Pranav Jani - Podcast
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Pranav Jani: Some people overblow it, and they want to say it's, you know, just the people taking over, right? Some people give too much power to the kings and say they co opt everything, there's debates among historians about this. But, in the end, you have the biggest rebellion in the history of the British Empire happening between 1857 until it's finally quashed in 1859 when they have to bring in European soldiers, right, to come in because they can't trust Indian soldiers anymore. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, and Physics. Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Emergent Materials and Mathematics and Languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting [00:01:00] happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: I'm joined today in the ASC Marketing and Communications Studio by Pranav Jani, Associate Professor of English, Program Director of Asian American Studies, and Faculty Advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. His research and teaching interests focus on the literatures, cultures and history of colonized and formerly colonized people, including Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Ireland and people of color in the United States.

Dr. Jani, welcome to Voices. 

Pranav Jani: I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for the invitation. 

David Staley: Well, and I want to talk about your most recent book project, which is on the 1857 Rebellion in British India. 

Pranav Jani: Yeah. 

David Staley: Before we dive into that, I think I need a Wikipedia or a brief primer about the history of the 1857 Rebellion in British India.

Pranav Jani: Right, right. Let's, get right into it. So, as you noted, I'm a Professor in the English Department and my field is [00:02:00] in post colonial studies, ethnic studies, and so I'm coming at this project around 1857 and the rebellion through the lens of literary and cultural studies, right? Close reading of texts, you know, essays and memoirs, biographies, and including the kind of classic archival research from the National Archives of India and things like that.

So it's a really, a combination of different kinds of texts, and then using close readings as a way to map out how colonized Indians and going into early years of post colonial India, post independence India, how they imagined 1857 over the 100 years after it, right? So going from 1857 itself, which I will define in a minute, and then going all the way up to 1957, in which the government of India in its 10th year of independence celebrated nationally the 100th year of the 1857 rebellion.

And so, that's the kind of arc that I trace in my book, but through the methodology of close [00:03:00] reading of different kinds of texts that I find along the way, and then explaining the shifts that are happening in the consciousness of Indians as they think and rethink 1857 and adapt it to their current moment.

So, that's what the book is about, but let's go to the rebellion itself, right? Because, if you're from South Asia, not a historian or anything like that, just an ordinary person, all you have to say is 1857 and people have it fresh in their minds. There's Bollywood movies to this day being made about 1857.

There's TV serial, like this idea that this was our rebellion against the British is, it's as common as, you're saying the Civil War in the United States and people know exactly what you're talking about and they have a theory about it, whether or not they're scholars about it, right? So, 1857 is just known by its date, by its year.

That's how people know it, 1857. I'm saying 1857 rebellion [00:04:00] to counter the way most people who, anyone who has heard about it in circles in the U. S., whether scholarly or activist, probably knows it as the 1857 Mutiny or the Sepoy Mutiny. That was the British imperialist version of the events that happened.

They had an interest in saying this was just a rebellion within the army. The 1857 Rebellion is saying, no, this was a much wider rebellion involving lots of groups of people who had lots of different interests, going towards what the nationalists say, the movement for free India, right? This is the side I'm exploring.

So let's go back to what it was. So the 1857 Rebellion was a combination of things, but I think the best way to talk about it is that it was a reaction to the steady and systematic encroachment of the East India Company into what became known later as [00:05:00] British India under Queen Victoria. So in 1857, it's still under the East India Company, but by that time, right, capitalism is coming in. India was a trading partner for goods. If we look at English novels in the century before that, you'll see all of the items, right, Indian made cloth, that was now appearing in different households of the rich, and even of the working class, in England, right? India was a trading partner.

But with capitalism coming in, India begins to shift from a place that produces things and trades through the East India Company to a proper colony, a place for raw materials, a place for labor, where cotton, indigo and other things are taken from India, sent to England, and manufactured into products in factories there.

And so, India actually becomes like the other colonies, but India in a very specific way, India actually becomes a huge engine [00:06:00] for the Industrial Revolution itself and for the growth of Britain, and so that translation from a trading partner, right, to a colony, that's the cusp at which the 1857 rebellion is happening.

So, if we think about the 1857 rebellion, the way we think about the 1848 revolutions in Europe, right, the way we think about any huge uprising that's created by this tremendous change being caused by the Industrial Revolution, even the U. S. Civil War should be put in that history, right? Although, in the case of the U. S. Civil War, the victory of the capitalist forces results in this progressive change of the end of plantation slavery. But in places like India, the victory of those capitalist forces actually produces the greater and deeper colonization and exploitation, you know, of India. And then on and on from India, we see the rise of imperialism across the rest of the [00:07:00] 19th century, right?

So Indians actually not only were victims of this process of colonization, think about this huge wave that's happening, but they were also often the forces through which that colonization happened, because Indians made up the army under the East India Company that was then shipped around for conquests in Afghanistan and Burma and over the place, right?

And then we see, you know, going all the way up to World War I and World War II, often when we say the British were in X, Y, Z place, it's often Indians in the British army along with Africans and others, right? So, we take that dynamic on the one hand, India's being transformed. People who used to be producers are now turned into workers or they're jobless, right, because all of these courts and other kinds of local models of government are being destroyed and being taken over by the East India Company, which is setting up different models of government. So if we think of a huge [00:08:00] devastation in terms of how land and property, know, is ownership and sale of property.

If we think about a huge impact that's happening in terms of the destruction of artisans, and the destruction of the producers, right? If we think about the toll that it's taking on soldiers in the Indian Army who often have these kind of caste ideas and don't want to move from place to place, don't want to necessarily mix with people of other communities, but are now being folded together into this army, at the behest of the East India Company.

You have kings and queens who are angry because their property is being taken away, right? There's these annexations from the East India Company that are becoming more and more. 

David Staley: Indian kings and queens? 

Pranav Jani: Indian kings and queens, who are really big landowners, honestly, often they were given titles of kings and queens by the British who were trying to work with the existing elites, to rule in previous years.

Now, there's just huge annexations going on. In short, you have people at the bottom of society who are getting enraged by all of the poverty and [00:09:00] unemployment that's being created in these upheavals. You have elites and landowners who are getting angry. You have these soldiers within the military who are getting angry.

You have a number of different people who are disaffected, and what happens in the 1857 Rebellion and why historians, and this is not stuff that I'm bringing out, so why historians call it a rebellion, is that it isn't just mutinies that happen in the army, but it's also rebellions that happen in the countryside and the active involvement of these kings and queens in organizing rebellion.

So, let me step back a little bit. So the spark is a mutiny in the town of Meerut, which is about 60 miles north of Delhi, and there had been all of these agitations going on, right? Like the broader kind of processes that I'm talking about, we're getting a lot of people agitated in different ways.

You know, we're going to lose our culture, we're going to lose our ancestral land, we're going to lose our language, missionaries [00:10:00] are being supported, right? New models of education are coming in, some of which are actually good. They're letting people of lower and oppressed castes actually come into education.

Not that the British were really interested in that, but there is that kind of move happening, right? And some of the things that are disrupting Indian society are actually changes that we might call progressive, that other progressive Indians are fighting for, like bills against sati, the kind of, brutal practice that some people were still practicing of widows being burned on the funeral pyre, and this is something that is happening in a minority of situations that that gets blown up into like, this is what Indians do kind of thing. That's a whole history about sati.

But progressive Indians, liberal Indians, English educated Indians had been pushing the colonial government to push for a ban on sati. They had been pushing for widow remarriage, right, and this idea that widows can remarry, et cetera. So some of the things that are motivating the rebels of 1857 are things like caste mobility and things [00:11:00] around women's rights, things that other liberal Indians had been fighting for under the British crown, right?

So, that's part of what's motivating alongside land grabs, exploitation and all of the things I talked about with capitalism coming through colonialism, right? So, in short, you have all of these recipes for discontent happening everywhere. The spark becomes this rumor, and this is what everyone loves to talk about, so I feel like I need to talk about it because people know about it, but then move on from it and give an explanation for it. So, the spark becomes this mutiny that happens in the town of Meerut, 60 miles north of Delhi. There's been a rumor going on at that point for several months that there's a new Enfield rifle that's being used by the British and that they're saying we need to use this rifle, it's more effective, etc, right, technology always helping better killing and whatnot, and in order to use that rifle you have to bite open the [00:12:00] cartridge ,you know, the packet of the cartridge and put that in the rifle, but the rumor was that that cartridge is greased with cow fat and pig fat. 

David Staley: Ah. 

Pranav Jani: And so, Hindus will lose caste, Muslims, you know, this will be haram, they'll be excommunicated, and then they'll be ready to become Christian, right?

And so, the reason why we need to talk about the cartridge is because it actually is the spark for this uprising in Meerut, right, that then turns into a series of military mutinies all over northern and north central India, which then combines with rebellions in the countryside and different kings and queens taking the opportunity to take back lands you know, that had been taken over by the British, right? so it does work as a spark. What happens in some of the British historiography, or at least the imperialist historiography, is it reduces [00:13:00] what Indians want to questions of culture and religion. If you mess with their culture, it's an orientalist kind of thing.

If you mess with their culture and religion, they'll get very, very angry and they'll rebel. We don't have any instances where after the rebellions happened, when they broke open the armories, and they took all the arms, I've never come across any instance where a rebel is like, I'm not sure I should use this rifle because it might have pig or cow fat.

So, if it's just a cultural thing, why would they break open the armories and use those same weapons, you know, against the British? So, it's not to say that those things don't matter, but the ground for the complete mistrust of the British government is laid by all of these deeper conditions.

The British actually hear of this rumor for months in advance. They try to send people around to say there is no pig and cow fat there, they try to, like, prevent this kind of thing and people just won't have it. They just don't trust the British by that point at all. The patterns of [00:14:00] racialization and segregation had been increasing along with this kind of tighter colonial control that was happening after the Industrial Revolution, and those divisions were already set. So, the imperialist historians want to say the mutiny to name the whole thing. I'm saying let's acknowledge there were mutinies, but I'm calling the whole thing a rebellion, right? So, so to just explain when I use the term mutiny, I mean they're actually, you know, soldiers rebelling against their officers.

So when these mutinies happen, they're bloody, quite destructive, in the sense of they're turning their guns on British officers, they're killing their officers, they're setting fires to bungalows, civilians who are British and European are being driven out of cities, right?

So Meerut, for example, the whole cantonment explodes. There's a unity between the Indian soldiers taking off their red coats, right, because they're red coats, taking them off, joining in with other peasant organizers. Historians tell us they had been organizing actually night after night and had been [00:15:00] pushing for this mutiny to happen.

They joined together. They take over the whole town of Meerut, wipe Europeans out, you know, with violence, out of Meerut, and then marched to Delhi, where they take the old descendant of the Mughal Empire, who was more of a poet than a ruler, and he was ruling only in name, and they kill the British resident, they take over Delhi, Indian soldiers have been hearing in Delhi that they're coming, and so when the soldiers come they just open the doors, right?

They take over Delhi and all that, and they take this reluctant ruler and they put him on the throne and say, you are now our king, and it's a brilliant symbolic move because the city of Delhi for so many centuries was seen as, you know, the place where the Mughal Empire and others ruled from, and so this idea that we have Delhi again sparks a number of mutinies and rebellions all across the region, and that's what 1857 becomes. So then, you have Indians, you know, taking back cities [00:16:00] that had been taken by the East India Company, ruling, setting up their own governments, in some places we have experiments with democratic government with kind of equal votes for soldiers and civilians and the king. So, the king is still important to give the final word, but this idea that everyone has to be part of it, the soldiers aren't easily giving up their own power. There's some really interesting, fascinating things happening.

Some people overblow it, and they want to say it's, you know, just the people taking over, right? Some people give too much power to the kings and say they co opt everything, there's debates among historians about this. But, in the end, you have the biggest rebellion in the history of the British Empire happening between 1857 until it's finally quashed in 1859 when they have to bring in European soldiers, right, to come in because they can't trust Indian soldiers anymore.

David Staley: So what's the contribution of your book? 

Pranav Jani: Yeah. 

David Staley: Is it, is it sort of laying all this out, that this is not just a mutiny, that this is a full scale rebellion? 

Pranav Jani: No. [00:17:00] This is the premise. Unfortunately, because it's a scholarly book and not a popular book, right, I need to quickly cite the historians who say all of this already, and have for decades, and then move to what I want to talk about, which is what was 1857 in the Indian imagination over the next hundred years, right? And that's the subject of my book. And so, to give you the premise on that, I already said that, if you talk to someone. you know, from India or South Asia, you know, we have to remember that people of Bangladesh and Pakistan also see 1857 as part of their history, and so the shift after 1947 and 1971 into the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, right, that shouldn't prevent us from seeing that this is a common history. My focus is on Indian nationalism because I want to go into the post colonial Indian state, and I want to talk about particularly Hindutva or kind of extreme Hindu [00:18:00] nationalism, right?

And so, because I want to talk about those things, and because of my fields of expertise, my focus is on how 1857 operates within Indian nationalism. But we have to understand that before 1947, Indian nationalism actually means everyone from what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh. So I'll be using the word Indian, but I actually mean before 1947, we're talking about everybody, you know?

Right. So if you go and talk to any Indian or Pakistani or Bangladesh, but specifically Indian, and if you say, what was 1857, I already said it would be familiar with people, but it's not just familiar. If you ask them further, what was 1857, they'll tell you it was the first war of Indian independence, and that is utterly normal. No one sees any tension there between saying 1857 is the first war of independence and also saying something like, who's the father of the nation, Gandhi., [00:19:00] And what kind of revolution happened in India, a nonviolent revolution. And people will move quickly between embracing 1857 to embracing Gandhi.

If you go to next year's India Day celebrations, you might see kind of a pantheon of nationalist heroes and Gandhi would be on there, and he'd be sitting side by side with someone like Mangal Pandey or the Rani of Jhansi or any of these other rebels of 1857 without missing a beat. So, if we want to do an ideological critique, we could say, well, that's just contradictory.

How can you champion a violent, bloody rebellion as the first war of independence and also say India had a non violent revolution? And I'm less interested in saying people are being contradictory than asking, how is it that this complexity happened, right? What happened over time that people easily embrace anyone who stood against colonialism [00:20:00] and the British regardless of the means that they used? What happened over time, and if we think about it, this is true in many many different movements and many many different struggles.

We can talk about Palestine, we can talk about the Black liberation struggle in the United States. There's one really interesting set of interviews I read where some high school students went to a group of Black veterans of the Civil Rights Movement who were, and if I get the name right, I think they were called the Deacons of Self Defense, but they might have a slightly different name, and they were people who used to be military, and were armed, and they used to support Martin Luther King Jr., and they used to stand outside the voting booths that were threatened by the KKK and white supremacists. And these high school children were doing an interview, and they said, did you support Martin Luther King Jr.? They said, Absolutely. They're like, he was for nonviolence, they said, Yeah. They said, But you carried guns, they said, Yeah. And they said, Why did you carry guns? And they said, Well [00:21:00] It's only after the KKK knew that we had guns that they stopped coming to the polls and Martin Luther King's work could be done.

And so, they moved very easily from this idea that us carrying guns is actually necessary for Martin Luther King's nonviolent, you know, work to happen. And you know, again, on an intellectual level, you could say, oh, wait, this is contradictory, but it says something deep about movements and the fact that all kinds of force... I don't want to say is needed, I want to say people have saw the need to bring all kinds of force and means into a movement and not having a sharp dichotomy that we often have if we intellectualize it from a distance and say, well, is it nonviolence or is it violence? Or, not just us, Martin Luther King himself made very clear arguments for nonviolence, right?

But in the actual, you know, how the people feel is often quite mixed, but I think the people often see it as, the goal is for us to be free from apartheid or restrictions or colonialism or whatnot, and here's [00:22:00] someone who's fighting the good fight through whatever means.

So, I'm trying to say it's not about passing judgment on people, you know, like my parents or my family who will say very openly, we support Gandhi, 1857 rebels, you know, they, they, they fought hard for the nation, you know? So I'm not trying to kind of say, Oh, that's hypocritical, that's not my interest. My interest is saying what happened historically, right, to make this happen. So the nationalist version is 1857 to 1947, there's a straight line, 1947 being the date of independence. There's a straight line, right? And things built and things were refined, and then Gandhi's movement, right, it actually made it a popular movement, did things the right way so that you could actually win. That's the general narrative. But with respect for militants from 1857 on through the Ghandian movement, next to the Gandian movement, there's always been a call for armed militancy in the anti colonial struggle in India, and it's actually a misnomer and a reduction, and really an erasure of [00:23:00] many people's sacrifice to only talk about the nonviolent struggle as being present in that movement. So, the nationalist view and the common view is that there's this line between 1857 and 1947, but when we actually slow down and look at the different moments, we find something very interesting. So, for example, we find that from 1857 until about the turn of the century, very few people, at least people who have a voice in print and other, other way, very few people are openingly championing 1857.

And that includes not just the loyalists, right, who were kind of sticking to Britain, and seeing Britain as the way towards progress, right, but also the emerging nationalists, who also didn't look to 1857 as a model. They looked for questions like, you know, let's have some more autonomy, let's be like Australia or New Zealand, right? Still within the empire and part of the commonwealth, but a little bit more freedom. They were reformists, they were legislators, they were lawyers, things like that. [00:24:00] They, you know, so I pull out quotes of these nationalists who, again, looking at things from the present and the first war of independence view, you would think that the early nationalists were supporters of 1857 in the late 19th century.

No way. They often distanced themselves, and they in fact said that we were loyal to the empire and that's why we deserve more independence. So on the one hand, I talk about how the nationalists themselves were not really pro 1857 at all, but I also talk about how we should think in more complex way about those we call loyalists.

There's a Muslim leader, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who is definitely a loyalist. He literally helps the British during 1857, and actually rises in rank because of that. But he writes an essay in 1859 called "The Causes of the Indian Revolt" that is a blistering critique of the East India Company and how it was responsible for causing the ,revolt.

So you get this loyalist who's trying to fight the idea [00:25:00] that Muslims created 1857, there was a lot of Islamophobia being used, right, trying to protect his community. He's a loyalist, but he's saying these things really about encroaching colonial capitalism, that are amazing in terms of thinking about under the guise of loyalism, what can we do?

So what I do with the late 19th century texts, right, they're anti caste warriors like Jyotiba Phule, in that time period, and he's like 1857 is the upper caste people's war. They just want to continue, he even says things like, thank God for Queen Victoria, because otherwise the Brahmins wouldn't have let us in their classroom.

So, I'm trying to draw out this like rich tapestry of the voices of the colonized that don't actually fit with this idea of 1857 as a vehicle for progress, but might even look to Queen Victoria, and all that. So that's the 19th century. It's at the 50th anniversary of the rebellion in 1907, 1908, in that period, that an Indian revolutionary Vinayak Damodar [00:26:00] Savarkar, who is a student in London, in a place called India House, and he decides to do a celebration of the 50th anniversary, right, to the great chagrin of all of these people who are looking at the rebellion as this, this horror, right, that happened to them, right?

London society is really angry, but he holds this kind of 50th anniversary festival for revolutionaries and there he gives the name, the first war of independence. He is opposed to Gandhi because he is for militancy. Gandhi's around, Gandhi's starting to visit London from South Africa. He's condemning acts of militancy against the British, and Savarkar is like, absolutely not.

Not only is this our duty and what our ancestors did in 1857, but also this is what we need to do now. And so he publishes a book on 1857, sneaks into the British library, publishes a book using archives, and he calls it the First War of Independence, right? But that's [00:27:00] still a minority view, so I talk about that.

But that same Savarkar, after he's jailed by the British for being a revolutionary, in jail in 1920s, he writes a book called _Hindutva_, The Fundamentals of Hindutva, basically, and he's literally the father of Hindutva. So, on the one hand, you can say, wow, here's a militant, anti colonial revolutionary, who's bringing 1857 back, that same person is the founder of of Hindutva and Hindu nationalism.

So, this vector we may want to ascribe to Savarkar as progressive and anti colonial and all that, also gets a little bit complicated by the fact of what kind of India does he want, he wants a Hindu India. So I kind of explored that, along with the fact that many left wingers emerging in the early 20th century, who are anti colonial, also took Savarkar's book and used it, you know, Communist [00:28:00] Party, the Ghadar Party of San Francisco, a revolutionary nationalist party of Indian workers on the West Coast in San Francisco, they're called the Ghadar Party, Ghadar means rebellion, and they're referring to 1857.

They're saying we need a new rebellion, we need to organize ourselves in the U. S. where it's fairly safe, and bring Indians into India who are armed and to foment a rebellion there. And there's deeper layers there about how they're Sikh and how they're Sikhs in the Indian army and the way that they're trying to work there, which I won't go into right now. But I'm just saying that you have... I'm constantlyy interested in complexity in the story, right? So here you have Savarkar, a revolutionary, but a Hindu nationalist revolutionary, who is bringing 1857 into modern nationalism. That's being used by left secular forces, including Communist Party who are starting to recruit, and people like the Ghadar Party of San Francisco who have their newspaper circulating in all the places where Indians are in the world with [00:29:00] excerpts of Savarkar's book, which is quickly banned, say, kind of popularizing the 1857 as our first war of independence, right? And so, I kind of look at that and how that's still a minority view, Gandhi still hasn't emerged, but it's sort of being brought out by these radicals. And then I move through other series of texts, through the 30s and the 40s, until finally even the Indian state in 1957 is saying we need to celebrate the 100th anniversary of 1857. I'll just jump to that for a minute.

I look at the records of the committees discussing how should we celebrate 1857 because they have a problem. It's 1957 and the Bandung Conference has already happened, the Conference of African and Asian Unity of either emerging independent states or newly independent states that happens in Bandung, Indonesia, which is a peace movement, which says we're against the Cold War, we're against this idea of there's an American way or a Russian [00:30:00] way. We're the third world, we're a third way. We're for non alignment and we're for peace, we're against nuclear weapons and all that. And Nehru, the prime minister of India, is one of the greatest symbols of that. How do you celebrate the 100th anniversary of a bloody rebellion and also claim to be the representative of peace in the world?

And so, this kind of, again, these moments fascinate me, of complexity, right? And so, you see Nehru's commission constantly saying we're going to celebrate this because this is a nationally significant event, but the British are our friends now, and we stand for peace now, and we need to project that as well.

So on the one hand, my argument is that they make 1857 national, because the rebellion happened in northern and north central India, not in the south, not in the west really, not in the east really, not in so many parts of the nation. But how do you make it national?

And so, the state literally organizes, here's what everyone is going to [00:31:00] do. We're going to have, you know, what's your state's contribution to 1857? Write a book. Who are your heroes? Make a monument. Every school is going to talk about 1857. So, on the 10th anniversary of independence, it becomes this era of national pride, but in that city of Meerut, where the rebellion started, they said, we're going to celebrate May 10th, 1857, which was the date of the rebellion, and an emergency telegram out goes out, no, you're not. We need to be peaceful. We're celebrating 1857 100th anniversary on August 15th, which is Independence Day, they try to fuse the story of 1857 into the story of the nation. The icon I really look at is this stamp that they produce.

David Staley: Postage stamp? 

Pranav Jani: Postage stamp. Commemorative postage stamp. There's one stamp, beautiful stamp, of these rebels with swords upraised, you know, and who are going into battle. Nehru and the committee say, absolutely not. The one they finally pick is this [00:32:00] queen, this rebel queen, the Rani of Jhansi, who actually was trained as a warrior and died fighting the British in battle, in 1858, which is a brilliant story, and she's become the most popular rebel of 1857. The stamp is of her with her sword upright like a sentinel, right, like a guard, and that becomes the commemorative stamp, right? This idea that it's a history of militancy we're going to revere, but now it's going to be used towards peace, right?

And I trace the rise of this figure of the Rani of Jhansi through the 1930s, with an epic poem written by a woman who was herself an activist in the Gandhian forces. And that's a poem that's so famous that if you go to somebody right now, who was in an Indian school, and you say, "khūb laḍī mardānī", and they'll probably response, "vah to jhāňsī vālī rānī thī॥", which is the refrain of this 1920s poem about the Rani of Jhansi, which has become [00:33:00] so popular still today, because it's been ingrained in national consciousness deliberately, right? And so, my argument is that actually gender becomes crucial for the way that Indian nationalism smooths over this tension between the rebellion and the violence of 1857 and the kind of non violence of Gandhi, is this figure of the Rani of Jhansi actually does a lot of work. And so, there's so many mythologies and things about her where they rewrite her story to try to show that she wasn't actually violent. She actually cared for everyone, but in a time of violence against her people, to protect her people, she had to take up arms, right, which is a pretty standard defense of anti colonial militancy as self defense, right? Even the Black Panthers is the party of self defense. It's the idea that our violence is not for the sake of, you know, killing people, our violence is what we need to do for self defense. And so, what I try to do in this history is take different moments to show [00:34:00] how the story changed and how in each moment, different activists, different writers took 1857, projected on their vision of freedom and their vision of what progress looks like, and tried to bring it into the nation. Ultimately, the nation itself kind of adopts this narrative, you know. But then we're left with a bit of a crisis for those of us not, and meshed in the narrative of what looks like a crisis of origin stories.

So it's an attempt to explain that. 

David Staley: I'm interested to know why the 1857 Rebellion? You said earlier that you've been working on this for what, 15 years or so. 

Pranav Jani: Yeah. 

David Staley: Why this problem as opposed to something else? Why did you choose 1857? 

Pranav Jani: Well, if I could have got the book done in five years, I probably would have moved to something else.

But that's a whole other story. You know, looking backward, there's a lot of different motivations here. I think on one level, it's always been something that's fascinated me, right? So, the way [00:35:00] that this idea got ingrained in people's minds is so many TV shows, comic books, storybook, you know, all this stuff.

I can think of myself probably like seven or eight years old and, you know, our Jersey City apartment probably stretched out reading a comic book about the Rani of Jhansi, about this queen, and, you know, who knows, like what kind of sense of power, you know, does it give to a kid in a racialized society, right, about like, these are our stories, these are our histories, these are our people, you know, there was a time where we fought off the British and that kind of thing. That was something that was part of my family consciousness way before I knew something called politics. The idea that we were anti British and we fought them and it got them out of our country, that was not even seen as politics. That was seen as part of identity, right? So I remember that, you know, I remember my mom telling me that when she was ten years old she gave a speech, you know, and she's a very vocal person, a leader in her community and the first speech she ever gave was when she was 10, and it was about the Rani of Jhansi, this queen, right?

And when I look back, that was [00:36:00] 1957, and it must have been a speech in her school as part of this, 100th year anniversary. So, there's a bunch of those kinds of very personal connections. There's another kind of connection that comes through postcolonial theory. I had started really getting interested in Marx, you know, in graduate school.

I was like, oh, this guy, you know, seems to be anti capitalist, anti colonialist, anti racist, all that stuff. I was very excited by that. You know, he was a contemporary of Lincoln, celebrating the victory of the North, in getting rid of slavery and all that stuff, right? So there was all this kind of stuff.

And then I read Edward Said's criticism of Marx, where he said Marx was actually an Orientalist, because in his early articles on India, he says no matter how brutal English colonialism is, it's actually bringing civilizational progress to Asia by introducing capitalism, which is going to break up the Asiatic mode of production and bring in modernity, right?

So, it's going to be a tough pill to swallow, and for Edward [00:37:00] Said, this becomes the mark that every European thinker of the 19th century, whether left or right, was participating in Eurocentric thinking. So, this shattered me when I read this, and then I had a professor, Professor Brantlinger, at Indiana University who came in and said, wait, Marx wrote 40 articles about India.

Said, you know, he didn't tell me, but I figured out after Said only quotes from the earliest ones of 1853. And then I read Marx's articles published by Moscow in a book called _The First Indian War of Independence_. And you read the 40 and you read 1857 and Marx starts defending the rebels, and he's writing in London and there's all this racism about, you know, all these made up stories, many about rape and this and that and how we need the military, we need to crush the Indians.

And he's saying, no, a group that is colonized might stand up and use basically any means necessary, so, Marx has stuff like that. So, my first article in 2002 was a study of Marx [00:38:00] in India, and I argue that, and I do a different reading of Marx's article on India. I'm like, the orientalism stuff is there, the Asiatic modal production stuff is there and is borrowed from Hegel, but that when Marx sees the rebels in action, that's when his theory begins to shift towards giving some agency to the Indians.

At one point he says freedom will only come to India when either the insurgent Hindus, he says, or the British proletariat overthrow the British capitalist. That's very different than saying colonialism is good for you, get over it, right? And so I kind of, in 2002, I traced this argument that, actually, shifts his theory a little bit, in the face of the events in history. I make a parallel about Lenin, this shifting on his theory of the state, or Marx shifting on his theory of the state after the Paris Commune and things like that. I kind of make a parallel.

Some Marxists say, Oh, this is where Lenin gets his theory of national self determination. I'm [00:39:00] like, don't go that far. Marx is still in a certain time period, but there's more of an opening towards Indian agency, right? So for me, that was kind of an important text. I went ahead and did my, the stuff I'm literally trained in, you know, the post colonial literary studies and all that.

My book on decentering Rushdie, Get Tenure, all that stuff happens. But then after that's done, somehow 1857 is attractive to me. The Mershon Center of Security Studies here at Ohio State was giving grants, and I thought I might go to India to do this research.

And I had a fascinating discussion with the director at the time who said, this is about security studies, but the mutiny, that's what we needed security from. He didn't put it in those words, but he said, isn't that about the studies of count, you know, so are you studying it from the point of Indians or are you studying it from the point of counterinsurgency, which is what they were more used to in Mershon.

And I said, Oh, this is a Eurocentric idea of security, which is that the colonizers are always [00:40:00] the problem. And they said, no, no, no, no, no, no. They sat down and talked to me, it was a very good conversation. I got the grants. But it was an interesting conversation where I had to say, no, they had to rebel for their own security against the East India Company, right?

And so, this idea of like security for whom, that insurgency might actually be an act of a desire for safety, you know, this kind of idea is something that really interested me. So I think I went back to it in order to explore... so there are a lot of books coming out called, how did the 1857 rebellion impact the European imagination?

People study how Boy Scout books and stuff are often modeled around, you know, the counterinsurgency against the Indian rebels and like being braver, you know, idea of British masculinity, all that stuff. And I was like, what would this look from an Indian point of view? What would it look from a colonized point of view?

And there were a lot of studies of individual voices of the colonized talking about 1857, but nothing that had this kind of larger arc that I was interested in investigating of [00:41:00] how does 1857 go from being what it was, which was not a nationalist uprising, no matter how much you tried to project it, there was no notion of the nation as we know it now. How does it go from that to being seen as the first war of independence? And that kind of scope is something I didn't find anywhere, so I thought I would take up that project. 

David Staley: Pranav Jani, thank you. 

Pranav Jani: Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for this opportunity. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio.

More podcast and our guests can be found at go. osu. edu slash voices. Produced by Doug Dangler, I'm Jen Farmer.