The Telegraph, alcutta
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060713/asp/opinion/story_6461478.asp#
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OF MANY PASTS - The 1857 celebrations raise questions Indians must confront
SHAHID AMIN
The author is professor of history, University of Delhi
Such are the pulls of appropriating History for the Nation that amidst a
busy July schedule ? interim report of the oversight committee,
negotiations with the IAEA, keeping the allies and tomato prices from
going over the top ? the prime minister will find time on July 13 to chair
a 68-member committee to commemorate 150 years of 1857. That?s a lot of
Indians ? former prime ministers, politicians, satraps, bureaucrats, and
some historians to boot. One may be proven wrong, but most of them,
including the two historians who have declined, would not be entirely
comfortable distinguishing a barkandaz from a tilanga sepoy, or be
familiar with say the ballad of Kunwar Singh of Shahabad or the shikasta
script of rebel communication. One could even wager that some of them
might even falter reciting little more than the refrain ?Khub lari
mardani? Jhansi wali rani?? Yet a group of ministers has gone ahead and
cleared Rs 150 crore of public money for a major commemoration, beginning,
we are told, August 2007. And there lies the rub, for what dreams have
propelled the August inauguration? we know.
It is the dream of annexing the events of 1857 to our freedom from Britain
almost to the month. But though crucial for 1942 and again 1947, August
was not a particularly good month for us Indians in 1857, especially in
Delhi, which fell to the vengeful firangis soon afterwards. If true, the
August inauguration to the celebrations of 1857 raises an important
question that we who people this nation ? historians, politicians, public
? face about our pasts. As elsewhere, so in India, school books,
street-names, and jubilee celebrations ? all seek to construct a sense of
an uncluttered national past. Opposition to the idea of a national-plural
is common to most nationalists, for it disorders a national past which is
simultaneously considered historical and singular. Swimming against the
tide enables us to ask a different set of questions: is there something
inherent in the ways of nation-states that makes it difficult for citizens
to relate to history outside a mainstream, accredited version of the past
? the national past? Can we at all remember without commemorating? Can we
recollect without celebrating, recall without avenging? Why are national
histories thought of invariably as time-resistant capsules buried for
ever, and in constant play at the same time?
San-sattavan! In northern India, this incomplete chronological slice, sans
the century, encapsulates in its pithiness the many things that went into
the making of that Great Event. San-sattavan can only be 1857; it can not
be 1957, or even 1757, though in some contemporary prophesies, British
rule was to end within a hundred years of the battle of Plassey. Be that
as it may, ?san sattavan? stands resplendent in perhaps the most
well-known poem on the Ghadar by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan: ?Chamak uthi san
sattavan mein, woh talwar purani thi.? The sword unleashed to push out the
firangis, had not been moulded in or wrested from colonial armouries; it
was the very old sword of an ?aged Bharat? which, rejuvenated, had now
stood up to claim this equally old land for itself (?burhe Bharat mein
aayi phir-se nai jawani thi?).
Let?s stay a bit longer with the stirring opening stanza of this epic poem
on 1857, on which we will have a surfeit of songs, dramas, marches,
exhibitions in the year to come. Let?s recall that this great nationalist
poem places the ?value of lost independence? and ?the resolve to throw the
firangi out? in every Indian heart. And yet the Bharat of 1857 is already
old, 90 years before the birth of the Indian nation-state. Let?s now cut
to a folk song about Jhansi-wali Rani, popular in district Etawah and its
environs in Uttar Pradesh before the more famous Chauhan version that has
been bequeathed to us as a nation: ?O, the Rani of Jhansi, well fought the
brave one/ All the soldiers were fed with sweets; she herself had treacle
and rice/? Leaving morcha, she ran to the lashkar, where she searched for
but found no water, O! The Rani of Jhansi well fought the brave one.? Here
in a local folk song, to be sung in the Dadra vein, we sure find the
Rani?s sacrifice and valour, but no intimations of a well-entrenched and
reactivated sense of Indian nationalism.
To adapt the opening sentence of Anna Karenina: all nations are new, but
each claims its antiquity in its own way. This is clearly in evidence in
the spirit behind the forthcoming official celebrations of 1857, as it is
in that famous nationalist poem on Rani Jhansi by Subhadra Chauhan. It is
a feature of nationalist consciousness, that the nation whose ?making?
requires large doses of energy, action and sacrifice, that very nation is
made available to us fully-formed ? like a mannequin in a shopping window
? merely awaiting a change of (nationalist) attire.
Only an informed public debate can stem the wastage of money and effort on
mere window-dressing: the sprucing up of an 1857 structure at one place,
the gouging out of a colonial memorial stone at another, ersatz purabiya
sipahis knocking at the Rajghat gate of the Red Fort, Big B daring you to
go 50-50 or phone a friend on a mega-Ghadar quiz, the launch of a desi
fizz-drink with the spirit of 1857 bottled evanescently in it.
The contrast with the centennial of the Ghadar in 1957 is instructive. A
lot of us midnight?s children were too young to recollect the hoopla, but
the long-term gains for historical understanding and democratizing access
to the events of 1857 still continue to be felt. Two noted scholars, very
different in orientation, produced two different accounts of those times;
a considerable amount of primary source material, largely from official
records, was published, notably the five volumes of Freedom Struggle in
Uttar Pradesh by the indefatigable S.A.A. Rizvi, distributed gratis till
the Eighties to bona fide scholars. This has encouraged a whole crop of
histories of the Ghadar in different districts and regions written in the
medium-sized university towns in North India. Other material connected
with the late-19th-century freedom struggle was brought out, for instance,
for Maharashtra, or lies unpublished in provincial archives. And all this
was made possible by advanced planning, and hard work by those adept, by
training, to delve into and narrate the past.
It would be said that commemoration is too serious (or political) a
business to be left to historians: poets, publicists, politicians,
playwrights all must contribute. It may well be that historians have to
cease being just whistle-blowers in such matters, telling others where
they have got their facts wrong. They must be concerned not just with what
happened in times past, but equally with how memory, indeed state
memorialization, plays on the certitude of facts. The new multimedia
exhibition at Tees Janvari Marg is an eye opener about how non-official
collaboration between historians, Gandhians and IT-savvy graphic and sound
artists can infuse excitement into a hoary and usually unimaginative
presentation of the ideas and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi.
The prime minister will be well advised to try and get the 1857 committee
to bankroll a similar venture for that Great Uprising, hangama, insurgency
and effervescence, aggregation and disorder, plebeian anger and
state-terror, regional groupings and wider alliances, atavistic
proclamations and radical stirrings, all on display for us to make sense,
warts and all. To hang the story of the Ghadar by a single thread would
amount to hanging its myriad rebels twice over.