Abstract
The title of the series of which the present volume is a part appears to be somewhat ambitious, at least in so far as the present collection is concerned. The eight essays assembled in it are fairly conventional, both in terms of the issues they address and the sources on which they are based. Nevertheless they are all valuable contributions to the historiography of the revolt of 1857 which is still, despite the huge literature on the subject, rather poorly developed. Moreover, many of the essays, concerned as they are with the military organization of the colonial state, add considerably to our knowledge of the British Indian army in the nineteenth century. In their introduction to the volume, the editors note that it has generally been very difficult to research on the experiences of the sipahis since they have left almost no accounts of their own. Specifically in the context of the revolt, the motives and actions of the sipahis, ‘marginalised on account of both race and class,’ are imperfectly understood. This is true ‘of those Indians who fought against, as well as those who fought in the service of, colonial power’ (p. xviii). Whereas a very large number of sipahis rebelled, many more remained loyal. It is not really easy to figure out the reasons that impelled them as individuals to make a particular choice.
Sabyasachi Dasgupta scrutinizes two late nineteenth century texts, Sitaram Pandey’s From Sepoy to Subedar (1873) and Durgadas Banerjee’s Amar Jivan Charit (c. 1890), to make sense of the sentiments of the sipahis. Sitaram and Durgadas both had long careers in the Bengal Army, the former as a trooper/ ‘native’ officer and the latter as a clerk, and remained loyal to the British during the revolt. The genuineness of From Sepoy to Subedar, as actually being the account of an Indian soldier, has not been satisfactorily established (Gajendra Singh, another contributor to the volume, completely dismisses the possibility of the narrative being authentic) (p. 133). However, Dasgupta suggests that ‘even if it is more literary than archival in nature’, it does reflect contemporary reality and is therefore a useful document. Obviously Sitaram, who did not flinch from his duty even when his son was sentenced to death for his participation in the revolt, was held up as an example for the sipahis to emulate. As for Durgadas, the story of his transformation from clerk to soldier during the crisis acquires meaning in relation to the colonial discourse about Bengali effeminacy. He was keen to publicize his role as a valiant fighter to establish his masculinity and thereby that of the Bengali upper castes. Thus, even as he was trying to demonstrate his loyalty, he was undermining colonial stereotypes.
Kaushik Roy’s essay focuses on a hitherto neglected dimension of soldierly behaviour during the revolt—the extreme brutality and sadism that combatants on both sides were capable of. Racial hatred was already an integral part of the emotional make-up of the white soldier. This could easily turn into cruel viciousness while dealing with an enemy who was seen as less than human and hence incapable of bravery and chivalry: ‘Acknowledgement of the rebels’ honour and courage in fighting effectively would have delegitimised the Raj’ (p. 29). After the revolt, some of those communities from which the British had been able to enlist sipahis to assist them in suppressing the uprising were perceived to be relatively more human and declared to possess the (racial) trait of martiality. It might be worthwhile to mention here Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s argument about ‘rebels’ replicating the violence that the British had routinely used to discipline their Indian subjects as an explanation for the Kanpur massacres. That sipahis had indeed been conditioned in a manner which made them react violently and ‘irrationally’, often over seemingly trivial issues, such as the introduction of a new turban in the Madras Army in the early years of the century, is brought out in James Frey’s reappraisal of the Vellore Mutiny (1806). Frey’s essay uses the extensive testimonies of sipahis available in the records of official enquiries about the mutiny to look ‘for moments in which ordinary participants articulated what they thought they were doing, and why’ (p. 5). He discerns a common pattern in the conduct of the sipahis in 1806 and 1857 when faced with similar situations, ‘rather complex socio-economic and political concerns’ (p. 18).
Gautam Chakravarty’s absorbing ‘Mutiny, War or Small War? Revisiting an Old Debate’ urges us to abandon the sterile debate over whether the upheaval of 1857–58 should be labelled as a mutiny or characterized as a war. The extreme brutality with which the revolt was suppressed became the basis, along with the experiences of similar colonial military campaigns of the nineteenth century, of the doctrine of ‘small wars’ articulated by C.E. Callwell in his influential work on the subject, published in 1899. These were wars fought not against regular armies attached to stable political entities, but against ‘an enemy with lower degree of organization, which limited itself to guerilla activities, [and] was much more difficult to deal with’ (p. 143). These were ‘expeditions against savages and semi-civilised races’ (p. 143), which justified the use of massive violence that did not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. It is pertinent that Callwells’ book came out in the same year as the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) in which Frederick Roberts and Kitchener vigorously implemented the scorched earth policy, advocated by the leading theorist of ‘small wars’. Chakravarty points out that the efficacy of this kind of war in dealing with the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America has encouraged Britain and America to turn in more recent times to ‘nineteenth century irregular colonial warfare, of which the Indian Rebellion is perhaps the centrepiece, for lessons in the containment of terrorism…and the re-tailoring of small war strategy and counter-insurgency for Islamic societies’ (p. 144).
The vexed question of the extent to which the rebels were inspired by religion is re-examined by Crispin Bates and Marina Carter. They steer clear of the standard formula which seeks to link the revolt to Wahhabis and ‘jihadis’, highlighting instead the role played by religious motifs in mobilizing people for the struggle against British rule. Opposition to colonial subjugation too was articulated in religious terms. Much of the vocabulary used by the sipahis, as well as by ideologues of the insurrection, was derived from religion. Rajat Ray in his important study of the revolt has observed that the ‘rebels’ were groping for a new vocabulary that would allow them to transcend the narrow confines of religious communities and express the idea of the nation, albeit in an embryonic form. At the same time, as Bates and Carter note, religious fervour was whipped up by the official church establishment in Britain to portray the military conflict as a holy war.
William Dalrymple’s essay on the logistic failures supposedly responsible for the loss of Delhi by the sipahis, dwells at some length on the ‘sheer chaos and administrative incompetence of the rebel government’ (p. 62). Although it is true that many of the problems enumerated by him such as inadequacy of food supplies, ransacking of shops, dearth of financial resources, and shortage of ammunition did contribute to the eventual defeat of the ‘rebel’ regime, yet the situation in the city between May and September 1857 was not as chaotic as he makes it out to be nor were the sipahis an incompetent lot. In fact it is astonishing that the main organ of their independent state, the ‘court of administration’, was able to govern and defend the city with great efficiency under the most adverse conditions. The defection of the city’s police force to the ‘rebel’ cause in the early stages of the liberation of Delhi provided the sipahis with a ready-made infrastructure for maintaining order, procuring supplies and carrying out routine administrative functions. The picture that emerges from the writings of other scholars who have researched on the Mutiny Papers, especially Talmiz Khaldun/Satinder Singh, Mahdi Husain and more recently Mahmood Farooqui, is certainly not that of an inept administration. The massive extent of the archive itself is an indication of the vast amount of documentation that the regime produced. It was not so much the kind of ‘logistical failures’ that Dalrymple draws attention to, which proved to be the undoing of the sipahis, as their failure to enlist the cooperation of bankers and wholesale merchants of the city. In the absence of support from this class, the ‘rebels’ had little access to funds. This is obvious from some of the evidence cited by Dalrymple himself.
There are two essays on the reorganization of the British Indian army that followed the suppression of the revolt. Gavin Rand’s study of the report of the Peel Commission, set up in 1858, stresses on continuities between the military thinking of the immediate post-revolt period and that of the Roberts era. In both cases the assessment that went into ‘the organisation and structure of the new army was shaped above all by the levies inherited from the counter-insurgency operations’ (p. 96). Gajendra Singh’s essay focuses on the ethnographical hocus-pocus contained in handbooks for recruitment that were intended to equip military officials with knowledge about communities that were labelled as ‘martial races’. It is not surprising that there was considerable fluidity, and arbitrariness, in defining communities as either ‘martial’ or ‘non-martial’. The social consequences of this exercise were devastating and, sadly, its divisive potential has still not been entirely exhausted.