The Skull of Alum Bheg
Page 32
7.‘The Mutiny at Sealkote,’ The Times, 1 Sept. 1857. Considering the absolute destruction of Indian cities such as Delhi or Lucknow at the hands of the British later on, there is more than a little hyperbole in this statement.
8.Letter from A. Gordon, 4 Aug. 1857, Evangelical Repository, p. 384.
9.Ibid.
10.Ibid., p. 385.
11.Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 143.
12.Letter from A. Gordon, 4 Aug. 1857, Evangelical Repository, p. 385.
13.Ibid.
14.Ibid.
15.R.C. Lawrence to R. Montgomery, 18 July 1857, Mutiny Records 7:1, p. 234.
16.Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 159.
17.R.C. Lawrence to R. Montgomery, 18 July 1857, Mutiny Records 7:1, p. 233.
18.Ibid., p. 234.
19.Ibid., pp. 234–5.
20.Ibid., p. 235.
21.Ibid., p. 234.
22.‘An Execution at Sealkote’, The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 26 Sept. 1857.
23.Ibid.
24.R.C. Lawrence to R. Montgomery, 18 July 1857, Mutiny Records 7:1, p. 238.
25.W. Graham to J. Graham, 27 July 1857, The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers, p. 45.
26.Cave-Browne, The Punjab and Delhi in 1857, II, pp. 98–99.
27.Brigadier-General R. E. H. Dyer to the General Staff, 25 Aug. 1919, in Disorders Inquiry Committee, 1919–1920: Evidence, III: Amritsar (Calcutta, 1920), p. 203.
28.Cooper, The Crisis in Punjab, p. 149.
29.‘Retribution—Delhi’, The Letters of Indophilus to “The Times”—with additional notes, London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman’s, and Roberts [1858], pp. 5–6.
30.Ibid.
31.See E.J. Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal, London: The Hogarth Press, 1925; Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of the Revolt: India 1857–1870, London: Oxford University Press, 1965; Wagner, ‘Treading Upon Fires’ and ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’; and Condos, The Insecurity State.
32.C.E. Stewart, Through Persia in Disguise: With Reminiscences of the Indian Mutiny, London: George Routledge & Sons, 1911, p. 11.
33.Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 161.
34.Ibid., p. 159.
35.Kaye’s and Malleson’s History, II, p. 177.
36.See Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009, p. 22.
37.Cooper, The Crisis in Punjab, p. 154.
38.F.H. Cooper to A.A. Roberts, 5 Aug. 1857, Mutiny Records 7:1, pp. 393–4.
39.Ibid., p. 394.
40.Ibid.
41.Cooper, The Crisis in Punjab, p. 163.
42.Ibid., p. 164.
43.Ibid., p. 167.
44.The work of Michael Taussig is obviously significant to this argument, see especially Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. This is further discussed in the penultimate chapter.
45.Cooper, The Crisis in Punjab, p. 164.
46.If this sounds familiar, it is because a very similar narrative emerged following the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, see Kim A. Wagner, ‘Seeing Like a Soldier: The Amritsar Massacre and the Politics of Military History’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (ed.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 23–37.
47.See Dixon, Weeping Britannia.
48.Don Randall, ‘Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 40, 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 97–120.
49.Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998; and Naser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
50.See Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny, 2 vols, London: London Printing & Publishing Co., 1858, II, pp. 395–396. See also Wagner, The Great Fear, pp. 173–174.
51.For a more detailed discussion of British reprisals, and the attempts at restoring order, see Jacob Ramsay Smith, ‘Imperial Retribution: The hunt for Nana Sahib and rebel leaders in the aftermath of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857’, unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2017.
52.Cooper, The Crisis in Punjab, p. 168.
53.See Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, pp. 431–43; and Wagner, The Great Fear, pp. 228–34.
54.G.H. Hodson (ed.), Hodson of Hodson’s Horse; or Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883, p. 224. See also Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, pp. 396–9.
55.V.D. Majendie, Up Among the Pandies; or, A Year’s Service in India, London, 1859, pp. 101–2.
9.A PURSUING DESTINY
1.R. Kipling, ‘The Lost Legion’, The Strand, May, 1892, p. 476.
2.See Smith, ‘Imperial Retribution’.
3.W. Butler, Land of the Veda, New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1895, p. 448.
4.‘The Indian Mutinies’, The Times, 26 October 1857.
5.W.R. Eliott to A.A. Roberts, 15 Feb. 1858, Mutiny Records 8:1, p. 286.
6.C.A. McMahon to A.A. Roberts, 4 Feb. 1858, ibid., p. 281.
7.Ibid. See also A. Brandreth to G.F. Edmonstone, 23 July 1857, Mutiny Records 7:1, p. 224.
8.C.A. McMahon to A.A. Roberts, 4 Feb. 1858, Mutiny Records 8:1, p. 281.
9.Ibid., p. 282.
10.Ibid. See also A. Brandreth to G.F. Edmonstone, 30 July 1857, Mutiny Records 7:1, p. 271.
11.C.A. McMahon to A.A. Roberts, 4 Feb. 1858, Mutiny Records 8:1, p. 282.
12.E.J. Lake to R. Montgomery, 5 Jan. 1858, Mutiny Records 8.1, p. 158.
13.R. Temple to G.F. Edmonstone, 14 June 1858, NAI, Foreign Political, 27 Aug. 1858, 7–10 S.C.
14.‘Official News from Lahore’, The Morning Chronicle, 17 Sept. 1857.
15.W.H. Russell, My Diary in India, in the year 1858–9, 2 vols, London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860, II, pp. 184–5.
16.Ibid.
17.G. Knox to R.G. Taylor, 27 Aug. 1858, NAI, Political Proceedings, 23 Sept. 1859, no. 102.
18.R. Temple to G.F. Edmonstone, 14 June 1858, NAI, Foreign Political, 27 Aug. 1858, 7–10 S.C.
19.This reconstruction is based mainly on J. Naesmith to R. Temple, 9 July 1858, NAI, Foreign Political, 31 Dec. 1858, 3288–3300 F.C.
20.J.H. Dyas to R. Lawrence, 2 June 1857, NAI, Foreign Political, 27 Aug. 1858, 7–10 S.C.
21.Ibid.
22.J. Naesmith to R. Temple, 9 July 1858, NAI, Foreign Political, 31 Dec. 1858, 3288–3300 F.C.
23.Ibid.
24.A.A. Roberts to R. Montgomery, 20 March 1858, Mutiny Records 8:1, pp. 250–1.
25.J. Naesmith to R. Temple, 9 July 1858, NAI, Foreign Political, 31 Dec. 1858, 3288–3300 F.C.
26.J. Naesmith to R. Temple, 3 June 1858, NAI, Foreign Political, 27 Aug. 1858, 7–10 S.C.; and J. Naesmith to R. Temple, 9 July 1858, NAI, Foreign Political, 31 Dec. 1858, 3288–3300 F.C.
27.J. Naesmith to R. Temple, 9 July 1858, NAI, Foreign Political, 31 Dec. 1858, 3288–3300 F.C.
28.Ibid.
29.‘The Punjaub’, The Homeward Mail, 27 July 1858.
30.Ibid.
31.E. Lake to E. Thornton, 8 Sept. 1858, NAI, Political Proceedings, 23 Sept. 1859, no. 100.
32.‘India’, Dublin Evening Mail, 6 Oct. 1858.
33.G. Knox to R.G. Taylor, 27 Aug. 1858, NAI, Political Proceedings, 23 Sept. 1859, no. 102.
34.Ibid.
35.E. Lake to E. Thornton, 8 Sept. 1858, NAI, Political Proceedings, 23 Sept. 1859, no. 100.
36.‘India’, Dublin Evening Mail, 6 Oct. 1858.
37.‘China and India’, The Times, 16 Sept. 1858.
38.G. Knox to R.G. Taylor, 27 Aug. 1858, NAI, Political Proceedings, 23 Sept. 1859, no. 102.
39.R. Temple to G.F. Edmonstone, 20 Sept. 1858, NAI, Political Proceedings, 23 Sept. 1859, no. 98.
40.‘Correspondent, Lahore’, The Times, 9 Nov. 1858.
<
br /> 41.See Smith, ‘Imperial Retribution’.
42.Biographical and descriptive Sketches of the Distinguished Characters which compose the Unrivalled Exhibition and Historical gallery of Madame Tussaud and Sons, London: W.S. Johnson, 1866, p. 36, no. 261. There was no evidence that Nana Sahib had in fact committed suicide—‘the coward’s death’ alluded to.
43.‘London, Saturday, October 23, 1858’, The Times, 23 Oct. 1858.
44.‘The Mutinies in India’, The Times, 21 Sept. 1857.
45.‘The Overland Mail’, The Morning Post, 4 Sept. 1858.
46.Rich, The Mutiny in Sialkot, p. 53.
10.SHARP AND SHORT AS THE CANNONS ROAR
1.See Diary of Capt W B Armstrong Diary 7DG-1, entry for 8 July and 10 July.
2.‘The English Raj in India’, The Times, 7 Oct. 1858; ‘The Overland Mail’, The Morning Post, 4 Sept. 1858; and ‘Sealkot’, Allen’s India Mail, 15 Sept. 1858, p. 775.
3.‘An Execution in India’, The Times, 3 Dec. 1857.
4.Ibid. This morbid curiosity appears to have been common amongst British spectators at executions, see F.C. Maude Memories of the Mutiny, London and Sydney: Remington and Company Limited, 1894, I, p. 277.
5.Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Allen Lane, 1977. For a more recent work on executions within a non-European context, see Stacey Hynd, Imperial Gallows: Capital Punishment, Violence and Colonial Rule in Britain’s African Territories c. 1903–1968, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
6.See Sumit Guha, ‘An Indian Penal Regime: Maharashtra in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, 147 (May 1995), pp. 101–26.
7.M. Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India, in an Attempt to Trace the History of Mysoor, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1810, I: p. 397.
8.R. Montgomery Martin, The Indian Empire: With a Full Account of the Mutiny of the Bengal Army, London: London Printing and Publishing Co., 1861, II, pp. 99–100. Thanks to Vijay Pinch for sharing his current work on this particular incident.
9.‘Extract of the General letter from Bombay,’ 30 April 1780; APAC, IOR, Home Misc., H/149 (5): 111.
10.See Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Nineteenth-Century India, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
11.H.H. Spry, Modern India: with Illustrations of the resources and Capabilities of Hindustan, 2 vols, London: Whittaker & Co., 1837, I, p. 165.
12.Ibid., pp. 166–168. Executioners often came from the caste of Chamars or tanners and shoemakers, who traditionally worked with leather and therefore were untouchable.
13.W.H. Sleeman to F.C. Smith, 15 Aug. 1832, APAC, BC, F/4/1406/55521.
14.Lieutenant-Colonel [G.A.] Fitzclarence, Journal of a Route across India, through Egypt, to England, London: John Murray, 1819, p. 157.
15.‘Blowing from Guns at Peshawur’, Daily News, 5 Nov. 1857.
16.Maude, Memories of the Mutiny, I, p. 71. Elsewhere Neill explicitly stated that ‘The task will be made as revolting to his feelings as possible…’ [italics in original], ibid., II, p. 526. See also H. W. Norman, Delhi—1857: The Siege, Assault, and Capture, London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1902, p. 252.
17.The Letters of Indophilus, p. 8.
18.Russell, My Diary in India, II, p. 43.
19.See also Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘“Satan Let Loose upon Earth”: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857’, Past and Present, 128 (Aug. 1990), pp. 92–116.
20.Quoted in Kaye’s and Malleson’s History, II, p. 367.
21.Cooper, The Crisis in Punjab, p. 168.
22.‘The British Army in India’, The Times, 19 July 1858.
23.See Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
24.‘Blowing from Guns at Peshawur’, Daily News, 5 Nov. 1857.
25.Kaye’s and Malleson’s History, II, pp. 369–70. See also T. R. Holmes, A History of the Indian Mutiny, London: Macmillan & Co., 1883, p. 338, fn.
26.Kaye’s and Malleson’s History, II, p. 369, fn.
27.‘The Mutiny at Jubbulpore’, Daily News, 3 Nov. 1857.
28.Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
29.It became something of a recurrent feature in popular literary depictions of the ‘Mutiny’ to have the roles reversed, with the British protagonists strapped to a cannon by cruel Indians, see for instance Jules Verne, The Steam House, part I: The Demon of Cawnpore & The Steam House, part II: Tigers and Traitors, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881; and Percival Lancaster, Chaloner of the Bengal Cavalry, London: Blackie and sons Limited, 1915. In George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Great Game, London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975, the eponymous anti-hero is almost blown from a cannon by British troops who mistake him for an Indian rebel, thus re-inverting the moral thrust of the colonial execution-narratives.
30.Lord [F.S.] Roberts, Forty-One Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief, London: Macmillan and Co., 1897, p. 68, fn.
31.See also Wood, Lynching and Spectacle.
32.See for instance ‘Execution of mutinous sepoys on the Parade, Peshawur’, Illustrated London News, 3 Oct. 1857.
33.See also the brilliant article by Michael G. Vann, ‘Of Pirates, Postcards, and Public Beheadings: The Pedagogic Execution in French Colonial Indochina, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 36, 2 (2010), pp. 39–58.
34.‘Blown Away!’, Household Words, 27 March 1858, p. 350.
35.Roberts, Forty-One Years in India, p. 69.
36.Wilberforce, An Unrecorded Chapter, p. 42.
37.Maude, Memories of the Mutiny, I, p. 277; and ‘India’, The Preston Guardian, 7 Nov. 1857.
38.‘India’, The Preston Guardian, 7 Nov. 1857.
39.Hansard, 3rd ser. (Commons), cviii, cols. 146–60 (14 March 1859).
40.See also Diana Paton, ‘Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’, Journal of Social History, 34, 4 (2001), pp. 923–54; and Taylor Sherman, ‘Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on Recent Developments in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean’, History Compass, 7, 3 (2009), pp. 659–77.
41.Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny, II, p. 394.
42.‘An Execution at Sealkote’, The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 26 Sept. 1857.
43.‘Correspondence’, Dunstable Chronicle, and Advertiser for Beds, Bucks & Herts, 30 Oct. 1858.
44.‘The Overland Mail’, The Morning Post, 4 Sept. 1858.
45.Gordon, Our India Mission, pp. 157–8.
46.F.H. Cooper to A.A. Roberts, 5 Aug. 1857, Mutiny Records 7:1, p. 394.
47.Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny, II, p. 145; and Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 158.
48.‘The Overland Mail’, The Morning Post, 4 Sept. 1858.
49.Diary of John Murray, 18 Jan. 1858, quoted in Sean Willcock, ‘The Aesthetics of Imperial Crisis: Image Making and Intervention in British India, c. 1857–1919’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, 2013, p. 120.
50.‘Correspondence’, Dunstable Chronicle, and Advertiser for Beds, Bucks & Herts, 30 Oct. 1858.
51.Ibid.
52.Gordon, Our Indian Mission, p. 158.
11.BUT FROM THE SKULLS OF THE SLAIN
1.‘Queen’s Troops’, Allen’s India Mail, 4 Oct. 1858, p. 808.
2.The scholarship that I have found most useful, and most inspiring, includes Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War, New York: Berghahn, 2012; Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, London: Granta, 2014; Edgar V. Winnans, ‘The Head of the King: Museums and the Path to Resistance’, Comparative studies in Society and History, 36, 2 (April 1994), pp. 221–41; Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006; Luise White, ‘The Traffic in Heads: Bodies, Borders and the Articulation of Re
gional Histories’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 23, 2 (1997), pp. 325–38; Cora Bender, ‘“Transgressive Objects” in America: Mimesis and Violence in the Collection of Trophies during the Nineteenth Century Indian Wars’, Civil Wars, 11, 4 (Dec. 2009), pp. 502–13; Antonia Lovelace, ‘War Booty: Changing Contexts, Changing Displays—Asante ‘Relics’ from Kumasi, Acquired by the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire in 1896’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 12 (May 2000), pp. 147–60; Merrick Burrow, ‘The Imperial Souvenir: Things and Masculinity in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quartermain’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18, 1 (2013), pp. 72–92; and Ricardo Roque, Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
3.Court-house.
4.Tribal headman.
5.S.S. Thorburn, Bannu: Our Afghan Frontier, London: Trübner & Co., 1876, p. 54.
6.R. E. Cholmeley, John Nicholson: The Lion of the Punjaub, London: Andrew Melrose, 1908, chapter VI.
7.See Larson, Severed; Patricia Palmer, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation, and Violence in Early Modern Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013; and Paton, ‘Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves’. Richard Ward (ed.), A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2015.
8.R. H. W. Dunlop, Service and Adventure with the Khakee Ressalah, or Meerut Volunteer Horse, during the Mutinies of 1857–58, London: s.n., 1858, p. 110. There were later attempts by the local rebels to recover the head, ibid., 112. See also Gautam Bhadra’ ‘Four rebels of Eighteen-Fifty-Seven, Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies 4, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 229–75, reprint: Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, G.C.(eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies, New York: 1988, pp. 129–75.
9.Michael Edwardes, Red Year: The Indian Rebellion of 1857, London: Cardinal, 1975, p. 220; Forrest, Selections, III, pp. ccvi and cccx; Rizvi, Freedom Struggle, II, pp. 651–2.
10.See Rizvi, Freedom Struggle, V, pp. 536, 538, 539, and 545.
11.H.H. Spry to P. Spry, 12 Oct. 1832, Letters of Henry Harpur Spry, vol. 4, Mss Eur Photo Eur 308, APAC.
12.See Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; and John van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.