The Politics of Ballads and the Poetics of Nationalism: The 1857 Indian Uprising, Tennyson’s Defence of Lucknow , and Chauhan’s Jhansi ki Rani

Abstract: This essay presents an intertextual reading of Tennyson’s imperial Defence of Lucknow (1879) in English and Chauhan’s anticolonial Rani of Jhansi (1923) in Hindi. Both are balladic celebrations of the 1857 Uprising in India, a major landmark in the Indian subcontinent’s history of colonization that is dominantly represented as a “sepoy mutiny” in British historiography and re-cognized by Indian historians as the “First War of Independence.” A postcolonial reading disrupts Defence ’s imperial-masculine underpinning of nationhood, which is mediated by the material context of its moment of production. But the same deconstructive process also leads to a defamiliarization of the Indian ballad’s negotiations of national identity. The play of counter-ballads based on counter-memory exposes the fault lines of nation formation and precipitates a critical understanding of nationalism itself. The ballad form, particularly the strategic ways in which its recalling of the past represents a nation to itself, offers a seductive ideological field for interrogating the relations between history, cultural nationalisms, and memory.