1857 Uprising: A Tale of an Indian Warrior (Translated from Durgadas Bandopadhyay's Amar Jivancharit)

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About the Book Most of the sources regarding the 1857 Uprising were written by British officials and civilians. From the Indian side we have more or less nothing as regards their experiences of the 'event. The only exception is the memoir of Durgadas Bandopadhyay which was published in Bengali in the 1920s. Translating this memoir is to ensure wider readership of such a valuable source. Durgadas, an assistant attached with the 8" Irregular Cavalry Regiment, provides a loyalist account of 1857 describing the causes and the course of the "Mutiny' as well as his role in the 'great event. Most of the memoirs by the sahibs and memsahibs concentrate on three epic centres of the Mutiny-Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur. Durgadas' story shifts the geographical focus to Rohilkhand and provides detailed portrayals of the rebel leaders - a feature missing in the accounts of British officers. An anti-British 1857 memoir from the Indian side is yet to emerge. The voice of the 'subaltern' is yet to assert itself. Perhaps, the subalterns can never speak. The Introduction contextualizes the memoir within the overall historical matrix. It attempts to compare and contrast Durgadas' account with the autobiographical and biographical narratives generated by Indians in English and the accounts of the British officers related to the colonial army between the eighteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

About the Author Kaushik Roy is an Associate Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) at International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). He also teaches History at Presidency College, Kolkata. His area of specialization is military history and security studies. Roy has published more than two dozen articles in joumals like War in History, Journal of Military History, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, Studies in History, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Calcutta Historical Review, etc. He has published four books, the latest being Brown Warriors of the Raj (2007).

Acknowledgements I express my gratitude to Prof. Gautam Bhadra and Prof. Subhas Chakraborty for alerting me to the existence of a Bengali memoir on 1857 a decade ago when I started my research on the colonial military history of South Asia. I am grateful to Prof. Uttara Chakraborty for providing me some of the sources cited in the endnotes. My thanks to Mr Abhijit Mazumder of Anthem Press for agreeing to publish this translation. I am indebted to Sridevi Ranganathan of Anthem Press for editorial assistance. Special thanks is due to my ex-student (now my friend) Sohini for contacting me as regards this project. I am grateful to my students Pratyay Nath and Srirupa Bhattacharya who helped me with the translation. Pratyay and Srirupa have ave completed com their graduation in History (Hons.) and Sociology (Hons.) respectively from Presidency College, Kolkata and are currently pursuing their Masters degree in their respective subjects in the University of Calcutta. Two of my students Anwesha and Madhuparna also checked my horrible English. For the cover photograph I am very thankful to Prof. Subhas Chakraborty. And finally, I thank Suhrita for everything.

Preface More than 90 per cent of the sources regarding the 1857 Uprising were documented by British officials and civilians. From the Indian side we have more or less nothing as regards their experiences of the 'event'. The only exception is the memoir of Durgadas Bandopadhyay which was published in Bengali in the 1920s. He describes the causes and course of the mutiny and his role in the 'great event'. Most of the memoirs by the sahibs and memsahibs concentrate on three epic centres of the mutiny - Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur. Durgadas' account shifts the geographical focus to northern Rohilkhand and provides detailed portrayals of the rebel leaders a feature missing in the accounts of the British officers. It is to be noted, however, that Durgadas provides a 'loyalist account' of 1857. An anti-British 1857 memoir from the Indian side is yet to emerge. Secondly, Durgadas was an elite in contemporary society. The voice of the 'subaltern' is yet to assert itself. Probably, the subalterns can never speak. The objective of this volume is to provide a translation to this memoir, so that such a valuable source gets a wider readership. Besides the translation, the Introduction contextualizes the memoir within the overall historical matrix. An attempt is made to compare and contrast Durgadas accounts with the autobiographical and biographical narratives generated by the Indians and the British officers related with the colonial army between the eighteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The endnotes with the Bibliography will aid the readers in further studies on 1857.

Introduction Historians writing about the colonial world face a severe problem in acquiring sources representing the 'other side of the hill'. Most of the available sources (both official and non-official) as regards Afro-Asia in the colonial period were written by the imperialist soldier-scholars and administrators for their own use. The African culture being predominantly oral did not generate adequate sources regarding the colonial confrontation. For the same reason, in India too it was the colonizers rather than the colonized who produced an overwhelming mass of historical data. James Belich, in the context of New Zealand's colonial encounter comments that the dominance of one-sided evidence generates the belief that the colonizers were inherently superior vis-à-vis their opponents, the colonized. This problem is especially important when one focuses on the 1857 Uprising in India. Here, Durgadas Bandopadhyay' autobiography titled Amar Jivancharit (My Life's Story) comes to our aid. Such a source, however, has several limitations. Diaries and journals are generally free from the retrospective rationalizations inherent in the memoirs and autobiographies. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I Rudolph rightly assert that since the autobiographers write after the 'event', they tell their stories teleologically and establish causal connections." Arthur Littlewood taking a more harsher view comments: 'Memoirs written long afterwards have a tendency to cast the writer in flattering terms which are not necessarily shared by contemporaries, while certain aspects of a situation are sometimes distorted or filtered out in order to enhance the writer's viewpoint'. This point has to be kept in mind while reading Durgadas' memoir. Superficially, it seems that Durgadas was a 'ferangi' collaborator as he was an out and out supporter of the British. Both in this memoir as well as from official documents it is clear that the Bengali middle-class' attitude during 1857 was similar to that of Durgadas. To categorize the Bengalis as loyalists is indeed a simplistic view. Instead of positing binary categories like loyalists versus nationalists as regards the different indigenous communities in the subcontinent, we should go for a more sophisticated classificatory scheme. To look for a united nationalist pan-Indian movement in mid nineteenth century or to portray 1857 as an all India anticolonial struggle is to fall into the teleological trap.