BHAWESH MISHRA: From your writing, you certainly don’t think 1857 was a Sepoy Mutiny, nor the first national war of independence fought by the Indian people against the colonial regime. Where exactly do you place yourself?

It’s a complicated issue, which is why it remains a chestnut which generations of historians will chew over long after I’m in my grave. It started very emphatically as a sepoy mutiny. And throughout 1857 the sepoys remained the military backbone of the rebel forces. Which is why it isn’t entirely incorrect to call it a sepoy mutiny. Nonetheless, there were civil uprisings in Lucknow and Delhi, there were princely associations in places like Jhansi, there were peasant uprisings in the Doab and the rural Awadh. Many different things are going on. The reason why the phrase sepoy mutiny has survived as long as it has in parlance is because of the centrality of the sepoy in what happened and the fact that they were the spark which lit the whole flame. But it is clearly more than a sepoy mutiny which is why I don’t use the phrase at all in the book, I call it an uprising.

Was it the first national war of independence? Well it certainly wasn’t the first because you can point to many other acts of resistance against the British. Was it a war of independence? In some ways it was. While in Delhi the rhetoric is religious, they talk about kafirs and Christians rather than the British or the imperialists. In the petitions in Delhi there is no phrase like Jang-e-Azadi or freedom struggle. Instead what you have is fasad and danga or commotion and unrest. Nonetheless there is an element in which it is true to say that this is clearly an attempt to get rid of rulers who are seen to be the ‘other’.

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