[Urbanstudy] (no subject)

[Anand Vivek Taneja]

Re/Dis-membering the city: Delhi/Jhansi/1857

Pardon the long silence. I have an excuse only for the last week, though, 
and not for the month or so preceding.

I have been out of Delhi – in Jhansi, Datia, Orchcha and Gwalior – 
researching the life and times of Rani Lakshmibai. The times of Laksmibai 
being the uprising(s) of 1857, which brings me back to City One and a few 
papers presented there, and some oft recurring thoughts about the city, and 
remembrance, and nostalgia.

Nayanjot Lahiri presented a paper on ‘Commemorating and Remembering 1857 in 
Delhi.’ The main thrust of her argument, as I remember it, was that after 
they crushed the revolts in Delhi in September, 1857, the British practised 
an ‘intentional desacrilization’ of the city. Turning the Fatehpuri Masjid 
into a bakery for several years, for example. They also radically altered 
the city’s physical geography. Many of the city’s landmarks were either 
destroyed or radically altered in structure and form… And perhaps most 
importantly, the British inscribed their victim-hood and ultimate victory 
all over the city. Delhi, and the Ridge became pilgrimage spots. Though by 
Curzon’s time, the memories of colonial violence were sought to be erased, 
the violence done to the Brits was immortalised across the city in memorials 
and pilgrimage spots such as the Telegraph Memorial, the Jeetgarh memorial 
on the ridge, Nicholson Cemetery, etc.

The Indians are completely absent from this landscape. There is not one 
single memorial to them, fifty five years after independence. Except for a 
small inscription at the base of the megalomaniac Victorian Gothic Mutiny 
memorial  - ‘the “enemy” of these inscriptions… were actually freedom 
fighters…’ (I am paraphrasing here…). In the narratives inscribed on the 
physical geography of the city, the Indians who fought and died and lost 
everything in the Gadar are one small post-script, tucked away in the 
Northern Ridge, where no one goes except to make-out.

Nayanjot Lahiri mourned the fact that there was no memorial put up by any 
government for 1857 in Delhi. And I had a problem with that. How do you put 
up a memorial to something as enormous as 1857? How do you ‘memorialize’ 
change and destruction and suppression of memory of that magnitude? And how 
do you do it without it falling into the trap of the politics of the ‘victim 
complex’? Without falling into what Thomas Friedman has called the ‘Yad 
Vashemization of Israel’ in the case of Israel? Where the holocaust never 
ends, and the politics of threat perception drives all sane opposition 
underground… after vilifying them as Nazis or Nazi sympathisers or worse? 
Especially with the sort of government we have right now…

Can 1857 and what it did to a city be ‘memorialised’?

According to Jhansi, yes.

Along the walls of Jhansi Fort, on the approach from the new city, there is 
an interesting tableau. Brightly painted scrap metal figures of British and 
Indian warriors, locked in combat with, artistically bent swords…  The 
mounted Rani herself, as Durga, trampling a Angrez demon underhoove. Select 
warriors on the Indian side, dressed in battle-gear that looks suspiciously 
high-Mughal. Select warriors on the English side, nameless, unlike the 
Indians, and evil looking. The Angrez who bribes Dulhaju to open the gates 
of the city actually has Ajit dark glasses. On a barren slope next to the 
dour walls of Jhansi Fort, the government of UP/India has chosen to 
memorialise 1857 as a …. Cut out comic strip.

But how Jhansi remembers 1857 is another matter. In old Jhansi, while 
walking around the crowded narrow streets, one comes across many mazaars. 
They are all said to be  Pathan soldiers who died fighting the British, in 
the vicious street to street, house to house fighting that followed the 
british re-conquest of Jhansi after the siege…

The point I’m trying to make is still pretty hazy with me. Except that in 
the memories still current in Jhansi, in the geography of the Old City in 
the popular imagination, the violence of what was done to the city has not 
been forgotten, or reduced to caricature.

Street to street, house to house. It  would be false to say it 
authoritatively, but sreets and houses in Old Jhansi, and those who live in 
them, have long memories. The localised, street/house events of 1857-58 are 
remembered and recounted, with a laconic air by those who live a hundred and 
fifty odd years away from those events. Ancestors, friends of ancestors, and 
ancestors of friends, and what they did in those tumultuous times and what 
was done to them is preserved and passed down, so far, from generation to 
generation. A city and a time, remembered through the stories of its people.

Which is not to say that Jhansi is an old town, wallowing in the past. It is 
fast paced, buzzing with activity, and as forward looking as any other town 
of its size in India. It is not a ‘backward’ town by any obvious standards. 
Except maybe, (I don’t know how much this is true but this is what 
everybodyin Jhansi says) that there have never been communal riots in 
Jhansi. And my own observations of the city were that Hindus and Muslims 
have a remarkably easy relationship in the city… and it is an uplifting 
thing to feel. And the worse times get everywhere else,  the more obvious 
this feeling becomes in Jhansi.

I would like to think that this happens because of the way the city is 
narrated… though the Rani of Jhansi has become a nationalist icon, a 
‘Veerangana’, a spiritual descendant of Shivaji, who made the ultimate 
sacrifice for the sake of the nation… in Jhansi, she is important and her 
memory is loved and venerated, but as ‘our queen…’. The grand narrative of 
‘the nation’ is here contested by the narratives of the streets and houses; 
the latter is not subsumed by the former. The stories of Ghulam Ghaus Khan, 
the love of Khudabaksh and Motibai, the story of Narayan Shastri the 
‘fallen’ Pandit, are as important in Jhansi as the story of the rani. And 
all these narratives are inextricably linked together in the tumult of 
1857-58… and somehow this prevents Jhansi from forgetting everyday relations 
between neighbours and friends, and going berserk in the name of injustices 
done to the ‘nation’ a thousand years ago. Remembering the everyday in the 
everyday is what keeps Jhansi sane.

Memorialising, can and does turn history into kitsch. Dangerous, kitsch. But 
remembering…

… I am trying to posit a difference between the two.


The memories of the city, rather than the memorials are what need to be 
preserved, and excavated.

One of the earliest, finest, examples   of  ‘subaltern history’ came about 
with  the young Mahasweta Devi going to Jhansi in the centennial year of the 
Revolt, and collecting folk tales and traditions of the Bundelkhand region 
about the Rani and the revolt… the book was a remarkable document, even 
coming out in the rush of material on 1857 being produced and excavated all 
over the country for the centennial year… patthar mitti se fauj bannayi/ 
kaathse katowar /pahaad uthake ghoda banaayi/ chali gwalior…


I want to end this rambling by saying that one of the ways to counter the 
grand narrative of the nation is to celebrate the memory of the city, its 
everydayness… that at least in the ‘old cities’ of India, the narratives do 
run counter to each other… it is when cities become ‘imperial cities’, 
that….





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