Advance, not retreat

The building up of tension in anticipation of the verdict of the Allahabad High Court on four title suits claiming ownership over  the disputed Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi site at Ayodhya on September 24 is palpable. In this context, one cannot escape recollecting that on this day — September

 14, 1857 – the British launched their final assault on Delhi, completely routing “the most magnificent city east of Constantinople”. Thus began the notorious divide-and-rule policy that the British adopted to consolidate their colonial occupation and loot of India. A contemporary British chronicler in central India,  Thomas Lowe, during the first war of independence wrote in 1860: “To live in India now was like standing on the verge of a volcanic crater, the sides of which were fast crumbling away from our feet, while the boiling lava was ready to erupt and consume us”.

Further, he exclaimed: “The infanticide Rajput, the bigoted Brahmin, the fanatic Mussalman, had joined together in the cause; cow-killer and the cow-worshipper, the pig-hater and the pig-eater…” had revolted together.

Clearly, such unity as displayed by Indians during 1857-59 against the British could not be allowed if the British were to continue to rule India. The divide-and-rule policy officially began and was later cemented with the partition of the Hindu and the Muslim electorates in undivided Bengal in 1905. The popular resistance to this — the swadeshi movement — laid the foundations for the emergence of the modern freedom struggle.

In a groundbreaking work, Besieged, Mahmood Farooqui provides a rich translation of the archival ‘Mutiny Papers’ for the first time. One can see here that in every statement/deposition made by every resident of Delhi to the authorities against the entry Qaun, we find descriptions such as Ahir, Gujjar, Rajput, Kori, Khatri, Shaikh, Pathan, Dafali etc. Nowhere has a categorisation been made on the basis of religion. In fact, the widely circulated daily, Dihli Urdu Akhbaar, reported that the 1857 rebellion “had been sent by the Gods to punish the kafirs (read British) for their arrogant plan to wipe out the religions of India”. Note the reference is not any particular religion but to all religions of this land.

Full report here Hindustan Times

1857 and the sighs & groans of Delhi

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.

Full review here Hindu

Kavi sammelan to remmeber 1857 martyrs

A rendezvous of popular Hindi and Urdu poets was organised in Noida to commemorate the martyrdom of
freedom fighters hailing from the present national capital region during the 1857 movement.

The 'kavi sammelan' which had patriotic recitals and proses from historic verses, was held at the Ramlila ground last night here and was attended by the young and old from the villages and cities around Delhi.

"A freedom struggle was launched by the freedom fighters from Meerut, Bulandshahar, Ghaziabad and the adjoining areas of the present national capital area on May 10, 1857. They took control of the area around the Hindon river on May 30. Since then, this struggle is called the May mutiny," organiser of the event and President of Shaheed Smriti Sansthan Rao Sanjay Bhati said.

Full report here Zeenews

REVIEW: Operation Red Lotus

REVIEW
Tatya Tope's Operation Red Lotus 
Parag Tope
Rupa
Rs 595
Pp 468
ISBN: 9788129115621
Hardbound

Blurb
Tatya Tope's Operation Red Lotus is a quest to understand the real history of the Anglo-Indian War of 1857. A quest by the contemporary members of the Tope family, which led to the discovery of the dramatic battle manoeuvres of their ancestor, the legendary Tatya Tope, as well as the true import of the war.

Reviews
1857 and all that TOI Crest 
Why would a book on a historical figure – a national hero in the first war of independence – not have a single photo of the man, except for a grainy sketch on the cover? "Because not a single photograph of Tatya Tope is available anywhere. The sketch is an artist's imagination and the only photograph taken by the British in April 1859 can't be real because Tatya had died in January 1859, three months before," says Parag Tope, who is descended from the freedom-fighter.

Parag's "Operation Red Lotus: Tatya and the Anglo-Indian war of 1857" has just been published. He is not a historian and does not claim to be one, but he believes Indian history is too serious a matter to be left to the British. "History is always written with an agenda," says the engineer and MBA who owns a company in San Francisco. Parag worked with five others to research his famous forebear in an attempt to bring out the "truth....We grew up hearing stories about Tatya's life and his bravery from old people in our family but we could not find any of this in history books."

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Reverberations – 150 years later 2nd look
The 1857 war in India, is something that remained an enigma for the last 150 years. For “the public was at the time and for years to come saturated to an astonishing degree with lurid accounts of the uprising, which became the subject of countless sermons, novels, plays and poems, and about which more than eighty novels were written, six appearing in the “peak” year of 1896 alone”.

So, I too was vaguely thrilled to receive a draft copy of the Operation Red Lotus (Red Lotus) by Parag Tope, some 7 months ago. Over the next 2-3 weeks, I went through the book. The first time with more enthusiasm than objectivity. Then came the time to take a 2ndlook look.

This book was an interesting experience. For one it represents yet another attempt to clean up Indian history of colonial detritus.

REVIEW
Tatya Tope’s Operation Red Lotus
Prag Tope.
Rupa and Co
Pp 893
Rs 595.

THIS is an extraordinary book, an unusual and different one in tone and method from the general run of studies published on what the historians have called the Sepoy Mutiny, revolt, rebellion, or the War of Indian Independence. From a different angle, the 1857 revolt has been interpreted as the last bid of the ill-organised, disorderly and degenerate Indian forces to challenge the rising tide of new civilisation that was emerging in the country. The author of the present study, Prag Tope, describes the 1857 revolt as the Anglo Indian War of 1857. The main focus of the study is on the heroic role of Tatya Tope in the revolt of 1857. Tatya Tope waged a war against the British government from the middle of 1857 to 1858, especially at Jhansi and Gwalior. A man of great courage and reckless energy, he was determined to defy the necessities of the situation that confronted him.
From the study of this work, it is evident that a team of researchers were engaged in collecting and compiling the source-material on the subject, which was interpreted and chiselled into shape finally by Prag Tope, "the main architect of the book" who was assisted by his wife Manisha, and other members of the family. A vast array of literature, including the Marathi, English, Persian, Urdu, and Bundeli sources, has been used to construct the traumatic events of 1857-58. A special feature of the book is the inclusion of several short and neat maps, illustrating precisely the Indian and British military encounters of various places of conflict.
The author of this study asserts that an authoritative and important historical work on 1857 has still to be written because the books published on the subject are written from the British perspective, and regrettably, the Indian historians too follow the British line by using the English sources.

Prag Tope makes a strenuous effort to wrestle with two issues: firstly, to rehabilitate the reputation of Tatya Tope which has been sullied in British histography of 1857, and secondly, to challenge eminent historians like RC Majumdar and Surendranath Sen who have berated the national character of 1857. Denouncing the Emperor Bahadur Shah, as a feeble and inert dotard, a small potato, RC Majumdar declared that the 1857 struggle was "purely a mutiny of the sepoys joined last by some discontented elements as well as of the riff raff and other disorderly elements". In his official history of 1857, Surendranath Sen emphasised that the 1857 upheaval was essentially a military revolt, though later, in Oudh and Central India, it exhibited among some people the signs of strong patriotic feelings of national upsurge.

The author emphasised that Tatya Tope was not the Maratha Peshwa Nana Sahib’s aid-e-camp or the superintendent of his kitchen, but his Dewan, a mentor and guide and an undaunted military genius. From his several military encounters with some of the top-ranking British military officers, it is clear that in his battle with them, he took no rest himself and gave none to others. His military operations were secret, prudent and rapid. Surendrath Sen acknowledged that Tatya Tope inherited the natural instinct of his Maratha race for guerrilla tactics. His lightning speed, his daring and tactical skills formed the essence of his military genius. He knew the terrain—the hills, the forests, the valleys, and the rivers—and made the best use of them in his battles with the adversary. Even when he retreated, he drew new resources from adversity.

Full review here The Tribune