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Historians and the Great Revolt, 1857-59* Jitendra Kumar, M.A

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Historians and the Great Revolt, 1857-59* Jitendra Kumar, M.A Historians and the Great Revolt, 1857-59* Jitendra Kumar, M.A. (F) History, University of Delhi. Abstract: The mutinies that took place on 10th of May, 1857 in Meerut and their marched to Delhi on 11th May and very soon the spread of the mutinies in Kanpur, Locnow, Jhansi etc. have been called as “Sepoy Mutiny” by the colonial official and British colonial historians. But after a few decades of the revolt, perception of the historian like John. W. Kaye was different in nature. An remarkable turning point came out on the notion of the revolt in 1909 when V.D. Savarkar published his work and defined it as the Indian War of Independence. While the celebration of 100th anniversary of revolt has brought a large number of researches and books on the topic by Joshi, Chaudhary and Sen ect. where they saw the revolt of 1857 into a new perspectives. Then the new kinds of historiographies ermerged by Mukherjee and Stokes in the late 20th century and works of Dalrymple, Yadav and Rajendran in early decades of 21st century presented the historyof the revolt in the very new perspectives that had been never written by the early historians. In his article, i will highlight the issues and concept of historiography that had been done both in the colonial India and independent India. The causes, concept and the nature of the mutinies that took place at Meerut on 10th May 1857 and soon the sepoy of the Meerut cotinental reached to Delhi and proclaimed 8o's year old Bahadur Shah Zafar as the Badshah (kingh) of Hindustan, can not only be understood by the writings that had been produced in the 19th century and early 20th century, whether they are John Kaye's History of the Sepoy War in India or V.D. Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence of 1857. It is also not possible for us to understand and write the history of the mutinies on the basis of the readings of the text produced in the Independent India. If we have to learn the things that exactly caused the revolt of 1857 and the circumstances and problems that the people of Indian sub-continet faced. In order to find the full hisotry of the mutinies that had been occured basically in Meerut, Delhi, Kanpur, Locnow, Jhanshi and Jagdishpur etc., there is need to study all the writings that had been produced during and after the revolts; whether it was written by foreigners or Indians, in colonial India or Independent India. In order to hide the cause of the mutines broke out in Meerut and its spread to Delhi, the British colonial official began to credited the grease cartidges which caused the break out of the revolt in terms to save their religius beliefs. But very soon after the break out of the mutinies, Syed Ahmad Khan (1817 - 1898) wrote a tract called ‘The Causes of the Indian Revolt’ to counter this allegation, where he sought to examine the underlying features that determined the nature of 1857. The most serious dissenting voice was that of Karl Marx who linked the colonial exploitation of India to the anger that * This article has been written by me to submit as an Assignment for my Internal Assessment of M.A. (F) History to Prof. Amar Farooqui, Department of History, University of Delhi, New Delhi in April 2015. was displayed by the people during the Revolt. Marx and Engels hailed the unity displayed by the different religious communities who opposed British colonialism.1 The most important books on the mutinies that had been written on the colonial point of view in the next decade of revolt is the work of John W. Kaye's History of the Sepoy War in India.2 In his book, Kaye has given a detailed analysis of the causes and the phases of the revolt that had bben occured during the revolts. He provides a fairly detailed account of the background to the Upsurge, concentrating espectially on teh trails and tribulations of Awadh in the decade preceding the revolt. Kaye's work can be read at one level as a historigraphical discourse on the exercise of colonial power over Indian society. The preface of Kaye's work directly shows that his work is written to highlight the history of the strugle between the colonizers and the colonized. He talks that this uprising was marked by the rising of of Black man against the White man. But Shahid Amin in his review of John Kaye's History of the Sepoy War in India points out that “Kaye's history is not so much about the Black Man's rising as about the White Man's suppression of that uprising. It underlines the unity of his enterprises as one where the colonial masters are so completely the subject of Indian history that an account of hte most important rebellion against them, can only be written up as the history of the English-under-fire”3 By the end of the nineteenth century the Revolt attracted and inspired the first generation of the Indian nationalists. Thus, V.D.Savarkar, who was perhaps the first Indian to write about the Revolt in 1909, called it The Indian War of Independence of 1857. His pro-nationalist stance made Savarkar reject the colonial assertion that linked the Revolt with the greased cartridges. As he put it, 'if this had been the issue it would be difficult to explain how it could attract Nana Sahib, the Emperor of Delhi, the Queen of Jhansi and Khan Bahadur Khan to join it.'4 Besides, he also focused on the fact that the Revolt continued even after the English Governor General had issued a proclamation to withdraw the offending greased bullets. Savarkar went ahead and connected the Revolt to the ‘atrocities’ committed by the British. At the same time, the importance he gave to religion illustrates the influence of the imperialist writers on him. Jyotirmaya Sharma in review of Savarkar's writings has pointed out that “Savarkar's account of 1857 has served to legitimise retributive voilence in the name of Hindu nationalism. It is based on a conception of how the history of the “Hindu Rastra” ought to be written, while enunciating a model of politics based on the opposition between “friend” and “foe”. A justification of revenge, retaliation and retribution was carefully built into Savarkar's retelling of 1857. For Savarkar, a massacre is a terrible thing that happens because humankind has failed to approximate the lofty ideals of natural justice, peace, parity and unverdal brotherhodd. And he says that these kinds of humankind are largly absent in the rule and nature of the both the colonial rulers and their authority. From the 1920s, efforts were made to analyse the Revolt from a Marxist position by pioneers like M.N. Roy (India in Transition, 1922) and Rajni Palme Dutt (India Today, 1940). Roy was rather dismissive about 1857 and saw in its failure the shattering of the last vestiges of feudal power. He was emphatic about the ‘revolution of 1857’ being a struggle between the worn out feudal system and the newly introduced commercial capitalism, that aimed to achieve political supremacy. In contrast, Palme Dutt 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The First War of Independence, 1857-1859, Moscow, 1975. 2 J.W. Kaye, Hisotry of the Sepoy War, Vol. 2, 1910 (reprinted at New Delhi in 1988). 3 Shahid Amin, English Domination and Indian Subordination: A Reading of John Kaye's Hisotry of the Sepoy War, Vol. 2, 1910. Vol. II Nos. 7 & 8, July-August 1997. 4 V.D. Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence of 1857, (London, 1909). saw 1857 as a major peasant revolt, even though it had been led by the decaying feudal forces, fighting to get back their privileges and turn back the tide of foreign domination. After the independence, the Govt. Of India had celebreted the 100th anniversary of the revolt of the 1857 and during and after the occassion a large number of works were written to highlight the casues and the nature of the revolt in the different types of point of vies. Some of the important works are of R.C. Majumdar's The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 (1957), S.B.Chaudhuri's Civil Revolt in the Indian Mutinies, 1857-59, (1957) and Theories of the Indian Mutiny, (1965), S.N. Sen's Eighteen Fifty- Seven, (1957), and, K.K. Datta's Reflections on the Mutiny, (1967). These historians were not uniformly comfortable with the idea that the 1857 Revolt was the ‘First War of Indian Independence’. Moreover, they referred to ideas like nationalism that were supposedly witnessed during 1857 or saw the very inception of the national movement contained in the Revolt. The most important and widely read work produced after the indepence was S.N. Sen's Eithteen Fifty- Seven was written 1957.5 It was written by Sen when he recieved a request from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, then Education Minister. Azad fetl that “time had now come to write a new and objective history of the movement of 1857.”6 So he commissioned S.N. Sen to write an “authentic account” based on “facts and facts alone.” After the publication of S.N. Sen's works, Azad's comments on the book shows Sen's writings had avoided “all appeal to passion or sentiment.” Sen followed in the footsteps of Kaye and treated the uprising in terms of administrative divisions or geographical regions. Rudrankshu Mukherjee points out that Sen has given a lot time in his work to highlight the details of the events, but in order to highlihght “the linkages which existed between the events and the activities of the rebels of one area with those of another Zone of the rebelion.” Whatever we study about the revolts, whatever we write about the causes of 1857, the last dicision that many historians show that more or less the revolt of the 1857 was caused by the domination of the Company's colonial rule and the exploitation of the Indian people whether it might be the economic resouces or social or cultural identities.
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