"The 1857 Uprising wasn’t a coherent political war of independence"

Author and historian William Dalrymple spent four years in dusty archives to study hitherto unquoted 20,000 "rebel documents" to construct his new book, The Last Mughal: The Eclipse of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. The horrific story of the rebellion of 1857 against the British and how it resulted in the fall of Mughal Delhi. Dalrymple’s masterpiece throws new light on the cause of the 1857 revolt, popularly known as India’s First War of Independence, reasons for its failure and its central location and figure. The 41-year-old Scottish writer answers questions ranging from the writing of history in India to his claims that the 1857 Uprising was primarily a "war of religion." Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Vishal Arora:

I think the contrast between Indian and British or American historians is really one of fashion. If you were talking about 20 years ago, I would say much the same thing about the British academics. There were only one or two popularisers like A.J.P. Taylor, who used to go on BBC. But by and large British academics were equally specialists. However, there has been a big change in the last 20 years. People such as Simon Scharmer and Linda Colley now regularly appear on bestsellers’ lists and do television programmmes. As a result, history is discussed by the people.

In middle-class Delhi households, many discus new Vikram Chandra or latest Salman Rushdie over dinner, like ‘I hated this one but I love that one.’ History is never a part of their discussion. It’s a specialist thing with a specialist language.

This leads to two unhappy tendencies. One, that there is a situation where historical figures become objects of hagiography, so you cannot have a serious discussion about the merits or not of Shivaji or Netaji (Subhas Chandra Bose) or Mahatma Gandhi. These figures become turned into living saints about whom it is impossible to discuss. For instance, was it a good idea for Netaji to align himself with the Japanese? Or issues related to Shivaji. Such issues should be open to discussion without having research institutes trashed. Second, in the absence of an enlightened discussion, mythology prevails. For example, I have received a number of e-mails in the last two months about Taj Mahal being a Shiva temple dating 500 B.C., Qutub Minar being a Vishnu observatory and Argentina named after Arjun (laughs). Such things should not be seriously discussed in the country.

(Dalrymple takes out a copy of the Mutiny Papers from his bag and laughs) Open any page and read. Look at the details. The whole of Delhi is there — potters, wood sellers, bullock-cart drivers, courtesans, carpenters and soldiers. Incredible details. Profound. There are hundreds of PhDs there. There are 20,000 copies about just one city on the edge of destruction.

I think historians have some explaining to do, in the context that this was
the largest armed revolt against any imperial power anywhere in the world— an uprising followed by the dissolution of the East India Company. And within that uprising, 100,000 of the 167,000 sepoys headed safe to Delhi.In other words, two-thirds of all the rebel sepoys gathered in one place. Yet, this (The Last Mughal) is the first book on Delhi in 1857. This should not be the case.

Was it national? No, because it was only in Hindustan, mainly in the cow-belt and in bits of Punjab and Madhya Pradesh. But the whole of south India, Bombay and the Deccan remained quiet. Was it a war of independence? In some ways, because you have Indians wishing to get rid of the British. In that general sense yes. Was it a coherent political war of independence in the modern sense? No. It was a chain reaction of uprisings. Initially, you have sepoys’ uprising. In Delhi, it also becomes a jehad with as many as 25,000 jehadis joining and individual Indian Muslim freelance civilians taking up arms. In Lucknow, it becomes a mass civil revolt. In Rohtak you have the Jats rising up. It was many different things in different places. So in a very wide and general sense it was kind of a war of independence but not in the modern sense. Largely, it was a sepoy mutiny, but it was not just that. I like to call it an uprising, about which there can be no dispute.

I think it’s slightly too much of a paraphrase. All I have said is that in the Mutiny Papers (or rebel documents), the proclamations of the Delhi rebels are expressed in a religious language, as they talk about deen and dharma (Urdu and Hindi words for religion). But that doesn’t mean there was not a whole wide range of secular, political, social and economic reasons behind it. It’s a complicated issue.

I think it was an enormous Western prestige (attached to Christianity), which is visible in Ghalib’s letters. For example, he writes, "Why are you fussing about the past? Look at what Christianity has achieved." To the intellectuals, Christianity represented reason as against the "irrational" faith of their community. I don’t say that was the case, but this is how they felt. However, missionaries had very little success in North India. It wasn’t like "mass conversions"; that never happened and strikingly not. Rather, missionaries were strikingly unsuccessful. Yet, there was fear, tension and anxiety.

Why have you compared the attitude of "high-caste" Hindus towards the Mughal Empire in 1857 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992? Don’t you think the act of vandalism in 1992 was merely political in nature and perpetrated by the cadre of the Sangh Parivar which did not represent a popular opinion?

True. But, it is also true that there is a very widespread unease among the middle-class with India’s Mughal past. I have never done a scientific survey of it, but I think many people are uneasy with the Mughals, due to their misconceptions – which is partly because of historians’ navel-gazing and writing for themselves.

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