On the Rebellion of 1857 A Brief History of an Idea Colonial arguments about 1857 largely centred on the nature of India and the way it should be ruled. For their part, Indian arguments after independence were similarly debates about Indian nationhood. These debates continue to the present: was there a multicultural polity in place or a monocultural identity at work? The various arguments on the nature of 1857 as also history of the idea of a rebellion are also in a subliminal sense a debate on identity and developing a nationhood. PETER ROBB Eric Stokes commented on the heat of reactions even in the late 20th century to the rebellion of 1857-58. He referred to the notorious scene of the massacre in Kanpur, the well down which victims were stuffed, and the site of a memorial from which Indians other than Christians were barred until independence. It was then replaced by a bronze effigy of Nana Sahib’s general, Tantia Topi. This “singularly tasteless and vicious reprisal” was curious evidence of the power of symbols, according to Stokes. The memory of European dead was desecrated while more numerous Indian victims of British atrocities went without memorial. For both India and Pakistan, Stokes argued, the rebellion had become “the formative violence of their national history, the proof that colonialism had been withstood even unto blood”.1 Is this why the revolt is still so prominent in the popular imagination, in India today as it was in Britain in the later 19th century? I suggest that the key aspect is that it is regarded not just as a mutiny in the Indian army and an uprising in regions of India but as an Indian revolt against the British. “Indians rose against East India Company rule”, according to one recent historian.2 It is said without reflection. The rebellion was thus a crucial stage and expression of two nations in making. This essay is about the characterisation of the revolt. Definitions matter. States are built from sentiment and loyalty as well as from self-interest and force. Of course technological and material changes are important to the creation of nations, but they act on the ways people see themselves and their ability to combine. Conditions and understanding are shaped by economic and political power, but the processes are complex. Nations develop (as do labour relations and the mode of production) not only from the logic of capitalism but also because of resistance, protest and law, which are expressions of ideas and experience. Put another way, there is the power of capitalists or politicians or generals, but also the power of context, organisation and rhetoric. These are distinct forms that interact.3 To return to the subject of this paper: the great rebellion of 1857-58 was crucial largely because of its impact on perceptions and terminology. It was – another point from Stokes – one of a wave of revolts from Europe in 1848 to Taiping and Nien after 1858; but all they had in common was failure.4 The Indian uprising mattered greatly because British rule was restored but would have mattered much more if the British had been thrown out of India. Its material consequences were minor by comparison with its impact on the mind.5 I In the 1890s H G Keene (of the Indian Civil Service, 1847- 1882) wrote a history of India for students and colleges. It was produced by W H Allen and Co, “Publishers to the India Office”.6 It blamed the mutiny and revolt on over-ambitious changes introduced by Dalhousie, policies that challenged the “two main classes of the Natives” (Hindus and Muslims) who though not uncivilised were “at an earlier stage of human development” and thus found the “ideas and practices of Christendom …unintelligible”. Hindus objected to attempts to curb the polygamy of “certain classes of Brahmins” and feared for the corruption by English ideas of young babus in Bengal. Muslims were alarmed at the deposing of the Nawab of Awadh, the threats to Delhi, and the loss of elite employment; they ignored the sage advice that under Islamic law they were neither required nor permitted to rebel against the British. (This infantilising of Indians and the listing of their “irrational” prejudices were hackneyed well before the rebellion.) Keene then acknowledged the multiplicity of more material motives in 1857. Soldiers objected to their conditions and especially to overseas campaigns. In Awadh, Henry Lawrence faced a combination of the high and low, offended by the annexation, injured in their property and privileges, or suffering hardship as a result of discharge from the army or loss of trade after the demise of the court at Lucknow. But the verdict was that interference had been the problem, unlike in areas still ruled indirectly through their own chiefs. Keene then celebrated British military prowess, and the loyalty of the Sikhs. He cited some benefits of the victory such as an end to the Court of Directors, reorganisation of the army, the final expulsion of the Mughals. He offered both an historical analysis and a prospectus for successful British rule. It should be indirect as far as possible but firm and conducive to loyalty. Keene did recognise the importance of sentiment. As well as the immediate loss of life, the interruption of business, and the financial burden, he considered there were major long-term costs from the “suspension of all good feeling between the European community and the Native population”.7 In the classic early histories Kaye too had drawn attention to a broad and deep alienation from British rule, while Malleson (apart from savagely attacking Canning’s “weakness”) advanced an elaborate conspiracy theory.8 Many contemporary officials blamed disaffected Muslims; and later that friend of Pakistan, Ian Stephen (among others) attributed a decline in Muslim fortunes to their consequent victimisation by the British.9 Saiyid Ahmad Khan made his initial reputation among the British by rebutting this supposed Islamic perfidy, while echoing those who blamed British incompetence. On the other hand, another contemporary official, Charles Metcalfe, thought Muslims too clumsy to plot whereas Hindus had a “genius for conspiracy”.10 Muslim responsibility had been assumed from their alleged violence and fanaticism while Hindus were thought passive and fatalistic. In time rather more officials came round to Metcalfe’s view as they faced Hindu protesters and revolutionaries, and sought to make allies of the Muslims. Even in the 1920s, Al Carthill (the pseudonym of B C Kennedy, ICS) was convinced there had been a Hindu revolt in 1857, fomented out of the brahmanical supremacy that had arisen among the Marathas and that later would inspire those Hindu nationalists who reacted against western rule and knowledge. By Carthill-Kennedy’s account, the rebellion was an early part of “a secular war with the west” that would eventually grip both Hindus and Muslims.11 Whatever the butt of the accusations, in such colonial histories we find the familiar tropes of contented and ignorant dupes led astray by cynics or fanatics, and of secret combinations among opponents unknown to the British. They were not devised in 1857, and are arguably inherent in the attitudes of all governments. But certainly the many accounts of mutiny and revolt gave them credence and publicity. Elements were repeated many times in a wide range of different situations during colonial rule. They were applied, we may note, particularly to religions as units of political analysis and fitted neatly with stereotypes about Indian religiosity. Other colonial writers were concerned to minimise or explain away disaffection among Indians. These conclusions too had their roots in current policy and attitudes. Rice Holmes thought he “ought to reserve his detailed narrative for events of historical importance”. The choices he made are plain to see. His much re-printed book, first published in 1883, was called in full A History of the Indian Mutiny and of the disturbances which accompanied it among the civil population.12 The title says it all. Holmes concluded that the mutiny could have been prevented by better treatment of the army, better discipline, and a higher proportion of European troops. But once the army had rebelled “no power on earth could have prevented quasi-rebellious disturbances”. Just as the “lawless and tyrannical barons” of twelfthcentury England took advantage of King Stephen’s weakness and later chafed against the strong and just Henry Plantagenet, or as London “thieves and roughs” would foment a “violent outburst of crime” if the police were to mutiny, “so would the talukdars, the dispossessed landholders, the Gujars, and the ‘budmashes’ of India have welcomed the first symptom of governmental weakness as a signal for gratifying their selfish instincts”. In short, government weakness would promote self-interested rebellion anywhere, and this one (we note) was created by disappointed lawless nobility and opportunistic criminals. There was more infantilising here too: some of the rebels, wrote Holmes, were like “schoolboys who, though prepared to reverence authority, must find a vent for their inborn love of mischief when they feel that their master is powerless to control them”.13 Then, shifting his ground, Holmes admitted that there might have been some civil resentment, but stated that if so it was by the few over measures taken to protect the many. Thus, in some late 19th century British accounts it was no longer acceptable to think that undue interference by Dalhousie and Canning had stirred up feelings and caused a popular rebellion. The duty of government to promote improvement had been too often proclaimed. The problem in 1857 had been insufficiently stern and effective control, and the opposition of old elites that had deserved to be dispossessed. That shrewd well-connected conservative official Harcourt Butler quoted Sir Alfred Lyall: “The wild fanatic outbreak of 1857 was reactionary in its causes and revolutionary in its effects. It shook for a moment the empire’s foundations, but it cleared the way for reconstruction and improvement.” Pausing only to reflect on Indian autocracy and potential for sudden violence, Butler thus moved on rapidly to the “moving language” of Queen Victoria’s conciliatory proclamation (1858).14 At first sight a French commentator and admirer of the British empire seemed to combine these opposing British perspectives in another study of the rebellion, published in English a little before Keene and Holmes. To Eugene de Valbezen the outbreaks in 1857 could be attributed to latent indiscipline in the army and a “mad panic produced by the spirit of caste” – a mixture of “passion and weakness”. He thought the most remarkable thing about the British empire was its imposition by so few upon so many, when the British unlike the Mughals had attempted no social connection with their subjects. The Indian empire could be personified as a British master who preserved his nationality and exclusivity, separated by “an impassable barrier from the natives he has despoiled”. Even modern civilisation had “passed over the soil of India without making any impression in it”. Nonetheless the revolt was not nationalistic. The Hindus felt jealousy or even hatred towards their foreign rulers, but “in this strange land patriotism does not exist, the feeling of nationality, of independence finds no echo in the population”.15 So it seems that de Valbezen was a child of the revolution who equated nationality and liberty, and also a disciple of the assimilative project of empire undertaken by the French. He did not see the signs that an appreciation of aspects of “modern civilisation” by wealthy and educated Indian elites would help the British to remain in India for generations to come. Nor did he give weight to the fact that British rule was not sustained or sustainable only by the small mainly European body of men who formed the Indian Civil Service and the officer corps of the army. II Among Indians, parallel or related differences of view were also closely connected to underlying attitudes to issues of the day. The most heated debates concerned the nationalistic character of the revolt. V D Savarkar famously dubbed it India’s first war of independence; later his followers appropriated it for a Hindu history. Savarkar justified violent resistance, noted Hindu- Muslim cooperation in 1857, and rejected “Muslim domination”.16 After the transfer of power, S B Chaudhuri and R C Majumdar had a celebrated tussle over whether or not it was a popular uprising. Their exchanges summed up the range of meanings attributed to the rebellion in the early years after independence.17 Their significance will be discussed later. Different aspects were also contained within the conclusions of S N Sen who found that there had been a spontaneous revolt from all sections of the people. He admitted that law-breakers were not necessarily patriots. He studied the multiplicity of actions and motives that combined in the rebellion. He agreed that “the conception of Indian nationality was yet in embryo” and that there was “no conception of individual liberty” either. Given the brutality on all sides, this was certainly not a war between civilisation and barbarism. Nor were Indians pitted against Europeans, because there were at least 20 Indians for every European on the Company side, combatants as well as camp-followers. However, Sen asserted, there was nonetheless a “main movement” that was a popular revolt of a “national” character. The historian was struggling with the patriot, and at first the patriot won. He decided: “No dependent nation can for ever reconcile itself to foreign domination”. Then the historian rallied: “The educated Indian at first had no faith in armed rebellion, and the failure of the revolt confirmed him in his conviction. He placed his hopes in British liberalism.”18 Hope thus deferred presumably prepared for the partial fulfilment that was the active but mainly non-violent opposition led by Gandhi. Abul Kalam Azad, in his preface to Sen’s book, wrote with a deliberate balance that summed up the spirit of his cohort of Congress leaders.19 It was, he said, now time for objective history. The rebellion ought not be a matter of political polemic, as it had been when it was claimed to be a war for the lost privileges of the nobility. Rather, he declared, Indian national character had sunk so low that no agreed leadership could be found to unite the people. Disjointed protests faced an organised and cohesive foe. Even Tantia Topi fled to Maratha territories expecting protection and was hunted down in the forests after being betrayed by a friend. Azad did not need to add that, since then, the Congress had shown Indians how to mobilise and resist. Yet even in 1857 (he also remarked, with an eye to the present and the personal and to Hindu chauvinists that undermined his rejection of propaganda) there had been remarkable cooperation between Hindus and Muslims, and deep residual loyalty to Mughal suzerainty. The British overthrow of Mughal rulers and lack of respect for Indian susceptibilities had fired the rebellion. At the time Azad was president of India. He did not need to worry when he contradicted himself. General crisis theories have basically believed in a clash of cultures. If not over religion, then it was (following the famous account by Buckler)20 a struggle for political legitimacy. Charles Metcalfe, anticipating de Valbezen, claimed to recall a growing disaffection as British authority was extended with “a cold, unyielding hand”.21 Some have proposed a broad economic dislocation. However, that is complex and controversial. Stokes emphasised the Company’s caution. Bayly and others identified economic and political continuities well into the 19th century. Even among those who believe in significant British impact, there was no unanimity about the damage caused by Company and colonial rule. Morris and McAlpin made often-challenged assumptions about the impact of markets and the nature of the colonial state that implied an improvement (at least after the 1850s) rather than a decline in general well-being.22 By contrast, Michael Mann’s stimulating study identified major economic, social and ecological damage in north India even from the early years after British annexation, and an agricultural transformation carried on by cultivators who had to exploit the land beyond its “natural capacity”.23 The real problem, however, is not in showing economic or other general motives for the rebellion. It is that people who feel aggrieved have a choice of how to act. There may be passivity, avoidance, individual or group protest, political organisation, or insurrection. Common actions require not only a common purpose but generalisable means and understandings. Were these evident in 1857? Stokes sought particular explanations for peasants by studying the varying details of their agrarian experience. It does not matter greatly to the argument that he concentrated on peasant uprisings and neglected the rebellions to the east and in Awadh.24 His great contribution was his penetrating analysis of the material and local bases of the revolt in many areas. His arguments were of his time (and place, in Cambridge), when self-interest was placed above ideology, just as historical processes outranked “great men”.25 Yet the cases analysed by him, augmented by others, show that the uprising was not a coordinated event or even a related set of events. Rather it was a mass of separate happenings and responses that fed off each other. The extent and longevity of revolt related more to group cohesion than disadvantage.26 Stokes need not be understood as implying that Indian people had no ideas that shaped their experience, but only that such mentalité was not very generalised. The vivid diary of Munshi Jeevan Lal, who was “so terrified” at the mutiny of the army that “his heart almost ceased to beat”, supports the accidental and impromptu character of the revolt in Delhi.27 Markovits uses the cliché of the prairie fire to describe the spread of the revolt. But a veritable cult, he asserts, has grown up around two now-legendary figures, the unassailable Tantia Topi and Lakshmibai, rani of Jhansi.28 There is still a reluctance to think through the implications of Stokes’ work. No serious historian believes the myth of unity among all Indians or even all Hindus that legitimised, in advance, the struggles for independence. But Stokes’ findings sit uneasily with popular and much scholarly understanding. Sen’s “main movement” remains to this day a primary defence against him, while Stokes shows us instead that, in the main, 1857 was not a movement expressing generic interests, even though there may well have been common grievances. But it is being described as a general movement every time we talk of Indians and the British, or Hindus and Muslims. III The colonial and nationalist debates have a surprising amount in common. Both were ahistorical when they reached a level of generality. As said, the stereotypes in the images of 1857 were of two large opponents, Europeans and Indians, and of two components within India: Muslims and Hindus. We know that both are misleading. But both remain fundamental to almost all studies of the rebellion, and certainly are taken to be axiomatic in all popular accounts, both in India and in Britain. Let us consider them in reverse order. The second stereotype, that of Hindus and Muslims, has been much discussed and the ground need not be covered again in detail. Clearly Indians in 1857 did not obviously comprise the “two main classes” identified by Keene. By this I do not mean that there was no recognisable Islamic sentiment or practice, or no long traditions of brahmanical and kshatriya, or shaivite and vaishnava – or for that matter anti-caste – culture. Identities were re-imagined and re-focused in modern times, not invented. Actions throughout history had depended on very general allegiances across differing classes and regions. I have made this point about the so-called Wahhabis,29 and it is evident in other popular, religious or political movements of the 19th century. General religious sentiment is also to be found among some of those participating in the rebellion. But what Eric Stokes showed was that the larger communal and social categories, much favoured when he was writing, and often adopted by subsequent polemicists, did not work very well to explain behaviour in 1857. There is an odd ambivalence about advancing such ideas. The understanding of Hindu and Muslim as belated categories of power comes with faultless postcolonial credentials from Foucauldians and others who exaggerate the extent to which allegiances and categories were invented. However, it carries a disreputable colonialist tail. On one hand, there is the journalist and author Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) and his extraordinary attack on Hindus, Gandhi and the “fascist” Congress, written before the fall of Hitler. He began with the standard denial that “Indians” existed and nearly 200 pages later reached his apotheosis in an interview with Jinnah, Asia’s “most important man” and the “most competent to solve” one of the world’s greatest problems. Jinnah had told him that Indian Muslims’ outlook was fundamentally different and often radically antagonistic towards the Hindus because they were “different beings” and there was “nothing in life that linked” them together.30 On the other hand, one might consider the liberal imperial apologist, Edwyn Bevan, who typically justified empire by the service it provided to India, while also condemning the lack of imagination in Englishmen when it came to encouraging Indian advancement. He believed in the “simple-hearted content” of the millions of Indians. And he also saw a great barrier not just in the big communal divisions, but in “all that disintegration of India into little societies with their few common interests”.31 Any insistence on India’s disunity has unfortunate echoes, therefore, of all those Englishmen who excused their empire with an infuriating air of superiority – as if it was more than just a conquest to keep out the French and keep the natives quiet. Thus they hark back to the comparative social history of Henry Maine, with civilisations at different stages of development. Bevan imagined that, however “deplorable the interior condition of a foreign country might be, an English statesman would not be likely to propose to his people to annex [it] out of pure philanthropy”. 32 From Bevan’s own example we might say that few English statesmen in possession of an empire would refrain from proclaiming their altruism. However, I have written elsewhere that this liberal agenda had its advantages for India,33 and now compound the offence by denying that Hindus and Muslims operated as fully unitary categories in 1857, let alone as great battalions fighting in a common cause. It then follows that the first stereotype of the rebellion as a conflict between nations is equally suspect. Here we come back to the “main movement” of irreconcilable national resentment. Could it have been a matter of race, after all? I do not underestimate the ferocity of the rebellion and its suppression. Violent animosity was expressed in the massacre in Kanpur and in the barbaric destruction wreaked by the returning British forces on foe and bystander alike. Rage was also directed on all sides against religious buildings and other symbols of opposing systems or ideologies. Many writers, from the very first, referred to deep distrust of British rule. Mainodin Hassan Khan’s narrative, in Metcalfe’s translation, claims that the English were “regarded as trespassers” from the first. He attributed the disaffection to Indian oppressors rather than the poor, and believed that there had been a conspiracy.34 There is also much evidence of cultural misunderstanding or race hatred in the contemporary European press and in later memoirs and tales. Canning’s “clemency” was despised by many of his countrymen, who agreed with Holmes that the rebellion had been produced because the British had been weak not overbearing. But, even without the detailed evidence of the nature of local revolts that has now accumulated, it seems wrong-headed to regard the rebellion as a widespread reaction against the British because they were foreign. Rule by outsiders (or people of different kind) was the norm rather than the exception in India, and had been for many hundreds of years. Today it may be possible to think towards a common culture and certainly a common allegiance, but in the 1850s even more than now there were multiple cultures and loyalties. Was this “modern” rule under Dalhousie and Canning really more generally intrusive or more offensive for northern India than its predecessors – even its Company predecessors in Madras, Bengal and Bombay? Rulers annoy lots of people all the time, and the Company certainly irritated many in north India in the 1850s. But there is little evidence of a general revulsion at its alien character – more than there had been to, say, Vijayanagar or the Deccani sultans or Aurangzeb or Portuguese Goa or Tipu Sultan. Did those ‘sipahis’, whose families may have been serving the Company for generations, suddenly decide at Meerut that they objected on principle to taking the coin of the ‘firinghi’ or ‘mleccha’? Did the poor cultivator in Awadh reject the new rule as foreign (as opposed to illegitimate) even supposing he had understood the annexation of 1856? Markovits, attributing the defeat of the rebellion partly to British ruthlessness, writes that ‘certains éléments indigènes, sikhs et Gurkha (soldats népalais)’ played an important part in the British victory.35 Were they traitors? What did it mean, in 1857, to be indigenous or Nepali? For the rebellion to have been a reaction against “foreign” rule, the two sides would have needed to be “Indian” and “British” or “Hindu”/“Muslim” and “European”. Ethnicity has to be at the heart of any so-called “Indian” revolt against “British” rule. But this was not a war between races, though its viciousness was portrayed as such. Nor was it a war between advanced and backward civilisations. The fact that the rebels were not “Indians” is the real message of Stokes’ revisions about the nature of the uprisings and their motives. At a superficial level this is obvious because of the participants: the mix of supporters and enemies of the British within most of the obvious social, religious and political categories and in different regions, alongside the large numbers who held aloof or changed sides or followed a narrow self-interest. What of the “British”? One cannot simply forget the aforementioned Sikhs and other indigenous combatants, or the Bengalis who had migrated upcountry with British rule and in some cases became victims of the revolt. Metcalfe noted that “Amidst the bloodshed and violence there were found natives loyal and true, whose minds remained unaffected by the madness of the times”.36 Again, everyone knows this and forgets it. Ignoring evidence is the way of legend. It is the impulse that in Attenborough’s film Gandhi depicted a composite Indian government as a full table-load of pompous and braided Europeans. History relates that it contained three well known Indians but that would have spoilt the story. It would have confused the dramatic simplicity of the image – arguably (I do not deny) its dramatic truth. In 1857, too, the rebels’ opponents were not “British” if many different kinds of people fought with the returning armies or sustained the government in the rest of the subcontinent. Many Indians whether from loyalty or common humanity also gave succour to European and Christian fugitives. If popular and even scholarly history glosses over these inconvenient complications, that tells us more about the afterlife of the idea of the rebellion than about the rebellion itself. IV What were the consequences of this characterisation of the Mutiny as a conflict of communities and nations? To put it another way, what was the context of the heated debates about the nature of the rebellion not only among the European rulers but among Indians soon after independence? Reasons for the British colonial debates have already been suggested and are too obvious to need further elaboration. I will not pursue here the representation of the revolt by Hindu nationalists. But more can still be said about the Indian reactions. There were two models of modern nationhood presented to India during colonial rule. They are not usually separated, though they have been implicitly by scholars of international law, for example by James Crawford in a volume discussing the extension of the concept of rights. He advanced a thoroughly intermingled definition of the state as the “social fact of a territorial community of persons with a certain political organisation”. But he then went on, drawing on Sieghart’s definitions, to distinguish between rights relating to sovereignty and rights relating to the continuity of groups.37 Similarly, the first concept of the state that I identify is based around territory. It was reinforced by claims to sovereignty through regulation and policy, and by notions of national interest and state responsibility.38 It produced citizens of the land and the law. It was potentially multicultural. Heterogeneity of class and culture was immaterial to this nationalism because of the common place of birth, the common allegiance to a state, the common subjection to rules, and the common involvement in a national project. This nationality was constructed from actions, jurisdictions and benefits defined within bounded space. As Sugata Bose put it, “modern colonial empires drew heavily from the model of European nation states in their centralised structures and unitary ideologies of sovereignty, and they bequeathed these to postcolonial nation states”.39 Nicholas Dirks too has come to recognise that it is not possible to reconstruct Indian understandings of sovereignty in isolation from European debates.40 The second model of nationhood depended on ethnicity and culture. It became important in the history of modern states, especially for its rhetorical force. Here were citizens by type, or the nation as community. It was effectively monocultural. A fundamental homogeneity had to be imagined, regardless of class or other conflicting interests, though of course within perceivable limits and affinities. One touchstone was the degree of constitutional prominence given to the idea of representation. If selfdetermination were the goal, then the “self” had to be defined. Few if any of those participating in the rebellions of 1857 would have understood either of these concepts of the nation, and the leaders would have opposed them. The discrepancy helps explain the history of the rebellion as an idea. In Europe and America, where most of these concepts originated, both elements had tended to come together, but always as a process of linking two distinguishable rationales. In the British Isles there was an imperfect conjuncture between the United Kingdom as a space and the British as a people. The match was better within the constituent states of the union, but at times a necessary commonality was accepted between rich and poor, or Protestant, Catholic and Jew, or Scottish and English. At other times it was fractured. Britain also oscillated between the two models in its plans and laws, sometimes attempting a common citizenship for far-flung peoples in a Commonwealth, and at other times restricting entry to the United Kingdom except for the descendants of former (white) emigrants. In the US the identity of space has predominated so far, because diverse peoples were defined as American by their arrival on shore and their usurpation and settlement of the land, even when they retained versions of pre-existing identities and cultures. It is no accident that when native Americans had to be conciliated they were given “reservations”, or that the majority demand of the excluded blacks (despite the exceptions from Liberia to the Rastafarians or black Muslims) was to have full rights as Americans, as citizens of the republic. To this day, the president must be American-born, and a degree of plurality is assumed within the American way. Germany, however, was a different case. Its unity was created out of hundreds of political units, and so depended ultimately on the Volk, on language and culture. The atrocities of the third Reich were a pathological extension of that logic. Hitler did not demand the integrity of German land and borders; he sought the purity of the supposed German race and its ‘Lebensraum’. Despite that warning, in the later twentieth century the resident ‘Gastarbeiten’ remained “guests”, the East Germans were always part of a putative single German nation, and Russian “Germans” absent for generations and often “deculturated” had rights to “return” and to belong, just like the Germans of the Sudetenland before them. Italians followed a similar path to unity, while Greeks, Czechs, Hungarians and Catholic Irish sought to distinguish themselves from larger units or stronger neighbours. It was as peoples that they demanded to be nations. Palestinians and Kurds too have sought land to express their separate nationalities. The Zionist insistance on Israel, a land for the Jews, was another example of the same idea. The demand for Pakistan and the claims of Hindutva are others. The homeland expressed the people and preserved them wherever they are, which is the mirror image of the citizenry defined and contained by the bounded state. Partition and even ethnic “cleansing” are never too far away with this model of nationality as a people. In south Asia, as elsewhere, the two models or elements coexisted and overlapped. On the one hand, the whole tendency of British rule was towards the creation of a unitary state within borders. In the early years fantasies about place and climate encouraged distinctions between British-born and “country-born” Europeans (though mixed race was also an issue). From the later 19th century, passports were issued to travellers and pilgrims. All residents were “subjects” and their dissent was “sedition”. In the early 20th century the Round Table group and others proposed an imperial federation that included India. At that time Muslims could support Turkey, the Caliph, the Red Crescent, and the ‘umma’ that was the worldwide community of Islam, and yet be Indian nationalists or loyal subjects of the empire. On the other hand, the British were obsessed with religious communities and ethnicities. The first was more important to them than the second, and indeed everywhere nationalities were mostly cultural. Except in the worst excesses of “scientific” racism, such as the Nazis’ vile selection of “Aryans” among the children of occupied Poland, it had to be culture that sorted out the ethnic Europeans. The British had been asserting a single and special British identity for themselves since the 18th century, and from much earlier as English and Scots. The Greeks claimed nationhood from language and ancient history. The Italians did so in memory of the glories of Rome and the Renaissance. The Irish did so from suffering and song. So it was that Greek independence, Italian unification, Irish freedom and also Japanese and later Chinese nation-building were appropriate exemplars for India. It was from such comparisons that many claimed that India could never be a nation because of its plurality and political division. However, Indians too sought histories and characteristics to define themselves. Race, despite Jinnah’s claims, was little more than a confusing surrogate for the affinities of culture and history. The very existence of multiple jurisdictions required Indian nationalists to emphasise history, culture, regional economy and broad geography. The nationalists depended upon the assertion of popular identities within or beyond pre-existing political units, rather than on any one existing state, in their search for national identity. Thus they ran the risk of communal divisions that turned into political boundaries, and also of other secessions (Sikhs, dalits, Dravidians) that were avoided. At the same time, some writers – those we have seen and many others – worked themselves into a fury to disparage Indian character and customs. Here too the obvious response for Indians was to celebrate and revalue culture, and to annex or give new meanings to the past, as when Bengalis celebrated Rajput annals, or Muslims or Hindus praised “their” glorious eras or moments, including their heroic sacrifices in 1857. As in Britain (where imperial and military exploits were acclaimed) this was both a product and a means of creating the identity of community. The balance between the opposing ideas changed over time. The first, territorial mode was dominant in India until about 1920 and the second thereafter. The change of emphasis coincided with the recognition of common interests for “Indians” across the world, from Gandhi in South Africa to his friend C F Andrews in Fiji. Their joint campaign against the conditions of indentured migrants was an early assertion of the importance of the identity of community over that of political territory. The change around this time also was marked by the concession of self-government as a goal for India and the elaboration of national and nationalist institutions and policies: more representative legislature and executives, gradual Indianisation of the army and civil service, membership of international bodies, the enunciation of national strategies for development, trade, and foreign relations. Politicians had to seek out constituencies. Leaders were defined by followers as well as status. Religious symbols proved strong motivators of supporters. In this context, the Nehru Report (1928) sought compromise within an India union, and the Congress proclaimed its secularism, meaning neutrality between religions. But even these moves already acknowledged the political role of religious identity. Similarly, the original notion of Pakistan assumed a loose union and, to put it crudely, hostages on both sides, with many Muslims in India and many Hindus or Sikhs in undivided Bengal and Punjab. But this plural, territorial vision of nationhood was swallowed by the 20th century dogma of self-determination. The boundary commission was told to draw lines according to the majority religions at the sub-district level. It was an incitement to population transfer and murder. By this time the British rulers (though not all of British opinion) had come to believe that “Indians” existed and could be represented by leaders. It followed that there would have to be “India” The Montagu-Chelmsford report (1918) conceded that the Indian princely states had to be incorporated in some way within a single though federal polity. It argued too that territorial constituencies were needed to build a self-governing nation, just as an earlier generation of colonial officials had espoused mass education and local self-government with a promise of building civil society and participatory democracy. These were important steps, partly for pushing back racist stereotypes about who was capable of self-rule, and partly for stopping talk of provincial autonomy, long advocated by some on practical grounds and by analogy with Europe. From the 1930s the assumptions whereby the British had divided and ruled led to talks and conferences among representatives that were supposed to produce a plural national unity, ultimately in a constituent assembly for India. But all these impulses were either inadequate or suppressed in practice. Mass education remained an under-funded dream. Communal electorates were politically expedient. The princely states were kept apart from directly-and then Indian-ruled provinces, an unresolved problem that would cause lasting damage after independence. Thus in the great negotiations towards selfgovernment that dragged on into the 1940s the territorial and the plural declined in significance. The attempt to create the nation as territory was flawed. It is true despite that failure between Pakistani Muslims and Hindus, that plurality remained a firm and necessary goal in India, and efforts to promote it have helped preserve the union. The weakness or ambiguity of plurality in Pakistan contributed to its dismemberment in 1971. On the other hand, India’s position on national identity remains confused. It is notorious that Gandhi was a leader who espoused harmony while valuing and using religion, and who fought to incorporate dalits in an identity that discriminated against them; and that Jawaharlal Nehru was a liberal socialist and internationalist who despised the feudal mindset of religious politics but expressed quasi-mystical reverence for an Indian cultural essence. His annexation of Kashmir asserted territoriality against religious allegiance, but his invasion of Goa proclaimed the supremacy of ethnicity over legal jurisdiction. On the whole, culture and alleged ethnicity still seem the stronger of the two elements. The existence of effective nationwide institutions has been an advantage for India, in comparison with Pakistan, but even in India the role of Hindu-ness and the struggle for linguistic states have signalled the choice of community rather than terrritory as the primary identity. At Partition officials on both sides organised the “repatriation” of prisoners, patients and women on the basis of religion and not birthplace, at the same time as Indian politicians were proclaiming that secularism and non-sectarianism were guiding moral principles of the new state.41 In what would be a contravention of British laws (if they applied in these cases), the Indian government has offered visa privileges to British-born persons of south Asian descent (provided they have “Hindu” names), while giving fewer privileges to other British applicants. On the other hand, confusingly, it required British citizens with south Asian “Muslim” names to prove that their parents were not born in what is now Pakistan. The representation of the rebellion of 1857-58 as an “Indian revolt” provided a myth, a history and heroes, of the cultural or ethnic kind. Sikhs and the many others who fought with the British were thus traitors to their national identity, though this uncomfortable conclusion is glossed over in such accounts. By contrast Queen Victoria’s proclamation, also much noticed by aspirant sectors of the people of India, was an enunciation of the territorial principle and of plurality whereby all subjects of the Crown were entitled to equality of respect and treatment, whatever their creed or race. The colonial arguments about 1857 were thus in part arguments about the nature of India and the way it should be ruled. Indian arguments after Independence were similarly debates about Indian nationhood. They continue to this day. Is there a multicultural polity or a monocultural identity? The answer could be discerned in what happened in 1857-58, whether or not there was a “main movement” that was a “national” rejection of the “foreigner”. I do not say that individuals necessarily recognised what they were arguing about, though some did (such as Savarkar). I suggest the debates were in parallel at a subliminal level. In particular, the afterlife of the rebellion, by posing a conflict of all “classes” between indigenous and alien, or Indian and British, helped forge a necessary history of both nations as identities. Email: [email protected]
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 06:49:39 +0000