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The relevance of 1857 in the context of India’s recent history—by Mubarak Ali

by RY Deshpande on Mon 28 Sep 2009 03:30 AM IST | Permanent Link | Cosmos

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the uprising of 1857 against the British Raj in India, we organised three conferences—in Lahore, Karachi and Gujrat. The idea was to recall and analyse the events of that historic year.

Some friends raised questions about its relevance to the times in which we are living. We realised how people can misunderstand history and take it as an obsolete discipline.

True, all historical events are not relevant to the present. But very often those events which are forgotten surface again in a pattern that sheds light on the happenings of today and inspire us to learn lessons from the past. The commemoration of 1857 not only serves to revive the past and to help us remember the sacrifices of those who fought against foreign rule, it also helps us understand the people’s response to such rule. Thus we can grasp its consequences.

The revolt of 1857 was a widespread popular reaction against British rule and its injustices. But the paradox was that there were also a number of native groups and individuals who supported and collaborated with the British. That raises the question: why did they collaborate with a foreign power against their own people?

There were actually three groups which had supported British rule.

First, there were those who were in the service of the East India Company and, following the tradition of loyalty, defended the Company’s interests. To them the Company Bahadur was personified as their patron whose servants they were and to support it in case of trouble was their moral duty as they had eaten salt with them—(namak halali). Being low-ranking office-holders, they were overawed and impressed by the Company’s organisation and its military power.

Second, there were the princes and feudal lords whose interest it was not to get involved in any conflict which could endanger their own property and privileges. They realised that the rebel forces could not successfully fight against the well-disciplined and well-organised British army. They were not interested in supporting a losing cause and paying heavily in the end. Only those princes and jagirdars sided with the rebels who had already lost their positions as a result of political structural changes.

The third group consisted of those who sincerely believed that British rule would modernise India. To them, foreign intervention offered the only option to pull India out of its backwardness. How far were these expectations proven correct? This is a question that needs to be analysed in order to understand the colonial period. As a matter of fact, British rule in India was beneficial to only those sections of society which were already at a certain level of civilisation and culture. Such was the case with the Brahmins and the Muslim bourgeosie.

The rest of the Indian population was backward, illiterate and extremely poor. The benefit of political reforms and technological advancement did not reach the majority. Here is an example for those who believe that relinquishing our national sovereignty and accepting foreign intervention is the only solution to our problems. The fact, as history tells us, is that nations cannot be reformed by alien and foreign powers. Only their own leaders can change them.

When the rebellion of 1857 was over, the British started to analyse its causes. The revolt had been too unexpected for them and they failed to understand why there was such a strong reaction against their policies. Some British bureaucrats reached the conclusion that the revolt was masterminded by the Muslims and the Hindus were just trapped in it. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, for one, was very much concerned with the hostile attitude of the British towards the Muslims. He had already written The Causes of the Indian Mutiny and Tarikh-Sarkashi-i-Bijnor (The History of the Mutiny of Bijnor). To respond to this allegation and to prove the innocence of the Muslims, he started to write a series of articles known as ‘The Loyal Mohammedans’.

He collected material from those Muslims who had supported the British during the rebellion and had protected their lives and properties, in some cases at the cost of their own lives. In his articles, Sir Syed mentioned the certificates which were given to the loyal servants of the Company by British officers acknowledging their support and loyalty. He also mentioned the awards of the British government to these people in the shape of landed properties and robes of honour in appreciation of their loyalty. He convinced the British that all Muslims were not against their government. On the other hand, they had respect for Christians as ‘people of the Book’ and remained loyal to their cause.

The interpretation of 1857 changed with the emergence of nationalism and the ‘mutiny’ was interpreted as a ‘national war of independence’. The heroes of the British became the villains of the people. However, the families of those ‘loyal Mohammedans’ who were awarded landed properties and cash remained as powerful and influential as before, especially in parts which later became Pakistan. For lack of historical knowledge and perception they are never brought to justice. The result is that there is no anti-colonial approach in our historical narrative. On the contrary, there is great admiration for British rule.

What is the lesson of history? History tells us that imperialism cannot succeed in occupying another country without local collaboration. Today, we are facing the same situation in Iraq and Afghanistan on the one hand and Palestine on the other. We are hearing the same arguments that with the help of foreign powers and intervention, religious extremism and terror will be wiped out. Again, history tells us that it is not correct. We cannot rely on others to fight our wars.

We learn from 1857 that the defeat of a resistance movement is not the end of the struggle, as those involved in it always learn a lot as a result of defeat and correct their approach for the next engagement. The events that followed 1857 were a mix of violence and non-violence. It was not the constitutional approach alone but also resistance which consequently led to our independence.

http://www.dawn.com/2008/04/29/op.htm

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Re: The relevance of 1857 in the context of India’s recent history—by Mubarak Ali

by RY Deshpande on Tue 29 Sep 2009 02:43 PM IST | Profile | Permanent Link

Here is an article by KN Panikkar entitled Recalling the legacy of the 1857 Revolt which appeared in the Hindu of 10 May 2007.

Recalling the legacy of the 1857 Revolt
The celebration of 150 years of the Revolt of 1857 has rekindled popular and academic interest in this important event in the colonial history of India, although the official enthusiasm does not match that prevalent during the centenary celebrations in 1957. The Revolt was the most formidable challenge the Colonial rule had to face in India, even if it did not cover the entire country. It was confined to northern and central India. The south and the east remained largely unaffected, both the army and the civil population. Yet the revolt almost swept the British away, coming as it did as the culmination of a series of incidents of armed resistance against colonial conquest and consolidation. The success of the British in quelling the Revolt, albeit with the support of some Indian rulers and the vacillation and uncertainty of some of its leaders, marked the end of armed resistance against the British rule led by the feudal order. Thereafter the resistance to colonialism entered a new phase, developing slowly into a popular agitation and mass movement.

There were three streams in the Revolt of 1857—military mutiny, civil rebellion, and feudal participation. All the three were occasioned by the adverse impact of colonial rule on the people of India. By 1857 the soldiers, sepoys in colonial officialese, had become quite dissatisfied with their service conditions. Their pay was limited, promotion chances very rare, and the new regulations impinged upon their religious sensibilities. The monthly salary of a sepoy was no more than Rs. 7, which was nothing much to write home about. Moreover, the sepoys carried the burden of the distress of the civil population as they were, in the words of Eric Stokes, peasants in uniform. The soldiers of the Bengal army, which was the backbone of the Revolt, were mainly drawn from the rural population of Oudh, Bihar, Ganges-Jamuna-Doab, Rohilkhand, and Bundelkhand. There was not a single agricultural family in Oudh that did not have at least one member in the army. As a result, there was a close nexus between the mutiny and civil rebellion. In 1857 there were 1,35,767 Indians in the Bengal army, half of whom rose up in revolt. At the all-India level, of the 2,33,000 sepoys only about 90,000 joined the revolt. That the majority of the soldiers remained loyal saved the day for the British.

The leadership of the Revolt was provided by the former rulers and the displaced territorial aristocrats, the most prominent being Bahadur Shah, Nana Saheb, the Rani of Jhansi, Kunwar Singh, and Tantia Tope. The British policy towards Indian rulers and aristocrats, beginning with the system of subordinate alliances to the Doctrine of Lapse had systematically deprived them of their powers and prerogatives. Most of them saw the Revolt as an opportunity to regain their lost status.

The Revolt was the collective expression of the resentment of all these sections against British rule. What brought them together was the mutiny that provided the occasion for the coalition of these forces to gain independence from British rule. It is true that these three sections were not part of an organisation nor were they planning a concerted and well-coordinated uprising. Yet, they did betray political consciousness and commitment to the traditionally accepted form of sovereignty. On March 10, when the sepoys marched to the capital of the former Mughal Empire they expressed their sense of allegiance to the pre-colonial polity. More so when they persuaded Bahadur Shah to accept their leadership and acknowledged him as the emperor of Hindustan. Although the British had relegated him to the position of a pensioner, he continued to command the people's respect. Despite the neglect and irreverence shown to him by the British, the Indian rulers acknowledged his sovereignty and sought recognition from him on ceremonial occasions. Even the Maratha leaders, traditional enemies of the Mughals, had no difficulty in accepting him as the leader. This, however, did not mean that Indian rulers were united in their opposition to the British. A fairly large number of them, particularly from central India and Punjab, supported the British with men and material. The British officers had opined that if Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior had supported the Revolt at a crucial juncture the outcome would have been different. Similarly, the capture of Delhi was possible only with the assistance of the rulers of Punjab. Yet, it is undeniable that in Bahadur Shah the rebels sought to create a political symbol with whom the people would be able to identify. In doing so the rebels were not moved by religious considerations but by political motivation.

Role of religion
This is not to suggest that religion was not a factor in the Revolt. In fact, it played a decisive role. However, it was a causative and not an ideological factor. What moved the sepoys initially was their apprehension that the conditions of service in the army were infringing upon their religious susceptibilities. Such a fear was felt during the Afghan and Burma wars. The fear was exacerbated by the rumour about bone dust in the wheat flour supplied to them. The introduction of Enfield rifles with cartridges smeared with animal fat proved to be the proverbial last straw. One of the proclamations during the Revolt stated: "Be it known to all Hindu and Muhammadan inhabitants of India... that within the last few years the British commenced to oppress the people of India under different pleas and contrived to eradicate Hinduism and Muhamadinism and to make all the people embrace Christianity... Since the real purpose of this war was to save religion, let every Hindu and Musalman render assistance to the utmost." Yet, their worldview was not influenced by religious identity, which enabled them to fight together—both Muslims and Hindus—against the British. What persuaded them to do so was their perception of the British as a common enemy. In doing so neither their religion nor that of the enemy assumed an ideological role.

An interesting aspect of the Revolt was the difference in the perception of its importance by the traditional and the colonial intelligentsia. Sensing the possibility of resurrecting the traditional way of life that was being undermined by the British, the former supported the Revolt and some of them even participated in it. The colonial intelligentsia, however, saw in the Revolt the return of the feudal order and hence favoured the continuation of British rule. In Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras they even convened meetings and passed resolutions praying for the success of the British. Their perception possibly was that the Revolt was a reaction of traditional conservative forces against modernity. Since the success of the Revolt certainly would have meant freedom from colonialism what turn history would have taken is difficult to conjecture. One thing is certain: it would have saved the country from the "benefits" of colonial modernity. Would it have led to the resurrection of the feudal order as Jawaharlal Nehru feared or would it have enabled an independent path of development towards modernity? No one can be certain. At any rate the anti-colonial legacy of the Revolt is worth recalling, as it was unmistakably a struggle for independence, when the country is steadily but surely slipping into dependence in the name of development.

Re: The relevance of 1857 in the context of India’s recent history—by Mubarak Ali

by RY Deshpande on Wed 30 Sep 2009 09:16 AM IST | Profile | Permanent Link

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple deals with the events of 1857 and the reign of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal. “… historical echoes that are still desperately relevant today...” states the New York Review of books.

Below is a review from the NY Times.

By Central Asian standards, the 19th-century Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II had some pretty impressive bloodlines. Put it this way: If the descendants of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan had held family reunions on the same summer Sunday, Zafar would have been expected to show up at each, lamb biryani in hand. Alas, Zafar—King of Delhi, Refuge of the Inhabitants of the World, Generous and Affectionate Killer of the Degenerate Infidels (perhaps these sound better in Persian)—was a case study in how even the finest thoroughbreds can beget an also-ran.

To be fair, the Islamic Mughal empire Zafar inherited in 1837 had been in steep decline since the death of Emperor Aurangzeb—as pitiless a tyrant as ever had a wazir disembowled—130 years earlier. With no real power and a nearly bare treasury, Zafar turned inward: he was a skilled calligrapher, Sufi mystic, speaker of five languages and master of verse in two. Deep into the night, he oversaw drunken poetry competitions called mushairas.

While Zafar is the title character of The Last Mughal, his life is just the thread along which William Dalrymple continues to explore a theme that has fascinated him for two decades: the utter collapse of relations between the British and the inhabitants of their Indian dominions. In his last book, the excellent White Mughals, a doomed love affair between a British civil servant and an Indian noblewoman served as an allegory for broader social unraveling. Here he tackles the most obvious example, the Great Mutiny of 1857, in which hundreds of thousands of mostly Hindu soldiers turned murderously on their British officers and inexplicably made their feeble Muslim monarch the figurehead of Asia’s first great anticolonial uprising.

Dalrymple excels at bringing grand historical events within contemporary understanding by documenting the way people went about their lives amid the maelstrom. His coup in researching “The Last Mughal” was his uncovering, deep in the National Archives of India, some 20,000 personal Persian and Urdu papers written by Delhi residents who survived the uprising.

Why had historians not used these papers before? As Dalrymple explains, what really happened doesn’t fit any fashionable academic dogmas: “The stories that the collection contains allow the uprising to be seen not in terms of nationalism, imperialism, orientalism or other such abstractions, but instead as a human event of extraordinary, tragic and often capricious outcomes.”

Dalrymple lets the characters tell their own tales: a 12-year-old Muslim nobleman who watched the defeated Indian mutineers and conquering British “vying with each other as to which should carry the day in pillage or robbery”; a functionary in Zafar’s court with the wonderful title of “Keeper of the Dynastic Fish Standard of the Mughals”; and a poet who saw that the mutiny was only empowering the uneducated Indian soldiers to wipe out his humanist class, “as the moon is engulfed by the eclipse.”

As for the British, Dalrymple focuses on a few whose emotional transformations are the most idiosyncratic: the gregarious son of a poisoned British official is driven to homicidal rage in the battle to retake Delhi; the editor of the city’s English-language daily becomes the leading voice in the movement to raze the capital; the wife of a senior British officer gives birth during her harrowing escape yet, almost alone among the participants, retains her sanity and humanity.

Sanity, alas, is not Zafar’s strong suit, at least not by the time he flees the city, only to dither on its outskirts and take refuge in the tomb of an ancestor, Humayun. This is fitting, as Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, was also more suited to poetry than politics and also lost his throne, regaining it just in time to pass it along to his remarkable son Akbar in 1556.

No such fortune awaited Zafar: he was arrested, given a kangaroo trial and exiled to Burma. What blame does he deserve for the bloody fiasco? Dalrymple feels it is “difficult to see what more Zafar could have done,” but the details he has so painstakingly assembled tend to undermine such sympathies.

Consider two events in the mutiny’s first week. On May 14, upset that some Indian soldiers were defiling a beloved garden, he began “refusing audience to all.” This was a threat to withdraw his imprimatur from their rebellion, and the mutineers moved on. Two days later, when the rebels discovered 52 Europeans Zafar had hidden in the palace, the emperor “wept and besought the mutineers not to take the lives of helpless women and children,” but stepped aside as the executioners went to work.

At the pivotal moment of his doomed reign, Zafar concentrated not on his role as a leader of men or on the sparing of innocent lives, but rather on his flowers. Deep in their tombs, one suspects, Humayun sympathized, Aurangzeb scoffed and Genghis Khan wept silent tears.

Re: The relevance of 1857 in the context of India’s recent history—by Mubarak Ali

by RY Deshpande on Thu 01 Oct 2009 05:53 AM IST | Profile | Permanent Link

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/opinion/04dalrymple.html

Bhutto’s Deadly Legacy
By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Published: January 4, 2008
New Delhi

When, in May 1991, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India was killed by a suicide bomber, there was an international outpouring of grief. Recent days have seen the same with the death of Benazir Bhutto: another glamorous, Western-educated scion of a great South Asian political dynasty tragically assassinated at an election rally.

There is, however, an important difference between the two deaths: while Mr. Gandhi was assassinated by Sri Lankan Hindu extremists because of his policy of confronting them, Ms. Bhutto was apparently the victim of Islamist militant groups that she allowed to flourish under her administrations in the 1980s and 1990s.

It was under Ms. Bhutto’s watch that the Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, first installed the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was also at that time that hundreds of young Islamic militants were recruited from the madrassas to do the agency’s dirty work in Indian Kashmir. It seems that, like some terrorist equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, the extremists turned on both the person and the state that had helped bring them into being.

While it is true that the recruitment of jihadists had started before she took office and that Ms. Bhutto was insufficiently strong—or competent—to have had full control over either the intelligence services or the Pakistani Army when she was in office, it is equally naïve to believe she had no influence over her country’s foreign policy toward its two most important neighbors, India and Afghanistan.

Everyone now knows how disastrous the rule of the Taliban turned out to be in Afghanistan, how brutally it subjected women and how it allowed Al Qaeda to train in camps within its territory. But another, and in the long term perhaps equally perilous, legacy of Ms. Bhutto’s tenure is often forgotten: the turning of Kashmir into a jihadist playground.

In 1989, when the insurgency in the Indian portion of the disputed region first began, it was largely an amateur affair of young, secular-minded Kashmiri Muslims rising village by village and wielding homemade weapons — firearms fashioned from the steering shafts of rickshaws and so on. By the early ’90s, however, Pakistan was sending over the border thousands of well-trained, heavily armed and ideologically hardened jihadis. Some were the same sorts of exiled Arab radicals who were at the same time forming Al Qaeda in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan.

By 1993, during Ms. Bhutto’s second term, the Arab and Afghan jihadis (and their Inter-Services Intelligence masters) had really begun to take over the uprising from the locals. It was at this stage that the secular leadership of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front began losing ground to hard-line Islamist outfits like Hizbul Mujahedeen.

I asked Benazir Bhutto about her Kashmir policy and the potential dangers of the growing role of religious extremists in the conflict during an interview in 1994. “India tries to gloss over its policy of repression in Kashmir,” she replied. “India does have might, but has been unable to crush the people of Kashmir. We are not prepared to keep silent, and collude with repression.”

Hamid Gul, who was the head of the intelligence agency during her first administration, was more forthcoming still. “The Kashmiri people have risen up,” he told me, “and it is the national purpose of Pakistan to help liberate them.” He continued, “If the jihadis go out and contain India, tying down their army on their own soil, for a legitimate cause, why should we not support them?”

Benazir Bhutto’s death is, of course, a calamity, particularly as she embodied the hopes of so many liberal Pakistanis. But, contrary to the commentary we’ve seen in the last week, she was not comparable to Myanmar’s Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ms. Bhutto’s governments were widely criticized by Amnesty International and other groups for their use of death squads and terrible record on deaths in police custody, abductions and torture. As for her democratic bona fides, she had no qualms about banning rallies by opposing political parties while in power.

Within her own party, she declared herself the president for life and controlled all decisions. She rejected her brother Murtaza’s bid to challenge her for its leadership and when he persisted, he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances during a police ambush outside the Bhutto family home.

Benazir Bhutto was certainly a brave and secular-minded woman. But the obituaries painting her as dying to save democracy distort history. Instead, she was a natural autocrat who did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan’s becoming the region’s principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.

William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857.

Re: The relevance of 1857 in the context of India’s recent history—by Mubarak Ali

by RY Deshpande on Fri 02 Oct 2009 03:55 PM IST | Profile | Permanent Link

http://newsx.com/story/6441

Purana Quila

Theatrical glory: Nadira Babbar recreates 1857 Mutiny
Sun-Apr 20, 2008
Delhi / Indo Asian News Service

The historical characters of Tantiya Tope, Nana Saheb and Nawab Wajid Ali Shah were brought to life at the 16th century Purana Qila in Delhi, as theatre personality Nadira Zaheer Babbar recreated the Sepoy Mutiny through a play.

1857: Ek Safarnama by Nadira, the wife of Bollywood actor and MP Raj Babbar, was part of the yearlong events lined up to celebrate 50 years of the National School of Drama (NSD), the capital's premier theatre school.

Raj, daughter Juhi, who is an actress and filmmaker, and son Arya, also an actor, were busy lending emotional and logistic support to mother Nadira on the sprawling green lawns of Purana Quila Friday evening.

Incidentally, the fort is a venue where Nadira and Babbar appeared on stage for some of their early plays like "Tughlaq" in 1974 as NSD students under their tutor, the legendary Ebrahim Alkazi.

And the imposing stone façade of the Purana Quila was hosting a play after 31 years.

1857: Ek Safarnama is about the revolt told from the perspective of the common people—the farmers, the potters and the working class of India. It has been narrated in a new way," said Nadira.

Steeped in socialist values since childhood, Nadira said that "when she delved into history, she found that all the values that are rooted in our own culture were present in the uprising".

"I chose '1857' as the theme because it is the 150th year of the Sepoy Mutiny and we all have to remember our heritage," she added.

The play opens with the annexation of Awadh—present day Lucknow—by the East India Company. Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the ruler, is forced to flee to Calcutta in Bengal. The plot cuts through the nawab's plight and zeroes in on Ramsaran, a labourer who deserts the company and joins ranks with a renegade, Shamsuddin.

Both of them join Nana Saheb, Tantiya Tope and Azimullah Khan, three nationalists, to mount an attack against the British. But the plan is aborted when the British army outsmarts Nana and his men.

The rebel leader then sends his forces to fight the British in Delhi under the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. The battle is bravely fought, but the Indians are betrayed.

"It is a story that reflects true India, it is totally secular in nature," said Nadira.

Safarnama draws from traditional Indian styles and makes liberal use of music and grand compositions to convey the expansive yet belligerent mood of the times.

"I shared a lot of new material that I had unearthed for my book War of Civilisation: India 1857 with Nadira for the play," said author and resource person Amaresh Misra.

"For the first time in history, we have given a different narrative to the infamous Bibigarh massacre. We have shown that the British killed their own women and children to defame Nana Saheb, because they wanted sanction for the mass killings of Indians."

Oscar winner Bhanu Athiaya of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi fame designed the costumes and Kajal Ghosh, a student of Pandit Vishwanath Bose, set the score.

Re: The relevance of 1857 in the context of India’s recent history—by Mubarak Ali

by RY Deshpande on Sun 04 Oct 2009 10:04 AM IST | Profile | Permanent Link

The 1857 was perhaps more a reaction than the beginning of the Independence movement which what the trenched nationalists claim.

Apropos of William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal the following point is made: “…well they seem to have located new sources of the narrative of 1857, while lamenting the fact that most of the historical sources of 1857 are British versions of events and British attitudes and preconceptions of the whole version of the uprising have traditionally been sources. He and his colleagues came upon some 20,000 virtually unused Persian and Urdu documents relating to Dehli in 1857 known as the Mutiny Papers in the Indian National Archives and his claim is that the story can now be told from an Indian perspective.”

But what do these sources lead up to? “The narratives are told of the lives of bird catchers and lime makers who have had their charpoys stolen by sepoys, the horse trader from Haryana looted by Gujars on the outskirts of Dehli on the way home from selling his wares,... Hansi the dancer who uses a British attack on Idgah to escape from the serai where she is staying with her husband and run off with her lover. Or Pandit Harichandra, who tried to exhort Hindus of Dehli to leave their shops and join the fight giving examples from the Mahabharat. Or Hazif Abdurrahman caught grilling beef kababs during a ban on cow slaughter who comes to beg for mercy from Zafar.... The strategy here seems to be to dissolve Colonialist historicity in the narratives and stories of indigenous folk who lived through it. Dalrymple also maintains that instead of one coherent mutiny beloved of Victorian or Indian nationalist historiography there was in reality a chain of very different uprisings and acts of resistance whose form and fate were determined by local and regional situations, passions and grievances.... 150 years after the event scholars still argue over the old chestnut of whether 1857 was a mutiny, a peasants revolt, an urban revolution or a war of independence. The answer was it was all of these things and many other things too in not one unified movement but many, with widely differing causes, motives and natures.”

But what do we get from these documentary findings? Perhaps nothing, nothing much in proportion to the amount of research effort that goes into them. Is it not simply a picture of a society sunken in the depths of the mediaeval darkness? It seems the throbbing vitality of the nation had got buried in terrible inertia or tamas of the age. There was the glāni as the Gita would say, the decline. Invasions by an alien civilization, robust and critically powerful, over the previous few centuries had uprooted the authentic traditions that had drawn nourishment from the foundational principles based on the spirit’s working. Foolish battles were fought for foolish gains and concerns of the larger society forgotten. Renaissance and Industrial Revolution were unknown to the country. What else could then the decadent feudalism do? The only brief period of glory during those long and wearisome centuries was the reign of Akbar and the arrival of Shivaji-Ramdas on the national scene. The rest was frustration,—moral, political, economic, religious except for the exceptional Bhakti movement, educational, ethical, etc, etc. All that makes the 1857 more a reaction than forward march of a nation.

One would tend to think that once history is stripped of its ideologies it shall speak most meaningfully to us through stories. The lessons of 1857 are perhaps not only relevant to India as to they are to the world today. In an Article for Time magazine Dalrymple says: “The lessons of 1857 can be seen today on the streets of Iraq. No one likes being conquered by people of a different faith, then being force-fed improving ideas. The British in 1857 discovered that nothing so easily radicalizes a people or undermines the moderate aspect of Islam than aggressive Western intrusion in the East. The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and Western imperialism have often been closely intertwined—so much so that thinking of 1857, we might remember the celebrated dictum of Edmund Burke: that those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.”

1857 on the streets of Iraq—how true! To use the earlier phrase again, here was a foolish battle fought for foolish gains. The entire region including Afghanistan and Pakistan today is in turmoil which is not going to affect India in a small way. Oil—automobile, was that not the invention of the Asura, and that America got seized by its injurious al spell? The slogan of the globalised Capitalism is: Elite of the world, unite to protect your consumer markets. Wheels of democracy move swiftly behind the banner of the Wealth of the Nations. But this has to go, the way the workers of the world could not assert themselves and disappeared—perhaps without throwing their chains. There are values of life and of the progressive spirit which must be nourished, values which could not be discerned by the 1857. But that began to happen not too long after that, in the New Birth of India. In this New Birth the spirit of nationalism derived its strength from the spirit of the country, when the soul of India began to awake. It was the first movement to step out of the degrading tamas with which it was overlaid for disappointing centuries. But it seems, today, we are falling into another trap, the vitalistic trap with the consumer model as the guiding principle, a model which will spell a greater disaster if we lose contact with the soul of India. Ditto for other nations and societies.

~ RYD

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