War of Civilisations: Two Volumes
Amaresh Misra
Rupa & Co, Rs 2,500

This is a book of great courage and perseverance. Authoring a two-volume magnum opus of more than 2,000 pages, on any subject, is not easy. Amaresh Misra’s earlier books on Lucknow and Mangal Pandey establish his interest in events centred on 1857. But first, the warts. A heavy dose of copy editing was required. At times, the style is repetitive, a serious problem if there are 64 chapters. The first volume is better written than the second.

However, this is more than compensated by extensive research. There is also an interesting experiment in the first two chapters of the first volume (concerning Azimullah Khan and Azeezun Bai) of using the fiction genre to describe events. This works quite well, except that the reader can’t always distinguish fact from fiction. But this isn’t an experiment that is repeated subsequently. The Misra propositions can be segregated into a few strands. Some have been established fairly convincingly, others less so.

First, the Mughal state came close to “establishing a mercantile industrial capitalism”, with the pressure for change emerging from a small town and rural economy that clashed against town capitalism led by big merchants and protected by the bureaucracy. This was a clash between two forms of capitalism. The argument thus turns the conventional approach, influenced by the West, on its head. Novelty is no argument against rejecting a hypothesis. Suffice to say that Misra has marshalled enough evidence to build his case. While the proposition isn’t quite proven, it merits serious consideration.

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