Ma~;M,Ddd Faro 9Q~ I,,
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. "-, l \'. Uf-you want ·to kn~~ whit Dilliwallas lii d to go thr9.1:1gh ·· • in 1857, YOl;l c·armot do better.than t ead this book' .;: ·S . · - Khushwan{Singh Ln lllli 11 v..., '· · Mu k.1111 u t-11i: hu 1. Uiw,u 1 ' Mnku uut lll.1 11J lul'11h11 r•r ,Jumu M 11 , J1,I rr,•l kh1"1 Ml l1 I . , ! COMPILED ANID TRANSLATED BY ~. Ma~;m,ddd Faro 9q~ i,, -----.., 406 B,siegtd . teners' One can therefore speculate that at least five to . one or rwo 11s · Sil( hundred people from the educated and presumably the better-off classes were familiar with the paper's contents. l ?. For this I rely on che many different kinds of arguments by Christopher Bayly in order ro push back the ~eri_od o'. the_emergence of nationalism, and more particularly, of patr1ot1sm m mneteenth-cencury Indian history. See his Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and IN THE NAME OF SARKAR Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Empire and Information: Intellignece Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (New York: Cambridge he terms rebel government and rebel administration have been University Press, 1996). used interchangeably in this book. Neither term is meant to convey 18. Baqar also launched into a long passage about how Dehli's luxurious air T a coherent, organized and regimented structure of authority. As has been makes idlers of us all, which is why the rulers of yore forever avoided staying coo long in this city, and how the laddus and the pedas of noted, there were multiple power centres in the city, which sometimes Ghantewala, the famous sweets shop at Chandni Chowk, turn valiant clashed with each other. The main constituents of these centres of soldiers into cowards. See Dehli Urdu Akhbar, 23 August 1857, Collection power included leading members of Bahadur Shah's court, the CoM 2,NAI. set up by the soldiers, the commissariat headed by Mirza Mughal and 19. Translation of a letter from Moonshee Mahomed Bakarr, Editor of Delhi the staff of the commander of the Bareilly forces, Bakht Khan, who had Oordoo Akhbar, Newsletter during the Mutiny, File No. 50, 28 July 1857, been appointed lord governor. The administrative structure included Delhi Archives. also the police force of the city, the darogha or the superintendent of 20. See the introduction in chis book to the section "The Ideologue'. the magazine, the regiment officers including such prominent ones as Mir Rajah Ali, the head of the sappers and miners regiment, the officers in charge of hospitals and royal functionaries such as the darogha of supplies. Together these formed a skeletal administration sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes working in unison. By using the term administration, or government, my intention is to delineate structures of authority from the outward picture of anarchy. The orders issued by the head of any of these power centres could translate into action at the ground level, as for example, in the movement of goods or people. The response to these orders in the form of acknowledgements or refusal or issuing of receipts, mostly in writing, also indicates some degree of bureaucratic functioning and the pursuit of established norms. Moreover, the fact that ordinary crimes such as gambling and stealing continued to be prose~uted, that missing persons were searched and other kinds of complaints were registered and dealt with also points 407 • 408 Besieged In th, Na m, ofS. ,.i,., 409 ro the continuation of some kind of settled administration. It is in this drninistration, court functionari es and institutions r h' ed the a ras 10n or limited sense that the word government has been used here. lied by the British-police and Lawcourcs-c w f contro 00 ere a pare An additional reason for persisting with these terms is the wide 0 . D oghas of different royal departments such as the ice f:a .L rt ar ctory, me prevalence of the Urdu word Sarkar, meaning government, in these officer in charge of ~upplie~, ~he superintendent of the roy.J mint and documents. The term is used alike by the petitioners authorities and ochers participated m the city s governance. The royal secretariat which soldiers. All of them regarded the government to have changed hands 1.ssue d parwanas, shuqqas and firmans from the King remained active and the King to have assumed the reins of the new government. 1 t h rou gh out· Informally, the member. s ofBahadur. Shah's courc •nota bly Constant appeals and exhortations to 'reasons of government; 'needs his sons and grandsons, also enJoyed substantial authority. of government' and 'responsibilities of government' imply a rationality Tue emphasis on ghadar as well as on orde r and orga nization , of governance. Conscripted workers are deemed to be working for the which are the twin leitmotifs of this book, may seem immediately sarkar. Exhortations to officers and soldiers are also made in the name of contr adictorv,, but in a larger protean event, the presence of smaller the sarkar. Families of workers killed in the magazine conflagration are crrc. 1e s of authority and struccure are not altogether anomalous and assured compensation by and in the name of the sarkar. Whether or not this book attempts to highlight them. there was a unified structure in Delhi, many of the participants assumed it to be there and expected it to perform as such. The word sarkar here needs to be correlated to another word that recurs frequently in the Tue initial turmoil created by the arrival of soldiers at Delhi and Dehli Urdu Akhbar, amaldari. The latter uses the term to denote a change the widespread plunder had a dimension of class war.2 The soldiers' of government. 'The English have lost the amaldari at Panipat; is the mistreatment of the city's elites, even of the person of Bahadur Shah, phrase used by the paper to describe the fall of the British government has been well documented. 3 Ji wan Lal, a former judicial functionary who there. It denotes the taking over of actual governance by Indians and turned into a British spy and whose diary was compiled by Metcalfe as sometimes acted as a synonym for hukumat, governance. This needs part of his Two Native Narratives, reported that, to be placed in the context of the exact phrase used for government proclamations, even by the East India Company. The phrase used by . several respectable men were seized and made to carry the town crier went, 'The creation/ people belong to god, the country to burdens to intimidate them and extort money, all valuable the Emperor and the government [that is, amaldari] to the Company: property had by chis time been buried, and a private police The use of the word amaldari implies a change of control or governing force had been raised by the better class of citizens to protect authority and has nothing to do with sovereignty, which remains where themselves and their property.4 it always was, with the King. According to the implied understanding of the newspaper, the rebels were merely (re)taking over actual control Private guards continued to remain in place for the well-to-do, of administration, not instituting a new regime. almost right till the end. The house of Mufti Sadruddin Azurda, However, even as the structure of authority is designated as a an important judicial authority under the British and a leading city rebel government, it needs to be underlined that it is not exclusively intellectual, had to be guarded by the volunteers. 5 People's houses a government formed of rebel soldiers or civilians. It should more could be raided on the charge, or pretext, of protecting Britishers or properly be described as the rebel-royal government. While formal containing stolen goods and arms from the magazine. This, of course, rebel structures such as the CoM played a cruci~l role in running created room for ambiguity and high and low were affected alike. There 410 Bes ieged In the Name of Sarkar 411 they had already paid their dues. Money colle . omplaints of this kind in the section titled 'The Person I . ctions could s . are numerous c . , . a me arb itrary di mens1ons; anybody and b omenmes ·c· Dilliwallas and the Upnsmg. The Dehl, Urdu Akhb~ Becomes P u bll · Hr assu b every ody could set L,_ here some ruffians, in this case, low-caste ones wer up as a royal collector ut equally, the poor could lod e uunse!f ase W reporte d a c . 6 . ' e harassed and hope to get some relie£9 g a complaint if roaming the city dressed as soldiers. For th~ Delhi elites the uprising. Soldiers were deputed to tend to sick and particularly its initial days, was a rough penod. However, this picrure wounded c d All who absented themselves because of medical 0 mra es. of rurmoil needs to be offset by other features which were simultaneous edical cert1'fi cate to sancn'fy t h e1r. leave, the lack reasonsf h· required a to it. By the 21st of May, barely ten days after the soldiers arrived, it m . b din 1 . o w ich could lead 0 prosecution. A scon g so diers who came and hid . th . had become customary to hold an evening parade, and in his entry t f h m eary,and there were many o t em, could also be arrested on . ' for the day, Jiwan Lal reported that some rwo hundred soldiers were .