Much is made about the ‘real story,’ a search for the truth. Was 1857 a war, a
rebellion, a mutiny, a peasant movement? Different histories state different truths. Simply a date then? For a date that is meant to have immense resonance with one’s nationhood, one wouldn’t be surprised if it mostly signified textbook headings like Causes, Events, Consequences or First War of Independence. And this, even though it isn’t like 1066, a date sunk deep into Britains’ national mythology, but so removed in relevance that a survey found most young people in England responding that it probably had something to do with WWII!
First person accounts, and travelogues especially have a way of giving relevance to time and space far removed from their own. Vishnu Bhatt Godshe Versaikar , a Brahmin priest from Alibagh district draws us into his life, the private travails of a family strapped for money, the concerns of the Brahmin community at large, and the everyday realities of the uprising of 1857 in Central India, and what it meant for the people whose homes and lands turned into sites of pitched battle.
He tells us that little did he know when he left home with his uncle to go north to Gwalior in order to earn money to pay off his massive family debts that he wouldn’t return home for three years. And little did one know that ‘ A Factual
Account of the 1857 Mutiny ’ — the only title he gave his manuscript, would turn out to be such a riproaring account of closely observed and keenly commented on adventure.
Written sometime in the 1870s the Marathi manuscript was not published until 1907. The mode of objective observation, and neutral reportage that is now well attached to notions of travel and journalistic writing is one that he largely adheres to. This is, one suspects, not only because of a fear of colonial reprisal. It is connected to the sense of transition, upheaval, change that couldn’t quite be pinned down nor predicted in trajectory as the events of 1857 unfolded onto the people of the countryside. It is through what the people of Gwalior, Jhansi, Lucknow, Bithur, Kalpi et al saw and then chose to tell and how to tell that Bhatt makes his ‘factual account.’ He was of course present at some of the most crucial points of the uprising and his account of the battle of Jhansi, where he was within the besieged fortress, is one that is at once thought provoking and plain hair raising.
Bhatt keeps to a chronology of events tied loosely around his own movements across the country, and to the tales he hears from people coming in from
besieged areas. The anecdotal is thus closely woven into the telling of this tale. So one reads a deeply personal account of how the residents of Bithur bid what they knew to be their final farewell to Nana Sahib and his family, saw the last glory of the Peshwas pass on down a muddy river by torchlight, and how a young street orphan threw himself onto the boat in grief.
But this remarkable tract is not just important for a lived sense of those years of immense upheaval with regard to the Mutiny solely. Anecdotes like the one about an irreverent Brahmin who dared take up publicly with his untouchable mistress are an invitation to imagine the nature of Jhansi’s urbane public culture, and a comment on elite society. Their visit to Dhar to visit the huge alms giving to Brahmins after the Raja’s death is undertaken even though his own sect cannot accept alms given after a death, because such occasions are rare and, he notes, unlikely to continue given the future.
Mrinal Pande’s translation is easy to read, rarely though on a few occasions rather clunky when it comes to the expressive mode. Her postscript is sharp and supplementary material interesting. As a text its significance is in its narrative, the detail and texture that it brings to a time rather than merely an event. It’s uniqueness is in how so little of the personal, local, immediate exists for the lay reader to access of 19th century, and the past in general. This is a terrific read, and that has very little to do with any quest for any ‘real story of the uprising of 1857.’
— Meghna Chaudhuri is a research student at The Centre for Historical Studies, JNU.