chakrabarty_ remembering 1857

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Economic and Political Weekly May 12, 20071692

Remembering 1857

An Introductory Note

To discuss the practice of memory and its relations to politics, social scientists

rely on three kinds of practices memorialising, memorising and the act ofremembering/forgetting. The commemoration of 1857 is unique in that officialcelebrations of the event have been instituted even as 1857 continues to refigure inmyths and endures as a symbol of popular resistance. The articles in this special

issue address the seeming contradictions and complexities that remembering1857 involves, and the tension that prevails between different kinds of recall.

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

personal grieving, in families and kin-groups sense of loss andbereavement, both on the British side and on the Indian. Think,for example, of the 250 rebels hanged or some blown to pieces

at the mouth of guns near Peshawar by the orders of ColonelJohn Nicholson in May 1857 or the British prisoners put to deaththe following month in Jhansi by the rebels, details of whichincidents are here reported in this special issue by Kaushik Roy.How much do we know about the history of the pain that theirrelatives would have suffered and about the expression andduration of such pain? Precious little. Not simply because wehave no documents, though there is no denying that documents,if they had existed, would have helped us to produce accountsof such painful memory. The more important reason, it seemsto me, why our memory-practices to do with deeply personalsense of loss challenge historical representation is because thesepractices speak often to a level existence that is better captured

by phenomenological thinking than by the kind of paper-trail thatthe historian routinely chases.

The Italian author Alessandro Portellis remarkable book, TheOrder Has Been Carried Out, gives some examples that mighthelp us to think through the problem.3 Portellis book is a study(mostly) of the wives and children of 335 unarmed and innocentcivilians who were mercilessly gunned down by Nazi occupationforces in Rome on March 24, 1944 in retaliation for a partisanattack on some Nazi personnel the day before. He gives severalexamples of expression of grief where the expression is built intoeveryday practices, leaving no traces for the future historian. Weasked my grandmother, says one of Portellis interviewees, noquestions about this story [to do with the interviewees uncle

killed in the massacre], as we knew it was almost a taboo subjectthat you couldnt touch. I remember that she had this goldenbrooch with my uncles picture, she always kept it pinned to hersuit, so the pain of this story is something that was passed throughto us, too. Yet this transmission of pain was conditional on whatwas described here as a great deal of restraint.4 Or there wasthis case of another mother whose grief was expressed life-longthrough her physical orientation to the world at times of holidays:

Most of the time [she] tried to deny it, and so she thought he wasabroad, she thought he was away. She knew, but she had developedthis neurotic denial of death my grandfather wrote about it insome poems where on holidays she would set the table for him,and when the season changed she would bring out his winter or

T

he 150th anniversary of 1857 is being celebrated in manyparts of India. That is one kind of remembering of thehistorical rebellion. Anniversaries ring of calendars set to

different scales, from the national and the regional to the personal.Calendars mean order, some ordering of national or personal time.There must be an element of unintended historical irony aboutthe process by which popular rebellions or insurgencies thequintessential politics of which is to challenge an oppressive orderby collective gestures of defiance, a phenomenon that RanajitGuha once called negation become domesticated festive dateson a national calendar and cease to act, or so at least the makersof the calendar hope, as an incitement to further rebellion.1 Thisshort introductory essay is built around the tension between thesetwo kinds of recall of the original event: as a recurring, ceremonialdate in the life of the nation and as a perpetual incitement tofuture rebellion.

What is the politics of remembering 1857? To facilitate dis-cussion, I shall begin by distinguishing between three kinds ofpractices involved in the work of memory. I do not claim thatthese three practices exhaust the complex phenomenon of memory.These are simply the practices that usually come under thepurview of the social sciences, while there remain many otheraspects to memory such that scientists study but socialscientists are not trained to speak of them. The three functionsI have in mind are (a) memorialising, (b) memorising, and(c) remembering/forgetting. Both memorialising and memorisinghave to do with representations of the past. The third function that of remembering/forgetting takes us beyond the politicsof representation. To speak in terms that thinkers such as Roman

Jakobson or Roland Barthes once made available, it could besaid that the relation between memorialising and memorising issomewhat akin to that between metaphor and metonymy, whilethe third function, remembering/forgetting, takes memory-workbeyond that of representation. Let me begin by explaining myterms, one by one.2

IMemory and the Question of Forgetting 1857

There is one kind of memory of 1857 that is perhaps nowirretrievably lost. This is the past as personal grief: memory thatwould have expressed itself at the time in numerous acts of


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his summer clothes; so that this agony was revived for those whohad come to terms with the problem of this death.5

Portellis material comes from interviews. But in either ex-ample, we are dealing with expressions of grief, culturally specificin their particularities no doubt, that would have left no evidenceon paper. Coming back to 1857, who knows how the bereftgrieved and for how long. This later forgetting of grief of thesurvivors of the event belongs to the memory function thatchallenges the very question of representation. Without repre-

sentation at a primary level, there is no second or third-orderrepresentation that we usually call history.

If grief presents us thus with a lost object of representation,there exists, it would seem, a critical relation between this lostobject and the object whose representation founds the nation.Take Rabindranath Tagores great novel Gora, serialised firstin the Bengali magazine Prabasi between the years 1907 and1909. The novel is set in Calcutta in the 1880s. Gora, the centralcharacter of the novel, is a child brought up by Hindu-Bengalifoster-parents. In his 20s, he becomes a convert to the stridentlyHindu nationalism that was sweeping across Bengal at the time.It is only towards the end of the novel, faced with a dying fatherwho tells Gora that he has no right to perform sradhha should

the father die, that he discovers suddenly his biological identity:he was not born a Hindu. He was born of Irish parents duringthe tumultuous events of 1857. Krishnadayal, his foster-fathersays to him: It was during the Mutiny. We were in Etawa then.Your mother fled from the sipahis and sought refuge one nightin our house. Your father was killed in the previous days fighting.He was an Irishman. That very night your mother died aftergiving birth to you. Ever since then you have been brought upin our house.6 Krishnadayal offered to tell Gora the name ofhis biological father: His name was . Gora stopped himmidway through the sentence: His name is not necessary. I dontneed to know his name.7

As is well known, it was on this deliberate refusal on Goras

part to know the lost object of his grief on this void thatTagore outlined the condition that made it possible for Gora tobe both expansively and inclusively Indian. Today, says Gorain the last chapter of the novel, I am Bharatiya. Within me thereis no conflict between communities, whether Hindu or Muslimor Khrishtan. Today all the castes of Bharat are my caste, whatevereverybody eats is my food. And he continues in this vein: Ihave taken birth this morning, with an utterly naked conscious-ness, in my own Bharatvarsha. Teach me the mantra of thatdeity who belongs to all Hindu, Musalman, Khrishtan, Brahmo the doors of whose temple are never closed to any person... the deity not only of Hindus but of Bharatvarsha.8 It wasas if only by making the grief of the Irish family (including his

own) unavailable to any order of signs that Gora could bringhis identity as Indian within the sphere of representation.

My conclusion, then, is: we have no memories of 1857. Therewere no doubt such memories once but they died without heirs.Andrew Ward tells the story of William Jonah Shepherd, aKanpur survivor. His nerves were so frayed by the scene ofhis familys massacre that, much though he tried, he could notwrite down his memories for about 20 years, and when he did,he depended on other peoples published papers for accuracy.His descendants barely remembered him. His letters were all lost.The family would never name a child after him for UncleJonah had such bad luck.9 For the Indian rebels, there is noteven this much detail about the complexities of familial grief

and the process of remembering/forgetting that challenge, as Ihave said, representation. Insofar as 1857 is concerned, all wehave, it seems to me, is the politics of memorialising and memorisingthe event, that is to say, the politics, indeed, of representation,of metaphorical and metonymic use of the composite name1857.

The Metaphoric Function of Memorialising

Memorialising has to do with the creation of memorials, tem-porary or permanent. But memorials, as mere objects, cannotperform the function of memorialising. Memorialising happenswhen particular objects associated with someone or some eventwe want to remember, are put in a relationship to certain practicesto create rituals of remembering. Such rituals are usually collectivein nature. A good example is the modern story of Shivajismemorial in Raigad, Maharashtra. Once erected in the memoryof the king who gave the Mughals many sleepless nights, it hadfallen into utter disrepair by the 19th century with a junglegrowing up around it. It was a European writer, James Douglas,the author ofBook of Bombay (1883), who first drew attentionto its dilapidated condition and upbraided nationalists in

Maharashtra for neglecting the memory of Chhatrapati Shivaji.It was then that Ranade, Tilak, and a host of others moved inthe 1880s to petition the government to sanction money for itsrepair and later created special nationalists rituals around thesamadhi.10 By itself, then, the samadhi performed nomemorialising function. It was only through a combination ofits own materiality and (nationalist) ritual activities associatedwith it that the samadhi resumed its status as a memorial.

1857, similarly has left many material traces, from the ruinsof the Residency building in Lucknow, the Memorial Well atKanpur, Felice Beatos photographs, William Simpsonswatercolours, to archival documents that scholars have pored overto produce historical narratives of the mutiny. These relics can

become memorials depending on what use we put them to. And,sometimes, they have indeed performed as memorials. As NarayaniGupta writes:

In the years after 1858, visitors to north India would reverentlyrelive the episodes (of 1857) by pacing them out on the ground,aided by detailed maps and copious albums of photographs. Asthe sites became pilgrim-destinations the concept of monumentused for historic architecture widened to include sacred landscapeslike the Ridge at Delhi and memorials to those who had died in1857-58. Historic buildings like the Delhi fort were invested withnew interest through their connection with the events of therevolt.11

What is at issue is the critical role of practices in making

memorialising possible. Photographs, maps, stories, coupled withthe practice of travel or pilgrimage, could be part of a memorialisingcomplex. Books or even films, as Rochona Majumdar and I havetried to suggest in our essay in this issue, can be grist to the millof memorialising. Surely, the official history of 1857, 1857,written by Surendranath Sen, was issued by the government ofIndia to memorialise the momentous year. Publishing a book tomark the national calendar, creating a readership through jour-nals, seminars and conferences, was indeed to memorialise.

The first step towards memorialising, it seems to me, is to createout of a set of events a second or higher-order representation.This is what I have called the metaphoric aspect of memorialising.Just as Jakobson defined metaphor as the word for word


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connection in language, one could say that to attempt to makethe events of 1857 stand for a larger, coherent theme is to createa metaphor out of these events: i e, to make these events representsomething beyond their immediacy. This is where this presentissue, at one level a memorialising enterprise marking the 150thanniversary of 1857, also takes a critical stance on anniversaries.For many of the essays collected here critically engage themetaphoric function that gives an anniversary its representationaldrive. Peter Robb questions many of the larger metaphors that

have subtended scholarly and amateur interest in the subject: themyth of an Indian revolt and colonial arguments that made1857 into a ground for debating the nature of India and the wayit should be ruled. Sabyasachi Dasgupta similarly questions thetendency to look on 1857 as a peoples revolt though KaushikRoy makes the events of rebellion an instance of the idea ofpeoples war that he sees as part of an emergent global historyin the middle of the 19th century. Aishwarya Lakshmi andSwarupa Gupta both delineate and critique colonial and Bengali-nationalist attempts, respectively, to render 1857 intelligible byproducing out of it larger narratives about the feminised landscapeof India (wanting to be colonised) or a space for reconfiguringthe nation. Barlow and Subramaniams detailed discussion of

the career of north Indian music and Anu Kumars essay on theDelhi College before and after 1857, both ask if 1857 was indeedthe fulcrum around which turned the meta-narrative of transitionto modernisation of music and education under British rule.Fishers essay brings into view a global aspect to the history of1857 by focusing on Indians in Britain. Here, again, 1857 is bothstaged and queried as a turning-point in the larger narrative ofrace relations in the empire.

It is the conversion of an event into a metaphor of relevanceto public life that makes for a degree of competition in the publicsphere as to which event should be memorialised, that is to say,which event could act as the best bearer of a chosen metaphor.In democracies, such competition borrows from the available

language of equal or proportional representation. In his afore-mentioned book, Portelli cites an interviewee who resented theattention that the monument at the Fosse Ardeatine received inthe commemoration of the Nazi massacre of 1944. He has aninterviewee called Nicoletta Leoni say:

It isnt right that in Rome we should talk only of the FosseArdeatine. We should talk also of Forte Bravetta, we should talkof La Storta, we should talk of people killed in the streets. Mygrandfather had been sentenced to death, he might have died atForte Bravetta; now, if he had died at Forte Bravetta, how wouldI feel when all that people talk about is the Ardeatine? But themedia, if you tell them about Forte Bravetta, they dont care. Doyou know why the Ardeatine are so important? Because the

monument is there.

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Echoing as it were the questions posed by Leoni, SabyasachiDasgupta asks in this issue, Why do we celebrate the revolt (of1857) as the first war of independence? Why should not wecelebrate say the santhal and the Moplah uprisings or for thatmatter countless other uprisings? Why are their 150th anniversa-ries not commemorated? The same contestatory spirit is docu-mented in the contributions, say, of Charu Gupta, Badri Narayan,Shashank Sinha, and in Lata Singhs essay on Courtesans andthe 1857 Revolt. All of these essays ask versions of NicolettaLeonis questions. They seek to represent the hitherto under-represented in the histories and commemorations of 1857: thecourtesan, the dalits and dalit women, the tribal peoples of

overlooked regions. They document the demand sometimespartially realised for new commemorations and anniversaries,that is to say, for a new national calendar and new set of heroes:Matadin Bhangi, Jhalkariibai and others. Gupta and Narayan, bytheir use of ballads and songs, also point to a domain of popular,anti-elite history and alternative practices of celebrations andclaims to the nation that challenge the official narrative of Indiannationalism. In both cases, what is fascinating is the absorptioninto the language of electoral politics in north India by Mayawati,

by the Bahujan Samaj Party and other agencies of dalit heroesand the tales about their valour relating to the battles of 1857.

Memorialising, one may then say, has a public character andseizes upon a historical moment to produce metaphors for publiclife. It is, however, at the same time open to all the contestationsof public life as well. And this collection of essays bears ampleand rich testimony to this contestation.

Memorising 1857: The Metonymic Function

By memorising, I refer to acts of remembering that workthrough certain short-hand devices that could be, in a mannerof speaking, compared to mnemonics. However, my use of the

term memorising, which owes much to the classic studies ofFrances Yates and Paul Ricoeur, is also different from theirs.13

So I need to explain a little. Readers of Ricoeur will find myjuxtaposition of memorising and remembering in the firstsentence of this paragraph strange because Ricoeur clearly seesthe two terms, with good reason, as opposed in meaning. Weremember things that have happened before. The temporal markof the before thus constitutes the distinctive mark of remembering,writes Ricoeur.14 Memorising, something that Yates, drawing onher sources, calls artificial memory, relates to what we delib-erately use as a learning strategy for mastering somethingunfamiliar (such as a foreign language).15

So why do I use memorising with respect to 1857? Why

do I use remembering and memorising in the same sentence?It seems to me that 1857 produced much panic on the Europeanside (shared by many non-combatant Indians as well). Its coun-terpart on the side of the rebels would be fear, the fear that Britishrevenge wanted to instil in them. It is hard to find a continuousaccount of what this panic, or its memory, did to the colonialofficialdom in the years following 1857. We have some indirectpieces of evidence close to hand. Writing on the occasion of thecentenary of 1857, the communist leader and writer P C Joshirecalled that when Keir Hardie came to India in 1907, the yearof the 50th anniversary of the 1857 uprising, Hardie noted inwhat jitters the British administration were, Joshi also citedEdward Thompson who, in 1925, wrote of the Mutiny as an

unavenged and unappeased ghost that flitted right at the backof the mind of many an Indian as he talks with an English-man.16 Thompsons statement may have had a measure of truth;but he was also probably looking into a mirror. Statements suchas his and Hardies point to a long after-life of the events of 1857in the minds of the British in India.

At the same time, it is clear that for historians on the Left,too, irrespective of debates about whether or not 1857 was apopular revolt, the rising has, for quite some time, meant ageneral figure of insurgency in the countryside that was to presagepolitical developments in the 20th century. Max Harcourt, whoin the 1970s studied peasant rebellions in Bihar and eastern UPduring the Quit India (1942) movement, was struck by the


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similarity between the violent events of that movement and thoseof 1857. The pattern of unrest, he writes, was very reminiscentof the rural disturbances accompanying the 1857 Mutiny, theonly difference being that the peasantry, disarmed after 1857,had no weapons to match those of the British.17 Ranajit Guhasclassic book on peasant insurgency in 19th century India thatsought to distil out of 1857 and other risings a general paradigmfor peasant insurgency in this period saw the same logic ofinsurrection at work in the anti-vasectomy campaign of the mid-

1970s in north India: ...one has merely to refer to some of theanti-nasbandi disturbances in rural Haryana and urban UP in1976-77 to realise how little the transfer of power has done todiminish the force of the paradigm (of peasant insurgency)illustrated by 18th and 19th century events.18 The inspirationthat Guhas words provided to his younger colleagues in Sub-altern Studies seems to be at work even today. Why else wouldthe Forum for Democratic Initiatives in Delhi propose to holda conference at the Gandhi Peace Foundation (ironies abound!)on March 20, 2007 on 1857 and the Legacy of Peasant Resistanceand give it the sub-title, Tebhaga, Telangana, Naxalbari andNow, Singur?19 This, clearly, is an instance of not just celebrat-ing a day on the national calendar but actually looking on 1857

as the precursor of many other rebellions to come.Thus, whether on the colonialists side or on that of the historian

of the Left, 1857 came to be codified into a general form ofinsurrection. By this code, 1857 is simply an incitement to popularpolitics, a call to insurgency. I have used the word memorisingto refer to this of silent process of codification, a deposition ofmemory that gets activated through triggers (a metonymic processor in Jakobsons terms, a word-to-word connection). This latterkind of recall of 1857 exceeds the logic of simple anniversarycelebrations. Surely, if 1857 were still seen in official circles asa potent and possible form of popular unrest that could breakout any time and on a large scale in the country, the governmentin Delhi would not be disbursing money to facilitate seminars

and symposia celebrating the anniversary. These two differentkinds of recall of 1857 as incitement for popular politics andas a festive time on the national calendar and the inherent tensionbetween them is what I have wanted to address in this introductoryessay. My point is that for good historical reasons, insurgencieshave remained a potential form of popular politics in India justas riots on the streets have been a part of French democracy sincethe revolution. That is why the element of incitement cannot everbe completely domesticated or extinguished by the process that

makes for a stable national calendar of political anniversariesof events such as 1857.

Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in ColonialIndia, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1983, Chapter on Negation.

2 I am drawing mainly on two essays: Roland Barthes, Myth Today inhisMythologies, translated Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, New York,1984; first published in French, 1957, pp 109-59 and Roman Jakobson,Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbancesin his Language in Literature, eds, Krystyna Pomorska and StephenRudy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1987, pp 95-114.

3 Alessandro Portelli, The Order Has Been Carried Out: History,Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, Palgrave Macmillan,New York, 2003.

4 Portelli, Order, p 212.5 Portelli, Order, p 213.6 Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, translated by Sujit Mukherjee Sahitya

Akademi, Delhi, 2001, p 471.7 Tagore, Gora, p 471.8 Tagore, Gora, pp 475-76.9 Andrew Ward, Our Bodies Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacre and

the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1996,pp 542-44.10 Sanjiv Desai (ed),Maharashtra Archives Bulletin, Nos 13 and 14: The

Shivaji Commemoration Movement, Department of Archives, Bombay,1983, pp iii-v.

11 Narayani Gupta, Pictorialising the Mutiny of 1857 in Maria AntonellaPelizzari (ed), Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and thePolitics of Representation, 1850-1900, Canadian Centre for Architectureand Yale Centre for British Art, Montreal and New Haven, 2003, p 225.

12 Portelli, Order, p 240.13 See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, The University of Chicago Press,

Chicago, 1974; Paul Ricoeur, The Uses of Artificial Memory: The Featsof Memorisation in hisMemory, History, Forgetting, translated KathleenBlamey and David Pellaur, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago,2004, pp 58-68.

14 Ricoeur, Memory, p 58.

15 Yates, Art, Chapter 1: Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art ofMemory.16 P C Joshi, 1857 in Our History in P C Joshi (ed),Rebellion 1857:

A Symposium, Peoples Publishing House, New Delhi, 1957, p 217.17 Max Harcourt, Kisan Populism and Revolution in Rural India: The 1942

Disturbances in Bihar and East United Provinces in D A Low (ed),Congress and the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle, Oxford UniversityPress, Delhi, 2004; first published in 1977, pp 318-20.

18 Guha, Elementary Aspects, p 336.19 I take the details of this event from a notice of the seminar received

via a list-serve email.

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