Revolt of 1857 In Hisar Region and Beyond: An Eyewitness Record of Sant Sahab Ram Rahad

Abstract

The historiography of the Revolt of 1857 has been dominated by colonial archives and elite nationalist narratives, which have largely silenced peasant, artisanal, and rural voices. This article recovers the subaltern dimensions of 1857 by foregrounding the eyewitness account of Sant Sahab Ram Ji Rahad (1814–1891), a folk-saint and katha-vachak of western Haryana. Drawing on his vernacular manuscripts Saar Sabad Gunjar and Teen Jambhsar, this paper argues that the revolt in Haryana was not confined to sepoys but was a broad-based agrarian uprising involving villages, religious communities, and ordinary cultivators. Rahad’s text, composed in Marwadi oral-poetic form, documents the causes, spread, organization, and repression of 1857 across Sirsa, Hisar, Fatehabad, Bhiwani districts of Haryana and adjoining regions of Rajasthan. It provides rare evidence of inter-community mobilization, local strategies of resistance, and the moral-religious framing of anti-colonial struggle. The article concludes that integrating such vernacular and oral sources is essential for writing a people’s history of 1857.