India's thought process before and after 1857

By Balraj Puri A lot of fresh material was made available on the revolt of 1857.

National Book Trust released a number of papers and a book on Rebellion of 1857, apart from reprinting PC Joshi's edited much valued book.

Annual conference of Indian History Congress devoted a major part of its session on papers read and discussion on the subject.

The Last Mughal, written by a British author William Daryample, was widely noticed by reviewers, academicians and laymen of the country.

This recent interest is obviously due to the national celebrations that are planned in the current year on the occasion of 150 years of the historic event.

Much more had already been written, starting from British scholars who called its mutiny to nationalists like Veer Savarker who called it the First war of independence.

Is there any room for a fresh interpretation of the event, circumstances that led to it and its after effects? The earlier work, however, exhausted most of the secondary sources.

Of late, people, in some parts depending on oral history, are projecting their local unsung and unrecorded heroes, who were not kings and queens but commoners.

May be some enterprising scholars get some fresh clues about their role, individually or collectively.

There may also be scope for deeper study into or causes of varying response to the rebellion in different parts of the country.

But there is far greater potentiality of collaboration with historians of Pakistan who have done and are doing research on the basis of secondary or primary sources.

In fact enthusiasm generated on the occasion of 150th anniversary of 1857 in India and Pakistan is so immense that it provides a rare opportunity for joint celebrations, at popular and academic levels and promoting closer understanding between the two peoples.

Of course many lessons have to be leant about the course of Indian history that followed 1857.

However, its own uniqueness cannot be underrated, the British rule was not the first rule of foreigners over India.

But there was a vital difference between the earlier foreigners and the British.

From Aryan invaders to Mughals, all of them adopted India as their home like the local inhabitants.

But the British continued to rule from a foreign land.

How much deeply Bahadurshah Zafar, the last Mughal ruler, for instance, was in love with the country is eloquently expressed in one of his last poems.

In one verse he says Kitna badnasib tha Zafar ke madfan kailiye Do gar zamina mil saki kue yar mein (How unfortunate was Zafar that he could not get two yards of land for his burial in the lane of his beloved) The choice of Bahadur Shah, as leader and symbol of the revolt, was therefore natural.

His rule did not extend beyond some miles around Delhi.

But Delhi was centre of India and capital of the erstwhile vast Mughal empire.

As the last descendant of the great family, 3,75,000 rebel soldiers from all over the country rallied round him for leadership.

He was the finest symbol of composite culture of India at that time Immediate consequence of 1857 revolt was a realization by the British government that a country like India could not be governed by British traders called East India Company.

It was substituted by a government responsible to the British Parliament and manned by a cadre of trained officers.

Britain was hardly a democratic country in the modern sense at that time but gradually it evolved in that direction.

The freedom movement in India did learn some lessons from the British experience in democratization.

A far more profound impact of 1857 revolt was that India which was a rich and ancient civilization got itself transformed into a nation.

As we found later that the ideology of nationalism could not retain all the profound values of that civilization.

No less a person than Rabinder Nath Tagore warned Mahatma Gandhi of the dangers of transforming India from a civilization to a nation which might not be able to retain its unity.

M N Roy, great thinker and philosopher, who also hailed from Bengal, was more forthright in condemning the cult of nationalism, which he was afraid might degenerate into fascism.

Such warnings were also issued by many Western philosophers.

They were influenced by the threat the two world wars, fought in the name of imperialism and fascism, the forms that nationalism had taken, posed.

It is true that when a nation fights for independence, it is inevitably inspired by the ideology of nationalism.

But it may be right time and also desirable to examine relevance and possibility of revival of some of the unique values of pre-1857 Indian civilization, which had a longer continuity than most other civilizations of the world.

It consisted of series of what social scientists call "Little Traditions", living in harmony with one another.

It was influenced by and in turn influenced various indigenous and foreign movements of ideas, religions and cultures.

Charuvakya, Buddha and Mahavir rejected all the scriptures of the Aryans.

But they were absorbed in the pantheon of Indian gods and separate existence of their followers became almost irrelevant.

Message of Christ reached India before it did in Europe.

What we call Hinduism was of an amorphous and evolutionary character.

According to Stephen Neil, " Hinduism was ready to absorb Jesus Christ into itself, His teachings as an ethical ideal and His life as an example, it can revere Him as one of the greatest teacher of the world.

Though Christ, the oriental teacher, is to be revered but not the Church as a western importation and part of the exploitation of India by the West".

(Builders of the Indian Church).

The impact of Islam on indigenous thought has certainly been most profound.

However as much larger number of its followers came to India than of any other religion, it had political overtones also.

It certainly enriched religious thought of India.

But according to Murray T.

Titus, " when all is said, there seems to be little doubt that Hinduism has wrought a far greater change in Islam than Islam has wrought in Hinduism".

(Islam in India and Pakistan).

Indeed Muslims of India are among the most advanced Muslim community of the world, intellectually and culturally.

After 1857, the process of mutual assimilation of diverse cultures and religious came to a halt.

A centralized administration and faster communications replaced syncretic "Little Traditions" by pan Indian identities of religions.

Apart from government policies, Western scholars who rediscovered India, through western academic tools, too, widened the gulf between the communities.

The ancient scriptures, manuscripts and documents were resurrected to glorify India's past, in which Hinduism and Indian nationalism became indistingusliable.

Thus Indian schools of philosophy, Indian mythology, Indian epics and their heroes became a part of modern Hinduism.

Thus as Nehru admitted, in his communication to Iqbal, " Indian nationalism was dominated by Hindus and had a Hinduised look." Indian nationalism took three broad forms symbolized by Gandhi, Subhash Chander Bose and Veer Savarkar.

The latter two were inspired by Hitter and Mussolee,, except that Bose strongly believed in secular nationalism.

Gandhi could isolate Savarkar-an atheist-and Golwadkar school of thought as he was the greatest praticizing Hindu in the image of religious saints.

However his religious approach to nationalism along with Maulana Azad alienated modern educated Muslims led by a non-practising Muslim like Jinnah.

All the factors that led to the partition of India need not be gone though here; except to point out the fact that due to its inadequacies, Indian nationalism could not inspire all communities alike.

Admittedly, it is very sketchy account of post-1857 evolution of Indian thought.

It merely underlines the fact that 1857 is a major watershed in the process of its evolution.

Every Indian, irrespective of his political or religious beliefs, is certainly proud of the valiant fight that their ancestors put against a foreign rule in that year and should proudly celebrate 150th year of the great event.

But it is also the right time for Indian scholarship to dispassionately study the course that Indian nationalism took thereafter.