War of Civilisations: 1857 AD

VICE PRESIDENT RELEASES BOOK ‘WAR OF CIVILIZATIONS : INDIA AD 1857

2008-03-10T07:08:00.000-07:00

The Vice President of India Shri Mohd. Hamid Ansari released the book titled “War of Civilizations: India AD 1857” –(Volume I -The Road to Delhi; & Volume II- The Long Revolution) authored by the writer/journalist Shri Amaresh Misra at a function here today. Addressing on the occasion, the Vice President said that writing such a voluminous book is an extraordinary success. Referring to the sources in the book he said that these sources are well-authenticated. He said that 1857 revolt was a revolution which failed because it was not sufficiently organized and many people did not join it. Congratulating the author the Vice President said that he has done a great service to the nation.

The book showcases a West, the West has never seen, an Asia which Asians are unaware of and a story of the ‘Indian Mutiny’ which has never been told before. The whole Asia-Europe conflict gets a new slant. Accessible to scholars, historians, lay readers, students of military adventure and battles, ideologies, action and drama, the story of 1857 resonates with smells and sounds of an Indian caravanserai, the auburn-gray picture of high sounding, Victorian England.

The author Shri Amaresh Misra gave a brief description of the book. Former Ministers Shri K. Natwar Singh and Shri Salman Khurshid also addressed. Many dignitaries were present on the occasion.

Indian Express review 24th February 2008

2008-02-25T01:40:00.000-08:00

150 Years Later
by Bibek Debroy

This is a book of great courage and perseverance. Authoring a two-volume magnum opus of more than 2,000 pages, on any subject, is not easy. Amaresh Misra’s earlier books on Lucknow and Mangal Pandey establish his interest in events centred on 1857. The first volume is better written than the second.

However, this is more than compensated by extensive research. There is also an interesting experiment in the first two chapters of the first volume (concerning Azimullah Khan and Azeezun Bai) of using the fiction genre to describe events. This works quite well, except that the reader can’t always distinguish fact from fiction. But this isn’t an experiment that is repeated subsequently. The Misra propositions can be segregated into a few strands. Some have been established fairly convincingly, others less so.

First, the Mughal state came close to “establishing a mercantile industrial capitalism”, with the pressure for change emerging from a small town and rural economy that clashed against town capitalism led by big merchants and protected by the bureaucracy. This was a clash between two forms of capitalism. The argument thus turns the conventional approach, influenced by the West, on its head. Novelty is no argument against rejecting a hypothesis. Suffice to say that Misra has marshalled enough evidence to build his case. While the proposition isn’t quite proven, it merits serious consideration.

Second, Mughal India didn’t exhibit rigidities of caste and religion. A composite and secular social structure had emerged. It was the British who created communalism.
Third, 1857 wasn’t a simple sepoy mutiny or a civil rebellion. It was much more broad-based than that and lasted well beyond 1857, all the way into the 20th century. It was a war of civilisations. “The conventional view that Indians lost militarily or politically has to be overhauled… Despite everything, Indians could still have won a conventional victory — it was only internal betrayal that probably skewed this possibility.”
Fourth, the number of Indians killed has been under-estimated. Computed afresh, figures represent almost a mass genocide. The Misra estimates are 10 million killed (7 per cent of the population) in UP, Haryana and Bihar alone. Fifth, several post-1947 developments in India and Pakistan can be traced to 1857. Sixth, outside the subcontinent, the 1857 struggle resonates in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America too.

Misra’s political ideology comes across in these propositions. There is nothing wrong with that, unless it leads to subjective biases. “It was the 1857 fear that forced British and Indian liberals, like Dadbhai (sic) Naoroji, to establish the Congress as a safety valve, capable of deflecting Indian revolutionary energies... It is clear that the British left India for they feared another 1857; the reformist leadership of both the Muslim League and the Congress also feared such a prospect — around 1947, a new 1857, would have meant a new, Hindu-Muslim unity — there would have been no Partition.”

Personally, I find that the first four propositions have been far better established than the last two, though the figures can still be accused of being somewhat back-of-the-envelope. However, there is yet another proposition that transcends all these and this is of 1857 being under-researched, with clichéd perspectives taken for granted. “Despite the instance of the chapters bringing forth hitherto unpublished material and a new look at the available, published, primary and secondary sources, 1857 research is still on a preliminary level; at the end, there are more questions than answers.” Against this background, this monumental work can be described as near-seminal.

Literary Review, The Hindu, 3rd February, 2008

2008-02-02T23:32:00.001-08:00

A work of monumental proportions

R.V. SMITH

A goldmine of information for researchers.

War of Civilisations: India AD 1857 (The Road to Delhi and The Long Revolution); Amaresh Misra, Rupa, Rs.2500.

The year 1857 marked a watershed not only in the history of India but of the subcontinent. Call it Mutiny, Revolt or First War of Independence, its impact cannot be belittled. No wonder there is a plethora of publications on it.

To this recently has been added War of Civilisations : India AD 1857 in two thick volumes — The Road to Delhi and The Long Revolution by Amaresh Misra. For those looking for variety in “Mutiny” literature, here is something that satiates both fact and fancy.

The first volume

First The Road to Delhi:

The Battle of Plassey (1757) followed by the Battle of Buxar (1764) put the English firmly on the road to Delhi. A far cry from 1610 when they posed as poor traders in Jahangir’s court at Agra to seek preferential treatment in trading rights in the Moghul empire. How traders became soldiers with territorial ambitions that culminated in India becoming a Jewel in the British Crown is a story of deceit, intrigue and opportunism that acquires the dimensions of a cloak-and-dagger mystery.

Misra highlights all these points painstakingly with the help of documentary evidence, rare photographs and wide-ranging views from Hindu, Muslim, and British sources. He has also brought out the passions, jealousies and ambitions that formed an intricate pattern in human relations in which characters like Umrao Jaan and Azeezun played an emotive role.

The outbreak of the Mutiny, the course it took, the hiding the British got before the recapture of Delhi and Lucknow and other places in North India, the arrest and trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the flight to Nepal of Hazrat Mahal of Awadh and her son Brijis Qadar all this and more is recounted in the two volumes with great detail.

The Long Revolution goes beyond 1857 in discussing the Sanatan Dharma Akhadas and reactions in the Haryana-Doab, Bulandshahr, Ranchi, Bengal, North-east, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, West Coast, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the south and international repercussions in Burma, Russia-Turkey, the U.S. All this goes to show the vast expanse on which the Mutiny repercussions where heard.

There is also a chapter on Islam as undivided India’s freedom struggle ideology. Muslims and Hindus where surely united against the firangis but each had his own narrow interest at heart. One wanted the glories of Moghul rule restored while the other had his eyes fixed on the restoration of Hindu ascendancy (brought down by Ghori after the Second battle of Terain and another big defeat by Abdali at the Third Battle of Panipat).

The “coquettish” Rani wanted her Jhansi back while the peasants and tribals had their own agenda. Turkey, with its ruler as the Khalifa of Islam, and Russia as the Big Bear confronting British hegemony in the Big Game all point to multifarious interests.

And to talk of a Shia-Sunni-Sanatani Republican State in Ayodhya Land was at best an illusion of the Begum of Lucknow. The British tightened their grip and continued to rule India for another 90 years after the uprising.

Medley of skirmishes

Instead of being a War of Civilisations, it was a medley of skirmishes in which the Wahabis wanted a Talibanised State and the Hindus the reinstatement of the Peshwa. The Mutiny was great on promises and short on achievements.

Pious intentions alone do not make a revolution. The whole surmise does not stand scrutiny. It was naïve to expect the firangis to be driven away from the country since they controlled the main ports and the coastline with a powerful navy.

The resultant chaos would have helped them to come back and pursue their policy of divide and rule with a vengeance. However this monumental work is a goldmine of information for which generations of researchers will be grateful.

The Hindu, Sunday February 3rd, 2008

2008-02-02T23:25:00.000-08:00

Indian perspective

Amaresh Misra’s book shed new light on the 1857 Revolt

Amaresh Misra is a film critic turned war analyst. The guy who acquitted himself creditably writing about films most read about, and only a few saw, is busy showing another facet of his personality. He has just authored an unexpected tome on the Revolt of 1857 or, as some call it, the First War of Independence. Amaresh calls it “the world’s first holocaust”. Brought out by Rupa, War of Civilisations: The Road to Delhi and India AD 1857 is not the first time Amaresh is walking down the history lane though.

Interest in history

Having already penned a biography of Lucknow in Lucknow: Fire of Grace and a biography of Mangal Pandey, Amaresh is well equipped. “My first book was on history. My interest in history run parallel to my love for films,” says the Mumbai-based Amaresh, adding, “I always admired the work of historians like Professor Irfan Habib and others, but they don’t ask new questions. My stint as a journalist came in handy. Since 1957, no Indian has written a comprehensive account of the Revolt. Indian historians have done a limited work. In the West Christopher Hubert wrote The Great Rebellion. William Dalrymple has also written. But I always felt the need to write of 1857 from the Indian perspective.”

He speaks like an academic when he speaks about 1857. For fleeting moments though, the cineaste in him comes to the fore. Then he shows the insight of a seasoned media man.

“1857 was the world’s first holocaust, resulting in the loss of an estimated 10 million Indians. The Revolt cannot be confined to just North India. There were widespread risings in Gujarat, the modern-day Pakistan, North Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Bengal, Assam, even modern-day Bangladesh. I don’t know why nobody talks of regional uprisings. No one attempted to put together a pan Indian picture. This book tells the reader that from Gilgit to Madurai, from Manipur to Maharashtra, not one area was unaffected. It was amazingly well coordinated.”

He is not through with surprises. “Contrary to common perception, important roles were played by the likes of Azimullah. In Ayodhya, at the site where the Babri Masjid was demolished, Mahant Ramdas and Maulavi Amir Ali, as well as Shambhu Prasad Shukla and Achchan Khan, two religious Hindus and two religious Muslims, were hanged side by side.”

He reveals that Zafar looked at his subjects as one, irrespective of religion. And in 1857, orthodox Chitpavan Brahmin leaders like Nana Saheb opened their proclamations with Islamic invocations while Begum Hazrat Mahal and Khan Bahadur Khan issued direct appeals to Hindus in the name of Lord Ram and Krishna.

Southern ripples

Similarly, Amaresh reveals that the Revolt had more than a ripple across the Vindhayas. “In Madras, at a place called Vaniyambadi, the 8th Madras Cavalry rose. Elsewhere, led by Thevar-Vellala sepoys, several 37th Madras infantry men deserted. I have discovered that 8th Madras Cavalry revolted in October 1857. It was disbanded but the British suppressed the news. There were desertions from Madras Infantry in Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon.”

Through with the unheard? Wait, there is more to come from Amaresh. “Bahadur Shah Zafar was sent to Rangoon and the Burmese king was deported to Satara in Maharashtra!”

He continues, “Western authors have tended to see Indian characters as caricatures. Stereotypes abound. They don’t care to say that Azimullah was like James Bond. He was sleeping with the enemy but getting information out. He was the mastermind behind 1857.”

Open subject

He believes earlier historians often just reproduced the existing works. “No chapter had been written from the Indian perspective. They did not find the Revolt interesting or challenging. But it is still an open subject.”

So, why did he dare to tread where others had feared to walk?

“Now there is a wealth of information available in Urdu books, Persian records. Then some new British sources have been revealed, confidential files have been opened. It is a historian’s job to look at unconventional data, go beyond the labour report, the road survey report, etc. He has to see the links.

“If a British official was building a road in 1857 in Awadh, he faced a labour crunch. He researched into the labour conditions, made an estimate of the number of people missing resulting in shortage. It was based on his own impromptu immediate census. Everywhere different officials mentioned the same figures.

“I found an interesting document in a general post office go-down in Lucknow where a British officer wrote to his colleague saying he had 20 lakh unopened envelopes addressed to people belonging to Awadh. These people could not be found.”

Painstaking effort

It took Amaresh five years of work to put together this painstaking work.

“I shifted base to Mumbai in 2003 and was involved with a couple of film projects. Around 2004 I realised that 2007 would mark 150 years of the Revolt, so I increased my pace and the film projects went to the backburner. Originally I had a 600-page book in mind. But it kept growing.” And how!

A Clash on the idea of Progress

2008-01-28T22:50:00.001-08:00

Financial Express 28th January 2008

As the massively underplayed, almost invisible 150th anniversary celebrations of 1857 wind down, one may well wonder why a movement that gave India’s erstwhile colonial masters their biggest scare ever, defined almost all their following policies, had such a long memory in oral history been so downplayed? Irrespective of the search for nomenclature defining its nature — mutiny/ revolt/ uprising/ petty bourgeois/ jacquerie — similar movements in other nations have had state-driven, passionate searches to unearth the smallest detail. What was its exact extent — geographically and in its scope? What were its socio-economic underpinnings? Who participated, who reaped the benefits by siding with the British? How many people died in the events of 1857? Why have we as a nation so bought into the British opinion that it was a mutiny? Fortunately most recent studies have debunked that it was just a soldiers’ revolt, but the knowledge has largely been confined to rarefied academic echelons. Amaresh Misra, author of Lucknow: Fire of Grace and Mangal Pandey: The True Story of an Indian Revolutionary, has written War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, a massive 3,000+-page, two-volume tome in which he has claims to make that would at least lead to further debate — 10 million dead, pan-Indian spread, longer-lasting reverberations than usually suspected. Suman Tarafdar summarises conversations with the author. Excerpts:

You do call your book a War of Civilisations?

I want to allude to the current clash of civilisations and go beyond it. The conflict is real, and its contours need to be defined. 1857 saw the British idea of progress clashing with the Indian one.

Did the British fail to gauge the nature of Indian capitalism?

We need to look at 1857 from an indigenous perspective. For India, the elements of capitalist progress were inside its rural infrastructure. While in the West, the city led the villages, it was the peasant-led pattadari system — by which 15-20 gotrabhais held land, in which the peasant and the artisan were integral to the system. The British failed to gauge the nature of Indian systems, and by the Permanent Settlement, destroyed them by reversing the direction of Indian capitalism, converting the talukdars into landowners, making the peasant a tenant and rupturing his links withthe artisan.

How did you arrive at a figure of 10 million dead, a massive jump from previous estimates?

Besides accessing sources not previously accessed, and relying on the labour and road survey reports of the time. A large reason for UP-Bihar belt remaining backward for long was that there was no labour, and the then intelligentsia was killed off. I provide the sources, it is up to others to agree or dispute them.

And the extent is wider than the Hindi belt?

Absolutely. The Hazara gazetteers mention the 55th BNI revolting in Nowshera and proceeding to meet Bahadurshah Zafar’s troops, while Gilgit ruler Gohar Aman was also coming to unite with them. In Gujarat areas the Mehsana and Borada gazetteers also mention vast sections of the state, especially Dahod, Godhra and central Gujarat revolting. The Okha Vaghelas revolted too, and the rare naval battles against the British are here. Then there is the Bhil-Koli uprising in the Nashik belt. Ratnagiri and Aurangabad areas are affected. Areas in north Karnataka, like Raichur and Bijapur had the Ramoshis, later dubbed ‘criminal’ castes by the British, in revolt. The Gond Rajas were Mughalised, and the tribes also sided with the Mughals. The Godavari delta saw Reddi landlords and Gurjar tribals fight together, while the 8th Madras Cavalry revolted too. The four big states that did not revolt were those of the Nizam, the Cis-Sutlej states, Kashmir and Nepal, and they were rewarded.

You see a conscious divide post 1857?

Instead of policies of modernisation followed by the likes of Bentinck, the British went on a conscious mode of orientalising — bringing back old faultlines, which by mid-18th century had vanished. Henry Lawrence gave a Hindu-Muslim-divide speech on May 12, the logic of which is still followed. The process was complex. They created new landlords, consuming classes and castes. They couldn’t do to India what they had done in the Americas, Africa and Australia, wiping out memory. More than a political war, bitter and racially contested, it was also a war to preserve memory.

Lyndon LaRouche lauds Amaresh Misra's findings

2008-01-14T00:30:00.000-08:00

HISTORY: What Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British"

Aug. 24, 2007 (LPAC) One of the tragedies of English-speaking British colonies is that their history under the British rule was written by the British historians, or by those natives who were trained by the British historians. However, it seems the time has come to record history in its true light-- at least so in India.
Amaresh Misra, writing about India's first war of independence in 1857, in his recently published book, In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, said that there was an "untold holocaust" that caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years, beginning in 1857. British-fed historians, claims Misra, have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order.
"It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple and brutal. Indians who stood in their way were killed. But its scale has been kept a secret," Misra told the Guardian in an interview
Misra's calculations rest on three principal sources. Two are records pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed -- either Islamic mujaheddin or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving out the British. The third source involves British labor-force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a fifth and a third across vast swaths of India, which as one British official records was "on account of the undisputed display of British power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days -- millions of wretches seemed to have died."
Misra is right. One of author's close friends lost 17 of his 19 family members at the time because one of them was a senior advisor to the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Indian Express 8th January 2008

2008-01-07T22:56:00.000-08:00

The Gujarati elite comprising ruling class, Mahajans were pro-British

Saurav KumarPosted , January 08, 2008 at 03:17:23

Ahmedabad, January 7 When the country was up in arms against the British in the First War of Independence in 1857, Gujarat, then the land of many princely states, was the only place in the country where a true-blue anti-colonial, anti-feudal peoples movement powered by an alliance of Kolis, Bhils, and Muslims, with helping hands from Khastriyas and Patels, was taking shape.
“Driven by the British polices and the angst of the peasantry with the rulers, it was perhaps the earliest example of social engineering in modern India. It was against the British rule and also against the local rulers and is the one aspect that has largely been ignored in the accounts of 1857. It was an historical alliance that predated the Congress’ much-touted KHAM alliance of the 1980s by more than a century and the real Gujarati Gaurav,” says Amaresh Misra, author of the just-released “War of Civilisations: 1857 AD”, a two-volume, 2,000-page opus that comprehensively spells out the history of 1857 making several startling revelations along the way.
Misra says, “In North India the peasantry and the ruling classes were of the same caste in many instances and they together rose against the Empire. In Gujarat, however, a class conflict was visible. The Gujarati elite comprising the ruling class and the rich Mahajans were pro-British and the peasantry from different castes rose in defiance.”
The most striking revelation in the book is the brutal British response to 1857 as an Indian Holocaust. And in pegging the number of people killed in response top 1857 at 10 million, four million more than Hitler’s extermination of Jews, Misra has ventured where no historian before him has.
He says, “Strangely the number of casualties of 1857, barring Bipin Chandra’s figure of 1.5 lakh, has never been conclusively documented and I wanted to find it. Even 20 years after 1857, British Road survey and labour records mention that they cannot find people to carry out the work. They attribute this to the Sepoy Mutiny as they called it. In the Lucknow GPO, going through old records I found that between 1857 and 1867, there were 25 lakh letters that could not be delivered because the ‘people were not there’.”
Misra, a self-proclaimed Left nationalist, also argued in his book that historians have suppressed the peasant nature of the revolt of 1857, undoubtedly a pan-India revolt in favour of a more elitist narrative. He says, “It was an out an out peasant revolt. It could have paved way for a peasant nationalist form of capitalist development rather than the elite centric one we have right now.”
Coming to the present, Misra says the story of 1857 holds great lessons for the politicians of today.
“KHAM is an historical alliance and it is the only way the Congress can make a comeback here. It was resisted by the elite then and it is being elite today,” he says.
What Gujarat needs is a monument remembering Hamir Khan, Tilayar Khan, Mustafa KHan, Jivabhai Thakor and the other heroes of 1857 and as Misra puts it “feel real proud of them and their heritage

2007-12-22T03:58:00.000-08:00

TEHELKA ARTICLE- SATURDAY 22ND DECEMBER 2007

2007-12-22T03:50:00.000-08:00

‘The elite today are the ones who supported the British in 1857’

Amaresh Misra’s book on 1857 offers startling hypotheses. LAKSHMI INDRASIMAN talks to him about his findings

Your book is massive. What new information have you unearthed?
An all-India picture of 1857, the first war of Independence, I will not call it the mutiny. Its pan-India scale has not been examined in any book so far, everything that happened from north to south and west to east. I wanted to cover the entire nation in one work, including small incidents that happened in Manipur and Nagaland.

What is each volume about?
The two volumes have a timeline. The first three chapters give a background of what was happening in India and in England. The first chapter, ‘A Pathan in London’, speaks about Azimullah Khan going to London to lobby for -- pension. He emerges as a major 1857 leader later. He’s interacting with the top personalities of his age. So I’ve drawn a portrait of Victorian London in 1854 -- Victorian morality, fashion, England’s technological prowess. I've tried to evoke the atmosphere, the way people were living there. And I have contrasted it with the way they were living in India.I have tried to show in the first chapter the growing alienation between India and England after the late-18th century when there were still white Mughals. In India we have Wajid Ali Shah exploring the depths of sensuality, laying the foundation for kathak and the whole school of Lucknow poetry is emerging. A lot is happening in the Indian cultural scene. At the same time in England we have a culture where women are not allowed to eat mangoes in public, where even the legs of the piano are covered lest their sight leads to immoral thoughts. The British didn’t understand Indian culture. They were coming from a very rigorous culture and here we had a sensual, subversive culture that was playing a game of subterfuge against the British.

How?
When Awadh was annexed, Wajid Ali Shah was asked to sign the treaty that would have formalised the annexation but he refused. He didn’t refuse aggressively, but he said he couldn’t sign because he said a treaty should be between equals, because after being deposed I am a nobody. The British were stuck, they were expecting him to accept the treaty and the 12 lakh-rupee annual pension. But the polite refusal sent a very different message to an Indian audience, who realised it as a slight. These are subtle codes of behaviour that the British completely missed but the Indians used to deadly effect. A small example of how Indians were combating the might of British technology and their superior arms -- I have unearthed evidence that Mangal Pandey’s regiment, the 34th BNI, was posted in Awadh in 1856, at the time of the annexation. Pandey pulled the trigger in March 1857. There is evidence that 34th BNI sepoys -- one account says Mangal himself went to Wajid Ali Shah -- wept, kept their weapons at his feet and they told him they were ready to fight for him. He said the time was not right but hinted that he was going to travel to Calcutta, and he was going to use this entire route from Lucknow to Calcutta, meeting Indian soldiers and princes. It is very uncanny because he reached Calcutta just before 1857 happened and he had started in March 1856. He stopped in Kanpur, in Farrokhabad, in Patna -- all these places that later emerged as major centres.

So he was setting some sort of plan.
Yes, three major Indian princely houses were involved -- the Mughal house, the Awadh house, and then Nana Sahib Dipeshwar. There were attempts to reach out to others. There is evidence that others had promised support but later it came out differently.

Is this different from what was previously believed?
It is radically different because no one has ever accepted that there was a plan. And no one has actually researched deeply into the state of the various regiments which actually revolted in 1857. Why is it that the Mangal Pandey incident happened in the same regiment that had gone and wept before Wajid Ali Shah? This for me is a very important connection. But no one has pointed this out. There this other fact, that Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi was a sufi. Akbar had started this tradition, and he used to collect a body of disciples, who later turned out to be the nine gems of the court. After Aurangzeb’s death this had fallen into disrepair, but Zafar revived it. He became the pir but who was the murid in 1854-55? The sepoys posted in Delhi. There are letters being exchanged between British officers expressing concern about Zafar’s intention. Why is he making sepoys murids? I think there is a connection between this revival of the pir-murid tradition and the sepoys marching later to restore him as India’s emperor. Azimullah Khan is sent to London and doesn’t return by the traditional route. He goes to Balaclava to watch the Crimean War. Howard Russell of the London Times, the world’s first war correspondent, meets him and wonders why he is studying British tactics. Russell mentions this in his diary.

Your book is suggesting that the idea of a concerted effort on the part of the Indian rulers has been suppressed?
Absolutely. Their whole idea was to establish a kind of new Indian constitutional monarchy because there was no chance of restoring the old Mughal Empire. It is clear that these princes were trying to win the sepoys over. The sepoys were basically peasants in uniform. There was a democratic spirit in Zafar. As a sufi, he saw himself merely as a symbol of India. After he was restored as the emperor on 11 May, 1857, there are speeches where he says it is the rule of the people that should reign. If a capable leader comes forward I am ready to relinquish my privileges. Now we have a court of administration where the middleclass and the peasants have representation.

Zafar suggested that they abolish the post of the emperor and that the Commander-in- Chief should be the head of the court. But his proposal was struck down and he was asked to continue as emperor. We see signs of Indians trying in wartime conditions to establish a democratic structure that is in tune with the times. The major problem is that British and Indians scholars see 1857 as a feudal reaction. That the British represented modernity and that 1857 was a traditional feudal reaction. I have taken this apart and shown that 1857 was not a struggle between the old and new, but rather one between the colonial new and the indigenous new, two alternative conceptions of modernity. A European modernity and an Asiatic modernity.

The book jacket says, “1857 was an attempt to establish a nationalist path of capitalist development.” What do you mean by that?
A nationalist peasant path is what it should be. There was the landlord path (England and Germany) and the peasant path (France, because of the revolution). So the patidars were the motor of dynamism, of progress and change, and they were suited to the peasant form. But the British saw that their interest lay in extraction of maximum land revenue. They invented European feudalism in India as the Permanent Settlement in Bengal. But they failed when they tried to implement this in present day Uttar Pradesh (UP). That is why present day UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh were so turbulent. That is where they challenged the British till the end.

You say ten million Indians were killed during 1857. Most scholars say it is in hundreds of thousands. How did you arrive at this figure?
I was intrigued that, in any history book, you won’t even find the question how many Indians were killed in 1857. Why hasn’t there been an attempt in independent India to find out? Bipin Chandra, in the NCERT textbooks, says about 1.5 lakh. We can’t ask what the sources are. And he only mentions Awadh. There is no attempt to arrive at an all-India figure. This has bugged me. Sources on this are extremely rare. But then I thought how did they find out how many Jews were killed by the Nazis, how many by Stalin, how many in China by Mao? I saw that western scholars had developed a very interesting methodology where they are looking at the labour reports. So they compare the labour reports from pre and post-Great Leap Forward. I did the same and then I went on to the road survey reports. Every road building report in UP complains that there is lack of labour and the percentage which they give is very interesting. In Awadh, there is 16 reports that say there is a shortfall of more than 25 percent.
At the conclusion of my second volume, I have quoted an officer’s letter who says, I think we have polished off about 25 percent of these black devils. The population of Awadh in 1857 was one crore. In the 1872-census there is a 15-20 percent drop. It is only in the 1902 census that the population returns to one crore. At the GPO in Lucknow, I discovered a godown where I bribed my way in and found a huge number of letters. They were reports by British GPO officers. One report that an officer was writing around early 1870s said that, between 1857 and 67, 20 lakh letters have been returned from Awadh addresses. He says that these people might have perished in the mutiny, because there is no account of them. He is enquiring into what to do with these, whether they should be addressed. I looked for a few letters and they were written in kheti, an early form of Devnagiri. I showed them to a scholar of kheti, and he was shocked because the dates they mention. One was 1859, sent by someone from abroad, writing because he has heard about the gadar. It is a very short letter. And they are sent by gotra-bhais abroad who couldn’t come back when 1857 started. These are major sources. These are the kind of sources that any western country would have jumped at.

Why have these been ignored?
India in 1947, the India that emerged, followed the landlord path of capitalist development. Basically, the peasant path was killed in 1857. It’s a political thing. Every time the question of 1857 comes up, the elites of present-day India become very nervous. The English speaking intelligentsia are very ambiguous. The Guardian of London was ready to acknowledge it, but elite Indians, knowing very well that this story is there, have not even bothered to be inquisitive about it.

Is this because of class?
Exactly. Basically, the elite that gained power, privilege and wealth in 1947, were those who sided with the British in 1857. Make a list of the richest Indians and tell me if there is one guy from UP or Bihar or any of the 1857 regions or any of the communities or castes which fought in 1857. You will not find a Yadav, a Rajput, a Brahmin or a Dalit. You will always find Marwaris, Parsis and Banias. These are the same forces that supported the British in 1857. I come to a very important part of my book where I say it is not only a war of independence, it is a civil war. There was an alliance between the landed and commercial elite against the peasantry. Of course, there are exceptions. There were many landlords that fought against the British, but they are limited to areas where the code of honour was very strong, like Awadh. But again, apart from 2-3 major talukdars that were anti-British from the beginning, they are all under tremendous pressure from their patidars to fight the British. When 1857 erupted, you have an interesting letter from a talukdar, Man Singh of Ayodhya. He fought against the British. But you see his earlier letters, he is writing to them and saying he is their loyal servant and that this is a very dangerous mutiny because, and he uses these words, “peasants have become kings” and that this will ultimately lead to the ruin of the landed class. It exposes the class biases and explains why when the British capture Lucknow, people like Man Singh switched sides immediately.

You talk about how the fighting occurred all over India and over ten years after 1857.
The information is not new but the perspective is. For example, the information that there were major uprisings in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka is generally neglected in 1857 studies. But it was in the old gazettes and regional literature, which was not part of the mainstream national historical discourse. And the reason was this concerted attempt by the British who didn’t want to accept that it was a national war of independence. Till date, they call it the sepoy mutiny. How could they accept that it was a national movement? So they drew this picture that it was only the Hindu-Urdu belt and other areas stayed quiet.

What other areas were involved?
Gujarat is an amazing case, because from 1857-67 there is ten-year guerrilla warfare in Saurashtra against the British, led by the waghers. They led the uprising which was joined in by the lower classes in Gujarat. It is very strange that the same social forces in Gujarat later became the basis of the Kshatriya-Harijan-Adivasi-Muslim coalition. , the subaltern classes were these that were revolting gin 1857. in Gujarat. Behind the rise of the bjp in Gujarat, the early financers were the same states that sided with the British. There was major fighting in 1857 in and around Godhra. The Muslims there led the kolis and the bhils against the British. And in 2002, you see the kolis and bhils being asked to attack the Muslims. In central Gujarat there were Rajpital, Lonawala, Soondh, Chota Udaipur -- four states, all with the British and their scions were the ones that financed the BJP and the erstwhile Jan Sangh.

What is their common interest?
It is a class interest. To me, the BJP represents the forces of British feudalism -- a kind of feudalism the British invented. BJP’s fascism emerges from there. A class driven fascism which uses the communal ideology to effect a divide in the Hindu-Muslim unity which actually played a revolutionary role in Gujarat.
Godhra was one of the two major centres of Gujarati rebellion in 1857. Koli-Bhil-Muslim alliance, with some Patels against the princely states that were mostly Jadeja Rajputs. All these areas where the princes sided with the British became BJP areas. It is uncanny. And the Muslims houses, such as the Muslim house of Junagadh -- he was one of the strongest supporters of Jinnah. These two ideologies that have played a divisive role in India – the Muslim League and the BJP – they have their roots among the Indian elites who supported the British in 1857.

The skirmishes continued for years after the supposed end.
There are some accounts that the last bullets were still being fired in 1885. Gujarat, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh -- all these areas kept on fighting. This is a grey area. Nana Sahib vanishes from history in 1859. No one knows what became of him, but the last letter which he wrote to the British -- which I have reproduced in my conclusion -- mentions specifically two things. It denies all responsibility for the Kanpur massacre, for the deaths of women and children, which was blamed on him. In Chapter 12, I prove that the British might have done the job themselves and put the blame on Nana Sahib. Because I have discovered a diary by a British spy that speaks of a British conspiracy.

Returning to Nana Sahib’s letter, he says he did not commit those murders -- it was your people who did that. And he also says that I have the honour of fighting a power like you and I will go on fighting, I will not surrender. And this is where the letter ends. This is where the saga of Nana Sahib disappears from the pages of history. But you have Nana Sahib’s emissaries touring India till the late 1860s. And you have this record of what the British call the post-1857 conspiracy in Marathwada in central India, and that there is a Nana Sahib hand in all these things. Also the Madras army regiment was posted in Singapore, Hong Kong and Burma. The British have denied that there were any disturbances in the Madras regiment. I have shown that there was a mutiny in the 38th Madras Cavalry, there were widespread disturbances in other Madras regiments, especially in Singapore, Hong Kong and Burma where the 12th and 37th Madras Infantry were stationed. There were major desertions and skirmishes there. I just wanted to capture the scale of the whole thing.

What new find surprised you the most?
The ten million figure. And this ten million figure is not just a figure that warrants the term Indian Holocaust, I also pose the question were we ever defeated? When you commit a massacre of this scale and then you obscure it, this is not a conventional battle. There are so many conventional battles that the Indians won. But there was a holocaust, a massive massacre of Indian civilians by British troops and Indian troops working for the British. When Indian sepoys saw this was going on, they changed tactics. There was a major fight between the Manipur Raj and the British in 1891, and there are British sources that say that there were some sepoys from 1857 in the Manipur army in 1891. So a large section of the sepoys after the massacre just dispersed and were present in various post-1857 peasant uprisings, like the Deccan rising of 1875. I am just an individual, so I can’t research everything, but despite writing such a voluminous work, I am still left with questions.

What has been missing from 1857 accounts till now?
They haven’t freshened and updated their perspective. They are still talking about the same old things. They say readers are not interested , but I have produced this big work and I am patient enough to wait for people to read it. I didn’t want to repeat Christopher Hibbert or Saul David who summed up 1857 in 500 pages.

What is the most important thing to remember from 1857?
The most important thing is the way the British colonised India and the way we threw up this great anti-imperialist struggle. This is still relevant because what we are seeing after the collapse of the Soviet Union is an attempt by America to recolonise the world in a way. For me 1857 offers a good understanding of the way the western colonial mind works. And the Indian moneyed elite is still colluding with these forces. I have also warned that the Indian peasantry has memories of 1857, and it is still an emotional issue in the current scenario where in an alliance with foreign capital, Indian corporate capital is trying to take over our national resources in a manner reminiscent of the 19th century. The forces which resist that takeover are still there and still active. I see a kind of backlash, similar to 1857, building up. To me there is more than a little coincidence that the forces that are supporting the Maoists in central India, are the Gonds, the premier fighting force in 1857.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 50, Dated Dec 29 , 2007

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10 million people killed in 1857 India: Guardian Article

2007-12-14T22:53:00.000-08:00

1857 mutiny revisited

India's secret history: 'A holocaust, one where millions
disappeared...'
Author says British reprisals involved the killing of 10m, spread over 10 years

Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi

Friday August 24, 2007
Guardian

A controversial new history of the Indian Mutiny, which broke out 150 years ago and is acknowledged to have been the greatest challenge to any European power in the 19th century, claims that the British pursued a murderous decade-long campaign to wipe
out millions of people who dared rise up against them.
In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an "untold holocaust" which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857. Britain was then the world's superpower but, says Misra, came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India. Conventional histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied
the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order, claims Misra.
The author says he was surprised to find that the "balance book of history" could not say how many Indians were killed in the aftermath of 1857. This is remarkable, he says, given that in an age of empires, nothing less than the fate of the world hung in the
balance.
"It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple and brutal. Indians who stood in their way
were killed. But its scale has been kept a secret," Misra told the Guardian.
His calculations rest on three principal sources. Two are records pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed -either Islamic mujahideen or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving out the British.The third source involves British labour force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a fifth and a third across vast
swaths of India, which as one British official records was "on account of the undisputed display of British power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days - millions of wretches seemed to have died."
There is a macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. In one incident Misra recounts how 2m letters lay unopened in government warehouses, which, according to civil servants, showed "the kind of vengeance our boys must have wreaked on the
abject Hindoos and Mohammadens, who killed our women and children."
Misra's casualty claims have been challenged in India and Britain. "It is very difficult to assess the extent of the reprisals simply
because we cannot say for sure if some of these populations did not just leave a conflict zone rather than being killed," said Shabi
Ahmad, head of the 1857 project at the Indian Council of Historical Research. "It could have been migration rather than murder
that depopulated areas."
Many view exaggeration rather than deceit in Misra's calculations. A British historian, Saul David, author of The Indian Mutiny, said
it was valid to count the death toll but reckoned that it ran into "hundreds of thousands".
"It looks like an overestimate. There were definitely famines that cost millions of lives, which were exacerbated by British
ruthlessness. You don't need these figures or talk of holocausts to hammer imperialism. It has a pretty bad track record."
Others say Misra has done well to unearth anything in that period, when the British assiduously snuffed out Indian versions of
history. "There appears a prolonged silence between 1860 and the end of the century where no native voices are heard. It is only
now that these stories are being found and there is another side to the story," said Amar Farooqui, history professor at Delhi
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University. "In many ways books like Misra's and those of [William] Dalrymple show there is lots of material around. But you have
to look for it."
What is not in doubt is that in 1857 Britain ruled much of the subcontinent in the name of the Bahadur Shah Zafar, the powerless
poet-king improbably descended from Genghis Khan.
Neither is there much dispute over how events began: on May 10 Indian soldiers, both Muslim and Hindu, who were stationed in
the central Indian town of Meerut revolted and killed their British officers before marching south to Delhi. The rebels proclaimed
Zafar, then 82, emperor of Hindustan and hoisted a saffron flag above the Red Fort.
What follows in Misra's view was nothing short of the first war of Indian independence, a story of a people rising to throw off the
imperial yoke. Critics say the intentions and motives were more muddled: a few sepoys misled into thinking the officers were
threatening their religious traditions. In the end British rule prevailed for another 90 years.
Misra's analysis breaks new ground by claiming the fighting stretched across India rather than accepting it was localised around
northern India. Misra says there were outbreaks of anti-British violence in southern Tamil Nadu, near the Himalayas, and bordering
Burma. "It was a pan-Indian thing. No doubt."
Misra also claims that the uprisings did not die out until years after the original mutiny had fizzled away, countering the widely held
view that the recapture of Delhi was the last important battle.
For many the fact that Indian historians debate 1857 from all angles is in itself a sign of a historical maturity. "You have to see this
in the context of a new, more confident India," said Jon E Wilson, lecturer in south Asian history at King's College London. "India
has a new relationship with 1857. In the 40s and 50s the rebellions were seen as an embarrassment. All that fighting, when Nehru
and Gandhi preached nonviolence. But today 1857 is becoming part of the Indian national story. That is a big change."
What they said
Charles Dickens: "I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that
appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race."
Karl Marx (below): "The question is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India
conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton."
L'Estaffette French newspaper: "Intervene in favour of the Indians, launch all our squadrons on the seas, join our efforts with
those of Russia against British India ...such is the only policy truly worthy of the glorious traditions of France."
The Guardian:
"We sincerely hope that the terrible lesson thus taught will never be forgotten ... We may rely on native bayonets, but they must be
officered by Europeans."

2007-12-14T22:47:00.000-08:00

Hey guys Pick up your copy from the nearest Book Shop- "War of Civilizations: 1857 A.D" by

Amaresh Misra

1857 was an epic confrontation of race and politics between the colonial new-Western secular-positivism now in alliance with Western Christianity and the indigenous new, the forces of peasant-aristocratic Asian capitalism and modernity. Till today it remains the only event, which gives a glimpse of lost possibilities of a non-western, free, unfettered Asiatic personality and development. It outlines in detail the machinations and mindset of Imperial-liberal fundamentalism, its promise of liberty turning into a nightmare of oppression and cruelty.

Amaresh Misra is a specialist in modern Indian history, written from a new, indigenous Asiatic perspective. Within Indian history, Misra is considered an expert on 1857, the first war of Indian Independence, also called the 'Indian Mutiny', by British historians.
It is in 2 volumes-- an amazing sight!

Happy reading!