Mahmood Farooqui is a historian and this comes out clearly in the compilation and translation of papers relating to 1857 entitled Besieged.
The materials of the book are drawn from the Mutiny Papers, a collection of documents mainly dealing with the period in 1857 when the Ghadar was succeeding — that is, between May and September of that year. These documents are stored in the National Archives, and were extracted from various sources by the occupying Brtish Army from the kotwali, the secretariat, private homes and spies. They formed the basis for the prosecution of Bahadur Shah Zafar. At the same time, they give us a glimpse of a city which was in the midst of a revolutionary upheavel.
Mahmood Farooqui is a historian and this comes out clearly in the compilation and translation of papers relating to 1857 entitled Besieged.
The materials of the book are drawn from the Mutiny Papers, a collection of documents mainly dealing with the period in 1857 when the Ghadar was succeeding — that is, between May and September of that year. These documents are stored in the National Archives, and were extracted from various sources by the occupying Brtish Army from the kotwali, the secretariat, private homes and spies. They formed the basis for the prosecution of Bahadur Shah Zafar. At the same time, they give us a glimpse of a city which was in the midst of a revolutionary upheavel.
In this work, the author argues against the idea spread by various historians, both British as well as Indian, that anarchy was the dominant feature of the revolutionary forces, that they did not have much of an organisation, and that the government established by the Ghadar did not try to organise military and civil affairs. The documents translated and compiled by the author show that within a short period, in the course of the war, structures of authority were established. The very existence of the documents, the author points out, shows that a system of governance had been established which allowed their production.
The papers compiled by the author show how the two warring sides — revolutionaries and the colonialists — fought each other on several planes including propaganda. The revolutionaries mobilised people pointing out amongst other things that the colonialists were plundering the country, and also denigrating their religions. The colonialists put out through their agents pamphets which denied that they were against Muslims and exhorted the Muslims to kill all Hindus. In response, the revolutionaries put out a pamphlet thoroughly exposing the aims of the colonialists and calling for Hindu-Muslim unity. In this period, cow slaughter was banned by a special proclamation.
The section of the compilation which deals with the work of the ideologues of the uprising – in particular the writings of the newspaper Delhi Urdu Akhbaar of 1857 — is perhaps the most enlightening part of the book. The editor of this paper spared no effort to create public opinion in favour of the Ghadar and to strengthen the revolutionary forces. The paper criticised the weaknesses of the armed forces. It criticised the well-off citizens of Delhi for not supporting the revolution, and pointed out various weaknesses of the revolutionary forces in organising the war as well as the finances and communications for the war.
Through the pages in this section, Prof Farooqi brings before us brilliant snap shots of the efforts of the revolutionaries to win the war of the mind. The exposition of the economic as well as political enslavement of Indians, the exposition of the mental enslavement of Indians, the call to get rid of this enslavement, reverberates through the writings of the revolutonaries, as brought out by the author. We find that the revolutionaries went to extraordinary lengths to forge Hindu-Muslim unity, fully recognising that the perfidious British colonisiers were bent on provoking divisions precisely on this basis.
The compilation has sections which are jarrring to the reader, with no conclusions given by the author. For instance, the defence of Bahadur Shah Zafar in his trial portrays him as a person opposed to the revolution. Similarly, various others who led the war in the capital and were murdered by the British are portrayed negatively. It would be interesting to know how much this negative portrayal was the result of the fact that the British were the victors, how much it was a deliberate attempt to crush the vanquished morally by saying to the Indian people — look at the kind of people you were following as leaders. It is known that after the Battle of Plassey in Bengal in 1757, the British protrayed the defeated king Siraj-ud-daullah as a debauch and drunkard. Incidentally this king was a young lad of barely 17 when he died fi ghting. The history books carry the British portrayal till this day.
In conclusion, the author deserves praise for a very painstakingly researched work that throws a little more light on the glorious Ghadar of 1857.
A review by Prakash Rao of Mahmood Farooqui’s book