1857: The real story of the great uprising
by Vishnu Bhatt Godshe Versaikar
translated by Mrinal Pande
Harper Perennial, 2011
In war, goes the old saying, the victor gets to write the history. There exist numerous eyewitness accounts of the rebellion of 1857 by Englishmen, based on which historians of the British Empire had no difficulty bringing out multi-volume tomes on the 'Sepoy Mutiny'. The defeated often did not live to tell their side of the story, after all, and in this case the 'mutineers' were ruthlessly hunted down and slaughtered, the towns that sheltered them pillaged. Little is known even about the last days of their prominent leaders – Nana Sahib who disappeared without a trace, Begum Hazrat Mahal who escaped to Nepal, Tantya Tope who the British claim to have captured, and the rani of Jhansi who died in battle.
The repression let loose in the aftermath of 1857 must have severely discouraged, and pushed underground, accounts that presented the rebels in a sympathetic light. But how did the people of the time view these watershed events? What did they think of the rebel soldiers and their leaders? Given the paucity of Indian voices from this period, an eyewitness account by a local evokes great interest. Noted journalist Mrinal Pande has now brought to an English-language readership Vishnu Bhatt Godshe Versaikar's Marathi work, Majha pravas: 1857chya bandachi hakikat, (My travels: A factual account of the 1857 mutiny) originally published in 1907.
The publication history of Vishnu Bhatt's work, traced by Pande, is a clear enough indication of the impediments of reconstructing history from the perspective of the underdog. Bhatt, a poor Brahmin priest from Versai in present-day coastal Maharashtra, penned his story many years after completing a far-ranging journey. Fearing retribution from the British, he left the manuscript with a traditional healer, Chintamani Vaidya, with instructions that it be published only after his death. The same fear pushed Vaidya to publish an edited version that could be passed off as a work of fiction rather than be considered a historical account. A version adhering to the original manuscript appeared in print in modern Marathi only in 1948 and in Hindi only as recently as 2007.