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https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Indian_Mutiny_and_the_British_Imagin/IG6avycWoe8C?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA36&printsec=frontcover
pp.36-40
[...] the general tenor of opinion before 1857 was, as Dalhousie proclaimed in his parting Minute of 28 February 1856, that under British rule 'the whole of India' was 'profoundly tranquil'.
The irony of this observation is striking when set against the prolonged attacks on British life and property that ensued. A series of indiscriminate attacks on the British, European and Indian Christian population in many towns and civil stations of north and central India followed the massacres at Meerut and Delhi. The most dramatic were those at Delhi — where some fifty British were murdered in a day — and at Kanpur, where the British under General Hugh Massey Wheeler took hasty refuge in an unfinished barrack house on 6 June only to be besieged by troops under the Nana Sahib, Dhondu Pant. Though the siege failed to take the ‘entrenchment’ – as the cluster of unfinished barracks came to be known – there were considerable casualties, leading to the garrison’s negotiated surrender on 26 June, following assurances of a safe passage by boat to Allahabad. The next day, however, the survivors of the siege were ambushed and killed at the Satichaura Ghat (a landing-stage on the Ganges) in Kanpur. Some two hundred women and children who escaped the massacre were imprisoned in the Bibighar, a house in the city, and killed on 15 July, two days before British reinforcements under General Havelock entered Kanpur. While Kanpur was extraordinarily sensational not only because of the numbers involved but also and especially because at Kanpur British women had been subjected to systematic humiliation and violence, the news of such events questioned current notions of security, and the inviolability of British power, prestige and person in India. Since the Bengal Army was responsible for, or had at least created conditions for, this state of affairs, Martin’s exclamation that the British were ‘met by foulest treachery in the very class’ they had relied on underlines hyperbolic governmental confidence and its strategic blindness.
There were several conflicting aspects to the initial reception of the news in Britain and in Anglo-India. Though early reports ‘were confused and disjointed, and sometimes . . . contradictory . . . there came enough of positive information to render it too certain that a terrible catastrophe had fallen upon British society in India’. There were some telling controversies over the reliability of what often passed for positive information, For instance, the Earl of Shaftesbury claimed in a public speech that ‘day by day ladies were coming into Calcutta with their ears and noses cut off and their eyes put out’, a claim he was soon forced to retract in the face of more sober versions. Early historiography too pauses dramatically over scenes of violence, and, as one of the first popular accounts, the History of the Indian Mutiny had no qualms in relying frequently on putative ‘eye- witness’ accounts and the often grisly newspaper reports. Thus Ball cites a letter from an officer in Delhi who wrote to say that: ‘such horrible, indescribable barbarities were surely never perpetrated before. You in England will not hear the worst. For the truth is so awful that the newspapers dare not publish it.’ Later, in his description of the carnage at Kanpur, Ball sets out to verbalise some of these ‘indescribable barbarities’: ‘There lay the hapless mother and the innocent babe; young wife and the aged matron; girlhood in its teens, and infancy in its helplessness - all - all had fallen beneath the dishonoured tulwars of the Mahratta destroyer, and his fierce and cowardly accomplices in crime.’ Again, while describing another massacre that took place on 6 June, Ball conjures: ‘Infants... actually torn from their mother’s arms, and their little limbs chopped off with tulwars yet reeking of their father’s blood; while the shrieking mother was forcibly compelled to hear the cries of her tortured child, and to behold, through scalding tears of agony, the death-writhings of the slaughtered innocent.’ Having retailed for the most part a saleable mood and idiom, Ball later admits with somewhat more circumspection that in ‘the early days of tumult and revolt, the terror inspired by the sudden and unlooked-for visitation, led to much exaggeration’ in the press and public opinion, though his vivid and enthusiastic representation of rebel (rather than the retaliatory British) brutalities is quite consonant with the predominant tone of popular media from the last quarter of 1857.
But the populism that Ball and others like him exploit turns upon a cluster of images and icons and their traumatic reversal, that deserve attention. In all such accounts, rebel violence is at once the sign and the effect of an event that had ‘indescribably’ upset habitual hierarchies, replacing the symbols and institutions of the British with indigenous alternatives, and physically attacking the person of the rulers. More than the causes of| the rebellion, or the judicious means of containment that preoccupied the echelons of high policy, it was this reversal that dominated the popular media, bringing forth calls for vengeance, and construing the event as a confrontation between races and religions, between martyrdom and heroism on the one side, treachery and bloodlust on the other. As the narrator of later Mutiny novel, In the Heart of the Storm, described the popular reaction in Britain and in Anglo-India: ‘[A] sort of madness seized upon the people, to whom the knowledge of Christian women and children of| their own race. slaughtered and tortured by that inferior and subject heathen race they had been accustomed to hold cheaply, was a horror beyond endurance.'
Recent studies on the discursive figuration of the rebellion have fruitfully argued how popular images of European ‘matrons’, ‘young wives’ and ‘girlhood’ exposed, helpless and at the mercy of the dark-skinned male rebels yields a scene of crime, showing up ‘English women as innocent victims and Indian men as sadistic sex criminals’, where the rebellion becomes above all else … a crime against women’; afiguration of torture and sexual violation in the early accounts that, turning upon the revival of chivalry in Victorian England, propels the urge for revenge and reconquest, while obscuring the political content of the rebellion and the history that it embodied. Enduring the wrongs done to them with a dignified calm, the suffering women ‘evoked 'a classical and biblical tradition’ and provide ‘the British with their charged plots of martyrdom [and] heroism, profitably recycled in ‘the popular imagination throughout the period of formal imperialism, and underscoring the braiding of gender and race in the rhetorical flourishes of empire building. But beyond the insignias of white female sexuality there is a tableau of other meanings in the penumbra of the scene of crime, including the often sharp division between the popular and the official versions.
Besides the obvious victim and the equally obvious chivalry she summons is a simultaneous representation of the perpetrators: the ‘fanatic races’ whose ‘past atrocities’ are insignificant ‘when compared with the prodigious and almost indescribable outrages’ that occurred during the rebellion. Derived from hoary stereotypes of Muslim sexual appetite and Hindu ‘depravity’, the tableau of native desire unleashed on the white woman's body, publicly, ritually and to the accompaniment of torture encodes an ethnographic proposition validated by a common perception of Indian history. As a reviewer in the Calcutta Review opined, the evidence of Indian history to the eighteenth century was ‘sufficient to show that the Asiatic, when the hand of the master is withdrawn, is quite capable of doing all that has been done in 1857’, that their instincts are towards disorder, and that they despise law’.
All was well so long as the native propensities of the ‘Asiatics’ were contained by a reforming administration; once that guiding, paternal authority was suspended, ironically by the army that was its chief enforcer, there followed the return to a licence whose object and victim is the flesh of the European female. ‘Dissimulation’, ‘treachery’ and ‘cruelty’, the inalienable constants of Asiatic history were, according to Ball, the cause and the content of the rebellion. Since Hindus and Muslims share this inheritance, their unity against the British - notwithstanding the ‘capricious distributions of | language, creed and appetite’ that Ball’s ethnography had drawn attention to - becomes a natural but ‘extraordinary combination of mutually-repulsive principles for [the] specific purpose’ of erasing the British from the land. Configured in the sign system of popular reception, the mutiny of the Bengal army was not military insubordination alone but a libidinal mutiny against an alien repression; and the obsessive repetition of the figures of rape and mutilation are enactments of a nightmare underlying the megalomania of empire. Beyond their obviously sexual charge, the emphasis on massacres, mutilations and rapes also points to the symbolic economy of British India. By attacking, disrobing, dismembering and otherwise violating the immaculate persons of the rulers - long confident of their absolute mastery and assured of the complete subservience of Indians - and by subjecting them to public humiliation, setting fire to their houses, destroying their property and reducing them to fugitives, suppliant or corpses, the rebels are placed in a new relationship with their erstwhile rulers. If British advance in India from the late eighteenth century was predicated on the growing assumption of a language of agency and command that required the submission and expropriation of a subject population, then at such moments of rebel violence the colonial project, incarnate in a violated or dismembered femininity, surrenders to the ‘humiliation by an inferior race’.
In contrast to the prurient fantasies of captive white women, a staple in the popular versions, official forensic records argue otherwise. While the former would not be appeased without rape, intelligence and judicial reports appear to suggest that, for a variety of reasons , including fear of caste defliement, the sipahis may not have violated captive women, or that, at the least, there was insufficient evidence of rape. In historiography, the contrast between popular and official versions can be seen in the contrast between the high drama of Ball and the quiet denials of John Kaye. The Secretary of the Secret and Political Department at India Office following the rebellion, Kaye wrote in his Histoy of the Sepoy War in India that:
'beyond this whole killing and burying, which sickened the entire Christian world, and roused English manhood in India to a pitch of national hatred that took years to allay, the atrocity was not pushed. The refinements of cruelty - the unutterable shame - with which, in some chronicles of the day, this hideous massacre was attended, were but fictions of an excited imagination, too readily believed without inquiry and circulated without thought.'
So too, William Muir, chief of the intelligence department of the North Western Provinces at Agra in1857, confirmed that that the ‘cold and heartless bloodthirstiness of the rebels was ‘at the farthest remove from the lust ‘of desire’, a view corroborated by district narratives from other sites of siege and massacre.
But it was from the hysterical popular media that counter-insurgency gathered energy and momentum. Reverting again to his populist tone, Ball announced that the news and rumours from India produced a climate of opinion so that: ‘Throughout the British empire the shout of the people was for rescue and for vengeance: the blood of their slaughtered countrymen, of their martyred women and children, came welling up before their mental vision; and one desire for retribution seemed to pervade all hearts, and nerve all arms.’ Prayers, funds, men, material chivalry and jingoistic fervour in Britain and in India followed in response to the ‘national cry for ‘unmitigated vengeance’.
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