Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  Beyond the Sepoy War

  Since our interest is in how the events of 1857 in India shaped an emergent critique of empire within Britain, I will not devote much space here to discussing the uprising itself. An historical episode that has received a great deal of scholarly attention from the late nineteenth century onwards, the uprising continues to be revisited and debated in salutary ways.18 In a volume produced by the Indian Council to commemorate the 150th anniversary of those events in 2007, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya notes rightly that the literature on the subject is ‘dauntingly large’ and includes important new revisionist work examining formerly overlooked aspects such as gender, the role of tribal and Dalit communities, and its representations in popular culture, making use of Indian-language sources as well.19 Initially a point of contestation in British debates, it became clear that the insurgency was more than a military mutiny, and involved ‘considerable participation by the civilian population’, and diverse elements of that population.20 It is also clear that a complex chain of causation extended well beyond the legendary ‘greased cartridges’ for the Enfield rifle, and indeed beyond religious identities and sentiments alone, even if those certainly played a determinate role. Our interest here is in how an understanding of causes and causality – and the predictable ferocity of the counterinsurgency – shaped dissent around the imperial question back in Britain.

  The briefest of overviews then: the uprising – or the ‘Ghadar’ as it is known in Urdu – formally broke out on 10 May 1957. The ostensible ‘last-straw’ provocation for it has traditionally been attributed to the controversial cartridges for the new Enfield rifle, which had been provided to the native regiments of the East India Company’s army, greased, it was rumoured, with pig and cow fat – thereby violating the religious sensibilities of both Muslim and Hindu infantrymen. The iconic cartridges, as Jill Bender has noted, ‘provided a convenient explanation for the rebellion, one that did not openly challenge the legitimacy of British colonial control or validate Indian unrest’.21 Rumour itself, of course, played a key role in the fomenting of the uprising, often acting, as in the instance of Meerut, as the match which lit a dry haystack. There were manifold other problems which caused soldierly discontent, including poor pay, loss of allowances, and insistence on overseas service. We know that soldier violence, one element of the uprising of 1857, was not in itself unprecedented; a contemporary observer notes that there ‘had previously been several mutinies in the native army … but they had been suppressed with little difficulty’.22 Troubles had in fact been rumbling from February 1857 onwards when in May, the troops at Meerut rose against their officers, shot them dead, freed imprisoned fellow troopers and set off for Delhi. (One of the most famous figures associated with the rebellion, the infantryman Mangal Pandey, had already been executed on 29 March for firing at and wounding his commanding officer at his barracks near Calcutta.) Once the rebels reached and captured Delhi, they were joined by the 54th Bengal Native Infantry, which, ordered to fire at them, had refused to. Violence then spread across northern India into other cantonments as well as civilian areas, with government officers, telegraph lines, post offices, treasuries and local courts – the apparatus and infrastructure of colonial rule – unsurprisingly being targeted for destruction, in addition to books in English, maps and instruments.23 As more than a dozen cantonments fell over that hot summer, hundreds of British officers and civilians perished in the rampage; their violent deaths, in particular those of women and children, would become the stuff of broadside and ballad. Among the fatalities were also ‘Anglo-Indians’ or ‘Eurasians’, as well as Indian Christians. In one of the most infamous incidents, in June 1857, after being promised safe passage by Nana Sahib, an entire garrison was ambushed and killed near Kanpur, on the banks of the Ganges at Satichaura Ghat, while 200 women and children were butchered, quite literally, in the equally infamous Bibighar incident after being confined there, their bodies thrown into a legendary well. The latter story would electrify British newspaper readers when it reached London two months later, becoming emblematic of ‘native’ treason and treachery.

  In an attempt by the rebels to unify multiple interests which were set in opposition to the British, and to provide a direct oppositional sovereignty to the British colonial order, the King of Delhi – the aging and somewhat reluctant Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar – was proclaimed emperor of India. Both Hindus and Muslims were enjoined to participate in the rebellion as a religious duty. As Kim Wagner notes, those who fought under the banner of the Mughal emperor ‘became the honourable defenders of deen and dharma, of faith and social duty and obligations. The rebels, in short, fought to preserve the moral order and fabric of north Indian society’.24 Some other princes and feudal aristocrats – most famously, Tantia Tope, leading the forces of Nana Sahib; Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi, the famous warrior queen of nationalist lore who died in battle; Khan Bahadur Khan; and Firoz Shah – also provided rallying points and leadership, while some stayed out of the fray or allied with the British. In August 1857, a famous proclamation issued in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s name adumbrated some of the reasons for the uprising. These included land seizures from zamindars; trade monopolies ‘of all the fine and valuable merchandise, such as indigo, cloth, and other articles of shipping, leaving only the trade of trifles to the people’; the treatment of natives employed in the civil and military services with ‘little respect, low pay, and no manner of influence’; the casting into unemployment of ‘the weavers, the cotton dressers, the carpenters, the blacksmiths, and the shoemakers … so that every description of native artisan has been thrown into beggary’; and, finally, ‘the Europeans being enemies of both the religions’, Hindu and Mohammedan.25 A multiplicity of causes fomented resistance, some of it directed against indigenous elites such as moneylenders and landlords.26 Attacks on and the seizing of the property of the rich were a frequent feature of the uprising, as was the releasing of prisoners from gaols and the ransacking of treasuries and Kutcheries (law courts).27 As Mukherjee notes, ‘Two overlapping structures of domination – one native and the other foreign – were simultaneously attacked by the subordinated.’28 Some of these elites, like moneylenders and traders, were also perceived to be collaborating with the British.

  From a large number of historical studies and popular accounts, we are now familiar with the overwhelming sense of national distress and hysterical racial outrage generated back in Britain by rebel violence. Atrocities such as those which took place in Kanpur (‘Cawnpore’) and Lucknow have attained legendary status and continue to be obsessively revisited in British popular history; the mutilation of – and alleged sexual violence against – British women became central to British imaginings of the uprising. As one historian notes, the very use of violence against the British itself constituted a startling reversal of direction, a challenge to the conquering power. To the extent that authority arrogates to itself a monopoly on exercising violence, its return in the opposite direction is a transgression, an assertion of autonomy: ‘The right to violence is everywhere a privilege that authority enjoys and refuses to share with those under it.’29 A challenge to this monopoly was also, of course, a direct challenge to legitimacy of rule. As The Times would put it on 31 August 1857, the sepoys had ‘broken the spell of inviolability that seemed to attach to an English man [sic] as such’.30 The ferocity of the British counterinsurgency, observed John Lawrence, the governor of the Punjab, sought to ‘make an example and terrify others’ who might be tempted to undertake similar challenges to the right to violence.31 The exemplary punishment by an ‘army of retribution’, as it came to be known, included shooting, hanging or blowing Indian suspects from the mouths of cannons. One British eyewitness wrote home thus:

  The prisoners, under a strong European guard, were then marched into the square, their crimes and sentences read aloud to them, and at the head of each regiment; they were then marched round the square, and up to the guns. The first ten were picked out … and they were bound to the guns
… The potfires were lighted, and at a signal from the artillery major, the guns were fired. It was a horrid sight that then met the eye, a regular shower of human fragments of heads, of arms, of legs, appeared in the air through the smoke.32

  Fragmenting bodies, including by guns ‘peppering away at niggers’, was a way of ensuring that there could be no appropriate funerary rites – a final humiliation.33 In some cases, Hindus were deliberately buried and Muslims cremated, contrary to each religion’s code. Boastful letters dispatched back to England spoke of terrified civilians hunted down and killed, their hutments razed to the ground or burned down. Two sons and a grandson of the Mughal were also scandalously shot in cold blood, after they had surrendered, unarmed. Bahadur Shah Zafar was himself imprisoned and put on trial ‘for his treasonable design of overthrowing and destroying the British government in India’, though he was spared execution.34 Though it took some time – nearly two years in the end – the uprising was ultimately put down decisively, though this did not spell an end to the periodic emergence of insurgencies, mutinies and other forms of resistance. The violence of 1857–58 had seen hundreds of Britons slain and tens of thousands of Indians slaughtered. In November 1858, the Crown proclaimed its sole control and constitutional authority, and the East India Company’s rule came to an end. In July 1859 the viceroy declared a ‘state of peace’.

  How and why the uprising of 1857 failed does not concern us here. Among the reasons historians have advanced are the very heterogeneity of the various interests involved and the absence of a coherent ideology and centralized leadership. There was, of course, also no matching the British when it came to strength in munitions and weaponry as the counter-insurgency, which saw thousands of troops in the shape of the ‘army of retribution’ shipped out from Britain to assist, would brutally illustrate. Significantly, however, despite the ultimate victory, ‘the rebellion and its aftermath embedded itself in the British national consciousness in a way unmatched by previous colonial confrontations’, though some slave insurrections – not least the 1823 Demerara uprising – had generated public controversy, and, not many years before, the Second Afghan War had featured in public discussions.35 Nonetheless, 1857 was undoubtedly the first major crisis in the post-Emancipation era to be relayed with relative immediacy to the British newspaper-reading public – news taking weeks rather than months to arrive – and to have generated such a vast amount of political, literary and cultural engagement, which continued into the next century. Before a degree of consensus emerged in the decade following the uprising – one in which Britain was figured as a benevolent and liberal colonial power disloyally attacked by reactionary native elites keen to preserve their own feudal and caste interests – the initial British responses to news of the uprising were in fact divided. Much scholarly work has been undertaken on mapping these fractures and debates, not least that between the Whig interpretation of the ‘Mutiny’ as a limited military insurrection and the Tory claim that interventionist reforms had caused the rebellion.36 Famously, Disraeli declared: ‘The decline and fall of empires are not the affair of greased cartridges. Such results are occasioned by adequate causes and the accumulation of adequate causes.’37 Most of those subscribing to this theory ‘were critical of the government and EIC, although the nature of their critique of colonial rule varied’, writes Salahuddin Malik, noting that there then began ‘a searching public exploration’ of what these causes might have been.38 Few, of course, challenged the legitimacy of British rule itself, focusing instead on specific policies and Company misdemeanours. On the contrary, Gautam Chakravarty has suggested, resistance in this case and others, including the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion and the 1882 Egyptian war, both of which I will examine in subsequent chapters, produced ‘sophisticated forms of metropolitan counter-mobilisation structured around themes of race, religion, “pacification”, imperial identity and a forthright binary of civilisation–savagery’.39 Yet 1857, like the other crises, also produced myriad forms of dissent, ranging from a radicalized liberalism that placed the agency of colonial subjects at its centre to outright condemnations of the colonial project that went so far as to call for the complete withdrawal of Britain from India. While these do not quite add up to what Christopher Herbert rather hyperbolically terms ‘a voluminous discourse of dissent’, certain distinct species of unease and critique did emerge out of the intellectual and political churning that took place 1857.40 I will explore some of the more uncompromising and interesting ones presently, and examine how they were directly shaped by the fact of rebellion read as a pedagogical text.

  Although a vast body of British writings on 1857 is indeed marked by what Herbert describes as a ‘hallucinatory stylistic register’, evoking a sense of ‘traumatic expulsion from a known world into a frightening new historical era’, very little of it actually took on the imperial project directly.41 The ‘profoundly traumatic cultural crisis’ generated by the conflicted responses to the retaliatory bloodshed suggests to Herbert that the imperial project was itself plagued by crises of ‘that vital constituent of mid-Victorian culture, the national conscience’. This, he avers, shows up the fundamental wrongness of ‘studies informed by Said’s ground-breaking Orientalism’, which have taken as their ‘first commandment the premise of the monolithic, always self-consistent nature of imperialism’.42 Quite apart from the patently absurd caricature of Said’s work, what is really telling here is Herbert’s own regurgitation of the axiom that imperialism was a self-correcting system, constitutively plagued by a sense of its own wrongness. If it was indeed the case that a constantly uneasy conscience redeems Victorian culture, then we must ask why it took events entailing violent anticolonial insurgency for a ‘faculty of searching self-scrutiny’ to be awakened, and for Britons to be ‘afforded a deeply disillusioning view into the national soul’.43 Why did this ‘national conscience’ emerge only in the face of resistance to the imperial mission and the brutal counterinsurgencies required to suppress it? Why would a value system inherently ‘fatally at odds with itself’ worry about ‘shocking perversions’ only when challenged by an opposite force making its own demands upon it?44

  My own argument here turns away from the hypostatizing pieties of a presumed national conscience towards an examination of rebel agency as a catalyst for serious criticism of the imperial project. Looking at three very different readings of 1857 perceived as a revolutionary moment, I want to draw out some aspects of dissident engagement with India. The first is the way in which the rebellion itself functions as a text upon which is impressed the voice and will of insurgents. The second is the manner in which this text functions as a pedagogical enterprise in which the direction of tutelage is reversed: it is the colonizers who must learn from the colonized. The last – and perhaps most important for a longer narrative account of the emergence of British anticolonialism – is the emergence of possibilities for forging fellow-feeling between denizens of the metropole and inhabitants of the periphery, a shift that would replace paternalism with dialogism, thus creating new affective and political dispositions. John Bruce Norton, an ‘India hand’ of a critical bent, called for a radical reconstitution of relations between rulers and ruled in the direction of equality and, in a remarkable inversion, for the British to assimilate with the Indians. The Chartist leader and poet Ernest Jones would explicitly celebrate revolutionary ‘contagion’, whereby the Indian rebels might inspire domestic resistance. Finally, there is the unexpected radicalism of Richard Congreve, the Positivist leader who was one of the few to call unambiguously for a full British withdrawal from India and the forging of working-class solidarity with those under British rule.