Amir Khan’s The Rising, scheduled to make its theatrical debut around Independence Day, promises a magnum opus out of one man’s revolt against his British masters some 150 years ago that sparked the imagination of several vested interests who had scores to settle with the Company Raj. Pandey’s rebellion, though quashed in days, led to a series of revolts across the heartland because of some real and many imagined excesses of Company Bahadur. One Britisher, James Outram, who witnessed the events between 1857 and 1859 first termed the episode “a war of independence”. Military historians call the sepoy uprising The Mutiny. Amir Khan calls it The Rising. One man’s Mutiny, is another man’s Rising, just as one man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. For now, I won’t join a debate with Mr Amir Khan on whether the events of 1857-59 should be called The Rising or The Mutiny. Not at least till I watched his film.
But I’m eager to settle scores on whether 1857 was ‘A War of Independence’. If Independence suggests the freedom of a nation from conquerors, nothing remotely like this took place in India 150 years ago. My reading of history suggests India was a geographical conglomeration of several small and big principalities, ruled by a bunch of despots, as brutal and extortionist as any other in the history of the pre-modern, pre-industrialised world. For many, the concept of desh or country was restricted to one’s village. The conquest of India by the British in the 100 years preceding 1857 is a plain distortion of history. The British did not get to rule India before 1859 when the dominions of the East India Company passed on to the Crown in England and a concept of a nation-state emerged. History is clear that the ouster of the nawab of Murshidabad and his replacement with another by Robert Clive in 1757, was financed by Hindu merchants, primarily, Jagath Seth Mahtab Rai, then among the world’s richest, who was pushed to a corner by the constant demands of an arrogant and extravagant monarch. Jean Law the head of the French establishment in Bengal noted: “They (the Jagath Seths) are, I can confirm, the originators of the revolution; without them, the English would never have carried out what they have.” It was a similar story with Surat, where Hindu merchants and Muslim shipowners, among them, Laldas Vithaldas Parekh and Muhammad Ali, and later, Jagganathadas, invited the English to capture the Surat fort and free them from their tormentors, the Maratha Gaikwads and Teg Beg Khan who had declared himself the nawab. In the following 100 years, the Company brought to heel several native rulers, both Hindus and Muslims, among them Tipu Sultan, the Peshwa, Sindhia, the nawab of Oudh, and finally the Sikhs after Ranjit Singh’s death, in active connivance with their subjects or local adversaries. Many forced into submission were allowed to retain their titles but pensioned off because they couldn’t manage their affairs, like the Peshwas and the nawab of Oudh. Others were allowed to rule as the Sindhias and the Nizam of Hyderabad. When the Company took over the administration, it affected a number of changes -- the railways and the telegraph were introduced, the burning of widows on the pyres of their dead husbands was abolished, and Hindu widows were allowed to remarry.
Over these 100 years, the Company also engaged in constant warfare in neighbouring and distant lands as far as Burma and Afghanistan, to protect and expand its trading interests. This took a heavy toll on the soldiers, some of whom mutinied against the Company on four separate occasions over 13 years before Mangal Pandey fired the popular imagination. It wasn’t long before some of the disgruntled princes and landlords started instigating more sepoys to revolt. One such noble was the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Nana Saheb, who was denied his pension. He savagely put to death 211 British women and children in Kanpur.
Another was the Rani of Jhansi, concerned about her impoverished kingdom passing on to the Company under Dalhousie’s Doctrine of Lapse. The rebels proclaimed the geriatric Bahadur Shah Zafar the ‘nominal’ ruler of Hindustan, before the old man was evicted from Delhi and pensioned off to Rangoon. The residents of Delhi were massacred by Sikh soldiers in the company’s pay in an act of revenge against the historical humiliation, torture and killings of their gurus by the Mughals. It did not matter to the Sikhs that their kingdom too had been annexed by the Company after Ranjit Singh’s death. Nor did it stop the subjugated Sindhias and the Nizam from siding with the British. The Company’s collaborators found merit in the rule of law. So much for the Rising. It gave birth to the concept of a nation-state in India. The War of Independence had to wait.
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