The Mutiny to Come

Abstract

The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was by far the most serious anticolonial insurrection of the nineteenth century and is generally held to constitute the last great act of traditional resistance to British rule. This essay is concerned with delineating another vision of the mutiny’s modernity than the one retailed by colonial and nationalist writers. It was neither the unity of India in any political sense, nor its division in any religious one, that the revolt brought to light, but rather an empire of distinctions where the native was not set against the alien but existed alongside it within a moral compact. And if much of this moral compact was drawn from tradition, its hesitant achievement during the rebellion of 1857 had unexpected consequences for India’s modernity. These became evident in the next period of anti-British mobilization across northern India, Gandhi’s movement of noncooperation that began with his defense of the caliphate in 1919. The extraordinary similarity of themes and arguments between these two events must give us pause for thought, even if we do not link them in any causal fashion. Whether it is the sacrifices made by one religious group for another or the practice of noncooperation itself, such elements appear to have been reincarnated from one historical moment to the next. For it was in the mutiny that these factors were transformed out of traditional recognition and made into the stuff of Indian modernity, destabilizing nationalist verities even as they made the nation itself possible in Gandhi’s spiritualization of politics.