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REVISITING 1857 — Myth, Memory, History: Sharmistha Gooptu and Boria Majumdar — Editors; The Lotus Collection, Roli Books Pvt. Ltd., M-75, G.K. II Market, New Delhi-110048. Rs. 295.

This question, incredibly, remains just as relevant — and unanswered — in 2008. When Ketan Mehta and Aamir Khan’s film “Mangal Pandey: The Rising” was released in 2005, the debate on what exactly the events of 1857 were, was thrust into the public domain and carried in Indian media on a scale never before seen in recent memory. Academics frowned upon the film for its license to imagine, and political figures were hypersensitive about the portrayal of their nationalist hero (specifically, his consumption of bhang and visits to a brothel). Before the clamour of voices could die down, the 150th anniversary of those events in 2007 presented another occasion for the debate to be re-opened. Political parties around the country grandly celebrated the memory of a “First War of Independence” — a label many continue to dispute.

A slew of publications came out last year in an effort to capitalise on the growing public awareness of the nature of the debate. Many of those fell into the trap of beating Disraeli’s question to death, asking the same questions that have been tossed back and forth for the greater part of the last century. Was it a nationalist uprising? Or a feudal clash of the classes? Was it a coordinated rebellion? Or just a haphazard, spontaneous outpouring of resentment?

Asking these questions misses the point, as Revisiting 1857: Myth, Memory and History suggests. This book, edited by Sharmistha Gooptu and Boria Majumdar, is a collection of essays that refreshingly embraces the complexity of the debate instead of seeking to settle it. It looks beyond the question of what actually happened, and instead suggests ways in which we might enrich our understanding of the events by situating them in their different avatars – as told through folk tales, cartoons, songs, myths and even sold as a part of political agendas.

Veteran historian David Washbrook sets up the debate by examining the nature of the discourse in William Dalrymple’s widely popular historical novel The Last Mughal; he asks the interesting question what kind of history the book speaks of. The Last Mughal is an interesting case that reflects the complicated tension between popular and academic history, suggesting that the distinction is not always palpable. It is brilliantly researched, and the author has painstakingly cited his sources in a way an academic would. Yet the narrative it weaves is unmistakably located in the realm of fiction – it has intricately developed characters and plots, and it romanticises a past that is very much imagined.

Washbrook concedes that in some respects, the distinctions do not really matter – the book succeeded in its aim to “make the familiar seem unfamiliar, to evoke a distant age for people living in the present, to provoke a re-appraisal of the reader’s own values and sense of place.” But importantly, he also warns that the book leaves many questions unanswered – questions, he says “which would need to be taken up in the classroom.”

Other essays innovatively bring to light lesser-researched aspects of the revolt. Manjita Mukharji looks at how violence was codified – often blatantly one-sidedly – as “just or unjust” by the British. Mukharji turns to a series of cartoons published in British newspapers at the time and looks at the culture of violence they spoke to. The events are presented in these cartoons with typically 19th century British, Orientalist slants – one cartoon shows a rather evil-looking Indian tiger standing on the corpses of a naked English woman, who has presumably been raped, and her child, while a majestically caricatured British lion gets ready to pounce to exact revenge on the tiger for its crimes. (In numerous 19th century cartoons about the revolt, Indian violence on English women was often highlighted, while British excesses were generally presented as some sort of retributive justice.)

Boria Majumdar creatively suggests a relationship between the competitive cricket matches between sepoys and their officers – and the proto-nationalist sentiment they engendered – and the spirit that fuelled the uprising. He argues that the cricket field gave the sepoys a confidence to take on the British that they had never before enjoyed – the question of sepoy confidence, specifically what emboldened the sepoys to rise against their officers at this particular historical moment, has itself been a bone of much contention.

Several other such essays suggest alternative examinations that take the great 1857 debate in a different – and welcome – direction. Ultimately, they help enrich our understanding of the events, instead of trying to deconstruct them in limiting ways with the objective of settling the question with a sense of finality, as numerous authors have sought – and failed – to do.

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