Public and Private Tragedies:
Voices of the Indian Mutiny
Bridging the chasm
The Great Mutiny was described by the Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s primarily as a rising against British economic policies. Over the last three years, however, I and my colleague Mahmoud Farooqi have been translating some of the 20,000 Urdu and Persian documents, many previously unaccessed, that we found in the Mutiny Papers section of the National Archives of India. This has allowed the rising in Delhi to be seen from a properly Indian perspective, and not just from the British sources from which, to date, it has usually been viewed.
Exactly the sort of people who usually escape the historian’s net
Glimpses of real life
What was even more exciting was the street-level nature of much of the material, collected by the victorious British from palace and army camp. There were huge quantities of petitions, complaints and requests from the ordinary citizens of Delhi: potters and courtesans, sweetmeat makers and overworked water carriers – exactly the sort of people who usually escape the historian’s net.
The Mutiny Papers overflow with glimpses of real life: the bird catchers and lime makers who have had their charpoys (rope beds) stolen by sepoys; the gamblers playing cards in a recently ruined house and ogling the women next door, to the great alarm of the family living there; the sweetmeat makers who refuse to take their sweets up to the trenches in Qudsia Bagh until they are paid for the last load.
‘Anarchy and injustice’
We meet people like Hasni the dancer who uses a British attack on the Idgah to escape from the serai where she has been staying with her husband and run off with her lover. And Pandit Harichandra who tries to exhort the Hindus of Delhi to leave their shops and join the fight, citing examples from the Mahabharat. And Hafiz Abdurrahman, caught grilling beef kebabs during a ban on cow slaughter, who comes to beg the mercy of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar.
And Chandan, sister of the courtesan Manglu, who rushes before the emperor after her beautiful sister has been seized and raped by the cavalryman Rustam Khan: ‘He has imprisoned her and beats her up, and even though she shouts and screams, nobody helps her ... Should this state of anarchy and injustice continue, the subjects of the Exalted One will all be destroyed.’
A human event
Cumulatively the stories in the archive allow the Rising to be seen, not in terms of nationalism, imperialism, orientalism or other such abstractions, but instead as a human event of dramatic, heart-rending and often capricious outcomes. They also resurrect the ordinary individuals whose fate it was to be accidentally caught up in one of the great upheavals of history.
After all, public, political and national tragedies consist of a multitude of private, domestic and individual tragedies. It is through the human stories of the successes, struggles, grief, anguish and despair of these individuals that we can best bridge the great chasm of time and understanding separating us from the remarkably different world of mid-19th-century India.
