Subaltern Consciousness and Historiography of Indian Rebellion of 1857

Author(s): Darshan Perusek

Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 28, No. 37 (Sep. 11, 1993), pp. 1931-1936
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
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Subaltern
of

Consciousnessand
Rebellion
Indian

His
of

toriography
1857

Darmhan Perusek
The subaltern historians' rewriting of history has twvoobjectives: (1) the dismantling of elitist historiography
by decoding biases and value judgments in records, testimonies, and narratives of the ruling-classes; and (2) the
restoration to subaltern groups of their 'agency' their role in history as 'subjects' with an ideology and a political
agenda of their own. While the first objective has yielded some interesting and important insights, the second
has led to results which have been, at best, problemati; and, at worst, tediously neo-antiquarian and remarkably
unremarkable in their banality. These problems derive from the cantradictions and confusions inherent in the
very concept of subaltetnity as a socio/political category.
MY interest in .jhe 1857 rebellion is more
than academic. It has partly to do with
the-story of how my great-grandfather
Baba Karak Singh was awarded a 'jagir'
(an estae and its revenues) by the British
for 'loyalty',in the midst of a 'contagion'
of betrayal and treachery by mutinous
-sepoys (soldiers) and disaffected
landlords, magnates and peasants.
Faithful to his masters, the old man, so
the family legend goes, rode like the wind
on a dark and moonless night to bring to
the officer in charge details of the secret
military plans of the rebels. My greatgrandfather's name does not appear in
any official roll-call of heroes or villains,
pre-independenceor post-independence;
he was too minor a figure, too insignificant to be deserving of such notice by
history. But he was rememberedvery well
by his children and their children for the
ill-gotten land that he left them, which
grewsugarcanethat sharecroppersplanted
and harvested and paid one-third as
revenue to him, and the freshness and
sweetness of which my mother could still
taste in her mouth years later when she
spoke of Baba KarakSingh and his family
jagir. So much for innocence.
But I tell this story less as a confession
of complicity by inheritance than as an
explanationof the initial enthusiasm with
which I read in the early 80s the first
essays in Indian social history by a group
of post-independence historians in
Subaltern Studies Writings on South
Asian History and Society, the first
volume of which appearedin 1982 under
the general editorship of RanajitGuha of
the Research lnstitut; of Pacific Studies
at the Australian National University,
Canberra. "The historiographyof Indian
nationalism". Guha stated in the first
essay in the volume, "has for a long time
been dominated by elitism-colonialist
-elitismand bourgeois-nationalist elitism"
['Historiography bf Colonial India',
Subaltern Studies, Vol 1, p I]-an elitism
which saw the making of the Indian
nation, predominantly,as the achievement

of ruling class ideas, institutions, and

personalities.
What is excluded or, if present,
marginalised,in these narratives,he charged, was the 'politics of the people' which,
in his view, was autonomous and existed
parallel to the domain of elite politics
throughout the colonial period. This was
politics "in which the principalactors were
not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities
but the 'subaltern'classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring
population and the intermediate strata in
town and country"[p 4].
To write history from the subaltern
point of view, as Guha makes clear later
in this essay, is at once to declare-an 'interest' that -is, to confess to the 'contamination'of subjectivityin an enterprise
which makes a point of defining itself in
terms of its disinterestednessand neutrality vis-a-vis the 'raw material' of history
(historicalrecords,eyewitness'reports,census data, etc). It is, in other words, to
make clear the historians' positionality
with regard to the structures of power as
they obtain within a given social formation. Thus, Guha says without equivocation that "the dominant groups will
receivein these volumes the consideration
they deserve without, however, being
endowed wit h the spurious primacy
assigned to them by the long-standing
tradition of elitism in South Asian
studies" [Preface, Selected Subaltern
Studies, p 35, Italics added].
Guha's characterisationof the primacy
attached to dominant groups by traditional ruling class historiography as
'spurious' is, of course, provocative and
intendedto be so. As EdwardSaid observed, "Theirs [the subaltern historians'] is
no history of ideas, no calmly Olympian
narrativeof events, no disengaged objective recital of facts. It is rather sharply
contestary, an attempt to wrest control of
the past from its scribes and curators in
the present, since...much of the past continues in the present" [Foreword to

Selected Subaltern Studies, p viii].

This was heady stuff, really. One knew
that history was biased, that there was no
such things as 'value-free', 'objective'
history, but the rules of the game, so far
as one knew it, involved revealingthe bias
in other historians' work and hiding your
own as cleverly as possible. To confess
your own bias? This was unheard of and
audacious and honest. And this business
of "wrestingthe past from its scribes and
curatorsin the present" this was no mere
fighting the windmills either, for one had
the vague suspicion that notwithstanding
'full-blooded' nationalist reconstructions
of the past, colonialist historiographycontinued to survive,albeit in more decorous
and subdued forms, in the corridors of
Oxbridge. In fact, my reading of Eric
Stokes's The Peasant and the Raj and The
Peasant Armed, necessary and illuminatingreadings,for any scholar of the
period, later proved that such forebodings
were no chimera of my mind.
This explicitly combative stance of the
new historians was in itself a promise of
good things to come. What seemed equally promising was a serious corrective, by
their insistence on the importance of the
cultural dimension of social life, to the
'lacks' in the already existing tradition of
'history from below' that is, of some
strandsof Marxist history.Early Marxian
history, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and
Eugene. D Genovese observe, was committed less to recording the totality of
social life than to the classes that contended for state power,and its major contributions to history lay in its documentation
and chronicling of this struggle in its
economic and political aspects. Social
history, rather than being a history of
social life in all its multitudinous aspects,
thus tended to be a history of organised
labouror the history of the socialist movement and, as such, "it could, by its
manifestation of names, dates, and
generously sprinkled initials, rival a
history of monarchs or of bourgeois
political parties".They conclude correctly

Economic and Political Weekly September11 1993

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1931

that a socialist sensibility,of itself, "could

not suffice to. break through the methodological hegemony of accepted historical
practice,' ['The Political Crisis of Social
History' in Fruits of Merchant Capital:

Slaveryand BourgeoisPropertyin the

Rise and Expansion of Capitalism,p 180].
It is this methodological hegemony,
insofar as it continues to foreground
economics and marginalise culture, that
subaltern historians, drawing upon
and
linguistic,
anthropological,
psychological theories and data, appeared
to repudiate, not Marxism itself. Thus,
when Dipesh Chakrabarty,in his study of
the working conditions of jute workersin
Calcutta from, 1890-1940, proposed that
such a study could not stop at the purely
economic but "must push itself into the
realm of working class culture', he
clarified immediately that in insisting on
the importance of the cultural dimension
of worlCingclass history, he was arguing
with Marx, not against him ['Conditions
for Knowledge of Working Class Conditions: Employers, Government, and the
Jute' Workers of Calcutta' in Subaltern
StudiesI, 1983, p 259].
So far so good. We were going to
witness, it seemed, the birth of a true
'history from below' a social history that
would add a new dimension to class struggle by presenting the totality of society in
all its inter-connectedness and density of
emotional, psychological, and material
lifc At a more immediate and personal
level, I was going to see and understand
the Baba KarakSinghs of 1857, those who
saw in the uprising a chance to secure a
place for themselves and their children to
come in the colonial order,as well as those
who, for a variety of reasons, were engaged in a mortal struggle against that order,
those who, for instance, William Russell,
reporterfor 7he Times,saw as he followed
Colin Campbell en route to Lucknow:
"Look! Look! The woods are alive with
men in white running back toward
Lucknow! See that stream of horsemen
rushing towards the Kakraal bridge!"
and the faces close up-"the slight, tall,
dark-coloured Hindu" with the shattered
leg of whom Russell observedwith clinical
interest: "The blood does not show as
much on the dark skin as on the white"
[My Indian Mutiny Diary, p 86]. The
crowds and individuals that Russell saw
were all fighting the colonial power of the
British.Werethey all fighting for the same
reasons? Or did their struggle encompass
a variety of congruent and conflicting
motives?
The promise, I must report with some
disappointment, proved to be brighter
than the actual achievementsof subaltern
historiography demonstrate, for reasons

whichwill be explainedin a latersection

1932

ground before an assembly of 1,700

British troops, with guns and rifles loaded, and a smaller number of Indian
troops. They were stripped off their
uniforms, their boots were removed, and
their ankles shackled.
BRIEF NOrE ON THE EVENTS OF THE
UPRISING
The mutiny broke out the following
evening, with one group of sepoys freeWhat is called the 'sepoy mutiny' by ing the 86 convicted men from the new
colonialist historians and 'the first war of
gaol, and another opening the doors of
independence by nationalist,brokeout on
the old gaol to let out 800 prisoners. The
May 10, 1857, in Meerut, a British cansepoys werejoined by civilians and, later,
tonment about 36 miles north-east of
by men from surrounding villages, armed
Delhi, after a series of telling incidents in with whatever weapons they could lay
Dum Dum, near Calcutta, resulting from their hands on. According to later British
rumours about cartridges soaked in cow accounts, the town was soon in flames,
and pork fat. The most dramatic of such sepoys and civilians looted stores and
incidents occurred on Sunday, March 29, smashed the contents of wineshops. By
when General Hearsey, the offrcer comnext morning, May 11, about 50 British
manding the presidency division, was inmen, women, and children weredead, and
formed by a young lieutenantabout a riot the mutinous troops had marched into
in the Indian lines. The cause of the
Delhi, where they presented themselves
disturbance was Mangal Pandey,a sepoy, before Bahadur Shah, the 82-year old
who seemed to be under the influence of
Moghul king, descendant of the powersome intoxicating drug and was "rampag- ful Moghul dynasty
and now pensioner
ing about with a loaded musket"'shouting of the British, and asked him to assume
to his fellow sepoys: "Come out, you bain- leadership of the rebellion.
chutes, the Europeans are here! Why
Thus began the rebellion which was to
aren't you getting ready? It's for our spread across all the major stations,in the
religion! From biting these cartridges wv north-westernprovincesand in Oudh and
shall become infidels. Get ready! Turnout
beyond, was joined by civilians(peasants),
all of you! You have incited me to do this
and lasted well into November 1859.
and now you bainchutes, you will not
Within a month of the Meerutmutiny,the
follow me!" [citedin ChristopherHibbert, British held only the fort at Agra, a few
The Great Mutiny, p 68].
entrenchmentsat Kanpur,and the residenMangal Pandey was restrained and
cy at Lucknow. Lord Canning, governoroverpowered with the help of a Muslim general, was to writeon June 19, 1857:"In
sepoy, Shaikh Paltu, tried, and sentenced Rohilcund and the Doab from Delhi to
to death. When asked to explain his conCawnpore and Allahabad the country is
duct, he readily admitted he had been tak- not only in rebellion against us, but is
ing bhang (hashish) and opium of lateb utterly lawless. Every man's hand is
but refused to give the names of any per- against his neighbour's, and nothing but
sons who had 'incited'him to mutiny:"Of our presencethere in force and the patient
my own free will". he answeredwhen ask- huntingout and exemplarypunishmentof
ed who had made him do what he had everymutineer and rebel will restorecomdone. Later,during the course of the war, plete order" [cited in Thomas Metcalfe,
all rebels were called 'pandys after
TheAftermath of Revolt:India 1857-1870,
Mangal Pandey. Thus Russell makes the
p 49].
following observations in My Indian
For both colonialist and nationalist
Mutiny Diary "I had a canter about Pan- historians of the rebellion, the primary
dy's deserted trenches" [p 861 and "In all material for reconstruction of the events
my wanderings today I saw only three or of the rebellion and its meaning is the
four 'pandies' in extremis" [p 87].
body of memoirs, journals, reminiscences,
What happened in Meerut on the day histories, and personal narratives that
before the sepoys mutinied also had to do
began to make their appearance even
with greased cartridges and the fear of
before the rebellion was defeated, and
pollution and loss of religion. A parade which swelled into a veritable flood durof the 3rd Native Light Cavalry had been ing the succeeding decades of the 19th
ordered for the morning of the 6th of
century.The entire corpus of this primary
May. When cartridgeswerepassed out, 86 material is the work of British. adof the sepoys refused to accept them,
ministrators, military staff and officers,
despite persuasion or threats by the soldiers, reporters,and civilians who were
brigadier. A court of inquiry was im- in some way connected with or actually
mediately held; the 86 men were tried, participatedin the war. Only one contencondemned, and sentenced to 10 yearsim- porary account by an Indian exists, that
prisonment with hard labour. The
by Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan in his 'An
sentences were read out on the parade Essay on the Causes of the Indian Revolt'

of this paper. I will now proceed to the

events of the uprising itself and the main
contours of colonialist and nationalist versions of the meaning of these events.

Economic and Political Weekly

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September 11, 1993

[1860].The point of view of the rebelssurvives only in the correspondence by rebel

leaders with representatives of the colonial state [e g, Nana Saheb's Ishiahar to
the Queen of England, April 26, 1859] or
in proclamations addressed by rebel
leaders to their followers (e,g, the 1857
proclamation of Khan Bahadur Khan,
nawab of Bareilly, suggesting terms on
which Hindus and Muslims could reconcile their differencesand combine to overthrow the British).The thousands of rebel
sepoys and peasants (who often came
from the same villages or even the same
families) are- present in the primary
material only by their total and complete
silence.
COLONIALIST AND NATIONALIST
HISTORIOGRAPH Y

Interpretation, Frederic Jameson says,

can be construed as an essentially allegorical act, which consists in re-writing
a given text in terms of.a particular interpretive "master- code"; furthermore,this
interpretation is not "an isolated act, but
takes place within a Homeric battlefield,
on which a host of interpretiveoptions are
either. openly or implicitly in conflict"
[Jameson, 'Preface, in The Political Unconscious, pp 10, 13]. The voice of the
Indian rebels being silent in the 1857
uprising, the ideological battlefield was
not, in any sense of the term, a battlefield
at all but an uncontested territory in
-which the allegories of the dominant
group could have free and wide-ranging
play. Thus George Trevelyan,son of the
governor of Madras, is transported,
literally,back to a Homeric battlefield in
the following: "Thereis much in common
between Leonidas dressinghis hair before
he went to his last fight, and Colvin
laughing over his rice and salt while
bullets pattered on the wall like hail. As
in the days of old Homer, cowards gain
neither honour nor safety" [cited in S B
Chaudhari, Exglish Historical Writings,
p 265]. And G B Malleson, the
anonymous author of The Mutiny of the
Bengal Army and later,with Kaye,of The
Indian Mutiny of 1857 [1891], incorporates the victory of the British in the
war into the larger history of British victories: "the spirit that had animated
.Raleigh,that had inspiredDrake, that had
given invincible force to the soldiers of
Cromwell, that had dealt the first blow to
the conqueror of Europe, lived in these
men. It was that spirit born of freedom
which filled their hearts with the conviction that being Englishmen, they are
bound to conquer" [cited in S B
Chaudhari, p 269]. All of this leads to the

of the confinal, indisputablemeanin~g

flict, as allegorisedby an Americanmis-

Economic and Political Weekly

sionary R B Minturn in From New York

to Delhi, by wav of Rio De Janeiro,
Australia, and China, 1858: "Asiatic
courage is of one kind, European of
another, and the former bow before the
latter...lfone thing has been demonstrated
by the recentmutiny,it is the indescribable
moralinferiorityof the Asiatic races"'And
then, like Trevelyan, Minturn too is
transported, not to the Homeric battlefield, but into a kind of ecstasy of
gratitude: "May Heaven bless the British
Nation! May God save the BritishQueen!
Ah Yes!And let every lover of liberty and
civilisation... in our own happy American
say, from the depths of his heart, Amen!"
[cited in S B Chaudhari, p 263].
When the battle was joined by Indian
nationalists, the meaning of the conflict
underwent a radical change. It was now
symbolic of the love of liberty and the
resentmentagainst oppression that burned in the heart of every Indian. In the
centennial publication, Rebellion: 1857,
P C Gupta, author of Nana Sahib and the
Rising at Cawnpore, 1963, writes that
although references to the uprising in
Hindi literaturewere few, referencesto the
economic plunder and exploitation were
many. One becomes aware, he says, in
these writings of a. constant feeling of
humiliation and misery seeping through
all modern Hindi literature,a "feeling of
sorrow that this great land has been
humbled and laid waste by the foreigner".
It is a feeling that comes through, as well,
in the folk tradition, witness the following Bhojpuri song:
The bark of the foreigneris now reeling
The country is sunk in poverty;
In midstreamhis bark reels.
Famineand disease increase in the land,
The clouds of trouble rumble;
In the riverof sorrowthereare fathomless
waters,
The windsof tyrannyblow fiercelyacross
the land.
The ruler-pilotis drunken-mad;
Weappealto him, but he says not a word.
0 foreigner,your boat is doomed;
Your funeral procession begins on the
river!
[from Krishna Deo Upadhyaya Bhojpuri
Gram-geet, pp 383-84 in Rebellion: 1857,
p 233].
Both versions of the uprising follow,
broadly speaking, the same narrativepattern: causes of the uprising, the events of
the uprising itself, and the aftermath of
the uprising. Thus John Williams Kaye's
History of the Sepoy War(3 vols), 1867,
a source book for all subsequent histories
of the war, offers a detailed account of
all the mutinies which preceded 1857,
describes the heavy-handed manner in
which the government tampered with the
pay of the sepoys, criticises Dalhousie's

annexation of Awadh and his alienation

of the Indian elite groups, and points to
economic factors like over-assessment of
land revenue and resumption of old
hereditary grants as causes of the revolt.
Among the cultural factors, he lists as a
prime reason the misguided policy,
resultingfrom a well-intentioneddesire to
disseminate Christian enlightenment in a
superstitious and decadent society, of
tampering with native customs oand
'superstitions'. In the same manner, the
Indian historian R C Majumdar's, The
Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857
[1957],after a chapterentitled 'Expansion
of British Dominions'. lists like causes of
the uprising: ruin of trade and industry,
oppressiveagrarianpolicy, discontent due
to social and religious causes, discontent
due to the administrative system, and
finally,discontent and disaffection among
the sepoys. With some differences in emphasis, the causes of the revoltin both versions cover the same territory, the colonialist being more sensitive to British
sensibilities and constraints, the nationalist more understandingof the rebels'
frustration and anger.
The aftermath of the revolt shows more
striking divergences, with the colonialist
version generally emphasising the
prevalence among the British of reason
and discipline after the 'excesses' of
'naturalpassions' of revengeand demands
of 'blood for blood', and the nationalist
detailing the excesses of the British
themselves. Thus Malleson in his The
Indian Mutiny of 1857, concludes his narrative with the following paragraph
intended to "disabuse the minds of those
who may have been influenced by
rumours current at the period as to the
nature of the retaliation dealt out to the
rebels by the British soldiers in the hour
of their triumph":
I haveexaminedall those rumours-I have
searchedout the detailsattendingthe storming of Delhi, of Lakhnao, and of
Jhansi-and I can emphatically declare
that, not only was the retaliationnot excessive, it did not exceed the bounds
necessaryto ensure the safety of the conquerors. Unfortunately war is war. It is
meetingin contact of two bodies of men
exasperatedagainst each other, alike-convincedthat victory can only be gained by
the destruction of the opponent. Under
such circumstancesit is impossibleto give
quarter...beyondthe deaths he inflictedin
fair fight, the Britishsoldier perpetrated
no unnecessaryslaughter...IPP 405-06].
Nationalist historians tend. to take a
somewhat more lingering and bitter look
at what appearedto have been, from most;
accounts, a somewhat more bloody affair
than Malleson's 'fair fight' would have it.
Thus R C Majumdar,whose history is, in

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1933

fact, far from a celebration of the

rebellion as the 'first war of Indian independence', describes in detail, drawing
upon British accounts, the wholesale
massacres that followed each successive
Britishcampaign in Allahabad, Peshawar,
Cawnpore, Lucknow, Delhi, Jhansi,
Ujnalla, and Gwalior. He quotes, for example, from Lt Col T Rice Holmes', A
history of the Indian Mutiny, and of the
disturbances which accompanied it
among the civil population, 1883: accounts of trials in Delhi by the military
court:
Nativeswerebroughtin batchesto be tried
by a MilitaryCommission, or by Special
Commissioners,each one of whom had
beeninvestedby the supremeGovernment
with full powersof life and death. These
judges were in no mood to show mercy.
Almost all who weretriedwerecondemned, and almost all who were condemned
were sentenced to death. A four-foot
square gallows was erected in a conspicuous place in the city and five or six
culpritswerehangedeveryday. Englishofftcersusedto sit by,puffing at theircigars,
and look on at the convulsivestrugglesof
the victims [cited in Majumdar,p 214].
And from Lt Vivian Majendie's Up
among the Pandies or, a YearsService in
India; 1859:
At the time of the captureof Lucknow-a
season of indiscriminatemassacre-such
distinction [betweenrebel and innocent]
was not made, and the unfortunatewho
fell into the hands of our troopswasmade
short work of-sepoy or Oude villagerit
matterednot,- no questions wereasked;
his skin was black, and did not that suffice? A piece of rope and the branchof
a tree, or a rifle bullet through his brain
soon terminatedthe poor devil'sexistence
[cited in Majumdar,p 2151.
The last words in any battle, however,
belong to the victorious, and in this instance they come from Kayes summation
of the meaning of 1857:
The story of the IndianRebellionof 1857
is perhapsthe most single illustrationof
our great national character ever yet
recordedin the annals of our country.It
was the vehement self-assertion of thie
Englishmanthat producedthis conflagration; it was the same vehement selfassertion that enabled him, by God's
blessings,to trampleit out. It was a noble
egoism, mighty,alike in doing and in suffering...(pp 89-90).
After such resounding triumphalism, the
words of P C Joshi, editor of the 1857
centennial volume, make for poor consolation: "The 1857 heritage played a big
part in giving a particular orientation to
Indian national literature in our various
languages. It has supplied Indian writers
with dramatic incidents of suffering,
struggle,and sacrifice,and noble dramnatic

1934

themes" [Rebellion, 1857, p vii].

HOW THE PASF CONTINUESIN THE
PRESENT, COLONIALSTYLE

Eric Stokes's The Peasant Armed [1985]

is a series of essays on the magnitude and
natureof civil rebellion-the participation
of peasants, that is-in the 1857 revolt.
Stokes, whose life-long professional interest and research in Indian agrarian
society has influenced a whole generation
of Indian and British historians, does not
discount the place of emotion in historical
research.In fact, although observing with
a degree of sadness, the excess of national
resentment which resulted, after independence, in the replacement by Tantia
Topi'seffigy of Marochettisweepingangel
over the well down which "Nana'sminions
had cast the butchered remains of some
200 British women and children"(p2), he
nevertheless maintains that it is almost a
pre-condition of the historian's activity
that the past should remain charged with
emotion. However, he warns "such emotion almost imprisons him [the historian]
within the framework of its own lines of
interpretation"(p 4). The way out of this
prison is through a calm, judicious, and
objectiveevaluationof empirical evidence,
to the gathering of which Stokes devoted
his entire career as a historian. He
sometimes complained, as his editor C A
Bayly reports, "that he was 'ploughing a
lonely furrow' in wrestling with the complexities of Indian tenurial forms..."
(p. 226), but wrestle he did, and the
evidence that he has brought to bear on
his central thesis that the complexity and
variability of social structures and relations in Indian ruralsociety in 1857do not
allow simple answers, is formidable.
But is empirical evidence,in fact, a way
out of the prison of emotion? It would
seem not. Three short passages, all from
the first chapter of Stokes' The Peasant
Armed, illustrate the point. This chapter,
along with the second, was the last to be
written, according to Bayly. In contrast to
the subsequent chapters, which are
analytic and ratherdry, these two chapteis
are narrativein form and charged with an
emotion that belie the 'objective scholar's
declaredneutrality.Here, in Bayly'swords,
"the human drama and the mythology of
the revolt, carefully excluded from the
chapters of secial history, reappear with
drive and conviction" [The Peasant
Armed, p 241J.
They certainly do. Here's how the first
lines of Chapter 1, 'The Military Dimension: British Strategy and Tactics', read:
On Sunday-, 10 May 1857, in that brief
hour befor darkness, when the descending fireballof the sun ignites the Indian
sky in the bloody hues of sunset, men of

the 20th and 11thBengal Native Infantry

brokeinto mutinyat the great militarystation of Meerut.By the time the European
troops... (p 17).
The narrative thus begins, not with an
explanatory analysis of events immediately preceding the outbreak, but with the
outbreak itself, which erupts, in the
absence of any background information,
with the force of a natural cataclysm. I
move now to the next passageon the same
page where, after talking about how the
'mob' quickly, as soon as the sepoys had
broken through the 'restraints of
discipline', began 'plundering and burning the European bungalows and murdering their inhabitants' and, because of the
inability of the European force to pursue
the mutineers(since they had to look after
the safety of the European families) were
able to enter Delhi and suborn the old
emperor Bahadur Shah to their side,
Stokes concludes:
Thus within the space of twenty-four
hours,what began as merelythe latestand
ugliest of a long series of mutinous incidents in the Bengal army had swelled
monstrously into full-scale political
rebellion.Delhi, the capital of the ancien
regime,had assumed the leadershipof a
movementto liberateIndiafrom the white
man's yoke (pp 18-19).
He does not conclude, exactly,because the
next sentence points to what could have
been had the British, even at this point,
been in a position to act faster:
Even then the rebellioncould have been
scotched swiftly as a snake or at least
driven back into its hole. But it was not
until 8 June that the British wereable to
get a forcebehind the walls of Delhi. The
interval was deadly (p 19).
To interpret, as Jameson points out, it
"to restructure the problematics of
ideology, of the unconscious and desire,
of representation, of history, and of a
cultural production, around the allinforming process of narrative...[whichis]
the central function or instance of the
human mind" [Political Unconscious,
p 131. What we have in these opening
passages is the story of "what happened"
and an allegory of "what could have
been". It is a story that could be interpretedas a dispassionaterepresentationof
the sequence of events strung together
with "By the time..." "As soon as...:' "by
ten o'clock...:' etc, were it not for the interpretive words and images that crowd
their way into the discourse. Even the first
paragraph, which may be slided over as
a theatrical piece of rhetoric,4understandable in a scholar who, in his own words,
for so long 'ploughed a lonely furrow,
and, as a professional historian, had to
follow the decorum of professional prose
(academic drone)-even
the first

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total: as Guha notes, this domain co-exists

with that of elite groups and, consequently, bears its marks. But there are, he insists, nonetheless "vast areas in the life
and consciousness of the people which
were [in colonial India] never integrated
into their [the elite groups] hegemony"
['Historiography of Colonial India',
Subaltern Studies, Vol 1, pp 5-6]. Very
likely not, but to make a leap from this
observation to the conclusion that there
exists such a phenomenon as 'subaltern
mentality' is surely a new kind of elitism,
based on discredited and untenable
anthropological theory Furthermore,it is
not just subaltern groups who are 'entrapped', as our historians suggest, in the old
culture of religious beliefs and customs;
the rulingclasses in a specific conflict have
recourse to and deploy beliefs and values
THE SUBALTERNINTERVENTION
from the same source. The question then
The subaltern historians' re-writingof
is, why do the former fail and the latter
history has two objectives: (1) The dis- succeed? Not just because of the 'menmantling of elitist historiography by tality' of the poor, decidedly, but because
decoding biases and value judgments in of the commanding advantage of power
records,testimonies, and narrativesof the the dominant classes possess. In short,
ruling-classes; (2) The restoration to
there seems to be greater emphasis in
subaltern groups of their 'agency', their subaltern historiography on the limitarole in history as 'subjects', with an tions of the mentalityof the poor as a facideology and a political agenda of their tor in the explanationof their failed strugown. The first objective has yielded some
gles than on the fact that they also lack
interestingand important insights as, for the instruments of coercion that their
in Guha'sreadingsof the official
exampmle
adversaries in the struggle own.
recordsof the Barasatpeasant uprisingof
The notion of 'autonomy' furthermore,
1831, the Santhal (tribal) revolt of 1855, while being empirically untenable, also
and the rebeilion of 1857 in 'The Prose leads at times into the kind of embarrassof Counter-Insurgency'[SubalternStudies ing difficulties Gautam Bhadra, for in11, pp 140, 19831.The second objective stance, has to explain awaywhen he makes
has, on the positive side, opened up a v'ast Manulla, a relatively prosperous headarea of research and study generally man, represent in the poem Kantanama
regarded by historians as the proper the culture of the subordinate classes.
sphereof anthropologists, ethnographers, There must have been, Bhadra concedes
and psychologists, e g, the significance of
as an afterthought, "important and inthe symbolic aspects of ritual, of the in- terestingdifferences betweenthe thoughts
stitutionalcodification of religious beliefs, of a poor peasant and those of a Mandal
of the natureof premodernforms of con-s [headman]",and Kantananmconsequentmunication, of the density of everyday ly cannot be made to the 'thought-world'
material life. See, for example, Gyan of the latter. But Bhadra does, nonethePandey's analysis of the religious aspects less, make it do so, by introducing into the
of peasant demands in 'Peasant Revolt presumably 'autonomous terrain' of
and Indian Nationalist: The Peasant subalternmentalitysome elements of elite
Movement in Awadh 1919-22'[Subaltern thought and beliefs:
Studies I, pp 166-85, 19821.
However, it seems to me that we would be
But if this kind of opening up is, on
erring in the opposite direction to think
principle,desirable,and even necessary,its
that there could be no exchange or sharresults, as evidenced by the actual work
ing of ideals or ideas between classes, or
of the subaltern group itself, have been,
that classes, even when they were in conat best, problematic, at worst, tediously
flict, did not learn from each other... The
neo-antiquarian' and remarkably uncognitive view that Manulla had of the
remarkable in their banality. These proworld may easily have been shared, though
not necessarily ^ holly, by a poor peasant
blems derive from the contradictions and
['The Mentality of Subalter nity', Subaltern
confusions inherent in the very concept of
Studies, Vol VI, pp 89-901.
subalternity as a socio/political category.
The first problem has to do with the
The second and even more serious proproposition regarding the 'autonomous
blem has to do with the use of the terms
'subaltern'and 'elite'as descriptiveof conterrain' of subaltern consciousness and
political activity. This autonomy is not
tending social forces w hich are, in

paragraphis saturated with images which

set the stage for the events to follow
("descending fireball". "bloody hues")
and define the character of the rebels and
the rebellion ("broke" into mutiny, like
waters crashing through a dam, and
"fled"' like thieves in the night). The
breaking waters engulf all, the thieves
"murder" and "plunder" and the flood
then swells "monstrously" into full-scale
"political rebellion" to throw off, under
an old king's impotent leadership, the
"white man's yoke' (faint sneer?). Finally (frustrated desire?) the "what could
have been of history" if the "snake"could
have been swiftly "scotched' or (damn it!)
"at least driven back into its hole". So
much for neutrality.

actuality, far more complex than this simple dichotomy would suggest. At no time
in any historical conflict have the material
interestsof the entire spectrum of the ruling elite classes on the one hand, and of
the contending classes on the other, been
identical. Subaltern historians recognise
this, but in their actual analysis, 'subalternity' as a theoretical concept seems to lend
itself more as a description of identity as
an oppressed group rather than differences in degree in the kind of oppression suffered, or the divergenceof interest
within that group once a particularsource
of oppression is removed.
Gautam Bhadra once again provides a
telling example in his 'Four Rebels of
Eighteen-Fifty-Seven'[Selected Subaltem
Studies, 1857, pp 129-75],the objective of
which essay, in the author'swords,was "to
seek after and restore the specific subjectivity of the rebels" (p 175). He begins by
pointing out the 'curious complicity' of
colonialist, nationalist, and radical
historians, including Eric Stokes, in denying ordinary rebels an independent role in
the rebellion of 1857 ("Eric Stokes':
Bhadranotes, "in his otherwise admirable
work on the local background of the
popular upsurge, has also described the
rural insurgency of 1857 as essentially
elitist in character,for the nuss of population appeared to have played [in his
account] little or no part or at the most
tamely followed the behests of caste
superiors", pp 129-30). But who does he
then offer as representative of 'ordinary
people'? A wildly eclectic group, who
seem to have had nothing in common with
each other except their 'subalternity' in
relation to the colonial British: Shah Mal,
a 'malik' (owner, landlord) of a portion
of a village; Devi Singh, master of 14
villages; the tribal, Gonoo, an ordinary
cultivator; and finally, Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, a member of 'a grandee family
of Carnatic. The rationale for grouping
them? Their 'ordinariness'; "It is the
'ordinariness' of these rebels which constitutes their distinction. Devi Singh could
hardlybe distinguishedfrom his followers,
Shah Mal was a small zamindar among
many and Gonoo was a common KoL
Even the Maulvi was hardlya learnedman
and knew only 'little Arabic and Persian"
(pp 174-75). This is surely naivete of the
most extraordinarysort. WasGonoo's interest in opposing the colonial order the
same as that of Devi Singh and Shah Mal?
The alien masters and the native, as far
as Gonoo was concerned, extracted
revenue equally ferociously from his
labour and that of his fellow tribals, did
they not? Bhadra does admit to differences in the social, economic, and
ideological backgroundand orientation of
his four rebels but, he asserts, "pitted as

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1935

they were against the s..me enemy at the seems to have little or no place in this
ed seeds of 'incipient' revolt. The primary
same historical morient, they shared, historiography is the institutions and
question, as the Genoveses insist, is, to
thanks to the logic of insurrection, some structures of power and economic exwhat extent did these revolts and deviacommon characteristics' (p 174). And ploitation which, in their very real and
tions pose a challenge to the ruling class?
wherein lies the source of this bloody exchanges with passive or inThe struggle of the powerless, if it is to
commonality? It lies in "their perception surgent masses, break bones and spirits
have any political significance, must be a
and day-to-day experience of the alien equally effectively.
struggle for changing the structureswhich
Of what political use is Partha Chaterstate in his [the rebel]immediate surrounreproduce relations of power. This redings.." (p 175).And what, finally, is their jees assertion that it would be totally conquires a clear-sighted and rigorous
histonrcalimportance?That they "asserted trary to the subaltern historians' prQject scrutiny by the rebellious forces and their
themselves through the act of insurgency "to go about as though only the dominant
well-wishers alike of the strengths and
and took the initiative denied-to them by culture has life in history and subaltern
weaknesses of their struggle. The
the dominant classes;and in doing so they consciousness eternally frozen in its strucpowerless cannot, just by virtue of their
put their stamp on the course of the ture of negation" ['Caste and Subaltern
indubitably heroic struggles, become subrebellion,therebybreakingthe long silence Consciousness Subaltern Studies VI, jects of uncritical admiration, nor can
imposed on them politically and culturally 1989, pp 206-071 when the only comfort
their cultural achievements, because they
are the achievementsof the oppressed, be
by the rulingclasses" (p 174). Bhadra fails he offers us in his 'own specific projectto ask how landlords and proprietors like the lessons of the failure of the religious
idealised without noting their inDevi Singh and Shah Mal, had they suc- movement of Balaram Hadi in the 1830s adequacies. The Genoveses observations
on Marx in this regard are to the point
ceeded, would have dealt with Gonoo's in- among the outcaste Hadis of Bengal-is
of the presence in Balaram's deviations
terests after the conclusion of the war.
Marx, concerned with political goals,
If a socialist sensibility, as the
from brahmanical orthodoxy of "an imnevermistook socialist demands for proGenoveses correctly observe, does not in plicit, barely stated search for a recogniletarian power for a celebration of
itself guarantee a break. from the tion whose signs lie not outside, but within
previousworking-classpatternsof life. He
could not afford to: as a great
hegemony of elitist historical practices, oneself"? ['Caste and Subaltern Conrevolutionary-committedto changingthe
neither, it seems, does a confused and sciousness'. p 206]. And what political
world and raising the working class to
romanticespousal of the 'people'shistory' significance can we possibly find in Sumit
power,one of his major projects had to
as a history of heroic resistanceby the opSarkar'sexcruciatinglydetailed analysisof
be precisely a ruthless criticism of all
pressed, regardless of their political and the Kalki-Avatar'scase, that for one night,
popularmovementsand classes,especially
materialinterests.Thus the only difference the Chandal (outcaste) Prasanna had not
the working class, in order to help steel
between the nationalist V D Savarkar's only "burst into and taken over a reit for battle. Hence, he had to view any
The irdian Warof Independence, 1857, enactment of the myth by a brahmin
attempt to cover the blemishesor exag(1909) and Bhadra's'Four Rebels' is that, sadhu and a bhadraloC[gentleman] discithe virtue not only as romantic
gerate
instead of the well known figures of Nana ple, he had appropriated bits of it, along
nonsense but as counter-revolutionary
Saheb, lTntia Tope, and Rani Jhansi, we with fragments from epics equally
politics [ElizabethFox-Genovese,Eugene
have those of 'ordinarypeople' like Shah deferential in intent, to terrorise the
Genovese, 'The Political Crisis of Social
Mal and Gonoo who, in terms of class, Doyhata bhadralok and make a wife kick
History' in The Fruits of Merchant
have little in common, but who,. as a husband on the forehead" [The KalkiCapital, p 203].
'subalterns presumably share a common Avatar Bikrampur',SubalternStudiesVI,
The subaltern historian, as a historian of
'mentality'derived from an 'autonomous 1989, pp 52-53].
the 'politics of the people', would do betculture'.
It is not enough for subalternhistorians ter justice to this politics, it seems, if
Subaltern social history, in the final to prove, by recounting 'people's
revolts', he/she were to keep Marx's purpose in
analysis, suffers from the same kind of
that the oppressed have never liked being mind.
'politically anesthetised idealism' that the oppressed, or to show that, when they did
(rhanks to my son Vivek Chibber, who
Genoveses note in the account of liberal not, their deviations from the rituals and
me articulatewhat I intuitively saw,
helped
history of slavery in the old south which,
symbols of the dominant culture contain- but lacked words to express.]
in its celebrationof black cultural achievement in slavery, "abstracts the slave experience almost completely from its
political conditions of incipient violence
and from that work experiencewhich consumed so many of the slaves' waking
hours..', and, in doing so "denies the
decisive importance of the master-slave
dialectic-of the specificity and historically ubiquitous form of class struggle"
Emeka Oliajunwa
[Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D
pp:viii+181
Rs. 180
Genovese, 'Pblitical Crisis of Social
History pp 196-97]. This retreat from
class strugglemakes every act of rebellion
An exhaustive treatment of the subject with adequately supportive facts
by the politically and socially disenfranand figures. Perceptive, illuminating, comprehensive.
chised in a particular historical context
evidenceof one aspect of subaltern 'menAvailable from all leading book distributors/sellers, or direct from:
tality':defiance. And it locates the failure

INDIA-US SECURITY RELATIONS

1947-1990

of this enterprisein the other aspectof

the same 'mentality':the contradictory
impulseof obedienceto authority.What

1936

Manager:

Chanakya Publications F10/14 Model Town, Dellhi-11009.

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September 11, 1993