1857 folklore: A national heritage

The folk songs of 1857, composed by talented poets, form part of our national heritage and provide valuable insight into the aspirations of the Indian people during the 1857 struggle. This literary heritage must be documented, popularised and preserved

The Afghan War in the early 1840s dealt a decisive blow to British pride. Then came the Crimean War reverses. The defeat of the army of Indus in 1842 sent signals to the Indian sipahi that their British masters were no longer invincible. The folklore of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh speaks of Kunwar Singh and Beni Madho Singh, highly agitated, vowing to cross swords with the British before they died. In 1842, the 65-year-old Kunwar was particularly exercised. He had seen the Maratha heydays.

India could regain its glory. Kunwar Singh had been active in anti-British plots during the Sikh wars. The Bengal Army regiments deployed west of the Indus had a serious effect on their morale. The Muslim sipahis were demoralised for having been deployed against a Muslim state (Afghanistan). The 2nd Bengal Cavalry, during the 1st Afghan war, had refused to fight against Dost Mohammad and was therefore disbanded.

Let us try and comprehend the communal situation of that period. Shah Walliullah, a Delhi Maulvi, had translated the Koran into Persian. His son Shah Abdul Aziz translated the Koran into Urdu. Aziz declared India dar-ul-harb (enemy territory) the moment Lord Lake captured Delhi from the Marathas in 1803. Shah Walliullah had spoken out against the Marathas.

Yet he had not proclaimed India as dar-ul-harb (Islam’s enemy territory) when Marathas were in power. Shah Walliullah’s followers, termed ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ by the British, did not regard Sanatan Dharmis as the ‘other’. The Mughal-Maratha alliance was considered natural.

Shah Walliullah’s movement, dubbed Wahabi by the British, had nothing to do with the orthodox Middle East trends. It was a quintessentially Indian movement of liberation, fought when the East India Company was seen not merely as an exploitative arm of the British Empire, but also as an alien force bent upon re-engineering Indian society.

As for dealing with the 1857 Rising per se, this was an armed mass movement and a planned political revolution of the Indian people as a whole, at one and the same time. Conscious actors and spontaneous masses played a crucial part - the peasantry was the leading force. 1857 was more ‘nationalist’ than the Congress-led twentieth-century freedom movement. People and forces from Gilgit to Tamil Nadu and from Manipur to Maharashtra fought for common aims.

The 1857 movement continued well up till 1875; in Bundelkhand, the last ‘Sepoy war’ bullets were being fired even in the 1880s. Refusing British offers of jagirs and an ‘honorable’ retirement in any place other than Lucknow and UP, Begum Hazrat Mahal died in Nepal, unvanquished and unconquered. The British never found Nana Saheb, his brothers (Baba Bhut and Bala Rao), and Azimullah Khan. They had ‘vanished into thin air’. Rao Tula Ram was never ‘caught’. In 1859, Tantya Tope was ‘caught’ and hanged — but, till the 1890s, the British remained skeptical, whether they had ‘tried’ the right man.

One of Nana Saheb’s last letters, written in April 1859, in response to British charges of him being a murderer of women and children, is an extraordinary document. It reveals that Nana was not only willing to fight, but had preserved soldiers and had a plan, that Begum Hazrat Mahal had arranged to attack Calcutta and free Wajid Ali Shah, before marching on to Delhi, with a Poorabia-Gurkha force.

In overall strategic terms, the combination of mass movements and armed action was a major 1857 highlight. Defeat nowhere meant that revolutionaries were broken. The conventional view is that Indians lost militarily and politically.

From Chinhat to Kanpur to Arrah to Jharkhand to Orissa, Maharashtra and Gujarat, every major Indian victory was achieved in the open field, with our sipahis blending European with Asiatic tactics. The revolutionary sipahi fighting big battles had not commanded more than a platoon before 1857. This Indian performance was indeed historic — there is no such parallel in either the American War of Independence or the French Revolution.

The Indian post-Independence elite was cut off from 1857 memories. The Bahadur Shah Zafar-Wajid Ali Shah-Nana Saheb ethos was permanently lost. The true figures of how many Indians lost their life in 1857 has never been researched. Preliminary enquiry is staggering, almost unbelievable. Some 30,00,000 Sanatan Dharmis perished in the Kranti. As per British records, the rough estimate is about 25,00,000 killed in Awadh alone.

The British thinking had rested on the theory that once the Hindu-Muslim alliance was broken, India and Indian-ness could simply be effaced. The India of Ram and Krishna, Muhammad, Guru Nanak, khayal, tappa, thumri, bhajan, gurubaani and qawwali would simply have vanished - there would be no Indian State power, even such as we have today. In this sense, 1857 fighters won the battle of civilisation.

After the 1857 war, European imperialism woke up to Asiatic assertion and gave up its plan of doctoring Asia culturally. Countries as diverse as Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Afghanistan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Vietnam and Korea reaped the benefits of this event.

But there is a lamentable lack of sound historical material from an Indian point of view. The conditions of terror that prevailed post 1857 were such that any writing from an Indian’s point of view, his version of 1857 history, seriously risked his skin. And it is precisely for this reason that the folk songs on 1857 constitute a very valuable source material. Their supreme value lies in the fact that they constitute an authentic record of the outlook of people whom they portray.  There is a rich gold mine of it waiting for it to be explored, reflective of our living love of common people for writing the history of 1857.

In the folklore, one often finds those who went against the national uprising cursed as traitors. The people of those days had the political sagacity to differentiate between the patriots and the traitors. There runs through these folk songs, a burning hatred of the firangis. The deeds most glorified are the ones of fighting the firangi. The virtues most admired are bravery, courage and sacrifice. The real shame is known to lie in passivity and submission.

The folk songs of 1857 were written by a host of most talented folk poets. This literature is part of our national heritage, which forms an important source of historical material on the outlook and aspirations of the Indian people during the 1857 struggle. But most unfortunately, they are little known part of our patriotic poetic heritage. There is a strong need to document, popularise and enrich this national literature.

It is also necessary to put this to heart-warming music for stirring the nation’s patriotic sentiments. It would be a fitting addition to our heritage of national music. To treasure, study and sing them is a simple way of paying the debt back to our forefathers who gave their lives during the kranti. The deeply moving and rousing incidents that find mention in the 1857 folklore can be excellent resource for inspirational creative work in our national literature and art.

In the folklore, one often finds those who went against the national uprising cursed as traitors. The people of those days had the political sagacity to differentiate between the patriots and the traitors

The writer is Advisor, Bharat Ki Soch; Views presented are personal.