The Lady of Shalott

The Year 1857

Indian Mutiny 1857

To most Indians, writes Ashok Malik, the Mutiny is not so much history as a happy cocktail of conspiracies, counter-factuals and pet theories.

Since the past is as much about fact as perception, how one sees history is often a product of social conditioning. Take some examples. To the lay citizen in the United States - the quintessential Middle American - the history of his country is an idealistic expansion of human freedom, from independence for white, property-owning males in 1776 to civil rights and equality for the coloured person in the 1960s.

To the educated Englishmen - or Briton, the words were once interchangeable but no longer - till about the middle of the 20th century, the history of his little island was seen as a divine mission, an obligation to carry education, rule of law, fair-play and, that dynamite word, civilisation, to the farthest corners of the world.

To the contemporary Israeli, the collective memory of the Jews is one of historical injustice, fortifying the determination that oppression and dispossession will not be repeated: “Masada shall not fall again”.

True, there is an element of myth to all these examples, but then the history of a nation is, in many ways, the collation of what its citizens want to believe themselves to be.

How then do Indians see their past, their legacy? Unlike the Anglo-American or Israeli models, there is no linear projection. Rather, history is a happy compendium of conspiracies, conspiracy theories and counter-factuals. The central narrative - if there is one in the first place - is easily obscured by the side stories and the sub-plots.

In short, history is some variation or the other of the Mahabharata. It is at once a moral war, a gigantic property dispute typical of so many Indian families, a series of personal and personalised blood feuds, plotting and intrigue - Jayadratha and the killing of Abhimanyu; the death of Ashwatthama the elephant and the cheating of Drona - a maddening mix of sub-stories ranging from Yayati’s tragedy to the Nal-Damayanti romance. The main thread is quickly lost - as it is in our history.

The events of 1857 make up India’s modern Mahabharata, not just as a terrible war but also in terms of the multiplicity of perceptions and interpretations the Mutiny or Revolt or Uprising or War of Independence lends itself to.

As such, every Indian who has heard of 1857 has his own idea of what it was or what it should have been. In their film on Mangal Pandey, Aamir Khan and Ketan Mehta decided to script it as, in part, a proletarian protest against a “Company” obsessed with “market” and “profit”. This was nonsense, of course, but so was Modern India, a class VIII textbook prescribed by NCERT and written by “historians” Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev, which claimed of 1857:

“In Britain itself, the common people, including industrial workers who had emerged as a new social class, had organised themselves and were demanding equal political rights for all citizens and abolition of inequalities in society. Many of their leaders, it would interest you to know, supported the aims of the revolt in India and condemned the atrocities committed by the British troops on the Indian people. It was their view that the British domination of India benefited only the small upper sections of British society against whom the common people of Britain were themselves struggling.“

Intellectuals have their hobby horses; commoners have their imagination. Since the conflict of 1857 - whatever one may insist upon calling it - was eventually lost, no grand, national celebration of a glorious triumph is possible. Indians tend to remember individuals from 1857 - none more than the dashing Tatya Tope and the courageous Rani of Jhansi.

With victory out of reach, they satisfy themselves with trivia - Lakshmibai guiding the horse’s reins with her teeth, brandishing two swords, one in each arm - or conspiracy - Tatya betrayed by an ally - esoterica and a lament of what might have been or almost was. From Porus to Panipat, India’s history is, alas, a saga of lost chances.

The 20th century had its own version of this great Indian mope trick. It was - is - called the Netaji legend, story of the Ghost who Walks, Man who Cannot Die. The Mukherjee Commission, which investigated the alleged air crash that killed Subhas Bose in Taiwan in 1945, went into various theories about the man’s last sighting. One of them, Justice Mukherjee’s findings said, was of a plane crash in an obscure village in Madhya Pradesh. It had two survivors, Netaji and Adolf Hitler.

If a judicial probe could give weightage to such profundity, why ridicule the man in the mohalla? Can be he blamed for seeing, for instance, 1857 as a collection of near misses and untold truths, the mother of all Hindi film screenplays, history as action, emotion, drama, thrills, all rolled into one.

Imagine for a moment that the UPA Government decides to mark the sesquicentennial of the Mutiny by setting up - what else? - a commission of inquiry. What could it set out to find? Candidate number one would be to establish the final destiny of Nana Saheb, heroic last Peshwa to Indians, fiend of Cawnpore to generations of English children, real-life inspiration for Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo (the fugitive submariner out to save the world), and the Netaji of the 19th century - the Mystery of the Mutiny.

Nana is said to have crossed into Nepal with eight elephants carrying his treasures. He is said to have asked the double-crossing Rana of Nepal for safe passage to Tibet or China. He is said to have been killed by a tiger in Nepal in 1859, to have gone to Russia or Mecca, to have lived in the south as the sadhu Jaja Maharaj till 1896 or as an ascetic in a cave in Sihor (Gujarat) till 1903 or in Sitapur (Uttar Pradesh) till 1926.

In 1877, the Bombay financial markets went into a tizzy when a newspaper reported that Nana Saheb was about to invade India at the head of a Russian army. In 1881, two of Nana’s servants returned home to Bithoor saying their master had just died in Nepal.

Andrew Ward’s Our Bones are Scattered captures the best story of all:

“In 1895, when Nana Saheb would have been 70 years old, an addled old man dressed as a sadhu was found in a station in Gujerat, staggering around the bazaar, pestered by children. He was placed in protective custody, where he confided to a young British police office that he was the Nana Saheb and wished to place himself under the protection of the King of Nepal. The police officer eagerly telegraphed district headquarters. ‘Have arrested the Nana Saheb,’ he declared. ‘Wire instructions.’

‘Release at once,’ came the weary reply.”

After such hysteria, who needs history?

Hindu Kush Massacre

Surya Makar Mein