Reading Fragments

Upon reading Gautam Bhadra’s article “Four Rebels of Eighteen Fifty Seven”, one needs to question, first, why the author chooses to talk about the 1857 Revolt?  What is to be gained from reading about the role of four individuals (distinct on their own terms) in the event?  One way to think about this Is to say that Bhadra is writing one possible ‘way of knowing’ 1857 and he thinks not so much on what happened than on who was involved. There is an acknowledgment in his work of the presence of other accounts but those historiographies  are what he contests for giving an elitist character to 1857 by suggesting that it was the class of landlords,  taluqdars and Zamindars who were the ‘natural leaders’ responsible for organizing and leading the revolt. For Bhadra nationalist and radical, Marxist histories have failed in making this assumption, which has also now become what I would think of as the dominant mode of remembering this episode in history. The tension between event and representation is then an underlying theme of his work and it feeds into a politics of collective remembrance. What Bhadra seems to be doing is undercutting existing historical imaginations through the intervention of the ordinary person as the rebel.

What I found interesting was the very distinct nature of the rebel narratives-- that they somehow cannot be compared. The lives of Gonoo, Shah Mal, Maulvi and Devi Singh operate in spaces different to each other and the breadth of their activities are also limited except for the Maulvi. They are also separated by their social and economic conditions and for Bhadra these differences impact the nature of their leadership and mobilization. If there is anything that links them is the fact that they “were pitted against the same enemy at the same historical moment”. For me, this raises the question of how one should read these narratives?  For one, the fact that these narratives cannot be joined and are fragmented in the nature of their representation says something about the question that is almost always mentioned in class: “where does one locate the subaltern”. Here is the part where we begin to think about the gaps in history keeping in mind that these gaps have their histories too. Secondly, these different narratives say something about methodology and the question of how a particular event is to be ordered and written about. Can these narratives be ordered in any way?  Perhaps one ordering could be to link them through the specificity that comes with a particular historical time in which they are functioning. Another could be to think of the agentive capacities of these rebels or perhaps sources of their leadership.  For instance, the Maulvi anchors his leadership in religion.  The article mentions that his popularity had much to do with the fact that people thought of him as an “inspired prophet”and he claimed to be “an Incarnation of the Diety”.  But then if the Maulvi’s consciousness is inspired by religious rhetoric, it is not the same for the other rebels whose consciousness is rooted in other factors.  Another way could be to think of these narratives in terms of how they contribute to the theme of a ‘the making of the subaltern’. From each of the sketches one gets the sense that these men were products of their time. Bhadra writes “they asserted themselves through the act of insurgency and took the initiative denied to them by the dominant classes” He says that their “consciousness had been formed through everyday experience”.  Yet as we try to arrange these fragments we encounter limitations of integrating them into a complete picture.  It is for this reason that Bhadra suggests that the only way to read these narratives is to be aware of the “multiple elements of conscious leadership” and the "variations" in them. 

This is a point to be made aside that it seems very easy to think of 1857 as a nationalist and/or anti-colonialist movement. I think the difference in the two terminologies needs to be maintained even when one feels compelled to merge the two.  Is anti-colonialism necessarily nationalism, especially when thought of in terms of the 1857 episode? Were these rebels nationalists? I think this is a problem arising out of the ways in which 1857 has been labeled such as the ‘war of Independence’ that give it a very nationalist bent. There is a politics attached to naming the event itself that excludes the possibility of other histories. Bhadra never names the event. He just calls it 1857 which is interesting too, because simply the date comes to signify a number of histories embedded in it. Nationalism I believe was a late nineteenth and early twentieth century term and the notion of national self-determination was adopted quite later in the subcontinent. When one interprets the narratives the rebels, we should be conscious of the fact that we are looking at perhaps a pre-ideological configuration or collection of sentiments.  If nationalism was a ‘modern phenomenon’ then in this case are we dealing with a kind of a proto-national movement?  To my mind, this is important because it is tied very closely to the way we understand these rebels and their participation in the event. If we think of them as nationalists then what are we missing out on? In fact can they be configured in any national or proto-national narrative at all?