History of heroes

This past week, I travelled to Shivpuri, a small city that’s a two-hour drive from Gwalior. Shivpuri’s claim to fame is that it was a settlement of the Scindias, the family that once ruled Gwalior, and was later strategically important for the British. It is not unusual to find colonial buildings, particularly when approaching the Collectorate area.
Shivpuri’s most solemn event took place on April 18, 1859, when Tatya Tope was executed near the old Collectorate building. A statue of the warrior, hero of the uprising of 1857, now stands there. The old tree from which he was hung has almost certainly gone, for the tree I saw nearby looked too young. Tatya was the general of the Maratha army of Nana Saheb, whom the English saw as an evil pretender but generations of Indians have cherished as the last Peshwa and the moving spirit behind 1857.
Nana’s court in Bithur (Kanpur) was adorned with two jewels: Tatya Tope and Azimullah Khan. Tatya was the commander, the military genius who engaged the English in a guerrilla war that used classical Maratha tactics and would have done the great Shivaji proud. A year after the rest of the Indian forces had been quelled, Tatya battled on. He was still fighting and still eluding the British a full 10 months after his comrade, Rani Lakshmibai, had died of wounds very close to Shivpuri.
Eventually, Tatya was captured by treachery, betrayed by a friend, Man Singh, the chief of Narwar. In Shivpuri, Tatya was apparently imprisoned in the ruins of an old palace that was later rebuilt by the British. Locals pointed me to a red-brick building that looked over a century old. Ten days after he was captured, he was hanged, proud to the last, refusing to beg for his life and — so the legend goes — grabbing the noose from the hangman and placing it around his own neck.
In Shivpuri, Tatya is not some distant icon; he is very much a real-life character, a part of local folklore. Guided to his statue, which stands at the believed location of his hanging, I was told of how the people of the town had grabbed tufts of hair from Tatya’s corpse and run home with them, clinging to a relic of a brave man and a folk hero of these parts and those times. Standing there in silence for a few minutes, it was difficult not to be moved by the story of Tatya’s valour as much as the story of how the people of Shivpuri had mourned him those 152 years ago. At five-foot nothing, Tatya was Maharashtra’s original — and perhaps most formidable — Little Master.
I asked if anybody knew where Tatya had been cremated. Nobody seemed to have an answer. There was no time to probe or make further inquiries. My work in Shivpuri was done, the few minutes of heritage tourism were all I could spare. I had to leave, but my date with Tatya was incomplete. Where did his ashes lie?
The question is somewhat easier to answer in the case of the Rani of Jhansi, if one goes by apocryphal legends. In June 1858, Lakshmibai died shortly after being wounded in a battle in Gwalior. Anxious not to allow her body to be captured and defiled by British soldiers, the Rani’s loyalists cremated her in secrecy. The story goes that one of her followers burnt his hut with her body inside, so that no one would find out. Where is this location? Folk memory insists it is on the expansive grounds of the Usha Kiran Palace, once home to the Scindia family but now a luxury hotel managed by the Taj Group.
At least we know when Tatya and Lakshmibai died. In the case of Nana, he simply disappeared, escaping to Nepal, contemporary accounts say, with eight elephants carrying his treasures. What became of the last Peshwa and his wealth? Nobody has a clue. He was sighted and his death report several times, between 1859 (killed by a tiger in Nepal) and 1926 (died while living as an ascetic in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh). We cannot be certain.
Finally, what of the second jewel in the court of Bithur — Azimullah Khan? Azimullah was Nana Saheb’s grand strategist, an astute, English-speaking Chanakya who travelled to London, Constantinople and the frontlines of the Crimean War, and came back to advise Nana that the British were not invulnerable and could be defeated in a planned military assault.
If the Indians had won that war of 1857 — which began 10 days ago this month, on May 10 — Tatya would probably have been defence minister in any hypothetical “national government” and Azimullah the foreign minister. Instead, Tatya died in Shivpuri and Azimullah was felled by fever in the Nepal Terai a few months later in 1859. Where do his bones lie buried? Again, we don’t know. The man who was doing the job of India’s national security adviser and building realpolitik alliances with the Russians and the Afghans in the middle of the 19th century is not remembered as a diplomatic genius; indeed, he is rarely remembered at all.
Why am I writing this today? To some degree it is indulgence following a trip that took me to Tatya’s statue and got me thinking of what became of him and his closest mates. There is another reason, too. Shivpuri left me wondering of our attitude (or attitudes) to history.
In the hyperbolic, hysterical media atmosphere of Lutyens Delhi, it is so easy to forget the rhythms of India. In Shivpuri, speaking to local people — ordinary people, not prime-time stars — about Tatya, I sensed folk tradition, oral history and a quiet pride that existed and flourished completely unrelated to the high-strung rhetoric of television and Twitter.
In New Delhi, Tatya is just another name, to exploit when a cartoon or a book about him can be suitably misused. In Shivpuri, he is closer to the earth, closer to the soul. May it always be that way.

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com [2]