1857–2017: The failure of 1857 spurred the idea of India

The basic prerequisite of a pan-India movement was the realisation among the entire population of the subcontinent that they were one and that they had to throw out the British if they wanted to be free. One of the reasons for the failure of the 1857 rebellion was the fact that it was not a pan-Indian movement. The rebel soldiers received local support only in the areas where the local feudals had also risen against the British.

There was, by and large, little resistance against the British in vast areas where the feudals had surrendered their sovereignty to the British or had joined forces with them in 1857. The masses were loyal to their feudal masters and went where they did. The emergence of a larger, all-inclusive and overarching Indian identity was still a few decades in the future.

In feudal societies, the Rani/Raja is the sustainer and protector and the territory that s/he controls defines the limits of the national loyalty of the subjects. It is these feudal loyalties that even to this day inform the sense of country, world, geography and history for vast populations. When unemployed youth and sons of impoverished peasants travel to the mega cities in search of work, it is said that he has gone abroad. Bombay, Bahrain and Britain are all bides (foreign land). This is India 70 years after independence, one can easily imagine how well defined, developed and understood were notions of country, nation and such other constructs a hundred and sixty years ago.

The major centres of the 1857 rebellion were Meerut, Saharanpur, Muradabad, Mathura, Rohtak, Agra, Shahjahanpur, Farrukhabad, Bithoor, Lucknow, Itawa, Kanpur, Jhansi Fatehpur, Allahabad, Azamgarh, Jaunpur, Banaras, Jabalpur, Indore, Neemuch, Peshawar, Lahore, Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Nasirpur, Arinpura, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Aarah, Murshidabad, Behrampur and Calcutta. These centres were located primarily in UP, Bihar and Bengal and a few areas of Punjab and Haryana. Outside of these areas there were isolated and scattered pockets in Maharashtra, MP, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Some Sikh soldiers deserted their units and joined the rebels but these were exceptions rather than the rule.

There were vast territories under the control of “native rulers” and these native rulers were against the struggle for freedom and therefore Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Udaipur, Alwar, Tonk, Bharatpur, Jammu, Himachal, Garhwal, Hyderabad, Mysore Travancore, Cochin, Baroda, Junagadh, Rampur, Gwalior, Bhopal, Kapurthala, Patiala, Dhenkanal, Saraikella, Coochbihar, Rajkot, Bhavnagae, Sangli, Miraj, Kohlapur and hundreds of other big, small and miniscule Rajas, Maharajas, Nawabs, Zameendaars and Thikanedaars sided with the British and the rebellion had almost negligible impact in these areas

The families, the names and even the memories of those feudals and nobles who dared to stand up against the East India Company were wiped out. There were many who had to face this erasure of all traces of their existence including Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, Velu Thampi, Rani Chenamma, and those involved in the Poligar Revolt in the pre-1857 era and Bahadur Shah Zafar, Lakshmi Bai, Nanaji of Bithoor, Kunwar Singh, Birjees Qadr and Zeenat Mahal and others. On the other hand were those who had pawned their fate to munificence of the British, waited patiently for little crumbs like an increased gun salute, a slightly more exalted prefix to their name, a knighthood or some such. Their progeny survives and flourishes, they still call themselves maharajas and maharanis and continue to rule today as members of Parliament, captains of industry, ministers and feudal lords to boot. They still get roads named after them, prefixed with feudal honourifics of Rajmata and Shrimant to name the scions of one family who had refused to help Rani Lakshmi Bai when she needed their help. These are the worthies who played no role in the struggle for freedom and sided with those who had come to loot and lay waste and they continue to rule, a new breed of “democratic” royals perhaps?

Immediately after the suppression of the revolt the hangers on were lining up to receive citations of loyalty even as the new generation of freedom fighters was trying to evolve a discourse that could knit the entire sub-continent into one entity. It is obvious that such a discourse could only be based on the premise of protecting the interests of the widest possible cross section of population, a discourse that rested on the solid foundation of ensuring equal rights and freedoms to everyone. Many among the youth and many elders, groping for this unifying panacea, were themselves not clear about their own ideas of country, nation, history and culture and many harboured rather antiquated and clearly regressive ideas of language, identity and culture. Amidst this chaotic churning there were others who were aware of the major upsurges for democracy and harboured visions of an egalitarian society, these visions had echoes of the republican constitution that Bakht Khan had devised for running the administrative machinery of Delhi while it was held by the rebels.

The ideas that grew out of these mutually contradictory notions were naturally informed by the preconceptions of their articulators. There were in the main two kinds of ideas that sought to imagine the India that will evolve after the British were made to leave.

One consisted of two mirror images presenting themselves as opposed to each other, virtually two sides of an exclusionist idea asserting that nation and religion were synonymous, an idea that the imperialists loved. The articulation of this idea did not come from antediluvian and ill-educated minds, some of those who propounded this theory were atheists and others were known as liberals. Both were intent on cynically milking religion to serve their narrow political interests.

The idea was propounded as Hindutva by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1921, he propounded the thesis that India was the land of the Hindus and everyone else was an outsider and so India should be a Hindu Rashtra. It is another matter that he used to be very active in the struggle for freedom in his early years and had been jailed as well, but by the time he invented Hindutva his attitude towards the colonisers had changed somewhat, he had written several apology letters from prison promising that if he was freed he will stay away from politics and be loyal to the British.

The other face of the coin was Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who built on the facetious myth of the 1,000-year rule of Muslims, spread by all manner of illiterate Islamists and articulated the idea of a Muslim nation in the early 1940s. He started almost twenty years after Savarkar and did not have to work very hard to build his innings since Savarkar had been preparing the pitch for over two decades.

It needs to be remembered that Jinnah was a liberal in his personal life and Savarkar was a self-declared atheist but this did not stop either from most cynically using religion to build their political career and we are even today suffering the consequences of this politics of hate on either side of the divided subcontinent.

There was another vision of a free India; this idea was not informed by an imagined history of ceaseless war between two contending religions but by the lived reality of inclusive co- existence of people, despite phenomenal regional and linguistic diversities and differences of faith and cultural practices.

This idea was born out of the existential reality of people living and creating together on a land nurtured by the inclusive practices of Bhakti and Sufi poets and saints and nurtured by the life blood of the martyrs of 1857 and those who stood with them.

This was the discourse whose warp and weft was drawn from the broad outline of a republican constitution in Delhi in 1857 at one end and the Constitution of India that promised equal rights for its citizens regardless of religion, caste and gender at the other.

The 1857 constitution was prepared, under the leadership of Bakht Khan, for better management of the affairs of Delhi (the manuscript is preserved at the national archives). This constitution envisaged that two representatives of the soldiers, chosen by the soldiers, two representatives of the traders of Delhi, chosen by the traders and two representatives of the citizens of Delhi chosen by the citizens will constitute themselves into a council that would be headed by Bahadur Shah Zafar or his nominee. The council was expected to take all decisions through consensus; the King/nominee could only cast his vote in case of a tie, but did not enjoy veto powers. No veto and the provision of going with the consensus for the King and the commander-in chief, were way ahead of their times.

People belonging to different faiths and creeds had been living together for centuries, but the decision to place one’s life on the line in defence of this way of life was taken only in 1857. This was the year when the people responded to this systematic attack on their inclusive traditions. The united struggle of the people against those who were enslaving them was the cementing factor that brought us together. Thus, began the process that gave birth to an Indian identity and of the Idea of India.

Those who sought to create religion-based identities succeeded in creating Pakistan and are now trying to create a Hindu Rashtra in India as a mirror reflection of the “enemy across the border”.

What shaped us into an independent nation, despite all our diversities and differences was our united struggle against imperialism and the dream of free, self-reliant India that would make common cause with every people fighting for freedom and would stand firmly for world peace. This was the world view that was the inheritance of the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal struggle for a free, secular and democratic nation against those indulging in narrow and sectarian politics of mixing nation and religion and trying to drag India back into an imagined glorious past.

Today 160 years after 1857, it is this heritage that is threatened. This heritage of unity is our identity, before the emergence of this unity, we were mere subjects of feuding satraps constantly jockeying for position and power, compelled to perform unpaid labour for the feudals or to slave for the British in territories controlled by the colonialists.

The decision that we, as a people, have to take is, whether we will allow this legacy of united struggle to fritter away or we will protect and defend this inheritance, because this unity of the people born in struggle is our only identity as Indians.

And it is this unity that is at stake today.

Forty years from now, in 2057, will we still be identified as a modern, progressive, secular nation or will we be trapped in the Savarkar and Jinnah created swamp of the imagined greatness of a glorious past, stuck as deeply as our separated at birth sibling, without a helping hand or a rope to pull us out of the morass of our own creation.

Now is the time to decide.

Sohail Hashmi is a Delhi-based writer and film-maker

This is the second part of the series which looks at how the British used the Mutiny of 1857 to change the religious tone of the country. The first part can be read here.