topics: |  india | history | mutiny

Review

Do those on the extreme right lie more frequently and more blatantly?  This
entire book appears to rest on a series of fabrications, reminiscent of
modern day right-wing "quack historians" like P. N. Oak.
[Surely Michael Moore has given us many more instances]

This book by VD Savarkar, was written when he was a young student in
London.  Subsequently he went on to become the president of the Hindu
Mahasabha, an early nationalist Hindutva groups related to the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.  In 1910, Savarkar was arrested for sedition,
and sentenced to two life sentences in the
Andamans.  After the partition of India, he blamed Mahatma Gandhi for
appeasing the Muslims, and it is widely believed to have been part of the
group that instigated Nathuram Godse to kill Mahatma Gandhi.  However, he
does not appear to have been directly involved in the conspiracy to kill
Gandhi.

A text of fabrications

What concerns us here is this extended text, which attempts to relate the
story of 1857 in nationalistic terms.

As an example, at the end of chapter 1, Savarkar quotes three British
authors.  All three appear to be fakes:

1. VS quote:
   Justin McCarthy says :
   The fact was that throughout the greater part of the northern and
   north-western provinces of the Indian peninsula, there was a rebellion of
   the native races against the English power. It was not alone the Sepoy who
   rose in revolt – it was not by any means a merely military mutiny. It was
   a combination of military grievance, national hatred, and religious
   fanaticism against the English occupation of India. The native princes and
   the native soldiers were in it. The Mahomedan and the Hindu forgot their
   old religious antipathies to join against the Christian. Hatred and panic
   were the stimulants of that great rebellious movement. The quarrel about
   the greased cartridges was but the chance spark flung in among all the
   combustible material. If that spark had not lighted it, some other would
   have done the work …… The Meerut Sepoys found, in a moment, a leader, a
   flag, and a cause, and the mutiny was transformed into a revolutionary
   war. When they reached the Jumna, glittering in the morning light, they
   had all unconsciously seized one of the great critical moments of history
   and converted a military mutiny into a national and religious war !
	[FN. History of Our Own Times, Vol.III.]

But you can't find this segment in any work attributed to Irish
nationalist and historian Justin McCarthy (1830–1912).   The list of
books cited at the start do not include any work by McCarthy.  Even the
content is unlikely to have been known to someone ensconced in London.

Another author cited here is an unknown "White":
   White writes in his Complete History of the Great Sepoy War :- “I should
   be wanting in faithfulness as an historian if I failed to record with
   admiration the courage displayed by the Oudhians. The great fault of the
   Oudh Talukdars from a moral point of view was their having made a common
   cause with the murderous mutineers. But for this, they might have been
   regarded as noble patriots, fighting in a good cause, pro rege et pro
   patria, for the King and the Motherland” – for Swaraj and Swadesh !

So we have a reference to what is presumably a book by one White, with the
title Complete History of the Great Sepoy War.  Savarkar's list of
"important books consulted", at the start of this volume, also has an entry
for "WHITE- Complete History of the Great Sepoy War" - but like his other
books, there are no details of year, publisher etc.

A book with such a title should have had some record in some catalog or
whatever, but no such title written by any White can be found on google
books or anywhere else; all the 5-6 citations google can find to such a
work are all based on Savarkar's text.  Since Savarkar originally wrote it
in Marathi, it is possible that some text may have been altered while
translating to English, but all kinds of approximations to the title fail
to find such a book.

--
Another British author cited by Savarkar at this point is Charles
Ball, whose work is well known.  Savarkar has him saying:

     At length, the torrent overflowed the banks, and saturated the moral
     soil of India. It was then expected that those waves would overwhelm and
     destroy the entire European element and that, when the torrent of
     rebellion should again confine itself within bounds, patriotic India,
     freed from its alien rulers, would bow only to the independent sceptre
     of a native prince. The movement, now, assumed a more important
     aspect. It became the rebellion of a whole people incited to outrage by
     resentment for imaginary wrongs and sustained in their delusions by
     hatred and fanaticism.”  [FN: Indian Mutiny, Vol.I, page 644]

But attempts to find "alien ruler", "torrent overflowed" "sceptre" "whole
people" etc. all failed.   The 1859 book is out of copyright and can be
searched at several places; [books?id=tuZCAAAAcAAJ|google books];
clearly this quotation does not appear anywhere in Ball.

review by Barun De

The Golden jubilee of 1857 was noted by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who had
grown up in Ratnagiri in the Konkan, close to the residence in exile of the
last Burmese monarch Thibaw, seeking to enthuse feelings of patriotism
against British oppression. His detailed counter-reading of Kaye and Forrest
was entitled The Indian War of Independence, 1857. This presented only the
point of view of the rebels, and lacked even Kaye's attempts, through
footnoting, at magisterial impartiality. The book was promptly banned,
Savarkar arrested on other counts of terrorism, and transported to the
Andamans, like many Bengalis and Marathis implicated in anti-colonialism in
those years. His subsequent shifts, already evident in the Hindu chauvinist
tone of his book, towards propagating Hindutva fascism culminated in his
involvement in the Gandhi murder trial.

However, read in many illegally published, different language translations,
this book played a part in inspiring the generation of militant
revolutionaries of the 1920s and the 1930s. Ultimately, Subhas Chandra Bose,
the self-exiled Congress president, and his reorganised Azad Hind Fauj in
South-East Asia during Japan's war against the British harped on these
feelings in the anti-colonial aspect of Japan's war with the Anglo-American
alliance, which was followed by the transfer of power and Independence.
- Barun De, http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2412/stories/20070629004000400.htm