About the Book
The Revolt of 1857 is being increasingly
recognized as one of the major events of the nineteenth century, a turning
point in the history of imperialism. The sheer scale of the uprising and its
unique place in the narrative of anti-colonial resistance has prompted it to be
interpreted on several occasions in the past by nationalist leaders, historians
and officials and the literature on 1857 has grown in volume as the country observed
its 150th anniversary.
Recently, there has been an increasing
awareness of the need to study, in detail, the ideas of the Rebels regarding
their own cause, the varied composition of their ranks and the different
understandings of their legacy. The essays in this volume have been written
essentially in response to this need, by scholars who have sought to explore
much hitherto neglected material on that event. Readers will find much that is
refreshing and provocative in this volume, and will get glimpses into the minds
of the Rebels who belonged to different areas and classes, as well as their
organizational capabilities and the problems they confronted during the Great
Revolt.
Shireen Moosvi,
the editor of this volume, is Professor of History at Aligarh Muslim
University. A well known historian, she has published books and papers on
Indian economic and social history of Mughal times
and the nineteenth century.
Preface
The Revolt of 1857 is being increasingly
recognized as one of the major events of the nineteenth century, a turning
point in the history of imperialism, an early anticipation of the saga of
anti-colonial resistance of the twentieth century. No apology should therefore
be necessary to add to the literature on 1857, which has naturally grown in
volume as the country observed its 150th anniversary.
Some of the essays collected in this volume are
revised versions of those which had previously been printed in Social Scientist, and some have been
written especially for this volume. I am grateful to the contributors, and have
tried in the Introduction to set their themes in the context of a general
understanding of the Revolt.
Thanks are due to the Indian Council of
Historical Research for a generous grant for the publication of this volume. Dr
Prabhat Shukla, the then
Member Secretary of the ICHR, took great interest in making it see the light of
day. I am indebted to both Dr Rajendra Prasad of
SAHMAT and Mrs Indira Chandrasekhar of Tulika Books for agreeing to publish the volume.
Mr Muniruddin Khan
has processed the entire manuscript at the office of the Aligarh Historians
Society. Ms Samira Junaid of Tulika
Books has copyedited the text. Many thanks are due to both of them.
Introduction
Shireen Moosvi
The Revolt of 1857 is one of those events which
have been interpreted on several occasions by nationalist leaders, historians
and officials. For one, here we have an uprising which for its sheer scale
alone demands explanation, whatever view of history we may adopt. Then there is
its unique place in the narrative of anti-colonial resistance. Irfan Habib, in his opening essay
to the present volume, underlines also the fact of its international
significance, in being 'the greatest armed challenge to imperialism the world
over during the entire course of the nineteenth century'.
The designation 'Mutiny', given by the rulers
and accepted by the ruled (who traditionally referred to it as the 'Ghadar'), loses its pejorative and restrictive colour when
applied to so great an event. Indeed it was a mutiny not of a small group, but one
involving the vast bulk of soldiers of the largest modern army in all of Asia
at the time. The Bengal Army comprised 132,000 native sepoys,
out of whom barely 8,000 remained loyal to the English. The Mutiny involved
troops stationed in the east, from Barrackpore near
Calcutta, all the way to Peshawar on the north-west frontier of the
subcontinent. The Revolt was nevertheless much more than a mutiny. In a large
geographic region, whose population today amounts to nearly a quarter of the
population of this country, the Revolt took on the complexion of what Disraeli
and Marx pronounced to be a 'national revolt'. In this extensive space, large
masses of the civilian population also joined the soldiers' rebellion. Whether
the Revolt was 'national' simply in this sense, or 'nationalist' in inspiration
and design as well, can always be debated, and, similarly, the absence of ideas
of social equality among the rebel leaders can also be legitimately stressed.
But what surprised even the English opponents of the Rebellion was the stress
laid by the Rebels on the unity between Hindus and Muslims, which has surely
been an important, perhaps even the crucial, building block for the modern Indian nation, despite the Partition.
There was, also, a fairly strong notion of India ('Hindustan') and the need to
free it of foreign rule, which went beyond the immediate local or parochial
grievances of the Mutineers, and was given
expression to in virtually all the important Rebel proclamations.
From these generalities, one must pass to the
specific problem of reconstructing the story of the Revolt on the basis of the
mass of information that exists, much of it still waiting to be explored. J.W.
Kaye's History of the Sepoy War and G.B. Malleson's
History of the Indian Mutiny, 1857-58,
written in the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny, deserve credit for extracting
information from materials of this kind for a reconstruction of events, even
when full allowance is made for their obvious bias. The authors would have been
the last to claim that they had exhausted all the possible sources, or that
they had been called upon to see the events from the Rebel point of view as
well, though, to be fair, sometimes Kaye does attempt even this. Much new
information has since been published, and the series of collections of
documents on the History of the Freedom Movement, commissioned after
Independence by the various state governments, especially the set of five
volumes edited by S.A.A. Rizvi, issued by the
Government of Uttar Pradesh, deserve special mention. The National Archives of
India as well as the State Archives contain much material, still unpublished,
that needs to be utilized. In particular, attention must be given to the large
amount of material in Urdu, then the language universally used in the lower
levels of administration and in the newspapers of upper India, and so also in
the Rebel orders and papers. The unfortunate decline in the study of that
language in India, and still more in the decipherment of the cursive (shikasta) script,
has greatly handicapped a thorough exploration of this rich set of sources. If
the inner history of the Rebellion, with an emphasis on what the Rebels
thought, did or aimed for, is to be reconstructed (a task in which S.N. Sen's Eighteen
Fifty-Seven, the officially sponsored account in Independent India,
unfortunately fails us so very lamentably), then this obstacle needs first to
be overcome.
The first essay in this collection, by Irfan Habib, gives an overview of
the factors that led to the Rebellion of 1857, as well as the ideas that
motivated the Rebels. Here, it is important to understand both the goals the
Rebels set for themselves, including unexpected elements of modernity seen
among the Sepoys and the educated, and the
limitations from which their outlook and strategy suffered. Irfan
Habib's essay seeks to bring to life this complex
picture and helps us understand what moved so many people to sacrifice their
all for the cause, as they saw it, of their faith and their country.
Delhi was the city from where the flames of the
Revolt spread the most powerfully and for which the first bitter battles were
fought. But it was Awadh where the true strength of
the Rebellion was ultimately displayed and resistance to the British proved to
be the most stubborn. For this there were certain specific local reasons. The
historical setting of the Rebellion in Awadh was
framed by the British annexation of the kingdom in 1856. Lucknow,
the capital of Awadh, was the largest city in India
at the time, with over 650,000 inhabitants. Its court and revenues sustained
numerous traditional arts and crafts and a rich culture, aided by the printing
press. The annexation destroyed the basis of this prosperity. Moreover, the taluqdars and peasants were threatened with a
heavy increase in revenue demands. There was, therefore, a surge of popular
sympathy for the fallen regime. One could see the glimmerings of
resentment against the English based on these grounds much before the actual
outbreak of the Rebellion. Of the extant Urdu news weeklies, the Tilism of Lucknow
began publication on 25 July 1856 and continued till 8 May 1857. Another
contemporary Lucknow weekly, Sabar Samri, started five months after the Tilism, on 17 November 1856, and the
last issue came out on 18 May 1857. Faruqi Anjum Taban, in her paper in this
volume, uses mainly Tilism and two Delhi-based news weeklies, Dehli Urdu Akhbar and
Sadiqul Akhbar, to
establish how civilian unrest was preparing the ground for the Revolt in Awadh.
The two Delhi-based weeklies mentioned above are
of extraordinary importance since they continued to be issued right through the
period of the Rebels' control over Delhi. My own paper is based on a study of
their files and I hope to bring out the fact that these rebel Urdu journalists
are entitled to a special niche in the history of Indian journalism, which has
so far been inadvertently denied to them.
In the next essay, Iqbal
Husain uses the Dehli Urdu Akhbar as
well as other archival material to reconstruct a picture of the Rebel administration
at Delhi. It is remarkable how the Sepoys took to the
British methods of holding consultations and constituting committees and
councils. The constitution (dasturulamal) of the Court of Administration in Delhi (its original text in cursive
hand is preserved in the National Archives of India) was reproduced by S.N. Sen in his Eighteen
Fifty-Seven, but still needs to be closely studied. It was established
not by an order of the Mughal king, but by a decision
taken by the Sepoys themselves in July 1857. There is a
hint here of Sepoy 'republicanism', which Percival
Spear had also noted in his very fair-minded account of Delhi, Twilight of the Mughals.
Both the Delhi newspapers and the archives strongly bring out the Sepoy General Bakht Khan's
no-nonsense attitude towards any attempt to provoke Hindu-Muslim differences.
S.Z.H. Jafri
reconstructs the biography of Ahmadullah Shah, a
saintly (though not a Wahabi) rebel who was already
in prison at Faizabad on the charge of sedition when the
Revolt broke out. It is debatable how far his own querulous attitude, bringing
about a duality of leadership (the court's and Ahmadullah
Shah's own), at Lucknow proved to be detrimental to
the Rebel cause.
Iqtidar Alam Khan traces the history of the Gwalior Contingent,
which, although betrayed by the Scindia, nevertheless
marched on and occupied Kanpur on 28 November 1857, inflicting
on General Windham one of the few defeats in an open engagement ever suffered
by the British in India. The resistance offered by the men of the Gwalior
Contingent remained stout-hearted to the very end. As late as 27 February,
exactly two months before the capture of Tatya Tope,
a telegraphic report (of 3 March 1859) reads: ' . during the night 6 hundred of
the rebel Gwalior Contingent went in the Bhilsa camp
[near Agra] announcing themselves as a British force. They poured in several vollies captured and killed about two hundred and burnt the
camp so the enemy now have four guns.'! This adherence to the cause and
persistence makes the memory of the Gwalior Contingent particularly sacred for
us.
The late K. Suresh Singh describes the role of
the tribals of Jharkhand in 1857 an oft-forgotten
chapter of its history. We may remember that K. Suresh Singh, the distinguished
Director General of the Anthropological Survey of India and the editor of the People of India volumes, was
especially dedicated to reconstructing tribal history.
Four other essays deal with the impact of 1857
in different ways: Badri Narayan
explores local folklore for its perception of Kunwar
Singh and his brother Amar Singh, the famous Rebel zamindars of Jagdishpur
who conducted a march of epic proportions from the neighbourhood of Arrah to Rewa, Kanpur, Lucknow, Azamgarh and then back
to their home territory, challenging the British all along and combining with
the rebelling Sepoy regiments with remarkable
success. Amar Singh, it should be noted, gets a
special word of praise from Engels for his readiness to move and conduct mobile
warfare.
Pankaj Rag,
advocating an approach 'from below', explores the Revolt of 1857 as it survives
in folk memory. How folk memory is influenced by later events makes for an
interesting theme on its own. S.P. Verma studies the
work of British artists, usually done in conformity with the textual accounts
of events of 1857, but also drawing on the imagination and perception of
artists themselves. While many of these drawings depict the brutalities alleged
to have been committed by the Sepoys, at least a few
of them also portray the English acts of terror, such as the blowing away of
rebellious Sepoys from the mouths of guns, a practice
already perfected by the English in Afghanistan, as a reader of the works of
the famous traveller Masson would find. Ramesh Rawat takes issue with the alleged connection between 1857
and the 'Hindi Renaissance', a view widely held amongst today's Hindi
litterateurs. The debate on the role of religion in 1857 in the historiography
of the Rebellion has been analysed by Farhat Hasan.
It is hoped that all those who are interested
in the role of imperialism in India and the history of the nation's resistance
will find these studies of some use and interest.
Contents
Preface |
ix |
Elegy: 1857 |
x |
Introduction |
xi |
The Coming of 1857 |
1 |
The Coming of the Revolt in Awadh: The
Evidence of Urdu Newspapers |
11 |
Rebel Press, Delhi 1857 |
18 |
The Rebel Administration of Delhi |
28 |
The Profile of a Saintly Rebel: Maulavi Ahmadullah Shah |
39 |
The Gwalior Contingent in 1857-58: The Organization and Ideology of
the Sepoy Rebels |
51 |
The Tribals and the 1857 Uprising |
69 |
Popular Culture and 1857: A Memory against Forgetting |
77 |
1857: The Need for Alternative Sources |
84 |
Contemporary Drawings of the Events of the Rebellion of 1857 |
112 |
1857 and the 'Renaissance' in Hindi Literature |
122 |
Religion in the History of 1857 |
135 |
Index |
143 |
About the Book
The Revolt of 1857 is being increasingly
recognized as one of the major events of the nineteenth century, a turning
point in the history of imperialism. The sheer scale of the uprising and its
unique place in the narrative of anti-colonial resistance has prompted it to be
interpreted on several occasions in the past by nationalist leaders, historians
and officials and the literature on 1857 has grown in volume as the country observed
its 150th anniversary.
Recently, there has been an increasing
awareness of the need to study, in detail, the ideas of the Rebels regarding
their own cause, the varied composition of their ranks and the different
understandings of their legacy. The essays in this volume have been written
essentially in response to this need, by scholars who have sought to explore
much hitherto neglected material on that event. Readers will find much that is
refreshing and provocative in this volume, and will get glimpses into the minds
of the Rebels who belonged to different areas and classes, as well as their
organizational capabilities and the problems they confronted during the Great
Revolt.
Shireen Moosvi,
the editor of this volume, is Professor of History at Aligarh Muslim
University. A well known historian, she has published books and papers on
Indian economic and social history of Mughal times
and the nineteenth century.
Preface
The Revolt of 1857 is being increasingly
recognized as one of the major events of the nineteenth century, a turning
point in the history of imperialism, an early anticipation of the saga of
anti-colonial resistance of the twentieth century. No apology should therefore
be necessary to add to the literature on 1857, which has naturally grown in
volume as the country observed its 150th anniversary.
Some of the essays collected in this volume are
revised versions of those which had previously been printed in Social Scientist, and some have been
written especially for this volume. I am grateful to the contributors, and have
tried in the Introduction to set their themes in the context of a general
understanding of the Revolt.
Thanks are due to the Indian Council of
Historical Research for a generous grant for the publication of this volume. Dr
Prabhat Shukla, the then
Member Secretary of the ICHR, took great interest in making it see the light of
day. I am indebted to both Dr Rajendra Prasad of
SAHMAT and Mrs Indira Chandrasekhar of Tulika Books for agreeing to publish the volume.
Mr Muniruddin Khan
has processed the entire manuscript at the office of the Aligarh Historians
Society. Ms Samira Junaid of Tulika
Books has copyedited the text. Many thanks are due to both of them.
Introduction
Shireen Moosvi
The Revolt of 1857 is one of those events which
have been interpreted on several occasions by nationalist leaders, historians
and officials. For one, here we have an uprising which for its sheer scale
alone demands explanation, whatever view of history we may adopt. Then there is
its unique place in the narrative of anti-colonial resistance. Irfan Habib, in his opening essay
to the present volume, underlines also the fact of its international
significance, in being 'the greatest armed challenge to imperialism the world
over during the entire course of the nineteenth century'.
The designation 'Mutiny', given by the rulers
and accepted by the ruled (who traditionally referred to it as the 'Ghadar'), loses its pejorative and restrictive colour when
applied to so great an event. Indeed it was a mutiny not of a small group, but one
involving the vast bulk of soldiers of the largest modern army in all of Asia
at the time. The Bengal Army comprised 132,000 native sepoys,
out of whom barely 8,000 remained loyal to the English. The Mutiny involved
troops stationed in the east, from Barrackpore near
Calcutta, all the way to Peshawar on the north-west frontier of the
subcontinent. The Revolt was nevertheless much more than a mutiny. In a large
geographic region, whose population today amounts to nearly a quarter of the
population of this country, the Revolt took on the complexion of what Disraeli
and Marx pronounced to be a 'national revolt'. In this extensive space, large
masses of the civilian population also joined the soldiers' rebellion. Whether
the Revolt was 'national' simply in this sense, or 'nationalist' in inspiration
and design as well, can always be debated, and, similarly, the absence of ideas
of social equality among the rebel leaders can also be legitimately stressed.
But what surprised even the English opponents of the Rebellion was the stress
laid by the Rebels on the unity between Hindus and Muslims, which has surely
been an important, perhaps even the crucial, building block for the modern Indian nation, despite the Partition.
There was, also, a fairly strong notion of India ('Hindustan') and the need to
free it of foreign rule, which went beyond the immediate local or parochial
grievances of the Mutineers, and was given
expression to in virtually all the important Rebel proclamations.
From these generalities, one must pass to the
specific problem of reconstructing the story of the Revolt on the basis of the
mass of information that exists, much of it still waiting to be explored. J.W.
Kaye's History of the Sepoy War and G.B. Malleson's
History of the Indian Mutiny, 1857-58,
written in the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny, deserve credit for extracting
information from materials of this kind for a reconstruction of events, even
when full allowance is made for their obvious bias. The authors would have been
the last to claim that they had exhausted all the possible sources, or that
they had been called upon to see the events from the Rebel point of view as
well, though, to be fair, sometimes Kaye does attempt even this. Much new
information has since been published, and the series of collections of
documents on the History of the Freedom Movement, commissioned after
Independence by the various state governments, especially the set of five
volumes edited by S.A.A. Rizvi, issued by the
Government of Uttar Pradesh, deserve special mention. The National Archives of
India as well as the State Archives contain much material, still unpublished,
that needs to be utilized. In particular, attention must be given to the large
amount of material in Urdu, then the language universally used in the lower
levels of administration and in the newspapers of upper India, and so also in
the Rebel orders and papers. The unfortunate decline in the study of that
language in India, and still more in the decipherment of the cursive (shikasta) script,
has greatly handicapped a thorough exploration of this rich set of sources. If
the inner history of the Rebellion, with an emphasis on what the Rebels
thought, did or aimed for, is to be reconstructed (a task in which S.N. Sen's Eighteen
Fifty-Seven, the officially sponsored account in Independent India,
unfortunately fails us so very lamentably), then this obstacle needs first to
be overcome.
The first essay in this collection, by Irfan Habib, gives an overview of
the factors that led to the Rebellion of 1857, as well as the ideas that
motivated the Rebels. Here, it is important to understand both the goals the
Rebels set for themselves, including unexpected elements of modernity seen
among the Sepoys and the educated, and the
limitations from which their outlook and strategy suffered. Irfan
Habib's essay seeks to bring to life this complex
picture and helps us understand what moved so many people to sacrifice their
all for the cause, as they saw it, of their faith and their country.
Delhi was the city from where the flames of the
Revolt spread the most powerfully and for which the first bitter battles were
fought. But it was Awadh where the true strength of
the Rebellion was ultimately displayed and resistance to the British proved to
be the most stubborn. For this there were certain specific local reasons. The
historical setting of the Rebellion in Awadh was
framed by the British annexation of the kingdom in 1856. Lucknow,
the capital of Awadh, was the largest city in India
at the time, with over 650,000 inhabitants. Its court and revenues sustained
numerous traditional arts and crafts and a rich culture, aided by the printing
press. The annexation destroyed the basis of this prosperity. Moreover, the taluqdars and peasants were threatened with a
heavy increase in revenue demands. There was, therefore, a surge of popular
sympathy for the fallen regime. One could see the glimmerings of
resentment against the English based on these grounds much before the actual
outbreak of the Rebellion. Of the extant Urdu news weeklies, the Tilism of Lucknow
began publication on 25 July 1856 and continued till 8 May 1857. Another
contemporary Lucknow weekly, Sabar Samri, started five months after the Tilism, on 17 November 1856, and the
last issue came out on 18 May 1857. Faruqi Anjum Taban, in her paper in this
volume, uses mainly Tilism and two Delhi-based news weeklies, Dehli Urdu Akhbar and
Sadiqul Akhbar, to
establish how civilian unrest was preparing the ground for the Revolt in Awadh.
The two Delhi-based weeklies mentioned above are
of extraordinary importance since they continued to be issued right through the
period of the Rebels' control over Delhi. My own paper is based on a study of
their files and I hope to bring out the fact that these rebel Urdu journalists
are entitled to a special niche in the history of Indian journalism, which has
so far been inadvertently denied to them.
In the next essay, Iqbal
Husain uses the Dehli Urdu Akhbar as
well as other archival material to reconstruct a picture of the Rebel administration
at Delhi. It is remarkable how the Sepoys took to the
British methods of holding consultations and constituting committees and
councils. The constitution (dasturulamal) of the Court of Administration in Delhi (its original text in cursive
hand is preserved in the National Archives of India) was reproduced by S.N. Sen in his Eighteen
Fifty-Seven, but still needs to be closely studied. It was established
not by an order of the Mughal king, but by a decision
taken by the Sepoys themselves in July 1857. There is a
hint here of Sepoy 'republicanism', which Percival
Spear had also noted in his very fair-minded account of Delhi, Twilight of the Mughals.
Both the Delhi newspapers and the archives strongly bring out the Sepoy General Bakht Khan's
no-nonsense attitude towards any attempt to provoke Hindu-Muslim differences.
S.Z.H. Jafri
reconstructs the biography of Ahmadullah Shah, a
saintly (though not a Wahabi) rebel who was already
in prison at Faizabad on the charge of sedition when the
Revolt broke out. It is debatable how far his own querulous attitude, bringing
about a duality of leadership (the court's and Ahmadullah
Shah's own), at Lucknow proved to be detrimental to
the Rebel cause.
Iqtidar Alam Khan traces the history of the Gwalior Contingent,
which, although betrayed by the Scindia, nevertheless
marched on and occupied Kanpur on 28 November 1857, inflicting
on General Windham one of the few defeats in an open engagement ever suffered
by the British in India. The resistance offered by the men of the Gwalior
Contingent remained stout-hearted to the very end. As late as 27 February,
exactly two months before the capture of Tatya Tope,
a telegraphic report (of 3 March 1859) reads: ' . during the night 6 hundred of
the rebel Gwalior Contingent went in the Bhilsa camp
[near Agra] announcing themselves as a British force. They poured in several vollies captured and killed about two hundred and burnt the
camp so the enemy now have four guns.'! This adherence to the cause and
persistence makes the memory of the Gwalior Contingent particularly sacred for
us.
The late K. Suresh Singh describes the role of
the tribals of Jharkhand in 1857 an oft-forgotten
chapter of its history. We may remember that K. Suresh Singh, the distinguished
Director General of the Anthropological Survey of India and the editor of the People of India volumes, was
especially dedicated to reconstructing tribal history.
Four other essays deal with the impact of 1857
in different ways: Badri Narayan
explores local folklore for its perception of Kunwar
Singh and his brother Amar Singh, the famous Rebel zamindars of Jagdishpur
who conducted a march of epic proportions from the neighbourhood of Arrah to Rewa, Kanpur, Lucknow, Azamgarh and then back
to their home territory, challenging the British all along and combining with
the rebelling Sepoy regiments with remarkable
success. Amar Singh, it should be noted, gets a
special word of praise from Engels for his readiness to move and conduct mobile
warfare.
Pankaj Rag,
advocating an approach 'from below', explores the Revolt of 1857 as it survives
in folk memory. How folk memory is influenced by later events makes for an
interesting theme on its own. S.P. Verma studies the
work of British artists, usually done in conformity with the textual accounts
of events of 1857, but also drawing on the imagination and perception of
artists themselves. While many of these drawings depict the brutalities alleged
to have been committed by the Sepoys, at least a few
of them also portray the English acts of terror, such as the blowing away of
rebellious Sepoys from the mouths of guns, a practice
already perfected by the English in Afghanistan, as a reader of the works of
the famous traveller Masson would find. Ramesh Rawat takes issue with the alleged connection between 1857
and the 'Hindi Renaissance', a view widely held amongst today's Hindi
litterateurs. The debate on the role of religion in 1857 in the historiography
of the Rebellion has been analysed by Farhat Hasan.
It is hoped that all those who are interested
in the role of imperialism in India and the history of the nation's resistance
will find these studies of some use and interest.
Contents
Preface |
ix |
Elegy: 1857 |
x |
Introduction |
xi |
The Coming of 1857 |
1 |
The Coming of the Revolt in Awadh: The
Evidence of Urdu Newspapers |
11 |
Rebel Press, Delhi 1857 |
18 |
The Rebel Administration of Delhi |
28 |
The Profile of a Saintly Rebel: Maulavi Ahmadullah Shah |
39 |
The Gwalior Contingent in 1857-58: The Organization and Ideology of
the Sepoy Rebels |
51 |
The Tribals and the 1857 Uprising |
69 |
Popular Culture and 1857: A Memory against Forgetting |
77 |
1857: The Need for Alternative Sources |
84 |
Contemporary Drawings of the Events of the Rebellion of 1857 |
112 |
1857 and the 'Renaissance' in Hindi Literature |
122 |
Religion in the History of 1857 |
135 |
Index |
143 |