Introduction

Summary

This introductory chapter situates the current study within the existing literature on the contested events of 1857 and highlights how a focus on the way in which the conflict became an almost obsessively commemorated event in colonial and postcolonial contexts can help us better understand a range of questions pertaining to identity, legitimacy, and power as successive generations (re)produced and (re)packaged the past for mass consumption in the constantly evolving present. In so doing, this chapter also outlines the methodological framework which will inform the study as a whole. Drawing on sociological accounts of ‘collective memory’, this chapter develops a socially grounded understanding of the relationship between memory and forgetting, and explains how practices of commemoration provide a moment in which this dynamic is played out.