Of histories (un)shared: India – Pakistan, postage stamps, and 1857

ABSTRACTWhile much has been written about how imperialist and Indian nationalist historiographies have approached 1857, scant attention has been paid to how it has been remembered in Pakistan. This article endeavours to explore the ways in which 1857 has been articulated by the state in India and Pakistan through a study of their commemorative postage stamps. On the face of it, India's emphasis on nonviolence and Pakistan's quest for an Islamic history make 1857 a misfit within the historiographies of both states. However, the paper outlines that during the centenary in 1957, both India and Pakistan commemorated 1857 while maintaining some discursive distance from it. While Pakistan chose to memorialise it as the beginning of its struggle for independence, India recessed it within the broader framework of independence itself. The paper goes on to demonstrate how this position has changed drastically over the years. In order to weave a composite and inclusive history of the country, India now celebrates the legacy of 1857 by appropriating it within the frames of national unity, patriotism, and anti-imperialism. Pakistan, on the other hand, uses 1857 merely as a means to segue into a discussion of reform efforts led by the subcontinent's Muslim elite, thereby relegating it to the background of the Pakistan movement.KEYWORDS: IndiaPakistan1857stamps AcknowledgementsI am indebted to Divisha Srivastava and Akhila Nagar for feedback on drafts of this paper. I am grateful to Jebin Samuel for his help in editing this article. I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their inputs. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 2022 BISA Annual Conference held at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 17 June 2022. My thanks to South Asian University for partially funding my travel for the Conference.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 For a detailed account of the enduring rivalry, see T. V. Paul (Citation2006).2 Pakistan observes its Independence Day on 14 August each year, while India observes it on 15 August.3 Although the nomenclature of the event has been subject to many debates, the problem of attaching these events to a category is not the puzzle of this paper. Hence, I shall be referring to these events collectively as 1857 throughout this essay.4 For more on stamps as a source for doing International Public History from the vantage point of India and Pakistan, see Sharma (Citation2021b).5 Pandey’s story became a subject of academic debate in the aftermath of a biopic that was released in 2005. For more, see Banerjee (Citation2018).6 One of the prominent scholars within this stream of thought was Bipan Chandra. Consider, for instance, the views expressed in his essay ‘The Making of the Indian Nation’. Arguing that India was a nation distinct from European nations because despite its cultural heterogeneity, there was nonetheless a ‘common consciousness’ that had developed over the years through ‘certain strands of a common cultural heritage’. India to him was home to a ‘composite culture’, strengthened by ‘the interaction of ancient ‘Hindu’ cultures with Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and with the Europe of the Enlightenment’ (Chandra Citation2012, 222). In making his arguments, he relied heavily on nationalist leaders such as Rammohan Roy, Dadabhai Naoroji, B. G. Tilak, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru, etc.7 Bold in original8 This entailed cementing the idea that the nation was created for the Muslims of the subcontinent, which meant that the ‘natural’ affinities of Pakistan with that of the broader Islamic socio-cultural world was amplified (Joshi Citation2010).9 Although the Pakistan Movement was demanding a state, its contours were elusive. While the basis of its creation was the amalgamation of contiguous areas of numerical Muslim majority in the western and eastern parts of British India, many leaders of the time argued that all Muslims of the subcontinent were automatically Pakistanis. See Zamindar (Citation2007), Jalal (Citation2014), Devji (Citation2013) for a more detailed discussion.10 As pointed out earlier, the histories of the postal system in India and Pakistan are joined at their hips. Yet, when it came to commemorating the centenary of the first stamp issued in the subcontinent, the two countries chose different years. Pakistan marked the centenary of postage stamps by issuing a commemorative stamp in 1952 (to mark the centenary of the Scinde Dawk). On the other hand, India issued its commemorative stamp in 1954 to commemorate the adoption of the stamp system by the East India Company. In fact, there is absolutely no mention of the Scinde Dawk in the souvenir album issued by the Indian postal department. For more, see Krishnan (Citation2021).11 For an image, see Stamps of the World (Citation2012a)12 All quotations cited from all stamps under discussion appear in uppercase on the stamps.13 For an image, see Stamps of the World (Citation2012a)14 For an image of the stamps, see: Stamps of the World (Citation2012b)15 The first was 15th/16th century Bhakti poet Mira as part of the ‘Saints and Poets’ series (1952). For more images, see Stamps of the World (Citation2016).16 Speech given on 10 May 1957 at New Delhi’s Ramlila Ground at the Centenary of the Meerut Uprising.17 Research on school and collegiate history textbooks from Pakistan has revealed concerning depictions of inter-religious relations. As highlighted by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), a think tank based in Islamabad, a 2002 Class VIII Social Studies reader published by the Punjab Textbook Board in Lahore contains a statement claiming that ‘Hindus declared the Congress rule as the Hindu rule, and started to unleash terror on Muslims’ (quoted in SDPI Citation2010, 22). This passage demonstrates an attempt to establish a clear division between Muslims as an ‘us’ group and Hindus as the ‘other’, while portraying the latter as perpetrators of violence against the former. The SDPI (Citation2010, 20) study also notes that the curriculum explicitly states that students should ‘develop understanding of the Hindu Muslim Differences and need for Pakistan’, indicating a deliberate effort to emphasise the differences between the two religions and promote the idea of Pakistan as a necessary separate homeland for Muslims. For further analysis, see Aziz (Citation1993), Tripathi and Raghuvanshi (Citation2020).18 For a detailed discussion on the memorialisation of 1857 in the context of the rise of Hindu nationalism, see ‘Celebrating the First War of Independence Today’ in Pender (Citation2022, 191–218).19 For an image of the stamp, see Stamps of the World (Citation2012c).20 For an image of the stamp, see Stamps of the World (Citation2012d).21 In a country like Pakistan where the official narratives of the past have rarely gone unchallenged, school textbooks provide a glimpse into how the officialdom sees Pakistan’s past. As Ayesha Jalal (Citation1995, 77) puts it, ‘[t]o know the alphabet and grammar of the textbooks is to uncover the idioms employed to nationalise the Pakistani past’.22 For the Indian state, ‘multicultural’-ness of India refers to the diversity in terms of religion, language, ethnicity, etc. within its geographical contours (Kaviraj Citation2010; Joshi Citation2010).Additional informationNotes on contributorsSridhar KrishnanSridhar Krishnan is currently working as Writing Tutor at the Centre for Writing & Communication in Ashoka University, Sonipat. He is also in the final stages of his doctoral research at the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. His thesis looks into how the Partition of 1947 has remained absent from public memory and the manner in which this amnesia manifests itself in curatorial spaces, especially in the Partition Museum in Amritsar, India.