Indian Mutiny Research Articles

Representation of Native Crowd in Alice Perrin’s Short Stories

The paper locates Alice Perrin’s short stories within the historical and literary contexts of the British Raj period and examines the representation of native crowds in order to understand India as a site of Anglo-Indian anxieties even during the period of “high imperialism” of the British Raj. Investigating her stories through the lens of the pragmatic theories of Elias Canetti, Le Bon Gustave, William Reddy, and Ann Laura Stoler, the paper demonstrates that Perrin colludes with the British Raj by nurturing negative emotional experiences via the representation of native crowds. In other words, the paper argues that her stories had imperial functions to play in the Empire and metropolitan Britain: to arrest the interracial romance; to reiterate the imperial policy of noninterference with native beliefs; to undermine New Woman ideals; to keep the memory of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 alive; to hint at the diplomatic use of labour force; and to discourage the dissolution of class and rank hierarchy.

The Malacca dilemma of the Raj: the Indian Uprising of 1857, the Second Opium War, and the British proposal of a Kra passage

Abstract In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the idea of building a passage through the Isthmus of Kra in the Malay Peninsula was hotly debated amongst British officials, merchants, and investors. This study finds that the British East India Company's rule over the Straits of Malacca had been a dilemma for itself and British merchants in China. The Second Opium War and the Indian Revolt of 1857 exacerbated the dilemma and pushed some British policymakers and investors to seek an alternative route between India and China. The proposal of the Kra passage was the response and solution to the Malacca dilemma. In historicising the Kra passage proposal and putting it in the context of the British empire's simultaneous crises in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the case of the proposed Kra passage reveals the complex relations between different actors within the British empire and the challenges of integrating multiple imperial interests into a British world system

The role of the Church during the First War of Scottish Independence

The work examines the actions taken by the Scottish Church during the First War of Scottish Independence (1296– 1328), as well as the preliminary period starting from 1286. The main objectives are to determine the direct role of the Scottish clergy in diplomatic and political activities, to assess the impact on the national liberation movement, as well as to study the position of the Scottish Church in the Christian world at the end of the First War of Independence. Great attention is given to the propaganda activities of the bishops, as well as the relationship of the secular and spiritual authorities with the Roman Church before and after 1302. The transformation of the position and structure of the Scottish Church in relation to the Roman See and the entire Christian world, both legally and spiritually, is analyzed.

Demystifying the First War of Independence of 1857

This research paper ‘Demystifying the First War of Independence of 1857’ is tended to rattle the jinx of not to call it a first war of independence. After the completion of more than 167 years when the most comprehensive and commendable works have been done by the generations of researchers/ historians from different regions of the subcontinent, so, it seems most opportune time to demystify the jinx of First War of Independence’. This paper is attempted to examine and analyze the uprisings in the different regions of the subcontinent simultaneously which lasted more than two years and shook the shackles of the British Empire. Contextually, when most of the regions/castes/ creeds were participating against the white race -the British, hence, it will be most plausible to call it a first war of independence.

Nationalist Discourse in the Colonial World: The Indian Uprising of 1857 Vis-à-Vis the Ambivalent Middle-Class Intelligentsia of Bengal

The paper addresses and contributes to one of the core debates concerning the usage of terminologies such as ‘loyalists’ and ‘rebels’, often ascribed to actors involved in the anti-colonial movements across the world. By taking the case of the Indian rebellion of 1857, the paper argues that moments such as this, more often than not, have subtle and nuanced reflections, and the trajectories of responses transcend simplistic categorisations. In the mid-nineteenth century colonial Bengal ‘loyalism’ of the middle-class intelligentsia towards the foreign rule contained internal contradictions, which was far more nuanced than has been portrayed in the last one and half centuries. Based on the contemporary reports, memoirs, and writings, the paper argues that while the nature of opposition and resistance were reflected in a rhetoric that was different, they emanated from similar sets of discontents, and would play a pivotal role in shaping the later-day discourse of nationalism in South Asia.

The Sepoy Mutiny (1857): A Landmark Event in the Modern Indian History

The Sepoy Mutiny (1857): A Landmark Event in the Modern Indian History

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

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.

Negotiating the Carceral Space

Following the Sepoy Mutiny (1857), a penal settlement in the Andamans started operating to accommodate mutiny and other prisoners, and a convict society devised by class, caste and religion gradually evolved in the Andaman Islands. Starting in 1909, the government transported “political prisoners” whom they labelled as “anarchists” or “terrorists”, and the settlement witnessed a revolutionary history. Subject to incessant tortures, the political prisoners wrote constant mercy petitions to the government reflecting remorse for their past revolutionary activities. This essay reads the politics of juridical and mercy petitions of the political prisoners and their families, and suggests that an inverted political identity negating contemporary nationalism operated in the carceral and personal site. It also presents the narrative of the struggle for personal and political freedom that involved hunger strikes and political negotiations in the penal space.

Soldier Saints, Missionaries and the Mountains

Abstract This paper intends to contextualise the life of Christianity in British India through the developments in military theology in the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century that put forth the image of the ‘soldier saint’- a true Christian soldier, British in blood and in faith. This discourse intensified after the military turned civilian Indian rebellion of 1857 which was immediately coloured in Christian vs heathen terms, and following which, the spiritual needs of Christian soldiers came into focus with the East India Company. The deaths, rituals and continued traditions of burial of the Christian soldiers, officers, and civilians have been marked through some prominent cemeteries and war memorials in India. While studies of these sites of memory have focused on the graves, tombs, and memorials in parts of north, west and south India, the frontier region of northeast India has remained outside the focus of most studies. This paper has chosen the eastern Himalayan territories comprising Sikkim and Kalimpong that fall on or near the Silk route to bring attention to the history of territorial aggression and the resulting material memory of lesser-known cemeteries and memorials Further. This paper analyses lesser discussed fiction to bring into focus the region’s human geography. This paper recognises the need to study inter-religious relations through materiality and afterlives of Christianity in India that was shaped to a large extent by the soldiers-both British and native, and the chaplains, gravediggers, priests and nurses and caregivers whose lives are recorded in the memory of death. By doing so, this study hopes to bring new dimensions to the study of Christianity in India with the inclusion of the materiality of religion, the postcolonial gothic imaginary and military theology.

Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain by Katherine Judith Anderson

Anderson’s Twisted Words examines the many ways in which torture featured as a tool of public and private governance in mid- and late-Victorian Britain and the British Empire. Anderson draws from critical terrorism studies to argue that the use of torture was not an extreme and anomalous practice that contravened liberal ideals of citizenship but rather a “state-sanctioned, physical or mental means of compulsion that [was] inflicted to elicit a specific response” from victim and perpetrator alike (5). She interweaves literary analysis with investigations of British-government reports to build her case, focusing on the many bodily and sensory experiences of those who suffered torture and those who inflicted it. At its core, the book argues that the use and experience of torture in the Victorian world was ordinary and normative, not a barbarous anomaly.The book begins with a reading of Victorian martyrological novels. Anderson posits that this genre reflected a sensory liberalism, referring to works by well-known writers like George Eliot and Cardinal John Henry Newman. Chapter 2 addresses the use of torture by Indian tax collectors in the Madras Presidency, the ways in which the British government responded to these acts, and Indian subjects’ narratives of pain as revealed in the government’s report on the abuses. Chapter 3 expands on this theme, examining the well-known Morant Bay uprising in 1865 and the subsequent Governor Eyre controversy concerning the colonial government’s violent conduct in quelling the uprising. Anderson’s attention to the physical and mental strain that British troops underwent through inflicting violence, including the haunting suicides of Gordon Duberry Ramsay and Colonel Thomas Hobbs, demonstrates the “tension between emerging expectations for a gentler form of masculinity and traditional expectations for military stoicism” (98).Chapter 4 shifts attention from the public to the private realm to argue that the patriarchal structure of the British family, and the psychological and physical abuse of women that it sometimes facilitated, constituted a form of domestic torture. In this context, Anderson’s argument that women existed in a liminal space between citizen and subject is somewhat opaque. It would be interesting to assess her argument beyond a close reading of novels by George Meredith, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope. In the book’s final chapter, Anderson makes the case that late-Victorian colonial-settler fiction, especially romantic adventure novels, demonstrates how torture was sanctioned by the liberal imperial state.Anderson’s insightful and thorough use of Victorian periodicals and newspapers, along with other literary and printed historical sources, reveals how torture was imbricated in Britons’ daily lives. The book, attuned to the question of audience, explains how different media reached different readers, and it inspires further interest in how visual sources might have functioned. Anderson’s broad reach across time and space—from Britain to Jamaica, South Africa to India, and Oceania and the settler colonial world—aptly demonstrates the pan-imperial nature of torture, but it also obscures the different social, cultural, and political circumstances of each locale. The Victorian Empire was both a single entity and a multitude of separate and distinct societies. Anderson implicitly suggests as much when she notes the tension between the universal assumptions of liberal citizenship and the unequal and violent experiences of different people. How did the administering of, and suffering from, torture change, for instance, in India once Britain officially became an empire after 1858? The Raj was instituted, after all, as a means for London to assert direct control of the subcontinent in response to the Indian Rebellion. Atrocity stories of British Indians suffering torture at Cawnpore, which produced outrage in Britain, served as excuses for extreme reprisals by the British, such as execution by cannon.A key finding of the book is that a close look at torture in British history helps us to understand the ways in which imperial citizenship was literally embodied through sensory experiences. This approach complements studies about the legal, cultural, and economic aspects of citizenship to provide a well-rounded sense of how citizens and subjects experienced the Victorian Empire. Anderson’s impressive interdisciplinary analysis demonstrates how scholars can benefit from methods of literary analysis and the tools of neighboring disciplines to enrich our understanding of the past.

Of Rights and Riots: Indenture and (Mis)Rule in the Late Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean

Abstract This article builds on the work of Walter Rodney, Thomas Holt, Gad Heuman, Diana Paton, and others who have investigated the complexities of post-slavery societies in the Caribbean. It addresses the dynamics of resistance and the re-working of legal and cultural processes that took place in the half-century following emancipation. Whereas indenture plays a tertiary role in these previous analyses, it is the central concern of this article. Through a close examination of the 1872 killing of five indentured Indian workers on the Devonshire Castle plantation, I analyse how the institution of indenture restructured the interrelation of the colonial state, labour control and violence in British Guiana. I consider the killings not only in the context typically employed by Caribbean historians to examine race, labour and violence—that of slave rebellions and African-Caribbean revolts in the post-emancipation era—but also in relation to the 1857 Indian Rebellion and in the context of an Empire-wide narrative that justified violent state repression against colonised peoples. Although this is largely a microhistorical account, I hope to provide some useful avenues of analysis by which indenture (primarily approached until now through the lens of social history) can be more broadly engaged as an institution that catalysed a new relationship between the state and labour management, that fostered new (or, at least, revised) discourses of the role of violence in colonialism, and that generated new patterns of response and resistance among subalterns.

Commentary: Science and colonialism

Commentary: Science and colonialism

“Through the Pen to Begin with”: Anticolonial Resistance in Tanika Gupta’s Adaptation of Great Expectations

Abstract Tanika Gupta’s neo-Victorian, postcolonial rewriting of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011) examines how India and Britain’s colonial history continues to shape both countries until the present day. The play is set in and around Calcutta in the years following 1861. Gupta thus not only relocates Pip’s transformation from village boy to metropolitan businessman to nineteenth-century India but also to a particularly fragile moment in the history of the British Empire: a subcontinent grappling with the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, facing the early years of the British Raj. Gupta interrogates narrow understandings of “Victorian” as located within the British Isles, explicating the contrapuntal reading practice that Edward W. Said calls for when highlighting Victorian literature’s implicit endorsement of imperialist ideologies and politics. Examining the play’s engagement with imperial power structures, this article centres on those moments that hint at the destabilisation of, if not revolt against, British rule. Gupta juxtaposes canonised narratives of undisturbed imperial hegemony with a tale of incessant colonial resistance. In doing so, she challenges those historiographical as well as fictional (neo-)Victorian texts that silence the sustained efforts and influence of anticolonial movements and that frame the history of Empire in terms of continuity rather than rupture.

‘Ingratitude! Treachery! Revenge!’: Race, Empire, and Mutinous Femininities in Harriette Gordon Smythies’A Faithful Woman(1865)

Harriette Gordon Smythies’ overlooked sensation novel A Faithful Woman (1865) engages with two cultural formations instrumental in shaping the Victorians’ representations of race, and to a large degree, also their understanding of it: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and minstrelsy. As its various symbolic appropriations of mutinous women show, the novel is highly critical of the easy and essentialising recriminations of ‘vile’ Indianness and offers a keen appreciation of the parallels between the Empire’s racialising oppressions abroad and its gendered oppressions at home. At the same time, however, its representations of African American characters seek to enshrine Britain’s moral superiority vis-à-vis the United States’ slavery system. Particularly, A Faithful Woman’s examinations of racialised imaginations of Indian Britons and African Americans – contrasting, for instance, British sculpture and portraiture with (allegedly) American minstrelsy – speak to its attempt to dissociate the practices of Empire from its former colonies across the Atlantic. Its critical examination of imperial notions of race in post-Rebellion sensation fiction, this article argues, helps to reaffirm the very colonial practices that it seeks to undermine.

War Memorials and Culture Wars in Mid-Nineteenth Century Sunderland

This article looks at two forms of war memorial installed in Sunderland’s Mowbray Park after the Crimean War and the Indian Rebellion: captured Russian cannons and a statue of the most famous British commander in India, General Henry Havelock. Although unveiled only four years apart, in 1857 and 1861, the memorials had strikingly different gestations and receptions: the Crimean War ‘memorial’ caused significant contestation within the local political and civic arena, attracting only several thousand spectators to a disorganised unveiling ceremony; conversely, the statue to General Henry Havelock unified Sunderland’s body politic, its unveiling witnessed by up to 100,000 people. This article analyses the organisational processes of the memorials and the narratives they sought to convey—and in the case of the Crimean cannons, why they caused serious controversy—in order to determine why the outcomes were so different. It argues that the memorials were by-products of contemporaneous struggles occurring within civic society and their failure or success depended on uniting the disparate status groups, religious denominations and political wings of the middle-class elite.

From Silver-Store to “all over the world”: The Transimperial Entanglements of “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners"

This essay situates Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins's "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" (1857), which critics have traditionally read as a reaction to the so-called Indian Mutiny, in a wider imperial context by foregrounding its setting of the Mosquito Coast in 1744. Reading the silver trade, which connects the setting of 1744 to the publication date of 1857, and connecting Britain to South America and China, this essay argues that "The Perils" enacts transimperial entanglements, presenting the British Empire as imbued with an expanded temporality and terrestrial reach that extends beyond its formal political boundaries. In "The Perils," Dickens and Collins locate 1857 and India in a genealogy of empire rather than treating the Mutiny as a significant but topical moment. In doing so, they forge connections with a fictional past of British ascendency in the silver trade, overlaying the historical mahogany and opium trades, to project a British-dominated imperial future, while simultaneously displacing and erasing Indigenous peoples in the transformation of the landscape for British benefit.

DARUL ULUM DEOBAND: PRESERVING RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL INTEGRITY OF SOUTH ASIAN MUSLIMS THROUGH STRUCTURAL AND STRATEGIC INNOVATIONS

The end of Mughal Empire in the wake of War of Independence 1857 left the Muslim community of South Asia political orphans; desperately facing religious and cultural assaults, political as well as economic victimization and marginalization under British Raj. At this time of vulnerability of the Muslim society, it was the educational institutions established by Muslim ideologues which took up the task of strengthening, reforming and revitalizing the Muslim society to cope with the challenges pushing them down to the bottom, they also helped them regain the lost confidence and integrity. These institutions were not merely educational bodies but the movements endeavoring for Muslim renaissance in South Asia. Among them, one was Darul Ulum Deoband which, from its inception to date, played a historic role in confronting the politico-cultural challenges to the South Asian Muslims by adopting dynamic political strategies and accommodating modern structural innovative modifications in the institutions. This, indeed, helped it be a popular movement and achieve its objectives. The present paper goes into some of important historical developments such as: socio-political circumstances which led to the origination of madrasah Deoband, lofty vision and objectives envisaged by its founders, administration of educational-cum-institutional paraphernalia, nationalist stance and struggle for freedom carried out by the Deobandi veterans, strategies and policies it adopted to deal with political challenges faced by the Indian Muslims during British Raj and after partition of India. It explores and discusses the factors which helped this school of thought be popular and become one of the major sects of Islam. Moreover, it also brings in the much debated issue of its stance on jihad, militant struggle and terrorism. By bringing to light the historical developments, vision of its founders, objectives they determined to achieve and strategies they devised to tackle the challenges, the paper argues that the main concern of Darul Ulum Deoband’s activities was and has been to preserve the Muslim culture in South Asia and to restore the confidence of the Muslim community which they lost after the First War of Independence in 1857 and decline of Mughal Empire, and the modernist and innovative strategies it adopted to achieve its objectives, despite the criticism from within and outside, led to it emerging as one of the dominant sects of Islam.

August - 15: Periyar's Reading

India's Independence Day was an important event in the history of world literature. At a time when India's allies and axis countries were at loggerheads during World War II, the Indian territory was actively engaged in its work for independence. The Indian War of Independence, led by Gandhi, had many turning points. The Congress movement, Subhash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army, and the non-Brahmin movement in the South have been at work with various internal contradictions in the history of Indian independence. Periyar was outraged by Congress's various initiatives and its leader, Gandhi, who was regarded as the sole representative of the Indian landscape in the worldview. Periyar declared August 15, 1947, to be a black day, claiming that the nation had not truly been liberated. This article takes shape through the reading experiences of Periyar: August 15, a transcript created by Comrade S.V.R. in 1998 in order to find an explanation for Periyar’s activities. Moreover, it can also be understood as the study of a man who had his eye on the matter without any compromise.

The Treason Case of Erasmo Seguín: A Story of Texas’s First War of Independence

In justice to the name of Seguin, let me add that no Mexican ever did more for Texas and the Colonists, than did that true-hearted man. In the infancy of Texas, in the days of her weakness and his strength, he was the faithful friend of the American. (Would I could say the same of the Americans towards him.) A man of intelligence and position, having the confidence of his government, through him Austin obtained many favors for the colonists. In San Antonio whenever an American got into difficulty, Seguin was the first and the best friend he had, and those who lived here in early times, when the Mexican was strong, know well how valuable such a friend could prove.

The Tribals and the National Uprising of 1857 in Rajputana States

The scholars have paid scant attention to the role of the Bhil and the Mina tribes of southern Rajputana States of Mewar, Banswara and Partapgarh in the 1857 national war of independence. These tribals were dissatisfied with the settlement of British paramountcy in the Rajputana States in 1818 as it was responsible for depriving them of their right to collect rakhwali (protection tax) from the neighbouring States, restraining their movements by stationing the Mewar Bhil Corps and the Kota Contingent in tribal regions, creating a fissure in their society by recruiting a section of tribals as soldiers in these Political Corps and, above all, penalising them as criminals for witch swinging and witch murdering in contravention of their community resolution. Disgruntled with the series of these innovations the Bhil chiefs, such as those of Pahara Bhomat in Mewar Hill Tracts, Onkar Rawat of Mowree Khera and Dalla Rawat of Sodulpur in Banswara State, and the Minas of Uncha village (in Jahazpur district of Mewar State) on the border of Deoli cantonment, revolted to end the British rule under the spell of the 1857 rebellion of the native sepoys of the British regiments at Neemuch, Nasirabad and Mhow cantonments. These tribal uprisings spread, far and wide, in Banswara, Partapgarh and Mewar Hill Tracts in southern Rajputana on the spur of Rawat Kesri Singh of Salumbar, a powerful Sisodia Rajput jagirdar of Mewar State, the Vilayati mercenaries (Makranis and Arabs) and Maratha General Tantia Tope who campaigned with his rabble force throughout Rajputana States between June 1858 and April 1859 for seeking support of people to overthrow the British government and also for punishing those Rajput rulers who had sided with it and surrendered to it the rebel leaders. Of course, the British government suppressed the tribal rebellions with the support of the Rajput rulers of Mewar, Partapgarh and Dungarpur States, but the prolongation of the 1857 tribal rebellions in southern Rajputana even after the restoration of British power in the imperial city of Delhi (September 1857) and in Lucknow (March 1858) confirmed the contention of the eminent historian V. D. Savarkar that the 1857 rebellion was the Indian War of Independence. Thus, the tribals have left a legacy of their valour and patriotic fervour during the 1857 national war of independence in Princely Rajputana.