Through colonial lenses

That book exposed a serious weakness amongst Indian historians who, in their quest for certification from Oxford and Cambridge, were content to adopt colonial lenses. In this scheme of things British rule was the best thing that happened to India. Many Indians still think so. Fortunately their numbers are shrinking.

From the 1960s onwards, Oxbridge steered Indian students towards a study of the freedom movement. In this view, the main villains were the Indians themselves. The divide-andrule aspect of British policy was mentioned only in passing.

There were some exceptions. But they were not taken seriously by the Establishment, which also refused to pay much attention to the works of Englishmen like William Digby and Penderel Moon. The latter was a member of the ICS, which he quit after a few years. Both showed British rule up for the abomination it really was.

Stanley Wolpert also wrote a book called “Shameful Flight: The Last Years of British Empire in India” in which he squarely blamed Mountbatten. Now, gradually, things have begun to change. Indian historians are beginning to show how the Oxbridge version was actually an “alternate truth” — post truth plus alternate facts. This is beginning to show how there can be entirely different versions and interpretations of events.

They are doing so by re-examining the many different aspects of 18571947. An altogether different picture of British rule emerges when these stories get told by un-colonised Indian minds.

The best known example of this is the book on the Bengal famine of 1943 by Madhusree Mukherjee. It is called Churchill’s Secret War. In it she shows how the ridiculous Winston Churchill, British prime minister during the War years of 1940-45, deliberately starved India of grain by sending them to England for stock piling.

Three million Indians died, which is half the number of Jews Hitler killed during the War. The Germans are still paying Israel for the holocaust. And Britain? The less said the better.

Another, much less known book is by a former diplomat, Chandrashekhar Dasgupta. It is called War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 194748, in which he reveals, for the first time, just why India was partitioned. The real reasons had very little to do with the confrontations of HinduMuslim politics. Britain wanted Pakistan because it needed a military base in the region, that’s all.

No wonder Mountbatten, at a Lifeguards mess dinner in 1965 said that he had “f***d up”. The women The list of such books is growing. The latest addition to it is by the historian, Kirti Narain. She has written an eyeopening book called “Participation and Position of Women — Uprising of 1857”. Needless to say, the English didn’t spare the women either. This book is also worth reading just for the bibliography, which is one of the most extensive I have ever seen.

We learn about the warrior queens, Begum Hazrat Mahal the queen of Awadh and Lakshmibai of Jhansi. They took on the British and were eventually defeated. The latter died, and the former fled to Nepal. No one knows what happened to her. But these were the famous ones. There are several lesser known ones, too.

The book also throws light on the women who defied the English before the Revolt, which suggests that opposition by women existed well before 1857. We thus have Rani Velu Nachiyar from Sivaganga (P Chidambaram’s constituency today) in Tamil Nadu and Rani Chennamma from Kittur in Karnataka, not to mention some others who challenged the British well before the Revolt.

There are also Rani Draupadi Bai of Dhar in MP, Rani Avanti Bai of Ramgarh, and several others. Then there are the courtesans like Azizan and Haidiri Bai, who were informants. Last but not least, says Dr Narain, are the prostitutes who “provided grass root liveliness to the tumult”. There were also the ayahs, the mid-wives, the wet nurses, the peasant women who looked after the wounded soldiers, acted as spies and carried information from one place to another.

Finally, there were the dalit women like Mahabiri Devi of Muzaffarpur in Bihar and Uda Devi who killed many British soldiers in Lucknow. The latter has been made a dalit woman icon by Mayawati.

Bhil and Koli women, it seems, also cheered the men on.