Indian Uprising Research Articles

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

Act XI of 1857: The life and afterlife of an emergency statute in colonial and post-colonial India

AbstractThis article seeks to assess the legal legacy of one of British India’s most significant emergency acts: Act XI of 1857, also known as the State Offences Act. Although introduced during the Indian Uprising of 1857, it will be argued that the extra-judicial provisions contained in this act exerted a strong influence on the legal character of post-1857 ‘special’ or exceptional colonial criminal legislation, an influence that continued to be reflected in the punitive emergency laws set in place in post-colonial India. The long-term historical significance of Act XI will be illustrated by examining some of the more notable pieces of punitive or repressive legislation enacted in colonial and post-colonial India, namely the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867, the 1915 Defence of India (Criminal Law Amendment) Act, the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919, the Defence of India Act, 1962, and, more recently, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act of 1985.

The Economic Causes of The 1857 Indian Uprising

Baharat ve İpek Yolları, tarih boyunca doğu-batı ticaretinin en önemli güzergâhları olmuştur. Avrupa ile Asya arasında cereyan eden bu ticaretin doğudaki ana merkezleri, Hindistan ve Çin’dir. O sebeple bu iki ülkeden Avrupa’ya taşınabilen zenginlikler, Kara Avrupası'ndaki ekonomik, kültürel ve siyasi dengeleri derinden etkilemiş hatta bazı hakimiyetlerin yolunu açmıştır. Hindistan, ilaç yapımında elzem olan baharat ve barutun ham maddesi küherçilenin temin edildiği coğrafya olması bakımından vazgeçilemez bir öneme sahipti. Bununla beraber Hindistan güzergâhlarının Türk kontrolünde olması, daha da önemlisi bulundukları konumdan dolayı her geçen gün güçlenen Türklerin Avrupa’da fetihlere girişmesi, Avrupalıların ciddi tedbirler almasını gerektiriyordu. Bu ve benzeri sebeplerden dolayı zaruri ihtiyaç haline gelen coğrafi keşifleri, devlet destekli ticari şirketlerin stratejik faaliyetleri izledi. 1601 yılından itibaren İngiltere adına Hindistan ticaretini yürüten İngiliz Doğu Hindistan Şirketi ise iki yüz elli yıl zarfında ülkenin ekonomisini ele geçirerek, Baburlu idaresini baskı altına aldı. Her yönden sömürülen Hindistan halkının dayanma gücü kalmayınca, İngilizlere karşı 1857 yılında büyük bir ayaklanma başladı.
 Bu çalışmada İngiltere’ye karşı gerçekleştirilen 1857 Hint Ayaklanmasının ekonomik sebepleri değerlendirilmektedir.

Remembering Hodson’s Horse: Commemoration and the Indian Uprising of 1857–58

Abstract This article presents analysis of the memorial to William Hodson in Lichfield Cathedral, designed by George Edmund Street between 1859 and 1862, focusing on the iconography of the monument and way that it was influenced by Muscular Christianity and ecclesiology. The attitude of Hodson and his brother George Hodson, who commissioned the monument, is examined through analysis of the publication that presented Hodson’s career to the Victorian public: Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India (1859). The memorial raises urgent questions about the future of Victorian cultural heritage as it demonstrably misrepresents a highly symbolic event within British imperial history. Hodson was represented as a hero by Victorian ecclesiologists but is now seen by many as an unscrupulous and ruthless imperialist. This paper will demonstrate that the extraordinary form of the tomb was determined by an alteration to the design: the inclusion of a sculptural panel representing the ‘Surrender of the King of Delhi’. This change was instigated by the committee of the Ecclesiological Society headed by A. J. Beresford Hope. The panel turns a relatively peripheral event into a symbolic tableau: the surrender of Indian Islam to British Christianity, a distortion typical of British culture in the aftermath of the Indian Uprising of 1857–1858. The historiography of Hodson’s career shows that the tomb has acted as a focus for those wishing to perpetuate a conservative interpretation of Hodson’s career.

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony

The Ajnala Massacre of 1857 and the Politics of Colonial Violence and Commemoration in Contemporary India

ABSTRACT In February 2014, an amateur archaeological team unearthed thousands of bones and other remains from an old well in the town of Ajnala, located in the Indian state of Punjab. These remains are believed to belong to 282 Indian sepoys who were summarily executed en masse on 1 August 1857 under the orders of Deputy Commissioner Frederic Cooper, during the height of the Indian Uprising of 1857. The discovery of the bodies has not only reignited fierce debates about the violent history of the British Empire in India, but also offers an interesting glimpse into some of the ways that Indian history and national identity are currently being remade and negotiated in relation to the colonial past. This article is about the contested historical narrations, memories, and ongoing efforts to commemorate the Ajnala Massacre. It reveals how the history and public memory of colonial violence remain poorly understood, and the ways that calls for the recognition of previously forgotten, absent, or erased memories can prompt difficult and highly politicized discussions about the meaning of history, identity, and politics.

Framing colonial war loot

Abstract This article investigates the provenance of four artefacts associated with the military commander Kunwar Singh (1777–1858), who fought a guerrilla campaign against the British during the Indian Uprising of 1857–8. By analysing how these objects were documented and inscribed, it can be shown that, through the invocation of what is characterized here as ‘martial discourse’, British officers framed the acquisition of the arms, armour and ceremonial possessions of an enemy commander in very specific ways. As an overlooked aspect of nineteenth-century British military culture, an examination of martial discourse helps to clarify how British officers presented acquisitions in colonial military contexts. Fundamental to the examples considered here – which include ‘taken in action’, ‘captured’ and ‘spolia opima’ – was an implicit and shared understanding within the British military establishment that artefacts deemed to signify victory and military prowess could be elevated above, and distinguished from those taken during acts of unsanctioned appropriation and looting.

Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia

Abstract In the wake of the Indian Uprising in 1857, British sanitary campaigner and statistician Florence Nightingale renewed her efforts to reform Britain's military forces at home and in India. With the Uprising following so soon after the Crimean War (1854-56), where poor sanitary conditions had also taken an enormous toll, in 1859 Nightingale pressed the British Parliament to establish a Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, which delivered its report in 1863. Western Australia was the only colony to present its case before the Commissioners as an ideal location for a foreign sanatorium, with glowing assessments offered by colonial elites and military physicians. In the meantime, Nightingale had also commenced an investigation into the health of Indigenous children across the British Empire. Nearly 150 schools responded to her survey from Ceylon, Natal, West Africa, Canada and Australia. The latter's returns came from just three schools in Western Australia: New Norcia, Annesfield in Albany and the Sisters of Mercy in Perth, which together yielded the highest death rate of the respondents. Although Nightingale herself saw these inquiries as separate, their juxtaposition invites closer analysis of the ways in which metropolitan elites envisioned particular racial futures for Anglo and indigenous populations of empire, and sought to steer them accordingly. The reports reflect prevailing expectations and anxieties about the social and biological reproduction of white society in the colonies, and the concomitant decline of Indigenous peoples. Read together, these two inquiries reveal the complex ways in which colonial matters of reproduction and dispossession, displacement and replacement, were mutually constituting concerns of empire. In this article I situate the efforts to attract white women and their wombs to the temperate colony of Western Australia from British India in the context of contemporary concerns about Anglo and Aboriginal mortality. In doing so, I reflect on the intersections of gender, race, medicine and environment in the imaginaries of empire in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Shadows of Empire: British Imperial and Sikh History on the Streets of Westminster, London

This paper presents field and desk research to give a Sikh perspective on the memorials of British imperialists and Sikhs of the Indian Army found in the City of Westminster, a borough located in Central London, United Kingdom. Given the concentration of sites of national importance and heritage, the streets of Westminster contain a wealth of memorials, artefacts and events which also are connected to Sikh political and military history, the region of Punjab and the Sikh people. The individuals commemorated on the streets of Westminster represent a palpable history of the Sikhs and the Kingdom of Lahore, the East India Company in the Anglo-Sikh Wars and the Indian uprising of 1857, and soldiers and officers serving in the Indian Army in the two World Wars and conflicts in the first half of the 20th century.

Picturing the Villain: Image-Making and the Indian Uprising

At the height of the Indian uprising in 1857, two rival London newspapers published portraits on the same day of the man who had become known in Britain as the primary villain of the conflicts: Nana Sahib. These were clearly portraits of two different men. This essay explores why Victorian image-making processes meant that such portraits were presumed accurate, and it traces multiple leads in identifying the men pictured within them. Considering “the villain” as a category steeped in conventions of melodrama, the essay argues that the portraits’ conflict with one another did not matter to the British public because such images worked to create certainty amid chaotic reportage of uprising events.

Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit by Sämi Ludwig

Reviewed by: Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit by Sämi Ludwig Joshua David Bellin (bio) Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit sämi ludwig University of Wisconsin Press, 2020 viii + 270 pp. In Resurrecting the First Great American Play, Sämi Ludwig sets out to demonstrate that Robert Rogers's 1766 frontier melodrama Ponteach: or, The Savages of America, generally treated by scholars as a middling work of only antiquarian value in the history of the early American drama, is not only of significant "ideological interest" but also the equal of "the best stage entertainment in English at that time" (4). To substantiate these claims, Ludwig offers to "analyze the cultural work" of Ponteach "in a historical context, mainly by means of honestly positioning myself with my limitations as an author of the twenty-first century while at the same time trying to understand the complex and distant reality of the eighteenth century" (5–6). Ludwig's passion for Rogers's work is palpable, and his humility laudable. At the same time, certain scholarly oversights and problematic assumptions weaken his case for the play's historical (and particularly intercultural) significance. The book is divided into two sections. The first outlines the life stories of Pontiac and Rogers, as well as the historical backdrop of the play; the second examines the literary qualities and significance of Rogers's work. The biographical material of the first section is generally engaging, though the first two chapters are needlessly padded with catalogs of every nonfictional and fictional representation of the two men's lives the author could find—from historical accounts to novelizations to children's books to films to toy soldiers (23–29, 57–63). Though interesting enough from a bibliophile's point of view, it's not clear how this information is helpful or germane to those seeking a new understanding of Rogers's play. More problematically from a theoretical standpoint, Ludwig tends to trust without question his historical sources' depictions of Native American peoples, as when he writes that Howard Peckham's Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (1947) is "a gold mine of cultural and historical information on the great chief's upbringing" (19). Given how little we know about Pontiac's life—not to mention Peckham's proclivity for referring to Pontiac and his people as "savages"—I find myself questioning the value of the gold [End Page 277] in this particular mine, whether for historical or literary analysis. This is a problem with many books about Indigenous persons and people: relying almost entirely on Euro-American sources, they are all too quick to make sweeping pronouncements about what Indians said, did, believed, desired, and were. Given Ludwig's claims about the intercultural significance of Rogers's play, one might have expected him to make a sustained effort to avoid or, at least, to theorize this problem. Invoking Bakhtinian dialogism in his introduction (10), Ludwig contends that the "disharmonies in [Rogers's] play" (10) derive not from the playwright's inexperience but from "the situation of the very territory that our story describes. The Northwest was a contested area of extreme social and cultural hybridity, where traditions were constantly being negotiated and reinvented" (65). As his authority for this claim, Ludwig puts forward Richard White's influential The Middle Ground (1991), which he relies on extensively in his third chapter. But while White's thesis offers an enduring framework for understanding eighteenth-century Indian-European relationships, Ludwig's use of this framework is at once inadequately grounded in existing scholarship and, likely as a consequence, inconsistent in its conceptualization of the "middle ground." In order to situate Ponteach in a space of "cultural hybridity," Ludwig argues that the play constitutes a reliable archive of "ethnographic information" (120) about eighteenth-century Indigenous lifeways as they came into conflict with their European counterparts. Yet this argument is based on the scantiest of evidence, consisting entirely of a few references in Rogers's play to such things as Indian gift-giving (120), oratory (121), scalping (122), and ransoming of hostages (123). One is left to wonder...

The ‘Public’ Indian Museum, Calcutta, 1858–1878

The first museum to be set up in India in 1814 by the British Orientalists underwent a significant change when the Government of India took it over in 1858. The change was shaped by the experience of the great Indian uprising of 1857 to which, most importantly, the ordinary people (artisans, peasants, the unemployed etc.) rallied. Though the Raj succeeded eventually in suppressing the Revolt, its officials were deeply disturbed by the popular uprising and its effects. Policies were designed thereafter with these anxieties in mind—notably the one for running the museum in Calcutta. The authorities designed the museum as a ‘public’ space rather than as an ‘imperial’ edifice, and they hoped to get over their prolonged alienation from the masses by opening its doors to the ordinary people. This article examines the background and intent of the establishment of the Museum in Calcutta and its administration in the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the conception of the ‘public’ that underpinned it. It also outlines how the public in question responded to the museum.

The Frightful Hobgoblin against Empire

Abstract Karl Marx and the Chartist leader, writer and poet Ernest Jones developed a close intellectual and political partnership from the late 1840s through the late 1850s. Their friendship invites attention because it places Marx in the company of one of Chartism’s leading anti-colonial advocates, precisely at a time when he was simultaneously moving in that direction. This article explores the ways in which Marx and Jones converged in their estimation of the 1857 Indian uprising. It is argued that the shift in Marx’s thought, whereby the dialectics of colonialism and anti-colonialism are integrated within his materialist conception of history, was not independent of Jones’s influence.

Epideictic Rhetoric and British Citizenship Practices: Remembering British Heroes from the 1857 Indian Uprising at Civic Celebrations

Epideixis is generally understood as ceremonial rhetoric that praises or blames. When examined through the lens of civic celebrations such as the Coronation Durbars in fin de siècle colonial India or the protection of Confederate monuments, epideictic rhetoric instructs the audience to uphold what are purported to be the community’s common values. This educational epideixis, however, also exposes veiled anxieties not commonly associated with a seemingly ceremonial speech act. This new understanding of epideictic should encourage rhetoricians to further question rhetors’ use of epideixis and interrogate other aims in those speech acts.

Wheels Coming Off the Empire: Transport, Flight and Gender in Victorian Accounts of the 1857-58 Indian Uprising

Cet article porte sur les représentations du conflit et de la fuite dans les récits de voyageuses victoriennes, pendant la Rébellion indienne de 1857-58. L’ébranlement soudain d’un ordre impérial apparemment stable met à nu la réalité des modes de transport dans l’Inde britannique. Des officiers de l’armée britannique contemplent, impuissants, des roues brisées, des chevaux récalcitrants et des domestiques enfuis, tandis que les femmes doivent négocier les routes de l’Inde, dont la réalité physique est altérée par les mouvements révolutionnaires. En analysant la représentation des transports coloniaux au travers du mélange de genres comme le récit de voyage, le récit de réfugiés et le récit de conflits, je montre que tous ces échecs et solutions de fortune, conséquences de la crise de l’Empire, deviennent, pour les voyageuses britanniques, le moyen de conceptualiser un échec plus profond : la fin de l’illusion du contrôle de l’espace, du temps, et du savoir.

Jill C. Bender. The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire.

Jill C. Bender. The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire.

Inventing an Indian Slave Conspiracy on Nantucket, 1738

In 1738 British colonists on Nantucket accused their Wampanoag neighbors of plotting to rise in violent rebellion. The colonists quickly discovered the rumor was false, but their retraction did not stop newspaper printers in Boston from creating a sensational story of Indian conspiracy that quickly spread throughout the British Empire, circling the Atlantic from New England to London. In the earliest version of the report, the Boston printer Thomas Draper relied on conventions from his previous stories of slave conspiracy to invent a sensational account of an imminent Indian uprising. Most printers copied his first account of the conspiracy. Examining the Nantucket Indian conspiracy of 1738 illuminates the process by which early American printers altered and even manufactured stories of conspiracy on the basis of conventions established over years of reporting slave unrest. Historians have long relied on newspaper accounts for evidence of subaltern rebellion in the Atlantic world. This case study challenges scholars to reevaluate the process by which printers created news of conspiracy during a formative period in the history of the early American press.

VERNACULAR OBJECTS | INDIAN MUTINY | IMPERIAL PANIC

This paper is a studyof subject-object relations in British writings about the Indian Uprising of 1857. I focus in particular on accounts vocalizing panic over a colony of objects “baldly encountered” and “not quite apprehended” in the context of remembering and remediating traumatic memories of the Uprising (Brown 5). What follows is an exercise in object-oriented investigation, reading depictions of subject-object and object-subject encounters, analyzingmatters-of-concernemerging from the events of 1857 (Latour, “Realpolitik” 14; also,Reassembling70n80, 114–20).

Necroecology: Undead, Dead, and Dying on the Limits of the Colony

This paper introduces and explicates the neologism “necroecology” as a critical, philosophical approach for studying human-nonhuman relations in the context of British colonialism and its aftermath. Necroecology also names an aesthetic that originated in the mid-nineteenth century as a direct consequence of the 1857 Indian Uprising. This paper develops its hypotheses through readings of Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

Book Review: Crispin Bates (ed.), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857 (Volume 5: Muslim, Dalit and Subaltern Narratives)

Book Review: Crispin Bates (ed.), <i>Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857 (Volume 5: Muslim, Dalit and Subaltern Narratives)</i>