The centenary of the revolt of 1857 saw the publication of two outstanding books on the uprising. One, by S N Sen, was officially sponsored by the government of India and the other by S B Chaudhuri was independently researched and published. This essay seeks to contrast the approach and the emphasis of the two books, both of which were written under the influence of nationalism. The authors used and read the existing archives very differently and tried to come to terms with the idea that the uprising was a war of independence.
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW june 14, 200851Two Responses to 1857 in the Centenary Year Rudrangshu MukherjeeRudrangshu Mukherjee (rudrangshu@abpmail.com) is with The Telegraph, Kolkata.The centenary of the revolt of 1857 saw the publication of two outstanding books on the uprising. One, by S N Sen, was officially sponsored by the government of India and the other by S B Chaudhuri was independently researched and published. This essay seeks to contrast the approach and the emphasis of the two books, both of which were written under the influence of nationalism. The authors used and read the existing archives very differently and tried to come to terms with the idea that the uprising was a war of independence.Anniversaries seldom go unnoticed in India. The centenary of 1857 and its 150th year are certainly no exceptions to this generalisation. But there is a difference in the man-ner in which the government of India decided to remember the centenary and the manner in which it is celebrating the 150th anniversary. There was a march of young men and women from Meerut that reached Delhi on May 11, 2007. The prime minister and other luminaries spoke to the nation on May 11 from the Red Fort. The date for the beginning of the uprising was quietly shifted from May 10 to May 11, presumably because it was only on the latter date that the sepoys from Meerut reached Delhi and the rebellion commenced there. How could a war of independence have begun in Meerut? It makes it look so much better to make it begin, with a small sleight of hand, in Delhi! Even earlier, a finance minister not known for his generosity had promised con-siderable amounts of largesse for organising seminars, exhibi-tions and so on.The mood in 1957 was remarkably different. There was a cele-bration, of course. However, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, unwilling perhaps to even unwittingly don the mantle of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, did not speak from the Red Fort but addressed a meeting at the Ram Lila grounds on May 10. Two years before that, the minister for education in 1955, Abul Kalam Azad, had announced at the meeting of the Indian Historical Records Commission that he had requested the renowned historian of the Marathas, Surendra Nath Sen, to write a one-volume history of the revolt of 1857. This was published in 1957and today it is known as S N Sen’s 1857, a standard reference book on the subject. The government in 1957, thus, chose to give a scholarly dimension to its own involvement in the centenary of the uprising. Two other Indian historians also published their own interpretations of the great rebellion in 1957. One was Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, who wrote The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 and the other was S B Chaudhuri,Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies (1857-59). Even after 50 years, it can hardly be denied that these three works were outstanding contributions to the scholarly literature on 1857. Much of what we say and write about 1857 today is possible because of the work of these three scholars and of the great narratives produced in the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century by Charles Ball, John Kaye, G W Forrest and others.Tension within the Nationalist AssessmentIn this paper I want to focus on the books by Sen and Chaudhuri and to contrast their approaches. But before I come to the writ-ings of these historians, I want to try to locate a tension within the nationalist assessment of the revolt of 1857. Let me begin by
SPECIAL ARTICLEjune 14, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly52taking Jawaharlal Nehru’sThe Discovery of India as a benchmark. Published in March 1946, it has been described by Nehru’s biographer, S Gopal, as an attempt “to portray an emotional comprehension of Indian nationalism”; it sought, according to Gopal, to so depict India’s past as to draw lessons for its future.1 The Discovery of India had a small section entitled ‘The Great Revolt of 1857’. Nehru wrote here, “It was much more than a military mutiny and it spread rapidly and assumed the character of a popular rebellion and a war of Indian independence.” A sentence after this summing up, Nehru commented, “essentially it was a feudal outburst”. This last qualification made it possible for Nehru to analyse some of the drawbacks of the uprising. Nehru spoke of the lack of unity among the feudal chiefs, their lack of any constructive ideal or community of interest. He asserted that the feudal chiefs “had already played their role in history and there was no place for them in the future”. Many of them, Nehru said, were opportunistic and “stood apart waiting to see on which side victory lay. Many played the part of Quislings.”2 It will not be unfair to draw the conclusion from Nehru’s com-ments that in his eyes, the feudal aspect of the uprising, which was essential to it, acted as a restraining element on the popular rebellion and the war of independence aspects of the revolt. Nehru detected but did not quite articulate a tension between the feudal and the popular elements of the uprising. The latter wanted to take the uprising towards a war of independence and the former pulled it back.A decade later, on the centenary of the revolt, when Nehru spoke at the Ram Lila maidan, this tension between the war of independence and the feudal elements had all but disappeared. A hundred years later, according to the first prime minister of India, 1857 had to be remembered as a War of Independence (and as if to emphasise the point, the editor of the relevant volume of Nehru’s Selected Works capitalised the W of war and the I of independence).3 This shift in emphasis – perhaps brought about by the demands of political rhetoric – has a bearing on the under-standing of the work of S N Sen to which I now turn.1 Sen’s Objective ApproachSen was given a clear brief and we know about the brief from the foreword Azad wrote to the volume. Azad felt that the “time had now come to write a new and objective history of the movement of 1857’’. The book would be an “authoritative account’’ written from the “standpoint of a true historian’’, “based on facts and facts alone and avoid all appeal to passion or sentiment’’. The brief followed from Azad’s premise that no “objective history’’ of the struggle existed. Sen’s book was expected to fill this void. Sen echoed these attitudes in his preface whose key phrases were “dispassionate study’’ and “purely objective and scrupulously impartial’’. It is surprising, reading the preface today, how even in 1957 Sen took all the claims about objectivity and impartial history so seriously. Sushobhan Sarkar, in an early review of the book, commented:4Historical writing...involves a process of selection from the mass of available facts on the basis of the author’s conception of what is impor-tant and relevant and what is not; an arrangement of the selected material in a coherent manner; an attempt to draw possible links between different events; a presentation of reflections and inferences which occur to the mind. All these imply point or points of view, an outlook which is the product of a certain experience and environment. It is idle to pretend that one can shake off such points of view. 1.1 SourcesThe quest for an objective history naturally led Sen to remain very close to his sources. The sources he used were largely writ-ten in English and produced by the British. This archive consists of memoirs of serving British officers or of reports prepared by them as part of the counter-insurgency measures. There are also reports of spies, depositions by various participants and reports of committees of inquiry – all produced by the colonial state to suppress the rebellion and to re-establish its power and domi-nance. Sen also used the great narrative histories of the 19th cen-tury written by Kaye, Ball, Rice Holmes, Forrest and so on quite extensively. What is remarkable – and this will remain a bit of a mystery – is that Sen refused to use the Persian and Urdu sources in the National Archives of India (NAI). I use the verb refused advisedly since it is not possible that he did not know of the exist-ence of these documents; after all, he had been head of theNAI and a check-list of these documents had been in print since 1921. He had the resources to have them read and translated but chose not to. Perhaps – and this is only a suggestion – Sen thought that he could not depend on documents that he himself could not read. I make this suggestion because Sen was not averse to using documents in Indian languages that he could himself read. Thus, apart from Bengali, he did use some Marathi material, which he could read as an accomplished historian of the marathas. What is also worth noting is that Sen did not consult and use the various regional archives, say in Allahabad and Patna. At around the same time that Sen was gathering material for his book and writ-ing it, S A Rizvi and M L Bhargava were putting together Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh that came out in the centenary year. There was obviously no coordination between Sen’s work based in Delhi, Calcutta and London and that of Rizvi and Bhargava based in Allahabad and Lucknow.1.2 Pattern and CausesSen followed in the footsteps of Kaye5 and treated the uprising in terms of administrative divisions or geographical regions. Kaye’s second and third volumes, which deal with the actual events of the uprising, have the following divisions: The Rising in the North-West, ‘Progress of the Rebellion in Upper India’, ‘The Pun-jab and Delhi, Bengal, Bihar and the North-West Provinces’, ‘Mutiny and Rebellion in the North-West Provinces’ and a section called ‘Lucknow and Delhi’. Sen described the events under the following chapters: ‘Delhi’, ‘Kanpur’, ‘Oudh’, ‘Bihar’, ‘Jhansi’, ‘Rajputana’ and ‘Central India’ and ‘The Punjab’. While this mode of arranging the material was convenient for constructing a narrative, in terms of analysis it could give rise to certain problems. Following this approach, Sen often failed to pick out the links that existed between the events and activities of the rebels in one area with those in another theatre of the rebellion. This made the uprising appear more fractured than it actually was. He arrived at the conclusion that “nowhere did the sepoy’s conduct conform
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW june 14, 200853to a common pattern”.6 Yet, as I have shown in my study of the revolt in Awadh, if one looks at the sepoy mutinies chronologi-cally rather than geographically, it is possible to establish a pat-tern of movement of the mutinies in the Gangetic plain.7 Sen assumed that to demonstrate a pattern in the sepoy mutinies would be to suggest that the sepoys had a “pre-concerted plan to follow”.8 Detecting a pattern in the actions of the sepoys when they chose to defy and attack their foreign masters is not neces-sarily to suggest that there was a plan or a conspiracy. Rather it is to show how a group of men from a similar background and with shared experiences driven by a sense of alarm acted in the same way when they chose to mutiny. A pattern is not always a plot.Sen concluded his chapter on the causes of the revolt with the observation, “The revolt had been long brewing, the greased car-tridge only hastened it”.9 This is a perfectly non-controversial statement but for the fact that Sen made no analysis of the long gestation and its causes. Indeed, in his review of Sen’s book from which I have already quoted, Sushobhan Sarkar made the very valid criticism that Sen had completely ignored S B Chaudhuri’s study of the anti-British movements in India in the century pre-ceding 1857.10 Chaudhuri’s book11 had come out in 1955, and it finds no mention in Sen’s exhaustive bibliography. Sen made no attempt to link the revolt of 1857 to colonial exploitation and domination. This may have been related to the fact that he was not without sympathy for Britain’s work in India. He believed that “the English government had imperceptibly effected a social rev-olution. They had removed some of the disabilities of women, they had tried to establish the equality of men in the eye of law, they had attempted to improve the lot of the peasant and the serf”.12 This assessment of British rule is a trifle surprising from the pen of a historian brought up in the nationalist ethos since it appears to underplay, if not ignore, the indictment of the eco-nomic aspects of British rule carried out by early nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji and R C Dutt. That apart, the premise that Brit-ish rule was the motor of major social changes in India coloured Sen’s assessment of the revolt. The rebels had fought against a regime that was committed to establishing modern ideas and institutions. The rebel leaders thus, according to Sen, “would have set the clock back…they wanted a counter-revolution”. Sen elaborated as follows, the rebel leadership “would have done away with the new reforms, with the new order, and gone back to the good old days when a commoner could not expect equal jus-tice with the noble, when the tenants were at the mercy of the talukdars, and when theft was punished with mutilation”.13 Even in Awadh, where Sen said the revolt had “assumed a national dimension though the term must be used in a limited sense”, the “patriots” [Sen’s word] “fought for their king and country but they were not champions of freedom for they had no conception of individual liberty…they would, if they could, revive the old order and perpetuate everything it stood for.”14 It is clear therefore, that in Sen’s mind freedom meant nothing without a conception of individual liberty. Sen was too good an empirical historian to ignore the fact that “the rebels wanted to get rid of the alien gov-ernment” but they also wanted to “restore the old order of which the king of Delhi was the rightful representative”.15 This seemed to fit awkwardly with what Sen considered to be freedom.1.3 Attitude towards the RebellionIt will not be unfair to say that Sen’s attitude towards the British rule and to the rebellion was no different from the Bengalis of his class in 1857. Most, if not all of them had also felt that the British rule was the harbinger of modernity in India and it had brought in social changes of enormous significance and that the ‘sipahis’ and the rebels of North India were protesting against these reforms and were therefore, not worthy of support. The loyalty that the western-educated intelligentsia of Calcutta displayed towards British rule in 1857 was subjected to biting satire in 1862 by Kaliprasanna Sinha inHootum Pyanchar Naksha. Sen’s text makes it clear that he was not in sympathy with the rebels, their actions and their aspirations. Yet he could not overlook the fact that the rebels had fought to get rid of foreign domination. He thus actually used the phrase “war of independence” to describe the events of 1857. “What began as a fight for religion”, he wrote, “ended as a war of independence.”16 But he could not reconcile the aims and aspirations of this war of independence to his understanding of freedom by which he only understood the liber-ties achieved by modern nationalism and bourgeois democracy. I will be bold enough to suggest that Sen was influenced, perhaps imperceptibly, by the shift that was taking place in the nationalist attitude towards 1857, a shift that I have tried to capture through the writings and speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru, who was a sensi-tive student of history. Thus, Sen’s almost intuitive antipathy for the aims of the rebels came to be overlaid by the idea of a war of independence. I would venture to say that he could not quite accept the term and so he qualified it by saying that this was not real freedom. This landed him in a mess of contradictions regard-ingindependence, freedom, individual liberty and so on, contra-dictions that he did not even try to clarify and resolve.I will briefly touch upon two other contradictions in Sen’s evaluation and analysis of the rebellion. He made the claim that “nomoral issues were involved in the war of 1857”.17 Yet a few paragraphs earlier he had written that the uprising “began as a fight for religion”. How a fight for religion could be devoid of moral issues is not clear. The sepoys and the rebels fought in the name of their ‘dharma’ and ‘deen’. Both the words resonate with moral overtones. Even the rebels’ perceptions of their own defeat and failure were imbricated with moral issues. Charles Ball recounted an incident in which a group of rebel sepoys were asked about their failure and they ascribed it to the lack of gratitude they had shown when they had killed their quondam masters. The sepoys said, “Sahib, it has all been the work of fate. After what we had done, we never could fight. No matter whether your troops were black or white, native or European, we could not stand against them; our salt choked us.”18 A loss of loyalty, a moral lapse in a world where loyalty and honour mattered, was seen as being the source of a failure of courage. The sepoys were emphatically making a moral statement and since it is recounted in Ball, it could not have been unknown to Sen. He chose to ignore it, perhaps because the moral world of the ‘sipahi’ was alien to him or distant from him.I have said earlier that Sen stayed very close to his sources. I want to demonstrate the consequences of this by looking at his chapter on Awadh. The choice of Awadh is to do with my own
SPECIAL ARTICLEjune 14, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly54familiarity with the revolt there, and also because Sen described the uprising there to have acquired some sort of “national dimen-sion’’. The first thing to notice following the footnotes in Sen’s chapter is the fact that the narrative is entirely built upon the memoirs of those Britons who were besieged in the Lucknow Residency or were part of the British armies that re-conquered Lucknow and Awadh. There is only one reference to an archival source and this is to a file in the foreign department, secret consultations series kept in theNIA.19 Sen noted in his bibliography that he had consulted this series, yet there is nothing of signi-ficance in the chapter that is actually culled from the files of this series. The overwhelming dependence on memoirs of Britons had an obvious and inevitable result. Sen’s chapter on Awadh is actu-ally an account not of the revolt but a description of those who were besieged in the Residency and of how they were relieved by Havelock, Outram and Campbell. The reader will look in vain to find the activities of the rebels, their strength, their strategy and so forth. This is a mystifying lapse since, as I found when doing my own research on Awadh, on the basis of the foreign depart-ment, secret consultations it is possible to build up a fairly detailed account of the rebels and their activities in Awadh. Sen completely ignored this. Thus, we are landed with this peculiar contradiction where an account that sees the rebellion as a war of independence, albeit with some qualifications, does not tell us about the rebels and the rebellion for the very area where Sen said the revolt had acquired a national dimension. From Sen’s chapter on Awadh, it is impossible to arrive at the conclusion that the revolt there had a national dimension or that it was a war of independence. The chapter in the manner of Kaye tells the story of British heroism and endurance.2 Chaudhuri’sNarrativeThis was exactly S B Chaudhuri’s point of departure. He was not concerned with the British, their sufferings and their military tri-umphs. He was also not concerned with the sepoy mutinies that triggered off the uprising. Two years before 1957, he had published a pioneering monograph describing the manner in which the British rule had been resisted across India in the 100 years preced-ing the uprising of 1857. His Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, 1857-59 was a natural continuation of the 1955 book.20 He wrote,21 These civil disturbances of the earlier period afford a welcome foothold to the historian in evaluating and estimating the civil rebel-lion of the mutiny period and in discovering that the latter are connected in a long chain of causes with the former and in some cases are even a continuation of them.The link was not only one of causality but also one of character. According to Chaudhuri, the civil rebellion of the pre-mutiny and the mutiny periods were linked because these were “primarily anti- British, anti-colonial movements running through feudal channels”.22Chaudhuri had read Sen’s work, even though both books came out in the same year and he made the following extremely critical and valid observation. “Dr Sen’s book”, he noted, “which contains a vivid and vigorous account of military activities is less than just to the part played by the general masses of the Indian people in the great upsurge.”23 The activities of the rebels were precisely what Chaudhuri wanted to capture and thus, fill a significant gap in Sen’s narrative of 1857. He set out the purpose of his book thus: 24The following pages, therefore, aim, so far as it is possible to bring within a convenient compass, at presenting the history of the civil rebel-lion in the Indian mutinies in a connected and indisputably authentic form, its scope and character, the class of people participating in it, and the effect produced in the direction and dimension of this vast confla-gration and in the prolongation of the conflict and its consequences. 2.1 SourcesHow did Chaudhuri propose to construct the activities of the rebels? He wrote that he depended on government records, the narrative of events recorded by British district officers, parliamentary papers, reports, minutes, dispatches and memoranda preserved in what was then the Commonwealth Relations Office in London. He claimed that these records were so voluminous that it minimised the search for unpublished papers or unknown sources. He asserted further that “fresh materials from untapped sources may only cor-roborate the approach to the subject taken”.25 In other words, Chaudhuri read the archives of the victor to arrive at the activities of the rebels. Long before reading sources against their grain or constructing a narrative of insurgency from the prose of counter-insurgency had been theoretically propounded, Chaudhuri, as a good empirical historian, had practised something similar. Lest you think I am making too tall a claim on behalf of Chaudhuri, let me present to you two statements. Here is one from Chaudhuri: 26No comprehensive account is available from the defeated side but this limitation in a way enhances the authenticity of the records of the British officers who were compelled in accordance with official orders, to compile a narrative of the mutinies and to acknowledge the genuine-ness of the popular reaction to the sepoy war…the account of the Indian rebellion furnished by the British themselves has at least the saving feature that it automatically rules out the charge of biased sources.Compare this with the following now famous formulation of Ranajit Guha: 27For counter-insurgency, which derives directly from insurgency…can hardly afford a discourse that is not fully and compulsively involved with the rebel and his activities. It is of course true that the reports, dispatches, minutes, judgments, laws, letters, etc, in which police-men, soldiers, bureaucrats…and others hostile to insurgency register their sentiments, amount to a representation of their will. But these documents do not get their content from that will alone, for the latter is predicated on another will – that of the insurgent. It should be possi-ble therefore to read the presence of a rebel consciousness as a neces-sary and pervasive element within that body of evidence. Might I be bold enough to suggest that the thrust and purport of both these statements are one and the same? Guha says with a great deal of philosophical sophistication what had already occurred to Chaudhuri. The archive of the victors of 1857 by its very nature was forced to record rebel activities and report their movements. Since this corpus of evidence was produced to aid the raj in quelling the revolt it needed to record the rebellion with a degree of authenticity.2.2 Attitude towards the RebellionIn my discussion of Sen’s book, I tried to show with the example of Awadh how he failed to write a history of the rebellion. For Chaudhuri too I will draw on his section on Awadh to try and
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW june 14, 200855understand how far he fulfilled his own project. Like Sen, Chaud-huri followed a geographical division except that he went by administrative divisions created by the British. Thus, he treated the events in Awadh under two headings: The Faizabad division and the Lucknow division. He told the story of both these divi-sions separately and chronologically. For both the divisions, he showed which of the taluqdars joined the rebellion and their sup-port base. He tried to offer some estimate of the rebel strength at some specific moments of the uprising. The activities of the British came into his account only when they were necessary to explain rebel movements. He told the story of rebel activities and thus, tried to reconstruct a history of the rebellion.28 He did all this on the basis of sources and documents that were all available to S N Sen. The latter had, however, not adequately mined these sources, maybe because he was not as focused on constructing a narrative of rebel activities as Chaudhuri was. This is the princi-pal difference in the approach of the two historians.We are thus left with something of an anomaly. Sen was asked by the government of India to produce a history of 1857 that would be objective. The premise was that all or most previous histories of 1857 had been written from the British point of view and were therefore, not objective. The demand of objectivity that had been placed on Sen was nothing more than a call to reclaim 1857 for Indian history and Indian historians. But by depending heavily on British memoirs rather than on the archival sources he could have easily used, Sen produced an account that was no dif-ferent in the story that it told from those told by 19th century British historians. Chaudhuri had no official or state-sponsored brief, even though the then vice-president of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, wrote a laudatory foreword to the book. Chaudhuri set out to narrate the activities of the rebels and proceeded to do what Sen had failed to do.3 SimilarityinApproachesHaving emphasised a major difference between the two histori-ans, let me draw attention to one similarity. This concerns the attitude of the two historians towards the religious aspect of the revolt. Both tended to underplay it. Chaudhuri, despite his detailed chronicling and analysis of popular disaffection and rebellion, did not treat religion as a very important factor as a cause of the uprising and as a vehicle for mobilisation. He has a couple of pages on how Hindus and Muslims fought together and of how the various proclamations appealed to both Hindus and Muslims29 but otherwise kept religion outside his analysis of pop-ular revolt. Sen, as we have seen, said that the uprising began as a fight for religion and ended as a war of independence. In this transition from the beginning to the end, religion slipped out of Sen’s analytical framework. He made no analysis of the procla-mations and spent no time in trying to understand the role that religion had played in the uprising. Every single ‘ishtahar’ issued by the rebel leadership was formulated in religious terms: They asked the people, Hindus and Muslims, to rise up and fight the ‘firanghi’.30 This absence in both historians, otherwise so differ-ent in their approaches to 1857, is perhaps not without signifi-cance. Will it be an exaggeration to suggest that writing a decade after independence, when secularism had become enshrined in the nation’s spirit, they were influenced by that prevailing intel-lectual and political ambience? An attempt to claim 1857 to that prevailing spirit of secular-nationalism could not quite situate religion as an important element in the revolt.4 ConclusionIn conclusion, I want to briefly reiterate the point about claiming 1857 for a national ethos. In his last chapter, Sen wrote that the “heroes of 1857” had fought for independence but under Mahatma Gandhi’s national movement India “had achieved freedom and liberty”.31 Chaudhuri saw in 1857 a “curious” com-ing together of “old feudal instincts and anti-alien patriotism”. The latter, he said, “was not yet of the pure advanced political type, as the leaven of feudal discontent was still strong. Yet the yearning for freedom, which was latent in these instincts stood out as the outward emblem of a national outburst against for-eign rule.” “Who knows”, he asked in the penultimate sentence of his book, “that the inception of the nationalist movement was not contained in the rising of 1857 after the fashion of the oak in the acorn?”.32 For both historians, the revolt of 1857 was linked to the national movement through however jagged a line and however circuitous a route. Chaudhuri harked back to the Nehru of The Discovery of India, and saw a tension between the popular uprising and the feudal elements; Sen was closer to Nehru, the prime minister by emphasising that it was a war of independ-ence. The revolt of 1857 with all its power and passion could not be allowed to stand on its own. It had to be made a part of a bigger national narrative.Notes 1 S Gopal,Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Cape, London, 1975, p 299. 2 J Nehru,The Discovery of India, The Signet Press, Calcutta, 1946, p 383. 3 Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol 39, OUP, New Delhi, 2007, pp 7-11. 4 S C Sarkar, ‘Views on 1857’ inBengal Renaissance and Other Essays, People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1970, pp 123-35. 5 J W Kaye, History of the Sepoy War, 3 Vols, W H Allen,London,1864-1880. 6 S N Sen,1857,Publications Division, Government of India, New Delhi, 1957, reprint, 1995, p 405. All page references to the 1995 reprint. 7 Rudrangshu Mukherjee,Awadh in Revolt, 1857-58: A Study of Popular Resistance, OUP, Delhi, 1984, repr Permanent Black, Delhi, 2001, pp 64-65. All page references to the 1984 edition. 8 Sen,1857, p 405. 9 Sen,1857, p 38.10 Sarkar, ‘Views on 1857’, p 126.11 S B Chaudhuri,Civil Disturbances during British Rule in India, The World Press, Calcutta, 1955.12 Sen,1857, p 414.13 Sen,1857, p 414.14 Sen, 1857, p 414.15 Sen,1857, p 413.16 Sen, 1857, p 413.17 Sen,1857, p 414.18 C Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny, London, nd, Vol 2, p 550. The significance of this state-ment is discussed in Mukherjee,Awadh in Revolt, p 172.19 Sen,1857, p 240 n 133.20 S B Chaudhuri,Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies (1857-59), The World Press, Calcutta, 1957.21 Chaudhuri,Civil Rebellion, pp xvi-xvii.22 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, p xvii.23 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, p xx.24 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, p 22.25 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, p v.26 Chaudhuri,Civil Rebellion, pp v-vi.27 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insur-gency in Colonial India, OUP, Delhi, 1983, p 15.28 SeeChaudhuri,Civil Rebellion, pp 118-43.29 SeeChaudhuri,Civil Rebellion, pp 218-82.30 See Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, pp 147-54 for an analysis of the religious content of the proclamations.31 Sen,1857, p 419.32 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, pp 298-99.
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW june 14, 200851Two Responses to 1857 in the Centenary Year Rudrangshu MukherjeeRudrangshu Mukherjee (rudrangshu@abpmail.com) is with The Telegraph, Kolkata.The centenary of the revolt of 1857 saw the publication of two outstanding books on the uprising. One, by S N Sen, was officially sponsored by the government of India and the other by S B Chaudhuri was independently researched and published. This essay seeks to contrast the approach and the emphasis of the two books, both of which were written under the influence of nationalism. The authors used and read the existing archives very differently and tried to come to terms with the idea that the uprising was a war of independence.Anniversaries seldom go unnoticed in India. The centenary of 1857 and its 150th year are certainly no exceptions to this generalisation. But there is a difference in the man-ner in which the government of India decided to remember the centenary and the manner in which it is celebrating the 150th anniversary. There was a march of young men and women from Meerut that reached Delhi on May 11, 2007. The prime minister and other luminaries spoke to the nation on May 11 from the Red Fort. The date for the beginning of the uprising was quietly shifted from May 10 to May 11, presumably because it was only on the latter date that the sepoys from Meerut reached Delhi and the rebellion commenced there. How could a war of independence have begun in Meerut? It makes it look so much better to make it begin, with a small sleight of hand, in Delhi! Even earlier, a finance minister not known for his generosity had promised con-siderable amounts of largesse for organising seminars, exhibi-tions and so on.The mood in 1957 was remarkably different. There was a cele-bration, of course. However, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, unwilling perhaps to even unwittingly don the mantle of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, did not speak from the Red Fort but addressed a meeting at the Ram Lila grounds on May 10. Two years before that, the minister for education in 1955, Abul Kalam Azad, had announced at the meeting of the Indian Historical Records Commission that he had requested the renowned historian of the Marathas, Surendra Nath Sen, to write a one-volume history of the revolt of 1857. This was published in 1957and today it is known as S N Sen’s 1857, a standard reference book on the subject. The government in 1957, thus, chose to give a scholarly dimension to its own involvement in the centenary of the uprising. Two other Indian historians also published their own interpretations of the great rebellion in 1957. One was Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, who wrote The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 and the other was S B Chaudhuri,Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies (1857-59). Even after 50 years, it can hardly be denied that these three works were outstanding contributions to the scholarly literature on 1857. Much of what we say and write about 1857 today is possible because of the work of these three scholars and of the great narratives produced in the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century by Charles Ball, John Kaye, G W Forrest and others.Tension within the Nationalist AssessmentIn this paper I want to focus on the books by Sen and Chaudhuri and to contrast their approaches. But before I come to the writ-ings of these historians, I want to try to locate a tension within the nationalist assessment of the revolt of 1857. Let me begin by 
SPECIAL ARTICLEjune 14, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly52taking Jawaharlal Nehru’sThe Discovery of India as a benchmark. Published in March 1946, it has been described by Nehru’s biographer, S Gopal, as an attempt “to portray an emotional comprehension of Indian nationalism”; it sought, according to Gopal, to so depict India’s past as to draw lessons for its future.1 The Discovery of India had a small section entitled ‘The Great Revolt of 1857’. Nehru wrote here, “It was much more than a military mutiny and it spread rapidly and assumed the character of a popular rebellion and a war of Indian independence.” A sentence after this summing up, Nehru commented, “essentially it was a feudal outburst”. This last qualification made it possible for Nehru to analyse some of the drawbacks of the uprising. Nehru spoke of the lack of unity among the feudal chiefs, their lack of any constructive ideal or community of interest. He asserted that the feudal chiefs “had already played their role in history and there was no place for them in the future”. Many of them, Nehru said, were opportunistic and “stood apart waiting to see on which side victory lay. Many played the part of Quislings.”2 It will not be unfair to draw the conclusion from Nehru’s com-ments that in his eyes, the feudal aspect of the uprising, which was essential to it, acted as a restraining element on the popular rebellion and the war of independence aspects of the revolt. Nehru detected but did not quite articulate a tension between the feudal and the popular elements of the uprising. The latter wanted to take the uprising towards a war of independence and the former pulled it back.A decade later, on the centenary of the revolt, when Nehru spoke at the Ram Lila maidan, this tension between the war of independence and the feudal elements had all but disappeared. A hundred years later, according to the first prime minister of India, 1857 had to be remembered as a War of Independence (and as if to emphasise the point, the editor of the relevant volume of Nehru’s Selected Works capitalised the W of war and the I of independence).3 This shift in emphasis – perhaps brought about by the demands of political rhetoric – has a bearing on the under-standing of the work of S N Sen to which I now turn.1 Sen’s Objective ApproachSen was given a clear brief and we know about the brief from the foreword Azad wrote to the volume. Azad felt that the “time had now come to write a new and objective history of the movement of 1857’’. The book would be an “authoritative account’’ written from the “standpoint of a true historian’’, “based on facts and facts alone and avoid all appeal to passion or sentiment’’. The brief followed from Azad’s premise that no “objective history’’ of the struggle existed. Sen’s book was expected to fill this void. Sen echoed these attitudes in his preface whose key phrases were “dispassionate study’’ and “purely objective and scrupulously impartial’’. It is surprising, reading the preface today, how even in 1957 Sen took all the claims about objectivity and impartial history so seriously. Sushobhan Sarkar, in an early review of the book, commented:4Historical writing...involves a process of selection from the mass of available facts on the basis of the author’s conception of what is impor-tant and relevant and what is not; an arrangement of the selected material in a coherent manner; an attempt to draw possible links between different events; a presentation of reflections and inferences which occur to the mind. All these imply point or points of view, an outlook which is the product of a certain experience and environment. It is idle to pretend that one can shake off such points of view. 1.1 SourcesThe quest for an objective history naturally led Sen to remain very close to his sources. The sources he used were largely writ-ten in English and produced by the British. This archive consists of memoirs of serving British officers or of reports prepared by them as part of the counter-insurgency measures. There are also reports of spies, depositions by various participants and reports of committees of inquiry – all produced by the colonial state to suppress the rebellion and to re-establish its power and domi-nance. Sen also used the great narrative histories of the 19th cen-tury written by Kaye, Ball, Rice Holmes, Forrest and so on quite extensively. What is remarkable – and this will remain a bit of a mystery – is that Sen refused to use the Persian and Urdu sources in the National Archives of India (NAI). I use the verb refused advisedly since it is not possible that he did not know of the exist-ence of these documents; after all, he had been head of theNAI and a check-list of these documents had been in print since 1921. He had the resources to have them read and translated but chose not to. Perhaps – and this is only a suggestion – Sen thought that he could not depend on documents that he himself could not read. I make this suggestion because Sen was not averse to using documents in Indian languages that he could himself read. Thus, apart from Bengali, he did use some Marathi material, which he could read as an accomplished historian of the marathas. What is also worth noting is that Sen did not consult and use the various regional archives, say in Allahabad and Patna. At around the same time that Sen was gathering material for his book and writ-ing it, S A Rizvi and M L Bhargava were putting together Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh that came out in the centenary year. There was obviously no coordination between Sen’s work based in Delhi, Calcutta and London and that of Rizvi and Bhargava based in Allahabad and Lucknow.1.2 Pattern and CausesSen followed in the footsteps of Kaye5 and treated the uprising in terms of administrative divisions or geographical regions. Kaye’s second and third volumes, which deal with the actual events of the uprising, have the following divisions: The Rising in the North-West, ‘Progress of the Rebellion in Upper India’, ‘The Pun-jab and Delhi, Bengal, Bihar and the North-West Provinces’, ‘Mutiny and Rebellion in the North-West Provinces’ and a section called ‘Lucknow and Delhi’. Sen described the events under the following chapters: ‘Delhi’, ‘Kanpur’, ‘Oudh’, ‘Bihar’, ‘Jhansi’, ‘Rajputana’ and ‘Central India’ and ‘The Punjab’. While this mode of arranging the material was convenient for constructing a narrative, in terms of analysis it could give rise to certain problems. Following this approach, Sen often failed to pick out the links that existed between the events and activities of the rebels in one area with those in another theatre of the rebellion. This made the uprising appear more fractured than it actually was. He arrived at the conclusion that “nowhere did the sepoy’s conduct conform 
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW june 14, 200853to a common pattern”.6 Yet, as I have shown in my study of the revolt in Awadh, if one looks at the sepoy mutinies chronologi-cally rather than geographically, it is possible to establish a pat-tern of movement of the mutinies in the Gangetic plain.7 Sen assumed that to demonstrate a pattern in the sepoy mutinies would be to suggest that the sepoys had a “pre-concerted plan to follow”.8 Detecting a pattern in the actions of the sepoys when they chose to defy and attack their foreign masters is not neces-sarily to suggest that there was a plan or a conspiracy. Rather it is to show how a group of men from a similar background and with shared experiences driven by a sense of alarm acted in the same way when they chose to mutiny. A pattern is not always a plot.Sen concluded his chapter on the causes of the revolt with the observation, “The revolt had been long brewing, the greased car-tridge only hastened it”.9 This is a perfectly non-controversial statement but for the fact that Sen made no analysis of the long gestation and its causes. Indeed, in his review of Sen’s book from which I have already quoted, Sushobhan Sarkar made the very valid criticism that Sen had completely ignored S B Chaudhuri’s study of the anti-British movements in India in the century pre-ceding 1857.10 Chaudhuri’s book11 had come out in 1955, and it finds no mention in Sen’s exhaustive bibliography. Sen made no attempt to link the revolt of 1857 to colonial exploitation and domination. This may have been related to the fact that he was not without sympathy for Britain’s work in India. He believed that “the English government had imperceptibly effected a social rev-olution. They had removed some of the disabilities of women, they had tried to establish the equality of men in the eye of law, they had attempted to improve the lot of the peasant and the serf”.12 This assessment of British rule is a trifle surprising from the pen of a historian brought up in the nationalist ethos since it appears to underplay, if not ignore, the indictment of the eco-nomic aspects of British rule carried out by early nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji and R C Dutt. That apart, the premise that Brit-ish rule was the motor of major social changes in India coloured Sen’s assessment of the revolt. The rebels had fought against a regime that was committed to establishing modern ideas and institutions. The rebel leaders thus, according to Sen, “would have set the clock back…they wanted a counter-revolution”. Sen elaborated as follows, the rebel leadership “would have done away with the new reforms, with the new order, and gone back to the good old days when a commoner could not expect equal jus-tice with the noble, when the tenants were at the mercy of the talukdars, and when theft was punished with mutilation”.13 Even in Awadh, where Sen said the revolt had “assumed a national dimension though the term must be used in a limited sense”, the “patriots” [Sen’s word] “fought for their king and country but they were not champions of freedom for they had no conception of individual liberty…they would, if they could, revive the old order and perpetuate everything it stood for.”14 It is clear therefore, that in Sen’s mind freedom meant nothing without a conception of individual liberty. Sen was too good an empirical historian to ignore the fact that “the rebels wanted to get rid of the alien gov-ernment” but they also wanted to “restore the old order of which the king of Delhi was the rightful representative”.15 This seemed to fit awkwardly with what Sen considered to be freedom.1.3 Attitude towards the RebellionIt will not be unfair to say that Sen’s attitude towards the British rule and to the rebellion was no different from the Bengalis of his class in 1857. Most, if not all of them had also felt that the British rule was the harbinger of modernity in India and it had brought in social changes of enormous significance and that the ‘sipahis’ and the rebels of North India were protesting against these reforms and were therefore, not worthy of support. The loyalty that the western-educated intelligentsia of Calcutta displayed towards British rule in 1857 was subjected to biting satire in 1862 by Kaliprasanna Sinha inHootum Pyanchar Naksha. Sen’s text makes it clear that he was not in sympathy with the rebels, their actions and their aspirations. Yet he could not overlook the fact that the rebels had fought to get rid of foreign domination. He thus actually used the phrase “war of independence” to describe the events of 1857. “What began as a fight for religion”, he wrote, “ended as a war of independence.”16 But he could not reconcile the aims and aspirations of this war of independence to his understanding of freedom by which he only understood the liber-ties achieved by modern nationalism and bourgeois democracy. I will be bold enough to suggest that Sen was influenced, perhaps imperceptibly, by the shift that was taking place in the nationalist attitude towards 1857, a shift that I have tried to capture through the writings and speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru, who was a sensi-tive student of history. Thus, Sen’s almost intuitive antipathy for the aims of the rebels came to be overlaid by the idea of a war of independence. I would venture to say that he could not quite accept the term and so he qualified it by saying that this was not real freedom. This landed him in a mess of contradictions regard-ingindependence, freedom, individual liberty and so on, contra-dictions that he did not even try to clarify and resolve.I will briefly touch upon two other contradictions in Sen’s evaluation and analysis of the rebellion. He made the claim that “nomoral issues were involved in the war of 1857”.17 Yet a few paragraphs earlier he had written that the uprising “began as a fight for religion”. How a fight for religion could be devoid of moral issues is not clear. The sepoys and the rebels fought in the name of their ‘dharma’ and ‘deen’. Both the words resonate with moral overtones. Even the rebels’ perceptions of their own defeat and failure were imbricated with moral issues. Charles Ball recounted an incident in which a group of rebel sepoys were asked about their failure and they ascribed it to the lack of gratitude they had shown when they had killed their quondam masters. The sepoys said, “Sahib, it has all been the work of fate. After what we had done, we never could fight. No matter whether your troops were black or white, native or European, we could not stand against them; our salt choked us.”18 A loss of loyalty, a moral lapse in a world where loyalty and honour mattered, was seen as being the source of a failure of courage. The sepoys were emphatically making a moral statement and since it is recounted in Ball, it could not have been unknown to Sen. He chose to ignore it, perhaps because the moral world of the ‘sipahi’ was alien to him or distant from him.I have said earlier that Sen stayed very close to his sources. I want to demonstrate the consequences of this by looking at his chapter on Awadh. The choice of Awadh is to do with my own 
SPECIAL ARTICLEjune 14, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly54familiarity with the revolt there, and also because Sen described the uprising there to have acquired some sort of “national dimen-sion’’. The first thing to notice following the footnotes in Sen’s chapter is the fact that the narrative is entirely built upon the memoirs of those Britons who were besieged in the Lucknow Residency or were part of the British armies that re-conquered Lucknow and Awadh. There is only one reference to an archival source and this is to a file in the foreign department, secret consultations series kept in theNIA.19 Sen noted in his bibliography that he had consulted this series, yet there is nothing of signi-ficance in the chapter that is actually culled from the files of this series. The overwhelming dependence on memoirs of Britons had an obvious and inevitable result. Sen’s chapter on Awadh is actu-ally an account not of the revolt but a description of those who were besieged in the Residency and of how they were relieved by Havelock, Outram and Campbell. The reader will look in vain to find the activities of the rebels, their strength, their strategy and so forth. This is a mystifying lapse since, as I found when doing my own research on Awadh, on the basis of the foreign depart-ment, secret consultations it is possible to build up a fairly detailed account of the rebels and their activities in Awadh. Sen completely ignored this. Thus, we are landed with this peculiar contradiction where an account that sees the rebellion as a war of independence, albeit with some qualifications, does not tell us about the rebels and the rebellion for the very area where Sen said the revolt had acquired a national dimension. From Sen’s chapter on Awadh, it is impossible to arrive at the conclusion that the revolt there had a national dimension or that it was a war of independence. The chapter in the manner of Kaye tells the story of British heroism and endurance.2 Chaudhuri’sNarrativeThis was exactly S B Chaudhuri’s point of departure. He was not concerned with the British, their sufferings and their military tri-umphs. He was also not concerned with the sepoy mutinies that triggered off the uprising. Two years before 1957, he had published a pioneering monograph describing the manner in which the British rule had been resisted across India in the 100 years preced-ing the uprising of 1857. His Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, 1857-59 was a natural continuation of the 1955 book.20 He wrote,21 These civil disturbances of the earlier period afford a welcome foothold to the historian in evaluating and estimating the civil rebel-lion of the mutiny period and in discovering that the latter are connected in a long chain of causes with the former and in some cases are even a continuation of them.The link was not only one of causality but also one of character. According to Chaudhuri, the civil rebellion of the pre-mutiny and the mutiny periods were linked because these were “primarily anti- British, anti-colonial movements running through feudal channels”.22Chaudhuri had read Sen’s work, even though both books came out in the same year and he made the following extremely critical and valid observation. “Dr Sen’s book”, he noted, “which contains a vivid and vigorous account of military activities is less than just to the part played by the general masses of the Indian people in the great upsurge.”23 The activities of the rebels were precisely what Chaudhuri wanted to capture and thus, fill a significant gap in Sen’s narrative of 1857. He set out the purpose of his book thus: 24The following pages, therefore, aim, so far as it is possible to bring within a convenient compass, at presenting the history of the civil rebel-lion in the Indian mutinies in a connected and indisputably authentic form, its scope and character, the class of people participating in it, and the effect produced in the direction and dimension of this vast confla-gration and in the prolongation of the conflict and its consequences. 2.1 SourcesHow did Chaudhuri propose to construct the activities of the rebels? He wrote that he depended on government records, the narrative of events recorded by British district officers, parliamentary papers, reports, minutes, dispatches and memoranda preserved in what was then the Commonwealth Relations Office in London. He claimed that these records were so voluminous that it minimised the search for unpublished papers or unknown sources. He asserted further that “fresh materials from untapped sources may only cor-roborate the approach to the subject taken”.25 In other words, Chaudhuri read the archives of the victor to arrive at the activities of the rebels. Long before reading sources against their grain or constructing a narrative of insurgency from the prose of counter-insurgency had been theoretically propounded, Chaudhuri, as a good empirical historian, had practised something similar. Lest you think I am making too tall a claim on behalf of Chaudhuri, let me present to you two statements. Here is one from Chaudhuri: 26No comprehensive account is available from the defeated side but this limitation in a way enhances the authenticity of the records of the British officers who were compelled in accordance with official orders, to compile a narrative of the mutinies and to acknowledge the genuine-ness of the popular reaction to the sepoy war…the account of the Indian rebellion furnished by the British themselves has at least the saving feature that it automatically rules out the charge of biased sources.Compare this with the following now famous formulation of Ranajit Guha: 27For counter-insurgency, which derives directly from insurgency…can hardly afford a discourse that is not fully and compulsively involved with the rebel and his activities. It is of course true that the reports, dispatches, minutes, judgments, laws, letters, etc, in which police-men, soldiers, bureaucrats…and others hostile to insurgency register their sentiments, amount to a representation of their will. But these documents do not get their content from that will alone, for the latter is predicated on another will – that of the insurgent. It should be possi-ble therefore to read the presence of a rebel consciousness as a neces-sary and pervasive element within that body of evidence. Might I be bold enough to suggest that the thrust and purport of both these statements are one and the same? Guha says with a great deal of philosophical sophistication what had already occurred to Chaudhuri. The archive of the victors of 1857 by its very nature was forced to record rebel activities and report their movements. Since this corpus of evidence was produced to aid the raj in quelling the revolt it needed to record the rebellion with a degree of authenticity.2.2 Attitude towards the RebellionIn my discussion of Sen’s book, I tried to show with the example of Awadh how he failed to write a history of the rebellion. For Chaudhuri too I will draw on his section on Awadh to try and 
SPECIAL ARTICLEEconomic & Political Weekly EPW june 14, 200855understand how far he fulfilled his own project. Like Sen, Chaud-huri followed a geographical division except that he went by administrative divisions created by the British. Thus, he treated the events in Awadh under two headings: The Faizabad division and the Lucknow division. He told the story of both these divi-sions separately and chronologically. For both the divisions, he showed which of the taluqdars joined the rebellion and their sup-port base. He tried to offer some estimate of the rebel strength at some specific moments of the uprising. The activities of the British came into his account only when they were necessary to explain rebel movements. He told the story of rebel activities and thus, tried to reconstruct a history of the rebellion.28 He did all this on the basis of sources and documents that were all available to S N Sen. The latter had, however, not adequately mined these sources, maybe because he was not as focused on constructing a narrative of rebel activities as Chaudhuri was. This is the princi-pal difference in the approach of the two historians.We are thus left with something of an anomaly. Sen was asked by the government of India to produce a history of 1857 that would be objective. The premise was that all or most previous histories of 1857 had been written from the British point of view and were therefore, not objective. The demand of objectivity that had been placed on Sen was nothing more than a call to reclaim 1857 for Indian history and Indian historians. But by depending heavily on British memoirs rather than on the archival sources he could have easily used, Sen produced an account that was no dif-ferent in the story that it told from those told by 19th century British historians. Chaudhuri had no official or state-sponsored brief, even though the then vice-president of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, wrote a laudatory foreword to the book. Chaudhuri set out to narrate the activities of the rebels and proceeded to do what Sen had failed to do.3 SimilarityinApproachesHaving emphasised a major difference between the two histori-ans, let me draw attention to one similarity. This concerns the attitude of the two historians towards the religious aspect of the revolt. Both tended to underplay it. Chaudhuri, despite his detailed chronicling and analysis of popular disaffection and rebellion, did not treat religion as a very important factor as a cause of the uprising and as a vehicle for mobilisation. He has a couple of pages on how Hindus and Muslims fought together and of how the various proclamations appealed to both Hindus and Muslims29 but otherwise kept religion outside his analysis of pop-ular revolt. Sen, as we have seen, said that the uprising began as a fight for religion and ended as a war of independence. In this transition from the beginning to the end, religion slipped out of Sen’s analytical framework. He made no analysis of the procla-mations and spent no time in trying to understand the role that religion had played in the uprising. Every single ‘ishtahar’ issued by the rebel leadership was formulated in religious terms: They asked the people, Hindus and Muslims, to rise up and fight the ‘firanghi’.30 This absence in both historians, otherwise so differ-ent in their approaches to 1857, is perhaps not without signifi-cance. Will it be an exaggeration to suggest that writing a decade after independence, when secularism had become enshrined in the nation’s spirit, they were influenced by that prevailing intel-lectual and political ambience? An attempt to claim 1857 to that prevailing spirit of secular-nationalism could not quite situate religion as an important element in the revolt.4 ConclusionIn conclusion, I want to briefly reiterate the point about claiming 1857 for a national ethos. In his last chapter, Sen wrote that the “heroes of 1857” had fought for independence but under Mahatma Gandhi’s national movement India “had achieved freedom and liberty”.31 Chaudhuri saw in 1857 a “curious” com-ing together of “old feudal instincts and anti-alien patriotism”. The latter, he said, “was not yet of the pure advanced political type, as the leaven of feudal discontent was still strong. Yet the yearning for freedom, which was latent in these instincts stood out as the outward emblem of a national outburst against for-eign rule.” “Who knows”, he asked in the penultimate sentence of his book, “that the inception of the nationalist movement was not contained in the rising of 1857 after the fashion of the oak in the acorn?”.32 For both historians, the revolt of 1857 was linked to the national movement through however jagged a line and however circuitous a route. Chaudhuri harked back to the Nehru of The Discovery of India, and saw a tension between the popular uprising and the feudal elements; Sen was closer to Nehru, the prime minister by emphasising that it was a war of independ-ence. The revolt of 1857 with all its power and passion could not be allowed to stand on its own. It had to be made a part of a bigger national narrative.Notes 1 S Gopal,Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Cape, London, 1975, p 299. 2 J Nehru,The Discovery of India, The Signet Press, Calcutta, 1946, p 383. 3 Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol 39, OUP, New Delhi, 2007, pp 7-11. 4 S C Sarkar, ‘Views on 1857’ inBengal Renaissance and Other Essays, People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1970, pp 123-35. 5 J W Kaye, History of the Sepoy War, 3 Vols, W H Allen,London,1864-1880. 6 S N Sen,1857,Publications Division, Government of India, New Delhi, 1957, reprint, 1995, p 405. All page references to the 1995 reprint. 7 Rudrangshu Mukherjee,Awadh in Revolt, 1857-58: A Study of Popular Resistance, OUP, Delhi, 1984, repr Permanent Black, Delhi, 2001, pp 64-65. All page references to the 1984 edition. 8 Sen,1857, p 405. 9 Sen,1857, p 38.10 Sarkar, ‘Views on 1857’, p 126.11 S B Chaudhuri,Civil Disturbances during British Rule in India, The World Press, Calcutta, 1955.12 Sen,1857, p 414.13 Sen,1857, p 414.14 Sen, 1857, p 414.15 Sen,1857, p 413.16 Sen, 1857, p 413.17 Sen,1857, p 414.18 C Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny, London, nd, Vol 2, p 550. The significance of this state-ment is discussed in Mukherjee,Awadh in Revolt, p 172.19 Sen,1857, p 240 n 133.20 S B Chaudhuri,Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies (1857-59), The World Press, Calcutta, 1957.21 Chaudhuri,Civil Rebellion, pp xvi-xvii.22 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, p xvii.23 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, p xx.24 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, p 22.25 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, p v.26 Chaudhuri,Civil Rebellion, pp v-vi.27 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insur-gency in Colonial India, OUP, Delhi, 1983, p 15.28 SeeChaudhuri,Civil Rebellion, pp 118-43.29 SeeChaudhuri,Civil Rebellion, pp 218-82.30 See Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, pp 147-54 for an analysis of the religious content of the proclamations.31 Sen,1857, p 419.32 Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion, pp 298-99.
