| The "Sepoy Mutiny" and Historical Distortions | |||
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By: Dr.Dipak Basu February 23, 2007 Views expressed here are author’s own and not of this website. Full disclaimer is at the bottom. 
Feedback(The author is a Professor in International Economics in Nagasaki University, Japan) The intellectuals of India today derive their recognitions and rewards because of their pro-Western attitude. As a result what should be a gigantic celebration for 150th anniversary of the India’s First War of Independence or what the British called “Sepoy Munity” is now reduced to arguments and counterarguments between politicians and historians about the specific version, which should be acceptable to them. Some historians of India recently are pursuing a policy to reflect and amplify the Anglo-American and Pakistani opinion, which is hostile towards India and the Indian history. The so-called “Sepoy Mutiny” is the latest victim. British historians and their Indian followers like Sir Jadunath Sarkar have tried to prove that the revolt in 1857 was nothing but a mutiny of some undisciplined, uneducated soldiers, who had caused a lot of chaos and destructions but were unconnected to nationalist movement which came later. According to the British, the battle of Plassey in 1757 was a war between the French and the British where the Nawab of Bengal foolishly had supported the French. Similarly, they cannot not see the reason why the Indians who were saved from the ‘thugis’ and ‘sati’ would revolt against the British who did their best to bring civilization to this dark sub-continent. The hero of the so-called ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ Mongal Pandey was described, by Rudranshu Mukherjee a very pro-British historian in his book ‘Mongal Pandey – brave martyr or accidental hero’, published by the Penguin Press, as a drunk, characterless person suddenly under intoxications had attacked his superior officer and he had nothing to do with the uprising of 1857. The same description of Mongal Pandey was there also in various history books written by the British historians (Sir Colin Campbell, Narrative of the Indian Revolt. London: George Vickers, 1858; John William Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War In India (3 vols). London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1878; Colonel G.B Malleson, The Indian Mutiny of 1857. New York: Scribner & Sons, 1891). Although the above description of Mongal Pandey was disputed by Ramesh Chandra Mazumdar (Struggle for freedom, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1969) and many other notable Indian historians, I will not quote from them, as they are already dismissed by the British historians and their Indian followers from Jawaharlal Nehru University( JNU), Delhi University and Aligarh Muslim University( AMU) as “communal historians”. “Sepoy Mutiny” as described by Karl Marx: Recently Sitaram Yachury of the CPI(M) called for a fresh look at the Sepoy Mutiny. But what he has in mind is the JNU-AMU and Pakistani version of the revolt which was first described as the “ First War of Independence” by Karl Marx, as the historians of India could not understand the true significance of that revolt and still in the text books in India we can see only the British explanation of that event. During the revolt of 1857, Karl Marx was writing regularly in the New York Daily Tribune about the progress and the suppressions of that revolt. His description of the Mongal Pandey’s courageous act is as follows: “On the 22nd of January, an incendiary fire broke out in cantonments a short distance from Calcutta. On the 25th of February the 19th native regiment mutinied at Berhampore; the men objecting to the cartridges served out to them. On the 31st of March that regiment was disbanded; at the end of March the 34th Sepoy regiment, stationed at Barrackpore, allowed one of its men to advance (i.e., Mongal Pandey) with a loaded musket upon the parade-ground in front of the line, and, after having called his comrades to mutiny, he was permitted to attack and wound the Adjutant and Sergeant-Major of his regiment. During the hand-to-hand conflict, that ensued, hundreds of sepoys looked passively on, while others participated in the struggle, and attacked the officers with the butt ends of their muskets.” (Karl Marx on 4 August 1857, New York Daily Tribune). Thus, Mongal Pandey was not alone; he was not drunk or intoxicated but he was a part of the Sepoys who could not tolerate any more the continuous humiliations or torture of their countrymen by the British. According to the British historians and Rudranshu Mukherjee Mongal Pandey’s action was unconnected to the subsequent revolt that took place in Meerut much later in 1857. The famous Indian historian Jadunath Sarkar also supported this British view. However, according to Karl Marx, the action of Mongal Pandey was the beginning of the revolt, which spread like bonfire after that incident. Marx wrote, “Subsequently that regiment was also disbanded. The month of April was signalized by incendiary fires in several cantonments of the Bengal army at Allahabad, Agra, Umballah, by a mutiny of the 3rd regiment of light cavalry at Meerut, and by similar appearances of disaffection in the Madras and Bombay armies. (Karl Marx in August 4 1857, New York Daily Tribune). The cause of the revolt was not just religious taboo or superstitions, as the British historians and their Indian agents have suggested, but torture and humiliations the people suffered in the hands of the army of the East India Company. On August 28, 1857, Marx published an article in The New York Daily Tribune in order to show that “the British rulers of India are by no means such mild and spotless benefactors of the Indian people as they would have the world believe”. Marx cited the official Blue Books -- entitled "East India (Torture) 1855-57"-- that were laid before the House of Commons during the sessions of 1856 and 1857. The reports revealed that British officers were allowed an extended series of appeals if convicted or accused of brutality or crimes against Indians. Concerning matters of extortion in collecting public revenue, the report indicates that officers had free reign of any methods at their disposal. Marx also refers to Lord Dalhousie"s statements in the Blue Books that there was "irrefragable proof" that various officers had committed "gross injustice, to arbitrary imprisonment and cruel torture". According to Karl Marx, before this there had been mutiny in the Indian army, but the present revolt is distinguished by characteristic and features. It is the first time that sepoy regiments have murdered their European officers; that “Mussulmans and Hindoos, renouncing their mutual antipathies, have combined against their common masters”; that “disturbances beginning with the Hindoos, have actually, ended in placing on the throne of Delhi a Mohammedan Emperor;” that the mutiny, “has not been confined to a few localities”; and lastly, that “the revolt in the Anglo-Indian army has coincided with a general disaffection exhibited against English supremacy on the part of the great Asiatic nations, the revolt of the Bengal army being, beyond doubt, intimately connected with the Persian and Chinese wars”. “The ‘unorganized peasants’ of India fought one of the most powerful empires in the world to near defeat with limited resources and even more limited training. It is clear that British interference governments and the oppression of the Indian people, religious and economic, created a bloody revolution”. “If there is a lesson to be learned from any of this, it is that a people, once pushed into a corner, will fight for nothing more than the freedom to fight, and live, if not for religion then for their basic right to live in freedom.” (in Marx, Karl & Freidrich Engels. The First Indian War of Independence 1857-1859. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959). Mongal Pandey has initiated that first war of independence in 1857 and he should be respected as such. However, the pro-British historians of India are now doing their best to diminish the importance of both Mongal Pandey and the 1857 revolt. The JNU and Pakistani historians on the other hand is glorifying only the Mughal rulers and the contributions of their followers ignoring the role of the indigenous Indians Conclusion: Pro-Britishand pro-Pakistani journalists and historians of India want to malign and admonish the revolutionaries and important personalities of India, modern, medieval, or ancient. They have taken up the task to satisfy their masters in the West, who as Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan wrote, “… tried their best to persuade India that its philosophy is absurd, its art puerile, its poetry uninspired, its religion grotesque and its ethics barbarous.” [in ‘Indian Philosophy’, Vol.II, Allen& Unwin, London, 1977, p.779]. The historians following the British tradition describe India as an inferior civilization, always poor, always defeated and fragmented. Both James Mill in 19th century (in The History of British India) and Gunner Myrdall in 1970 (in Asian Drama) said that India is a civilization without any quality. According to the British historians, whether MaxMuller in 19th century or F.R.Allchin and Bridget Allchin in 21st century, everything in Indian civilization was borrowed starting with the Sanskrit language and the Aryan civilization, which were both of foreign origin. It is unfortunate that some Indian journalist and historians are propagating for the British journalists and historians to gain favour and the Indian establishment supports them. Yvette Rosser in her PhD thesis, “Curricula as Destiny: Forging National Identities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh" in the University of Texas in Austin, has proved that the source of the recent writings of the JNU-AMU-Delhi historians are the Pakistani textbooks. In India, some recent historians from the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Jamia Milia Islamia, and Delhi University, Satish Chandra, K.M. Shrimali, K.M.Pannikar, R.S. Sharma, D. N. Jha, Gyanendra Pandey, Irfan Habib, Arjun Deva, Musirul Hussain, Harbans Mukhia, and Romila Thaper, are called Marxist historians. However, a closer look at their writings would show that they are not Marxian but loyalist of the British and Pakistani historical traditions, which are anti-Marxist, and anti-Indian. Unfortunately Sitaram Yachury is asking people to follow this pro-Pakistani version of the “Sepoy Mutiny” ignoring version given by Karl Marx. Dr.Dipak Basu
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