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The Many Meanings of "1857": Perspectives on the 150th Anniversary
Organizer: Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College
Chair and Discussant: Thomas Metcalf, U. California, Berkeley
Few moments in South Asian or British history hold as many contested meanings as does "1857." Enshrined in many British imperial histories as "The Great Indian Sepoy Mutiny," conversely in Indian and Pakistani nationalist narratives as "The First War for Independence," and in Marxist or Neo-Marxist accounts as class insurgency or subaltern resistance, the 1857 conflicts should not remain so simply represented. This panel, held 150 years (almost to the day) after the fighting broke out, enables us to understand "1857" as the result of complex interactions among many diverse groups in the larger contexts of South Asian, British imperial, and world history.
Each paper presenter and the distinguished chairman/discussant considers one integrated aspect of these events and their conventional meanings. Vijay Pinch closely reexamines the cast of symbolic figures who soon emerged in constructed narratives of the day in order to understand the underlying causes sparking the violence in Meerut. Complementing Pinch, Seema Alavi analyzes larger contexts, embedding the Bengal army in the shifting political culture and newly created "traditions" over the preceding decades. She also looks beyond Meerut to other Indian sites of conflict. Anand Yang will consider jail-breaking as a form of resistance. Michael Fisher expands the framework further, showing how "1857" catalyzed growing tensions among various classes of Indians in Britain and British society into deeper divides based on racial difference. Finally, Thomas Metcalf (who has written on this topic since the centennial commemoration of 1857) will embed these papers in larger historiographies.
Staging the Mutiny
W.R. Vijay Pinch, Jamia Millia University
Despite Meerut’s chronological significance in the unfolding of the Mutiny-Rebellion of 1857, it has received limited attention in historical research and writing. In part this is because the sudden violence of 10 May 1857 at Meerut lacks the dramatic quality of the Massacres at Cawnpore and Defense of the Lucknow Residency. But it is also due to the fact that a close examination of the evidence reveals that the unfolding of the Meerut mutiny was a chance occurrence that, but for a whole host of contingencies, might never have happened. Given that the dissemination of the news of the Meerut killings was central to all subsequent garrison uprisings, this is a fact of no small historical significance. The contingent nature of the Meerut uprising, and of "1857" the event, prompts a reconsideration of the evidence along new lines. When the emphasis on difference, resistance, and insurgency is relinquished, Meerut takes on new significance. Meerut affords a glimpse into the social, religious, and military worlds of the Bengal Army on the eve of the rebellion. The individuals that emerge in the 1858 depositions include a "suspicious fakeer," an "unpopular officer," an "ill-omened orderly," a "Cashmerian girl," and a "wretched cook boy." Together, I argue, these innocuous figures provide the outline for a road map to the – as yet uncharted – middle ground between "colonizer" and "colonized", victor and victim, without which there would have been no British India to mount a mutiny against.
Rethinking Rebel Responses: The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857
Seema Alavi, Jamia Millia University
This paper attempts to bridge the civil-military divide that frames most historical works on 1857. It concentrates on the Sepoy angle of 1857. However, it does not see Sepoy actions as merely a mutiny, that later connected to a larger civilian rebellion. Neither does it see it as one that that derived from an antique military tradition that resisted the advanced technological know how of the colonial powers. Instead, it argues that the Company’s military was very much part of civilian village society and coloured by its economic and cultural referents. Indeed Company recruitment had helped to keep alive not just the primordial elements of this village connection, but also kept aflame the memory of the Mughal Empire itself. Until the 1840s, colonial political culture rested on the strength of these political and cultural connects with the colonized. No doubt these referents were in the process considerably modified and internalized as ‘tradition’. The attempts in the ‘Age of Reforms’ to dismantle this political culture and replace it with something new resulted in the fiercest efforts to defend ‘tradition’. Of course this ‘tradition’ the Company had itself helped construct. It was therefore not surprising that rebel responses derived from what was truly a Company constructed politico-military culture. There was nothing authentically ‘traditional’ in rebel response. The paper looks at important rebel sites- Jhansi, Maratha territory, Rohilkhand, south Bihar and eastern Awadh-to show how rebel responses used and cashed on the symbols, strategies and sensitivities made popular by the Company.
Jail Breaks: Rebels, Mutineers, and Prisoners in Bihar, 1857-58
Anand A. Yang, University of Washington
Jail breaks were a frequent occurrence in prisons all over India throughout the nineteenth century. Invariably, they involved prisoners in small numbers or en masse attempting to break out of prisons, on occasions resulting in violent confrontations with local authorities. In 1857-1858 the pattern of jail breaks changed dramatically. In many prisons across north India the impetus came from the outside as rebels and mutineers broke into jails and liberated prisoners. My paper will examine the dramatic events of the mutiny/rebellion of 1857-58 from the perspective of several jails in Bihar where rebellious sepoys and their local allies freed so-called “dangerous classes” and “dangerous characters” in order to gauge specifically the kinds of alliances that resulted from such actions and generally the extent to which the Mutiny/Rebellion was a popular uprising.
The Multiple Meanings of '1857' for South Asians in Britain
Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College
Some of the larger meanings of the conflict of 1857 were its effects on Indians in Britain. For those thousands of Indians of all classes already present there, the news of this conflict profoundly altered their positions in British society. Working class Indian servants and seamen found themselves assaulted verbally and otherwise by passers-by on the street as "Johnny Sepoy." Their hitherto relatively easy relationships with British men and women of their own economic class became charged with racial and sexual tensions as lurid rumors and reports flooded London about sepoy atrocities against British men, women, and children. Similarly, Indian elites in Britain found their loyalty to the British Queen questioned. For example, the huge delegation from the deposed King of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah—which included his mother, a brother, and a son, having come to plead for his restoration—had to alter their mission fundamentally. As the news of the fighting began to shape British policies, this Awadh delegation suddenly proposed that Wajid Ali Shah be released from prison in Calcutta and put in charge of a British army that would reconquer north India in the name of Queen Victoria.
From 1857 onward, indeed, British attitudes toward Indians generally, including toward Indians in Britain, shifted. British racial theory altered, based on 1857 and other colonial conflicts in New Zealand and Jamaica. Hence, both immediately and subsequently, the events of 1857 reshaped and continue to affect the meaning of being South Asian in Britain.