of this epic poem on 
1857, on which we will have a surfeit of songs, dramas, marches, exhibitions 
in the year to come. Let's recall that this great nationalist poem places 
the 'value of lost independence' and 'the resolve to throw the firangi out' 
in every Indian heart. And yet the Bharat of 1857 is already old, 90 years 
before the birth of the Indian nation-state. Let's now cut to a folk song 
about Jhansi-wali Rani, popular in district Etawah and its environs in Uttar 
Pradesh before the more famous Chauhan version that has been bequeathed to us 
as a nation: "O, the Rani of Jhansi, well fought the brave one/ All the 
soldiers were fed with sweets; she herself had treacle and rice/… Leaving 
morcha, she ran to the lashkar, where she searched for but found no water, O! 
The Rani of Jhansi well fought the brave one." Here in a local folk song, to 
be sung in the Dadra vein, we sure find the Rani's sacrifice and valour, but 
no intimations of a well-entrenched and reactivated sense of Indian 
nationalism.

To adapt the opening sentence of Anna Karenina: all nations are new, but each 
claims its antiquity in its own way. This is clearly in evidence in the 
spirit behind the forthcoming official celebrations of 1857, as it is in that 
famous nationalist poem on Rani Jhansi by Subhadra Chauhan. It is a feature 
of nationalist consciousness, that the nation whose 'making' requires large 
doses of energy, action and sacrifice, that very nation is made available to 
us fully-formed - like a mannequin in a shopping window - merely awaiting a 
change of (nationalist) attire.
Only an informed public debate can stem the wastage of money and effort on 
mere window-dressing: the sprucing up of an 1857 structure at one place, the 
gouging out of a colonial memorial stone at another, ersatz purabiya sipahis 
knocking at the Rajghat gate of the Red Fort, Big B daring you to go 50-50 or 
phone a friend on a mega-Ghadar quiz, the launch of a desi fizz-drink with 
the spirit of 1857 bottled evanescently in it.
The contrast with the centennial of the Ghadar in 1957 is instructive. A lot 
of us midnight's children were too young to recollect the hoopla, but the 
long-term gains for historical understanding and democratizing access to the 
events of 1857 still continue to be felt. Two noted scholars, very different 
in orientation, produced two different accounts of those times; a 
considerable amount of primary source material, largely from official 
records, was published, notably the five volumes of Freedom Struggle in Uttar 
Pradesh by the indefatigable S.A.A. Rizvi, distributed gratis till the 
Eighties to bona fide scholars. This has encouraged a whole crop of histories 
of the Ghadar in different districts and regions written in the medium-sized 
university towns in North India. Other material connected with the 
late-19th-century freedom struggle was brought out, for instance, for 
Maharashtra, or lies unpublished in provincial archives. And all this was 
made possible by advanced planning, and hard work by those adept, by 
training, to delve into and narrate the past.

It would be said that commemoration is too serious (or political) a business 
to be left to historians: poets, publicists, politicians, playwrights all 
must contribute. It may well be that historians have to cease being just 
whistle-blowers in such matters, telling others where they have got their 
facts wrong. They must be concerned not just with what happened in times 
past, but equally with how memory, indeed state memorialization, plays on the 
certitude of facts. The new multimedia exhibition at Tees Janvari Marg is an 
eye opener about how non-official collaboration between historians, Gandhians 
and IT-savvy graphic and sound artists can infuse excitement into a hoary and 
usually unimaginative presentation of the ideas and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi.
The prime minister will be well advised to try and get the 1857 committee to 
bankroll a similar venture for that Great Uprising, hangama, insurgency and 
effervescence, aggregation and disorder, plebeian anger and state-terror, 
regional groupings and wider alliances, atavistic proclamations and radical 
stirrings, all on display for us to make sense, warts and all. To hang the 
story of the Ghadar by a single thread would amount to hanging its myriad 
rebels twice over.