Land of Lime

[Also posted in Revise and Dissent]

William Dalrymple has a long essay on the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in the latest issue of Outlook, India’s leading news magazine. This essay is based on the third book in Dalrymple’s proposed quartet on Delhi: The Last Mughal, which will be published later this year. Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor and Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 against the East India Company’s growing British Empire in India constitute the subject of this book. Dalrympe’s earlier books on Delhi, The City of Djinns and the White Mughals were widely acclaimed.

William Dalrymple’s revisionary essay begins with a fairly long description of of William Howard Russell, the Times Correspondent, who reported from Delhi in 1858. I am puzzled since Dalrymple’s goal is to provide an Indian perspective on the Rising but I struggle to find a single direct quote of an Indian actor. Dalrymple claims that he is offering a new account of the mutiny from an Indian perspective for the first time using previously unaccessed sources. After reading the essay, I am left with three questions on sources, actors and the narrative itself:

What number is ‘Some’? Where are the Indian actors in this account? What is new in Dalrymple’s account?

Dalrymple’s central claim is that his account is based on previously unused sources, which would enable him to write the history of the Mutiny from the perspective of Indians. One can only point towards the rich historical, literary, oral and visual narratives produced from 1858 onwards in English and Indian languages by Indians themselves. I am not a historian of the 19^th century nor do I know particularly well the sources on Sepoy Mutiny in any language. So I will leave it to the experts to raise questions on what even to a generalist appear to be exaggerated claims. Yet I have the sneaking suspicion that Dalrymple needs to hit the library before making such a sweeping claim.

Consider this paragraph:

The Great Mutiny has usually been told by the Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s primarily as the rising against British economic policies. Over the last three years, however, my colleague Mahmoud Farooqi has been translating some of the 20,000 Urdu and Persian documents, many previously unaccessed, that we have found in the Mutiny Papers section of the National Archives of India. This has allowed the Rising in Delhi to be seen from a properly Indian perspective, and not just from the British sources which to date it has usually been viewed.

I am not sure whether this is a fair characterization of the Marxist argument. But let us leave that aside for the moment and focus on Dalrymple’s own alternative framework: to see Sepoy Mutiny as a religious conflict, which is neither new nor particularly insightful. What of his claim that one quarter of the rebels in Delhi were jehadis, fighting to defend their faith? Is this a fact and if so, what is this claim based on?

But more generally I want to raise some questions on these previously unaccessed sources that Dalrymple refers to? If they are present in the National Archives, aren’t they all either British court documents or testimony collected by the Colonial state, even if they include testimony by the ‘natives’? I do not want to be a nitpicking historian, especially because I share Dalrymple’s passion and commitment to write histories of significant historical moments and the human drama for a general audience.

What I find troubling is the disingenuous use of the nature of historical argument and the appeal to sources. Consider phrases such as ‘previously unaccessed’ and ‘properly Indian perspective’ which are deployed strategically to make historical critique. While the qualifiers such as ‘some of the’ and ‘usually been viewed’ would offer plausible escape paths, questions still persist in our mind. If Farooqi is translating some of the 20,000 Urdu and Persian documents, which offer an Indian perspective, what number is ‘some’? Is it 500 or 18,000? Does Dalrymple sahib himself read any of these Persian and Urdu documents or does he rely on Farooqi? If he does, then who is actually doing the archival work that underwrites the revisionism here? Who is determining what sources and stories are valuable? These are not trivial questions if Dalrymple claims to offer new facts and perspectives on the Mutiny.

Dalrytmple is a compelling story teller and a gifted writer. As we noted above, we share his commitment to narrate the human element in these dramatic stories, and incorporate the multiple personal and the street level stories. But does Dalrymple himself practice what he preaches? In the Outlook essay, we don’t find too many ‘Indian’ quotes from the Mutiny papers. Even as we search in vain for a new perspective on the Rising, the historian in us uneasily reverts back to this testimony of a 19 year old English soldier as an instance of Dalyrmple’s problematic approach:

“In one mohalla alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 Delhiwallahs were cut down. “The order went out to shoot every soul,” recorded Edward Vibart, a newly orphaned 19 year old subaltern. … “It was literally murder …. I have seen many bloody and awful sight lately but such a one as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful … Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look with indifference….”

Dalrymple does choose a good quote to bring out the drama of human tragedy. But let us ask some questions nevertheless. Did he consider he is quoting a 19 year old boy, who had probably just gotten to India? What life has this boy seen and further, does his youth compromise force of his testimony, especially if you can find either a 39 year old British soldier (would he be a Colonel by then) or even better, the testimony of a victim? Surely, Dalrymple could find a single quote from among the 20,000 documents to bring out this drama?

A good historian would at least ask these questions, for history writing is a humbling task. As historians, we constantly choose sources and pick actors that we find appealing, even as we make claims of producing historical knowledge. In Dalrymple’s case, we probably need to read the whole book and not rely merely on the essay or on the bullet points in the unattributed side-bar story. As much as we admire Dalrymple, there are times when his generalizations are not supported by his analysis. That proves to be an unnecessary distraction. He would do well to consider some one like Simon Schama as a role model.