The Skull of Alum Bheg

by Kim A. Wagner

  “The wrath which hurled to Pluto’s gloomy reign

  The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;

  Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,

  Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore!”’32

  Elsewhere, at the village of Doondea-Kheyra, which was about to be demolished, a British officer inspected a temple where some of the survivors from Cawnpore had taken refuge months earlier. The temple was ‘pitted with bullet-marks and blackened by fire; and, sad reminiscence of the tragedy enacted, a human skull, lying, with a terrible significance, among the dust and rubbish of the deserted buildings.’33 A uniquely Victorian aesthetic, almost gothic in nature, seems to have influenced the way that the British interacted with human remains on the battlefields of India, and it is interesting to note how skulls elicited far more emotional responses than did the corpses of dead rebels encountered with such frightful frequency.

  Costello was furthermore not the only soldier serving in the ‘Mutiny’ who brought a skull back home. Reporting on the return of the soldiers of the 42nd Highlanders from service in India, one newspaper noted in passing that ‘one of them has brought, as a trophy of the Indian war, the skull of a Sepoy, which had been perforated by bullets.’34 This skull was, apparently, simply that of ‘a Sepoy’ but derived its value from the bullet-holes which testified to the intensity of combat as well as, of course, British victory. It was at times a rather banal wish to acquire a souvenir that led British soldiers to collect body-parts from dead Indians, as one ‘Mutiny’-veteran recounted half a century later:

  ‘Our officers had told us not to go near an out-lying part because dead bodies were putrefying there. But one of our fellows sneaked out without telling anybody and brought back a black man’s skull to make a box for his pipeclay. He thought p’raps it would be a sort of souvenir. Well, it was. It brought the cholera, and between Saturday and Monday we left 300 of our poor chaps behind. It was terrible.’35

  While it remains unclear whether it was indeed the rotting head that was the source of cholera, the story gives some indication of just how disgusting the taking of a head could be. As opposed to skulls picked up from a battlefield months and years after their owner died, the collection of a ‘fresh’ head entailed careful defleshing. Later accounts of trophy-skulls describe the stench they exuded, and some turned green and grew mould when not preserved properly.36 Surrounded by death and decay, British troops during the uprising grew accustomed to such sights and smells, as Henry Dunlop of the Volunteer Cavalry described:

  ‘Numerous dead bodies of Sepoys lay along the road by the Serai. Exposure to the sun had distended and bloated every limb; the corpse looked as though blown full of air. We had read and heard of the murderers of our women and children, so looked on with grim satisfaction on the distorted features of the dead around, limiting our pity to the case of an unfortunate pariah dog, which some stray shot had killed amidst the Sepoys, and whose body was also bloated out and distended, almost a ludicrous caricature of the human mortality around.’37

  If British soldiers were not actively encouraged to mutilate the bodies of Indian rebels, they were certainly not given any reason to view them with anything but indifference or disdain. Anyone who was in India during those years could thus with ease have acquired the skull of a sepoy should he have wished to do so. The circumstances surrounding Captain Costello’s involvement in the ‘Mutiny’ were, however, somewhat unusual.

  * * *

  Captain Costello and the 7th Dragoon Guards were only despatched to India towards the end of 1857 and arrived too late to participate in any of the actual fighting. The ‘Mutiny’ was accordingly not included in the regiment’s battle-honours and none of the troopers received the Mutiny Medal. Costello himself went back to Ireland where he resigned his commission altogether; he never involved himself again with either the military or with India. Costello had, in other words, participated in one of the most celebrated colonial wars of the nineteenth century with nothing to show for it. To grasp the full significance of this, it is important to remember that scores of Victorian heroes were forged in the crucible of the ‘Mutiny’—including more than thirty recipients of the Victoria Cross from other cavalry units who saw action during the uprising. The most exciting part of Costello’s brief sojourn in India, by contrast, was probably the execution of Alum Bheg and the compulsion to acquire a war-trophy may thus have been much greater. It is also worth noting that Costello’s regiment had served in South Africa during the Seventh Xhosa War 1846–7, just a few years before he joined. There may thus very well have been stories and tales involving the taking of trophy-skulls circulating amongst the veterans of the regiment. To bring back the skull of a murderous mutineer, and one who had moreover been executed by cannon, might thus have gone some way towards soothing Costello’s sense of ‘losing out’ by making up for some of the glory of which he and his comrades had been cheated.

  There is nothing to suggest that Costello had a phrenological interest or that Alum Bheg’s skull was ever intended for scientific examination. Nevertheless, Costello would undoubtedly have been aware of scientific practices of collecting skulls at the time—practices which opened up a space for such actions as socially permissible and morally sanctioned. There was moreover an element of opportunism to Costello’s action, since he did not single-handedly defeat Alum Bheg and behead him as proof of his status and masculinity. Costello simply happened to be present at an execution, which ‘produced’ a head that could be collected and preserved. Taking possession of Alum Bheg’s head nonetheless constituted a very deliberate assertion of dominance on the part of Costello.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, when Costello acquired Alum Bheg’s head, a skull could mean a range of different things. A skull could be akin to a hunting-trophy, testifying to the martial prowess of the ‘barbarian gentleman’, but it could also be a memento of the ‘Mutiny’ or a souvenir from an execution witnessed.38 In Costello’s case it was probably a combination of all three, although it appears that he did not want just any old skull and that the story of the murder of Dr Graham and the Hunters was part of the intrinsic value attached to Alum Bheg’s head. The description of Alum Bheg that Costello provided on the small note—as a ‘principal leader in the mutiny’ who intercepted fleeing Europeans and personally killed them—was really much closer to Hurmat Khan’s role during the outbreak at Sialkot. But Hurmat Khan had gotten away, and the fugitives from the 46th who were brought back to Sialkot for punishment were indiscriminately executed for the murder of Dr Graham and the Hunters as well as all the other victims. We know that the officers of the 7th Dragoon Guards dined with Reverend Boyle while at Sialkot, and moreover messed with the officers of the 52nd, and it is likely that Costello’s knowledge of the outbreak at Sialkot was based on such encounters.39 Skulls were, as we have seen, easily available in India in 1858, but their meaning and value as trophies was derived entirely from the stories attached to them. The greater the infamy of the living person, the greater the worth of his skull. Costello thus turned the insignificant Alum Bheg into a ‘principal leader’, transforming his skull into a far more interesting trophy. And while the story Costello attached to the trophy testified to the violence and treachery of Indian rebels, the skull itself became the proof of British victory.

  A photograph taken in 1857 of Captain Thomas B. Ray of the Volunteer Cavalry provides another hint of what a trophy-skull might have meant to a British officer who served in the ‘Mutiny’. The portrait shows Ray in his uniform and with the revolver he carried in India and carefully arranged like a colonial still-life on the table next to him is a human skull and a pith-helmet. In this portrait, the dapper and moustachioed Ray accordingly presents himself as a colonial gentleman officer with the tools of his trade, and the skull is as much a prop in his self-fashioning as is the tulwar, or Indian sword, resting by his side. Like a hunter posing with a tiger-skin or the mounted head of a deer, the trophy-skull in the photograph is proudly displayed as a reflec
tion of Ray’s martial status without any indication of shame or embarrassment. Because Ray served in the Volunteer Cavalry like Dunlop, it is likely that the skull was actually that of Shah Mall, which, having served its purpose as a tool of intimidation, was apparently kept as a personal trophy. There are several later examples of colonial officers who kept human trophy-skulls proudly exhibited on their desk or mantelpiece; in some instances, this was combined with a sense of respect, and even affection, for the defeated enemy. By displaying the skull of a ‘savage’ within the confines of one’s home, the threat once posed by this individual was effectively neutralised and the savagery domesticated.

  The pride that Costello might have derived from possessing Alum Bheg’s skull could not, however, be taken for granted. Human remains are symbolically tricky objects, and can invoke horror and disgust just as easily as they inspire respect for the ‘barbarian gentleman’.40 The fact is that, over time, the skull itself became a troublesome trophy: it embodied the violence of Empire, both Indian and British, making it a les-than-appropriate morbid memento during the aftermath of the ‘Mutiny’, when calls for retribution and bloody vengeance were gradually replaced by a more restrained Victorian form of commemoration. The many stories and reports of the rape of European women by Indian rebels, which had so occupied the British press during the uprising, were thus officially denied by the Government in an explicit attempt to control public sentiments and facilitate a new era of peaceful coexistence between rulers and ruled.41 Narratives of atrocities carried out by mutineers, as detailed in the note accompanying Alum Bheg’s skull, had initially served to rally the British forces during the suppression of the uprising, but once the dust had settled, and peace supposedly restored, they proved merely to be painful and disruptive.42

  Attitudes to the Empire, and to colonial violence more generally, also underwent significant changes within Britain during these years. The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, for instance, was brutally suppressed by the British authorities and hundreds of former slaves were either executed or flogged.43 The incident caused an outcry and the Governor, E.J. Eyre, was eventually recalled and dismissed, though the debate concerning the morality and legality of the violence raged for decades.44 A few years later, in 1872, a small group of Sikhs, belonging to the Kuka sect, attacked several villages belonging to Muslims in Punjab, and a local British official panicked and promptly executed sixty-eight of them by blowing them from cannon.45 The response was much as it had been over the Eyre affair, not least because such blatantly excessive violence belied the ideals of the civilising mission and made imperialism so hard to defend.

  Like the brutality of the British repression of the ‘Mutiny’, the taking of Alum Bheg’s skull would accordingly have been difficult to justify once the moral hangover of colonial violence kicked in during the decades following 1857. Possessing a trophy-skull might have been personally rewarding for Costello, yet the violence that the skull symbolised was morally incompatible with the rhetoric of liberal imperialism which shaped British imperialist project during the second half of the nineteenth century. The skull of Alum Bheg was, in a sense, a permanent relic of a passing madness and would have seemed increasingly out of place in an era where people perceived themselves as rational and enlightened. Phrenology, too, had fallen out of favour and the ‘Thug’ skulls in Edinburgh were later re-classified as racially significant specimens and subjected to another type of examination within the field of craniology. This also goes some way towards explaining why, having gone through all the trouble of preserving the skull and taking it back home, Costello appears to have gotten rid of it so quickly.

  * * *

  It is not that the obsession with skulls went away, or that the collecting practices of human remains within the European empires ceased in the second half of the nineteenth century—quite the opposite, in fact. In Africa, the colonial practice of collecting skulls was so prevalent and conspicuous that it was noticed and commented on among the local population. A Muslim who had accompanied Richard Burton on the expedition in 1859, referred to above, later told the famous journalist and explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, that Burton was ‘one of the wickedest white men born, because he saw him pick up men’s skulls and put them in sacks, as if he was about to prepare a horrible medicine with them.’46 Two decades later, in Southern Africa, Zulu warriors fighting the British asked a Dutch trader ‘Why did the Whites cut off the heads of those who had fallen, and put them in their wagons? What did they do with these heads? Or was it to let the Queen see how they had fought?’47 The very people whom the British considered as savage and un-civilised, it turns out, were troubled by the white man’s propensity for head-hunting. During the Zulu War 1879–80, in particular, skulls were being collected on a large scale and when the first batches were received at the Royal College of Surgeons it was even reported in the press:

  ‘The skulls possess all the characteristics which are typical of the negro races. It is to be hoped that additions will be made to those Zulu skulls now received, and that also some of the officials connected with the British army in Afghanistan will follow the good example, and send home some skulls and skeletons of the inhabitants of that country.’48

  The Zulu War and the Second Afghan War were taking place at the same time, and the intimate relationship between military campaigns and the scientific collection of body parts within the Empire was accordingly quite explicit.

  Apart from ending up in various collections, Zulu skulls were furthermore also being sold quite openly in the imperial metropole during the immediate aftermath of the war. These commercial skulls, however, were sold, not as scientific specimens, but as household objects intended for the gentlemen’s smoking room.49 Never known for its squeamishness, the satirical Punch magazine took issue with the crass commodification of human remains in a piece entitled ‘Skulls for Cigar-Holders’:

  ‘There have lately been displayed in Piccadilly, in the shop-window of Mr. Ward, the famous Taxidermist and Naturalist, numerous specimens of human skulls, neatly mounted and fitted up as cigar-cases and tobacco-holders. In the former character, the cranium is pierced with holes, through which the cigars stand out, “like quills upon the fretful porcupine.” We know nothing of the locus a quo of these ghastly relics of mortality. Probably they may be Zulu crania—war-trophies brought back by some of our young bloods, fresh from South-African warfare, and with some taint of its practices. We know that savage warriors—Maori, Dyak, and Fan—are found of turning the heads of their slaughtered enemies to account as ornaments and symbols of prowess, if not as cigar-boxes. But this appropriation of foemen’s skulls to purposes at once of use and ornament among ourselves, marks a distinct move in civilisation, and establishes another tie of fellow-feeling and common usage between us and our savage dependencies.’50

  Undermining the distinction between civilised and un-civilised, which after all was the foundation of imperialism, Ward had simply gone too far. A later newspaper report described Ward’s shop, with its room full of Zulu skulls, as ‘a perfect Golgotha’, referring to the site where Jesus was crucified, the name of which meant ‘place of the skull’.51 Golgotha, however, was also the epithet used for the execution grounds and sacrificial groves of the West-African kingdoms, against which the British waged several major campaigns. In 1874, Stanley accompanied the British force that invaded Ashanti, and he provided an evocative description of the scene they encountered as they entered the capital of Kumasi:

  ‘We came to a grove, whence the terrible effluvia issued which caused all men in Coomassie to describe the place as a vast charnel-house. The grove, which was but a continuation of the tall forest we had travelled through, penetrated as far as the great market-place. A narrow footpath led into this grove, and now the foul smells became so suffocating that we were glad to produce our handkerchiefs to prevent the intolerable and almost palpable odour from mounting into the brain and overpowering us. After some thirty paces we arrived before the dreadful scene, but it wa
s almost impossible to stop longer than to take a general view of the great Golgotha. We saw some thirty or forty decapitated bodies in the last stages of corruption, and countless skulls which lay piled in heaps and scattered over a wide extent. The stoutest heart and the most stoical mind might have been appalled.’52

  Where Richard Burton had found a Temple Bar in Africa, people were now finding a Golgotha in Ward’s shop in the heart of London, and they were duly appalled. Attitudes were gradually changing, and heads and skulls could no longer be acquired and treated with quite the same ease and lack of circumspection that had characterised the endeavours of a Spry or a Knox, in India or in Africa, decades before. Not without provoking a public outcry, at least.

  During the 1890’s, several cases involving the acquisition of skulls under dubious circumstances, reached the headlines and sparked public debate in the imperial metropole and beyond. In 1890, disturbing rumours emerged that the Scottish naturalist, James S. Jameson, who was with the rear column of Stanley’s Emin Pasha Relief Expedition to what is today Uganda, had paid local cannibals to kill and eat a young girl in order to satisfy his curiosity concerning this ‘barbarous’ practice. The story caused a sensation and while Jameson himself died of fever while still in Africa, Stanley and several other members publicly denounced this horrible act, which brought the entire expedition into disrepute. It furthermore turned out that before he died, Jameson had sent the head of an African man home to his wife. William Bonny, who had been a member of the expedition, later confirmed the story in an interview with The Times: