[Reader-list] Shahid Amin on 1857

[Ravikant]

May be of interest to some in the context of the current round of celebrations 
of the great rebellion. There are also a couple of very good pictures on the 
link below. 

Enjoy
Ravikant

The Outlook magazine, 26 march, 2007
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20070326&fname=Shahid+%28F%29&sid=1&pn=1

A hanging Twice Over 
Shahid Amin

They say it was the telegraph and 'native intelligence' (Indian spies) that 
saved the Company Bahadur in 1857, helping the firangis retake 'their' Indian 
Empire. But that was in real historical time. In poised retrospect, it was 
photography—the thousands of takes of ruined remains, strung-up rebels, the 
dead stripped to skulls and bones that held the Ghadar up as an object lesson 
for all colonial times to come. Then there were the unrelenting Stones of the 
Empire: the manicured, bombed-out Residency at Lucknow, the pointed victory 
memorial on the Delhi Ridge which were meant to monumentalise the mutiny for 
posterity.
And finally, as is its wont, came History. English history, written almost in 
the manner of the classic accounts of Mughal royal hunts: the hounding of 
game gone wild into ever-shrinking enclosures for the final, heroic coup de 
grace.

The challenge of 2007 is how to rescue the centenary-and-a-half of 'san 
sattavan' from evaporating into
fluffy celebrations ad nauseam. Our leaders and copywriters, the media and 
sarkari commemorators are all set to carry the day. However, the enticement 
of the thousands of 'mutiny photographs' housed now in the fabulous Alkazi 
Collection in New Delhi, some of them showcased in a recent exhibition, and 
of the canonical, colonial histories, is here to stay. And they pose a 
challenge to historians, who have a professional and not just a national 
stake in our past: how to read and behold these, not as Past Reality slices 
(to which we can counter our very own), but as texts and images suffused 
irrevocably with the spirit of triumphant colonialism.
Just as rebels require masters to pit themselves against, similarly most 
histories of rebellions cannot be written without reference to the accounts 
of the dominant. Indeed, it would be an unhistorical revenge—a 
quaint 'magical realism' of sorts—were we to conjure up a history of 
anti-colonialism in India without once mentioning the British, or the 
colonial records for that matter.
Of all the tomes that appeared in the aftermath of the great revolt, the most 
authoritative and influential was, and has been, the massive three-volume 
History of the Sepoy War in India by Sir John William Kaye. By the time Kaye 
sat down to writing it soon after the event, he had on his desk personal 
communications from the main English actors of this high drama and records 
loaned by a gracious India Office, in which he held a senior position. Kaye 
produced the three volumes between 1864 and 1876, and died almost immediately 
afterwards. Till the late 1980s, perched on a pedestal in the India Office 
Library, London, a bust-size statue of Sir John seemed to keep watch over 
the 'native' researchers going in and out of that great colonial archive!

A cursory reading of Kaye's prefatory statements may convey the impression 
that what we have here is a history of the struggle between the colonisers 
and the colonised: "a multitude of detached and almost contemporaneous 
incidents, the only connecting link being the universal fact that the Black 
man had risen against the White."

But Kaye's history is not so much about the Black Man's rising as about the 
White Man's suppression of that uprising. In Kaye's Sepoy War , the colonial 
masters are so completely the subject of Indian history that an account of 
the most important rebellion against them can only be written up as English 
history, that is, the heroism of the English under fire: "The story of the 
Indian Rebellion of 1857 is, perhaps, the most single illustration of our 
national character ever yet recorded in the annals of our country." Contrary 
to that famous quip in Midnight's Children—What do the English know of their 
history, for a great deal of it happened elsewhere—Kaye was intent on 
teaching the English their overseas history: (It was) "because we were too 
English.
  (2 of 4)..(in) the over-eager pursuit of Humanity and Civilisation...that 
the great crisis arose; but it was because we were English that when it 
arose, it did not utterly overwhelm us."

Our response, by and large, has been to replace the word English with Indian 
in the above description: as we were colonised, we rebelled; but because we 
were not yet fully Indian, we failed. This seems to be as true of Subhadra 
Kumari Chauhan's famous Hindi poem (Khoob ladi mardani...) about the Rani of 
Jhansi, where 'an old Bharat' is not quite fully rejuvenated, as of the 
persistent idea, down to the present celebrations, of the Ghadar as the First 
War of Indian Independence.
But History is always messier, more cluttered, than the Museum of a National 
Past. Recent first-rate historical work by Rudrangshu Mukherjee on Awadh—a 
core area of the rebellion—has painted a more nuanced picture. True, the 
injustice of exiling Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was felt generally: 'Angrej Bahadur 
aien, aur muluk le lihin', as a popular Awadhi dirge has it. But it was only 
after the mutinies in each and every station had succeeded that the landed 
chiefs, who had earlier given shelter to the British, marched with their 
retainers and peasants to besiege and harass the British in and around 
Lucknow. Paradoxically, while the British sought to sunder the moral and 
economic ties that bound taluqdars and peasants, it was these very 
traditional loyalties that asserted themselves in the moment of rebellion. 
Even when fighting together, the Indians did not constitute an 
undifferentiated mass.
Not so in Kaye's Sepoy War. Here king, nawab, taluqdars, sipahsalar, sipahi 
are all flattened out so that the triumphant march of 'English heroes' may 
continue—interrupted, yet unabated: "Over the Indian Dead Level which that 
system had created, the English heroes marched triumphantly to victory." 
Whether it is Mangal Pandey, the purabiya sipahi running amok in the 
Barrackpore Quarter Guard in March 1857, only to attempt suicide at the sight 
of the advancing General, or the young Wajid Ali Shah, face to face with Lord 
Hardinge in 1847, it is the English gaze that transfixes native prince and 
peasant alike. "Lord Hardinge lifted up his voice in earnest remonstrance and 
solemn warning; and the young King (of Awadh) cowered beneath the keen glance 
of the clear blue eyes that were turned upon him."

It's not that Kaye's History has no place for the natives; the Indians of his 
narrative are fixed into their appointed places. This comes across nicely in 
Kaye's description of the 'Treatment of the Natives' on Delhi's northern 
ridge. For it was here, abutting the cantonment, that the British driven out 
of the city in the summer of 1857 encamped, a large number huddled into the 
Flagstaff tower, awaiting the siege train from the Punjab. By July, there 
were 10 natives for every European on the Ridge. The demands of humanity 
suggested that the English be slightly more considerate towards their Indian 
camp-followers, without whom the project of the reconquest of Delhi would 
have been quite impossible. But the distance between the native and the sahib 
on the Ridge, implies Kaye, could not be reduced in the process of the bloody 
assault on Delhi, meant to re-establish the lost supremacy of the Company 
Bahadur. In the moment of the crisis of the civilising mission of the English 
in India, 'humanity' had to make way for the successful march of 'history'—
the victory of the English in the 'Sepoy War'.

In contrast to Kaye's "stern, hard and immovable" Englishmen, standing 
tall "in the midst of disasters and humiliations", a contemporary satire in a 
Delhi akhbar had lampooned the harassed 'English Gathering at the 
Flagstaff': 'Jamiyat-i-Angrezi-az-Baunta'.
(3 of 4)Here 'Angrez ki aqal ki topi aur khirad ka patloon ', the thinking cap 
of the English and the pantaloons of their wisdom, had slipped all the way 
down to their 'moza-i-ghabrahat' (sockful of worries). And it went on to poke 
fun at the inability of the Ridge force to raise the wherewithal from Delhi's 
hostile villages for an immediate frontal attack on the city.

The barrenness of that place which in the mid-1950s was associated with keekar 
jungle and wildness is remarkably portrayed in war photographer Felice 
Beato's shots of the Delhi Ridge taken soon after the recapture of the city. 
The Flagstaff of today is very much as it was in late 1857, except that it 
had then only a solitary midgety tree where the road forked right towards the 
Chauburja Mosque picket, another of the hallowed sites of the English heroism 
in the summer and autumn of 1857.
Akin to Kaye's victorious prose, Felice Beato's photographs of the Flagstaff 
and the Chauburja are celebrations of the English ability to withstand the 
sustained artillery pounding from the city of Delhi. In Beato's frame, 
this 'Mosque Picket' looms large in a desolate nowhere, its 400-year history 
as an outlying Tughlaq-era masjid standing testimony solely to British 
resolve in the year of the mutiny. Three of the four domes that gave the 
mosque its chauburja name had withstood the pounding of 1857.

It was from this mosque-picket and other batteries on the northern ridge that 
the British had made their decisive assault on Kashmiri Gate in mid-September 
1857, and then onwards to the city, the Fort and Humayun's Tomb, halfway to 
where Hudson captured Bahadur Shah Zafar and brought him back to trial and 
eventual exile in Rangoon.

Now a World Heritage Site and one of the best maintained of Delhi's monuments, 
Humayun's Tomb in Beato's sepia composition stands testimony to an Indian 
past lodged firmly in its own ruins. The long shot catches a relatively small 
tomb in the distance with an oversized, pockmarked dome; the majestic gateway 
of today appears detached and almost unnecessary. Bits of low walls, a 
solitary keekar tree and two small puddles from a late September shower, all 
combine to give the place a sense of oblivious vulnerability. What a sad and 
ludicrous place for Bahadur Shah to have repaired to after the fall of Delhi, 
Beato's photograph seems to be telling us; what a waste of time and effort 
before the march of colonial history.

Applauded as the lung of Delhi, the Ridge now exists in a non-historical 
present. The historic Flagstaff is an unprotected mutiny building in a state 
of disrepair, in virtual possession of a 'Baunta Royal Club (Regd.)' of yoga 
practitioners and morning walkers. Its circular ground-floor hall is used to 
house durries and mattresses in king-size trunks.
No notice about the past of the narrow strip of this Ridge to which the 
British were confined between early May and mid-September 1857 greets the 
energetic early morning walkers in tracksuits, as they expertly sidestep the 
audacious Delhi monkeys, feeding them bananas as they go along.

Even the Flagstaff Road, winding up the Ridge to that undisputed mutiny 
structure, has lost its name to the idiosyncrasies of a high-level street 
name-changing decision: it is now called Bhimrao Ambedkar Memorial Marg! Dr 
Ambedkar indeed lived on an adjacent street during his Delhi sojourn, but as 
that (already renamed) road was then closed due to the construction of the 
metro, three years ago our previous prime minister was counselled to go ahead 
and perform a surgical name-change on the adjacent Flagstaff Road! The 
Chauburja Marg leading up to that bombed-out mosque-picket has been renamed 
Acharya Sushil Muni Marg, and this even without the benefit of a prime 
ministerial visit.

It is nobody's case that distinguished persons from our recent or distant 
pasts should not have roads, towns, even districts named after them. There 
are sundry pasts that tend to remain, each laying its own claim to our 
collective present. However, the exigencies of both municipal and national 
politics—the reworking of histories and memories by sarkari fiat—require that 
past events be cobbled shoddily into 'national histories': history be damned. 
But to rechristen place names connected with the rebellion of 1857, while 
going about commemorating it doesn't quite make sense. It is like countering 
the colonialist history of Kaye's Sepoy War with a pucca nationalist version, 
but with the names of all the sites of action changed unrecognisably in 
deference to the wishes of a provincial satrap or a municipal councillor.

As the search for heroes and martyrs goes into top gear, we are bound to 
witness an excessive focus on acts of valour and chivalry; the spotlight 
would be on manly acts, or on women who acted like real men. And we would 
tend to miss out on the way 1857 has been sung, indeed feminised, in some 
North Indian folksongs: 'Meerut ka Sadr Bazar hai, mera saiyan lute na 
jaane': the bazaar of Meerut is up for grabs after the mutiny in the 
barracks, and my love does not even know how to plunder properly! And in a 
similar vein: Others looted shawls, large and small, my love brought home a 
small kerchief; others looted gold coins, big and small, my lover, a novice 
in such matters and much else, could manage only a copper paisa! How striking 
in its sensuousness is this ditty to the mock celebration of the anari, 
nadaan—untrained in the arts of love—balma or lover, who is the object of 
desire precisely because he has to be taught the finer points of love-making: 
mora nadaan balma, na jaane dil ki baat re, to cite that filmi hit of 
yesteryears.

Should we forget these folk products of the events of 1857, simply because 
they inconvenience a neatly ordered, male-centric understanding of the 
Rebellion as the first great stirrings of our long-existent sense of 
nationalism? Must we be content with the gouging out of a colonial memorial 
stone at one place, or with mock sepoys knocking at the Rajghat gate of the 
Red Fort on the morning of May 11, 2007? To orchestrate a unified 
commemoration in 2007 would be to bleach that multifaceted occurrence of its 
true colours. To hang the story of the Ghadar by a single thread would amount 
to hanging its myriad rebels twice over.
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