[Reader-list] Shahid Amin on 1857

[Jassim Ali]

This maybe out of context but I guess we need to mobilise effort amongst
ourselves to update the wikipedia/other entries on the Indian subjects so
that there could be a universally accessible and (if need arises) flexible
information in the public domain

cheers
jassim

On 7/13/06, Ravikant <ravikant at sarai.net> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
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-- 
Jassim Ali

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