Two years from now the country would be commemorating the blaze that lit the Indian subcontinent 150 years ago in 1857. Reports have started coming in about historians being commissioned and crores of rupees being allocated for nation wide celebrations.
Officially during Congress rule, India ’s delivery from colonial rule has often been projected as a narrative of the actions of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi and Nehru - with others’ role reduced to an agreement or disagreement with them. During the NDA rule though, history itself became an act of invention. Desperate attempts were made to portray the Hindu communalists as freedom fighters and the anti-British struggles of RSS were fabricated, Savarkar’s apology glossed over and his portrait accorded a place of honour in the parliament. However, the ordinary people who played heroic roles remained in the margins of history as in contemporary Indian society.
The year 1857, and the First War of Indian Independence, though, has a special significance. This was the year when ordinary peasantry and the working people joined revolting sepoys in a struggle to overthrow the British and the Company rule. Yet, even today, the most referred aspects of 1857 continue to be the contribution of the Mughal Emperor and the princely states that fought fearing annexation and loss of privilege as well as the revolt of the sepoys, who fought fearing loss of caste and religion from the greased cartridges. However, an increasing body of scholarship indicates the role played by the tax-burdened, impoverished peasantry and the ‘mutinies’ of Meerut and Delhi, where ordinary people joined, just as they did across the Gangetic plain wherever it spread. In the repression that followed the uprising, the British acted with vendetta and of the lakh and a half people tried and killed, 1 lakh were civilians alone. Yet little is known and still little accorded a popular presentation or given official recognition, other than what one finds on stones and pillars etched by people on their own to commemorate those who fought and died.
The first time a face was being given to the action of the sepoys, was by accruing the actions of 1857 to the act of Mangal Pandey, in Barrackpore. However the act of giving a face remained and continues to remain symbolic. The arrival of two books and a film with a star cast has however pried open the discussion once again and attempt to unravel the sepoy, who pulled the musket on English Officers and the obedience demanded in the Company army.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee suggests that Mangal Pandey may be an accidental hero, whose individual act reflected collective disgruntlement, and acquired meaning following the events of May 1857. In another book by Amresh Mishra, however Pandey has been suggested to be a conscious provocateur of the mutiny. The film however has no such doubts: it begins with the assumption that the events of 1857 and the subsequent freedom struggle were sparked off by the young sepoy who pulls the trigger on his officers for fear of losing his caste and religion, knowing the implications of his act.
The film, by and large unremarkable, to its credit goes with the byline ‘The Ballad of Mangal Pandey’ and begins with claims of “history meets folklore”. However what passes off as folklore is orientalist kitsch - performers on elephants, girls doing the rope trick, colourful bazars, merry nautch girls, intoxicated revelry, mud wrestling and of course the melas - with a keen eye on the overseas market. The narrative carries references to the practise of Sati and untouchablity and the discrimination faced by women and people born into the traditionally oppressed castes reflecting the imperfections of the social fabric. However, in the effort to make the film larger than life and saleable, irritating inaccuracies abound - with men and women dancing around in colourful designer Rajasthani costumes in Barrackpore! Mangal Pandey remains larger than what any ballad can portray and he is both in Berhampore and Barrackpore and in all acts of open rebellion.
The film is built around two central characters of Mangal Pandey and a British Officer William Gordon. All that is known about Mangal Pandey, historically is through the trial papers and almost nothing is known about the British Officer, and the film is an imaginative take off from accounts of one English man who fought by the side of the revolting sepoys. While folklore on Pandey may not be replete with Gordon, yet the latter overshadows the narration in the film, so much so that the tale at various points of time gets told from his perspective. While, the character does succeed in keeping the film from being a tale of Black Men vs White men and brings aspects of class within the British order, the flaw lies in the fact that by 1857 even the cordiality observed between officers and sepoys upto the 1820s had already ceased. The “not all British were not bad, some were also friends” thesis leads to strange and inaccurate presentation of Gordon pleading to save Mangal desperately in the trial.
Interestingly, however, the political economy of free trade espoused by the company, is brought out through the reflections of Gordon. In fact, the infamous speech of the Manmohan Singh in Oxford eulogising British Rule, interestingly, finds a resonance in Lord Canning’s speech in the film, where he speaks of the wonders done by British in India . However, in an attempt to place Pandey in the nationalist pantheon, his actions are equated by paying mandatory tributes to officially recognised figures that emerged much later. And the ballad of Mangal Pandey ends, like all liberal nationalist history-writing, with Gandhi leading the Quit India movement and Nehru unfurling the Indian flag in 1947 - indicating that the struggle against imperialism ended at that juncture, and 1857 has no relevance to our struggles against the East India-like Companies of today.
- Radhika Menon