People's Democracy

1857 And The Hindoo Patriot: Other Voices

Malini Bhattacharya

THE Hindoo Patriot, started in January 1853, was one of the rare English language papers of the time to be owned and run by Indians. It was a weekly paper published from Kolkata by a group of young English-educated men, the leading light among whom was Hurrish Chunder Mookerji, who bought its ownership from the businessman who had started it in 1855 and ran it virtually on his own until his untimely death in 1861 as a result of excessive strain. At that time, papers did not generally carry the names of the editors and the lead articles were all unsigned or pseudonymous. But there is no doubt that Hurrish carried the full responsibilities of editorship on his shoulders and that most of the lead articles were written by him. In fact, it has been recorded that even in his very last breath; he expressed his anxiety about the number to be published the next day. The paper continued to be published after his death. But the rare radical thrust he had succeeded in giving it particularly in the years of the peasant uprising against the infamous indigo planters was lost once Hurrish was not there. During the ‘Indigo Revolt’ which followed on the heels of the 1857 Uprising, The Hindoo Patriot became a mouthpiece for the grievances of the ryots of Bengal and highlighted the oppressive and coercive practices adopted by the planters to force the ryot to plant indigo to ensure hefty profits for the former. The greater part of Hurrish’s salary as a government servant at this time was spent in providing shelter and legal advice to ryots who flocked to Kolkata to seek recourse to law against the planters. He also had to confront expensive libel suits brought by the planters against The Hindoo Patriot for having exposed their tyrannical treatment of the ryots and as a result of all this, all his savings were exhausted by the time he died and his family was left in indigent circumstances. But throughout his life he remained a steadfast crusader on behalf of the ryots, so much so that in the countryside he was regarded as a kind of a legendary hero and folk-songs were composed and sung hailing him as a saviour of the peasants.  

Between 1857 and 1858, The Hindoo Patriot also published regularly a series of lead articles on the ‘Mutinies’and even in 1859 recorded the incident of the hanging of Tantia Topi and made appreciative comments on the former and also on Kunwar Singh and Lakshmibai of Jhansi, at a time when most other journals were busy demonising them. We may justly surmise that most of the lead articles on this subject were written by Hurrish himself, but it is interesting to note that while in its early phase, The Hindoo Patriot had a readership of only about 200 and could hardly compete with other English papers in Kolkata being run by Europeans, its readership substantially increased from the end of 1857 and a profit margin was achieved and advertisements could be obtained. While this was no doubt owing to Hurrish’s able editorship, perhaps it also suggests an increase in the number of English-knowing Bengali readers who endorsed the analytical and critical style of The Hindoo Patriot and the spirit of journalistic honesty and independence it displayed. Some of the correspondence published on the subject in the paper during this time supports this view. If in one number, the paper castigates the rebels as ‘demons’, in the very next issue , a correspondent calling himself ‘Mortalis’ sharply criticises the practice of referring to the rebels as ‘scoundrels, rascals, villains’, because they are not inferior to ‘English privates’ in ‘fortitude, or endurance, or other qualities of a high type of manhood’. ‘Remember that these murderers, in many instances disdained the spoils of pillage, while they were ready and prepared to sacrifice their lives’ (July 30, 1857).

Hurrish was hardly a supporter of the ‘Mutinies’ which however he refers to more often as ‘rebellion’, ‘war’ or ‘insurrection’ in the later articles. In an article, written on January 21, 1858, he describes ‘rebellion’ as a ‘crime’ to which all societies have extended a measure of ‘leniency’. It has come to be recognised as a ‘fixed principle of civilised law that political crimes should not be capitally punished; and simple rebellion is but a political crime’. At a time of widespread anti-‘sepoy’ hysteria, he reminds his readers of the inherent dignity of the political rebel as a seeker of justice and this is precisely where Hurrish’s loyalty to colonial rule as an English-educated beneficiary of it yields place to his clear-sighted admission of the very real sense of injustice felt by his countrymen, which according to him is the real reason for the uprising. Even as early as April 2, 1857, an article in The Hindoo Patriot says: ‘it was neither the fat of oxen nor the dread of proselytism, but a deep-rooted cause of estrangement that led to these mutinous outbreaks…. nothing short of grievous oppression or the most flagrant disrespect of substantial prejudices can drive the native soldiery to conduct foreign to their obligations and their duty.’ While more than once, he says that the rebels are working under a ‘delusion’ and he never doubts that the ‘mass of the Indian population’ would acknowledge ‘the substantial benefits of British rule’ and that therefore the latter would stay in spite of the unsettling incidents, he also points out the reasons for the sympathy among the civilian population for the rebels.

We generally think that such sympathy did not touch people like Hurrish, people from the urban English-educated intellectual classes who were in fact a creation of colonial hegemony. Hence it is rather striking that it is precisely of these classes that he speaks: ‘There is not a single native of India who does not feel the full weight of the grievances imposed upon him by the very existence of the British rule in India --- grievances inseparable from subjection to a foreign rule. There is not one among the educated classes who do not feel his prospects circumscribed and his ambition restricted by the supremacy of that power’ (May 21, 1857). According to Hurrish, apart from ‘a small circle in Bengal of those who have been indoctrinated into the mysteries of European civilization’, the sense of mistrust and injustice is felt by all. Obviously, for him this ‘small circle’ does not comprehend the whole of the educated classes and his contempt for the former is manifest in the article titled ‘The Panic at Calcutta’ where he blasts the so-called Calcutta Volunteers, ‘the notabilities of Chowringhee and their humbler satellites in Kassitollah’ for going into ridiculous heroics and pompously arming themselves against ‘Pandyism’ (May 28, 1857). Is it wishful thinking on Hurrish’s part that the educated classes should not necessarily be identified with the Calcutta Volunteers? Is he imputing the spirit of independence that he as an individual possessed to his own class as a whole? Or is he referring to certain new nuances within the colonial discourse, which the voice of The Hindoo Patriot helped to articulate?

Hurrish has sometimes been branded as a ‘Canningite’ and there is a story that while the 1857 uprising was going on, Canning would send messengers to get copies of The Hindoo Patriot from the hawkers every Thursday and send a few copies to the ministers in England regularly, because he believed that the analysis of contemporary incidents in the paper was realistic and would help the British government to contain the uprising. Indeed, Hurrish was a great admirer of “Clemency Canning’ as he was called by his detractors, and no doubt, even as the 1857 uprising gradually died down he perceived the role of his paper to lie chiefly in mediation and intercession on behalf of his countrymen; Canning’s policy of moderation provided him with a foothold. But the new radical nuances that have been mentioned in the earlier paragraph assert themselves even when the general tone is reconciliatory. Even while he comes out with parochial statements which emphasise the ineffectuality of ‘North Indian’ passions in Bengal, or the ‘upper caste’ discipline of the ‘native sepoys’ or speaks of the mistake made by the rebels in endowing leadership on ‘the rotten house of Tamerlane’, he leaves us in no doubt that the colonial wrongs leading to the revolt are wrongs that affect the entire Indian people. There is a striking passage in an article written on the Delhi Proclamation of 25 August, 1857 where an episode in the Ramayana where Rama sends ‘his brother and lieutenant’ to the ‘vanquished and dying king of Singhal to learn from him some of the maxims of government by which he had raised his monarchy to such a height of power and splendour’ is recalled and it is hoped that the colonial government would learn something from this ‘Asiatic state power’ whose merits are of a very high order. He adds that if the Declaration had a large circulation, its results would have been disastrous for the British. .

 The vulnerabilities of imperial rule as such were reiterated by him even after the Uprising forced the British Parliament to start debate on the shifting of the administration of the empire to the Crown .An article published on 14 January, 1858, asks: ‘Can a revolution in the Indian Government be authorised in Parliament without consulting the wishes of the vast millions of men for whose benefits it is proposed to be made? The reply must be in the negative. The time has nearly come, when Indian questions must be solved by Indians .The Mutinies have made patent to the English public what must be the effect of politics in which the native is allowed no voice’. Obviously he is thinking of no more than adequate representation of the Indian people within the colonial system, of the politics of persuasion, negotiations and bargaining, a platform for which was provided by the British Indian Association of which Hurrish was also a leading member. But that does not take away from the sharpness of his comments in many other articles in other issues on the mass-hysteria whipped up by the ‘atrocity-mongers’ baying for bloody retribution on the rebels; with rare journalistic balance he exposes the concocted nature of many of the stories of the bloodthirstiness of the so-called ‘Pandy’ and highlights the sheer barbarity of British revenge .On January 7, 1858, a caustic passage in one article describes missionaries and clergymen as having ‘ever been the protectors of the aborigines’ as a result of whose benevolent presence, the American-Indian has survived colonial conquest and ‘there are still traces of Australasian and Polynesian races’. But in India, even they have joined the ‘impious senseless cry for indiscriminate retribution’. Another article says: ‘The Indian Mutiny has demonstrated that exaggeration is not limited to the natives of Oriental countries, but that Western nations are as prone to be imaginative and find as much delight in the horrible and the marvelous…’(April 15, 1858). His exposure of ‘indiscriminate retribution’ as well as the hysteric demand for it demonstrates effectively the gap between the professions of moderation at the government level and the ruthless suppression of the Indian people as a whole through massacres at the ground level.

The Hindoo Patriot, in the second half of the 1850s, offers a rare instance of radical journalism in spite of its avowed and open loyalty to the colonial system. It is obvious that its commitment to the people involved in the ‘Indigo Uprising’ is much more wholehearted. This is because the oppression unleashed by the indigo planters could be taken as an instance of misgovernance against which justice could be sought from the colonial government itself; to that extent it was not so unsettling as the 1857 uprising which came to put in jeopardy the existence of the empire itself. It is baseless to argue, however, that Hurrish was more worried about the Indian landowners than the ryots so far as his involvement in the Indigo Uprising is concerned. Neither his writings nor his sending of young journalists to the districts to find out the real situation nor the evidence he gave before the Indigo Commission, corroborate such a thesis. Perhaps we may rather say that the distance which the English-educated Bengali intellectual had felt from the ‘North Indian sepoy’ did not operate to the same extent in a situation where both the ryots and members of the landowning classes in Bengal found themselves in the same boat vis-à-vis colonial exploitation. An opportunity for discovering links in common oppression with the other classes offered itself.  In fact many more educated middle class Bengalis raised their voices against the atrocities of the indigo planters than against the bloody retributions visited upon those involved in any way in the 1857 uprising.

 But at the same time one may also say that if the great shock of 1857 had not been there and if a few committed liberal intellectuals like Hurrish had not made it an occasion for pointing out the injustices of the empire, breaches within the colonised consciousness of the educated urban classes would not have been demonstrated and even the Indigo Uprising would not have found some supporters among them. Even before 1857, when in 1855-56 the Saontal Uprising took place on the Bengal-Bihar border under the leadership of Sidhu and Kanhoo , The Hindoo Patriot  had taken up the issue of social and political justice and had said : ‘..they must have been driven to the present insurrection by substantial injuries…Oppression is the cause, revenge is the motive, and the object of the insurrection a vague undefined idea of freedom from sorely felt annoyance’( July 19, 1855). The educated urban Indians took their own time even to evolve such a ‘vague undefined idea of freedom’ from the annoyance of colonial oppression for themselves, but radical journalism in The Hindoo Patriot perhaps had some role to play in articulating such consciousness. 

Box Item:

Bengal might well be proud of it peasantry. In no other country in the world is to be found in the tillers of the soil the virtues which the ryots of Bengal have so prominently displayed ever since the indigo agitation has begun Wanting power, wealth, political knowledge and even leadership, the peasantry of Bengal have brought about a revolution inferior in magnitude and importance to none that has happened in the social history of any other country.