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Book Review
Inner history of the uprising
AMAR FAROOQUI
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This collection of essays is a major intervention in the recent debate on the ‘Great Revolt of 1857’
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FACETS OF THE GREAT REVOLT-1857: Edited by Shireen Moosvi; Tulika Books,
35 A/1 Shahpur Jat, New Delhi-110049. Rs. 225.
This slim volume is a major intervention in the recent debate on the ‘Great Revolt of 1857’. Of the 12 essays in it, nine are the revised and updated versions of those published in the special issue of Social Scientist in 1998, which was immediately recognised as the most important collection of writings on the revolt, within a broadly Marxist framework, since the P.C. Joshi-edited volume brought out in 1957. The rest are new contributions.<
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Indigenous sources
These essays represent the cutting-edge research on the revolt, especially in their use of a wide range of indigenous sources and their creative exploration of the colonial archive for recovering the rebels’ versions of the uprising. As Shireen Moosvi observes in her introduction, the decline of Urdu (and, one might add, the virtual disappearance of Persian) and lack of knowledge of the shikasta script have rendered much of the indigenous source material inaccessible for researchers. It is thus no easy task to reconstruct the ‘inner history of the Rebellion.’ In their respective studies, Moosvi and Faruqui Anjum Taban have mined the contemporary Urdu press (Dehli Urdu Akhbar and Sadiq ul Akhbar of Delhi, and Tilism of Lucknow); Iqbal Husain has used the Mutiny Papers at the National Archives of India in his study of the Rebel Administration of Delhi; S. Zaheer Husain Jafri has probed diverse, hitherto neglected, Urdu and Persian sources (e.g., Fath Muhammad Taib’s masnavi Tawarikh-e-Ahmadi composed in 1863); and Badri Narayan and Pankaj Rag have turned to folklore and oral traditions. These sources give us a glimpse of the world view and perspective of the rebels.
Historical context
Irfan Habib’s article places the revolt in its historical context wherein we can see it not as a sudden impulsive outburst but as the outcome of a long tradition of opposition and resistance to the exploitative policies of the East India Company’s regime. Habib examines the motivations of various plebeian sections of society — peasants, the urban poor, sipahis — who participated in the revolt. Whereas there were groups such as the Wahabis who had a religious agenda, he generally discounts the role of religion in the rebel programme. Moosvi, in her study of the rebel press in Delhi, discerns a gradual shift away from the use of religious terminology in the articulation of the rebel cause. We can see the rebels groping for a new vocabulary to express their vision of a common struggle: sipah-e-Hindostan (army of Hindustan), ahl-e-watan (fellow countrymen), aziz ham-watan (dear compatriots).
Jafri’s elegant, heavily referenced paper delineates the career of Maulavi Ahmadullah Shah, an outstanding leader, and ideologue, of the revolt. He played a critical role in grassroots mobilisation during the epic siege of the Lucknow residency. Jafri pays close attention to contemporary theological debates for a nuanced understanding of the ideas of the rebels, especially the trend that was inspired by religion.
Gwalior Contingent
Iqtidar Alam Khan’s essay on the Gwalior Contingent, Scindia’s elite British-officered troops, is a study of the organisation and ideology of the rebel sipahis of the contingent. There were elements among the Gwalior rebels who favoured a general massacre of the English, but were restrained from adopting this course by the sipahi leadership. Unfortunately, the full potential of the strategic advantage gained by the Gwalior soldiers was never realised. They were pre-empted by the Scindia darbar which manipulated the situation in a manner that prevented the troops from engaging in action for nearly a year.
It was only after the fall of Jhansi and Kalpi in early 1858 that Gwalior became the base of rebel leaders who engaged in a last-ditch struggle against the British. Khan provides a vivid account of the intense debates among the sipahis, their differing perceptions and assessments, their negotiations with the darbar, and their comprehension of the nature of the struggle so that we see them not as an inert mass but as real historical figures with individuality.
Aspects of the revolt that have hitherto been largely neglected are explored by Kumar Suresh Singh, focussing on the rebellion in Jharkhand and by Pankaj Rag, who dips into the oral traditions to highlight class/caste tensions of rural society and the ways in which they conditioned subaltern narratives of and responses to, the revolt.
S.P. Verma discusses contemporary visual representations of the rebellion, while Ramesh Rawat questions the supposed link between the revolt and the ‘Hindi Renaissance’ of the late 19th century. Farhat Hasan’s article is a balanced critical assessment of William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal.
The revolt marked an important stage in the growth of a pan-Indian anti-colonial political consciousness. The complex relationship between the emergence of the idea of Indian nationhood and the anti-colonial consciousness of the revolt has not been sufficiently explored in writings on the subject (except perhaps in the lengthy section on the revolt in Rajat Ray’s Felt Community). This collection shows the way forward for meaningful research in this direction.
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