More parallels between Gaza and the 1857 Indian Uprising
Posted by Ian M on January 7, 2024, 8:00 pm
...from 'The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination' by Gautam Chakravarty. From it all being quiet before the surprise attack, to the racialised depiction of the colonised people, the depoliticisation, the active refusal to investigate historical context, the laser focus on the alleged crimes of the oppressed (exaggerated or invented), the harping on about innocent victims, and finally the avoidance of any discussion of the brutal reprisals which far exceeded the 'barbarism' of the act of resistance... we've been here before.
[...] 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’. Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Re: More parallels between Gaza and the 1857 Indian Uprising
and more pearl clutching from the London Times, with a clergyman laundering the most graphic accusations (does he remind you of a certain 'national treasure'?)
'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.”
*****
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?
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 Molière, 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.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/