Two queens and a rebellion
This masterly history of India’s great war of 1857, contrarily described as a war of independence and a mutiny, is, despite its dealing with only a facet of that war, probably the best work on the subject. With its repeated reference to public participation in events and continuing public reactions in recounting the course of this war as espoused by two of its foremost leaders, notably in its concluding chapter, “Afterlife”, Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s is a consummate subaltern history merging seamlessly with mainstream. This is also an abiding tribute to India’s womanhood. “The embrace of a popular uprising that thrust upon them leadership roles, made them fulfil the dream —and dare one add for women of the future too — of what a woman ought to be and ought to do,” the author writes in his conclusion.
This is, above all, a work of history seeking to reconstruct a vital event in the birth of the Indian nation, rationalising facts drawn from sources created by what Dr Mukherjee describes as an Indian past appropriated by British rulers, with a paucity of accounts from the Indian side. But from the archives that the British had produced or allowed to survive, Dr Mukherjee has created an incisive narrative addressing the origins of the uprising and the course of the war in Awadh and Jhansi, situating Hazrat Mahal and Lakshmibai in each. It is the people, their reactions and impulses that are the theme of this work and give it a stature, in my view, unmatched by any other history of that time. “Resistance to tyranny,” the author reminds us, “is always a collective act.” The book opens with the observation, “In 1857, the resistance of common people made leaders of obscure royals.”
Lakshmibai was queen of “the small principality called Jhansi,” once a subehdari of the Peshwa, annexed by the British in 1853, never an independent state. Hazrat Mahal was the discarded wife of the ruler of Awadh, “one of the areas where economic growth was noticeable within the overall decline of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century”. The outbreak of a mutiny in Meerut on May 10, 1857, triggered by a firing parade ordered by an unthinking British colonel on April 24 on sepoys protesting what they saw as a defilement of their religion, far from Lucknow or Jhansi but close to the seat of the last Mughal, was to become a defining moment of India’s history. That Mughal king, with utmost reluctance, gave the mutineers legitimacy. But as Dr Mukherjee argues decisively, with empirical evidence, this was followed not by random outbreaks across the Indo-gangetic plain, as many historians made out, but by an uprising that followed a clear pattern in support of the erstwhile empire. The sequence of events indicate a plan of action. Nevertheless, the British, who had touted the idea of Wajid Ali Shah, King of Awadh, being incompetent, “had not quite reckoned with the fact that he was a popular king, much loved by his subjects”. According to a contemporary account, “there was no street or market or house which did not wail out the cry of agony in separation of Jan-i-alam.”
In Awadh, the majority of noble and peasant is
Hindu. I refer to it because
Dr Mukherjee’s book, despite no direct reference, more incisively than in his Awadh in Revolt 1857-1858 — A Study in Popular Resistance makes short shrift of the myth of hostility amongst Indians because of Babri Masjid/ramjanmabhoomi. The British Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh, published in 1877– 78, under the heading “The Janamasthan and other Temples” refers to “the great rupture between the Hindus and Muhammadans” of 1855. Place this against the celebration of the rout of the British at Chinhat on June 30 1857, their first military encounter with the rebels, with groups of rebels spilling onto the streets of Lucknow chanting “Bom Mahadeo.” Birjis Qadr, Wajid Ali Shah’s 12-year-old son, was hailed as Nawab representing the Mughal Emperor to cries of “you are Kanhaiya (Krishna).” Dr Mukherjee cites folk songs on the defence of Jhansi in which chief gunner Ghulam Ghaus Khan, sings to his friend Khudadad Kahn, both killed in the defence of Jhansi fort: “For our queen, I shall lay down my life/i shall hack the Firanghi with my sword.”
And so Dr Mukherjee summarises Hazrat Mahal’s position in history: “A rebellion of the people made her a leader and she became the leader of the people”. Lakshmibai, on the other hand, was a pensioner of the British faced with a people joining in rebellion with the mutinous sepoys by early June 1857, who after massacring the British in Jhansi — for which the British never forgave the Rani, although she had no part in it — proclaimed “The people are God’s, the country is the Padishah’s and the two religions govern” followed with her proclamation “Raj is Lachmee Bai’s”. “Her activities were more rooted in arms and located in the actual battlefield,” the author writes.
“Lakshmibai,” says the author in his concluding sentence, “is not only remembered, but also commemorated and celebrated. Hazrat Mahal hovers on the margins of remembrance”. Why that is so is an issue discussed extensively. Yet, Dr Mukherjee has succeeded in placing the two women in their rightful position in India’s history, whose example in leading a rebellion of “sepoys, peasants, artisans, common people” and the message of whose times carry lessons for India in the present, often described as India under challenge.