The story of the spread of European power in India, even before 1857, was not one of unresisted colonisation. The Kunjalis of Calicut, admirals of the Zamorin, fought the Portuguese, after an early spell of collaboration. The King of Travancore defeated De Lennoy of the Dutch East India Company at Kolachal, before Plassey witnessed Clive’s rise.

Tippu Sultan was engaged in a lifelong struggle against the British. Pazhassi Raja fought a guerrilla war first against Tippu and then the British with the help of bow-wielding hill people. Soldiers in Vellore revolted and sought to place in power one of Tippu’s reluctant sons incarcerated there.

A Dewan of Travancore, driven to the corner, declared independence through what came to be known as the Kundara Proclamation. The Santhals and the Moplahs had their struggles going from time to time. None of this however had the sweep of the events of 1857 which Savarkar named the ‘first war of independence’.

The books under review recapture the bravery and the brutality of those times. Mirza Ghalib was outraged by Indian vandalism in Delhi. Dickens and Tennyson lavished their words on the massacres in Kanpur. Theirs was the general British perception. Nayar and Mukherjee show how John Nicholson’s and James Neil’s fiendish acts have been sought to be presented as retribution. 

‘Imperial Psychopath’
Neil would have his captives lick blood off the ground before killing them. Nicholson commended himself saying, “not a bad sliver, that,” when he split a captive’s head into two with one stroke of his sword. It is only now that Nicholson is seen as what he was, an “imperial psychopath”, as William Darlymple calls him in his, The Last Mughal. Mukherjee helpfully tells us how his book, whose first edition came out ten years ago, is different in approach and emphasis.

Nayar’s one volume is a simple, interesting narrative, punctuated with relevant quotations from witnesses and commentators and the other— a compendium of excerpts from a variety of documents relating to the events of 1857. 

There is also a short essay on the literature of and on 1857, particularly fiction. Through his narrative of the events, and the contradictory responses to them, emerges the saga of an uncoordinated struggle waged largely by irate soldiers on behalf of a vast humanity against a comparatively small imperial army.

That it could not last out long was foreseen by someone who recognised its legitimacy— Karl Marx. Marx said: “However infamous the conduct of the sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India.”

That was what it was, a violent, short-lived reflex of a war of independence covering a good part of India. It took almost another century of struggle, of a different style, with a different stratagem, to achieve the goal.

As its story is retold from the rising in Barrackpore to the valiant end in Jhansi, it may be tempting to take a second look at the motives of those who rushed into action.  Mukherjee has reproduced the deposition of the legendary Mangal Pandey, celebrated not only in a recent Hindi film but an earlier novel in Malayalam, a language of an area unaffected by 1857.

He had started taking bhang and opium; he had intended to take his own life but missed narrowly; he was not aware of what he was doing at that time. Jhansi’s brave queen, immortalised through folklore and poetry, was initially reluctant to back those who erupted into mutiny. So was Nana Sahib who remained ever elusive to his pursuers.

It is instructive to read how personal compulsions and objective conditions coalesced in 1857 to spur India’s first war of independence. While reviewing a war, it is pointless to consider its personal reasons. What really matters, historically, is its cumulative result. The result, in this case, was a ferment that throbbed through almost another century of struggle.