Marxism,Mediation,Historiography: Writing About 1857

Introduction

Neil Lazarus (2011) has suggested that after years of critiquing the limits of postmodern theories of representation in the humanities and social sciences, Marxists in postcolonial studies need to turn their attention to producing richer and more accurate accounts of the culture, society, and history of the postcolonial world than are currently on offer. Undoubtedly, as is apparent from the various and generally unfulfilling responses to Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013), discussions about Marxism, postmodernism, and postcolonial studies at the theoretical level still leave much to be desired (see Spivak, 2014). ¹ But for Marxists working within postcolonial studies and related fields, such theoretical discussions need to be linked to materialist methods of analysis that lead to more convincing interpretations of history, culture, and society. Marxists do need to address questions about representation, false universalisms, and grand narratives that have been raised by the linguistic and cultural turns – but theorizing in isolation is not enough. We also need to write histories that show, in practice, better ways of accounting for fragmentation, levels of mediation, and the complexities of difference.

This article illustrates what Marxist historiography can look like when it is attentive to the nuances and particularities of the historical archive, deploying methods of close reading and ‘reading against the grain’ that have become popular in the humanities over the last 30 years. My focus is a July 1857 file from the British colonial archives concerning the actions of Lakshmibai, the deposed rani (queen) of the central Indian city of Jhansi, during the period of the 1857 Revolt in British India. The file contains and organizes a number of documents and meta-commentaries, including: letters from the Rani, written in June 1857, to Major W.C. Erskine, a British official in central India (penned in Persian but translated into English); Erskine’s letters to his superiors in the Home and Foreign Departments of the Government of India at Fort William, which summarize and comment upon the Rani’s letters and report on his actions; and the informal commentaries of Fort William officials on Erskine’s reports, often quite critical, that allow us to see how British policy developed in the midst of the insurgency.

While this particular file from July 1857 is not unknown to historians, the method of close reading I bring to it allows for a detailed discussion of mediation, fragments, and historiography. My reading is in line with more comprehensive accounts of 1857 and/or Lakshmibai by scholars who have emphasized the dynamic, heterogeneous and uneven nature of the Revolt and its construction in order to critique the linear, homogenizing nationalist narratives that still dominate its popular understanding. ² Besides adding more detail to the historical record, my study contributes to this discussion by suggesting that Marxist approaches to mediation and the fragment are ultimately better equipped to contend with the problems of writing radical histories than the postmodernist ones foregrounded in postcolonial studies today.

By drawing out and accounting for the layered fragments of the files and what they suggest about the complex workings of the colonial administration and anti-British resistance, I hope to demonstrate the value of critical methods that force scholars to pay attention to the highly mediated quality of the truths we find in archival material – even as we maintain the goal of developing a better and more accurate understanding of what happened in 1857. On the one hand, the colonial archives cannot simply offer up ‘historical truth’ in a direct and unmediated way, since they themselves are constructed, censored, and produced by the colonial state. What gets included or excluded, how and for what purpose the materials are organized, what is preserved and valued and what is considered negligible – all of these shape the archive. The historian risks ‘adopt[ing] the view of the established state’ if she uncritically centers her analysis on the official archives (Pandey, 1991: 560). At the same time, I contend that there are truths to be gleaned even from such an over-determined space. Despite its material dominance and force, the colonial state did not always speak with one voice, especially in its internal reports, as it tried to rule over living, active people in changing economic, social, and political conditions. A close look at archival material reveals fissures and tensions, produced by the mediated voices of the colonized (of various classes and social groups), and sharp debates among colonial officials about how to govern most effectively. The concern that the historian will adopt ‘the view of the established state’ flattens out the nuanced and contradictory way in which this ‘view’ emerges. Indeed, the historian needs to avoid another risk: the erasure of the historicity of the colonial/modern state. We must resist the purist impulse to fetishize the fragment, the different, or the unknown – defined, by default, as that which exists outside the archive or even outside the modern – and thereby eschew the task of radical history, namely, to develop a people-centered narrative that can shed light on the past and illuminate the present.

These fragments of 1857, I aim to show, can be fairly accurately explained and accounted for if we ground them in the understanding that the colonial archive is made possible by the material power of the colonial state, that that material power can be tracked and understood with reference to events in the world outside archival files, and that the latter are significant only insofar as they are understood in terms of the totality of that world. The fragment is not autonomous or self-generated but the product of the interaction between socio-historical conditions and human action. Therefore, I maintain – following Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs but also Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin – that this totality, for Marxism, cannot be posited as an already-existing truth. It cannot be closed or rigid but must remain open to the new, the unexpected, and the resistant because real life and the dynamic nature of consciousness and struggle always exceed what can be captured by the historian, the elite intellectual, or, for that matter, the revolutionary party.

From the perspective of the debates around Marxism, subaltern studies, and postcolonial studies, my project can be read as recovering and interrogating an earlier moment in Subaltern Studies – before the journal turned definitely towards postmodernist methods and aims in the late 1980s and 1990s. Subaltern Studies initially emerged as a challenge to decades of rigid Marxist historiography in India, offering a new focus on marginalized voices – and yet presented itself as further developing Marxist methods and theories, not standing in opposition to them. Consider Gautam Bhadra’s ‘Four Rebels of 1857’ (1988 [1985]), published in the fourth volume of Subaltern Studies. Speaking in the discourse of historical recovery that can hardly be associated with subaltern studies or postcolonial studies today, Bhadra writes that his project is to interrogate the absence, in nationalist texts, of the subaltern figure’s ‘role … and perception of alien rule and contemporary crisis’ and to ‘rehabilitate some of the rebels of 1857 who have already been forgotten by historians, or scantily treated, with no more than a nod in their direction’ (p. 130). The epigraph of the essay is from Marx and Engels’ The Holy Family, imagining a historiography that places human activity and agency firmly at the center: ‘History does nothing. … It is man [sic], real, living man who does [everything] … history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims, history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his own aims’ (p. 129). Aligning himself thus, Bhadra clearly sees his task as identifying and correcting a gap in mainstream historiography, and then linking history-writing to human agency and a politics of struggle.

But the fields of subalternist historiography and postcolonial studies soon shifted away from Bhadra’s positions. In the same 1985 volume, Gayatri Spivak had published the essay ‘Deconstructing Historiography’, that reread subalternists’ awareness of the gap in mainstream and left historiography through a deconstructive lens. By 1988, Spivak’s single intervention in one volume became enshrined as a central voice in Subaltern Studies when it appeared as the main article of an anthology, Selected Subaltern Studies – in which Bhadra’s essay is also included, but in a reduced role. Edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, and with a foreword by Edward Said, this volume introduced Subaltern Studies to an audience beyond India, in a new postmodernist/postcolonialist garb. Recovering that earlier moment in the field of subaltern studies requires challenging simplistic formulations that assign mediation and fragmentation to postmodernism and rigid totalities to Marxism – and demonstrating, at the same time, the kinds of histories and analyses that can be produced with a nuanced understanding of Marxist historiography and its links to radical struggle.

Contexts of the July 1857 File

On 10 May 1857, the Indian soldiers of the East India Company Army stationed in Meerut mutinied – killing their officers, expelling the European population of the town, and, having marched down to Delhi with local peasants and others, helping to foment rebellion there. A series of mutinies and uprisings subsequently took place across northern and central India over the next 18 to 20 months, bringing together soldiers, peasants, artisans, and landowners in a struggle against the British. ³ The transformation of British India’s economy in the decades after the industrial revolution, the rapid annexation of territories and displacement of indigenous rulers by the British under the ‘doctrine of lapse’ policy, ⁴ the heavy and unfamiliar arm of British taxation: these and other conditions helped to create an anti-British animosity across Indian social divisions, especially in recently-annexed territories like Satara (1848), Jhansi (1854), and Awadh (1856). Between May 1857 and January 1859, when the British finally declared victory in the rebel stronghold of Awadh, rebels drove the British out of Delhi, Aligarh, Lucknow, Allahabad, Bareilley, Kanpur, Mathura, Faizabad, Fatehgarh, Gwalior, Jhansi, and many more cities. Ultimately, the Revolt was savagely suppressed by the British counter-insurgency. In the aftermath, East India Company rule over India was disbanded for good, and India was placed directly under the Crown. The Indian Empire became more highly centralized and repressive over the course of its last 90 years, but the specter of 1857 haunted and inspired both colonizer and colonized, respectively.

Jhansi’s location, south of Delhi and west of Awadh, made it an important site of the 1857 struggle – but its legacy has been enhanced greatly by the memorialization of Rani Lakshmibai, who was killed by British troops on the battlefield. On 5 June 1857, soldiers of the 12th Native Infantry in Jhansi mutinied, executed most of the European military and civilian population, and took over the city. Placing Jhansi under the rule and security of the Rani, the rebel troops received arms and funds from her and left for Delhi. Neighboring rulers with long-standing boundary disputes with Jhansi saw the British departure as a sign of weakness, but Lakshmibai, who had rebuilt Jhansi’s army, thwarted their attacks. Nationalist accounts, combining scanty evidence with a powerful imagination, depict this short period of Lakshmibai’s rule as a golden age. ⁵ In any event, when Sir Hugh Rose arrived in Jhansi with the British army on 10 March 1858 and placed Jhansi under seige, he faced a well-defended fort with heavy guns. Lakshmibai herself fought in the battle – ‘like a man’ (mardaani) in the words of a famous nationalist poem by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan – and escaped to join Tatia Tope and other rebels in Kalpi when the city was taken in early April. Again Lakshmibai led troops into battle against the British in Kalpi in May 1858, and finally died on the battlefield in Gwalior on 17 June 1858.

In both nationalist and imperialist histories, there is a tendency to draw a straight line of anti-British resistance in the Rani’s politics between May 1857 and June 1858: the villains and conspirators of the early imperialist histories become the coherent rebellious forces in the national ones, sometimes imbued with a fully nationalist consciousness. ⁶ However, the July 1857 file, which was produced after the rebellion in Jhansi and before the British retaking of the city, problematizes any such narrative. Lakshmibai herself states, in her June letters to Erskine, that she was no supporter of the rebel soldiers but had been forced to help them, and had taken the throne only to keep order in the city on behalf of the British. Assessing and interpreting the Rani’s self-profession of innocence, through the re-circulation and re-interpretation of her letters and Erskine’s responses, makes up the substance of the July 1857 file being investigated here. Erskine’s superiors rejected his sympathetic responses to Lakshmibai; in fact, ‘all her subsequent communications to British officials went unanswered’, including letters she sent to them in January and February 1858, on the eve of the coming battle with Rose (Lebra-Chapman, 1986: 70). ⁷ The Rani was thus in political limbo. By revealing the Rani’s uncertain allegiances in June–July 1857, and the British colonizers’ resolution of internal debates, the file demands a more dynamic understanding of the relationship between the colonial state, the Indian ruling elites, and the soldiers and peasants at the backbone of the rebellion. When read with an alertness to micro-level fragments but also the macro-level totality, the file reveals a deep ambiguity about Lakshmibai’s role in relation to the Revolt, and questions, simultaneously, Indian-nationalist, British-imperialist, and even some radical accounts of the Rani. Through this process we can arrive at a more accurate understanding of what actually happened, and also account for aspects of the history that we will never know.

The problem of mediation and fragmentation is, in fact, multiplied when examining not just the structured and organized colonial archive but also the multi-layered and spectacularly unstructured archive of the colonized. ⁸ In my current book project, on 1857 and the Indian imagination, I investigate how a variety of Indian voices and texts have represented the Revolt and its suppression across the colonial and postcolonial periods. This entails an examination of official sources but also memoirs and memorials, fictions and histories, folk songs and popular culture. Tracing the legacies of 1857 in terms of ‘Indian’ political consciousness quickly becomes about the emergence and solidification of the very concept of ‘Indian’ at a specific historical moment – as the colonial state aimed to consolidate the regions and economies of the Indian subcontinent into a cohesive ‘India’. The July 1857 file, for all of its ambiguity, is fairly straightforward in comparison because its sense of ‘British’ identity and mission is clearly delineated; the file itself, enacting a definitive role in the bureaucracy of empire, reflects the centralized colonial project that underpins this coherent identity.

Preserving an understanding of the ambiguities and mediations in the document does not necessarily result in writing a radically unknowable history, I demonstrate, but can produce a history with clear explanations as to how colonial power worked. What I highlight here, therefore, is the methodology of the materialist historian and critic when approaching such ambiguity – especially when the meaning of 1857 seems over-determined by previous histories. Developing a coherent narrative of ‘what happened’ while retaining a sense of the multiple meanings of the evidence requires: (1) an attentiveness to fragments and a skepticism towards existing grand narratives from nationalist and radical historians (1857 as the first war of independence; 1857 as the last gasp of feudal chieftains against an encroaching modernity), but also (2) a commitment to a materialist model of representation and historiography in which research can produce convincing and explanatory pictures of reality – including the history of emerging concepts of self, community, and nation. Acknowledging heterogeneity, multiplicity, difference, and unevenness in the process of writing history doesn’t make radical history impossible, in the sense that the discipline itself is forever doomed to be on the side of repressive state power, ‘collu[ding] with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity’ (Chakrabarty, 1998b: 290). Such generalities give the discipline of history at once too little and too much credit: we can construct radical histories that are more and more inclusive of subaltern voices and fragmentary evidence, remain critical of histories that directly serve the interests of the status quo, and remember that, after all, history can only aim to represent, but never to fully contain or explain, lived experience.

Marxism, Postmodernism, and ‘the Fragment’

What new ideas have developed in Marxist cultural criticism and historiography in the aftermath of subaltern studies and postcolonial studies? Do Marxist theories of representation and culture need to side-step the cultural turn? Or have Marxist theories and methods of cultural criticism grown and developed after subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, and the like? These are some of the bigger questions – beyond the scope of this paper – with which Marxists in literary and cultural studies need to engage.

My sketch below of the differences between Marxism and postmodernism in approaching the question of mediation and fragmentation is rooted in two areas of my engagement with Marxism: within postcolonial and cultural studies, and within political theory. My premise is that the postmodernist models of representation and historiography emerging from subaltern studies – and dominant in postcolonial studies – are problematic in two key ways as far as writing radical histories is concerned. ⁹ I question: (1) the extent to which subalternist historians have actually offered new models of radical history-writing beyond ‘histories from below’ and what Chakrabarty calls ‘minority histories’ (1998a), and (2) the reification of subalternity that occurs when theorists define subalterns as those who are forever marginalized, regarding ‘subaltern pasts’ and ‘fragments’ as those events which cannot appear in histories except through acts of epistemic violence. What I am seeking, in effect, is the historiographical counterpart to the theories of consciousness and revolution in Gramsci (1980), Luxemburg (1999), and Lenin (1999), in which subaltern/proletarian consciousness is regarded as central to fundamental transformations in society but, in order to achieve this potential, needs to expand from the limitations and isolation caused by exploitative and oppressive conditions – in short, the conditions of subalternity. Due to his insistence that subalterns need to transcend their isolation and that this development must happen organically, out of the tremendous capacity of the oppressed, Gramsci ‘provides an alternative both to the celebration of fragmentation fashionable in liberal multiculturalism and uncritical postmodernism as well as other attempts of overcoming it through recourse to some external, transcendental, or imposed worldview’ (Green and Ives, 2009: 28). ¹⁰

Indeed, we see a similar valuing of the activity and thought of the marginalized and oppressed in Luxemburg (1999) and Lenin (1999), while recognizing the limitations of subaltern agency in and of itself – despite the fact that the intense polemics between them have overshadowed their commonalities. Luxemburg’s attacks on the restrictive nature of party leadership and emphasis on spontaneity in the context of German social democracy have buried quotations like this from The Mass Strike: ‘the apparently “chaotic” strikes and the “disorganized” revolutionary action after the January general strike are becoming the starting point of a feverish work of organization’ (Luxemburg, 1999). Lenin’s insistence, in the face of tsarist torture and oppression, that ‘professional revolutionaries’ need to bring radical consciousness to workers ‘from without’ in What is To Be Done? has displaced the careful dialectic of passages like this: ‘the mass movement places before us new theoretical, political, and organizational tasks, far more complicated than those that might have satisfied us in the period before the rise of the mass movement’ (Lenin, 1999). ¹¹ According to Ernest Mandel:

Lenin welcomed huge, spontaneous outbreaks of mass strikes and demonstrations just as enthusiastically and just as explicitly as Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky. Only the Stalinist bureaucracy falsified Leninism with its increasing distrust of spontaneous mass movements […] The difference between the Leninist theory of organization and the so-called theory of spontaneity – which can be attributed to Luxemburg only with important reservations – is thus to be found not in an underestimation of mass initiative but in an understanding of its limitations. (1994: 91–2)

Returning to Gramsci, we see the same dynamic: ‘every “spontaneous” movement contains rudimentary elements of conscious leadership’ (1980: 197).

In what ways can the historical need of the subaltern to abolish subalternity be translated into a historiographical necessity of making fragments integral to – not outside the purview of – history-writing? How have Stalinist theories of struggle, revolution, organization, and historiography impacted our notions of what Marxist and radical historiography entails? What would a 21st-century Marxist historiography look like that learns from the linguistic and cultural turns – acknowledging that they emerged, in fact, from a left intelligentsia dissatisfied with ‘actually existing socialism’?

While there is a basic difference between how Marxists and postmodernists interpret evidence, theorists in both camps have a common recognition of the complexities presented by fragmentation and mediation. ¹² The problems of historical interpretation highlighted by postmodernists in challenging both dominant and resistant historiographies and modes of representation are also problems with which Marxists have wrestled. As expressed by Georg Lukacs throughout History and Class Consciousness, for instance, the fragment or the particular can be related to the totality of social relations but only through a process that grasps the complexity of mediation, disallowing both empiricism and transcendental, anti-materialist appeals to ‘the whole’ or ‘the universal’ (Scott, 2006) . Taking up the terms ‘totality,’ ‘contradiction,’ ‘mediation,’ and ‘change’ in Lukacs, Helen Scott expresses the Marxist problematic thus: ‘Capitalism is a totality, yet is immediately experienced as disconnected parts; the parts are in a relationship of mutual conditioning, or mediation, and this relationship is not static but contradictory and fluid’ (Scott, 2006: 14).

The central aspect of the difference between Marxist and postmodernist notions of the fragment is that whereas Marxists seek to understanding the particular and specific in relation to the totality of social relations – to examine the materiality and the context of a given fragment – postmodernists champion the fragment against totality as such. But what each camp means by ‘totality’ is itself a subject for debate. The fragment, postmodernists insist, is not a sign of some larger, static whole; it is not a transparent entity whose meaning can simply be determined by placing it within a larger narrative about development or class struggle or how the world works. What can get lost within this articulation, however, is that Marxism’s totality is also positioned against empiricist knowledge – and any tautological methodology by which specific objects (texts, individuals, etc.) are understood in relation to a larger, already-existing whole whose existence is given. The Marxist insistence on revolution and transformation, as described in the work of Gramsci, Luxemburg, and Lenin, demands that movement, disruption, and explosiveness remain at the center of any understanding of subaltern life and consciousness.

For postmodernism, ‘fragment’ is a category that is linked to ‘difference’: it cannot be incorporated into any larger narratives without an act of epistemic violence. It is not critical only of specific representations or specific meta-narratives, but all representations and meta-narratives as such. The researcher’s method, then, should be to resist patterns of analysis that explain the particular in terms of the general since that method, in the postmodernist point of view, tends towards the fiction that the fragment is transparent, a sign that definitively points itself to something that pre-exists analysis and is already known. Reading the fragment as always already part of a whole, then, can shut down the process of making new knowledge, and keeps us stuck in old ways of thinking. Rather, we must understand, especially when we look at the past, that the paradigms we use to explain things belong to our time and not to the time we are studying. Having particularized and historicized the fragment thus, we must remain radically open to new meanings that might suggest themselves. In Pandey’s definition, the fragment is

an appeal to an alternative perspective, or at least the possibility of another perspective. It is a call to try and analyze the historical construction of the totalities we work with, the contradictions that survive within them, the possibilities they appear to fulfill, the dreams and possibilities apparently suppressed. (Pandey, 2000: 296)

For Marxists, fragments, details, particulars, individual texts, etc. are to be understood in terms of a web of larger and larger contexts and structures – in terms of the totality of social relations. This totality invokes everything from the very mode of production itself (how things are produced and reproduced) to the conditions that have produced the object being examined (a text, an artifact, an idea, the actions of an individual, etc.). Lukacs, however, rebelled against what he called a ‘mechanical totality,’ an undialectical, static model of totality that – like bourgeois thought – saw the particular, the fragment, as a transparent object whose meaning would be clear simply by viewing it through the ‘correct’ lens. Marxism contains a radical understanding that the process of writing history (of linking a historical artifact to the totality of social relations) involves much self-reflexivity, respect for nuance, and openness to new and unexpected knowledge and ways of knowing. When Marx insisted that ‘it is essential to educate the educator himself’ in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (2002), for instance, he was raging against the smug confidence of empiricist and closed systems of knowledge in which everything is always already thought out, and research is additive not generative. Very much like postmodernism, then, Marxism has always asked questions about the lenses, the disciplinary conventions, the theories of knowledge through which we view and interpret things, historicizing them and drawing out the conditions that produce, shape, and limit them. The entire criticism of bourgeois ideology and methodology in Marxism is premised on such a thorough critique, and an exposure of the blindness of bourgeois thought to its own conditions of emergence, its contingency.

Rather than rejecting totality, however, Marxism rejects specific totalities and universalisms that are blind to the material contexts that shape the world of the text. The fact that objects need to be interpreted, that mediation needs to be recognized, that knowledge and truth are not static and closed does not mean that interpretation is impossible, or complicit within structures of dominance, because texts exist in a real relation to forces in the world, and each fragment and particular exists in a real world whose machinations can be analyzed. Marxists challenge representations of the real in order to find adequate and better representations; we account for historical artifacts that don’t fit existing narratives by being open to developing new ones. And yet these are only representations. Real life goes beyond history-writing, and the goal of revolutionary theory and practice is not to be able to grasp everything, but to transform the material and ideological structures that create subalternity in the first place.

Let’s turn now to the July 1857 file. As we shall see, the contestation of imperialist and nationalist historiographies of 1857 is relatively easy: it’s mainly a matter of empirical archival work. But the reconstruction of an alternative historiography is harder, and raises questions about what theories and methods we use to understanding the reality of mediation and interpretation in writing history. By peeling off the many layers of the July 1857 file, I hope to show both the complexity of historical interpretation and the possibility, nonetheless, of arriving at a fairly coherent understanding of what actually happened. While the examination of this file – and others like it – do not reveal exactly what the Rani was thinking in June and July of 1857, restoring that ambiguity reveals the complexity of the cross-class alliances of 1857, as well as the British ability to turn that ambiguity to their advantage.

The Rani of Jhansi: The Reluctant Rebel

On the night of 1 July 1857, almost a month after the Jhansi uprising, two tired Indian messengers from Lakshmibai arrived in Jabalpur in central India, at the office of Major Erskine. Coming through dangerous forest paths, the two men had been stripped of all their clothes and belongings. But concealed in their walking sticks they held letters to Erskine from Lakshmibai who, along with her child, had lost all claims to the throne after the death of her husband, Gangadhar Rao, in 1854. The British – denying that Gangadhar’s adopted heir, Damodar Rao, had any legitimate claim to the throne, and disregarding the Jhansi king’s long-standing fealty to the British – had annexed Jhansi under the new ‘doctrine of lapse’ policy of Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India. Lakshmibai was allowed to live with Damodar in a palace in the town of Jhansi, located outside the fort, as legal debates continued regarding her individual property rights.

So why was the Rani of Jhansi communicating with Erskine at all? If all you know about Lakshmibai is what I have related here, then the question is not too mysterious. British rule in India was constituted not only by direct colonial occupation and control but innumerable political, military, and economic alliances with local kings, ruling families, and landlords. It makes perfect sense that the widow of the loyal ruling family in Jhansi would communicate with her allies after a mutiny and armed uprising in her town. It is hardly surprising to learn that this letter was just the latest in an ongoing series of legal and political communications. Between 1854, the year of annexation, and 1857, the year of rebellion, Lakshmibai was constantly in touch with various British officials, constructing arguments through her scribe and legal advisers that quite eloquently tried to re-open the case of the annexation of Jhansi. ¹³

But if you have heard of the Queen before reading this essay, then you have learned, through popular histories and narratives, that Lakshmibai was not only linked directly to the rebellion but has been one of its most celebrated leaders for over a century. The issue of the Rani’s communication with the British now takes on a new and different meaning. The very presence of these letters, in fact, represents deep problems for the imperialist, nationalist, and even some radical histories of the uprising. For the imperialists she was a Jezebel, and British fictional accounts of her represent her as a lascivious, beautiful, and terrible rebel queen. In nationalist accounts she is like a goddess, the heroic queen who stared down the British, organized her city and kept it secure, and led troops into battles against the British several times before she was killed. Today, the Rani of Jhansi is held as one of the greatest heroes of the nationalist pantheon as a whole, extending well beyond the Revolt. In my estimation, Lakshmibai plays a central role in making the bloody conflagration of 1857 palatable to a nationalist mythology that also embraces Gandhian non-violence. ¹⁴

If the Rani and Erskine are carrying on conversations in June–July 1857, the mainstream imperialist and nationalist narratives of the Rani, which posit her as being completely one with the mutinous soldiers of Jhansi, are unsustainable. What we see, in both imperialist and nationalist histories, is a projection of the final unity of Lakshmibai and the rebels in March1858 back onto the entire course of their relationship since June 1857. The logic of colonialism meant that the British authorities at the highest levels eventually ignored the Rani’s pleas; they treated her with suspicion and mistrust, and thus paved the way for the strategic unity of the various anti-British forces. For their various political purposes, it is convenient for both imperialism and nationalism to read this unity as the final expression of a bond that always already existed between ‘Indians.’ But this means ignoring the real complexities of the relationships between ordinary Indians, the soldiers, the old ruling classes, and the British.

Imperialist and nationalist accounts, for example, must rest on surface-level refutations of any claims that the Rani was acting in good faith when she wrote to the British – even when, in fact, all of the evidence points in the other direction. Nationalist histories, as Tapti Roy argues persuasively in Raj of the Rani, have a second-order problem, because after painting a queen who was always already rebellious, they have to come up with strategies to show that she was not responsible for the massacre of Europeans, including children and civilians, that occurred during the rebellion. These strategies include: ignoring the massacre, mentioning it quickly as the act of a few bad rebels, or even trying to show the queen – as in one artistic rendering I saw in the Jhansi Museum in 2011 – as being kind to the British civilians and ill-served by the vengeful and ignorant soldiers. In short, Lakshmibai’s ambiguous acts of 1857 are dissolved into pre-existing narratives about her relationship to the Revolt. They are worked into ideology, and used to justify imperialist counter-insurgency narratives and nationalist representations of rebellion. This process of myth-making is something that both Marxist and postmodernist methods would critique and interrogate.

Lakshmibai and Erskine

In her letters to Erskine, the Rani writers that after the Indian soldiers’ mutiny in the Jhansi regiment, they attacked and threatened her. Lakshmibai insists on her fealty to the British crown, and requests permission to rule the kingdom of Jhansi on a temporary basis until the British are able to reassert their presence in the city. Here’s a sample of the epistolary exchange in order to give a sense of its tone. The Rani’s letter (originally in Persian, summarized by a translator), reports on the ‘faithlessness, cruelty, and violence’ of the rebel soldiers, and that she ‘very much regrets’ that she could not aid the government forces. The Rani hints that ‘greater cruelties could have been enacted’ than this. The rebels ‘behaved with much violence against herself,’ and said they would ‘blow up her palace with guns’ if she did not help them. The Rani admits that she is ‘in continual dread of her own life, and that of the inhabitants of the town.’ She is sure that the rebels will meet their fate for ‘murdering [the European civilians] in such a cruel manner that the Almighty is sure to punish them for it.’

The British received the letter and communicated to her rapidly. Erskine wrote to the Rani on 2 July (the very next day), in response to her request for temporary reinstatement:

I beg you will manage the District for the British Government, collecting the Revenue, raising the police, as may be necessary and making other proper arrangements as the government will approve, and when the Superintendent takes charge from you he will not only give you no trouble, but will repay you for all your losses and expenses, and deal liberally with you.

Erskine then issued an official proclamation to be read aloud in Jhansi, confirming that ‘the strong and powerful British government is sending thousands of European soldiers … to restore order in Jhansee.’ In the meantime, the proclamation added: ‘[T]he Rani will rule in the name of the British government, and according to the customs of the British government. I hereby call on all, great and small, to obey the Rani and pay the government revenue to her.’ But it was a classic carrot and stick approach. The proclamation assured the people of British protection but also warned them against disobedience, reporting that: ‘The British Agency has retaken the city of Delhi and has killed thousands of rebels, and will hang or shoot all the rebels wherever they may be found.’ The reporting was either faulty or deliberately false – the British retook Delhi only in September 1857. In either case, Erskine was clearly relying on the symbolic importance of Delhi, captured by soldiers and civilians on 11 May 1857, to give teeth to his threat.

Was Erskine lying to the Rani? Was he setting up a trap in order to be able to call her a usurper – and to justify the assault on Jhansi that began in early 1858? The correspondence suggests that he was not, and opens our eyes to the fact that the colonial government itself, though highly centralized, was also a complex entity, with different officials within the bureaucracy taking different perspectives on the best way to control India. Erskine duly reported to his superiors on the same day, enclosing all of the documents (the Rani’s letters and his response) along with a cover letter justifying his actions. His full acceptance of the Rani’s position is worth noting: ‘From this it will be seen by the Ranee’s own account that she in no way lent assistance to the mutineers and rebels; on the contrary, she herself was plundered and forced to take charge of the district.’

From these different sets of letters, the only straightforward reading would be that the Rani was an ally of the British, that the British recognized her as such from their past dealings with her, and that this alliance emerged unscathed in 1857 even though the two parties had been debating the Rani’s status since the annexation of 1854. The imperialist and nationalist versions of events, that the Rani was a full-on rebel, can only be maintained by arguing that the Rani was lying throughout, knowing full well that the British would have to trust her since there were no Europeans left in Jhansi. But this would be pure speculation, imputing a rebellious anticolonial consciousness to the Rani for which there is no evidence. Furthermore, it is hard to imagine the rebel soldiers allowing a letter to the British that denounced them as thieves and murderers.

Nevertheless, it is true – and this is the ultimate basis of the obfuscation in the imperialist and nationalist accounts – that in May 1858 a united force of the soldiers, the civilians, and Lakshmibai faced the British army in a battle for Jhansi. Between July 1857 and March 1858, as Lakshmibai armed herself and her city against local (and pro-British) rulers who came to fight her, as Jhansi came to be treated as a liberated zone by rebels and activists passing through central India, and as Tatia Tope, the rebel strategist of another ruler, Nana Saheb, gained influence in central India, the British increasingly began to see the Rani as a rebel too. And so when the armies of Sir Hugh Rose, attempting to take back central India, arrived in front of a highly militarized Jhansi, they approached her as an enemy – and she, anticipating antagonism after her last letter to the British of February 1858 went unanswered, was ready. Whereas nationalist texts – like the movie The Rising: The Ballad of Mangal Pandey (2005) – make much of this historical coming together of rebel leaders as the sign of a pre-existing national unity with deep roots in the past, historians like Roy have resisted positing such an ahistorical consciousness by showing how different, independent motivations came together at a specific moment; in this instance, she argues, ‘the rajas who rebelled were compelled more by the immediate insurrectionary situation than past grievances under British rule’ (1996: 19).

For those seeking to ‘set the record straight’ without falling into the tautological readings of imperialism and nationalism, there is no magic bullet to be found that tells us the Rani’s true intentions, or that explains, once and for all, what the relationship between Lakshmibai and the rebels really was. We have to grapple with complexity, mediation, indirect evidence, and logical inference. For instance, consider the letters of Lakshmibai. For someone raised on the nationalist myths – or, more precisely, for a second-generation desi like myself who grew up casting his second-hand, fully derivative nationalist sentiments in a rebellious mold to confront US racism – it’s a real thrill to read the actual letters of someone perceived to be a heroic, anti-British rebel. But the letters of Lakshmibai can only be found in the colonial archives, refracted multiple times through: (1) the scribes who wrote the letters; (2) the translators who made them legible to the British; (3) the colonial bureaucracy that circulated, commented upon, debated, and preserved them; and (4) the nationalist bureaucracy that has maintained these archives along with its more or less wholesale adoption of the colonial state structure. Whether we contest the nationalist narrative of the Rani or not, we cannot really appeal to unmediated, unproblematic accounts of the Rani’s real voice, or to real eyewitness testimonies.

The Empire Strikes Back

At this point it may be tempting to say that the meaning of the letters cannot actually be contained in the letters themselves. Let’s admit, certainly, that much exists outside the texts to help us explain the letters properly. But I want us to hold back from that leap to the contextualized reading for another moment, as the textual fragment is richer still. The Fort Williams officials’ comments on the stack of letters give a clue, in fact, to how the British bureaucracy and military began writing the imperialist history of Lakshmibai from the outset: immediately asserting her complicity in the 1857 rebellion and disagreeing with Erskine’s sympathetic commentary. The physical file is not only a palimpsest figuratively but also literally, marked up in blue pen by various East India Company officials, with commentary – often snide when referring to Erskine – in the margins.

Above I cited Erskine’s lines: ‘From this it will be seen by the Ranee’s own account that she in no way lent assistance to the mutineers and rebels’; in the margins, an official commented: ‘Major Ellis [political assistant in Jhansi] writes that she did. That she gave them guns and men.’ When Erskine writes that ‘on the contrary she herself was plundered and forced to take charge of the district,’ one reader underlines the word ‘forced’ and adds ‘!’ in the margins. When Erskine summarizes his proclamation, that the Rani ought to rule on behalf of the British, a marginal note says: ‘Major Erskine is powerless, but it would have been better to be [unreadable] than to give [unreadable] to a woman, who [unreadable] the atrocities of Jhansi.’ Combining skepticism of Indian trustworthiness, conviction in Indians’ collective guilt, and classic Victorian misogyny, the topmost officials smoothed over the complexities of the moment in order to clarify and facilitate imperialist aims. In doing so, ironically, they created the nucleus of the nationalist version of these events.

This marginalia turned gradually into a verdict, as reflected in the series of one-line comments on the envelope containing the documents as it circulated between Fort William officials from 16 July to 21 July 1857. The series of comments, reading like a contemporary social media chat, reads thus:

Fort William, in fact, approves Erskine’s actions, but does so tentatively, and with a constant focus on the long-term goal of the British: retaking Jhansi and exploiting, if necessary, the temporary and contingent rule of the Rani. The stage was thus set for the imperialist narrative that was to come – buttressed by other British accounts, particularly those of one S. Thornton who said he had escaped from Jhansi and claimed the Rani was absolutely complicit in the killing of the Europeans, and of a woman who claimed she was the only European to have escaped. In February, after months of refusing to reply to Lakshmibai’s letters but now positioned to launch an army towards Jhansi, the Governor-General Charles Channing wrote instructions to local officials from Fort William on how to treat the Rani if she were captured: to detain her, to appoint a Commissioner to make a ‘preliminary inquiry into her conduct,’ and then to bring her to Fort William on trial without ‘any doubt as to whether she deserves to be tried or not’ (quoted in Lebra-Chapman, 1986: 70). Lakshmibai kept writing to the British, but the decision had already been made and Rose’s Field Force was already on the move.

Conclusion

The file we have examined might look like the perfect example of the postmodernist fragment, whose mediated and thickly layered quality resists easy merging into any dominant narrative. The subaltern queen cannot speak, we might say, and the many meanings we attach onto her letters are only those we impute to her; that all we can do is ventriloquize her voice, and that this is once again gendered, as the imperialist and nationalist narratives construct that female voice for their own agendas. The only speech that the Rani possesses to make her claims – whatever her motivations – is ensconced in the language of colonial law and politics.

In my contextualized reading of the file, however, I have tried to demonstrate that a better reading would join an understanding of the mediated quality of these documents and an acceptance of their complexity with an awareness of their materiality and historical context. The July 1857 can be a hard text to read, but it can be read intelligibly. The different layers of the palimpsest are quite clear: the voice of the top officials, the voice of a lower official, and the voice of a supplicant. The Home and Foreign Departments, overruling lower officials like Erskine, read the Rani ‘against the grain’ in order to maintain flexible tactics that could achieve that larger strategic aims of British rule. And around all of this was the context of the rebellion, at a time when the British were actually temporarily paralyzed – they had no forces in the region – and yet remained confident that they would recover and find other ways to retake central India. The only explanation that makes sense, as Tapti Roy puts it, comes through an understanding that the Rani was in fact a reluctant rebel: pulled into the uprising through circumstances that she did not create and yet, in the months after the mutiny and rebellion in Jhansi, finding herself to be in a position of power whose basis was much more in line with the aims of the rebellion than those of the British. Several questions remain unanswered about what actually happened, on the level of event and of the Rani’s political consciousness, but this fragment is certainly not standing by itself, resisting our ability to put forward a rational and coherent narrative.

Decades removed from the sharp postmodernism/Marxism debates of the 1990s, I find it useful to return to that moment in the early volumes of Subaltern Studies described above, in which a flexibility of approach was combined with a Marxian insistence on writing people-centered, radical histories. Indeed, Marxist historiography can find common cause with other radical traditions developing in that time period, including black feminism and critical race theory, that saw themselves as moving away from Marxism yet were not quite compatible with postmodernism either. For example, Kimberle Crenshaw’s ‘Mapping the Margins’ (1991), a crucial text in the development of these fields, approaches the question of black women’s erasure in histories and movements in ways that are closer to Bhadra’s approach than to Spivak’s. For while Crenshaw notes, early in the piece, that many movements ‘relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling,’ her aim is not to mainly talk about how that silencing happens but to ‘advance the telling of that location’ (Crenshaw, 1991: 357), to put forward a method through which voices might be heard, and representation might be possible. What models of writing radical histories emerge from black feminism and materialist feminism more generally? What parallels to Marxist historiography might be made in the process, illuminating its capabilities for grappling with mediation and fragmentation? How might Marxists contribute to, and learn from, other materialist traditions of radical history writing? Such are the horizons and possibilities that closed up in postcolonial studies through the 1990s. A renewed understanding of mediation in Marxist methods of writing history can open them up once more.