Remembrance

Indian consciousness and the Battle of Plassey

Sankar Ray

On 23 June, 1757, the British colonialism unfurled the Union Jack on Indian soil after a fateful Battle of Plassey that lasted for half a day. Twenty-year-old Mirza Muhammad Sirajuddaula, Nawab of Bengal, had fallen to the infamous colonial skullduggery of English East India Company, led by Colonel Robert Clive, not at all to the military brilliance. The subjugation Bengal which included not only eastern Bengal, now Bangladesh, but Bihar and Orissa as well, preceded colonisation of the rest of India within three decades. The entire history reflects what Puran Chand Joshi, general secretary of undivided CPI (1935-47) described as the colonial policy of ‘unsatiated aggression and unprincipled annexations”

Indian historians, including Leftist ones showed a strange apathy towards remembering the 250th anniversary of the episode, at least in exposing the Albion principle of divide et impera in contrast to great of enthusiasm in refocusing on the 150th anniversary of the ‘Rebellion of 1857,’ India’s first war of independence, thanks to the wake-up call from a British journalist William Dalrymple’s Last Mughal, The Fall of A Dynasty,
published last year.

Reviewers from historian-turned-journalist Rudrangshu Mukherjee to columnist Suresh Nair extolled him as a historian of merit, but doyens among scholars like Irfan Habib and Sushil Chaudhury nailed Dalrymple’s historiography. For Dalrymple 1857 was “a war of religion,” on par with “contemporary Islamic insurgencies against the West.”

Indian historians seemed to await another Dalrymple to remind them of 1757. They didn’t even say that the Battle of Plassey was an imprint of colonial calumny. Small wonder, John Zephaniah Holwell’s concocted ‘black hole’ episode (death of 123 Europeans due to suffocation on 17 June at the Fort William in Calcutta) is still described as authentic, eg, ’Simon Winchester’s Calcutta’ (2004) and goes un-rebuked by critics. Should younger generations remain deprived of a detailed expose of the conspiracy Clive, hatched with the power-hungry caucus of Mir Jaffar, multi-millionnaire Jagat Seth and others around the royal family to dethrone Sirajuddoula ?

Politico-historic consciousness demands remembrance of 250th year of the onset of Rule Britannica. The untold repression of the British rule forms the backwash for the emergence of ‘Rebellion 1857,’ and responsible historians can’t shirk the duty to rid the posterity of British distortion of the martyrdom of Sirajuddaula, along with his brave subordinates, Mir Madan , Mohanlal and nameless hundreds.

The canard that moral aberrations and 16-month misrule of the young Nabab gave rise to the welcome of the foreigners was first exposed by a 19th century historian Akshay Kumar Maitra who earned high appreciation from Rabindranath Tagore. Mark Bence-Jones, biographer of Lord Clive, portrayed Sirajuddula as “a monster of vice, cruelty and depravity”. Chaudhury inferred racial prejudice of historians, originally British civilian or military officers and their “personal and pecuniary interests” against Sirajuddoulah (Chaudhury: Palashir Ajana Kahini – ‘Unknown story of Plassey’) whose chagrin against the British traders was unalloyed.

Pakistani scholar Dr Syed Jaffar Ahmed deserves praise for linking 1857 with 1757 (‘Revolts that mattered,’ Dawn , 6 May 2007) . “Though separated by a century, both events are interlinked. While the first resulted in the first annexation of an Indian territory, the latter completed the total annihilation of the British Empire in the Indian subcontinent, 32 times bigger than that of England,” he rightly said

Distortion of Indian nationalism, especially the 19th century Bengal Renaissance – as if all this was also a colonial gift - has been the thematic strategy of the Cambridge School of historians like J H Broomfield and Anil Seal. The Bengal Renaissance gave to the nation sterling leaders like Raja Rammohun Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, intrepid journalist Harish Mukherjee and Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar. They denigrate the latter as an affair of the educated elite.

Broomfield in his Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal poured scorn on them as self-seekers and bhadralok but glorified the British ICS officers as “mai-baap” (parents) of natives. Among the takers of this tendentious formulation is Dr Barun De, a Leftist historian and one-man think-tank of CPI (M)-led Left Front government on historical issues. He had been heard describing the Raj as of “benevolent despots” at an international seminar in Moscow in the mid-1970s.

Former CPI (M) MP Dr Ashok Mitra’s famous jibe, “We are no bhadraloks, but communists”, when he was the finance minister of West Bengal, was but parroting the Cambridge School vocabulary.

Veteran communist historian Narahari Kaviraj in the now-defunct Bengali periodical Mulyayan, wrote in the 1970s that the connotation bhadralok was a reflection of the British ICS officers’ anger against those that inspired peasant protests of the 19th century. Kaviraj had referred to the ‘annual report’ (1871) by a British ICS officer, a divisional commissioner then, where bhadralok was used contemptuously.

Disillusionment and hatred combined in the revolt of 1857, a dialectical response to the limitless plunder of the East India Company. Russian scholar Nikolai Dobrolyubov’s in his account , The Indian National Uprising of 1857, penned in the 19th century, (Tr. Harish C Gupta, Calcutta,1968) had narrated the “gloomy, aimless existence” of sepoys.

Sankar Ray, a retired senior journalist, is an avid afficianado of Marxist Thought, besides being once a member of the CPI.

In My View

India proving dear for the USA

The USA cannot be blamed for the present stalemate on the nuclear issue in its negotiations with India. The way the erstwhile BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government had unabashedly courted Washington after the Pokhran II blasts of 1998, in public and private, must have given the American policy mavens an idea that India could be bought cheap.

“Show them the superpower pedestal and throw in good measure some tough talk on mutual interest in eradicating Islamist terrorism, and India would come knocking on the doors of various beltway insiders seeking to join the party,” they must have calculated.

When the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government came into power, they must have laughed in private with all the homilies about following an “independent foreign policy” and aims of “multipolarity,” for they knew that line with the bait and the hook had been sunk and someone will bite. Didn’t they reel in the lot the earlier time around when the neo-liberal economic policies were introduced in a sub-continental sized country without even a reference to the Union Cabinet?

Then, as now, they had their clapper boys amongst the mainstream media who consider that this is a generation of Indians (especially the moderately English educated urban youth) are more rooted in “European Enlightenment!” This is a generation that was tired of ponderous diplomacy of India of the yore and incessantly searched for the “new,” after of course depositing all dissension towards their grand “Enlightened” design into the dustbin of history as ‘Cold War relics.’

So on 18 July, 2005, the US president, George W. Bush – with Dr Manmohan Singh in tow - pronounced the platitudes of presidential speech writers about shared dreams of the India and the USA, vocal sections of India dreamt of such things like a de facto “Nuclear Weapon State (NWS)” status and cutting edge nuclear technology collaborations. Again in 2 March, 2006, they expressed apoplectic joy at such convergence of US and Indian interest.

Excepting, there was no convergence. The country’s nuclear deal with the USA provides it the latitude to emerge on the nuclear mainstream in terms of smoother commerce and technology access, while the USA would like to lock down the nuclear barn door after putting inside it. The extrinsic and intrinsic nature of the two goals thus define the yawning difference of perception about the deal.

It is even more ironic that it took the USA negotiators almost seven years – if one accounts for the 12 round of negotiations that the former Union minister, Jaswant Singh held with then deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott – that when India talks of fundamental issues they are not a ‘negotiating tactic’ but national ‘realities.’ On Tuesday, a senior Indian official briefed the Hindu that Dr Singh had to tell the visiting Undersecretary of State, Nicholas Burns, that nuclear fuel ‘reprocessing rights’ and ‘supply guarantees’ are of fundamental nature and not nuances that can be finessed. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration would now end up with egg on its face for not informing the US Congress that India wanted the former. And that the deal was a little more than a slam dunk!

Perhaps, this is also the time when the Indian side would need to take a deep breath and go back being ponderous a little. What have been the gains till now of this exercise that has continued for so long?

(1) It has clearly exemplified to the world that India was an acceptable nuclear power. Even the US – the most monopolistic of nuclear powers - considers that the country’s nuclear advancement cannot be contained.

(2) India is also a responsible nuclear power in line with the current non-proliferation regimes that fall well short of the nuclear disarmament goals. As Raminder Singh Jassal, the country’s deputy chief of mission in Washington told an audience at arch conservative American think tank, the Heritage Foundation in end May, “India follows an NPT plus commitment.”

(3) The stalemate has also signalled to the world that India will not accept any deal even in this unipolar world that goes against the core of its national interest. The Chinese, especially, must have taken note of this fact. They have been pioneers of the approach.

(4) Finally, unlike what Arun Shourie and Jaswant Singh believed, most of India does not take mercantilist approach in its worldview of first joining the club and then shutting the doors behind it. For, India’s case could be a precedent in terms of setting a standard for international conduct, seeking fair play.

Considering that the Bush administration will become lame duck by the end of this year, these gains can be counted as tangible returns of the Indo-US nuclear dialogue. The two governments now have a solid foundation on which to build an equitable structure that does not seek to short circuit the global push for a democratic world system. Whether the the US policymakers are able to grasp the opportunity to redeem themselves, is a reality that world will intently watch.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in

Democracy At Work!!!

DEMOCRATIC TRIUMPH: Cindy Sheehan Steps Aside

WAIT TILL YOU WATCH SHEEHAN"S INTERVIEW