Raj
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No editor shrank from printing the most harrowing details of the fighting, which is not surprising since the peacetime stock-in-trade of the press were gruesome accounts of coroners’ inquests and murder trials. The predominantly middle-class newspaper readership were treated to the same brutal realism when it came to reporting battles. One officer’s letter, printed in The Times and reproduced in the provincial press, graphically described how exhausted, thirst-crazed men had swilled water stained with the blood of Sikhs, whose bayonetted bodies lay by a well. It was a striking feature of early and mid-Victorian journalism that papers could print grim eyewitness accounts of the miseries of war alongside bellicose appeals to patriotic pride. The capacity of British soldiers to endure and overcome privation were proof of superior mettle. As for the wars, they were, ultimately, tests of national superiority, a conceit which underlay verses published during the first Sikh war.
We lately tamed the Afghan’s pride,
And now rolls down a fiercer blood.
The clarion sounds, the cannons boom –
Unfurl the banner of St George!
Proudly the Punjab’s bandits come,
Grim Havoc’s joyful maw to gorge!
Their cry blasphemes the name of God –
‘Allah! Il Allah! Wild hurrahs
Respond . . .7
There were warlike alarums, war cries, the thunder of cannon, bugle calls and British hurrahs in plenty for audiences at Astley’s Amphitheatre, which staged The War in the Punjab during Whitsun week, 1846. These spectacular reconstructions of scenes from imperial campaigns were the equivalent of newsreels, and were an exciting and immensely popular entertainment for Londoners and their families until the end of the century. India, as seen from the stalls at Astley’s, was a remote, exotic land where the British triumphed over wild-eyed savages, whose images were familiar from the illustrated papers.
Of considerably less interest were the public affairs of India which, when debated by Parliament, rarely attracted much interest or, for that matter, many MPs and peers. Neither they nor the government could ignore the concerns of businessmen, particularly the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire for whom India was a major market, or the pressure from the church lobbies, who were always displeased by the way in which the Company treated missions. Both groups had to be pandered to, for they exerted considerable influence over a largely middle-class electorate which was particularly susceptible to political arguments which had religious overtones.
II
Public indifference towards India vanished in the summer of 1857. The dramatic events there had a compelling fascination which was amply catered for by the press. By mid-July, the news from Meerut and Delhi had supplanted the trial of Madeleine Smith as the main story in every national and provincial paper. The saga of the Indian Mutiny was related to the British public in a sequence of episodes which made it, in many ways, like a contemporary novel by Dickens or Thackeray, whose parts were published monthly. Every two to three weeks, a new batch of telegrams and private letters would arrive from India and be swiftly disseminated through the sheets. As relaid through the newspapers, the Indian Mutiny was part penny dreadful, with plenty of grisly murders and massacres, and part cliffhanger, for reports of the sieges at Delhi and Lucknow kept readers on tenterhooks for over three months. To this mixture of melodrama and expectation was added a powerful series of images provided by the Illustrated London News. Not surprisingly, the public’s reaction ranged across the whole emotional spectrum; according to the nature of the reports and in quick succession, Britain was convulsed by anguish, despair, trepidation, fury and elation.
Rage dominated during the summer and autumn of 1857 as news poured in of the wholesale defection of the sepoys and the massacres of women and children at Meerut, Delhi, Jhansi and Cawnpore. ‘I wish I were commander-in-chief in India,’ wrote Charles Dickens on 4 October. ‘I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.’ He spoke for millions outraged by the betrayal and murder of their countrymen and women which, so the stories ran, had been accompanied by rape and lingering tortures. Nothing less than extermination of the Hindus would have satisfied Dickens, who was disgusted by reports in October that Canning had offered an amnesty to mutineers not directly involved in the killings.8 The clamour for promiscuous revenge became so strident in both Britain and India that Sir John Lawrence feared it would hinder operations, driving Indians to wage a defensive guerrilla war against vengeful armies. Such a war, he imagined, would be protracted and debilitating.9 In the midst of the hysteria, the voice of reason was not quite drowned. Disturbed by reports of Neill’s activities around Benares and Allahabad, an anonymous poet warned the British soldier not to embrace his adversaries’ habits:
Upon the wretched slave they vengeance feast;
There stop; let not his guilt they manhood stain,
But spare the Indian mother and her child.10
The defilement of innocence, whether of children or women, had sent collective shudders through Britain. What the Manchester Guardian called ‘outrages fouler than our pens can describe’ left the British people stunned and burning for vengeance.11 Invented atrocities jostled with real ones in the newspaper columns, including a tale of a colonel’s wife sawn in half, which appeared at the end of September in Dublin and Edinburgh.12 A fortnight later, the Illustrated London News offered what was one of the most compelling icons of the Mutiny, an imaginative engraving of the last moments of Miss Wheeler during the first Cawnpore massacre. Distraught, she points a pistol at her head as fiendish sepoys approach. The message is clear: she will take her own life rather than suffer violation. This was universally regarded as the fate of any European women at the hands of the mutineers, a fact which drove Alexander Skene to shoot his wife and then himself after an unequal fight with mutineers at Jhansi. An imaginative reconstruction of the incident also appeared in the Illustrated London News.
This poignant scene deeply moved Christina Rossetti who, within a few days, had composed a poem in tribute to a love which was so deeply shared, compassionate and noble:
A hundred, a thousand to one; even so;
Not a hope in the world remained;
The swarming howling wretches below,
Gained, and gained, and gained.
Skene look’d at his pale young wife: –
‘Is the time come?’ ‘The time is come!’
Young, strong, and so full of life;
The agony struck them dumb.
‘Will it hurt much?’ ‘No, mine own:
I wish I could bear the pang for both.’
‘I wish I could bear the pang alone:
Courage, dear! I am not loth.’
Kiss and kiss: ‘It is no pain
Thus to kiss and die.
One kiss more,’ ‘And yet one again.’
‘Good bye! Good bye!’
The sum of such acts of individual self-sacrifice and heroism combined with national pride made Tennyson contemplate writing an epic of the siege of Delhi. In 1879 he produced a shorter work, The Defence of Lucknow, which extols the endurance of the defenders and repeats in every stanza a reference to the ‘banner of England’ which remains flying over the residency.
The Indian popular muse was stimulated by the Mutiny. Forty years after, Gujar women in the countryside around Saharanpur were singing the lament of a wife whose husband had proved an inefficient thief:
People got shawls, large and small; my love got a kerchief.
There is a great bazaar in Meerut; my love did not know how to plunder.
People got dishes and cups; my love got a glass.
There is a great bazaar in Meerut; my love did not know how to plunder.
People got coconuts and dates; my love got an almond.
There is a great bazaar in Meerut; my love did not know how to plunder.
People got coins of gold; my love got a half-penny.
There is a great bazaar in Meerut; my love did not
know how to plunder.
In answer, as it were, to Tennyson’s heroic account of Lucknow, was a song in praise of the exploits of Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi:
Well fought the brave rani; Oh, the rani of Jhansi.
The guns were placed in the towers, the heavenly balls were fired.
Oh, the rani of Jhansi, well fought the brave one.
All the soldiers were fed with sweets; she herself had treacle and rice.
Oh, the rani of Jhansi, well fought the brave one.
Leaving Morcha, she fled to the army; where she searched and found no water
Oh, the rani of Jhansi, well fought the brave one.
Unlike their British counterparts, Indian balladeers were ready to honour the gallantry of their adversaries, and did so in this song about the relief and second defence of Lucknow:
Time upon time, the sepoys struck their blows,
Digging in about them, the white warriors fought well.
On their feet they wore boots, on their bodies kilts.
Tassels of silk on their hats and trembling aigrettes
The white warriors went into battle like elephants on heat
With no fear of death, they set their faces to the front.13
As the British had long imagined, the kilts, feathered bonnets and cockades of the Highlanders unnerved their enemies.
British artists were also inspired by episodes in the Mutiny. It offered perfect subjects for that school of genre painters who sought to capture a dramatic moment which, according to the viewer’s imagination, could be interpreted as a turning point in a broader narrative. Edward Hopley’s Alarm in India, exhibited in February 1858, shows a nocturnal scene in which a fraught officer looks from a window across an Indian townscape, illuminated by distant fires. He grasps a revolver while his wife reaches for another; whether to defend herself, or to hand to her husband we do not know. She might even, like Miss Wheeler, be preparing to take her own life rather than die dishonoured. There was no ambiguity about Edward Armstrong’s Retribution, displayed at the same time. A stalwart Britannia thrusts a sword into the breast of a tiger, whose recent prey, a dead mother and child, lies in the foreground. This painting derives from an earlier Punch cartoon of 22 August 1857, in which a snarling British lion leaps on a crouching tiger, again disturbed by the bodies of a woman and infant.
An atmosphere of terror pervades Joseph Noel Paton’s In Memoriam, which was shown at the Royal Academy’s 1858 summer exhibition. A group of fearful women and children are huddled in a room in what must be Cawnpore, for the severed hand of a child lies on the floor. One woman clasps an infant to her while another holds a Bible; beyond, at the end of a narrow corridor, a door is being opened by a villainous sepoy. There is no question what is about to happen, and the frightening implications of the picture made some argue that it should never have been displayed. It was said that one young lady fainted contemplating the scene. Bowing to pressure, Paton withdrew the study and hastily repainted it, replacing the mutineer with a reassuring bearded Highlander to give his story a ‘happy ending’. It was re-titled In Memoriam, Henry Havelock.14
The artists had responded to the stories that were circulating during 1857 and early 1858 which alleged that women had been raped, sometimes tortured by the mutineers. These tales had a disturbing effect on public opinion; the mutiny was more than a violation of trust, it was a brutal assault on national ideals of womanhood and it placed the perpetrators beyond the pale of mercy. The violation of women, more than anything else, justified the retribution which was being handed out and reported throughout the press. On 31 October the Illustrated London News showed pictures of mutineers being hanged (executions were still public in Britain and drew large crowds in London and the provinces), and of others being blown from cannon with flying limbs clearly visible amid the smoke. Such vignettes and lurid eyewitness accounts of shootings and hangings whetted the public appetite for more. The voice from the pulpit was stern and echoed those many Old Testament demands for mass slaughter delivered by Jehovah to the Israelites. The Bishop of Carlisle demanded severe punishments in a sermon on 7 October, a day designated by Queen Victoria as one in which her church-going subjects should fast, consider the nation’s sins and pray for God’s assistance in India. Anglican wrath was matched by Presbyterian. In Edinburgh, Dr Cumming forthrightly denounced the ‘whining sentimentalism’ of anyone who dared question the rightness or severity of retribution then being served out by Britain’s soldiers.15
In India, careful enquiries revealed that rape and torture had not been the prelude to the murder of European women.16 This information, one official noted, was of some comfort to those who had lost wives, sisters and daughters, but there were many in Britain who refused to accept it. In February 1858, Lord Malmesbury told the Lords that he had private information that women had been raped and tormented, but refused to give either details or sources.17 By then the public mood was less frenzied and horror stories were treated with a degree of scepticism. One Scottish journal felt obliged to prefix a letter describing the mutiny of the 34th Bengal NI in Chittagong as from ‘a perfectly trustworthy source’, which suggests that the public was becoming wary of hair-raising horror stories.18 Investigation into the fate of Miss Wheeler, who had preferred to die unsullied, revealed that she had made no such choice, but had, it appeared, been abducted by a Muslim with whom she was later found to be living.19 Nonetheless, it was deemed prudent for women to carry revolvers when they accompanied their husbands on campaign.20
Given the choice between telling the truth or repeating the legend, James Grant took the latter course in his novel First Love and Last Love: A Tale of the Indian Mutiny. Although it appeared ten years after the suppression of mutiny, it contains many passages which shed a revealing light on contemporary attitudes towards women and their sexual maltreatment. Its author was born in 1822 and served as an ensign in the 62nd Regiment until 1843, when he turned to writing, producing over sixty history books and novels during the next forty-seven years. In many respects, First Love and Last Love was a conventional romance in which two eminently eligible young officers set their caps towards two pretty young ladies, Magdalene and Kate Weston, the daughters of a clergyman. The course of love is more than usually convoluted and full of adventures, for the background is Delhi in the spring and summer of 1857.
The two girls and their younger sister, Polly, have other, sinister admirers, Mirza Mughal and Mirza Ali Bakht, the son and grandson of Bahadur Shah, then King of Delhi. The two men follow the sisters through the streets of Delhi, provoking one of the heroes, Jack Harrower, to rail against them as: ‘A couple of d___d impertinent niggers.’ Inside their father’s palace, the two princes are plotting a rebellion which, one says, will ‘fill our tents with gold mohurs, and the white-skinned girls of the Europeans’. Grant explains the roots of this desire:
To the brutal Mussulman [Muslim] and the sensual Hindu, the position occupied by an English lady, or any Christian woman, seems absurd and incomprehensible; hence came the mad desire to insult, degrade and torture, ere they slay them.21
This is the fate of the European women in Delhi once the mutiny is under way. In passages which, for the period, were extraordinarily explicit, white women ‘were outraged again and again before they were slaughtered’, or forced to suffer ‘every indignity that the singularly fiendish invention of the Oriental mind could suggest’. Polly, the youngest Weston sister, falls into the hands of Babu Singh, who strips her to the waist before delivering her to Mirza’s zenana (ladies’ quarters), where she rejects his advances and is thrown, naked, into the streets. When Delhi has fallen and her tormentor has been shot, she is found, crucified.
For all its elements of grand guignol, and there are plenty of them, First Love and Last Love presents a picture which would have been understandable to those who were appalled by what had apparently happened in India. Whereas the young officers regard women as creatures to be set on a pedestal and treated with honour and Christian chiva
lry, the Indians see them as playthings without feelings. Moreover, as Polly’s steadfastness suggests, no truly pure women could ever be raped entirely against their will, a foolish contemporary assumption that largely explains why English courts often handed out light sentences to rapists.
Equally realistic, but in different ways, is the vivid novel My Escape from the Mutineers in Oudh. It was also from the pen of a soldier, Captain Gibney, who preferred to remain anonymous, and was published in September 1858. It claims to be autobiographical and some of its material prompted the Atheneum to wonder where fact began and fiction ended. The appearance of ‘irascible, ignorant and tyrannical commanding officers and slang-talking, smoking, drinking and dissatisfied subalterns’ indicated to the priggish reviewer that the book was fabrication; he obviously knew nothing of India or the Indian army.22
The actual mutiny plays a relatively small part in what is an exciting picaresque novel full of well-observed local colour, frank comment and convincing dialogue. The Company’s officers embrace all the vices listed by the reviewer and petty snobbery is endemic. In one mess, a drunken young officer asks a poor colleague: ‘“How did you come to India? Did the parish send you?”’ The hero and narrator, Phillip Villars, also encounters his countrymen’s attitude towards the Indians, who are everywhere referred to as ‘niggers’. On arrival, he hears from an old hand of the curative and punitive values of ‘a fearful kick’, which he termed a ‘lifter’, on the natives. There is warm praise for Sir John Lawrence and his knot of young administrators in the Punjab, who made decisions and dispensed justice swiftly, winning respect and affection, unlike the ‘rich old civilians choaking with pride and satisfaction at their position and immunity from censure’ who ruled Bengal. Missionaries were depicted as overfed creatures whose self-indulgence set the natives a poor example.