The Uprising of 1857 has triggered strong sentiments and spawned lively debates. It has been a subject of scholarly concerns and impassioned invocations, a site of spectacular clash of snarling half-truths and eager political appropriation. If, in the aftermath of the Uprising, the field was almost exclusively occupied by the victorious British, the nationalists grabbed it later with no less alacrity and passion, and this resulted in yet another historiographical divide.
There have, however, been sophisticated departures from the established divide in the overall or specific contexts of the event, but Mahmood Farooqui's book on Delhi in 1857 is at once brilliant and unique in that it gives us a poignant immediacy and feel of one of the sites of the Uprising. The reader is parachuted, as it were, into the besieged city to experience the trauma the people went through in those tumultuous days.
ASPECTS
The book presents, for the first time, an English translation of the Mutiny Papers on the siege of Delhi in 1857, originally written in Persian and in Shikastah (cursive) Urdu. They represent three aspects of the Uprising: the way it affected the common people; the manner in which the Uprising was organised and managed in the besieged city; and the way Maulvi Baqar, editor of Dehli Urdu Akhbar perceived the events. The documents unfold the overlapping nodes of authority under siege: the Court, the Commander-in-Chief, the Court of Mutineers, and the police that were constantly struggling to maintain order in the face of refractory loyalties of the mutinied soldiers and their intrusive and plundering instincts and habits, and grappling with shortages of food, money, paper, and gun powder, not to speak of the eroding morale and increasing desertions.
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