1857: NEED FOR ALTERNATIVE SOURCES 115 However, even in the works which have attempted to study 1857 from a perspective of 'history from beloV ; the sources u^ed to construct rebel mentality are primarily elitist official sources (the minutes, dispatches, correspondence, reports and narrative of events written by British officials and generals) which have very little to say about rebel mentality. Rather, these sources speak of the overriding concern on the part of the colonialist state to preserve law and order and the common rebel is totally denied a mind and rationality of his own. The Rebellion is treated either as a conspiracy by some ill-willed men or as a mishap or disease — something akin to an epidemic. Such official sources prefer to treat 1857 as an uprising without an issue wherever possible, and where it was not possible the issues are termed as unreasonable, irrational and steeped in obscurantism and fanaticism. The term 'rebel*, 'badmash', 'dacoit', all seem to overlap one another. Wherever an uprising occurred it led to 'anarchy' or 'disorganization' in the eyes of the British; by the same logic wherever it was suppressed the place was 'fast settling down' - as if the Rebellion was just a freak wave and an abnormal mishap in the smooth course of sedentary life under the beneficial British rule.8 The solution advocated and practised by historians like Ranajit Guha to 'invert' these official sources in order to arrive at the rebel mentality seems to move within a framework of binary opposites which is problematic. Such an approach misses out on a whole range of nuances and shades of intermediary attitudes and interpretations that various groups of rebels manifested through their actions and perceptions. It gives us little idea of the separate cultural domain that the groups of common men had tried to preserve against the onslaught of the colonialist regime. There is very little help from the official sources in trying to construct the various constituents of popular culture - its notions of 'dharma' and life, its meaningful symbolism and ritual significance within polity and society arrived at by different groups of rebels - all of which are essential to truly grasp and understand the modalities and idioms of popular grievances and actions in 1857 with the casual and characteristic inter-relations and spatial variations. It is here that the importance of sources of oral and popular history like folk songs, folk tales, etc., as a primary source material for constructing the history of 1857 from the point of view of a common rebel acquires relevance. A serious criticism of the historians of the so-called 'subaltern' school is that unfortunately, their 'new' writing is still largely based on the old elitist sources. Despite realising the