The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Revolt’s echoes in South highlighted

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Tuesday, Dec 18, 2007
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Karnataka - Bangalore

Revolt’s echoes in South highlighted

Special Correspondent

Examining records: (From left) N. Rajendran, ICHR Chairman Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, S.K. Aruni and B. Surendra Rao at a symposium organised by the Indian Council of Historical Research in Bangalore on Monday.

Bangalore: Did south India remain an area of silence even as soldiers and commoners rose in revolt in the northern part of the subcontinent against the British in 1857?

Even as colonial and later historians have tended to treat south India as a “political backwaters” during the revolt and the years preceding it, six papers presented at a symposium organised by the Indian Council of Historical Research here on Monday presented sources that provide enough evidence to the contrary.

S. Chandrasekhar from Bangalore University’s Department of History has put together evidence from historical documents and folk traditions to show how the revolt had its echoes in the Karnataka region too.

Proclamation

Citing from the proclamation of Nana Saheb inviting people of the Deccan to join the revolt, found in the possession of Bhima Rao of Mundargi (now in Gadag district), he said it not only provided evidence of participation but also of a “collective political consciousness” that drove the revolt.

Interestingly, the proclamation describes the English as “kafirs” who destroyed “Hindu and Mohammedan kingdoms”. The note by the magistrate in Dharwad, who sent a translation of it to the Governor in Bombay, says that Bhima Rao was put to death for “effecting a diversion in south India in favour of the rebels in the north of India”.

There are enough and more subaltern sources of history too that valorise the participation of common men, soldiers and kings in the revolt. Sixty-three popular ballads collected by John Fleet, a British officer, show that it was not just the aristocracy that was involved in the revolt, Prof. Chandrasekhar pointed out.

As Fleet himself put it, the ballads of “uneducated rustics” shows that the revolt “engrossed the large classes of the community” and present a “genuine native view”.

Providing evidence of the participation of lower castes and classes of people in the revolt, Prof. Chandrasekhar said that it was the Bedars (hunters) who participated in the Hadagali revolt, and the famous Surpur revolt led by king Venkappa Naika was supported by a large civilian population. “They often used agricultural implements like sickles and daggers rather than guns,” he said.

The presentation by B. Surendra Rao from Mangalore University focused on how the revolt in south Canara occurred decades before the rebellion elsewhere and happened in three phases. While the first wave was by kings in Kumbla, Vittla and Neeleshwar after 1799, the later ones were peasant revolts in response to heavy taxation. Drawing attention to the economic conditions that provided the base for the revolt, he said that it was a phase of agricultural crisis and economic depression.

‘Civilised defiance’

It is interesting, said Prof. Rao, that the first phase of rebellion around 1810 was no more than a “civilised defiance” involving writing petitions to the British authorities asking for tax relief. It was the later rebellion by a self-appointed king called Kalyana Swami who “made capital of the peasant discontentment” and organised a militia. He even came to capture Mangalore for a brief period of 15 days.

These, Prof. Rao said, were not examples of “gun booming” resistance, but expressions of “anger and anguish against the British” in multiple ways.

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