Delhi knows Mahmood Farooqui the dastango. Now meet Farooqui the scholar. A scholar who is disarming, even diffident, acknowledging the contributions of others with generosity. And what makes his book, Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857, special is his sense of delight and curiosity, and a style that moves between the sober and the theatrical. Begin the book not on Page 1 but with the dramatic paragraph on pages 429-30, and you won’t put it down.
Some years ago I counted over 200 books on 1857. And they continue to be published, in inverse proportion to the discussions on 1857 in our school and college history courses. Twice — in 1957 and in 2007 — the government got into the act. Roads were renamed, memorial parks were planned, the Red Fort was brushed and cleaned and lit up, speeches made... But the archived treasures of 1857 have hardly been mined. For 150 years, the Mutiny Papers — Persian and Urdu documents (20,000 according to William Dalrymple, 10,000 according to Farooqui,) from Shahjahanabad city’s thanas — remained undisturbed and undusted, first in the Imperial Record Department in Calcutta and then in Lutyens’ beautiful building in Delhi, the National Archives of India. Except that in 1921 the officials published a detailed Press List of the Delhi Mutiny Papers, in English (in 12 volumes), so that some of us got a sense of the documents, though we could not read the original.
Few scholars of modern Indian history could decipher the shikastah (literally, “broken”) script, and those who could were not scholars of modern history. Obviously a partnership was called for, and this happened when Dalrymple came along, and found Mahmood (read the first paragraph of the “Acknowledgments” in The Last Mughal). The result was two books for the price of one arduous four-year stint in the Archives, deciphering, transcribing and then translating.
In the process, Farooqui admits in his book, that he has “stuck to the outward form and ignored the internal rhythms” since the documents are not only difficult to decipher, but also lack punctuation marks.
Dalrymple incorporated only those documents which filled out his narrative. Farooqui has now published the text of as many as 400, in 15 sections, along with 50 pages of translated excerpts from the 1857 issues of Dehli Urdu Akhbar. This book is, therefore, both a primary source as well as an analysis of how the inhabitants locked inside Delhi lived through those difficult four months, coexisting with 70,000 soldiers forcibly billeted on them. Farooqui refers more than once to the writings of that brilliant scholar of the French Revolution, Richard Cobb. Both Cobb and Farooqui extract from day-to-day police records the many stories of people caught in a crisis not of their making, one in Paris and the other in Delhi.
Some of the cases documented in Farooqui’s book are such as could have occurred in uneventful times. But we get vivid accounts of the rebels’ government negotiating with local bankers and banias to secure money and supplies without resorting to force. There are delightful anecdotes about dhobis stealing clothes given for washing, and women running away with soldiers. Bahadur Shah alternates between being a statesman-like ruler and getting irritated by the soldiers’ importunations, and threatening to retire to Bakhtiyar Kaki’s dargah. Not all the documents narrate stories which we can follow through to the end, but even the glimpses are enough to bring Delhi to life in a way never before available, not even from the letters of Ghalib and his diaries, published as Dastanbu.
In 1857, Delhi was still regulated by the Mughal police-system. The barqandaz (police constables) reported to the thanadars, who were under the jurisdiction of the kotwal, who communicated with the Commander-in-Chief and the King. What marked a break with Mughal governance was that the Army Chief and the King in 1857 functioned within the limits of a written constitution. The Constitution of the “Court of Mutineers” (the governing council which the soldiers themselves referred to by the English term “Court [of] Administration”) is a truly remarkable document. If this were seen as reflecting a modern political outlook superimposed on a medieval system of governance, one can understand Farooqui’s enthusiastic comparison of this brief period in Indian history with the long saga of the French Revolution.
Farooqui cautions us against assuming that the Muslim mutineers were jihadis. The excerpts from the Dehli Urdu Akhbar help correct stereotypes — its editor Mohammed Baqar’s exhortations to jihad were matched by his informed references to mythology in his appeals to Hindus to fight the British. The term qaum is used frequently, but to mean not a community but occupation/caste.
The 50th anniversary of 1857 was marked by V.D. Savarkar’s feverishly “patriotic” The Indian War of Independence, 1857. Consistently banned by the government, the book in its title had coined a phrase which came in handy for political leaders across the spectrum. In 1957, the centenary year, Surendra Nath Sen, commissioned by the government, wrote the meticulously-researched Eighteen Fifty Seven, which set the pattern for more work of the same kind, all using English archival material. The year 2007 saw celebratory books of varying quality, but hopefully Beseiged has laid out a different way to look at 1857-59. And again, hopefully the translations will be translated back into Urdu and Hindi, to reach a wider audience.
Narayani Gupta retired as a professor of history from Jamia Millia Islamia.
Currently she is a consultant with INTACH.