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.