Postage stamps are small objects with heavy ideological freight. What nations choose to remember on them often reveals as much as what they forget. In 1957, India and Pakistan briefly converged in commemorating the centenary of the 1857 revolt, before their partitioned histories pulled these meanings apart. Here is an attempt to linger over the small, official images through which nations remember and forget.
In 2007, professional artists were called upon to re-enact scenes of the 1857 revolt at an event held at New Delhi’s Red Fort to commemorate what is dubbed in India as the “First War of Independence”. Ambika Soni, then Minister of Culture, felt that such a spectacle was necessary to instil “a sense of pride” amongst the Indian youth “who eat out at McDonald’s and Pizza Hut”. If fast food was the culprit, it had apparently triumphed across the border in Pakistan, where 1857 remained forgotten and unsung. By 2007, 1857 had slipped out of the Pakistani public consciousness altogether.
The partition of British India had also partitioned the histories of the newly independent India and Pakistan. And what was India’s first war of Independence was hardly worth remembering. In the words of Pakistani civil servant turned academic Akbar Ahmed, 1857 was nothing but “a disastrous misadventure, an exercise in bluff and bravado”.