A jumble of myth, history, narrative and nationalism.

The insurrection of 1857.
British India.

The East India Company or John’s Company as it was known in England at the time remains the only trading firm in the world to have practically turned into a regional empire during the phase of its rise and decline in what is today the subcontinent of India. Having entered native politics on the invitation of Mir Jafar, a noble and general of the prince Sirajuddaulla of Bengal, in what had been a secret alliance to help Jafar usurp the throne, the E.I.C. had within the close of the century acquired vast stretches of territories through diplomacy or direct conquest.

In the process of expanding its borders in all directions, it had annexed native kingdoms of all sizes and makes, and after a point of time even brought under its control formidable powers such as the Marathas and the Sikhs – that not too long ago in the past had hastened the demise of the once-mighty Mughal empire, with the Marathas, in particular, having turned the later Mughal emperors into puppet kings.

Yet and in spite of having humbled the major powers, including the Scindia kings of Gwalior in 1843 and achieving the complete annexation of Punjab in 1849, the E.I.C. had been unable to prevent rebellions and revolts surfacing every now and then. Barely had an odd twenty years passed since it had first stepped into the power game in 1757, that troubles had already begun brewing within its far-flung borders.

In 1781 rebellion broke out in Varanasi after Governor-General Warren Hastings had put under arrest its king, Chait Singh. In 1799 a company deposed Nawab by the name of Wazir Ali had openly defiled the company and orchestrated an armed uprising. In 1803 North Arcot, a region in the Carnatic had revolted. In 1806, the Sepoys at Vellore had staged a violent mutiny over the company’s interference in sacred matters. In 1813 the Gujars of Saharanpur had gone on the rampage. In 1830 the Singpos of Assam gathering around some three thousand able-bodied men had initiated unrest. In 1832 the Kols of Chotanagpur had stirred up civil disturbance. In 1839 had come about the Sadiya insurrection, and some ten years later in 1849 the Nagas had taken up arms and started their own campaign of terror.

In fact, the number of uprisings the E.I.C faced in a century of its rule was so numerous that hardly does a lapse of a few years pass by that without fail we find an armed resistance or civil disturbance taking place in one or another part of the E.I.C.’s expansive territories – with the triggering causes most often but not always to be the policies and laws the company enforced and rigidly adhered to.

Given this frequency of outbreaks and the political scenario that prevailed in the subcontinent at the time, the mutiny of 1857 was no different and had it not been for two very important factors, it may also not have acquired the legendary status as it has come to be endowed with today. For no British media would have come to take such interest in it and very likely no books, literature, journals, histographies or memoirs would ever have come to be produced, at least in such vast numbers, or the commemorative events that have come to celebrated.

Within this context, it is also not too difficult to see that of the parts that made up the Indian mutiny, very few were practically new, and even before its outbreak, princes and chieftains fed up and angered were plotting to shake off the British yolk; peasants now and then were giving vent to their frustrations; high caste Hindu and Muslims were expressing their resentment towards Christianity, and the Sepoys had already left an indelible mark of their bitterness over religion at Vellore.

But whereas one would typically expect the E.I.C. to have tackled the situation effectively having acquired the experience in curbing revolts through the years, on the contrary, it had been taken by complete surprise when the Bengal Sepoys had mutinied in 1857 – and the reason was not compliancy or incompetency on the part of the E.I.C.

On the slightest sign of trouble, the company had indeed acted swiftly and firmly suppressed initial flares by disbanding individual regiments and apprehending firestarters, but where it had ultimately failed was in its ability to judge the extent of the discontentment that had spread through the ranks of the Bengal army since the time it had annexed the kingdom of Oudh in 1856, and then ofcourse, there were those infamous greased cartridges that had led the E.I.C., to court-martial a squadron of sowars at Meerut.

Unlike at Vellore, here within the borders of the Bengal Presidency almost 64 units of a very large Bengal army had mutinied and so spontaneously that early chroniclers of the event such as George Bruce Malleson was convinced the Great Revolt of 1857, as it first came to termed by historian William Kaye for its magnitude and ferocity was a planned conspiracy set to explode at a prefixed date. Malleson’s fears were utterly misplaced, for we know that wasn’t the case.

In essence a series of outbreaks, interdependent and spontaneous but not in the least planned, the uprising had been at its core as historian J.M. Roberts puts it “a jumble of reactionary protests”, albeit of an extremely violent nature and of colossal dimensions. Erupting on the 10th of May 1857 at the military cantonment of Meerut, approximately eighty-four kilometres away from Delhi, it had unfolded with a domino effect, and in which the Sepoys and Sowars of the Bengal army had acted like a pair of floodgates.

Trained, equipped and supplied to keep local troublemakers at bay, once these floodgates had given away, princes, chieftains, landlords, peasants, mobs, rioters, looters and pillagers had all risen up to take advantage of the chaos and submerged parts of the Bengal Presidency, especially Northern India, in a tide of hatred and terror.

Reasons for the outbreaks was quintessentially not the same for every participant nor had the mutineers behaved in a uniform manner to suggest an orchestrated rebellion. Broadly speaking, for the Sepoys and Sowars it was long-festering discontentment coupled with religious grievances and loss of privileges. For the princes and chieftains, the opportunity to reclaim back their lost reigns. For the peasants, in parts, forest and land laws, and for the native societies of Hindus and Muslims the fear of being converted into Christianity and a deep-seated resentment towards change and modernity, cocooned as these societies were in centuries-old superstitions and traditions.

The two factors that actually gained the insurrection of 1857 global recognition and made it the most remembered out of all the other revolts and rebellions was not its size, ferocity or complexity, but the large scale massacre of civilians and the European Revolutions of 1848 – a wave of short-lived nationalistic movements that had emerged in response to various impediments prevailing in Europe at the time.

While the former engaged public attention and spurred the British press to turn it into a media sensation (see Farbound.Net story: Political Animals), the latter affixed it with words such as people’s movement, revolution and nationalistic – for when the insurrection had erupted some nine years after, Europe already having witnessed the events of the movements of 1848 had immediately related to it in the same light, and thus had its popularity grown.

Moreover, the prominent byproducts of these movements were the thinkers and revolutionaries that had come to the fore such as the German philosopher, author, and journalist, Karl Marx, who had turned out to be the first European to dub the insurrection of 1857 as nationalist in character.

Later famous as the progenitor of the Marxism stream of thought, Marx was a communist and the author of the communist manifesto which in collaboration with his best friend Engels he had produced in 1848. When the mutiny broke out Marx was residing in London and an international correspondent for the New York Daily. For Marx, the mutiny was both an opportunity to reach out to a wider audience with his own views as well as improve his fortunes, and the essays published by him on the mutiny are till date admired for their sophistication and balance.

However, Marx had never visited British India nor interviewed the mutineers. He had based his analysis on available material flooding into London at the time as had most authors and journalists, and in this particular case, picked up the words from an energetic British politician who had been concerned over events barely two months into the mutiny.

Twice elected as the Prime Minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli, then the leader of the house of commons and the opposition, had been one of the most vociferous in the British Parliament.

With imperial Britain engaged in three wars against the Russians, the Chinese and the Persians, and a substantial portion of the regular British army normally stationed in British India send to Afghanistan, diverting European troops to suppress the rebellion had become the need of the hour and subsequently required Parliamentary approval – which had been long in coming with representatives of the East India Company having played down their incapability of containing the insurrection.

In a short series of speeches, Disraeli had attempted to build in the urgency. He had first compared the outbreak at Meerut with the French and American Revolution and later questioned if it was a national war or mutiny. Disraeli’s political rhetoric had come embedded with handpicked words that all of Britain let alone the Parliament could easily comprehend. The American Revolution, in particular, had left Imperial Britain bereft of her American possession and Europe had been well acquainted with the upheaval the nationalistic elements of the 1848 revolutions had brought about.

Disraeli’s speeches in spite of having met with resistance in Parliament especially from the representatives of the East India Company had nonetheless proved effective. With fresh troops arriving by land and sea, native Sepoys of the Madras and Bombay presidencies, units of Sikhs, Gurkhas and additionally the forces of allied kingdoms, the E.I.C. had within a span of two years reconquered lost territories and regained back control but found its long illustrious career suddenly brought to an end – for Disraeli’s scathing criticism of its conduct had also led to its dissolution shortly after the mutiny had been curbed.

While Disraeli may have set in motion events that eventually led to the curbing of the mutiny and the dissolution of E.I.C., sympathetic as he may well have been towards the grievances of the native Sepoys, the European Revolution of 1848 on the other hand, was what in essence had eventually influenced the birth of the Indian freedom struggle of the nineteenth century and led to the development of phrase, the First India War of Independence – although the phrase did not emerge during the time of mutiny but almost fifty years later in the early half of the nineteenth century.

Even at a slight glance, the phrase that is the First Indian War of Independence is a perplexing term. A debatable set of words mashed together to present an even more debatable scenario, it neither qualifies the dictionary definition of a war of independence which states a conflict has to be won to be declared so. Nor has it always managed to clearly establish the nationalistic spirit that is said to lie at its heart.

Furthermore, once we begin to compare this war with other wars of independence such as the American revolution of 1765-83 in which imperial Britain also featured as an antagonist and colonial master, we find vast differences. Prominent among these is that while in the American war of Independence, there was a central command structure with Commander-in-chief, George Washington reporting to the Second Continental Congress, in the First Indian war of Independence, no central command structure or leader has ever emerged.

Yet surprisingly, since India’s independence, this phrase has enjoyed the official designation of India’s nomenclature of the mutiny of 1857. Endorsed by none other than India’s first Prime Minister, Pandit Jawarhal Nehru, and subsequently promoted by the Government of Independent India through various mechanisms, it came to be frequently projected in the years that followed 1947 – with the aim of having it deeply embedded in Indian society.

Towards this end, and if the commemorative events, issuance of postage, political speeches and even its insemination into school textbooks wasn’t enough, journalist columns, magazines articles, books, movies, telly serials, advertisements and art, all clubbed together, in an attempt to drive it straight into the Indian subconscious and vocabulary.

Then as reputed Indian historians like Ramesh Chandra Majumdar and other international scholars began to argue against the eligibility of the phrase in the context of a war of independence, those in its favour began to defend it by putting forth various arguments – with the most common defence that emerged describing it as a ‘one of a kind event’ that involved the participation of all sections of Indian society, more specifically of Hindus and Muslims, who were united by a common goal.

In this conflict of arguments that cropped up between the two opposing sides, the exact cause that led to the creation of the phase and its creator receded behind the seldom visited corridors of scholarly discussions and research, while its alternate version, supported by the Government, was made more readily available, so as to influence more people with its nationalist pride and patriotic appeal.

In spite of these adopted measures and far from getting an entire country to revel in its nationalist spirit, the phrase came to evoke a bunch of contradictory responses in the 20th century. In political circles, it strangely outgrew the mutiny that gave rise to it, and as is evident from newspaper articles citing ministers of states asking for a revolt or rebellion to be honoured with the title of the First War of Indian Independence simply for its chronological appearance in the timeline.

For instance, on the 23rd of October 2017, the newspaper Tribune reported that the Chief Minister of Odisha was desirous of seeing the Paika Bidroha of 1817 honoured as the First War of Indian Independence. Similarly, a year earlier, on the 11th of July 2016, the BBC recorded the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu pushing to have the Vellore mutiny of 1806 conferred with the same title. Farther back in time, on 10th of May 2007, reports flowed in of three Sikh MPs arguing the First-Anglo Sikh War to be the real First War of Independence during a Parliamentary meet.

To Indians outside the political and government circles, opinion on the phrase was divided. Those born in a pre-Independent India with a natural affinity for the nineteenth-century freedom movement and freedom fighters tended to largely agree with the message the phrase carried but for those born in a post-independent India, the words held practically no significance.

Perhaps, it was on sensing this lack of national spirit in the youth of the day, that the Government of India then headed by the Congress Party with Dr. Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister, had taken the initiative of organizing a commemorative reenactment to resuscitate interest in both the event and the phrase that emerged from it, on the 150th anniversary of the mutiny in 2007.

Held consecutively on the 10th and 11th of May in 2007, this commemorative reenactment that clubbed together two different eras of colonial history, saw a large procession of volunteers marching all the way from Meerut to Delhi to celebrate not the mutiny of 1857 but the first war of Independence.

Among the newspapers that covered the event, the New York Times, known as the New York Daily during the period of the mutiny, later reported that the going had not been smooth. En route students had rioted over being served low-grade Chapattis, several were hospitalized for severe dehydration and generally, interest levels in the events were low. In fact, the organizers, stated the New York Times, had to persuade the participants to continue.

No matter what had prevailed during the procession, the historic mutiny that shook both Imperial Britain and British India in the 18th century, nonetheless, came to be relived to a certain degree that day. While the Chapattis alluded to the unexplained Chapatti incident that had vexed both the indigenous populace and the E.I.C. in 1857, the march reanimated the historic path the Meerut mutineers had taken to ignite the flame of rebellion in Delhi or in the Indian context ‘flame of independence’.

What was more important was the activities that took place the next day on the 11th of May. For these while not being identical was still strongly reminiscent of the counter-tactics of the India House, a political organization based in London, that on the 10th of May, 1907 had originally initiated the tradition of celebrations with a 24-year-old Marathi young man from the town of Bhagupur, near Nasik in the state of Maharashtra, having publicly announced the phrase for the first time in Indian history.

The phrase that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had introduced on the 10th of May in 1907, incidentally, was the title of a book that he had been labouring on at the time. Built out of British historiographies, documents, journals, correspondence and files available at the British Library in London and imbibed with an alternative narrative to reflect the Indian, or to be more specific his own point of view, it had been published first in 1909, banned by the British, and republished again in 1947 in independent India, in a true India House counter tactic to defy British rules and highlight the end of the British Raj.

Savarkar’s epic work of history, however, wasn’t really about history. A freedom activist, politician and revolutionary, inspired by the likes of European revolutionaries such as Giuseppe Mazzini, Camillo de Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi, all products of the European Revolutions of 1848, he had created the retelling to serve a very political purpose and which was to counter the British narratives of the mutiny and bolster the Indian freedom movement of the nineteenth century – and likewise what to the British was an insurrection had become for India, a war of independence.

The nationalist retelling Savarkar ultimately created not only gifted India with the phrase ‘the Indian war of independence’ which was prefixed with the word ‘first’ to differentiate it from the actual freedom movement of the nineteenth century, but also the heroic character of the freedom fighter Nana Saheb, hitherto featured in British literature as a criminal and rebel for the Satighat and Bibighar massacre that had occurred during his brief reign as Peshwa.

Where Savarkar left off in 1909, Nehru picked up the threads, almost thirty years later, in 1942 and quintessential became the man to popularize the phrase with more sophistication and seriousness.

Nehru not only approved of Savarkar’s phrase and implemented the same into his own interpretation of the insurrection of 1857 but also added to it and secured its future, as Prime Minister, by urging India to remember the phrase for the next hundred years – in a speech that he made at the Ram Lila Grounds on the 10th of May, 1957.

As Mahatma Gandhi’s chief lieutenant, a freedom fighter, and a prominent figure of Indian nationalism, Nehru, like Savarkar, was deeply involved in the freedom struggle and after independence, he had frequently used the phrase to deliver inspiring political speeches revolving around the importance of national unity and in doing so established a trend for future political leaders to follow suit.

In time even those not in the least aware of the history of the mutiny or as to why the phrase was created in the first place, injected it into their own narratives for patriotic effect or to simply emulate the charismatic Kashmiri pandit whose influence on Indian nationalism and politics remains unquestioned even in the 20th century.

The Discovery of India, a book Nehru had written while serving a four year internment period as a political prisoner at the Ahmednagar fort, between 1942-46, provides us with an understanding of Nehru’s motive of incorporating the phrase into his own nationalist vision for India.

Published in March 1946, a year shy of India’s actual independence in 1947, the book was an instant bestseller upon release, and although often stated to have been written for his daughter Indira Gandhi, it was, in reality, a nationalistic piece of literature – and as Sabyasachi Bhattacharya reflects in the academic work, Talking back: The Idea of civilization in the Nationalist Discourse, it was “Nehru’s idea of Indian civilization as a guide to her post-independent future”.

Mirroring the sentiments of Tagore in 1902, and of his inspiration, Mahatma Gandhi, in 1909, Nehru, in this book had disclosed his romantic imaginings of an Indian past that was culturally united and where the Indian identity was already in existence. Penned during a time when the creation of Pakistan, had become an unavoidable truth and possibly with the intention of preventing the partition by making both Hindus and Muslims (those in support of Jinnah) feel part of the same national heritage and culture, the underlying theme that ran through the pages was national unity amidst diversity.

The Padma Vibushan awardee, Sarvepalli Gopal, the official biographer of Nehru, had later explained The Discovery of India, to be a “Great Jumble of a Book which bears the marks of haste and tension and lacking in analysis, elegance and clear thinking, it carried not a precise scientific argument but a buoyant message”. In another of his authored books on Nehru, titled, “The Mind of Jawaharlal Nehru” Gopal, further quoted:

Yet Gopal was also the foremost to state the purpose of the book and which was Nehru’s way of depicting India’s past in such a manner so as to draw lessons for its future, and it is in this context of nation-building that permits one to confidently deduce that the 1857 mutiny for Nehru had simply served as a trope to both regale and teach Indians of the essence of unity with special emphasis on Indian nationalism – that gaining momentum in the early half of the nineteenth century had by this time been poised to step into the spotlight with the freedom struggle almost won.

Allocating as much space as was required to stress upon the reader the importance of the 1857 insurrection as a war of freedom, and also mentioning Savarkar’s book in the background as something of a rare book of Indian history banned by the British, Nehru much like Savarkar, had cleverly manipulated historical evidence to explain his view of both the cause of the rebellion and its defeat.

Which in Nehru’s opinion and in Nehru’s own words were the feudal chiefs and their indecisiveness, lack of unity, and traitorous behaviour. By which Nehru was basically implicating the independent chiefdoms and kingdoms that had either supported the British at the time of the mutiny or preferred not to meddle – and to crown it all, the mutiny had failed for the absence of modern Indian nationalism.

NEHRU’S VERSION OF THE 1857 MUTINY

In May, 1857, the Indian army at Meerut mutinied. The revolt had been secretly and well organised but a premature outburst rather upset the plans of the leaders. It was more than a military mutiny and it spread rapidly and assumed the character of a popular rebellion and war of Indian independence. As such a popular rebellion of the masses, it was confined to Delhi, the United Provinces (as they are now called), and parts of a central India and Bihar. Essentially it was feudal outburst, headed by feudal chiefs and their followers and aided by the wide-spread anti-foreign sentiment. Inevitably it looked up to the relic of the Mughal dynasty, still sitting in Delhi palace, but feeble and old and powerless. Both Hindus and Moslems took full part in the Revolt.

This Revolt strained British rule to the utmost and it was ultimately suppressed with Indian help. It brought out all the inherent weaknesses of the old regime, which was making its last despairing effort to drive out foreign rule. The feudal chiefs had the sympathy of the masses over the large area, but they were incapable, unorganised and no constructive ideal or community of interest. They had already played their role in history and there was no place for them in the future… There was hardly any national and unifying sentiment among the leaders and a mere anti-foreign feeling, coupled with a desire to maintain their feudal privileges, was a poor substitute for this…

It is clear, however, that there was lack of nationalist feeling which might have bound the people of India together. Nationalism of the modern type was yet to come; India had still to go through much sorrow and travail before she learnt the lesson which would give her real freedom. Not by fighting for a lost cause, the feudal order, would freedom come…

In the extract above, which in large parts come from The Discovery of India, it is clear to find Nehru’s version of 1857 owes much to Savarkar’s retelling, and which in turn was founded on the works of early colonial British historians, journals and writings such as G.B. Malleson epic historical work, and specifically his account of the conspiracy theory, stated in the extract as “secretly and well organized”.

What is also apparent is that Nehru imposes his romantic imagining of the “Indian identity” over historical truth by using the words “Indian army” and “with the help of Indians”. In the time frame of the mutiny of 1857, the indigenous populations that dwelled in the geographical location that makes up the present-day countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, had never referred to each other as Indians, as Indians, in the majority, still don’t even today – preferring to identify each other either by ethnic origins or from the region they belong to.

Secondly, the ‘Indian’ army was the British Indian army peopled by Indian Sepoys and British officers, and neither did those who supported the British consider themselves as Indians such as the Sikhs and the Hydrabadis. The Indian nationality only came into being during the national movement of the early nineteenth century and was made official after 1947 – in the bygone era, it was the British and Europeans who had loosely referred to the indigenous populace as Indians, when not using terms such as Hindoos.

Much in the same manner the feudal chiefs that Nehru criticizes for the failure of the insurrection never saw themselves as Indians. But Nehru is correct when he says the “feudal chiefs enjoyed the loyalty of the masses”, for during the mutiny mentions of “Indians” fighting patriotically did not imply for a country or nation but more specifically for their kings, chiefs, localities, tribes or people.

The criticism of the feudal elements follows Savarkar’s epic in which Nana Saheb is a hero and a feudal chieftain, and just like Savarkar produces the transition of feudalism to nationalism so does Nehru also express the same by stating the feudal chiefs had done their part and now the time had come for the nineteenth-century revolutionaries or more specifically Indian nationalism to take the stage. Nehru’s feudal elements may have also alluded to the 562 princely states that prior to their incorporation into the Indian union had functioned as semi-independent monarchies under the sovereignty of the British Empire.

Nehru is again factually and historically correct to analyze that the mutiny of 1857 was not a nationalistic war but in doing so he contradicts his own statement that this rebellion was a war of independence. Finally one can see the main message Nehru is trying to convey when he says “It is clear, however, that there was a lack of nationalist feeling which might have bound the people of India together. Nationalism of the modern type was yet to come…”

Thus for Nehru, like Savarkar, it wasn’t the historical truth that was important at this juncture of Indian history but to propagate the “spirit of nationalism”, and in this regard what Savakrar had started in 1907, Nehru had completed by 1946, and which was the myth of the First War of Independence.

The phrase from a historical perspective may have been at the best a case of tailored history and but from Savarkar and Nehru’s point of view, it was a very potent tool to build the past of country so as to inspire its present and strengthen its future. Like the other myths of “unity in diversity” and “Indian identity”, this phrase was also put into public discourse and celebrated for the purpose of nation-building.

However, from as early as 1947, Nehru’s romantic notions, unsupported by factual evidence, was destined to suffer one blow after another. As Sabyasachi Bhattacharya mentions, the first being the communal partition (creation of Pakistan) which bared hollow his idea of ‘unity in diversity’ and “the syncretic ability of Indian culture” to tolerate and absorb – even in the present times, and within India, diversity continues to be its charm and a problem.

The political relation of Savarkar and Nehru was also not destined to be cordial as it was during the freedom struggle, rifts in political opinions and thoughts brought about by a changing world eventually put them on extreme ends.

But the phrase they created and popularized still enjoys a large fan base, although a gradually diminishing one. In the present century, it still finds its place in political speeches; writers still use it to create nationalist versions; students still find it in their school history books; journalist columns still speak of it; Bollywood still moulds it into what it never was; parents still pass it down to their children, and a large section of Indian society still believe it to be actually true.

The immense popularity it came to achieve in the odd decades that followed 1947 was largely because of its incorporation just after independence when India was jubilant over finally attaining its freedom and still harboured strong feelings towards British rule, with much of it whipped up by the Indian nationalists such as Savarkar and Nehru.

Yet its future in a now globalized world, which neither Savarkar nor Nehru saw coming, is fast becoming uncertain.

THE 50 YEAR GAP: The Indian Mutiny occurred in the year 1857. After a 50-year gap in 1907, it was transformed into a War of Independence by V.D. Savarkar. After a 50 year gap again, in 1957 Nehru consolidated its popularity by urging India to remember it for a hundred years. Following yet another gap of 50 years, in 2007, India organized a reenactment of the mutiny to rekindle nationalist spirit I F I