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https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Vanishing_Women/MshzI9iQ79sC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA33&printsec=frontcover
'Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism' by Karen Redrobe Beckman, pp.33-4
In the wake of these horrific murders on the site of European men’s transgressive sexual intercourse with Indian women, the London Times became obsessed with voyeuristic fantasies of Indian men raping Englishwomen. In what appears to be a clear case of English-men projecting onto Indian men their own desires for the foreign body of the “other” woman, a series of “eyewitness” accounts of rape incidents appeared in the paper, in spite of the fact that there was, according to Hyam at least, no physical evidence to support these testimonies. These articles tease the reader, refusing to repeat the horror out of a sense of propriety even as they report the most graphic de- tails: “There are some acts of atrocity so abominable that they will not even bear narration. . . . We cannot print these narratives—they are too foul for publication. We should have to speak of families murdered in cold blood—and murder was mercy!—of the violation of English ladies in the presence of their husbands, of their parents, of their children—and then, but not till then, of their assasination.” The same article even places Englishwomen at the very root of the revolt, suggesting that “to the great mass we doubt not that the plunder of English treasure, the violation of Englishwomen, the massacre of Englishmen, were the chief and immediate incentives to the bloody game.”
In subsequent months, the descriptions of violence became increasingly graphic and sexualized. Although each account is marked by the author's awareness of crossing a line of discursive propriety, the events at Cawnpore somehow lifted a taboo on a certain type of public speech. One supposed eyewitness account from another clergyman in Bangalore appeared in the Times on August 25.
"No words can express the feeling of horror which pervades society in India, we hear so many private accounts of the tragedy, which are too sickening to repeat. ... They took 48 females, most of them girls of from 10-14, many delicately nurtured ladies - violated them, and kept them for the base purposes of the heads of the insurrection for a whole week. At the end of that time they made them strip themselves, and gave them up to the lowest of the people, to abuse in broad daylight in the streets of Delhi. They then commenced the work of torturing them to death, cutting off their breasts, fingers, and noses, and leaving them to die. One lady was three days dying. They flayed the face of another lady, and made her walk naked through the street. Poor Mrs. -----, the wife of an officer ... was soon expecting her confinement. They violated her, then ripped her up, and, taking from her the unborn child, cast it and her into the flames."
Karl Marx, responding to this report in the New York Daily Tribune, noted that the letter was obviously written by “a cowardly parson residing at Bangalore, Mysore, more than a thousand miles, as the bird flies, distant from the scene of the action.”
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Marx's response in full (funny, I knew I'd be able to find it in full, unlike the original Times articles which were nowhere to be found - good old Marxists...). Quite a sophisticated media analyst for his time, don't you think?
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https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/09/16.htm
Karl Marx in the New-York Tribune 1857
The Indian Revolt
Source: New-York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1857;
Transcribed: by Tony Brown.
London, Sept. 4, 1857
The outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable — such as one is prepared to meet – only in wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of religion; in one word, such as respectable England used to applaud when perpetrated by the Vendeans on the “Blues,” by the Spanish guerrillas on the infidel Frenchmen, by Servians on their German and Hungarian neighbors, by Croats on Viennese rebels, by Cavaignac’s Garde Mobile or Bonaparte’s Decembrists on the sons and daughters of proletarian France.
However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.
The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the Ryots, tortured, dishonored and stripped naked by the British, but with the Sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them. To find parallels to the Sepoy atrocities, we need not, as some London papers pretend, fall back on the middle ages, not, even wander beyond the history of contemporary England. All we want is to study the first Chinese war, an event, so to say, of yesterday. The English soldiery then committed abominations for the mere fun of it; their passions being neither sanctified by religious fanaticism nor exacerbated by hatred against an overbearing and conquering race, nor provoked by the stern resistance of a heroic enemy. The violations of women, the spittings of children, the roastings of whole villages, were then mere wanton sports, not recorded by Mandarins, but by British officers themselves.
Even at the present catastrophe it would be an unmitigated mistake to suppose that all the cruelty is on the side of the Sepoys, and all the milk of human kindness flows on the side of the English. The letters of the British officers are redolent of malignity. An officer writing from Peshawur gives a description of the disarming of the 10th irregular cavalry for not charging the 55th native infantry when ordered to do so. He exults in the fact that they were not only disarmed, but stripped of their coats and boots, and after having received 12d. per man, were marched down to the river side, and there embarked in boats and sent down the Indus, where the writer is delighted to expect every mother’s son will have a chance of being drowned in the rapids. Another writer informs us that, some inhabitants of Peshawur having caused a night alarm by exploding little mines of gunpowder in honor of a wedding (a national custom), the persons concerned were tied up next morning, and
“received such a flogging as they will not easily forget.”
News arrived from Pindee that three native chiefs were plotting. Sir John Lawrence replied by a message ordering a spy to attend to the meeting. On the spy’s report, Sir John sent a second message, “Hang them.” The chiefs were hanged. An officer in
the civil service, from Allahabad, writes:
“We have power of life and death in our hands, and we assure you we spare not.”
Another, from the same place:
“Not a day passes but we string up front ten to fifteen of them (non-combatants).”
One exulting officer writes:
“Holmes is hanging them by the score, like a ‘brick.’”
Another, in allusion to the summary hanging of a large body of the natives:
“Then our fun commenced.”
A third:
“We hold court-martials on horseback, and every nigger we meet with we either string up or shoot.”
From Benares we are informed that thirty Zemindars were hanged on the mere suspicion of sympathizing with their own countrymen, and whole villages were burned down on the same plea. An officer from Benares, whose letter is printed in The London Times, says:
“The European troops have become fiends when opposed to natives.”
And then it should not be forgotten that, while the cruelties of the English are related as acts of martial vigor, told simply, rapidly, without dwelling on disgusting details, the outrages of the natives, shocking as they are, are still deliberately exaggerated. For instance, the circumstantial account first appearing in The Times, and then going the round of the London press, of the atrocities perpetrated at Delhi and Meerut, from whom did it proceed? From a cowardly parson residing at Bangalore, Mysore, more than a thousand miles, as the bird flies, distant from the scene of action. Actual accounts of Delhi evince the imagination of an English parson to be capable of breeding greater horrors than even the wild fancy of a Hindoo mutineer. The cutting of noses, breasts, &c., in one word, the horrid mutilations committed by the Sepoys, are of course more revolting to European feeling than the throwing of red-hot shell on Canton dwellings by a Secretary of the Manchester Peace Society, or the roasting of Arabs pent up in a cave by a French Marshal, or the flaying alive of British soldiers by the cat-o’-nine-tails under drum-head court-martial, or any other of the philanthropical appliances used in British penitentiary colonies. Cruelty, like every other thing, has its fashion, changing according to time and place. Caesar, the accomplished scholar, candidly narrates how he ordered many thousand Gallic warriors to have their right hands cut off. Napoleon would have been ashamed to do this. He preferred dispatching his own French regiments, suspected of republicanism, to St. Domingo, there to die of the blacks and the plague.
The infamous mutilations committed by the Sepoys remind one of the practices of the Christian Byzantine Empire, or the prescriptions of Emperor Charles V.’s criminal law, or the English punishments for high treason, as still recorded by Judge Blackstone. With Hindoos, whom their religion has made virtuosi in the art of self-torturing, these tortures inflicted on the enemies of their race and creed appear quite natural, and must appear still more so to the English, who, only some years since, still used to draw revenues from the Juggernaut festivals, protecting and assisting the bloody rites of a religion of cruelty.
The frantic roars of the “bloody old Times,” as Cobbett used to call it – its, playing the part of a furious character in one of Mozart’s operas, who indulges in most melodious strains in the idea of first hanging his enemy, then roasting him, then quartering him, then spitting him, and then flaying him alive — its tearing the passion of revenge to tatters and to rags – all this would appear but silly if under the pathos of tragedy there were not distinctly perceptible the tricks of comedy. The London Times overdoes its part, not only from panic. It supplies comedy with a subject even missed by Moličre, the Tartuffe of Revenge. What it simply wants is to write up the funds and to screen the Government. As Delhi has not, like the walls of Jericho, fallen before mere puffs of wind, John Bull is to be steeped in cries for revenge up to his very ears, to make him forget that his Government is responsible for the mischief hatched and the colossal dimensions it has been allowed to assume.
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