History Compass 9/10 (2011): 760766, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00799.

The Marginal Mutiny: The New Historiography of the

Indian Uprising of 1857
Kim A. Wagner*
University of Birmingham

Abstract
This essay considers the main developments within the historiography of the Indian Uprising of
1857 over the past decade.

In September 2007 a small group of elderly British tourists ran into unexpected trouble
while visiting some of the key sites of the Indian Uprising of 1857. Their attempt to
erect a plaque commemorating the bravery and distinguished service of members of the
60th HMS Rifles at the cemetery in Meerut was prevented by the authorities who felt it
to be insensitive and an insult to Indians. During a later visit to the Residency at
Lucknow, the group had to be escorted away by the police when surrounded by an
angry crowd and pelted with stones and bottles. A few days later the tour was cancelled.1
While the incident was quite clearly exploited by local politicians, the response to this
British attempt at commemorating the Mutiny is testament to the continuing signifi-
cance of the events of 1857 in India and beyond. This is also reflected in the persistent
scholarly interest in the subject. As the dust has subsided after the flurry of conferences
and publications of the 150th anniversary year, it is perhaps time to take stock of the state
of the art; this essay accordingly considers the main developments within the historiogra-
phy of the Indian Uprising over the past decade.
The greatest splash in the historiographical pond was undoubtedly William Dalrymples
The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, which provided a richly detailed
account of the period during which the erstwhile Mughal capital was in the hands of the
rebels.2 In researching the book, Dalrymple was assisted by Mahmood Farooqui, who
translated the notoriously difficult vernacular Urdu and Shikastah sources of the Mutiny
Papers. Farooquis own account, Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857, makes this unique
material available in English for the first time and works as an excellent companion-piece
to Dalrymples book.3 While The Last Mughal has outsold all other accounts of 1857 by a
long stretch, its reception was not uniformly positive and Dalrymple might arguably be
criticised for overstating the significance of religion during the Uprising and perhaps still
focussing excessively on British experiences (for which the sources remain clearly more
abundant and accessible). He certainly did not make any friends within Indian academia
by his polemic posturing. Yet, one cannot but suspect that much of the critique directed
at the book was largely due to the fact that Dalrymple did not bend over backwards to
downplay divisions and politico-religious discord amongst the Indian rebels, nor did he
seek to discover the proto-nationalist roots of modern India in 1857 (which has been a
constant theme of much Indian writing). That Dalrymple has become the first port of call
for so many students and new readers is a thing to be celebrated rather than lamented.
The Last Mughal is far more sophisticated and well-researched than usually credited and

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certainly more so than most of its paperback neighbours on the shelves in airport book-
stores (or pirate-editions on the kerb of Connaught Circle in New Delhi).
Amongst the popular histories may be found Saul David and Julian Spilsburys two
books sharing the same title, The Indian Mutiny, both of which might easily be mistaken
for reprints of Mallesons old colonial accounts.4 The two authors pay only lip-service to
the historiographical developments of the last four decades and even though David in
particular makes use of a vast array of primary sources we learn nothing that Michael
Edwardes or Christopher Hibbert have not already told us. These old-fashioned accounts
of the Mutiny also have Indian counterparts and Amaresh Misras Indo-centric revision-
ism constitutes a serious step backwards from any sort of objectivity in the study of 1857.
In his Mangal Pandey (2002) and two-volume tome 1857 A.D.: Clash of Civilizations
(2007), Misra invents a revolutionary conspiracy, as did V. D. Savarkar before him, and
generally fictionalises the events of 1857 to suit a contemporary Indian agenda.5 The
worst fiction of Misras oeuvre is probably the absurd (and entirely unsubstantiated) claim
that the British themselves orchestrated the Bibighar Massacre, in which some 192 British
women and children were killed following the siege of Cawnpore. It may also be noted
that the popular Bollywood-film of 2005, The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey (staring
Amir Khan and directed by Kehtan Mehta) follows a similar plot, which has only the
most tangential relation to historical facts. Anachronistic historical narratives are accord-
ingly as prevalent amongst the post-colonised as they are amongst post-colonisers.
Turning to academic publications, the success of conferences is often measured by the
edited volumes they produce, and by that standard the anniversary was a big success
indeed. An unprecedented number of edited volumes have appeared (and are still appear-
ing) in the wake of conferences on various aspects of the Indian Uprising. Amongst the
most important ones are Rethinking 1857 (edited by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya), The 1857
Rebellion: Debates in Indian History and Society (edited by Biswamoy Pati), 1857: Essays
from Economic and Political Weekly (edited by Sekhar Bandhyopadhyay), Insurgent Sepoys:
Europe Views the Revolt of 1857 (edited by Shaswati Mazumdar), The Great Rebellion of
1857 in India: Exploring Transgressions, Contests and Diversities (edited by Biswamoy Pati),
and the forthcoming multi-volume outputs of the Mutiny at the Margins project headed
by Crispin Bates at the University of Edinburgh, the first of which is New Perspectives on
1857: Anticipation and Experiences in the Locality.6
These volumes reflect the extensive collaborations and synergies between scholars and
authors of different backgrounds and different disciplines that have characterised renewed
interest in 1857. As such they provide a breath of fresh air in that they largely focus on
hitherto neglected aspects of the Uprising, including unrest in peripheral regions, and
issues relating to gender, Dalit and tribal involvement in the events of 1857, the study of
which now takes centre stage. New types of sources, such as oral accounts, folklore and
songs, are increasingly used to explore popular histories and the memory of the Indian
Uprising. Following Gautam Chakravartys authoritative work, The Indian Mutiny and the
British Imagination, the study of British, Indian and international literature on 1857 has
also developed in leaps and bounds.7
Often relegating the Mutiny proper to the margins, the fragmentising effect of these
edited works have both redefined what 1857 means and opened up new avenues of
inquiry. The chronology has also effectively been exploded and 1857 as a historical sub-
ject may now be located on a chronological scale anywhere between 1757 and 2007.
This scattergun approach, however, has its limitations. While some of the complexities of
the precedents, the events and the legacies of the Indian Uprising have been duly high-
lighted, the relevance of some studies carrying the 1857 label has at times proven to be

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rather tenuous. Not everything that happened in 1857, or was written at the time, is rele-
vant, or contributes, to our understanding of the Uprising and editors have often been
left with the thankless task of tying together widely disparate strands of scholarship into
something resembling thematic coherence. In the rush for a bite of the anniversary cake,
and easy publication contracts, quality has not always taken the front seat.
One of the undisputed benefits of the anniversary, however, is the publication, in print
or online, of many of the primary sources relating to the Uprising. Unlike previous gen-
erations, we have most of our research within arms reach (wherever we may be)
which should alert us to the fact that so much work remains to be done.8 In this regard
Indian historian Pramod K. Nayar has been particularly prolific during the anniversary
year, producing no less than two edited volumes, The Penguin 1857 Reader and The Trial
of Bahadur Shah Zafar, as well as the very accessible account India 1857: The Great Upris-
ing.9 Useful as a basic introduction to students, little new ground, though, is covered in
these works and more than a few misconceptions are perpetuated. While Nayar should
be commended for publishing the important documents of the trial of the Mughal
Emperor Bahadur Shah, he fails, for instance, to adequately explore how the peculiarity
of the trial was a result of its contested origins. Rather than a reflection of colonial rule,
it was in reality the JudgeAdvocate F. J. Harriott who single-handedly committed the
British to a formal trial by leaking his charges to the press much against the wishes of
John Lawrence and others.10 The trial of Bahadur Shah was accordingly little more than
an inquiry with a purely nominal trial attached in the most perfunctory manner. Like so
many other aspects of the Indian Uprising, the trial was characterised by contradictions
and ambiguities, shaped by contingencies as much as structure, which does not lend itself
easily to conventional interpretations.
The dearth of contemporary Indian accounts to complement the exuberance of British
ones remains a perennial problem facing historians desperately trying to imbue their anal-
ysis with a semblance of balance. A remedy for this problem is often sought through the
use of the (alleged) autobiography of Sita Ram From Sepoy to Subedar supposedly an
authentic account of the life of a sepoy (an Indian soldier serving in the British
Indian Army) who witnessed the Uprising.11 Rather than the pure voice of a sepoy,
however, the account was at best edited by a British officer, and at worst simply authored
by one. Luckily, a far more authentic alternative to Sita Ram has now emerged with the
publication of Durgadas Bandophadhyays memoirs, edited by Kaushik Roy, which pre-
sents a unique account of the Uprising in Rohilkhand from a loyal Indian eyewitness.12
With the publication of new sources, the rediscovery of old ones, and the extensive use
of rebel proclamations, for instance, we are beginning to get a more complex picture of
the events of 1857.13
For all the recent developments, however, Indian historiography on 1857 remains highly
politicised and still seems, in part at least, to be responding to the prejudices of colonial
accounts of the 19th century. A number of Indian historians have recently argued that it
should be the prerogative of Indians to write about their own past, and quoting Hiren Mu-
kherji, the historian K. C. Yadav has stated that The mutiny, more than any other
event of the 19th century, shook our peoples minds and hearts, and its real story can be
told only by ourselves.14 The continued popularity of Savarkars Indian War of Independence
is yet another indication of the extent to which the events of 1857 are still understood in
light of the Freedom Struggle that came to fruition in 1947.15 As suggested by the title,
the book provided a highly ideological account of the Indian Uprising as a proto-national-
ist revolution, an interpretation which was strongly influenced by European nationalist
struggles of the 19th century. Savarkars work, however, must be recognised for what it is:

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an important ideological tract of the early nationalist movement with very limited historical
value as far as the events of 1857 are concerned. Savarkar was entirely dependent on the
likes of Kaye and Malleson and merely inverted the ideological thrust of the most staid
tropes and grossest stereotypes of colonial historiography. That serious historians should
continue to celebrate Savarkars account and his so-called psychological understanding of
the rebels of 1857 is nothing short of bizarre.16
The presence of a strong strain of what may be described as secular nationalism in con-
temporary Indian scholarship on the Uprising is indisputable. This is particularly evident
in the terminology used. Even the highly respected historian Sabyasachi Batacharya, for
instance, does not hesitate to describe the Uprising as a glorious struggle or refer to the
heroism of the rebel leaders.17 Yet we do not have to glorify the past in order to coun-
terbalance historiographical misrepresentations. If assigning moral responsibility is not the
job of the historian, and I agree with Rudrangshu Mukherjee that it is not, then accounts
of 1857 have to move beyond the historical indignation that has hitherto characterised
much of the post-Independence historiography. Simply reversing the colonial hagiograph-
ies and exchanging Lawrence with Tantia Tope, or Nicholson with Mangal Pandey, does
not advance our understanding of the past.
While the centrality of the Uprising to Indian national identity has ensured both con-
tinued and widespread interest in the subject, it does make the study of the past hostage
to contemporary concerns. The noted historian Rajat Kanta Ray, for instance, has thus
suggested that foregrounding HinduMuslim unity during 1857 is the only means by
which historians can counter sectarian violence in India today. While this approach may
be good politics, it makes for bad history (however admirable the intention may be). In
his book The Felt Community of 2002, Ray further describes the rebel council at Delhi as
the expression of the peoples wish.18 This presupposes a unity between sepoy regiments
who mutinied and captured the city and its inhabitants, which is not only contradicted
by several key sources, but also ignores the fact that the Council, set up as late as July
1857 and never effectively functioning, was composed of officers from the various regi-
ments that converged at Delhi. Besides, a concept such as the people remains extremely
problematic due to its ideological connotations and obvious inadequacy in describing,
with any accuracy, specific groups. Unless many of the key primary sources available are
discounted due to their supposed pro-British stance, the image of democratic rebel rule
based on solidarity in Delhi simply does not stand up to closer scrutiny.19
The same applies to the notion that the sepoys who rebelled in 1857 were merely
peasants in uniform, as argued by Eric Stokes.20 However, Stokes was not the first to
make this argument and since the middle of the 20th century, the Uprising has often
been interpreted as a peasant rebellion. Ranajit Guha in particular has analysed the events
of 1857 in the context of a model of popular insurgency.21 This structuralist reading of
the Uprising, however, is not quite adequate in explaining events at Meerut and Delhi,
where neither the sepoys nor the local crowds could appropriately be described simply as
peasants. In contrast, the dynamics of ethno-religious violence and urban riots, which
have been eminently described by Stanley Tambiah, Veena Das, Paul Brass and others, in
the context of contemporary South Asia, appear to provide a rather more convincing
framework within which to reassess the violence of 1857.22 If not elementary aspects,
there are nevertheless certain recurring patterns to be discerned and many of the findings
of the classical works on crowds and peasant protest, following on from George Lefebvre
and E. P. Thompson, might usefully be updated by looking to modern anthropology.
Having successfully explored the margins of 1857 in great detail, it is perhaps time for
historians to return to the central events armed with new insights and some novel

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approaches. It is often taken for granted that the basic facts have been firmly established
and the primary material fully exhausted. Yet much confusion still prevails concerning a
number of key issues what, for instance, was the extent of the alleged conspiracies that
preceded the outbreak, or the significance of the greased cartridges, and the mysterious
circulation of chapattis said to have anticipated the uprising? Some of these questions I
have addressed in The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the
Indian Uprising, but many more remain to be explored.23
In her critique of Rudrangshu Mukherjee and his interpretation of the Cawnpore Mas-
sacres, Barbara English suggested that it may be impossible to construct a model that
could explain the unnecessary and indiscriminate slaughter involved in a massacre....24
This is nevertheless what is attempted in The Great Fear in regard to the initial outbreaks
of the Indian Uprising. In so doing I argue that for those involved, the violence was nei-
ther unnecessary, nor indiscriminate. The notion that rebel violence replicated that of
the British, as Mukherjee has suggested in connection with the Cawnpore Massacres,
may perhaps more appropriately be applied to Meerut, albeit with some modification.25
The desperate ferocity that characterised much of the rebel violence was of an altogether
different nature from the sustained everyday brutality of the colonial state.26 And yet the
violence of the outbreak at places like Meerut and Delhi can be understood as a direct
response to the perceived threat of British intervention in Indian society more generally. In
that sense it was a pre-emptive attack that derived its terms from the intentions ascribed
to the British, and this accounts for the retributive character of much of the violence that
erupted.27 This violence did not occur in the context of British mass executions or
bloody counter-insurgency operations, but as a defensive act against something far less
tangible and thus far more threatening: the apparent subversion of the sepoys entire way
of life.
Accordingly, The Great Fear does not only refer to colonial paranoia following 1857,
but also to the fear of Indians, which preceded the outbreak. C. A. Bayly has famously
used the notion of information panic to describe the inability of the British to effectively
gather and interpret information relating to indigenous practices and movements.28 This
concept can perhaps be applied equally to Indian misreadings of the British. The Uprising
was in fact precipitated by what may appropriately be described as an information panic
amongst the sepoys and part of the Indian population who saw in British reforms a direct
attack on their culture and society. Religion represented the social order of Indian society
for both Hindus and Muslims and the sepoys fears of the greased cartridges thus embod-
ied much more general concerns over British intrusion.
Equipped with the work of Eric Stokes, Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Tapti Roy, to
which might now be added William Dalrymple and a number of other recent case-stud-
ies, we can begin to see the contours of what a new 1857-narrative might look like.29 It
is still evolving and yet while some headway has been made, many publications of the last
decade are still informed by views that would not have been out of place in 1907 or
1957. It is high time for the historiography of 1857 to move beyond the tired dichotomy
exemplified by the Mutiny-or-War of Independence debate so that perhaps by 2057
history will be rather less anachronistic and can provide a more genuinely post-colonial
perspective.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Crispin Bates, Gavin Schaffer and John Pincince for their
comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

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Short Biography
Kim A. Wagner did his BA and MA in History at the University of Copenhagen and in
2003 completed a PhD on South Asian history at the University of Cambridge. He was a
Junior Research Fellow at Kings College, Cambridge, from 2004 to 2008, and Associate
Researcher on the AHRC-funded project Mutiny at the Margins at the University of
Edinburgh, where he taught South Asian History from 2008 to 2009. He joined the Uni-
versity of Birmingham in 2009. Wagner is currently working on a long-term project
entitled Colonial Nightmares: Rebellion, Surveillance and the Politics of Panic in British
India, 18181919. This project explores the significance of the precedents and entrenched
modes of interpretation established during earlier stages of British rule in India, or what
may be described as the long-term impact of the paranoid style in colonial politics. The
key issues that will be addressed include British fears of indigenous conspiracies and secret
modes of communication, colonial intelligence gathering and state violence and counter-
insurgency.

Notes
* Correspondence: Birmingham University, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. Email: kim.ati.wagner@
gmail.com.

1
The affair was widely covered in the press in India and in Britain, see for instance Hindustan Times (September
21, 2007).
2
William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).
3
Mahmood Farooqui, Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857 (Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2010).
4
Saul David, The Indian Mutiny (London: Viking, 2002); Julian Spilsbury, The Indian Mutiny (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson, 2007). Apart from co-editing the official history of the Indian Uprising following the death of
John Kaye, namely History of the Indian Mutiny (London: Allen, 188889), Colonel G. B. Malleson also wrote the
popular account The Indian Mutiny of 1857 (London: s.n., 1891).
5
Amaresh Misra, Mangal Pandey: The True Story of an Indian Revolutionary (New Delhi: Rupa, 2005); War of Civili-
zations: India AD 1857 (New Delhi: Rupa, 2008). In the latter work, Misra also appears to have used an alternative
and presumably non-eurocentric mode of referencing secondary literature upon which he has based his account.
6
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (ed.), Rethinking 1857 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007); Biswamoy Pati (ed.), The
1857 Rebellion: Debates in Indian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2007); Sekhar Bandhyo-
padhyay (ed.), 1857: Essays from Economic and Political Weekly (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2008); Shaswati
Mazumdar (ed.), Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857 (Delhi: Routledge India, 2010); Biswamoy Pati
(ed.), The Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: Exploring Transgressions, Contests and Diversities (London: Routledge,
2010); Crispin Bates (ed.), New Perspectives on 1857: Anticipation and Experiences in the Locality (Delhi: Sage, 2011).
7
Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
8
New online resources include documents and images collected by the Edinburgh University research project and
hosted by the Universitys Centre for South Asian Studies at http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/mutiny/.
9
Pramod K. Nayar (ed.), The Penguin 1857 Reader (Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2007); The Trial of Bahadur Shah
(Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007); India 1857: The Great Uprising (Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2007).
10
The relevant sources can be found in Punjab Government Records (Lahore: s.n., 1911), VII, part II.
11
James Lunt (ed.), From Sepoy to Subedar, being the Life and Adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, a Native Officer of the
Bengal Army written and related by Himself (Lahore, 1873).
12
Kaushik Roy (ed.), 1857 Uprising: A Tale of an Indian Warrior (Kolkata: Anthem Press, 2008).
13
Apart from the many Indian testimonies recorded in the Trial of Bahadur Shah, key native sources may also be
found in Statement of Shaik Hedayut Ali, Kaye Papers, H 727(a), 75966, APAC (British Library); and Statement
of Mohun Lal, Kaye Papers, H 725, 389422, APAC (British Library).
14
K. C. Yadav, Interpreting 1857: A Case Study, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (ed.), Rethinking 1857 (New Delhi:
Orient Longman, 2007), 17.
15
V. D. Savarkar, Indian War of Independence 1857 (London: s.n., 1909).
16
See Nupur Chaudhuri and Rajat Kanta Ray, 1857: Historical Works and Proclamations, paper presented at
Mutiny at the Margins workshop, Royal Asiatic Society, London, 27 July 2007.
17
See Bhattacharyas introduction in Rethinking 1857.

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766 The Marginal Mutiny
18
See Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2003).
19
See for instance Charles T. Metcalfe (trans.), Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi (Westminster: A. Con-
stable & co, 1898).
20
Eric Stokes (C. A. Bayly, ed.), The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
21
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Apart from Guha, see also S. B. Chaudhuri, Civil Disturbances during the British Rule in India, 1765-1857 (Calcutta:
World Press, 1955).
22
See for instance S. Tambiah, Levelling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflict and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1996); Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Paul Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of
Collective Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
23
Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford:
Peter Lang Oxford, 2010).
24
Barbara English, The Kanpur Massacres in India and the Revolt of 1857, Past & Present, 142 (1994): 16978,
177.
25
Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Satan Let Loose upon Earth: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of
1857, Past & Present, 128 (1990): 92116.
26
It is also worth keeping in mind that much colonial violence was actually committed by sepoys.
27
See Mukherjee, Satan Let Loose upon Earth: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857, 112.
28
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 17801870 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1714.
29
See Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt 18571858 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Tapti Roy, The Politics of a
Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857 (Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1994).

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