In March, 161 years ago, the Rajmata of Gwalior held a ₹7 lakh yagna . Vishnubhat Godse, a Brahmin priest, set off from Versai — a village in the Kolaba district — to reach the yagna on time. He planned to earn something along the way by performing rituals. Interestingly, he and his uncle, who accompanied him, had some concerns about being viewed as dark-skinned ‘southerners’ as they journeyed northwards!
At precisely the same time, in cantonments dotted across the Indo-Gangetic plain, Indian soldiers in the East India Company’s army were refusing to use the cartridges issued to them. Both Hindus and Muslims were convinced that the cartridges were greased with pork and beef fat, and the sepoys rebelled against their military masters.
There were other reasons too for what happened on 10th May 1857, — an anniversary just days away — but this was the trigger : all the sepoys rebelled against their military masters. There followed 13 months of furious armed resistance which shook British authority in North India.
Entirely by chance, their journey took Godse and his uncle directly into this bitter conflict. One of the most crucial battles of the Indian “mutiny” was fought in the fortress city of Jhansi and lines from a famous poem by Christina Rossetti echo the popular British understanding of the event: ‘The swarming, howling wretches below/ Gained and gained and gained.’
Authentic narrative
But what about the counter view of the same event? There is only one eye-witness account of the fall of Jhansi from the Indian point of view and it came from our priest, Vishnubhat Godse (also known as Vishnushastri) who returned to his village three years later with a pitcher of water from the Ganga and very little money.
Written nearly 30 years later, in 1883, encouraged by Chintamanrao Vaidya whose family priest he was, Godse called his work Mazha or Majha Pravas (journey). Neither creative nor imaginative, the narration is precise and remarkably cold, and in that very quality lies its historical value.
Mazha Pravas is a classic example of how an authentic narration can help historians reconstruct an important event. Characters from the book filled many novels plays, poems and films, both historical and biographical. Indeed if a single source for the popular image of Rani Lakshmibai has to be cited, it is Mazha Pravas .
Fearing reprisals from the government, and in accordance with his wishes, Godse’s travelogue-cum-memoir was published only in 1907 — six years after his passing.
This was Chintamanrao Vaidya’s highly edited and abridged version which influenced popular imagination till Datto Vaman Potdar published the work in full in 1966 but by then Vaidya’s edition had damaged the author’s voice.
In 1957, the centenary of the Uprising, Godse was still unknown to an English reading public, but by 2007 three English translations were underway. Mrinal Pande’s version titled 1857: The Real Story of the Uprising (Harper Collins), Sukhmani Roy’s translation Travails of 1857 (Asiatic Society of Mumbai / Rohan Prakashan) and Adventures of a Brahmin Priest : My Travels in the 1857 Rebellion by Priya Adarkar/ Shanta Gokhale (Oxford University Press).
In flight
Together, the three books provide a marvellous case study for what happens to translations between Indian languages and out of them into English. In its first linguistic crossover, Mazha Pravas broke out of Marathi when Amritlal Nagar translated the heavily abridged Vaidya version into Hindi in 1966.
In the introduction to her translation, Sukhmani Roy regrets that it was this truncated and embellished version of Godse’s narrative on which Mrinal Pande’s translation was based. Pande herself states that it was her mother, Shivani, who had drawn her attention to Nagar’s translation. She also says that she consulted the Marathi, but it could not have been the original which is divided into six sections with anything from seven to 24 units in each of them because the Harper book collapses all 87 units into eight chapters.
Priya Adarkar and Shanta Gokhale (like Sukhmani Roy) based their translation on the Potdar version but their approach to translation varies greatly from that of Sukhmani Roy, (a direct descendant of the author) addressing the general reader whereas Sukhmani Roy’s translation is for academia.
After Godse’s narrative, the queen rode again and again — in 1956 when Mahasweta Devi published Jhansir Rani ; in 1958 when D.V. Tahmankar published The Ranee of Jhansi (Macgibbon & Kee); in 1966 when Vrindavanlal Varma published his novel in Hindi (Delhi) and in 1972 when Hamish Hamilton (U.K.) released Manohar Malgonkar’s The Devil’s Wind. But the most vivid picture of her remains from MazhaPravas : on horseback, her son strapped to her back and in flight from Jhansi at night.
The writer edits translations for Oxford University Press, India.
