Memorial as aegis: Colonial sovereignty and the unmaking of the Kanpur Memorial Well Monument

Abstract

This article addresses competing visions of sovereignty that underwrite recent debates about monuments. It turns to a well-known monument built to commemorate the loss of British lives in the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–59: the Kanpur (Cawnpore) Memorial Well Monument. The memorial stood over a well in which the bodies of 200 British women and children killed by Indian sepoys lay buried. A large landscaped enclosure was built around the memorial and only European visitors were given access to the site. On August 15, 1947, the day of Indian independence from British rule, a crowd overran the site and defaced the monument. Much of the monument was subsequently dismantled and moved to a more secluded site within the Kanpur cantonment. The desire among the British stakeholders to leave no trace of its former identity focused attention on those aspects of meaning ascribed to the monument that could not be erased. Building on the Hobbesian idea of passion as a key element of sovereignty, this article argues that the monument may be viewed as an aegis — an apotropaion — that deflects gaze more than it enables attentive looking.