Harshita

B.A. (hons.) History

IIIrd Year
0327
Daulat Ram College

Can the revolt of 1857 be described as a popular

uprising? Comment.

Introduction:

The year 1857 witnessed armed revolts in parts of central and northern-India,
of which the event of 10th May 1857, when the 11th and 20th Native Cavalry of
the Bengal Army, assembled in Meerut, turned on their commanding officers,
is a significant one. The rebels turned for leadership to Delhi to get the
blessings of the Mughal Emperor and thus give to their actions legitimacy. The
Revolt of 1857, irrespective of its true nature and character, was so intense
that it appeared for a time that the Company’s Raj would disappear from India
until the spring of 1858, when order was restored again by the advancing
imperial forces.

The Revolt was fundamentally different from earlier instances of rebellion

which were irregular and related to local affairs. It was spread at a larger scale
and sepoys at many centres mutinied followed by civil disturbances as well.
Leaders of the revolt included Nana Sahib at Kanpur, Begum Hazrat Mahal at
Lucknow, Khan Bahadur at Rohilakhand, Rani Lakshmibai at Jhansi and Tantia
Tope at Bareilly.

The revolt shattered the ‘snug feeling of liberal fulfilment, that all was well in
India under the British’. It ended British rule for months in certain parts of
India. So it remains the most written about event in modern Indian history.
Like all such events, 1857 has also generated its own controversies. While
there is near unanimity with regard to the course of the events, it is not so
with the causes and character. It has been mentioned as the ‘War of
Independence’ by most of the indigenous historians and scholars, while at
the same time branded as ‘mutiny’ by almost all British and European
writers with a very few exceptions. It has also been asserted as a purely
military outbreak produced jointly by ill-advised and faulty policies of the
East India Company’s military authorities and the grievances and indiscipline
of the Indian troops of the Company. The question that bothered all of the
historians was whether the event was a people’s uprising, or a mere mutiny.

Official writings about 1857 revolt set the trend for Imperialist historiography.
Sir John Kaye stated that hurt religious sentiments, violation of caste rules and
the greased cartridges led to the ‘mutiny’. The British represented a modern
civilization and a white domination; the uprising represented a popular
backlash, motivated by reactionary, native yearnings. He knew that it was a
popular war against an alien race, and he grasped the psychology of the
rebellion as no one had done before, or even afterwards. Kaye had no doubt
that the aims of the insurgents were counter-modern; it is a judgment that has
not been effectively challenged. Writings by J.B. Norton and T. Rice Holmes
were broadly in agreement with Kaye. 

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar came out with a work that exhibited the same
grasp of popular psychology. He was at the time a revolutionary nationalist and
was yet to metamorphose into the Hindu communalist of later days. The work
is remarkable for its instinctive sympathy with the aspirations of the
insurgents, and its convincing grasp of their aims. Savarkar’s grasp of the
popular mentality, like that of Kaye, was masterly. He demonstrated that the
insurgents were inspired by the vision of Swadharma, and Swarajya.
These two aims, ‘one’s own religion’, and ‘one’s own realm’, drove the
insurgents into a war of independence. According to him, the revolt had two
phases, destructive and creative. The destructive phase was marked by
attempts to overthrow the British rule, while the constructive phase was
characterized by attempts to form an alternative government.

The year 1957, brought a massive Indian intervention in the debate.

Surendranath Sen wrote an official history that concluded, carefully and with
admirable restraint, that it was a war of independence that assumed a national
scope in the recently abolished Kingdom of Awadh. He rejected the theory of
proper preparation and conspiracy. The revolt, he says, had its origin in the
sepoy discontent and it derived strength from the widespread disaffection of
the civil population. The British administrators and the English historians had
said this long before this had dawned in the Indian mind. Other historians, RC
Majumdar and HP Chattopadhyay, had formed a club with Sen in enunciating a
viewpoint which was not Indian in the true sense of the term.

Both Majumdar and Sen agree that, in the middle of the nineteenth
century, nationalism in India was yet in its infancy. There was no feeling of
nationalism, as we know it today. Majumdar saw it as the “dying groans of an
obsolete aristocracy”. In their different ways they all retold the story from
the Indian side, without quite the electrifying insight into the Indian angle of
vision that had earlier come out of Savarkar’s inspired re-writing of history.

They dwelt on the causes and motivations, rather than the aspirations and
aims, of the uprising. Collectively, the effect of their work was to establish that
the Mutiny was not a mere mutiny of the sepoys.

Thomas Metcalf agreed to the view that 1857 was a broad, popular uprising
directed against the new landlord class. He says that as a result of the agrarian
grievances arising from British over-assessment and the passage of landed
property to the money-lender, the people of the North West Provinces gave
their support to the rebel cause. However, the revolt can be called popular
only in Awadh, where the taulakdars and peasants participated together in
favour of the royal court.

The debate moved on to another level with Eric Stokes. He wrote about the
return of the peasant to Modern Indian History. His originality lay in his grasp
of the fact that the revolt of the peasant army lay at the very heart of the rural
and agrarian uprising of 1857. He thus did away with the false distinction
between the ‘civil’ and ‘military’ dimensions of 1857. But he, too, focused on
the causes rather than the aspirations of the uprising. His probing into the
agrarian structure went deeper than those of his contemporary Ranajit Guha.
Guha saw the happening as a primitive inversion which turned the lowliest into
the highest. In truth, as Buckler had pointed out many years ago in his
reconstruction of the legitimist standpoint of the insurgents, they aimed at
the restoration of hierarchy and not at its overthrow. What they sought
was not turning things upside down, but righting the illegitimate
overturning of the old order by the aliens; not inversion, but re-inversion and
restoration. In a broadly similar vein, Stokes saw the uprising as a traditional
resistance movement in which the locally dominant peasant lineages
oppressed by the heavy land tax played the critical part.

An example of how local and caste factors gave a unique character to the
revolt in each region is shown by Rudrangshu Mukherjee in Awadh, He found a
certain commonalty of interest between dispossessed landlords and
endangered peasants. This ensured that practically three fourths of the adult
male population of the occupied Kingdom rose in arms against the British.
‘Theirs was not’, he observed, ‘a struggle to establish a new social order.
British rule had turned their world topsy-turvy; their aim was to restore that
world, and all therein.’

In a subsequent work on the town of Cawnpore, he found that the uprising

was the work of the lower orders of the town, the respectable citizens being
reluctant to join in initially. The massacres of the Whites were justified by
religious requirement. Mukherjee probed into the psyche of popular violence
and found there a collective of the mind moved by hatred of an alien order.
Awadh, concludes Mukherjee, ‘the opposition to the British in 1857 was truly
universal, a people’s resistance’.

Tapti Roy, in her study of the revolt in Bundelkhand, state that the peasants
were not confined to their localities and tried to spread the revolt. They
targeted visible forms of British power. They also moved against auction
purchasers and money lenders. The popular rebellion in Bundelkhand was
distinct in her opinion from the mutiny of the sepoys, the revolt of the Rajas
and the rebellion of the landlords, and it was the collective action of the
people of the villages which gave the uprising its popular dimension. She noted
that the insurgent Ahir peasants gave strong support to the rebellious
Bundela Rajput landlords: no one led, all rose together, and a collective
arose from simultaneous outbreaks caused by divergent aims and
aspirations. The popular actions in the remote villages were, never the less,
autonomous. Roy disagreed with her ‘imperialist’ and ‘nationalist’
predecessors who had written totalizing histories in the form of the single
linear narrative in the alternative frameworks of empire and nation.
Conclusion:

New questions are asked by every generation, and there are still angles that
have not been thoroughly probed. This is particularly true of the visions,
strategies and aims of the insurgents, which stand out above all from the
proclamations.

The elitist versus popular debate asks for particular case studies. The rebellion
as a whole can’t be represented in a standardized blueprint as it differs from
region to region with political and social motives merging. The national,
regional, local and social, economic, cultural and political factors were so
complex and variegated in the revolt of 1857 that a mono-causal explanation is
not possible. There is thus the need to make regional studies and uncover the
different layers of the social hierarchy involved in the revolt to bring out all the
complexities of this great uprising.

Bibliography:

 Eric Stokes: “The Peasant Armed”

 R.C. Majumdar: “The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857”
 Rudrangshu Mukherjee: “Awadh in Revolt, 1857-1858”
 Surendra Nath Sen: “Eighteen Fifty-Seven”
 K. Gopalankutty: “Revolt of 1857: Historiographic trends”
 Nupur Chaudhuri and Rajat Kanta Ray: “1857: Historical Works and
Proclamations”