Jan 18, 1999
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Memories of Mutiny Why 1857 is still obscured by biased accounts. By Salim Al-din Quraishi SPECTRE OF VIOLENCE
Even a self-confessed British sympathiser like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was threatened with prosecution for writing what he considered the true Causes of the Indian Revolt. So one can understand the paucity, even absence, of any source material which could give us the rebels' viewpoint. Under the circumstances, historians have no option but to fall back on British documentation and hope to "read the presence of rebel consciousness as a necessary and pervasive element within that body of evidence". Rudrangshu Mukherjee's latest work focuses on one particular theatre of the war: Kanpur. He provides us with a dispassionate reconstruction of the massacres at Satichaura and Bibighur in Kanpur in 1857, as well as the British retaliatory action after recovering the city from the rebels. Mukherjee had the advantage of access to the Mutiny records of the British Library where he could examine the original manuscript versions of some of the contemporary accounts and compare them with later ones. He proves beyond doubt that Amelia Bennet's "eyewitness" account was actually written with the help of records available to her in 1913. It is in his postscript that Mukherjee seems vulnerable. Without producing any evidence to the contrary, he questions the results of an inquiry into the allegations that British women were raped during the Mutiny. It is also surprising to note the absence of any reference to original material at any of the archive centres in India itself. Nevertheless, the book is quite a valuable addition to the literature of a most volatile and emotional chapter in India's history. |
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Most books available so far on 1857, whether by historians of the
subcontinent or their British counterparts, rely mainly on histories and personal accounts
by Britons published just after the Mutiny. Similarly, almost all important contemporary
accounts of the revolt by native authors -- Muinuddin, Jivan Lal and so on -- were written
either on the request of British officials or to please the government. As such, they can
hardly qualify as independent. 
