The Skull of Alum Bheg
Page 33
13.K.A. Wagner, ‘Confessions of a Skull: Phrenology and Colonial Knowledge in early nineteenth-century India’, History Workshop Journal, 69 (Spring, 2010), pp. 28–51. See also Shruti Kapila, ‘Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond c. 1770—1880’ Modern Asian Studies, 41, 3 (2007), pp. 471–513.
14.Robert Cox, ‘Remarks on the Skulls and Character of the Thugs’ Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 8 (1834), pp. 524–30.
15.Ibid. 530.
16.Andrew Bank, ‘Of ‘Native Skulls’ and Noble Caucasians: Phrenology in Colonial South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 22, 3 (Sept. 1996), pp. 387–403; and Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa 1820–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
17.Harrison, Dark Trophies.
18.Denver A. Webb, ‘War, Racism, and the Taking of Heads: Revisiting Military Conflict in the Cape Colony and Western Xhosaland in the Nineteenth Century’, The Journal of African History, 56, 1 (March 2015), pp. 37–55.
19.Ibid., p. 45. See also P. Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts, Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009.
20.For the commodification of shrunken heads, or tsantsas, from South America, and Maori heads, or mokomokai, from New Zealand, see Larson, Severed, pp. 17–28, 40–3; and Harrison, Dark Trophies, p. 62.
21.Quoted in Webb, ‘War, Racism, and the Taking of Heads’, p. 47.
22.Ibid., p. 44.
23.Ibid., p. 47.
24.Isabel Burton, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, London: Duckworth & Co., 1898, p. 211.
25.See also Richard F. Burton, Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast, 2 vols, London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872, II, p. 346.
26.R.G. Woodthorpe, The Lushai Expedition, 1871–1872, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1873, pp. 282–283.
27.The National Army Museum, London, has several such souvenirs, including children’s shoes and locks of hair: ‘Child’s shoe recovered from the well at Cawnpore, 1857’, NAM 1963–10–237–1; and ‘Lock of hair taken from Cawnpore and mounted on velvet board, 1857’, NAM 1960–02–2–1. http://www.nam.ac.uk/online-collection/results.php?searchType=simple&simpleText=indian%20mutiny&themeID=&resultsDisplay=list&page=3
28.These were untouchable sweepers and scavengers often used to assist in executions.
29.Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny, II, p. 602. A lock of Tantia Tope’s hair was actually on display at the National Army Museum in London, when it re-opened in 2017: ‘Snuff box containing a lock of Tatya Tope’s hair, removed after his execution in 1859’, NAM 1965–09–54–1.
30.See for instance Ruth Penfold-Mounce, ‘Consuming Criminal Corpses: Fascination with the Dead Criminal Body’, Mortality, 15, 3 (2010), pp. 250–65; and Sarah Tarlow, ‘Curious Afterlives: The Enduring Appeal of the Criminal Corpse’, Mortality, 21, 3 (2016), pp. 210–28.
31.Russell, My Diary in India, I, p. 202.
32.Butler, Land of the Veda, p. 417. The quote is from the Illiad.
33.Majendie, Up Among the Pandies, pp. 278–9.
34.‘Local News: Soldier from India’, Stirling Observer, 12 Jan. 1860.
35.‘Tragedy of a Skull’, Eastbourne Gazette, 18 Jan. 1911.
36.Harrison, Dark Trophies; and Larson, Severed.
37.Dunlop, Service and Adventure, p. 14.
38.See Burrow, ‘The Imperial Souvenir’. We know that Costello, like most British officers at the time, was an avid hunter, see ‘Diary of William B. Armstrong’, entry for 11 Feb. 1858.
39.‘Diary of William B. Armstrong’, entry for 9, 11 and 26 July 1858.
40.See Burrow, ‘The Imperial Souvenir’, p. 73.
41.Sharpe, Allegories of Empire; Paxton, Writing under the Raj; and Blunt, ‘Embodying War’.
42.See also Anderson, Subaltern Lives, pp. 124–56.
43.R.W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
44.By 1872, the case was fresh in everyone’s mind and in fact the cost of Eyre’s legal defence was still being decided, ‘Weekly Reviews’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 13 July 1872.
45.Wagner, ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’. This was the last time that cannon was used for executions in British India.
46.Henry M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa, London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1871, pp. 270–271.
47.Cornelius Vijn, Cetshwayo’s Dutchman, Being the Private Journals of a White Trader in Zululand during the British Invasion, London: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1880, p. 38.
48.‘Zulu Skulls’, The Globe, 12 March 1880.
49.For a description of the whole range of human and animal trophies and body parts sold in one shop, see ‘Sporting Trophies’, The Sportsman, 31 January 1883.
50.‘Skulls for Cigar-Holders’, Punch, 77, December 1879, p. 268. Italics in original
51.‘Society Gossip’, Beverley and East Riding Recorder, 10 July 1880.
52.Henry M. Stanley, Coomassie and Magdala: The Story of Two British Campaigns in Africa, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874, p. 231.
53.Jameson’s posthumously published account suggests that he actually skinned the head like that of an animal and that the skull itself was of no interest to him, see James S. Jameson, The Story of the Rear Column of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, London: R.H. Porter, 1890, p. 204.
54.‘Mr. Bonny and the cannibal story’, The Times, 14 Nov. 1890.
55.Hedley A. Chilvers, The Yellow Man Looks On: Being the Story of the Anglo-Dutch Conflict in Southern Africa and its Interest for the Peoples of Asia, London: Cassell, 1933, p. 132.
56.‘The Mutilation of Luka Jantje—Treatment of Langeberg Rebels’, Glasgow Herald, 22 Sept. 1897.
57.Ibid.
58.Ibid.
59.Chilvers, The Yellow Man Looks On, p. 133. For a very different version of the story, see: https://dustymuffin.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/luka-jantje-pieces-of-the-puzzle/—last accessed 24 June 2017.
60.Ernst N. Bennett, ‘After Omdurman’, Contemporary Review, January 1899, p. 29
61.Quoted in George H. Gilpin, Art of Contemporary English Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991, p. 6.
62.‘The Vote to Lord Kitchener’, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 6 June 1899.
63.‘Treatment of the Mahdi’s body condemned’, Manchester Guardian, 21 Feb. 1899.
64.Lord Kitchener to Queen Victoria, 7 March 1899, quoted in Philip Magnus, Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1968, p. 134.
65.Queen Victoria to Lord Kitchener, 24 March 1899, ibid.
66.Wilfred Scawen Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888–1914, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922, diary entry for 27 April 1899, p. 320.
67.‘London Correspondence’, Freeman’s Journal, 24 Feb. 1899.
68.Winston S. Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Conquest of the Soudan, 2 vols, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899, II, p. 196.
69.Official report cited in ‘Bambaata’s Head’, Dundee Courier, 19 July 1906.
70.Ibid.
71.Ibid.
72.Harrison, Dark Trophies, pp. 71–2.
73.Hatch, D. Spencer, ‘Beyond the End of the Road: Legs for knowledge’, unpublished typescript, n. d. [c. 1962], University of Arizona, Tucson, Special Collections, Spencer Hatch Collection, Box 3. Thanks to Harald Fisher-Tiné for this reference.
74.Ibid.
75.Harrison, Dark Trophies, pp. 157–8.
76.Ibid., pp. 155–163
77.See for instance Jose E. Alvarez, The Betrothed of Death: The Spanish Foreign Legion During the Rif Rebellion, 1920–1927, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995.
78.Harrison, Dark Trophies, pp. 129–53 and 165–85.
79.It should be noted, however, that the use of photography in either celebrating or documenting different forms of atrocities has a long history—in
the American case dating back to lynching and colonial campaigns in the Philippines of the early twentieth century, see for instance Wood, Lynching and Spectacle. See also Vann, ‘Of Pirates, Postcards, and Public Beheadings’.
80.William Morris, ‘Notes on Passing Events’, The Commonweal, 15 May 1886, p. 50.
EPILOGUE: THE DEAD BODIES OF THY SERVANTS
1.‘India: Arrival of refugees’, The Newcastle Courant, 6 Nov. 1857.
2.George Smith, Stephen Hislop: Pioneer Missionary & Naturalist in Central India from 1844 to 1863, London, John Murray, 1888, pp. 185–186.
3.Letter from A. Gordon, 4 Aug. 1857, Evangelical Repository, p. 386.
4.J. Graham to S. Graham, 29 July 1857, The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers, p. 74.
5.Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 166.
6.J. Graham to A. Graham, 27 July 1857, The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers, p. 73; and W. Graham to D. Cullimore, 17 Nov. 1858, ibid., p. 88.
7.W. Graham to D. Cullimore, 27 Sept. 1857, The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers, p. 82.
8.‘The old imbecile King’, as the historian John Kaye described Bahadur Shah, was found guilty of having conspired and waged war against the British and was exiled to Rangoon where he died in 1862, see Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, III, p. 634. Most of Bahadur Shah’s sons and male relatives had been summarily executed and the last surviving members of the Mughal dynasty reduced to abject poverty and consigned to oblivion, see Dalrymple, The Last Mughal.
9.Zahir Dehlavi, Dastan i-Ghadr, cited in Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, p. 387.
10.Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, III, p. 638.
11.Kaye, Lives of Indian Officers, London: W.H. Allen, 1889, II, pp. 671–683.
12.Ibid., p. 688.
13.Rich, The Mutiny in Sialkot, p. 80.
14.Photographs currently in the possession of Catherine Nichol, the last remaining Scottish missionary in Sialkot.
15.Gordon, Our India Mission, pp. 163–4.
16.Ibid. See also ‘Hormut Khan’, Allen’s India Mail, 8 Aug. 1862, p. 621. Interestingly, a shrine was later erected on the tomb of Hurmat Khan where apparently the prostitutes of Sialkot kept a light burning, see Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 164. See also Green, Islam and the Army, pp. 84–85.
17.http://www.dover-kent.com/lord-clyde-walmer.html—last accessed 28 July 2017.
18.The politics behind the lack of official interest are not entirely clear to me, but see for instance: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/the-black-hole/—last accessed 4 Aug. 2017.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARCHIVAL MATERIAL
National Archives of India (NAI), New Delhi:
Military Department
Thagi & Dakaiti
Political Department
British Library, Asian and African Studies Collections:
Kaye Papers, H/725(2),1057
Boards Collections
Home Miscellaneous
Royal Dragoon Guards Museum:
‘Diary of William B. Armstrong 4th Dragoon Guards and 7th (Princess Royal) Dragoons’
‘Diary of 7th Dragoon Guards 1851–1859’
University of Arizona
Hatch, D. Spencer, ‘Beyond the End of the Road: Legs for knowledge’, unpublished typescript, n. d. [c. 1962], University of Arizona, Tucson, Special Collections, Spencer Hatch Collection, Box 3.
PRIMARY MATERIAL PUBLISHED
Depositions taken at Cawnpore under the directions of Lieut-Colonel G. W. Williams (Allahabad, 1858).
Disorders Inquiry Committee, 1919–1920: Evidence, III: Amritsar (Calcutta, 1920), PP 1857–58 [2449]
Forrest, George W. (ed.), Selections from the Letters, Despatches and Other State Papers Preserved in the Military Department of the Government of India, 1857–58, 4 vols, Calcutta Military Department Press, 1893.
Government Records, Vol. 7:1–2—Punjab: Mutiny Records (Correspondence), Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1911.
Government Records, Vol. 8:1–2—Punjab: Mutiny Records (Reportse), Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1911.
Harrison, A.T. (ed.) The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers, Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1980.
Ibbetson, Denzil (ed.), Gazetteer of the Sialkot District, 1883–4, Lahore: Civil and Military Press, 1884
Metcalfe, C. T. (trans.), Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi, Westminster: A. Constable and Co., 1898.
Nayar, P.K. (ed.), The Trial of Bahadur Shah (Hyderabad, Orient Longman, 2007)
Official Catalogue of the Royal United Service Museum, London: J.J. Keliher & Co., 1914.
The Letters of Indophilus to “The Times”—with additional notes, London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman’s, and Roberts [1858].
NEWSPAPERS & PERIODICALS
Allen’s India Mail
Beverley and East Riding Recorder
Contemporary Review
Daily News
Dublin Daily Express
Dublin Evening Mail
Dublin Evening Post
Dundee Courier
Dunstable Chronicle, and Advertiser for Beds, Bucks & Herts
Eastbourne Gazette
Evangelical Repository
Freeman’s Journal
Glasgow Herald
Household Words
Illustrated London News
Isle of Wight Observer
Mayo Constitution
Stirling Observer
The Belfast Newsletter
The Commonweal
The Delhi Gazette
The Derby Mercury
The Globe
The Homeward Mail
The London Gazette
The Manchester Times
The Morning Chronicle
The Morning Post
The Newcastle Courant
The Pall Mall Gazette
The Preston Guardian
The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent
The Sportsman
The Standard
The Times
Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer
WORKS PUBLISHED BEFORE 1947
Ball, Charles, The History of the Indian Mutiny, 2 vols, London: London Printing & Publishing Co., 1858.
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.
Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888–1914, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922.
Bourchier, G., Eight Month’s Campaign Against the Bengal Sepoy Army, During the Mutiny of 1857, London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1858.
Burton, Isabel, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, London: Duckworth & Co., 1898.
Burton, Richard F., Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast, 2 vols, London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872.
Butler, W., Land of the Veda, New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1895.
Cardew, F. G., A Sketch of the Services of the Bengal Army, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1909.
Cave-Browne, John, The Punjab and Delhi in 1857: Being a Narrative of the Measures by which the Punjab was Saved and Delhi Recovered during the Indian Mutiny, London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1861.
Chilvers, Hedley A., The Yellow Man Looks On: Being the Story of the Anglo-Dutch Conflict in Southern Africa and its Interest for the Peoples of Asia, London: Cassell, 1933.
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Churchill, Winston S., The River War: An Historical Account of the Conquest of the Soudan, 2 vols, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899.
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, orig. 1899, Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition; New York: Norton, 1988.
Cooper, Frederic, The Crisis in Punjab, from the 10th of May until the Fall of Delhi, London: Smith, Elders and Co., 1858.
Cox, Robert, ‘Remarks on the Skulls and Character of the Thugs’ Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 8 (1834), pp. 524–30.
Duff, Alexander, The Indian Rebellion: Its Causes and Results—In a Series of Letters, London: s.n., 1858.
Dunlop, R.H.W., Service and Adventure with the Khakee Ressalah, or Meerut Volunteer Horse, during the Mutinies of 1857–58, London: s.n., 1858.
Fitzclarence, Lieutenant-Colonel [G.A.], Journal of a Route across India, through Egypt, to England, London: John Murray, 1819.
Gimlette, G.H.D., A Postscript to the Records of the Indian Mutiny, London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1927.
Gordon, A., Our India Mission: A Thirty Years’ History of the India Mission of the United Presbyterian Church of North America, Philadelphia: Andrew Gordon, 1886.
Hodson, G.H. (ed.), Hodson of Hodson’s Horse; or Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883.
Jameson, James S., The Story of the Rear Column of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, London: R.H. Porter, 1890.
Kaye, J.W., Lives of Indian Officers, London: W.H. Allen, 1889.
——— A History of the Sepoy War in India 1857–1858, 3 vols, London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1876–80.
Kaye, John, and GB. Malleson (ed.), Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny, I-VI, London: Allen, 1888–9.
Khan, Syud Ahmed, The Causes of the Indian Revolt, orig. 1858, Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1873.
Kipling, R., Kim, orig. 1901, Norton Critical Edition, New York: Norton, 2002.
——— ‘The Lost Legion’, The Strand, May, 1892.
Lancaster, Percival, Chaloner of the Bengal Cavalry, London: Blackie and sons Limited, 1915.
Leckey, Edward, Fictions Connected with the Indian Outbreak of 1857 Exposed, Bombay: Chesson and Woodhall, 1859.
Leeke, W., The History of Lord Seaton’s Regiment (The 52nd Light Infantry), London: Hatchard and Co., 1866.
Majendie, V.D., Up Among the Pandies; or, A Year’s Service in India, London, 1859.
Martin, R. Montgomery, The Indian Empire: With a Full Account of the Mutiny of the Bengal Army, London: London Printing and Publishing Co., 1861.