In the historiography of the Great Revolt, the sheer volume of the published material written from the perspective of the victor ensured that for nearly a century the colonial view of this upheaval was hegemonic. Until the first decade of the 20th century there was no major published work from the perspective of the colonised. This, however, is not surprising. Given the ruthlessness with which the Revolt was crushed, and the repression unleashed by the colonial state in the post-1857 period, any attempt to glorify the Revolt was out of the question.

For several decades it was just not possible to challenge the colonial narrative of the events of 1857. There might have been a handful of stray texts that told a different story but it is doubtful that these had a wide circulation. One such rare text was the Marathi memoir by Vishnu Bhatt Godshe, written two decades after the event and first published in 1907 under the title Maajha Pravas. It is pertinent that the author was reluctant to publish the memoir even 24 years after the Revolt, and that it was initially published a few years after his death, with considerable editorial changes to avoid official displeasure.
Mrinal Pande has provided us with a translation of the original text, and in doing so has greatly enriched the historiography of the Revolt by making available to a wider audience a major vernacular account of the period. Godshe was an impoverished Brahmin beggar-priest from Versai near Pune, who set out in early 1857 to participate in a grand yagna that was to be held at Mathura and was caught unawares in the tumult that was turning the world upside down north of the Satpuras. Curiously, the author and his companions had no inkling whatsoever of the insurrection that had engulfed large parts of northern, central and eastern India since the second week of May, till they arrived on the outskirts of the Mhow cantonment at the beginning of July. Such was the poverty of Godshe (who had grown up in a region that was continuously under the Company’s rule for several decades) that in his desperate bid to earn a trifling sum of money for his debt-ridden family he placed his life at great risk by persisting with his journey even in the midst of the violence all around him. He miraculously escaped death — at the hands of British soldiers, of mutineers, and of bandits — on several occasions during the following two years.
As a historical account of the Revolt itself, the crucial portion of the work is the section dealing with the battle for Jhansi. Whereas the descriptions of the military encounters at Kanpur, Lucknow and Gwalior are based on hearsay, memories of which would have been considerably influenced 24 years later by the colonial discourse particularly as he had no direct recollection of the events, Godshe actually lived through the nightmare of Jhansi. As a Brahmin priest with several family connections in Maratha-ruled principalities, he was able to gain access to the inner quarters of the palace which provided him with the opportunity to get acquainted with Rani Lakshmi Bai. We get an endearing portrait of the real Rani, which incidentally is very close to that of the Rani Lakshmi Bai of legend. What the author has to tell us about the supreme courage of the Rani and the manner in which she led from the front in the bloody contest for Jhansi reaffirms her iconic status. Moreover, she emerges as a very gentle and humane person. Godshe’s understanding of power is also significant. For him, Lakshmi Bai, as the widow of Gangadhar Rao and regent for his adopted son, was the legitimate ruler of Jhansi. The British were able to enforce their authority because they had superior force at their command, not the legitimacy to rule.
The stiff resistance put up by the people of Jhansi brought forth fierce vengeance: the city was decimated following its capture by the British. The plunder and destruction of Jhansi was brutally systematic, carried out by British troops and their native contingents, followed by troops from Hyderabad and other princely states, to the extent that they even took away “bolts from doors, turnstiles from roads, ropes and fixtures from wells, doors, wood, chairs, fruits from trees — nothing was left”.
Godshe barely managed to escape alive from Jhansi. Now that there was little hope of earning any money (the proposed yagna had obviously been abandoned), he decided to undertake a pilgrimage to Kashi. The rest of the narrative is the story of his arduous journey to that preeminent holy city and thence back to Versai. This too is a gripping tale, and perhaps more important, for it dwells not on high politics or military conflicts but on the experiences of the common people in those troubled times.
As this virtually penniless pilgrim traverses north India, he survives from day to day relying on the generosity of humble folk (though occasionally on that of remnants of the old feudal elite as well), who have not lost their humanity despite their deprivation or the terror unleashed by the British. There is the touching incident of the bullock-cart driver who agrees to carry, without any charge, Vishnu Bhatt’s ailing uncle to a nearby village even though it means a long detour for the driver; or that of the sadhu who gives him an instant cure for guinea-worm and then vanishes without waiting to be thanked. We thus have in the memoir a rich social history of a kind that is very difficult to come by.
Godshe writes with much candour, even sharing with us the details of his brief visit to Lucknow which was the only time during his entire journey when he let himself go and had a good time visiting courtesans or watching magic-shows. He comes across as a deeply religious person, trying to adhere strictly to the teachings of the scriptures as he knew them. In fact, he took great pride in his learning which was “pure and precious” if not vast. Godshe loses no opportunity to get acquainted with new texts or observe complex rituals. This was knowledge which though increasingly marginalised was not yet entirely irrelevant in the mid-19th century. It was free from the bigotry that was to come later with the politics of religious identity.
How very different the concerns of this traditional Chitpavan Brahmin priest were from those of the ideologues of that politics is brought out sharply in the meaning that his spiritually satisfying sojourn in Ayodhya had for him a meaning derived from piety and religiosity rather than religious assertiveness. Such a world view allows Godshe to give us a narrative of the Revolt that is marked by “innocence”, an innocence that reminds us, as Pande notes in her postscript, of Good Soldier Schweik whose gestures could “confer a deep meaning to the madness rampant in a meaningless world”.

Amar Farooqui is a professor in the department of history, University of Delhi