THE coming year marks the 150th Anniversary of India’s first war of Independence. Wehear that the Government has a lavish 150 crore Budget to celebrate this event. On the eve of the 150th Anniversary of 1857 and the Birth Centenary of Bhagat Singh, we are witness to the Central Industries Minister declaring that he would “ideally” like to see the whole of India turned into an SEZ; to the swelling ranks of farmers’ suicides and starvation deaths; to snatching away of land from tribals and peasants to hand over to corporate capital; to an unprecedented degree of ‘strategic’ slavishness towards the US; towards a US shadow over everything from agrarian policy to security secrets to military plans. It is well known that a ruling class that is a broker of imperialism needs to mask itself in nationalist garb. On the other hand, an alternative tradition of nationalism is just as badly needed by those who dream of a second war of independence in this age of breakneck neo-colonialism. It is in this context that the tussle over defining nationalism and history becomes relevant and urgent. 

The Congress and the BJP keep vying to outdo each other in craven pro-Americanism in economic as well as foreign relations. Similarly they also compete to outdo each other to don the nationalist garb – and we saw a crude demonstration of this recently on September 7. This date neither marked the centenary of the composition of Vande Mataram nor of its adoption as national song by the Congress. But on this date, cadres of both Congress and BJP enthusiastically sang Vande Mataram in their respective offices. The shadow-boxing match over nationalism was fought over whether two stanzas should be sung or the whole song? Whether the singing should be voluntary or compulsory? The Sangh Parivar, in the name of Vande Mataram, targeted the Muslims – and perhaps they won the shadow-boxing contest.
But it seems that such a ruling class appropriation of 1857 and Bhagat Singh will not be easy. 1857, which in essence was a peasant insurgency, marked by a remarkable Hindu-Muslim unity, is especially indigestible for the Indian ruling classes, whose policies have made farmers’ suicides into a national metaphor of the times. What can a ruling class of brokers for imperialism, surrounded by crores of peasants battling starvation, debt, and displacement, do with the memory of the insurgent peasants of 1857? The problem is that India’s peasants have time and again chosen the path of the peasants of 1857 – from Chauri Chaura, Telengana, to Naxalbari. In such circumstances, what can be more suitable than to turn 1857 into a museum? Preserve it as the mortal remains of a lived history and then celebrate it as a festival?
But 1857 is not ready to become the stuff of a museum. It haunts the forces of power in so many terrifying and disturbing ways. Not only that, it is not particularly reassuring even for an entire section of the liberal intelligentsia. The fear of 1857 has a good long history. The reactions of Ghalib, Sir Sayyed, and Bhartendu give us some idea of the terror that pervaded the entire feudal class as well as the newly emergent middle class intelligentsia, when this battle ended with the bloody massacre of lakhs of Indians. The torchbearers of the Bengal Renaissance were as it is, not just indifferent but hostile to 1857. In any case, it is fairly easy to understand such reactions dating to the second half of the 19th century. But in these early years of the 21st century, the fear of 1857 is being played out on the screen of a collage of old and new discourses and logics. We can consider some representative examples.
 

Dalrymple’s Distortions
Some excerpts of The Last Mughal, published by Penguin in November, appeared in the 3 July issue of Outlook maghazine. Its author William Dalrymple is regarded to be a liberal Indophile. The excerpts of his book carried in Outlook suggest that according to him, public, political and national tragedies are ultimately expressed at the level of the private-domestic and the personal/individual. Consequently, he defines his objective as depicting the suffering of ordinary people caught in the crossfire of the terrible with ‘a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers set against the forces of world’s greatest contemporary military power.’ Here it is important to recall that quite a few moneylenders, landlords, and tradesmen had left eye-witness accounts which described the damage inflicted by the insurgents on their family and property. As for ordinary citizens, in all the arenas of rebellion, they would either have been with the insurgents, or they would have scarcely had the resources to leave behind records of their experiences. Anyway, Mr. Dalrymple reads 20,000 pages worth of documents confiscated from the Red Fort by the British (written in Persian) with the help of his friend Mahmood Farooqui, and arrives at the conclusion that the Revolt cannot be understood through the ideological grids of nationalism, imperialism, orientalism, etc.; rather, what one hears in it is the echo of the Clash of Civilisations.                     
It is strange that the seeker of private-domestic and personal tragedies, who is unwilling to lose the pain of the common man in the grand narratives of nationalism-imperialism etc…, should have no objection to the grand narrative of ‘Clash of Civilisations’. After all that research, Dalrymple finds out that the 19th century British rulers and administrators, unlike William Jones and Hastings of the 18th century, did not see Indians as heirs of an advanced civilisation and ancient wisdom. The evangelical British and missionaries branded them as uncivilised and savage, and launched an aggressive proselytising campaign. There was an outcry of religion being polluted, which took the form of the Revolt. One may well ask- what is new about Dalrymple’s thesis? After all, British historians had always propagated the ‘greased cartridges’ as the main reason for the insurgency. But there is indeed something new in Dalrymple’s narrative; the story of Hindus and Muslims alike being galvanised to revolt against the British because of religious sentiments being hurt doesn’t fit in easily with the thesis of Clash of Civilisations, which has a conflict between ‘Islam and the West’ at its centre. Dalrymple therefore sets his sights on words like ‘kafir’, ‘ghazi’, ‘mujahideen’, and ‘jehad’ in the Persian documents. He finds a ‘strong contemporary echo’ of these expressions.In his own words, “These were words which had no resonance to the historians of the 1960s. Now, sadly, in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 they are words we understand all too well, and words like jehad scream out of dusty pages of the source manuscripts, demanding attention.” The British scholar conflates the meaning of a particular idiom, a particular religious vocabulary of a national war of independence to resonate and echo a contemporary terror act. Even today, the different usages of the word jehad in common parlance of Hindi-Urdu belt may shock people from Bush to Dalrymple who attribute a single, frozen meaning to the word to mean ‘a terror act’. When a local politician of Hindi belt [whether Hindu or Muslim] in a characteristic rhetorical stance, vows to launch jehad against injustice, poverty, corruption or crime, what meaning would Mr. Bush or Mr. Dalrymple deduce from such an expression? Dalrymple himself mentions that it was Hindus who formed the majority of rebels on the Delhi front. In these same documents, the author found an appeal by Pandit Harichand, citing the Mahabharata to appeal to traders to shut shops and plunge into the revolt. But this appeal in a Hindu idiom does not find pride of place in the ‘Clash of Civilisations’. For Dalrymple, what is important is that in the Persian documents, the enemy is not called ‘angrez’ or ‘gora’ but ‘kafir’ and ‘nasrani’; while the fighters are called ‘jehadi’, ‘mujahideen’ and ‘ghazi’. Dalrymple also underlines the fact that on the Delhi front, it was the small contingent of ghazis who fought till the end, and they had suicide squads too. One does not need to be well versed in the metaphorical usage of the word ‘Kafir’in Urdu-persian poetry, as a signifier of ‘beloved’, ‘an intimate other’ or more prominently, ‘a positive oppositionality to orthodoxy’, to question the freezing and fixing of meaning of such words by the ‘terror struck’ contemporary western scholarship. Dalrymple must answer what kind of clash of civilisations was this in which believers (Muslims) joined hands with kafirs (Hindus) to fight kafirs (the British)? Recall that in Huntington’s paradigm of the Clash, Hindu civilisation was meant to ally with the West against Islam. It is true that in addition to making appeals for religious unity, the rebel leaders also issued separate appeals to people from different religions. For the literate class in those days, the only available idiom was a religious one. Pay attention to Dalrymple’s linguistic usage – he takes infinite pains to avoid identifying that the call for ‘jehad’ was issued against a particular injustice, a particular Government; because the meaning of jehad (from Bush to Dalrymple) has been fixed.
Presuming end of all grand narratives, Dalrymple freezes 1857 into the single grand narrative of Clash of Civilisations. Why, after all, did Ruhelas, Bundelas, Jats, Gujjars, Pasis, Mughals, Rajputs, Brahmans, Pathans, Satnamis, Bahavis, Kols and other tribal people (who did not as yet identify themselves only as Hinuds or Muslims), join hands to fight the British? Why did the entire struggle, which simultaneously drew together and cut through multiple religious, caste, and regional identities, hinge only on one point – who was with the British and who was against them? Most of the princely states (both Hindu and Muslim) were with the British. Many zamindars and some riyasats on the brink of devastation, supported the peasants and sepoys. But those moneylenders and zamindars who had benefited from colonial agrarian policy were firmly with the British. The ‘dumb’ natives may bother their heads with these questions; Dalrymple’s book is forever and always at the service of the ‘Clash of Civilisations’, and presents a gift of fresh legitimacy to the ‘War on Terror’ – a fresh neo-colonial reading of 1857.
 

(Page 1266, Samajik Kranti ke Dastavez, Vol II)