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This paper tries to elucidate the autobiographical writing of Durgadas Bandyopadhyay on the Great Uprising of 1857 in Bareilly in North India. This kind of autobiographical writings are very few in number and not well known to researchers. So, this paper will review the autobiography as a first-hand source of the 1857 uprising in colonial India. The war literature and its histories are a new thing in current social science discourse. Issues, which were once marginal, now become central to the academic world. The Great Uprising of 1857 and the indigenous literature about it are many, yet it could not attract the minds of the historians. This article seeks to identify such native, especially one Bengali memoir whose subject matter is the 1857 Uprising in colonial India and subsequent causes and consequences. By drawing the relation between memory and history, this paper tries to adopt the critical memory and literary studies and their relation with history following the analytical methodology and archival documents. This article also seeks to examine questions of loyalty, resistance, and the nature of the Revolt through an examination of loyalist narrative. Central to the argument is an attempt to question the teleological histories of 1857 that seek to establish a long and continuous history of discontent and resistance in the Bengal Army. This paper further argues for a reappraisal of sources and, especially, for a more deliberate engagement with first-hand autobiographical accounts and commentaries on 1857.
Dr. Manas Dutta. “Reclaiming the Autobiographical Expression of the Great Revolt of 1857 in British India: A Study of Bidrohi Bangalee ba Amar Jivan Charit by Durgadas Bandyopadhyay.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 882-904. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.54.
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