‘Those Noble Exemplars of the True Military Tradition’; Constructions of the Indian Army in the Mid-Victorian Press

Abstract

This paper is directed first at identifying where and by whom military influences or topics manifested themselves in the periodical pressʼns coverage of India in the period up to the Indian Rebellion. How such manifestations changed over time, as well as the convergence of Anglo-Indian and British newspapers and magazines on Indian topics, will form an important component of this study. Stemming from these initial enquiries, I will further suggest that the model often employed to comprehend such representations —namely ‘orientalism’ —is, as it is often configured, too simplistic and reductionist to account for all the forces at work in the production of images of India. Instead, the mid-Victorian image of India was produced by a very fractured discourse. Racial stereotypes and affirmations of British superiority were certainly to the forefront, but these were frequently inflected by quite separate agendaʼns, such as the military's pursuit of political and professional status and influence, publishers’ search for profits, and the quest for suitable middle-class role models. Moreover, it was a discourse constrained by the dominant contemporary literary conventions and tropes, notably the historical romance in fiction and didacticism in history and biography. Yet there is one strand that runs through these various agendas and literary strategies and that is the one provided by the Indian army. India was by the third decade of the nineteenth-century as much a military as it was a commercial site. In 1850, the then reigning governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, was reminded by John Lawrence of this fact when the latter insisted that ‘public opinion is essentially military in India. Military views, feelings and interests are therefore paramount’.