Author: Sunil Khilnani
Category: Nonfiction
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Unmoved, the British stationed a garrison in Lakshmi Bai’s kingdom to oversee the running of her state. For a time, she seemed an unimportant problem—until June 1857, when, after several weeks, the rebel sepoys reached Jhansi.
* * *
Fearful of the spreading unrest, sixty British officials had taken refuge with their families in the fort. As their food supplies dwindled, they were offered safe passage by the rebels on the condition that they lay down their arms. The British complied, but as the families filed out of the fort, they were corralled. The men were beheaded; the women and children hacked to pieces. The dismembered bodies were left to rot on the red earth for days, until eventually buried by British forces. (Later, the British erected a monument, which today stands a little forlornly behind locked gates, down a lane filled with small workshops repairing tires and other automotive parts.)
Though Lakshmi Bai denied any involvement, the British held her responsible for the massacre. We still don’t know the truth. Nonetheless, British forces were soon advancing on Jhansi. There is evidence that Lakshmi Bai used her considerable diplomatic skills to try to stay out of the fighting, but she was now part of the uprising whether she liked it or not. Cornered, she exhorted her people to fight. “We fight for independence,” she is supposed to have said. “In the words of Lord Krishna we will, if we are victorious, enjoy the fruits of victory; if defeated and killed on the field of battle, we shall surely earn eternal glory and salvation.”
The British bombarded the fort, and were answered by heavy return fire, some of it from a massive thirty-inch cannon mounted on the ramparts, where the queen was said to stand, sword in hand, urging her fighters on. In his memoir, the visiting priest Bhatt wrote of eleven nights of harrowing fighting, including British projectiles that burst in a hail of pellets and nails. Fires swept through parts of the fort, setting off a powerful explosion in the armory and destroying the temple. The British also had the advantage of telescopes, which allowed them to locate and blow up the water supply.
By the time the British finally breached the walls, the queen, whom they’d also stalked by telescope, had vanished. Just before they arrived, she made her famous horseback leap—or, if we are to take the word of Bhatt, who was hiding in the fort at the time, her midnight escape down a back staircase. Indian martial traditions typically stress either victory or giving up one’s life (“Do or Die,” in Mohandas Gandhi’s later slogan, see 38). But there is a third option they allow, and it’s built into the architecture of many Indian forts: it’s known as the dharm-darvar, or “dharma door,” a small doorway or side gate through which a fort’s defenders might discreetly and safely depart.
In the ruined fort, the queen left behind at least three thousand dead Indians; the British had achieved retribution, at a ratio of fifty to one. From Gwalior, roughly a ten-hour ride south of Jhansi, General Rose would soon report the death of another. In Lakshmi Bai’s final charge, she came galloping at the British dressed in red, like a male soldier, and brandishing her sword. According to Rose, her recovered corpse wore gold anklets and a necklace of pearls.
* * *
The death of the Rani of Jhansi was one of the final death knells of the larger rebellion, though there continued to be reprisals by the British—a rash of retaliatory violence the Indians called the Devil’s Wind.
Lakshmi Bai’s mythification began shortly thereafter. In this rare case, India and the West were on the same side. Characters based on her began appearing in popular British novels, women who were invariably seductive and potentially deadly. There were also Indian songs featuring versions of Lakshmi Bai—and novels, and eventually television series and Bollywood films. Even political leaders such as Indira Gandhi (46) and Sonia Gandhi would be portrayed, sometimes a little satirically, as Lakshmi Bai, atop her steed, midleap.
Lakshmi Bai’s moat at Jhansi is now a field of scrub grass. Just beyond it is a little diorama of the battle. At its center is the most iconic image of the queen: on her springing charger, with her sword held high—a bit like Shivaji (19), except she holds the reins between her teeth.
Lakshmi Bai was the most famous female figure of the uprising of 1857. Yet she was not the only woman to have picked up arms against the British that year. Primary sources give us enigmatic glimpses of others: the so-called Maid of Delhi, who fought in the uniform of a man; the Lucknow woman firing her gun from a pipal tree during the Battle of Sikandar Bagh, hitting six British officers before being blasted right out of the branches. But because of Lakshmi Bai’s social position and a fascination with her unusual story on both the British and the Indian national sides, the sources for her life are relatively richer than those we have for many other women in Indian history—despite the fact that, in 1858, the British ran off with the boxes containing her administration’s records.
Even as Indian society often subjugates its female citizens, a belief in feminine power and force is lodged deep in the popular psyche. Lakshmi Bai’s famous image evokes powerful Hindu goddesses such as Kali and Durga. What’s troubling is that women who manage to excel in a largely male-dominated society are seldom construed as human, as examples capable of emulation. Instead, they’re ascribed extrahuman powers. Supposedly, this celebrates them, but in fact it denies the reality and thus the relevance of their experience.
Of the few women who figure in the Indian historical pantheon, most are royal or upper caste. Deified, even these few remain elusive. Harleen Singh, in her research on Lakshmi Bai, was tantalized by the idea of the queen’s records, which were never recovered. “It’s a great wish of mine,” she says, “a romantic desire you might say, that one day that box might be found—that one day we would have her own voice telling us her story rather than trying to reconstruct her life and her story from all these different sources that purport to tell us the Rani’s story, when we know so little about her.”
I can imagine many such boxes, which together might contain the greatest lost treasure of Indian history: the voices of its women.
24
JYOTIRAO PHULE
The Open Well
1827–1890
I’ve often fancied that behind every revolution lurks a gardener. Sixty years after flower sellers took part in the storming of the Bastille in 1789, a young Indian man from a gardening caste, Jyotirao Phule, whose surname means “flower,” began his own lifelong assault on a social order far older and even more rank-conscious than the French ancien régime. His intent was to uproot the Brahminical order, and with it the caste system, which blocked access to education, jobs, and a sense of self-worth for people of his background.
Phule was born around 1827, and lived on the outskirts of the city of Poona (now Pune), once the headquarters of the Maratha states that Shivaji (19) helped establish. His grandfather had been a mali, or “gardener,” in a royal compound, and his father farmed vegetables and flowers. Though, as members of the Mali caste, the family was from the lowest, Shudra, order, they supplied the city’s elite, moving between the homes of the upper castes and the fields and villages. That, I think, gave them special insight into the advantages of privilege and the distribution of opportunity in their society. Phule grasped early on that Brahmins had reserved education for themselves, exploiting the ignorance of the lower castes and outcastes while mopping up the benefits of status.
In time, this young man’s frustration would become a critique, and then an agenda for change. He set up first a chain of schools for outcastes (today’s Dalits) and girls, and then a home for widows and orphans. His effort soon became a full-out polemical war against the Brahmins. Phule’s nineteenth-century experiments in schooling the unprivileged helped show what more democratic access to education might look like, and his systemic analysis of the political psychology of being poor, and attention to the consequences of exploitation for individual lives, have a cutting timeliness in contemporary India.
Phule is often clubbed together, misleadingly, with other Indian nationalists. “He’s really an anti
nationalist,” contends the scholar and social scientist Gail Omvedt. “He’s warning his people to be wary of instructions that they should put aside all grumblings about the hierarchies and distinctions in the country and become united.” Education, and not any idea of nation or territory, “was his swadeshi,” or patriotism, Omvedt says.
Phule’s anti-Brahminism and democratic ideas about education had more in common with Christian missionary pedagogy, from which he benefited directly. The irony of his story is that, if it were not for the usurping East India Company and the new order it established, one of the nineteenth century’s great radical humanists—in any country—might have been just another unknown vegetable supplier. Stories such as Phule’s complicate the idea of imperialism, according to the novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. “The British drained the wealth of a continent, impoverished it, and entrenched old values,” she says, “but they also opened doors for Phule, Ambedkar (41), and others to enter the discourse and change it.”
* * *
Pune today is one of India’s ten richest cities, a hub of education, manufacturing, information technology, and luxury car assembly lines. Parts of it feel like the corridors of steel and glass found in any of the world’s major business districts. It is easy to forget that the city is also the historical center of several important, if mutually antagonistic, schools of Indian thought.
As the seat of Maratha power, Pune was once second only to Delhi on the subcontinent’s political map. In the decades after the British gained control of the city, in 1818, it became fertile ground for Indian liberalism. Reform-minded intellectuals, many of them from the highest Chitpavan Brahmin caste, drew on their exposure to Western ideas to develop arguments for Indian constitutional government, the rule of law, and individual rights—arguments that would later influence Mohandas Gandhi (38), Jinnah (39), and Nehru. Meanwhile, more conservative Chitpavans advocated a militant effort to preserve Hindu values against perceived Christian and Muslim encroachment. Looking back at Pune’s vigorous nineteenth-century intellectual history, we can now make out a third important strain of social and philosophical argument: the thought of the lower-caste Phule.
Phule’s story is often told as a classic narrative of an individual bootstrapping himself out of poverty (school textbooks sometimes describe him as a child who worked the fields to survive). In truth, his father’s respectability as a vegetable vendor and owner of fertile land gave Phule the social confidence and educational head start that he would later use to launch a movement.
During the early colonial period, before rebellion and the hardening of British rule, Protestant missionaries were opening schools in many parts of the country. Not all the educators were Bible-beating dogmatists, interested only in notching up conversions. In an era when many poor, lower-caste teenagers went to work after a brief and perfunctory primary education (if that), Phule was meeting the Enlightenment, alongside high-caste and Muslim students, in a Scottish missionary school. In addition to Christian tracts, he was taught about the lives of Martin Luther, George Washington, and the Maratha warrior king Shivaji. Yet the writings that most stirred Phule were those of Thomas Paine, the revolutionary critic of the clergy and of irrational authority, and author of Rights of Man.
Phule acquired the missionaries’ distaste for superstition and idolatry and would soon outdo them in his loathing of a Hindu system whose power was organized around mass deference toward the priestly castes. But in Phule’s own telling, his transforming moment came at a classmate’s wedding. You can almost picture him, a rugged and handsome youth in his late teens, amid the wedding procession that escorted the bridegroom to the ceremony. The groom, one of his Brahmin schoolfriends, had invited him—innocently, so the story goes. Yet when orthodox elders noticed his presence, they commanded him to leave. A mere Shudra Mali, he was contaminating the Brahmin ritual.
That this expulsion came as a deep shock to Phule suggests how sheltered he had been thus far from the daily discriminations and aggression to which ordinary low-caste and outcaste people were subject. As with the Buddha (1), who recognized suffering only when he became a young man, the question arises: How could it have taken him this long? Phule may of course have been shaping his story for dramatic effect. Or perhaps while studying ideas of equality and justice, rationalism and individualism, in school, he had lost touch with the realities of his hometown.
Disabused of his social innocence, Phule developed a new clarity of vision. He saw not only that the caste order was an engine of suffering and exploitation, but that the submissiveness of the lower castes contributed some fuel. Providing the unprivileged with a rational education of the sort he had been granted, along with a belief in the possibility of progress against custom, seemed to him necessary elements of a remedy. As he later wrote, “Without education, wisdom was lost; without morals, development was lost; without development, wealth was lost; without wealth, the Shudras were ruined.”
* * *
An aspect of Phule that is neglected today by those who make him a hero of lower-caste politics is his shrewd and swashbuckling interest in Indian history. He would have been aware that he was living through one of his country’s key transitional moments. He was born less than ten years after the East India Company defeated the last peshwa of the Maratha Confederacy, which had once controlled vast portions of the western subcontinent. In the following decades, the British moved toward full mastery of India, but the new order was not yet set, and alliances were still unfixed. It was a period in which change could be articulated and enacted.
Phule would do both, in pursuit of the values he had imbibed from his reading of Rights of Man. He was barely twenty when, after visiting an American missionary school for disadvantaged girls, he started his first institution for girls and Dalits. His commitment to educating women, and lower-caste ones at that, ranked as scandalous even within his own community. He had taught his unschooled but bright teenage bride, Savitribai, to read and write so that she could teach at his school. This was an assault not just on Hindu stricture, but on family culture. “Every time Savitribai went on her way to work in the morning to teach in this little school they had started for girls, she would be pelted with mud and stones and garbage,” says Vidya Natarajan, author of an illustrated book about Phule.
But she was quite matter-of-fact about it. She would wear a dirty sari on her way to school, get into the schoolroom, change into her clean sari, teach all day, and then change back into her grubby sari to walk home past the same jeering crowds that she ran the gauntlet with in the morning.
Jyotirao was also roundly mocked, and his traumatized father kicked the young couple out of the family house. Leaving home turned out to give Phule and his wife new freedom to be social provocateurs. The small house into which they moved is now a staid museum with mud-colored walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, and displays of scenes from their life. But back then it was the war room for a passionate campaign against social and gender discrimination. By the time Phule was thirty, he and Savitribai were earning praise from the British for their schools, and contempt from conservative Brahmins. Childless (another social scandal of that age), the couple adopted a Brahmin widow’s son as their own, which provoked further distaste among leading members of the highest caste.
Phule found even progressive Brahmins suspect, writing that those who “are called reformed, and who are so clever … from time to time commit deeds so evil they would make your hair stand on end.” Still, when Phule and Savitribai set up a refuge for unwanted children and widows, some funding did come from Brahmin friends, as well as European supporters and Phule’s own occasional work as a contractor.
Some of Phule’s critics thought of him as a crypto-Christian, though unlike many others in his circle, he never converted—influenced, perhaps, by Thomas Paine’s anticlericalism. Other critics considered him a lackey of the British; obsessed with caste injuries, he was effectively conspiring to make Indians embarrassed about the entirety of their culture. One of
his ideological opponents put it like this: “What boldness and what loyalty to government and truth do these tough guys like Phule show in barking at Brahmins and licking their lips.” By attacking Hinduism instead of trying to reform it, Indian liberals contended, he was sabotaging the nascent possibility of Indians uniting to throw off British rule. When challenged about his plans and theories, Phule was rarely diplomatic: he labeled those he disagreed with as “silly,” “idiotic,” or worse. To him, some vague future nationalism led by the upper castes felt far less urgent than immediate, tangible gains for the ostracized.
Phule’s feelings about the British evolved in later life as the colonial project changed, and he came to share the critique of colonial economic exploitation held by some of his contemporaries. Yet Phule was in accord with many among the Indian elites he otherwise opposed in thinking that, overall, the British had a positive, even providential impact on India. It would have been hard for him to be anti-British, since one of his hopes was to claim for the lower castes the administrative jobs Brahmins held within the government. Good jobs were elusive, then as now; with education, Phule thought that the lower castes might displace so many Brahmins from British posts that they would become a new professional elite.
* * *
Across Maharashtra and India today, many government-funded schemes for schools, especially for Dalits and lower castes, bear either Jyotirao’s or Savitribai’s name, but to remember Phule only as an educationalist reduces and domesticates a tough, wide-ranging mind. Phule thought it insufficient to set up small islands of education and equality. He wanted to topple the entire caste order. His tireless writing to that end (as poet, playwright, historian, and polemicist) contains a social analysis whose iconoclasm still resonates.