Contemporary Perspectives of The Sepoy Mutiny: The Beginning of The End of Empire

 

Daniel F. Schultz, Ph.D.  and Maryanne Felter, Ph.D.

Departments of Social Sciences and English

Cayuga Community College

Auburn, New York 13021

315-255-1743 x 263/245

schultdf@auburn.cayuga-cc.edu

felterma@cayuga-cc.edu

 

 

As Andrew Ward says in Our Bones are Scattered, “Anyone who tries to tell the story of Cawnpore must subsist on a sometimes sparse diet of questionable depositions, muddled accounts, dubious journals, and the narratives of shell-shocked survivors with axes to grind” (Andrew Ward, Our Bones are Scattered [New York:  Henry Holt, 1996], 555).  More than this, Ward acknowledges a “dearth of primary material from the Indian side of the equation”; the Indians at the time—at least those writing in English—told “the British only what they wanted to hear” (Andrew Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, 555). The various depictions of the Mutiny, whether in paintings, cartoons, poetry, or prose, reflect the various agenda that underlie Britain’s presence in India.  Taken together these representations of the Mutiny provide what  might best be called a “theatre,” “a spectacle,” one that was used, even as it was being produced, to justify British action in India. After all the ultimate result of the Mutiny by the sepoys was a relinquishing of the control of India by the East India Company and an official setting of this jewel into the crown.

When the Indian Mutiny began in May of 1857, it was given very little attention in the “respectable” press back home.  It took nearly six weeks for the news to reach London. India was such a “non-topic” in the British press at the time that the Times’s initial reporting of the Mutiny was actually a response to a suggestion in the French press that India was revolting against British rule (Kevin Hobson, “The British Press; The Indian Mutiny” [http://www.edunltd.com/empire/article/mutinypress.htm (2/20/00)], 1). Especially since the administration of William Bentinck (1828-35), Anglo-Indian relations were becoming strained.  A comprehensive education system, emphasizing British language, culture, and traditions was installed, reflecting the Company’s need for educated manpower for which it was reluctant to pay the costs of transporting them from England.  British reforms, however,  were perceived as unsought interference in Indian cultural and religious life.  The irony is that reform spawned revolution.  The introduction of the “Doctrine of Lapse” and the acquisition of the Sind by Lord Dalhousie (1848-56) extended the discontent across religious lines.  Britain,  lulled into complacency, with foreign policy concerns elsewhere—China, the Crimea, Italy--paid scant attention to the rising tide of grievances among the native people in India. At first there was little coverage of the Mutiny in the press.  In fact,  Punch’s early reporting  uses the Mutiny as a way of taking jabs at national politics and politicians. A Punch cartoon of 15 August 1857 entitled “Execution of John Company: or the Blowing up (there ought to be) in Leadenhall Street”   was critical of the mismanagement of Indian affairs by the East India Company while “The Asiatic Mystery” (8 August 1857) (figure 2 BELOW)

 

 

 

focused more on anti-Semitic and orientalist views of Disraeli himself rather than on events in India.

 Although some of the reports played up racial superiority (as in the Saturday Review’s “resolute vigour of the Anglo Saxon race” qtd. in Kevin Hobson, “The British Press; The British Mutiny,” 3), early reporting remained fairly dispassionate until after the massacre at Cawnpore on 15 July 1857.  By 22 August, Punch was running a full page cartoon, “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger” (figure 3),

 

showing India having killed a helpless woman and child, the lion of England leaping onto the tiger in revenge.  Newspaper reports began to portray the siege, and a spate of memoirs, journals, and letters, some still in manuscript, some published, were sent home. For a time in October, Punch’s coverage of Indian affairs seemed an intense “charivari” of reporting. Many full page cartoons focused on Britain’s duties in India while some of the articles and poems  sensationalized  the events.  The shocking descriptions of Cawnpore must have recalled in the British mind images of the Black Hole of Calcutta  about a century before, and rekindled memories of earlier sepoy mutinies (1764, 1806, 1824). Meanwhile, in India caste grievances, coupled with rumor and Company insensitivity, brought four more rebellions (1844-57) thus making it even more urgent to justify retaliation to the general public British (figure 4). 

General Sir George Jacob said mutiny was a normal state of affairs in the Bengal army and wrote a letter to that effect to The Times (“The Indian Mutiny”   Encyclopedia Britannica [9th edition 1911], 446).   After the initial frenzy of reporting Cawnpore, Punch returned to its previous position. Punch in 13 February 1858 was critical of the singular pursuit of profit which characterized company rule rather than focusing on the brutality of the rebellion itself. However, in the poem “Our Army of Martyrs,” this narrow economic interest was criticized and something broader, something better, urged. Here Punch anticipated  Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” warning of the burdens of empire: “ Laid they their lives down but for this,/ That commerce might pursue/ Her thriving course, and rich men miss/ No doit of revenue?/ Of pompous wealth, or mere purse-pride/ The champions did they fall?/If so, they martyrs only died/ To Mammon after all./ Not so; those martyrs’ blood, we trust,/ To better purpose sown,/ Will not have sunk in Indian dust,/  To bear such fruits alone:/ The blood of martyrs is a seed/ Whence springs another crop,/ Our heroes were designed to bleed/ For something more than Shop” (“ Our Army of Martyrs” Punch, 13 February 1858).  But by 26 December 1857, “How Mr Cooke takes Delhi,” moves the tone of Punch’s India coverage away from the sensational and the sentimental back to heavy sarcasm:  a “Spectacle” seen from a “box at Astley’s” shows the rebellion as a “Most animated affair, the interest never flags, and the author has had the good taste (lacked elsewhere, and where it might have been reasonable looked for), to omit any attempt at reproducing the horrors of the Indian crisis.  We see the black rascals plotting and rebelling, and rendering themselves just detestable enough to make the audience shout with joy when the swift vengeance of countless supernumeraries breaks upon the miscreants, and they are banged, beaten, bayoneted, blown from guns, or otherwise disposed of, as suits the scene….And as for Delhi, the revenge of England comes down upon it in a storm of fire that makes you smell powder for an hour afterwards.  The spectacle is quite a national one, and sends away the audience most confirmed anti-sentimentalists” (“How Mr. Cooke takes Delhi” Punch, 26 December 1857, 259). Punch’s reaction to this pandering to the Britons’ s need to see this nationalist/ imperialist battle waged on their own stages was clear. Only a few weeks earlier, in the midst of a (collection) of articles and cartoons in immediate response to Cawnpore,   Punch made fun of liberal humanitarian concerns for the poor native, urging Britons to see that those natives ready to kill British soldiers “are entitled to the tender mercies of the Pagan code of war” (“A Leader from the ‘Star’ “ Punch, 31 October 1857, 177).

Right after the Mutiny, numerous accounts found a welcome audience: John Adye’s  Defense of Cawnpore, by the troops under the orders of Major General Charles A. Windham (1858), Charles Wade Crump’s A Pictorial record of the Cawnpore Massacre (1858), Alexander Duff’s The Indian Rebellion (1858), and Major Charles North’s Journal of an English Officer in India (1858) were just a few titles in a dazzling array of writing on the subject. Mrs. Harris’s Lady’s Diary (1858) is one of the most famous of the “survivor journals,” full of the images people back home wanted to read about.  Harris wrote of  “Many ladies and children [who] have fortunately made their escape from different small stations in the district, just in time to save their lives, leaving all their worldly goods to be burnt and plundered…gentlemen bayoneted on the spot, wives and children looking on….The ladies were equally calm and heroic; they knelt down with their little ones under a tree praying, and as soon as their husbands were slaughtered, their turn came” (Mrs. Harris, A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow: Written for the Perusal of Friends at Home .[ London: John Murray, 1858],  n.p.).   Similar outrage was rendered by survivor Amelia Horne, who described the massacres in lurid detail, referring to the victims “shrieks” and their “agonized prayers… the water red with blood…the mutilation of husbands…infants torn from their mothers’ arms and hacked to pieces” (qtd in Chrhistopher Wilkinson-Latham [The Indian Mutiny. Osprey: London, 1977], 26).

It is not only the women diarists and survivors of the Mutiny who dramatized the events for English readers.  Male survivors as well wrote their stories in such a way as to sway English audiences not only to sympathize with the survivors’ plights but also to see that England was clearly justified in its treatment of the rebels. In A Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow: from its commencement to its relief by Sir Colin Campbell, L.E. Ruutz Rees portrayed the siege in yet even more melodramatic ways than did Mrs. Harris.  His description of the treatment of women and children is almost a cliché in accounts of the Mutiny. Indians “had torn infants from their mothers’ breasts, and bayoneted the babes before their eyes….the floor was still black with congealed blood; and large bunches of long hair, probably torn out [lay on the floor]…the walls were covered with bloody finger-marks of little babies and children and delicate hands of wounded females” (L.E. Ruutz Rees [A Personal Narrative if the Siege of Lucknow. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858], 228).  Similar sentimental comments were applied to male combatants as well: “Our men found his [Cornet Raleigh’s] body still warm, and the blood yet oozing from his wounds, when they came to him. Poor fellow! What makes his end more sad is, that the unfortunate young officer—he was only 17—had joined his regiment but three days before. A lock of hair of some young lady love, to whom perhaps he had plighted his faith, was found round his neck.  One of his fingers, on which there had been a ring, was cut off”  (L.E. Ruutz Rees, A Personal Narrative if the Siege of Lucknow, 19). No such condemnation of atrocity and theft is given Hodson, slayer of the sons of Bahadur Shah in whose possession their jewelry was found (“Hodson” Encyclopedia Britannica [9th edition, 1911], 559).

Poets, too, were reacting to the events in India.  Martin Tupper, often called “the English poet of the rebellion ” (Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri [English Historical Writing on the Indian Mutiny 1857-1859 [Calcutta: The World Press, 1979], 259),  was also significant in molding public opinion.  He steadfastly advocated rigorous repression in the wake of the reported brutalities of the sepoys. The British were so incensed by these atrocities, he says, that they must react strongly to such slaughter: “And England, now avenged their wrongs by vengeance deep and dire,/ Cut this canker with sword, and burn it out with fire;/ Destroy those traitor regions, hang every pariah hound,/ And hunt them down to death, in all hills and cities ‘round (qtd. in Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri,  English Historical Writing on the Indian Mutiny 1857-1859,  259).  Tupper  personified the domestic British attitude of vengeance and fury : “Who pulls about the mercy?—the agonized wail of babies hewn piecemeal yet sickens the air”  (qtd in Chaudhuri, ibid., 259). If Tupper advocated revenge,  Christina Rossetti focused more on the dramatic story of Alexander Skene and his wife: as the “swarming howling wretches below gained and gained” (lines3-4), Skene and his “pale young wife” (line 5) decide the time has come: “Close his arm about her now/ Close her cheek to his/ Close the pistol to her brow—/God forgive them this!” (Christina Rossetti, “In the Round Tower at Jhansi 1857,” in Chris Brooks  and Peter Faulkner. Eds. The White Man’s Burdens: An Anthology of British Poetry of Empire [UK: University of Exeter Press, 1996], 184). As they get ready to commit a murder/suicide rather than face the rebels, they “kiss and kiss: ‘It is not pain/ Thus to kiss and die” before they part forever” (Christina Rossetti, ibid.,  184).   This bears a striking resemblance to similar rhetoric about settlers in the American West while facing hostile native Americans—the idea of saving the last bullet for yourself.  Death is better than falling into the hands of blood-thirsty savages, and the possibility of  rape, of torture, of untold misery.

In addition to print media, galleries, too, took advantage of the public interest in sensationalized accounts of the Mutiny.  Mutiny paintings and “Scenes of the Headquarters of the Revolt in India” at the Great Globe in Leicester Square were popular entertainment, so much so that Punch on 17 October 1857 complained: “The supply of the demand for information on any point in connection with the melancholy subject of the day, is quite a legitimate undertaking—but…can amuse nobody” (“Amusement Extraordinary,” 17 October 1857, 159).   Paintings on exhibit at the time included Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s In Memoriam: designed to commemorate the Christian heroism of the British Ladies in India during the Mutiny of 1857, and their ultimate Deliverance by British Prowess (1858) (figure 5). Here we see the more sentimental image portrayed, with fair-skinned English women, eyes heavenward, praying for deliverance, while the dark-skinned ayah, turned toward the door, hears the entry of Scottish troops, here to save the innocents.  Curiously, Paton had originally exhibited the painting with “ ‘maddenend Sepoys, hot after blood’ as The Times put it,…bursting through the door” (C.A. ed. et. al. Bayly [The Raj: India and the British 1600-1947. London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1990], 241).  One of the most contentious works exhibited at the Royal Academy, Paton was persuaded to exchange the sepoys for Scottish troops entering to rescue the women and children.  According to a critic in the Illustrated London News, the original painting was “too revolting for further description….which ought not to have been hung” (qtd. In C.A. Bayly, ibid., 241). Such a comment reminds us of the common interest in the sensational and the prurient covered up by the genteel Victorian sensibility of the emergent bourgeoisie patterning its behavior on the mores of the upper classes. Thomas Jones Barker’s The Relief of Lucknow (1859) (figure 6) 

depicted a famous episode in the war with three of the major heroes being celebrated in England: Colin Campbell, Sir James Outram, and General Sir Henry Havelock.  Commissioned by the dealers Agnews, Barker painted from sketches made by a Swedish artist, the only European artist in India during the rebellion. There was such demand for paintings of the Mutiny that dealers knew they could not possibly send their artists to India to paint and have the painting in time to keep up with the news. Both paintings are typical of the period,  glorifying the British in heroic battles and sieges in heroic stereotypes, gallant poses, and consummate bravery where as natives are portrayed glowering, wide-eyed in terror, and retreating in disarray.  Even Madame Tussaud put “Nana Sahib” in her chamber of horrors until 1878, a “terrific embodiment of matted hair, rolling eyes and cruel teeth,” the standard way of representing the native villain (qtd. in Andrew Ward, Our Bones are Scattered,  531). Not only did sensationalism prevail, some of the depictions were downright false. One of the most famous images of the Mutiny was a steel engraving reproduced in Ball’s History of India, “Miss Wheeler slays her captives” (figure 7). 

 

Here, General Sir Hugh Wheeler’s youngest daughter slayed her captors before they could do her harm, after which she reportedly threw herself down a well.  “Her gallant end became a staple of Victorian theatricals” (Anderw Ward, Our Bones are Scattered,  505) although the story is thought to be entirely false.  In fact, some historians now believe the story was circulated by “Nana Sahib’s agents to discourage mutineers from keeping English girls hostage” (Andrew Ward, Our Bones are Scattered,  675 note 328).

The reports of the  Sepoy mutiny that reached the English audience at the time had such a  powerful effect on the English reading public that it became hard to separate fact from fiction.  Even such novelists as Charles Dickens, known for his sympathy for the downtrodden and the poor in his own country, had this to say in an essay written with Wilkie Collins, entitled “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” in the Christmas 1857 issue of Household Words: “I wish I were a commander in chief in India.  The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental Race with amazement . . . should be to proclaim to them . . . that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and that I was . . .now proceeding, with  . . . merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth” (qtd in Patrick  Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914 [Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1988],  206-7). This was precisely the kind of response needed in England as the British  response to the Indian atrocities became increasingly vicious and bloody. Although “Clemency Canning” had earlier called for moderation in Anglo-Indian affairs surrounding the Mutiny, Britons wanted revenge (figures 8 and 9). 

Even after Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858 calling for leniency and moderation, brutality continued as Britons  punished  their “ungrateful” subjects. As late as the 9th edition of the Britannica (1911), even such unsavory characters as Major Wilson Hodson, known for fiscal fraud and callousness towards the natives, were painted in a favorable light. For example, George Malleson (1825-98), an Indian army veteran and prolific writer on the Mutiny and Indian history, described him as “daring, courting danger, reckless, he was a condotteri of the hills, a free-lance of the Middle Ages.  He joyed in the life of the camps and reveled in the clash of arms.  His music was the call of the trumpet, the battlefield his ballroom. He would have been at home in the camp of Wallenstein and the sack to Madgeburg” (Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri, English Historical Writings on the Indian Mutiny 1857-1859, 122). Hodson was lauded for his capture of Bahadur Shah, sultan of Delhi. A later British commissioner in Oudh congratulated him, “for catching the king and slaying his sons.  I hope you will bag many more” (qtd. in Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri, ibid., 122). Even the murder in cold blood of the unarmed sons of the last Moghul emperor was justified: “This is the most bitterly criticized action in his career , but no one but the man on the spot can judge how it is necessary to handle a crowd; in addition, one of the prisoners…had made himself notorious by cutting off the arms and legs of English children and pouring their blood into the mothers’ mouths.  Considering the circumstances, Hodson’s act at worst was one of irregular justice” (“Hodson,” Encyclopedia Britannica 9th edition 1911,  559).  Valbezon said, “Posterity must overlook the slaughter of the Delhi princes and place on Hodson’s brow a crown without thorns….[He was] a man of foreign race, a simple cavalry Major was presiding over this species of entombment; but he represented all the living forces of modern civilization, Christian faith, military discipline, political intelligence, science and industry.  Hodson, as the instrument of destiny, was merely executing the decree of that irresistible law of progress which condemned the decrepit monarchy of Asia to pass under the sway of free and happy England” (qtd. In Sashi Bhusan Chadhuri, ibid., 250-263). Killed at Begamkuthi, Hodson’s  career was summarized: “On the whole, it can hardly be doubted that he  was somewhat unscrupulous in his private character, but he was a splendid soldier and rendered inestimable service to the Empire” (“Hodson,” Encyclopdeia Britannica, 9th edition 1911, 559).  Similar distortions were perpetuated to rationalize the wholesale slaughter of Indian captives.  Frederic Cooper, who was responsible for the massacre of over 237 Indian sepoys, imprisoned a number of alleged rebellious sepoys and summarily executed a number of them.  As the slaughter proceeded, he was informed that the prisoners refused to depart the barracks. Upon inspection he found that they had suffocated, a gruesome reprise of the “Black Hole” of a century before.  Cooper’s words reflected  Anglo-Saxon sanctimonious superiority: “a single Anglo-Saxon supported by a section of Asiatics, under taking so tremendous responsibility, and coldly presiding over so memorable an execution without the excitement of battle, or a sense of individual injury to imbue the proceedings with the faintest hint of vindictiveness.  The governors of the Punjab are of the true English stamp and mould, and knew that England expected every man to do his duty, and that duty done, thanks them warmly for doing it…wisdom and heroism are still but mere dross before the manifest and wondrous interposition of Almighty God in the cause of Christianity” (qtd. in Robert Huttenback, The British Imperial Experience [New York: Harper and Row, 1966],  65). In short, British atrocities are condoned, justified, and applauded whereas Indian massacres are ascribed to the Asiatic temper and unregenerate barbarism.

            Some British authors made a pretense of historical objectivity.  For example, Charles Ball, in The History of the Indian Mutiny (1859), states categorically that he gets his information from  official documents, dispatches, and Parliamentary papers.  But he destroyed any such objectivity by stating, “that he will inscribe on the pages of history the details of acts of atrocity which have indelibly stained the annals of Indian and its people with crimes that disgrace the name of humanity” (Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny vol.1[New York: S.D. Brain, 1859],  33). 

By 1865, G.O. Trevelyan  published Cawnpore, a respected “history,” one that would characterize the general English tenor about this historical event for a long time to come—at least until Indian independence when Indian historians, who had been suppressed earlier, began to publish their side of the  story (figures 10). 

Trevelyan’s “history” clearly emphasized the sensational side of the Mutiny story. In his “Preface,” Trevelyan told his reader his aim was an objective, authentic account of the Mutiny.  He relied on depositions of natives, British soldiers, and government narrative, particularly Sir John Lawrence who provided him with private and unpublished government documents.  The implication is that he was doing good historical research—and he was. But the documents he used from natives are ones that,  merely echo British sentiments. And he chose to perpetuate the melodramatic accounting of survivors with an axe to grind distorting his objectivity. And so the content of his account belied this promise.  The tone of Trevelyan’s work was steeped in Victoria sentimentalism—an account right in line with journal accounts of eyewitnesses, the imperialist poetry, and other “spectacles” of the day.  His antipathy towards the Asiatic comes through in his descriptions of “Mutineers reeking with English blood”  (George Trevelyan, Cawnpore [London: Macmillan, 1865],  n.p.). As he described the Cawnpore massacres, he continued to reinforce those ideas of the cowardly slaughter of non-combatants: “the inner apartment was ankle deep in blood…strips of dresses, vainly tied round the handles of doors, signified the contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of keeping our the murderers.  Broken combs were there, and the frills of children’s trousers, and torn cuffs, and pinafores, and little round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets” (George Trevelyan, ibid., n.p.). Trevelyan relied on contemporary accounts, as he says in his Preface, but the accounts and depositions  were precisely those which had established this sensational tone: “’ bodies,’ says one who was present throughout, ‘were dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head. Those who had clothes worth taking were stripped.  Some of the women were alive…they prayed for the sake of God that an end might be put to their sufferings …Three boys were alive. They were fair children. The eldest , I think, must have been six or seven, and the youngest five years.  They were running around the well, (where else could they go to?) and there was none to save them.  No: none said a word or tried to save them’ ” (George Trevelyan, ibid., n.p.).

Although most of the contemporary account of the Mutiny dramatized and sensationalized it, some political figures such as Canning, Disraeli, and Victoria, and some British writers, showed sympathy, and urged restraint,  for their Indian subjects. For example, William Howard Russell, correspondent for The Times, visited Cawnpore after its recapture and penned his reflections in My Indian Mutiny Diary ( 1860). British racism in India was apparent as was the dawn of a reconsideration of the British imperial mission: “Nana Sahib moving about amid haughty stares and unconcealed dislike. ‘What the deuce does the General ask that nigger here for?’ . . . . But one is tempted to ask if there is not some lesson and some warning given to our race in reference to India by the tremendous catastrophe of Cawnpore….[I]s India the better for our rule so far as regards the social conditions of the great mass of the people[?].…We have put down widow burning, we have sought to check infanticide; but I have traveled hundred s of mile through a country peopled with beggars and covered with wigwam villages” (qtd. in Robert Huttenback, The British Imperial Experience, 67).  Alfred Comyn Lyall , not only a veteran of the Indian Mutiny but also a high ranking civil servant in the Indian government and a member of the Council of India from 1888-1903, published Verses Written in India in 1889, a book that was at the time quite popular. Lyall’s intimate knowledge of Indian culture based on his long stay in India is reflected in his Asiatic Studies published in 1882, exhibiting deep insight into the life and character of India. Since twenty-five years had lapsed and the horrors of the Mutiny were not longer fresh in the public mind, Lyall’s poetry reflects a sympathy to the native cause which would have been unthinkable during the time of the uprising.  “The Rajpoot Rebels,” written around 1858, depicted a ragged, ill-equipped Indian army, wounded, sick, surrounded outgunned, but nonetheless motivated for reasons of retaining their land and their culture against the encroachment of the British. It reflects their struggles and losses in the past; they know they must ultimately surrender. The poem, from the perspective of an Indian rebel, ends: “When the army has slain its fill,/ When they bid the hangman cease;/ When they beckon us down from the desert hill/  To go to our homes in peace/ To bow with a heavy heart,/ And, of half our fields bereft,/ ‘Gainst the usurer’s oath, and the lawyer’s art/ To battle that some be left/ At the sight of an English face/ Loyally bow the head/ And cringe like slaves to the surly race/ For  pay and a morsel of bread;/ Toil like an ox or a mule/ To earn the stranger his fee—/ Our sons may brook the Feringhee’s rule,/ There is no more life for me” (Alfred Comyn Lyall, “Rajpoot Rebels,” in Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner. The White Man’s Burden: An Anthology of British Poetry of Empire, 187-9).

Given the date of publication, Lyall appears to hint at the demise of Empire. Despite protestations in Victoria’s Proclamation  (1858) of universal brotherhood, religious tolerance, and the promise to Indians of sharing in the shaping their own destiny, in actuality British rule was based on naked force (figure 11). In fact, during the 1880s British resistance to the Ilbert Bill (1883) destroyed any faith the vast majority  of Indian subjects could have in enlightened rule.  Within two years the Indian National Congress was formed, itself dividing into moderate and radical wings, the latter urging terror and selective violence against British officials (Bande-Mataram qtd in A.R. Desai, The Social Background of Indian Nationalism [Bombay: Indian Branch Oxford U.P, 1948], 311).  

Finally  the message that came through with few exceptions in contemporary accounts as well as in the early histories of this event justifies the imperial mission.  When humane and often evangelical motives of the “civilizing mission” seemed to fail, the imperialist obsession was reflected in constant reinforcement of ideas of racial superiority, the glory of English manhood, and the justification for revenge against the savage, dark-skinned alien hordes. The general reaction of the English public to the Mutiny was one of outrage and horror.  The Mutiny, as reported in the English press, as well as elsewhere in the Western world, was a watershed event.  England’s orientalizing of her natives had, in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, proven true.  Britons felt they had been betrayed by a people who should have thanked them for their introduction  of  “the best that has been known and thought in the world” into such a  dark corner of the globe. They reacted especially to the threat of the “Oriental,” that dark-skinned, overly-libidinous, unruly man who was a threat not just to innocent women and children but to everything civilized (i.e. English) man had sought to protect and serve.  This image continues through the early part of the next century in E.M. Forster’s  A Passage to India and Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. Played out in images of rape—the ultimate violation that the other races could perpetrate on a civilized one--the Sepoy Mutiny had an impact that was profound and lasting, an impact that embittered English relations with their subjects from that time forwards. If the Mutiny influenced the way the English behaved toward the Indians, it also impacted Indian behavior towards the English.  When independence finally came in 1947, Indian historians began to tell another story. Some, such as V.D. Savarkar, even refer to the Mutiny by another name: The Indian War of Independence of 1857. This book, which  was proscribed even before it was printed in 1908 because of its revolutionary intent (V.D. Savarkar, War of Independence [Reprint of 1909 ed. Bombay, 1947], viii, x, xvii)  was finally published in 1947 when Independence was achieved and allowed many of those silenced Indian perspectives to emerge. Despite a few enlightened voices urging moderation, they were drowned out in a crescendo of public opinion justifying retribution and British superiority. The former would be heard and lead to a major soul-searching of the imperial mission in the wake of similar atrocities committed by British arms during the South African War.  Kipling’s warnings as to the burdens of empire were already a half-century too late.

 

Works Cited

 

“Amusement Extraordinary. “ Punch 17 October 1857: 159.

“The Asiatic Mystery.” Punch 8 August 1857. n.p.

Ball, Charles. History of the Indian Mutiny 2 vols. New York: S.D. Brain, 1859.

Bayly, C.A. et. al. eds. The Raj: India and the British 1600-1947. London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1990.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

“The British Lion’s Revenge on the Bengal Tiger.” Punch 22 August 1857. n.p.

Brooks, Christopher and Peter Faulkner. Eds. The White Man’s Burdens: An Anthology of British Poetry of Empire. UK: University of Exeter Press, 1966.

Chaudhuri, Sashi Bhusan. English Historical Writing on the Indian Mutiny 1857-1859. Calcutta: The World Press, 1979.

Desai, A.R. The Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Bombay: Indian Branch Oxford UP, 1948.

“The Execution of John Company.” Punch 15 August 1857.n.p.

Harris, Mrs. J.P. A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow: Written for the Perusal of Friends at Home. London: John Murray, 1858.

Hobson, Kevin.
“The British Press: The British Mutiny.” http://www.edunltd.com/empire/article/mutinypress.htm (2/20/2000)

“Hodson.” Encyclopedia Britannica 9th ed. 1911.

“How Mr. Cooke takes Delhi.” Punch 26 December 1867. 259.

Huttenback, Robert. The British Imperial Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

“Indian Mutiny.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 9th edn. 1911.

“Justice.” Punch 29 August 1957. n.p.

“A Leader from the Start.” Punch 31 October 1857.177.

Lee, Sidney. Queen Victoria: a Biography. London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1903.

Lyall, Alfred Comyn. “Rajpoot Rebels.” In Brooks and Faulkner, 187-9.

“Our Army of Martyrs.” Punch 13 February 1858, n.p.

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