“Othering” Oneself: European Civilian Casualties and Representations of Gendered, Religious, and Racial Ideology During the Indian Rebellion of 1857

Home , 1980 Moradabad riots, Bengal Native Infantry, Indian Rebellion of 1857, John William Kaye, Kunwar Singh, Tatya Tope

“OTHERING” ONESELF: EUROPEAN CIVILIAN CASUALTIES AND REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDERED, RELIGIOUS, AND RACIAL IDEOLOGY DURING THE INDIAN REBELLION OF 1857

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

Florida Gulf Coast University

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirement for the Degree of

Masters of Arts in History

Stefanie A. Babb

2014

APPROVAL SHEET

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Masters of Arts in History

______

Stefanie A. Babb

Approved: April 2014

______

Eric A. Strahorn, Ph.D. Committee Chair / Advisor

______

Frances Davey, Ph.D

______

Habtamu Tegegne, Ph.D.

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.

One must claim the right and the duty of imagining the future, instead of accepting it.

—Eduardo Galeano

CONTENTS

PREFACE v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE HISTORIOGRAPHY 12

CHAPTER TWO LET THE “OTHERING” BEGIN 35 Modes of Isolation 39 Colonial Thought 40 Racialization 45 Social Reforms 51 Political Policies 61 Conclusion 65

CHAPTER THREE LINES DRAWN 70 Outbreak at Meerut and the Siege on Delhi 70 The Cawnpore Massacres 78 Changeable Realities 93 Conclusion 100

CONCLUSION 102

APPENDIX A MAPS 108

APPENDIX B TIMELINE OF INDIAN REBELLION 112

BIBLIOGRAPHY 114

Preface

This thesis began as a seminar paper that was written in conjunction with the

International Civilians in Warfare Conference hosted by Florida Gulf Coast University,

February, 2012. The conference examined the experiences of civilians in warfare in broad comparative chronological, disciplinary, and regional concentrations. I chose to develop my original paper, dealing largely with the racial and religious aspects of the 1857 Rebellion and the process of “othering,” into this thesis, which also incorporates gender, and the theories of

“groupness” and “imagined communities.” The nature of civilians and warfare lends itself to a more philosophical understanding of history and the choices individuals, cultures, and nations make that affect the people around them.

I owe a large portion of my investigation to earlier historians who have exhaustively researched the 1858 Rebellion. For this study, I have relied on primary resources, mainly personal accounts of European men and women, as well as colonial discourse and legal acts. I have chosen to use the English spelling for Indian names and places, except when used in direct quotations because of the nature of my sources. I also utilized scholarship from myriad fields including sociology and philosophy in order to take an interdisciplinary approach to this topic.

My aim was to create a theoretically grounded historical analysis of the European civilian victim experience during the 1857 Rebellion in an attempt to understand the intentions behind indiscriminate killings by both the British and the rebels.

Acknowledgments

So many people in my life have made this thesis a reality as I truly could not have only finished, but begun this process without them. First and foremost I would like to acknowledge and thank my thesis advisor and mentor for the past six years, Dr. Eric Strahorn. Without his knowledge, passion, and expertise on the topic of South Asia, I may never have been able to appreciate or understand its culturally diverse and fascinating history. I would also like to thank my other thesis committee members, Dr. Frances Davey and Dr. Habtamu Tegegne who devoted their professional skills to reading and critiquing my thesis. In addition, I would like to thank all of my professors at FGCU who have truly influenced my understanding of history, especially Dr.

Nicola Foote and Dr. Melodie Eichbauer; inspirational because of their professionalism and intelligence, but more importantly because they are amazingly thoughtful women, activists, and academics.

I thank my family—Mom, Dad, and Sarah—for their love and support; my Aunt Kitty for inspiring me from a young age to pursue knowledge beyond my own culture and its understanding of the world; my friend, John, for so much…; my colleagues in the history program for commiserating with me about the stresses of graduate school and inspiring me with their hard work and friendship; and the FGCU library staff, especially Rachel Tait, for putting up with my ridiculously late book returns and my extensive interlibrary loan requests.

Lastly, and most importantly, I thank Todd, who for the past twelve years has supported, trusted, and loved me in more ways than I ever deserved; you carry my heart. As with everything in my life and my life itself, this thesis is dedicated to my son, Mason.

Introduction

Civilian deaths that occurred during the 1857 Rebellion are innumerable. Thousands of

Indian civilians were indiscriminately murdered by the British and a comparatively low 1,000 to

1,500 British civilians were murdered by the rebels.1 The attacks on civilians by both the British and rebels were deliberate. Civilians have always been victim to injury or death during times of war, the euphemistic “collateral damage” of military strikes; however, one must consider the particular conditions that made civilians in the case of the 1857 Rebellion direct targets for attacks and not just unfortunate bystanders. By using the smaller and more documented cases of

European civilian victims, we can see that “othering” is in fact a reciprocal process that rationalizes violence on universal scale during a time of upheaval.2

In the following quotation by Queen Victoria, we see a variety of factors that help explain the nature of events that took place in India between 1857 and 1858. In 1857, in a letter to Lady

Canning—wife of Lord Canning, the Governor General of India during the Rebellion—Queen

Victoria struggles with comprehending the actions of the Indian rebels during the siege on

Cawnpore, where they massacred European women and children hostages: “My heart bleeds for the horrors that have been committed by people once so gentle (who seem to be seized with some awful mad fanaticism…) on my poor Country Women and their innocent little children.”3

1 Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, “The ‘Other’ Victims of 1857,” presented at the Center for South Asia Studies, Edinburgh, July 2007, at “Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857,” a conference funded as part of the “Mutiny at the Margins” project by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/mutiny/confpapers/llewellyn-paper.pdf (accessed December 1, 2012), 1.

2 The philosophical concept of “othering” was popularized in Edward Said’s book Orientalism and will be discussed in further detail later. Simply put, it refers to the defining of oneself through the existence of something or someone else’s differences.

This short excerpt reveals an assortment of explanatory features pertaining to the atmosphere of the 1857 Rebellion. Most importantly we see that women and children, or as a broader category, civilians, were directly targeted by the rebels during the Indian Rebellion.

Queen Victoria also states that a “mad fanaticism” must have consumed the rebels to have been able to act with such violence. Another noteworthy excerpt, “by a people once so gentle,” clearly generalizes an entire group of people—a trademark of essentialism and imperialism—by placing characteristics on that entire group; that is, “gentle” and just prior, “fanaticism.” This clearly shows her differentiation between groups, however general, and implies the partition between both the “us” and “them” that occurred in English mindsets. Whether her opinion is valid or not, a final analysis of the Queen’s statement also demonstrates that she noticed a change in behavior within this generalized group. Was this change in behavior real or imagined and what caused it to occur? Queen Victoria may have perceived a swift shift in the action or

“mindsets” of South Asians, but the shift towards violence was not swift like Queen Victoria implied, and was certainly not just exercised by South Asians. It was a gradual construction of hostility that manifested in the 1857 Rebellion and begs historians to examine why there was a sudden eruption of violence against civilians by those who participated in the insurrection, and for this particular study, why European women and children were directly targeted as enemies by the rebels.

My thesis seeks to scrutinize the 1857 Rebellion, which intensified the racial, religious, and gendered ideologies that encompassed the ethos of the Europeans residing in South Asia prior to and during the Rebellion causing them to identify themselves or others within particular groups creating sharp divisions between the communities. Further, it aims to prove that

3 Queen Victoria, Letter to Charlotte Canning from Balmoral Castle, September 8, 1857, reprinted in Virginia Surtees, Charlotte Canning: Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria and Wife of the First Viceroy of India 1817-1861 (London: J. Murray, 1975), 237.

European civilians were direct targets for attacks during the Rebellion, that there were apparent gendered experiences for the victims, and that these killings were a result of the latent racial and religious tensions in India, which were deepened by the socio-political reforms introduced by the

British. Therefore, through early imperial philosophy, racial and moral anxieties, and their own homogenization of and hostility towards Indians, the British caused themselves to also be treated as an entity by their enemies during the Rebellion, allowing for civilian deaths. If the goal of the rebels (as we will see) was to destroy anything intrinsically “British” than they were certainly working within the parameters of generalization—the same power structure used by the British during the previous century of early colonization. Most historians agree that nineteenth century social and political policies introduced to India through the East India Company were leading impetuses for the mutiny turned uprising. I believe that through these policies, British social and religious values were responsible for not only categorizing Indians, but the British themselves, as

“others” in India, therefore, strengthening the barriers between the “occident” and “orient”—to borrow Said’s terminology—causing a lack of distinction between “civilian” and “enemy” in terms of being targets for attacks by the rebels during the Uprising.

Prior to Queen Victoria’s letter to Lady Canning and the Cawnpore massacres, the mutiny first occurred in the city of Meerut, just outside of Delhi. Within hours of the sepoys first shooting their officers, civilian riots broke out, off-duty British soldiers were attacked, European homes were burned, and the mob attacked every European man, woman, and child with whom they came in contact.4 Noncombatants were targeted from the onset of the insurrection, and native civilians who had not previously joined in violent upheaval suddenly became fervent

4 For a detailed narrative of the events at Meerut see J.A.B. Palmer, The Mutiny Outbreak at Meerut in 1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). The term “sepoys” or sipahis is used to describe Indian soldiers under the command of British officers of the East India Company, but technically meant a private soldier in the infantry. See Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India, 1857 (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 398.

4 supporters of the mutinous Indian soldiers. Only two months after the initial outbreak of mutiny in Meerut, a gruesome manifestation of rebellion took place during the Cawnpore massacres when European hostages were misleadingly led to “rescue” boats and then systematically murdered by their Indian captors. The men who survived the initial round of attacks were then shot dead on the shores, while Queen Victoria’s “poor Country Women and innocent little children” were held for another two weeks until they met an even grislier death. Why were all

Europeans targeted during this attack and not just the men in the British Army; and why were women treated differently than the men who were shot onshore, with their capture and delayed yet impending death? These two events during the Rebellion, that is, the cases of Meerut and

Cawnpore, not only exhibit how latent fears and prejudices manifest themselves in violence, but warrant further investigations into how and why Europeans and Indians, civilians and offenders, understood and targeted their enemies.

Utilizing the European civilian victims of 1857 as an analytical lens assists in examining such ideologies as gender, race, and empire that existed at this time. Civilians—that is, those who prior to the Rebellion were not militarized but later become voluntarily or involuntarily combatants or victims—illustrate how the Rebellion evolved from a sepoy mutiny into a popular insurrection that lasted over a year. Attacks on and participation of civilians directly relates to how individuals identified themselves and others in terms of racial, religious, and gendered divisions. For this paper, I have worked within the theoretical framework of these contrasts, the most obvious being between the Europeans and native populations and civilians and military; however, there were other divisions, most notably between racial or ethnic groups, religions, and men and women that influenced the outcome of the civilian experience during the Rebellion.

During the late Victorian era colonized people, under the Imperial crown of Britain, were thought of as children—primitive versions of the civilized white man, devoid of the “virtues of cleanliness,” as it was so put in a soap advertisement from 1899.5 Even earlier, in the 1879 study

La Psychologie des Foules, Gustave le Bon claimed that the intelligence of women “represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man.”6 Here we see a lucid example of the interconnectedness of racial and gender inferiority overlapping in late nineteenth century Europe. But did these ideologies on gender and racism exist much earlier in Britain and Europe, and were they, by chance, brought into South Asia prior to the 1857 Rebellion through the East India Company contributing towards violence against civilians? I believe that they did, and that the questions that this thesis answers surrounding the involvement of European civilians as victims and agents of war, are historically important inquiries. Scholars acknowledge that it was social and political factors that provoked the violence behind the 1857 mutiny, but from where did those ideologies arise, by who were they perpetuated, and how did they contribute to the violence against civilians?

This thesis will contribute to current scholarship on gender and empire and demonstrate that the use of gender as a category of analysis by itself is not quite sufficient and does not allow for a deep understanding of the social hierarchies that exist within the imperial landscape. Most of the European civilians murdered were the wives and children of East India Company employees. There were few male civilians residing in South Asia at this time; nevertheless, the nature of these attacks add a gendered undercurrent to the murders and raises questions about how the social constructs of gender and race overlapped as fomenting factors for the attacks on

5 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 32-33.

6 Gustave le Bon, La Psychologie des Foules (1879), 60-6, trans. by Robert K. Merton, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Viking, 1960).

6 civilians. Were women seen as separate targets from the military or were all Europeans just seen as the enemy? Further, had gender played as significant of a role as it did in later systematic attacks on women? An even broader question that I explore is: how did race, religion, and gender factor into European civilian victims’ experiences as well as the British reprisals against

Indians and their subsequent colonization of India; did the British utilize these social categories in order to assert political hegemony over India?

Gender, race, and religion are not distinct spheres within the context of imperialism and cannot be isolated from one another as separate categories of analysis. Gender must, almost without exception, be evaluated in conjunction with class, race, sexuality, and national identity when being analyzed within the framework of empire. The yearlong rebellion most certainly created an environment in which ideology and social constructions congealed and materialized in the form of violence against civilians.

Along with gender theory, this thesis also engages with post-colonial theory, particularly the concept of “othering” through the works of Edward Said, Rogers Brubaker, and Benedict

Anderson. It is apparent that these perceptions of “groupness” traverse gender, race, and colonial representations of Indian masculinity and European femininity.7 Theories on

“groupness” and “imagined communities,” the title of Anderson’s 1983 book on nationalism, help to prove that boundaries between “civilian” and “military” or “friend” and “enemy” are abstract and fluid, though extremely powerful. It is with personal identification and the classification of people into groups that attacks on civilians can be justified by their perpetrators.

Warfare produces an environment in which “groupness” thrives and becomes a strong incentive for violence. Engaging with these theories is a useful methodology that creates the friction needed to draw out larger substantive conclusions and generate new insights into the social

7 I have borrowed the term “groupness” from sociologist Rogers Brubaker.

7 atmospheres in which the Rebellion took place, assisting in the understanding of violence used by and against civilians.

I owe a large portion of my investigation to earlier historians who have exhaustively researched the 1857 Rebellion creating overviews and perspectives that help set a historiographically solid basis for my arguments. For this study, I have also relied heavily on primary resources, mainly personal accounts of European men and women who recorded their own experiences in South Asia during the Rebellion. Most of the accounts were published soon after the Rebellion and though emotionally charged and sometimes fabricated, offer insight into the mentalities of those who experienced the perils of the Uprising. These accounts are often inflammatory responses to the “mutiny” and tend to be written as biased recollections that ignore the defeated Indians’ experience. Nevertheless, these accounts and accounts prior to the

Rebellion are extremely useful for illustrating the European/British mentality that provoked reprisals, but more importantly acted as a basis for actions taken by the British before and during the Rebellion. The practicality of these sources comes from the blatant racial and gendered language used. The fact that the authors willingly expressed these sentiments prior to and following the Rebellion, whether the story from which these sentiments arise are fabricated or not, shows their personal, and if looked at collectively, their mutual understandings of civilizational characteristics, racial hierarchies, and the ideologies used to construct colonialism and a power structure in South Asia.

As well as the more cultural sources used, I have also looked into the political policies of the Company in regards to the treatment of Indians within the racial, religious, and gendered spheres of ideology. The combination of legal acts and colonial discourse allows for a deconstruction of the British experience in the same method the experience was created. I have

8 tried to maintain a balance in both Indian and British sources; however, the latter is more heavily represented because of large spectrum of accounts published as well as issues with translation of the former. Because of these limitations, this thesis leans towards contributing to a history of imperial formation and the construction of British identity against a background of the perceived

Indian, which influenced “groupness” and the attacks against civilians. Some of the sources used in my thesis can be considered produced out of the imperialist paradigm of academic tradition; however, I use these sources as a means to understand how and explain that imperialist ventures were formed through limiting accounts of personal interaction and experience between individuals in the colonies and also through exaggerating the communal concerns of the more powerful administrators—often white, male, elitist, and ardent imperialists—who understood how much imperial ascendency relied on essentialism and generalities. These administrators also understood the fragility of the colonial structure in regards to the diversity of the cultural, political, and social terrain they were maneuvering and used state policy to control the large indigenous population, disregarding the actual and varied needs of the Indians. The Governor

Generals of the East India Company did not value the Indian experience unless it directly influenced or threatened the stability of the Company. Therefore, by analyzing discourse between the metropole and South Asia, one can see the transparency of European or British concerns. The lack of the Indian voice in this discourse is the dynamic that reveals how British identity construction merely relied on perceptions of “Indianness,” which changed based on the political, psychological, and material requirements of Europeans. Colonial discourse analysis, though limiting, allows me to see how British Eurocentrism created a solid basis for their own group formation in South Asia. By using this type of methodology I reveal the issues with homogenizing post-colonial historiographical methods and problematize the history of actual

European identity construction that employed similar tactics—how communal identity can only be formed through generalities and perceptions of shared characteristics.

For the same reasons I cannot provide a better contribution to Indian historiography of the Rebellion, because of Indian source limitations, my reliance on Saidian analysis disallows for a more integrated social historical methodology on the part of the Indians. It also places limitations on the extent of writing a history of European and Indian interaction. Nonetheless, it underscores the European process of communal identity that neglected the actual Indian experience yet aggressively utilized a Eurocentric view of South Asia as a means to further colonization. Discourse analysis, therefore, reveals a lot about the European colonial mindset, the process of “othering,” and the construction of self, which influences my argument that

Europeans created a distinct Britishness in India through these strategies, leading to their civilian population’s ultimate demise. This work, largely informed by post-colonial works that tend to deconstruct colonial discourse to reveal how it fashions the colonized “other,” aims to use

European discourse to reveal how it contributed to the fashioning of the colonizer “self.”

I have organized this paper into three chapters, two of which I intend to investigate the inquiries set forth in this introduction. The first chapter is a literature review in which I extensively discuss the historiography of the 1857 Rebellion, post-colonial studies, and gender and empire, outlining the historiographical framework in which my thesis rests. The second chapter, “Let the ‘Othering’ Begin,” will set a historical context for the Rebellion and analyze the various factors that led to the eruption of violence in 1857. In this section I will map the political and social environment in Company-ruled India and discuss European, or more specifically Victorian England’s, emerging and shifting ideologies on gender, race, and religion that were disseminated in South Asia through the East India Company. I also reposition the

10 social and political policies that were the leading impetuses for the Rebellion into, what I term,

“modes of isolation” and I address the differences between the East India Company in India and the metropole in regards to how they correspondingly thought and acted on these ideologies both universally and individually—in policy and in actuality.

The evidence set forth in chapter three, “Lines Drawn,” acts as the crux of my argument.

I have chosen to dissect the cases of Meerut and Delhi at the onslaught of insurrection and the

Cawnpore massacres because of their distinct circumstances involving civilians, and more specifically women and children. These two events display examples of civilian participation, as both victims and perpetrators, and exhibit how race, morality, and gender intersected during the course of the Rebellion in relation to Britain’s “modes of isolation.” It is divided into three sections: “Outbreak in Meerut” and “The Cawnpore Massacres,” which cover the first few days of the Rebellion in Meerut and the plight of Cawnpore respectively, and “Changeable Realities,” where I analyze various cases by applying the post-colonial theories of “othering” and

“groupness” as defined by Said, Brubaker, and Anderson. Using these concepts as implements, I will introduce new ideas about the reasoning behind the murders of civilians. How firm were the lines between civilian and military or even Indian and European? This section deconstructs the boundaries drawn between groups and attempts to determine that individual identification with a particular group or individual categorization of people as a group was a powerful incentive for violence, yet abstract and changeable. Finally, in my conclusion, in addition to drawing together my findings, I address the future of gendered, racial, and religious ideologies following the insurrection. I will briefly touch on how some events during the Rebellion, and the Rebellion as a whole, were appropriated by the British government in order to assert political hegemony and control over their South Asian subjects, thus supporting my assertion that group identification

11 was a very powerful incentive and justification for imperial pursuits and violence against the

“other.”

By using European civilians as an analytical lens and applying post-colonial theories set forth by Said and other post-colonial thinkers, I will uncover deeper truths about the effects of

European colonial and racial ideology and socio-political reforms on South Asians during the

1857 Rebellion. These “modes of isolation” were responsible for “othering” the Indian, but the process is reciprocal and can be self-inflicted. Therefore, the British caused themselves to become the “other” in India, producing a lack of distinction between “civilian” and “military” in terms of being direct targets for attacks by the rebels. We will see that the marked categorization of people into groups—even if the groups were constructed with abstract boundaries—created a space for violent and gendered attacks on civilians during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

CHAPTER ONE

Historiography

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 has been a topic of historical scholarship for over a century and there is no dearth of sources, investigations, books, personal narratives, and memoirs on the insurrection. Primarily, early historical literature on the Rebellion concentrated on the nature of the outbreak. The question of why the sepoys rebelled was thoroughly covered by mid- nineteenth century historians Charles Ball and John Kaye. Ball and Kaye both focused on the

“mutiny” aspect of the Rebellion and placed culpability on the sipahis, who tended to be unhappy with their treatment in the army and the army’s lack of respect for caste status and relations.8 Kaye specifically attributed the greased cartridges of the newly issued Enfield rifle to the dissatisfaction and anxiety among the sepoys as well as other factors that specifically related to caste status and religious contamination.9 Differing from early histories surrounding the

Rebellion, V.D. Savarkar wrote from an Indian nationalist perspective in the early twentieth century, calling the Uprising an “Indian War of Independence.”10 Eventually this notion was challenged by other Indian nationalist scholars like R.C. Majumdar, S.B. Chauduri, S.N. Sen, and KK. Datta during the mid-twentieth century. They continued to analyze the Rebellion within a nationalistic framework, but nonetheless challenged early nationalist perspectives and incorporated the Marxist position of early twentieth century historians, M.N. Roy and Rajni

8 Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny: Giving a Detailed Account of the Sepoy Insurrection in India; And a Concise History of the Great Military Events Which Have Tended to Consolidate British Empire in Hindostan (London: London Print. and Pub. Co, 1858), 33-40; John William Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857-1858 (London: W.H. Allen, 1880), Vol. 1, 487-496.

9 Biswamoy Pati, introduction to The 1857 Rebellion: Debates in Indian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), xx.

10 Savarkar’s book, The Indian War of Independence of 1857, was published in London in 1909 under the alias “An Indian Nationalist” and later published in Calcutta in 1930 under his real name.

Palme Dutt. Majumdar acknowledges that the Rebellion exudes certain characteristics of early nationalist movements, yet attests that there is not enough evidence to support these claims.

Emphasized in Majumdar’s The Sepoy Mutiny, the four most prominent rebels of 1857, Bahadur

Shah, Nana Sahib, the Rani of Jhansi, and Kunwar Singh, were not coordinated in their efforts against the British and undoubtedly had different personal agendas throughout the Rebellion, underscoring the lack of an underlying patriotic common cause.11 Shifting away from the nationalist perspective, Indian scholars like P.C. Joshi and Syed Ahmad Khan began to analyze the widespread support of the Rebellion and the reasons for that popular support—leaning toward the social dissatisfaction with Company-rule and the contemporary policies in which they were enacting.

Scholars generally agree that religious and social reforms of the early nineteenth century were a major factor in the popular support of the Rebellion. Although these later twentieth century historians, including Eric Stokes, Tapti Roy, and Rudrangshu Mukherjee—whose article on the Cawnpore massacres will soon be discussed in further detail—focus on the popular participation and protest during the Rebellion, they tend to neglect the specific motives for attacking civilians and focus more on the participation of the native civilian population on a large scale.12

In 1978, historian Christopher Hibbert produced a respected work on the Rebellion that fixed together the differing and sometimes opposing conclusions of earlier mutiny scholars to create a well-researched, substantial, and innovative piece of scholarship. The Great Mutiny:

India 1857 not only revived older arguments surrounding the Rebellion—encompassing both

11 R. C. Majumdar, The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963).

12 For a comprehensive look at past and current debates on the Rebellion see Biswamoy Pati, ed., The 1857 Rebellion: Debates in Indian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2007.

14 nationalistic and imperialistic approaches—it is also one of the first historical works to present the issue of race and its influence on actions during (and the outcome of) the war. Hibbert’s book defined a new era of scholarship on the Rebellion and created a space for later works dealing with race and mutiny—to include Mukherjee’s article on Cawnpore. Andrew Ward’s

1996 monograph on the Cawnpore massacres, Our Bones are Scattered: The Cawnpore

Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857, is a comprehensive account of the siege on Cawnpore and though considered a more popular history is thoughtfully researched with its arguments solidly supported, offering a detailed narrative of the events at Cawnpore.

There has been other interdisciplinary literature on the topic of the Rebellion that I have found extremely helpful in my overall analyses. Christopher Herbert’s War of No Pity, published in 2008, argues against “the deleterious effects of a longish course of doctrinaire anti- imperialist scholarship” on the Mutiny.13 Strictly analyzing post-Mutiny literature, Herbert unveils Britain’s obsession with the women and children victims, the stress and outcry that the

Mutiny caused, and the controversial accounts of early anti-Victorianism that eventually led to a modernist movement in England. Herbert’s work demonstrates the importance of questioning dominating, influential genres of historical analysis as a whole, which, as a whole, have condemned entire societies, in this case the Victorians, and do not recognize the contradictions within Victorian society in regards to their own classification of the 1857 Rebellion, its trauma on the Victorian conscience, if you will. Though Herbert’s work dissects the Mutiny from a perspective intending to reveal truths about the Victorian conscience post-Mutiny, I aim to deconstruct the cases of Meerut and Cawnpore—a snapshot of the overall Rebellion—to reveal

13 Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 17. Herbert directly challenges the notions of racial ferocity and jingoism that has saturated mutiny scholarship over the past century, specifically the post-colonial perspective’s anti-imperialist assault on Victorians.

15 truths about why the massacres and actions that disillusioned the post-Mutiny Victorian society happened in the first place. Herbert states that “key characteristics of Victorian Mutiny literature, so I argue, is that it is monolithic and cannot properly be read as anything like a confident allegory of British virtue and racial entitlement to rule.”14 Yet, “British virtue and racial entitlement” in a broader, less personal sense, may have very well created the boundaries between “ruler” and “subject” or “foreign” and “not foreign” that led to the “othering” of all

Europeans by the rebels, causing civilians to be violently targeted during the Rebellion.

In regards to the impact of the Rebellion specifically on the civilian population, Rosie

Llewellyn-Jones has produced some intriguing work. In “The ‘Other’ Victims of 1857,” a paper presented in Edinburgh at the Center for South Asian Studies 2007 conference, “Mutiny at the

Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857,” Llewellyn-Jones examines a group of victims that are often over looked in Mutiny historiography, namely, Anglo-Indians.15 Here she attempts to examine particular civilian groups within the Anglo-Indian community to include

Indian Christians, Indians working for the British, and widows. Llewellyn-Jones’s work is concerned primarily with the categorization of Anglo-Indians by both the British and Indians during the Rebellion, and how that categorization affected their outcome. The treatment of this particular group, which we will learn has fluid boundaries, offers insight into the treatment of

European civilians during the conflicts at Meerut and Cawnpore. Llewellyn reveals that during the crisis of rebellion, Anglo-Indians were counted as European by the British, therefore treated as the enemy by the Indian rebels. But what made an entire group—that is, all Europeans, male, female, child and adult alike—enemies in the first place? Working within the same vein as

14 Herbert, War of No Pity, 17.

15 “Anglo-Indian” is a term used to describe people who have one European parent and one South Asian parent. Prior to the term being officially adopted in 1935 the terms “Eurasian”, “East-Indian”, or “country-born” were used to describe people of mixed race.

Llewellyn-Jones’s investigation into Anglo-Indian victims, I aim to uncover the divisive motivations for targeting European civilians by Indian rebels beyond just the Anglo-Indian community to uncover both the racial and gendered underlying factors that led to their deaths.

Although the scholarship on the Rebellion is extensive, and includes discussions on civilian participation, the literature still leaves space for additional concentrated investigations into the implications of socially constructed racism and contemporary gender ideology, perpetuated by religious differences, on civilian victims during the Rebellion.

As previously mentioned, historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee, developed a provocative argument in his 1990 article “’Satan Let Loose upon Earth’: The Kanpur Massacres in India.”16

Focusing on the massacres at Cawnpore, Mukherjee suggests that the violent domination of the

British created a space for violent reprisals by the Indians, and that the racial ideology of the

British—that their superiority was “predestined by the birth and by the colour of their skin”— directly contributed to Indian violence against the British.17 He bases his argument on the structure of two “codes” of violence, which were demonstrated in the Cawnpore massacres: The first code being a public representation of a communal insurgency, and the second code being a private representation of a criminal insurgency. In both the public and private displays of violence, civilians were targeted or participated, whether accepted as immoral by the community or not.

To further Mukherjee’s argument, I would suggest that the development of racial ideologies also directly contributed to the attacks on the civilian populations in both the private and public spheres. The intentions of the rebels, particularly in the cases of Meerut and

16 “Kanpur” is the current Indian spelling for the city that was formerly “Cawnpore.”

17 Rudrangshu Mukherjee, “’Satan Let Loose upon Earth’: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857” Past and Present, no. 128 (August 1990): 93.

Cawnpore, were to defeat the British as an “other”; therefore, the distinctions made by the rebel groups were between Indian and European not military and civilian. The racial and religious bigotry that saturated East India Company philosophy, which was a reflection of the contemporary ideology of the metropole, in turn placed the British into a human-made construct that eventually set them apart as direct targets for assaults conducted by South Asians.

Adding to the debate on violence towards Europeans, scholar Barbara English challenged

Mukherjee’s conclusions in her 1994 article, “The Kanpur Massacres in Indian in the Revolt of

1857.” English criticizes Mukherjee’s historical methodology and argues that British colonial violence was not the primary culprit in the 1857 Rebellion; rather, that violence was already embedded in Indian society and was sparked by the changing socio-political atmosphere in

Northern India. English also raises her own questions about the Mutiny; for example, she called for a deeper analysis of the motives of the rebels and for further inquiries into the popular support of the common people, who had previously remained passive.

Positioned between Mukherjee’s and English’s dispute about communal involvement in the massacres or the various “codes” of violence, are other dynamics that need to be evaluated in order to understand the conflict between the Europeans and the Indian rebels. Steering clear of the debate surrounding the “codes” of violence, I address two underlying factors in Mukherjee’s and English’s arguments: that is, the presence of religion and race in regards to violence used by and against civilians during the insurrection.18 I would also like to address the apparent gendered violence that occurred during the Rebellion, specifically in the cases of Meerut and Cawnpore, which is lacking in both Mukerjee’s and English’s analyses. Women and children were targeted because of their classification as part of the “enemy” group; however, they were clearly placed

18 Race and religion are not always seen as separate entities, especially throughout the course of the Rebellion. They often become intertwined as we will see in some of the examples in Chapter Three.

18 within a subcategory as we can see by the treatment they received that was dissimilar to the handling of their adult male counterparts. The act of applying gender theory is integral to the comprehension of the multifaceted state of the Rebellion. In the cases of Meerut and Cawnpore we will see that gender, race, and religion all contributed to the categorization of people into groups and their treatment therein.

Late twentieth century genres of historical analysis that are integral to the development of my arguments include post-colonial studies, subaltern studies, and gender studies.19 The latter two responded to the gaps in post-colonial studies; however, post-colonial theory and gender theory are not that different. They run parallel in that they both deal with power and power imbalance. Nevertheless, when post-colonial scholarship discusses power imbalance, gender theory tends to be underemphasized. Subaltern studies, also dealing directly with power imbalance, emerged as a branch of post-colonial studies and stresses the importance of writing history from the perspective of the subjugated people.

One of the foundational post-colonial works that emerged in the late 1970s is Edward

Said’s Orientalism. Published in 1978 as a work of postcolonial critical theory, Orientalism deconstructs the discourse on the Orient and describes Orientalism as “knowledge of the Orient,” which places anything understood to be Oriental in categories—class for example—in order to scrutinize, study, judge, and govern it.20 His work emerged as a reaction to the imperialistic perspectives of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and sought to analyze the dominating frameworks that “contained and represented” Orientalism.21 Said successfully argues that

19 The term “subaltern” means any person in a lower position or rank and was borrowed from Gramsci’s use of the word in his Prison Notebooks. In particular, Subalternists focus on the effects of historical events on popular people as opposed to the selected elite.

20 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 41.

21 Said, Orientalism, 40.

Orientalism was constructed by the constant confrontations between the East and West, while setting boundaries for his study and acknowledging the controversy of his assertions.

Orientalism exposed the problems with Eurocentric historical interpretations of the past, thus underlining the importance of post-colonial studies and the works by which it produces. Said’s book, and its popularization of the concept of “othering,” has influenced scholarship in myriad disciplines. “Othering” is a conceptual implement that is integral to most arguments made by post-colonialists, subalternists, and gender historians alike. Over the past thirty years,

Orientalism has been praised as a profoundly significant analysis of the textual discourse on the

“Orient,” but has also been met with hostility and criticism from both intellectual and political spheres.

Several reproaches have been made by Said’s critics in response to Orientalism and its anti-imperial assertions about “East”/”West” confrontation. Edmund Burke, III and David

Prochaska, in the introduction to their edited volume Genealogies of Orientalism, specifically address the generalizing, somewhat, polemical tone of the book. Burke and Prochaska’s chapter,

“Introduction: Orientalism from Postcolonial Theory to World History,” offers a formal critique of Said’s work that places it within a historiographical context. They give an extensive overview of British, U.S., and French critiques of imperial thought to demonstrate that Orientalism was linked to a history of anti-imperial discourse, similar to the contention espoused by Herbert in

War of No Pity, as discussed above. Burke and Prochaska state that Said “imported the very dichotomies between powerful, active colonizers and passive peoples he otherwise sought to refute,” by homogenizing the West; a sentiment shared by most criticizers of post-colonial studies.22 Burke and Prochaska aim to relocate the critique of orientalism into a broader context

22 Edmund Burke, III and David Prochaska, “Introduction: Orientalism from Postcolonial Theory to World History” in Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 3.

20 of the human sciences as well as world history to show that orientalism was not unique to the

West. Their criticisms are noteworthy and appeal to my argument that the homogenization of people was practiced by various groups, not just the Europeans; though, Europeans benefited from their homogenization of the rest of the world during the colonial age and without colonialism other groups of people may not have reciprocated this generalizing process.

Throughout the Rebellion, we see that orientalism, or the romanticization turned standardization of an entire region or group of people from a region, was to a certain degree reflected by the

Indian rebels in the time of war to categorize all Europeans—not just the military—as the enemy; but, one must acknowledge that the seventeenth and eighteenth century European discourse on the “Orient,” to include South Asia, was emblazoned in the minds of those who traveled there in the early nineteenth century. Just as Said states that “Chateaubriand came to the

Orient as a constructed figure, not as a true self,” so early forms of colonial thought entered into

South Asia prior to the Rebellion contributing to the later social and political policies that

“grouped” natives and isolated the European community.23 The British chose to emphasize their perceived differences and created a “self” identity in order to “other” the Indians and formulate, support, and exact their imperial intentions. In other words, the process of “othering” is reciprocal and/or can be self-inflicted. Because of this process, the rebels were able to formulate stronger understandings of their own distinctiveness, by contributing to this method of abstract classification. In attacking European civilians, the rebels operated as a shadowy reflection of the

British’s own method of homogenization used to create a power hierarchy in South Asia.

One of the most enduring critiques of post-colonial studies, by feminist scholars and subalternists alike, is its lack of an extensive gender discussion. When discussing power and power imbalance, a keystone of post-colonial literature, one wonders how gender was left out, as

23 Said, Orientalism, 171.

21 it was in many influential works within the genre. A part of Burke and Prochaska’s introduction is heavily devoted to the historiography of gender and imperialism, in which they state that

Said’s treatment of the topic was lacking. However, gender as a category of analysis, as defined by historian Joan Scott, had yet to be introduced, much less solidified, by the time of

Orientalism’s publication; though, by 1978, there was a lot of feminist theory available. The issue is that Said tended to draw heavily on Foucault who lacked a gender analysis altogether.

Said turned to Foucault for the idea of discourse, which often overlooked the human experience, especially that of females. Therefore, Said’s treatment of gender at all is in itself an accomplishment, even if in need of expansion.

Burke and Prochaska indeed recognize Said’s advancement of gender history in their own denunciation of his deficiency in discussing women and gender; “Although Said discusses women and gender in Orientalism, notably in the section of Flaubert in Egypt, his approach largely ignores the salience of gender in colonial representations of the other that has become a central aspect of the post-Saidean critique of orientalism.”24 By merely creating debates about orientalism, Said in fact furthered debates on women and gender in colonial representations of the “orient.” Post-Saidean critique of orientalism would not exist without Saidean critique of orientalism, even in regards to gender. In Burke and Prochaska’s literature review of gender and imperialism—specifically highlighting notable feminist and subaltern historians such as Gayatri

Spivak, Lata Mani, and Julia Clancy-Smith—the authors discuss a series of gender scholarship that emerged in the late 1980s into the 1990s.25 Some of these works specifically respond to

24 Burke and Prochaska, “Introduction: Orientalism from Postcolonial Theory,” 28.

25 Burke and Prochaska, “Introduction,” 28.

Said’s “lack of gender.”26 With these responses, gendered post-colonial studies developed into the robust genre of historical analysis that it is today.

Spivak, in particular, has addressed the glaring issue of the marginalization of women, especially colonized women, in colonial discourse and archival material, but also in post-colonial theory and subaltern studies. The problem with the suppression of the Indian voice, in particular the colonized female, lies specifically in the inability to understand the subaltern-consciousness.

The subaltern consciousness, Spivak argues, “is not consciousness-in-general, but a historicized political species thereof.”27 Spivak also calls attention to the anti-humanist position that maintains that it is “always the desire for/of (the power of the Other) that produces an image of the self,” in “vague Hegelian limnings.”28 The issue with colonial discourse written by the elite, or other texts of counter-insurgency, is that the subaltern-consciousness is only formed through these considerations—quandaries for the historian attempting to reconstruct the experience of the colonial subaltern.29 Considering these predicaments, I cannot give the rebellious Indian an individual voice, especially by utilizing scholarship that relies on colonial discourse analysis to understand what white Europeans have made of non-Europeans. In this vein, however, I can look at what white Europeans have made of non-Europeans, and how those considerations contributed to what white Europeans made of themselves.

In her essay “Feminism and Critical Theory,” Spivak again underscores the problem with human discourse in general, especially in relation to the “female” or “woman” and how the terms

26 See Gayatri Spivak and Sarah Harasym, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990).

27 Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, 11.

28 Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, 11.

29 Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, 12.

23 are used in literary constructions of definition. Here, Spivak problematizes human discourse by stating it “articulates itself…in terms of three shifting ‘concepts’: language, world, and consciousness.”30 She goes on to say that “we operate with no other consciousness but one structured as a language…the category of language, then, embraces the categories of world and consciousness even as it is determined by them.”31 Though not a determinant for comprehensive historical conclusions, the historical predicament of consciousness construction that is inherent in the language of the texts and sources ascribed to colonial discourse can only be formed, at least with theoretical groundings, through its analysis. In an unconventional approach or understanding of the formation of consciousness, the language of elitist colonial discourse can be viewed as the consciousness of the colonizer and in similar metaphysical interpretations, as the basis for communal understandings of the “self” and the self-insulating process that led to universal violence during the Rebellion.

Even with the controversial nature of redefining an entire socially fabricated category,

Said’s powerful work offers an intense analysis of the historical discourse on orientalism and espouses new insights in understanding the vast structure of orientalism —a structure that was prominent in early forms of colonial thought in South Asia—and how it had been constructed and appropriated by various groups or countries to further political, military, or economic agendas. The importance of Orientalism lies in its controversial nature, without which a dialogue of criticism and deconstruction of the “orient”—and therefore, a more evolved and defined scholarship on gender and empire and methodological uses of deconstruction by

30 Spivak, “Feminism and Critical Theory,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 77.

31 Spivak, “Feminism and Critical Theory,” 78.

24 academic heavyweights like Aijaz Ahmed, R. A. Abou-El-Haj, or Spivak32—might not have ever emerged. Said’s “modest contribution”33 strove to create debates surrounding orientalism, and if

Prochaska and Burke state that the “critique of orientalism is far from exhausted” then Said’s work has certainly been effective.34 This is not to say that post-colonial studies was inclusive of gender discourse; it is to say that gender historians responded to post-colonial studies by acknowledging its shortcomings and producing provocative literature on the topic of gender and empire.

Subaltern studies emerged in the 1980s as a division of post-colonial studies, interested in post-colonial societies and the effects of imperialism and decolonization on subaltern people.

Spearheaded and heavily influenced by South Asian scholars Ranajit Guha and Gyanendra

Pandey, and centered on South Asian history, subaltern studies aims to resurrect the suppressed historical accounts of the marginalized masses. It not only challenges “Western” historians’ imperialistic conclusions, but the nationalist histories written by elite Indians who tend to follow the same model.35 An example of a subaltern history concerning the 1857 Rebellion is Gautam

Bhadra’s article “Four Rebels of Eighteen-Fifty-Seven.” In his article, Bhadra introduces four rebels that never received adequate, if any, attention from earlier historians. His four rebels—a small landlord, a cultivator, a poor tribal youth, and a Maulvi—counter the more admired and

32 See Aijaz Ahmed, “’Orientalism’ and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994) and Arif Dirlik, Vinay Bahl, and Peter Gran, History After the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

33 Said, Orientalism, 328.

34 Burke and Prochaska, “Introduction,” 45.

35 See Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

25 extensively researched rebels like Nana Sahib and Tatya Topi.36 His article emphasizes the participation and action taken by the majority of rebels during the war, not the few elite leaders.

As influential as subaltern studies was to the history of South Asia, and consequently to the history of the Rebellion, there remained a lack of attention towards gender relations and experiences in India. For instance, Bhadra asserts that past histories of the Rebellion lacked “the ordinary rebel, his role and his perception of alien rule and contemporary crisis.”37 Feminist historians ask the question: what about her role and her perceptions? If the history of subalterns is supposed to introduce missing narratives of marginalized groups, than it must include the narratives of women. In this regard, subaltern studies was critiqued by feminist historians, like

Spivak; nevertheless, subaltern studies, like the broader genre post-colonial studies, broke ground for scholarship on gendered experiences to be produced.

It is imperative to the narrative of civilian victims of the 1857 Rebellion to deconstruct their gendered experiences. As previously mentioned, the feminist response to post-colonial and subaltern studies produced some of the most pioneering scholarship on gender and empire.

Although the genre of women’s history that emerged and matured in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s produced myriad works on the lives of women and their experiences throughout history, an analysis of their lives within the context of gender and empire have only more recently been included in their historiography. More specifically—as we saw in the critique of Said and post-colonialism—gender and sexuality in relation to empire had been nearly neglected until the early 1990s.

36 Gautam Bhadra, “Four Rebels of Eighteen-Fifty-Seven,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 129-175.

37Bhadra, “Four Rebels,” 130. Emphasis in original.

Gender must be defined in order to understand its uses in historical methodology. One of the best examples of the definition of gender comes from sociologist Ann Oakley, who argued in her 1972 work Sex, Gender, and Society that

‘Sex’ is a word that refers to the biological differences between male and female…. ‘Gender’, however, is a matter of culture: it refers to the social classification into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’…. The constancy of sex must be admitted, but so also must the variability of gender.38

Therefore, “gender” is the socially constructed roles that are placed on both men and women, which vary based on temporal or geographical space—in our case, mid-nineteenth century South

Asia. Historians must explore how gender is constructed, as well as how masculinity and femininity interact with each other, and then use gender to examine the past.

Historian Joan W. Scott wrote an article in 1986 entitled “Gender: A Useful Category of

Historical Analysis,” which quickly became an important, pioneering piece of work that helped the burgeoning historical field of gender and sexuality to flourish. In this article, Scott stressed the differences in feminist and women’s scholarship to gender history and underscored the importance of studying men and women in relation to one another in order to fully understand them separately.39 Historians have built on Scott’s concept of using gender as a lens for exploring the past and proven that gender must be evaluated in conjunction with class, race, sexuality, and national identity especially within in the framework of empire. It is important to stress that South Asia in 1857 was not officially ruled by the Crown, but characteristics of empire and colonialism—as we will see in the next chapter—were heavily present during

38 Ann Oakley, Sex, Gender, and Society (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1972), 16.

39 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-1054.

Company-rule prior to the government takeover. Because of these colonial attitudes and consequently colonial-like policies, the framework of empire applies to the Rebellion.

To understand the field of gender history, one must look back to its precursor: women’s history. As a result of feminist social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, women slowly started to make their way back into the historical narrative of the past. The 1980s produced a remarkable increase of works on women’s history, sexuality, and gender, all of which set the stage for later works relating gender and empire.40 The late 1980s witnessed a transition from recuperative women’s history within imperialism toward gender history within imperialism with

Scott’s profound arguments on the uses of gender as a way to rethink historical paradigms.

In 1992, the collection of essays, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and

Resistance edited by Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, was published and serves as an early example of a gendered history that also successfully integrates class and race. Until the

1980s, imperialism was considered a masculine endeavor and therefore the experiences of women were virtually left out. With regards to empire as having masculine characteristics, when studying gender and empire, it is imperative to look at women of all classes and races because they too were oppressed inside and outside of the colonies. This collection of essays draws on the gendered experiences of Western women, that is, the plural roles they played as both victims and agents of empire and paternalism, interesting characteristics that may have aided in categorizing European women as the enemy during the Rebellion. The essays also integrated

40 Margaret MacMillan’s Women of the Raj, published in 1988, is characteristic of the first “recuperative” stage of women’s history. European Women and the Second British Empire by Margaret Strobel is another example of this type of women’s history in which she places women and their experiences back into the historical narrative. Margaret Strobel, nevertheless, became a leading contributor to gender and imperial scholarship with several of her later works. Some path-breaking works on sexuality, gender and empire are Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience published in 1990 and based on his article “Empire and Sexual Opportunity” published in 1988; Michel Foucault’s influential philosophical works, History of Sexuality, first published in 1980; and also printed in 1980, Kenneth Ballhatchet’s Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Politics and Their Critics, 1793-1905. Although there is an obvious connection between gender and sexuality, these earlier works focus on the latter.

28 insights from earlier works that aimed to assimilate women into the history of imperialism but failed to fully develop their involvement as more than a singular experience.41 As we will see later, in an example of a European woman who fought with the Indian rebels, women’s experiences in South Asia during the Rebellion were not singular, even within a particular ethnic group. Western Women and Imperialism follows historian Judith Bennett’s approach to women’s history in that it intends to break down the barriers that place women’s experiences into oversimplified stereotypes and explores the relationship between gender, race and class.42

The articles in Chaudhuri and Strobel’s collection primarily examine the British colonies because of the extensive imperial rule of Great Britain over a diverse range of people; more specifically, Africa and India. As a colonial framework, India is an ideal area of research and most scholarship on gender and imperialism use India as a case study because it exemplified the colonial atmosphere representative of the paternalism seen in most colonial ventures. Western

Women and Imperialism follows along these lines and a predominant number of articles examine the colonial system in India.

In 1995, three years after Chaudhuri and Strobel’s collection, Anne McClintock published her monograph, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial

Contest. McClintock’s book is a comprehensive monograph that spans colonial time and space, from Victorian England to post-colonial Africa, and focuses more on the sexualized image of women—but nevertheless, her conclusions are analogous to Chaudhuri and Strobel in that race

41 V. Bamfield’s On the Strength: The Story of the British Army Wife, Pat Barr’s The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India and Margaret MacMillan’s Women of the Raj published in 1974, 1976, and 1988 respectively, have all oversimplified the experience of the Western woman in the colonies and tend to be more of a narrative than a critical analysis of women.

42 Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, introduction to Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 4-5. In Judith Bennett’s article “Feminism and History,” published in Gender and History I (1989), she emphasizes the various ways in which women interacted with patriarchy. Even as active agents of empire, women were still influenced by patriarchal ideology. Therefore, women who conspired in perpetuating empire could dually be victims of empire.

29 and gender ideologies within the context of empire are undoubtedly connected. More precisely,

McClintock argues that race, gender, and class are not dissimilar spheres of experience that exist in isolation from each other; instead, they exist because of each other, even if in conflicting or contradicting relationships; that is, they are dependent on the functions in which each territory of race, class, and gender participates, yet they are not socially interchangeable.43 Imperialism cannot be sufficiently studied without a theory of gender dynamics, but to only use the category of gender for analysis, one dismisses the individual experiences of women that were formed through racial and social hierarchies. This is why the concepts of race and racialization, as well as “othering” and “groupness” are so important to my gender analysis of the 1857 Rebellion and its European civilian victims.

McClintock uses diaries, photographs, performance art, oral histories, novels, and a variety of other cultural material to analyze the conditions of Victorian imperial space. Through advertisements and cartoons, McClintock infers that the invention of race occurred quickly and simply as a way to justify and promulgate the imperial philosophy. I argue that this racialization occurred more swiftly in South Asia in the mid-nineteenth century because a colonial structure was already being practiced there by the East India Company; therefore, it needed justification for particular early imperial policies. That same justification, i.e. racialization and the practice of racial prejudices, becomes a mode of isolation for the European community. McClintock’s

Imperial Leather contributes new thought to the historiography of gender and imperialism while stressing the interrelationship and dependence of race and class on the existence of gender within the context of empire.

Women and the Colonial Gaze, edited by Tamara L. Hunt and Micheline R. Lessard, was published in 2002. This work fits into a short period during which gender scholarship moved

43 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 5.

30 away from its attempts at trying to integrate race, class, and gender with imperial history. In future works on gender and imperialism, you see a reemergence of emphasizing the significance of the “natural” integration of race, class, nationalism and gender. Hunt and Lessard’s objective is to view gender and imperialism through the eyes of the imperialists. These gender historians build on Edward Said’s construction of “othering” colonized people in Orientalism and Simone de Beauvior’s “othering” of the woman in her 1949 work The Second Sex, another enduring masterpiece that was a foundational text for feminist approaches in multiple disciplines. And though Hunt and Lessard’s book does not emphasize the integration of race with gender, it does offer an example of how gender historians use more theoretical concepts to study history within the social construct of gender. This thesis integrates the current methodologies of assimilating race, class, and gender with the concepts of “othering” by applying theory to the events of 1857.

Published in 2005, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton’s edited volume Bodies in

Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History includes essays on gender, empire and world history. Ballantyne and Burton emphasize the importance of using gender as a category of analysis within the context of empire and world history, because the cross-cultural exchanges made through colonial hegemony were shaped tremendously by “bodies” and religious, sexual, racial, and class relationships. The authors criticize world history for still applying the “add women and stir” model and challenge historians to further the dialogue on bodies in a global context—beyond what is even discussed in their own volume.44 They also offer a critique of colonial and post-colonial literature and underline the importance of looking at imperial ideology from varying perspectives; for example, colonial practices were present in

44 Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette M. Burton, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 7.

South Asia prior to the arrival of the British and in fact, the British borrowed some of their imperial ideology and structuring tactics from the Mughal Empire.

A more comprehensive volume on gender and British imperialism was published in 2004.

Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine, emphasizes the importance of understanding how the construction, practice, and experience of empire for both the colonizer and colonized was always gendered and influenced by the peoples understanding of sexual differences. The chapters argue that gender cannot be generalized and does not mean the same thing in all places at all times. It is merely a lens through which to analyze the choices and actions of the people involved in imperialism, working within an imperial paradigm, and imperial state policies. Most importantly, Levine’s book deconstructs the complexities of imperial formation—something that was occurring before and during the 1857 Rebellion—and does so by acknowledging gender as only one of many divisions placed on society that help structure imperialism; that is, race and class are integral to the understanding of gender within the framework of imperialism and are subject to change based on different social contexts. Levine claims that previous histories have not centralized gender and used it more as a supplement to their work on imperial studies.

Gender studies cannot be marginalized as a sub-branch of historical inquiry; rather, it must be seen as central to all historical inquiry because of gender’s influence on all aspects of empire and historical events.

Catherine Hall’s chapter “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century” first analyzed concepts of nation and gender, but then turned toward the racial influences within empire. She describes how “whiteness” became more defined in the colonies and took on a prominent role in building and maintaining empire.45 The Utilitarian ideology of James Mill

45 Catherine Hall, “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 49.

32 maintained the notion that the division between civilized and uncivilized rested in the treatment of a society’s women.46 Britain used Indian women’s “inferiority” to “white” women as a justification for the subjugation of India. “White” women also promulgated imperial ideology in their own interactions with Indian women. British women claimed to be connected with native women of the colonies through the “language of universal womanhood” and acted as advocates for social reform for native women, but did not understand the demeaning characteristics of the class and racial inequality of the native women’s dependence on the help of white upper-class women.47 Within the metropole during the era of empire, working-class women were subjected to the denigrating treatment of the superior classes of women who likened them to the “savage or depraved” colonized.48 Hall specifically links race, class, and gender to the structure of imperialism and emphasizes their inextricable connectedness demonstrating “white” women’s multifarious roles in perpetuating the paternalistic structure of imperialism. This revelation supports my assertion that European women, through their distinguishing characteristics against

Indians, were representative enough of the imperial structure that they could more easily be placed into the enemy group during the Rebellion.

To put my own historiographical conclusions concisely, racial ideology was a prominent feature in the justification of the conquest and expansion of empire; even when viewing imperialism through the lens of gender, we see that race cannot be ignored and is ever present.

National identity and pride were also intrinsic to imperial ideology, which was strengthened by the development of biological race science. The social hierarchies of class and of the concepts of

“civilized” and “uncivilized” are also entrenched in the rationalization of empire, while gender

46 Hall, “Of Gender and Empire,” 51.

47 Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 21.

48 Levine, Gender and Empire, 22.

33 and sexuality place women at the core of the imperial structure. The integration of these socially constructed environments resulted in a “new imperial history,” one that does not occur without the existence of these overlapping and interdependent realms.49

Because of the nature of my investigation, I will be working within and applying post- colonial theory and utilizing a variety of scholarship that identifies as post-colonial literature.

Said’s Orientalism popularized the concept of “othering,” and I engage extensively with this concept and the works and theoretical paradigms that were created as a reproaches, reactions, or extensions of and to Said’s writings. I also apply the same techniques as gender historians who wrote specifically about imperialism to the Rebellion—an event that exuded the same characteristics and took place within an analogous atmosphere to empire.

Within the singular context of imperial historical analysis, the amalgamation of gender, class, race and sexuality is the solution by which all aspects of imperialism and its precursors are infused. This solution creates an opportunity for future scholars to no longer try to prove how these frameworks intersect with one another within imperialism, but apply them simultaneously to the past to offer new insights on the practical structures of imperialism and imperialist ideology. Again, the British Empire did not officially exist in South Asia until 1858 but South

Asia, prior to the Rebellion, followed a similar paradigm. The East India Company’s ruling policies were established because of imperialist ideology and therefore created a type of empire.

The environment in South Asia did not change overnight with the stroke of a pen and empire and imperial ideology was already embedded in South Asian politics and social policies before the

Government of India Act 1858 was ever signed. Turning now to the century prior to the

49 Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 122.

Rebellion, let us examine the methods by which the British insulated and “othered” themselves, forming a group that would eventually be called “enemy” by the rebels.

CHAPTER TWO

Let the “Othering” Begin

At the Battle of Plassey in 1757, exactly one hundred years prior to the 1857 Rebellion, the East India Company, led by Robert Clive, defeated the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula.

This marked a major change in the extent of the political hegemony of the Company.

Immediately following the battle, the East India Company manipulated the new nawab, Mir

Jafar, extorted money from the Company, and placed pawns in high political positions. By 1765 the English had defeated the Mughal emperor in the Battle of Buxar. In return for allowing the emperor to stay on the throne as a mere figure-head, he granted them the diwani (revenue collecting rights), therefore securing the Company’s political and economic dominance over the large and lucrative provinces of Bengal, Orissa and Bihar.50

The success of the East India Company’s land revenue prospects and large military ascendancy helped launch them into the political administration of Bengal and furthered their transition from indirect to direct political domination of Northern India.51 As the East India

Company expanded, it brought with it a philosophy of imperial governance that initially lacked an explicit racial or religious component. Following the Battle of Plassey, the East India

Company—in spite of its newly obtained power—had retained a non-interference policy of lenience toward Indian society and the indigenous people, aimed at limiting social disorder and frustration within Britain’s de facto conquest. Clive made a prescient remark in 1765 in regards to native contentment with foreign rule:

50 ekhara Bandyop dhy a, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 44.

51 Bandyop dhy a, From Plassey to Partition, 61-62.

If ideas of conquest were to be the rule of our conduct, I foresee that we should, by necessity, be led from acquisition to acquisition, until we had the whole empire up in arms against us; and whilst we lay under the great disadvantage of fighting without a single ally, (for who could wish us well?) the natives, left without European allies, would find, in their own resources, means of carrying on war against us in a much more soldierly manner.52

Although Clive was thoroughly corrupt, he recognized the strategic value of military restraint in order for the Company to thrive without giving the native population cause for rebellion. Clive offered protection to the Indian rulers and maintained convenient relationships with them in order to allow the Company to continue to flourish.53 Clive and the East India Company felt no responsibility to administer their new territories, only to keep them dependent on the security of the Company. This non-interference policy was motivated by the reliance of the East India

Company’s monopoly on trade within India.

Succeeding Clive as Governor General, Warren Hastings acted as a shrewd and arrogant leader who was eventually impeached for extortion, but nevertheless was an Orientalist with reverence for Indian culture.54 Even as admiring onlookers, British Orientalists were fundamental to an early from of colonial knowledge and control when they meticulously recorded and collected information about Indian culture, which contributed to the understanding and eventual regulation of India’s cultural and political spheres.55 The intentions of British leaders in India such as Warren Hastings or founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Sir

William Jones (1746-1794), who sought to preserve Indian culture, even if for Company gain,

52 John Malcolm, The Life of Robert, Lord Clive: Collected from the Family Papers Communicated by the Earl of Powis (London: J. Murray, 1836), Vol. 2, 310, selection reprinted in Ramsay Muir, The Making of British India, 1756-1858, Described in a Series of Dispatches, Treaties, Statutes, and Other Documents (Lahore: Pakistan Branch, Oxford University Press, 1969), 82.

53 Stanley A. Wolpert, A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 191.

54 Wolpert, A New History, 194.

55 See Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

37 ended with the condemnation of orientalism by Utilitarians and liberal thinkers of the early nineteenth century.56

In the following decades, orientalism fell out of favor with the Company’s leadership and this led to substantive changes in the ways the Company dealt with social and cultural issues, including the regulation of religious practices that they considered repugnant. Views of the liberal reformers tended to lean toward the importance of religious reform as the foundation of a somewhat inchoate civilizing mission based on the anglicizing of the Indian elite. These reform policies were one of the many paternalistic exploits practiced by the British that were directly linked to the liberal ideology of early nineteenth century political thinkers like John Stuart Mill and T.B. Macaulay. Utilitarian philosopher, James Mill, wrote an eight-volume book titled

History of British India in 1818 that outlined the Victorian-era plan for “civilizing” India. It helped bridge the gap between religious ideology and secular, imperialist domination. Mill espoused a harsh evaluation of Indian culture—stating that India had remained unchanged since antiquity, an anachronistic space in the time of modernity—and because the book was historically acclaimed, provided the motivation for a “Benthamite” reform policy led by

Governor-General Lord William Bentinck, who was appointed to office in 1828. This reform agenda continued through the 1830s into the 1850s under Lord Dalhousie, a fervent propagator of reform.57

Liberal imperial governance is described by historian Shafqat Hussain as the implementation of authority over a territorial space, the protection over or the offering of security to a population, and the regulation and cultivation of appropriate behavior among the

56 Bandyop dhy a, From Plassey to Partition, 29-31.

57 Herbert, War of No Pity, 29-31.

38 people.58 Liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill spent his career looking for ways to temper the extremes of imperial thought on India. Mill believed in a British government that functioned “as a means of gradually training the people to walk alone.”59 His father, James Mill, was more critical of India and the pedagogical liberalism of his son when he called the country an infant in the “progress of civilization.60 In an effort to bridge the realms of total control and total chaos,

J.S. Mill turned to the ideology of paternalism. Liberal politician and reformer Thomas

Macaulay, shared J.S. Mill’s outlook and recognized the power that could be wielded with paternalism as an implement; “an admirable code of political ethics… ‘Be the father and the oppressor of the people, be just and unjust, moderate and rapacious.’”61 If India was the child of

James Mill’s seminal work, then Britain was surely the devoted parent that legitimized its rule through the progressive and liberal efforts of the Company.

The Company’s reform agenda was supported by the notion that there was “scale of civilization” and that Britain was at the apex. The belief in a hierarchical structure of civilization that was shared by both Mills and Macaulay served as the basis for most imperial interference and control of Indian society. It was also directly linked to the advent of scientific racism.

Liberal imperial ideology functioned in multiple ways; it was a foundation for political and social reforms in India and a propagator of separatist identity. Once a colonial space was evaluated and firmly established on the hierarchical scale of civilizational evolution, colonial

58 Shafqat Hussain, “Forms of Predation: Tiger and Markhor Hunting in Colonial Governance,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 5 (September 2012): 1215.

59 J.S.Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 176. Though written in 1861, Mill is expressing notions that developed prior to the 1857 Rebellion.

60 James Mill and William Thomas, The History of British India, Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 107.

61 T.B. Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” in Critical and Historical Essays (London: Methuen, 1903), 85-86, quoted in Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 105.

39 governance began to acclimate itself to the specifics of the colony. In this case, the Company and its policies represent the colonizer as forbearers to the British government. Macaulay and

J.S. Mill both propagated the “ideology of governance” that justified the Company’s reform policies and led to the articulation of differences between the two major groups within the subcontinent.62 Their views tended to align with and often influenced the paternalistic attitudes of the Company and were practically applied by Company administrators in a variety of ways. Let us look more closely at the fruition of these liberal ideals, which fused with colonial and racial attitudes in the early nineteenth century.

Modes of Isolation

The social and political policies and influences sanctioned by the East India Company were leading factors in the fomentation of mutiny in 1857. For the purpose of this paper and the arguments herein, I contend that these same policies were responsible for the violence against

European civilians during the mutiny and subsequent insurgencies. For organizational purposes

I have repositioned those policies—and added influential ideologies—into four “modes of isolation.” The four modes are termed: “Colonial Thought”; “Racialization”; “Social

Reformation”; and “Political Policies.” These four modes significantly contributed to the fluctuating divisions in Company-ruled South Asia that ultimately led to the targeting of

European civilians. This separation was not necessarily conscious on the part of the British or the South Asians; only in hindsight can we see that these policies, intricately connected, led to the self-inflicted “othering” by the insular British. By deconstructing these modes, we see that this “Age of Reform” and its corresponding policies are clearly responsible for the social

62 Clearly, there are more than two “groups” of people in South Asia at this time, but this was the beginning of the generalizations that led to the violence against civilians during the 1857 Rebellion. I will discuss this notion further in the “Colonial Thoughts” section.

40 dissatisfactions that led to the Rebellion and it was through these policies that England’s ideologies on race, religion, and gender were disseminated throughout South Asia by the East

India Company. Most importantly, however, it was these reforms that eventually isolated the

English, or Europeans as a whole, in South Asia, which led to their indiscriminate attack by the rebels.

Colonial thought on South Asia. The “colony” does not only exist in reality, but also in the minds of those who would best profit from such an endeavor. Therefore, the idea of colonization is present long before the realization of the colony ever occurs. Colonial attitudes were present in East India Company individuals and other Anglo-persons residing in the subcontinent as a result of their Eurocentric understandings of South Asia influenced by the development of

“scientific racism” and academic “Oriental” civilizational studies. To Europeans, the “Orient”— the way it looked and functioned and what it required—was a representation of the European perception of it. Said highlights an exemplary case of this Western observation in Orientalism.

In his analysis of Chateaubriand, the “constructed figure” mentioned above, we see that he could not possibly enter into the “Orient” because his perception of reality did not exist.63 In the same sense, eighteenth and nineteenth century East India Company employees could not enter South

Asia without also entering into a fabricated space based on their misconceptions. To them, the contrived presence of India was India, and India “required” control, protection, and moral guidance. Scholarly orientalist discourse, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century in

Europe supported the notion of Western supremacy and filtered into society through orientalist

63 Said, Orientalism, 171.

41 works of scholarship, novels, and museums, thus embedding Western knowledge of the East with Eurocentrism and colonial aspirations.64

An example of the pervasiveness of orientalist thought is present in a letter written by

Queen Victoria to Lady Canning. Just a year prior to the onslaught of the Rebellion, Queen

Victoria remarked that India, “that most luxuriant Country full of such wealth,” would someday

“become civilized” and “hold a different position in that respect, to what it has hitherto done!”65

The civilizing mission imagined by the Queen had already begun in India and the East India

Company was rapidly congealing into a slurry of racialized cultural arrogance based on the presumption of superiority, which extended to all Europeans in India. Lady Canning, who had only recently arrived in India, replied from Madras that “His Royal Highness [Prince Albert] would delight in the study of these races of people…and in the symptoms of improvement working in them.”66

During the same month, Canning notes in her journal a description of the European lifestyle in India that certainly implies that by the middle of the nineteenth century Europeans almost completely separated themselves from Indians both spatially and practically when she writes that “English people [lived] in these enormous houses with great rooms twenty feet high…with servants in crowds. Their servants, in white, have pretty flat turbans, and sashes of the colour of their master.”67 Also of note is Canning’s observance of Governor General

Canning’s meetings with some of Bombay’s elite citizens upon their arrival there. Two meetings

64 Said, Orientalism, 7-8.

65 Queen Victoria, Letter to Lady Canning from Windsor Castle, January 25, 1856, reprinted in Surtees, Charlotte Canning, 197.

66 Charlotte Canning and Charles Allen, A Glimpse of the Burning Plain: Leaves from the Indian Journals of Charlotte Canning (London: M. Joseph, 1986), 21. Emphasis mine.

67 Canning, A Glimpse of the Burning Plain, 21.

42 were held, one for the Europeans, and another for the Indians.68 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the boundaries between European and Indian were sharply defined and the communal identities of the people were gradually becoming established. Even then, however, it took the violent act of a large scale revolt to spur a severe enough separation between Europeans and

Indians or at least compel those involved in the Rebellion to choose one of two sides. In addition to the embedded Eurocentric consciousness of elite East India Company employees, their wives, and others traveling to India that influenced the governing tactics of the Company, was the consolidation of Company ascendancy in the late eighteenth century by Lord Frederick North’s

Regulating Act of 1773 and William Pitt’s India Act of 1784, which further linked East India

Company political policy to the Crown, even if their respective interests were not yet fully aligned.

Colonial relationships are paradoxically complex yet simple and binary. In colonial space, the intricacies of self-identity are reduced to the binary terms of “colonizer” and

“colonized” as expressed by Albert Memmi in his 1957 book The Colonizer and the Colonized.

Memmi reveals the particulars of colonial relationships and the fate of those relationships in the wake of upheaval.

Keep in mind the essential feature of the nature of colonial life; the colonial situation is based on the relationship between one group of people and another. The leftist colonizer is part of the oppressing group and will be forced to share its destiny, as he shared its good fortune. If his own kind, the colonizers, should one day be chased out of the colony, the colonized would probably not make any exception for him.69

This is the case in India during the 1857 Rebellion. Captain Julius George Medley, in his 1858 memoirs stated that:

68 Canning, A Glimpse of the Burning Plain, 18.

69 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1965), 38. The leftist colonizer is one who disagrees with what the colonial state is doing but cannot or does not do anything about it because he benefits from the colonial structure.

antagonism of race, colour, and religion which has always existed between the black and white man, which makes a broad line of demarcation between the two, not to be effaced by any individual efforts, and which, when the two parties stand in the relation of conquerors and conquered, as they do in India, requires to be borne in mind, to be acted on as a fact.70

Medley, like most other Europeans at this time, believed in the infinite separation of races and uses these beliefs to justify violence between groups. He demonstrates the powerful force of abstract binary representations that he and others acted within during the Rebellion. Based on these assumptions, individuals no longer exist in a time of upheaval, but are forced to cling to the collective identity of the people with whom they associate or are perceived to associate with by their respective “other.”

The terms “imperialism” and “colonialism” are sometimes used interchangeably but represent different entities. “Imperialism,” according to Said, is the “practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center” while “colonialism” is the action of settling in the particular place that is to be dominated.71 Therefore, in India prior to government acquisition, the East India Company acted as the settlers of the pre-colony, early representatives of the

“colonizer” who acted as agents of the metropole whether officially or not. They exuded the same qualities as any later colonizer especially in regards to their practices—practices that would not have existed without such a conviction. Said also notes the differences between metropolitan space and colonial space—which were characterized by British writers like Daniel Defoe,

Edmund Spenser, Jane Austin, and William Shakespeare—describing the metropolitan and colonial spaces respectively as “socially desirable, empowered space,” and “desirable but

70 Julius George Medley, A Year’s Campaigning in India, March 1857-March 1858 (London: W. Thacker and Co., 1858), 203-204.

71 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 9.

44 subordinate” space.72 Said contends that these notions about authority, civilizational hierarchy, and improvement, grew in Britain between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries into very powerful attitudes on colonialism. He also states that these attitudes were not derived from a

“pre-existing (semi-conspiratorial) design,” and then manipulated by British intellectuals, but were developed over time as part of British cultural identity in relation to the rest of the imagined geographical world.73

Following North’s Regulating Act of 1773, the Company was more explicitly linked to the British government and their colonial intentions, which facilitated the implementation of any colonial-like policy in South Asia. As the century progressed, the metropole’s power over the

Company increased as the preference for indirect rule declined. In the nineteenth century, the

Company’s overall views started to align with the consciousness of metropole as the British government exerted greater control over the Company’s operations by appointing a series of

Governor Generals who were no longer political figures in their own right, but were administrators who relied on the metropole for guidance.

As early colonizers, the East India Company had a reputation to uphold, one that was directly linked to the conductivity and propriety of nineteenth century England. Dominating

Victorian anxieties over imperial expansion, economic and political preeminence, masculinity, and religious morality saturated European self-consciousness and was expressed through their public identity. These same Victorian anxieties also contributed to the East India Company’s pursuit of gendered, religious, and racially impregnated reformations.74 In order to maintain

72 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 52.

73 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 52.

74 Similarly, these anxieties and ideologies are integral to the varying treatment of European civilian victims in regards to race, religion, and gender that will be discussed in Chapter Three.

Victorian ambitions in India, while at the same time gaining more control (for the sake of their coffers), the East India Company needed to create a type of subject that fit within the confines of this consciousness. Already exuding the qualities of the colonizer—control, authority, expansion, superiority, and civilizational hierarchy—East India Company officials, civilians, military, and non-employees residing in India alike, slowly produced in their collective consciousness a subject population that “required” and almost demanded domination and social reformation. Something to note is that most people that move to a colonial space do so because of the desirable assets of higher pay, and better social status. Because of these shared traits, it is easy to assume that the colonial residents also share the desire to dominate, having not been satisfied with the status quo of their homeland social or professional positions. They also might have a stronger tendency to want to protect their newly acquired positions. In effect, even the non-official British were by definition ardent imperialists. Once this latent colonial ideology became manifest in the form of official policy then practice, the racialization of the relationship between colonizer and colonized was firmly established; this being one of the first steps toward the self-inflicted, isolationism of the European in South Asia and the subsequent attacks on

European civilians.

Racialization. Similar to the embedded colonial discourse that developed as part of the

European cultural identity of the nineteenth century, racial attitudes helped create firm divisions in South Asia between Europeans and Indians and also led to a particular policy of control by the

East India Company. Racialized attitudes evolved over the course of several hundred years in

India, beginning with pre-Darwinian racism that eventually became justified by the pseudo- science of Social Darwinism in the mid to late nineteenth century that emerged following the

46 publication of influential works by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. English attitudes on race and racial differences closely followed the shift in colonial ideology in the metropole and racialization rapidly became a justification for empire and colonial control. Race became an outward marker of identity that often surpassed religion, gender, and class, when it came to targets and victims during the 1857 Rebellion. Race, in many cases, encompassed gender, religion, class and nationality—or at least skewed the reality of these markers during this time of upheaval, which we know become inextricably connected.

Fort William in Calcutta during the eighteenth century was the East India Company’s economic and political center, and Calcutta’s Europeans’ attitudes pertaining to racial characterization of Indians acts as a litmus test for East India Company ideology. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the Company had held the zamindari for three villages around

Calcutta.75 The Company encouraged Indians to settle in these villages under the protection of the East India Company as well as encouraged the locals to engage in trade and husbandry. Even in the early eighteenth century, several villages were actually acquired under nominal proprietorship by Indian servants of the Company.76 During these early years of Company presence in India, the English seemed to be more interested in profit for the Company than conceding to and perpetuating racial differences. In fact, more concern was placed on the religious affiliation of the native persons in question, emphasizing the entrenched contempt

Europeans felt for Islam that had developed over centuries. Claims of privilege of power in

South Asia, based on religion, date back to the Portuguese settlers at the turn of the sixteenth century. João de Barros, a Portuguese scholar in the sixteenth century accentuates the European

75 The Company had the right to settle people on the land and collect revenues.

76 Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 7.

Christian claim to domination over the non-Christian world when he stated that “…law applies only to the whole of Europe and its Christian inhabitants…But as regards Muslims and

Heathens…if these are condemned in their souls, being the principle part of them, their bodies which are animated by their souls cannot plead the privileges of our laws.”77 This contempt for

Islam eventually informed East India Company activities. In 1700, the Company directors in

London expressed an anti-Muslim and profiteering sentiment in a letter to Bengal stating “we have by every Shipping pressed you to make your ffortifications strong enough to discourage or sustaine any attempts of the Moors.” 78 At this stage, Company racial ideology was ambivalent, and concern was directed more toward religious and trade differences, as the indigenous people were generally categorized by their religious affiliation.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, Company ideology on racial inferiority was exemplified by official policy and expressed more freely by employees. Company employees and their families began segregating themselves from the local populations and lived in grandiose European-style homes with large gardens in “White Town.” “Black Town” housed the much larger Indian population and was located in a village north of “White Town,” separated by the Indo-Portuguese and Armenian communities.79 Determined efforts by the Company towards segregation laws were in effect by 1745, following a report declaring that “several Black people having intermixed themselves among the English Houses, and by that means occasion

Nusances and disturbances to Several of the English Inhabitants.”80 Bengal demanded to the

77 João de Barros, reprinted in C. R. Boxer, Joao de Barros: Portuguese Humanist and Historian of Asia (New Delhi: Concept, 1981), 100, quoted in Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire, 34.

78 General Letter from the Court to Bengal, London, November 29, 1700 in Old Fort William in Bengal: A Selection of Official Documents Dealing with Its History Vol. 1, ed. Charles Robert Wilson (London: John Murray, 1906), 43.

79 Chatterjee, Black Hole, 6.

Court of Directors in London that “Black People living in Town” must quit.81 London responded with instructions that “Houses belonging to our Servants or any English must not be sold to

Moors or any Black Merchants whatsoever.”82

During and after an attack on Fort William in 1756 by Siraj-ud-daula—who one year later was defeated by Clive at Plassey—racial divisions between Europeans and Indians strengthened. Defenders of the Fort, led by the governor of Fort William, Roger Drake, numbered approximately five hundred of which half were European, and the rest were Indo-

Portuguese, Armenian, and Indian. When Siraj marched into Calcutta with thirty thousand soldiers, the defenders took refuge in Fort William. Drake gave the families of the Europeans,

Indo-Portuguese, and Armenians shelter in the Fort, but there is no mention of his treatment of the Indians’ families in the sources.83 Drake then proposed the strategy of burning down the houses surrounding the Fort to act as a barrier, but his idea was effectively rejected by his company. Instead, Drake set fire to the Indian village of Gobindapur.84 Later, after only a few native people had offered him assistance, Drake noted that “They [Indians] are such a niggardly race of people that we gained no assistance or strength to the place from any of those whose great-great-grandfathers had enjoyed the protection of our flag under which they accumulated what they are now possessed of.”85 Under the pressure of captivity and low morale, Drake spewed more vitriolic and sweeping sentiments about Indians, “Every black fellow who could

80 Bengal Public Consultations, Fort William, June 24, 1745, in Wilson, Vol. 1, 183.

81 General Letter from Bengal to the Court, Fort William, January 31, 1746 in Wilson, Vol. 1, 185.

82 General Letter from the Court to Bengal, London, June 17, 1748, in Wilson, Vol. 1, 204-205.

83 Chatterjee, Black Hole, 14.

84 Chatterjee, Black Hole, 14.

85 Narrative by Governor Drake, July 19, 1756, in Bengal in 1756-1757: A Selection of Public and Private Papers Dealing with the Affairs of the British in Bengal during the Reign of Siraj-uddaula Vol. 1, ed. Samuel Charles Hill (London: John Murray, 1905), 139.

49 make his escape [ran away].”86 Evidently this statement was made after Drake burnt the Indian village of Gobindapur, but before he abandoned the Fort himself leaving behind a few remaining council members and around 150 defenders, 123 of whom suffocated to death in a cramped jail cell in an incident now termed by the British as the Black Hole of Calcutta.87

Racial and cultural intermixing in South Asia in the eighteenth century—incidences of

Europeans “going native,” that is—have been romanticized by some historians like William

Dalrymple.88 In his book White Mughals, Dalrymple suggests that relationships where

Europeans and Indians would trade customs, languages, and enter into conjugal relations, existed in the eighteenth century, prior to the emergence of British imperial ideology and racial prejudices.89 Though these relationships did occur, they tended to exist on the outskirts of

Company controlled India. Further, within these affairs, there still remained a sense of racial and gender superiority.90 Europeans who went native usually hid these transgressions from their families back in Europe and would follow the respectable and typical customs of England when disposing of their property and inheritance. Historian Durba Ghosh determines that “the building blocks of racial superiority and moral probity were in formation from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, prior to the development of scientific racism.” 91 Scientific racism

86 Narrative by Drake, in Hill, Vol. 1, 153.

87 Chatterjee, Black Hole, 15.

88 “Going native” is a phrase that refers to Europeans, typically men, who adopted the lifestyle and customs, including languages, of the local inhabitants of a particular place. This generally meant they took on local mistresses and lived according to native customs.

89 See William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in the Eighteenth-Century India (New York: Viking, 2003).

90 Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9-10.

91 Ghosh, Sex and Family, 9-10.

50 that emerged afterward was simply a validation of pre-existing European ideologies on racialized and gendered hierarchies.

By 1857, Europeans envisioned a hierarchy of civilizations that classified South Asians as an undeveloped society racially inferior to the British. Earlier, in the late eighteenth century racial policy began to creep into Company legislation as Indians were increasingly being blamed for issues that arose in the Company. In 1789 Commander-in-Chief and Governor General Lord

Charles Cornwallis argued that “Every native of Hindustan is corrupt” referring to the business tactic of bribery that was prevalent in South Asia.92 By 1793, he enacted a ban, motivated by explicit racism, on Indians serving in the bureaucracy, intending to insulate the British colonial administration from the moral laxness of Indian servants.93 Cornwallis also made sure that commissioned status in the East India Company’s army belonged only to British men, prohibiting any sepoy from rising through the ranks.94 Cornwallis was imperialist and was adamant about maintaining the image of British superiority and the moral conduct of East India

Company servants and to do this, he aimed to govern India without a reliance on Indians. By

1795, Lord Cornwallis ratified a policy that even disallowed Anglo-Indians—those persons with mixed racial parentage—from serving in the East India Company Army. It was feared by the

Company that men “born of Black women” would wound their reputation and disrupt discipline.95 They could only be employed as regimental bandsmen or drummers. Cornwallis’s racial policies broke away from the earlier policies of the Company that relied heavily on the

92 Lord Cornwallis, 1789, quoted in Thomas George Percival Spear, The Nabobs; A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 137.

93 Joseph Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765-1858 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 40.

94 Wolpert, A New History, 204.

95 Llewellyn-Jones, “The ‘Other’ Victims,” 2.

51 native intellectual elite and ushered in an officially racist form of domination by the English.

The actualized categorization and homogenization of Indians by Europeans, because of their attitudes on race, religion, and gender, at the time helped lead to the social and political reforms enacted by the East India Company in the early nineteenth century.

Social reformation and personal law. Political and social reforms were the outward manifestations of the colonial attitudes felt by the British and were the vehicles used to disseminate their Eurocentric ideologies. Though social and political reformation is closely linked, for the sake of this paper social reform is defined as those reforms that deal specifically with the private sphere of cultural traditions to include religion and gendered behaviors of the subject society. Over time, the British effectively turned cultural traditions into personal law sanctioned by the governing Company.

The “Age of Reform,” prior to the Rebellion encompassed an abundance of reforms that dealt with the management of native affairs. They all contributed to the categorization of

Europeans and natives into standardized groups, but I will focus on the few major reforms that would have permeated the larger population, creating the most dissent. Beginning with the

Charter Act of 1813, which famously forced the Company to open their ports and stations east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan changing the earlier laws allowing a monopoly on nearly all trade in the Indian Ocean region, also opened India to “licensed missionaries,” a seemingly small change, but one that directly opposed the religious lenience of the Company and their former ban on missionary aspirations in India.96 Missionaries tended to challenge South Asia’s socio-cultural structure, which had the potential to spur rebellion and was bad for Company business. The Company was well aware of the financial impact that could be

96 E. L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815-1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 8.

52 caused by such ambitious evangelists and open trade, strongly opposing the Charter Act for these very reasons, to no avail.97 Forced conversion to Christianity was a persistent fear among natives who had been exposed to Christian missionaries since the Charter Act of 1813 removed all obstacles that had previously kept them from wandering about freely while proselytizing their religion and setting up churches and schools.98

The much later Caste Disabilities Act enacted under Governor General Dalhousie in 1850 also ignited fear of religious conversion by the indigenous population. The Act, which states:

So much of any law or usage now in force within the territories subject to the government of the East India Company as inflicts on any person forfeiture of any rights or property, or may be held in any way to impair or affect any right of inheritance, by any reason of his or her renouncing, or having be excluded from the communion of, any religion, or being deprived of caste, shall cease to be enforced in the courts of the East India Company99 stipulates that Hindu and Muslim property and inheritance rights will remain intact, even if they denounce their religion and convert to Christianity. The Company is placing importance on the governing of Indian affairs in relation to European priorities.

The earlier abolition of sati in 1829 under Lord William Bentinck was a severe insult to

Hindu religious freedom. The immolation of widows on their husband’s funeral pyres was motivated by the manipulation of assorted ancient Hindu texts by the elite Brahman caste.

Bentinck and other British reformers, led by Utilitarian philosophy, first licensed then abolished sati though a legislative process. Although Bentinck and his reformer associates were undoubtedly ethically against sati, its abolition was done under calculating pretenses and

97 Wolpert, A New History, 213.

98 Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 224.

99 The Unrepealed General Acts of the Government of India, Legislative Department: The Governor General in Council with Chronological Table, from 1834-1867, both inclusive, Vol. 1, Third Edition (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1898), 72-73.

53 motived by a paternal, colonial interest in social control and other more imperialistic intentions.

During the late eighteenth century, England and Indian relations were symbiotic, and Britain had not yet cemented their political claim to India. Sati was seen by Europeans as a Hindu rite that could not be categorized by “Western” rules, generating a merely inquisitive attitude by the

British. During the nineteenth century, when early imperial imperatives revealed themselves in

Britain, and in India’s appointed Governor Generals, the disgust for sati became more prevalent in English writing and accounts, representing a shift in expressed reaction to sati, which extended to other native customs as well.100

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the practice of sati was protected by the East

India Company’s policy of non-interference with native “religious usages and institutions,” going so far as disallowing a tax collector in Shahabad to discourage a woman from self- immolation.101 The movement away from earlier orientalist appreciation for Indian culture led to the enforcement of English principles, beginning with, as Lord Bentinck called it, “the first and most criminal of their [Indian] customs,” sati.102 Even with a growing native movement against sati, the idea of a sacred Hindu religious practice being governed by British law was unsettling to most Hindus. General Indian consciousness revered sati as a sanctified Hindu practice and was understood in two ways by the native people. The Brahmin caste supported sati, because it supported their high status and virtuousness, all while enriching them financially. The other

100 Norbert Schürer, “The Impartial Spectator of Sati, 1757-84” Eighteenth Century Studies 42, no. 1 (2008): 21-23.

101 Nancy G. Cassels, “Bentinck: Humanitarian and Imperialist – The Abolition of Suttee” The Journal of British Studies 5, no. 1 (November 1965): 77.

102 Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989): 623.

54 perspective, by the general Hindu population, was that of indifference to the practice itself, but not to its regulation.103

In 1828, Bentinck released a circular to forty-nine of his most reliable officers. The circular comprised four questions pertaining to sati. He wanted to get honest feedback on how the sepoys felt about the abolition of sati, and if it would subsequently cause a revolt. After analyzing the results, the officers agreed that there was a general indifference to the issue of sati.

Some thought that if it was abolished the Indian newspapers might try and incite natives to rebel because of the contentious act of British control over native practices. Based on the responses from their Indian soldiers, more than half of the forty-nine officers favored abolition, as long as it was not “absolute and direct interference” by the British.104 This survey reveals a lot about the mentality of both the Governor General and the general intentions of the East India Company as well as the native soldier population’s fear of British control. On another note, it also reveals the masculinist nature of British and Indian rule in that females, who are directly affected by this practice, are never part of the actual conversation regarding it. One soldier made sure to mention that the Brahmin caste would “never acquiesce in the abolition of suttee—a practice which enriches both their pockets and their reputations.”105 The native reformer and ardent intellectual

Ram Mohun Roy, who opposed the practice of sati and benefited academically from the British presence in India, still could not support sati’s abolition through British legislation.106 Ram

Mohun Roy favored local police intervention over what he considered a premature enactment of

British control. He told Bentinck, in a private meeting that,

103 Cassels, “Bentinck,” 80.

104 Confidential Circular addressed to Officers of the Army on the Suttee Question by Captian R. Benson, 10 November, 1828, in Cassels, 80-81.

105 Cassels, “Bentinck,” 80.

106 Wolpert, A New History, 219.

While the English were contending for power they deemed it politic to allow universal toleration and to respect our [Hindu] religion, but having obtained the supremacy, their first act is a violation of their profession, and the next will probably be, like the Muhammadan conquerors, to force upon us their own religion.107

Roy was a social reformer who detested the act of sati, but as a Bengali Hindu intellectual, was not blind to the peril that official British reform would have on other native traditions. Indian public opinion existed and was usually influenced by elite Indians, but it was often ignored by

East India Company administrators.

Another circular by Bentinck, this time given to a group of civilian company servants, reveals a civilian perspective on the controversial topic. In this survey, Bentinck suggested repealing a tax on pilgrims who visited the religious centers of Jaggernauth and Gya, in conjunction with abolishing sati. The thirteen civilians saw Bentinck’s pairing of the tax repeal with the abolition of sati as nothing more than a bribe, and warned Bentinck that most Hindus would reject his scheme as such.108 The intention of Bentinck’s inquiry shows that he was curious to what extent he could interfere with native social practices on a legislative level without a popular backlash.

Bentinck’s disgust with the practice was shared by other English residents in South Asia and its abolition was supported largely by the European missionary groups residing there.

William Ward, one of the first missionaries to India who spent his early days evangelizing from the Danish territory Serampore, later spoke out against the harsh conditions of Hindu women.

Ward used sati to foment a domestic women’s movement against the indigenous degradation of

Hindu women, even though Ward’s statements were based on a very small faction of Hindu society. Female missionaries and activists like Ann Chaffin fostered the women’s movement

107 Minute by Bentinck, November 8, 1829, quoted in Cassels, “Bentinck,” 83.

108 Cassels, “Bentinck,” 81-82.

56 against sati in India.109 The support for sati’s abolition by not only the Governor General of the

East India Company, but other Europeans—especially missionaries who were already seen as a threat by the natives—led to a further homogenization of all Europeans.

British abhorrence to sati during the nineteenth century, in addition to growing imperialist ideology, was bolstered by England’s masculine identity as protectors of India, especially India’s women. British paternalists used the suffering of Indian widows as an excuse for “civilizing” India and enacting social reform. In turn, the Hindu elite used women as

“emblems of tradition” to counter the colonial interference with Indian culture.110 In most

British accounts of sati, the witnesses, both male and female, emphasize the feminine characteristics of the women performing sati: “She was twenty-one years of age, beautiful to my conception, by far the most so of any native female I have ever seen; combined with the beauty of face, the figure was perfect, which heightened the distress.”111 Another account highlights the appearance of the sati, stating: “the great personal beauty of the victim gave unusual interest and importance to this Suttee.”112 Sympathy for the burning widow is expressed in relation to her beauty, rather than the mal-intent of her coercers or the tortures of her unfortunate death. The voyeuristic quality of the accounts and their focus on the appearance of the widows showcases not only a phallocentric view of women, but represents Britain’s masculine-oriented agenda and moral imperative. Official legislature over Indian women’s rights introduced Victorian

109 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 83, 188-189.

110 Mani, Contentious Traditions, 160-161.

111 Calcutta Journal, April 14, 1821, in Mani, Contentious Traditions, 173.

112 Calcutta Journal, April 14, 1821, in Mani, Contentious Traditions, 173.

England’s ideology on gender to the Indian population through policy and solidified the gendered nature of control and colonization.113

As Philippa Levine states in her introduction to Gender and Imperialism, “Empire for both colonizer and colonized was always and everywhere gendered, that is to say, influenced in every way by people’s understanding of sexual difference.”114 Therefore, gender cannot be generalized as it functions differently in different times and places and can assist us in fully understanding the complexities of colonial formation and the actions of not only people, but state policies.115 The English tended to measure a society’s civility by the treatment of its women, with more advanced societies, such as Western Europe, being “respectful” toward women.

These representations are masculinist, in that they contend that women are only measurable against men and society and not of themselves.116 As previously mentioned, England’s developing obsession with sati and the treatment of women by Indian society, created a space in

European consciousness and policy to effectively govern over the “rudimentary” South Asians.

As England’s perspectives on the scale of civilization developed, gender became more of a classified ordering of society beyond that of sexual difference. Through the writings of missionaries and liberal politicians, all South Asians took on the identity of the colonized, the third “gender.” Gendered ideologies were already fostered by Indian society—women’s place in

India societal structure was certainly subaltern—however, recognizing England’s affinity for the

113 The British were concerned with the treatment of women, but only to the extent of what British male administrators deemed important. As the social structure of Victorian morality was changing domestically, European women’s dignity was valued and explicitly linked to sexual morality. British law did not extend to women’s education or their social advancement in society in England, and Company law followed suit by focusing on the sexual depravity of Indian men and the sexualized image of native women.

114 Levine, Gender and Empire, 2.

115 Levine, Gender and Empire, 2.

116 Levine, Gender and Empire, 7-8.

“lesser” sex and their fixation on the treatment of women as central to their civilizing mission, may have introduced the notion that England’s power also resided in its treatment of its women leading to later attacks on European women during the 1857 mutiny and subsequent rebellion.

The abolition of sati by Lord Bentinck generated an unalterable practice of interference into Indian ritual thus shifting the Company’s interests from strict profit to ones of moral intervention and political power. These sometimes subtle and other times ostentatious changes in European policy in India and advancing political authority denotes some of the many moves toward a colonial state and European homogenization in India. Power is dependent. Power only becomes definable and accessible when it is measured against other structures of control and is therefore dependent on the ability to control those other entities. For the British to have authority, they must have something to control. The British obtained this control through the implementation and regulation of personal law. The method and influence behind the

Company’s reform and abolishment of sati applies to most of the social reforms in India that are seen as influential in the discontent of the native population leading up to and inciting the 1857

Rebellion. These reforms are undoubtedly some of the major factors that caused the popular and widespread rebellion, but it is the nuances within the process of social reform that caused the

Europeans to gradually and effectively attain the role of “colonizer” while forcing the native population into the role of “colonized.”

The Utilitarian agenda for India was furthered by the Charter Act of 1833 or the “Liberal

Charter,” which was influenced and eventually produced by the predominant liberal principles in

England at this time. Macaulay, was now the Secretary of the Board of Control and Mill, was the examiner of correspondence at the India House.117 The “Liberal Charter” opened India to

117 Hrishikesh Brahma, “The Charter Act of 1833: A Study” the Echo, Vol. I, Issue IV (April 2013): 208, http://www.thecho.in/files/Hrishikesh-Brahmma.pdf (accessed January 10, 2014).

“unrestricted British emigration and enterprise” and abolished the trade monopoly of the East

India Company.118 It also was meant to decentralize executive and legislative functions and was the beginning of the “Indianization” of services. Gaining the most attention was a declaration in

Article 87 that stated: “no Native of the said Territories, nor any natural-born Subject of His

Majesty resident therein, shall, by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them be disabled from holding and Place, Office, or Employment under the said

Company.”119 The Indian intelligentsia that were championing the establishment of meritorious

Indians in government positions too closely resembled the English in character and manner and had already become the class of “Indian[s] in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” that Macaulay aimed to create just a few years later.120 Even with

English and Indian support for the gradual promotion of Indians in government affairs, the

Company fell short of realizing these sentiments. According to the Directors, the Act was not meant “to ascertain qualification, but to remove disqualification. It does not break down or derange the pally through the instrumentality of our regular servants, civil and military.”121

There were no provisions that required the nomination of Indians to the covenanted services of the Company and the only means by which a person could enter into civil service was by receiving an education at Haileybury, an act that would result in the pollution of caste for most

118 Wolpert, A New History, 220.

119 Brahma, “The Charter Act of 1833,” 218

120 Thomas B. Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), in Thomas Babington Macaulay: Selected Writings, ed. John Clive (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 249.

121 Parliamentary papers, Macaulay‘s Speech, House of Commons, July 10, 1833, Vol. XXI, p. 737, quoted in Brahma, “The Charter Act of 1833,” 218.

Hindus.122 Consequently, Indian’s remained in minor positions of both the civil and military departments, rendering Article 87 insignificant in reality.123

These social reforms were all part of the consolidation of British power in India. This shift of power led to a power struggle, which further reduced the South Asian populations into large generalized “sides.” Mostly the orthodox Hindu majority was affected by Bentinck’s utilitarian agenda, which was centered on cultural and social policy and personal law; but, the act of legislating Indian practices in general was enough to foment fear and violence on a large scale and create stricter division between the English and Indians. Further, it was this type of specific policy, that is, policy that directly affects traditional ethnic practices that primarily underscored the perceived differences between the cultures.

The General Service Enlistment Act of 1856, enacted under Governor General (and later

Viceroy) Lord Canning, forced soldiers to accept service in any province or even beyond the boundaries of South Asia without overseas pay. This new law spurred further rumors of forced religious conversion because of the risk of caste pollution.124 Other social reforms of the same year, such as the radical Hindu Widow Remarriage Act—which was culturally disturbing to the

Hindu majority by allowing outcast Hindu widows to remarry—also created an opportunity for

Indian inquiries about British interference in religious law, but were met with and overshadowed by the some of the more political reformations that were taking place at this late stage of developing British preeminence.

122 Haileybury or the East India Company College was located just outside of London and would have required high-caste Hindus to travel overseas for education thus polluting their caste.

123 Brahma, “The Charter Act of 1833,” 219.

124 Wolpert, A New History, 239.

Political policy. Political policies and their subsequent practices by the Company were doubtlessly some of the most obvious ways for Europeans to interfere with native practices and traditions in the public sphere. Political policy was also motivated by British anxieties surrounding the conduct and respectability of those who represented it. Like the social reforms enacted by the Company that were products of Victorian anxieties on moral conduct to include gender and religion, political policies in South Asia during the early nineteenth century were also meant bolster the civilizational superiority of the metropole. As Thomas Robert Malthus asserted in 1813, “those who go out to India must and will be men the moment they reach the country.”125 Both European men and their women counterparts who traveled to India were representatives of their home country and by the early nineteenth century were required to exude the masculine and moral characteristics of a civilizationally superior society that was quickly vindicating a colonial ideology of governance in South Asia. In a lot of cases women must also be “men” while in India as representatives of the metropole. Although women were seen as lower on the evolutionary scale and more primitive than men, they were still seen as superior to

Indians. Stephen Jay Gould states in The Mismeasure of Man that the “If adult blacks and women are like white male children, then they are living representatives of an ancestral stage in the evolution of white males” and that “an anatomical theory for ranking races—based on entire bodies—had been found [by the European racial scientists].” 126 Gould’s text highlights the feminization of indigenous people and the gendered relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.

125 Thomas Robert Malthus, Statements Respecting the East India Company College, With an Appeal to Facts, in Refutation of the Charges Lately Brought Against It, in the Court of Proprietors (London: John Murray, 1817), 102.

126 Stephan Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (W.W. Norton and Company, 1981), 326.

Lord Cornwallis’s 1793 Code of Forty-Eight Regulations—which included the abolition of faujdari courts presided over by Indian judges and the firing of Indian employees in bureaucratic decision-making positions—also established the Permanent Zamindari

Settlement.127 Land revenue reform was a top priority of Cornwallis’s regulation acts and the permanent settlement of hereditary zamindars completely altered the traditional functions of land administration and rights. Traditionally, zamindars administered the land on which they held

“interests,” which included revenue collection. They did not own the land; in fact, European notions of private land ownership were essentially non-existent in traditional Indian society.128

Following Cornwallis’s Code, zamindars were given a landholding grant for life. The land reform fixed a permanent limited annual revenue and also provided the zamindar with full private ownership rights in accordance to British common law.129 This created native landholding elites that put immense pressure on already struggling peasants to meet revenue demands. If the peasants could not meet those demands, the zamindaris had every right to remove them from their communal land. Most importantly, it communicated to the Indian people that the British no longer valued traditional Indian land rights. Moreover, within a few years of failed crops, the zamindaris themselves were unable to pay the fixed revenue to the

Company and their lands were taken over directly by bankers and moneylenders in Calcutta.130

Cornwallis, as the Governor General of Bengal and the Commander-in-Chief of the East India

Company’s army, was the principal engineer behind the Europeanization of Indian policy that continued to develop in the decades prior to the 1857 Rebellion.

127 Wolpert, A New History, 205.

128 Wolpert, A New History, 202.

129 Wolpert, A New History, 203.

130 Wolpert, A New History, 203.

Cornwallis changed the structure of the Company based on the changing moral standards of the metropole, believing that virtue was universal and not subjective. Throughout the eighteenth century private trade flourished and was one of the enticing features that encouraged men to join the East India Company. Salaries were meek and employees of the Company had to supplement their income through private trade.131 According to Cornwallis, Britons were honest virtuous people and private trade went against these markers of a British citizen. Upon entering the Governor General position, Cornwallis fired any “corrupt” members of the Board of Trade and upped the salary for Company servants.132 A seemingly insignificant move, in regards to

Indian and British relationships, this essentially ruined the business relationships between

European and Indian merchants and moneylenders that had developed over years and emphasized the differences between their subjective moral characters. As with a later prohibition of bribery—which also emphasized the alleged virtuousness of the British—this action acted as a reminder of the moral degeneration of the Indians.

Similar to the discouragement and suppression of “private” enterprise was the ban on bribery. After the turn of the nineteenth century, the Company’s policy of governing through moral jurisdiction continued as Governor General Lord Minto (1806-1813) specified that every

Briton in India had the obligation “to uphold the national character for integrity…and honor.”133

This statement came following the dismissal of Bengal Army Major James Mouat by the government of Bengal for bribery and attempting to extort money from the Nawab of Bengal by

131 Chatterjee, Black Hole, 9.

132 Wolpert, A New History, 202.

133 Minto Minute, September 11, 1813, in Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765- 1858, 1.

64 selling his horse to him for an exorbitant amount of money.134 The Bengal government concluded that Mouat degraded both himself and the character of Britain.135 Bribery and “gift- giving,” which were business tactics used in politics and commerce in India for centuries and embraced by early Company employees and officials, was now considered a marker of Indian denigration. As the Company became more fanatical about perpetuating British ascendency and maintaining moral order in India, officials quickly began outlawing former business tactics that would now seem uncomely for a British gentleman, and therefore the men who represent (what the British saw as) the superiority of the white male in the periphery of civilization, India.

One of the most offensive and directly inflammatory political policies that the East India

Company enacted was in the few years preceding the outbreak of mutiny in Meerut. Lord

Dalhousie introduced the “Doctrine of Lapse” in 1848 and by 1849 it was part of common law.

The new Doctrine allowed the East India Company to annex any Indian territory whose native ruler died without, in the view of English authorities, a legitimate heir. The Hindu custom of adoption was ignored by the Company and the large Northern province of Oudh, was taken over in 1856. Its ruler, Wajid Ali Shah was exiled.136 Interestingly, most of the Brahmans and

Kshatriyas that served in the Sepoy Army of Bengal were from Oudh and equally frustrated by the annexation and the General Service Enlistment Act of the same year.137 Other adopted heirs were deprived of their annual pensions because of the Doctrine, which positively affected the

Company’s growing coffers. Soon after, the deposed leaders conspired against the British during the Rebellion. The blatant disregard for Indian tradition sanctioned by the government was the

134 Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 233.

135 Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race, 1.

136 James, Raj, 233-234.

137 Wolpert, A New History, 239.

65 death-blow to Company-rule in India and incited popular support against the British before and during the Rebellion.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the East India Company and its puppeteering Board of

Directors had clearly homogenized an entire group of people through their governing practices and metropolic anxieties concerning race, religion, and gender. If the British had no regard for

Indian traditions as a whole and no longer differentiated between separate native groups, then why would the rebels make an effort to discern between civilians and military when they mutinied against the oppressive regime of the morally elitist colonizer? The “colonized” rebels needed to rid India of the British colonizer and the “colonizer” was anything deemed European or characterized by European traits, including men, women, and children.

Conclusion

The misconception that the East India Company ruled without the hindrance of racial, religious, or gendered influences has lost its grounding in current historiographical literature on the topic even though some historians still argue that Company dependency on Indian local elites and bureaucrats allowed for “dialogic interaction” and relative ambivalence toward racial and social exclusivity.138 Public opinion did exist in Company-ruled India, and was generally influenced by elite Indian intellectuals, but officially, the East India Company rarely heeded the advice of these individuals. As we have seen in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Company policies, shared religious morality, gendered anxieties, and racial attitudes developed parallel to one another and eventually intersected, materializing in a complex formation of ideas that became the backbone of Britain’s colonial pursuits. Although racial, religious, and gendered

138 Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race, 10. The phrase “dialogic interaction” was coined by Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South Asia, 1795-1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

66 divisions deepened following the 1857 Rebellion and factored into later reprisals by the British, stricter policies concerning Indian affairs, and justification for British imperialism, these earlier racially and morally charged sentiments—and the East India Company policies that perpetuated them—are directly linked to the violence against European civilians during the Rebellion. Racial arrogance and civilizational elitism, beginning in the eighteenth century, drove a wedge of contempt between European and Indian societies and imparted the Westernized notion of

“othering” to the rebels.

A precise understanding of the evolution of military and diplomatic tactics used by Indian leaders and soldiers during a time of upheaval can be grasped by analyzing the Black Hole of

Calcutta incident of 1756 in comparison to the 1857 Rebellion. Siraj-ud-duala’s march on

Calcutta and Fort William and the following treatment of the soldiers and civilians with whom he came in contact, displays marked differences from the treatment of those that were captured during the 1857 Rebellion by the rebels and rebel leaders. Prior to the attack on Calcutta, Siraj approached the English factory in Kasimbazar in an effort to get William Watts, the factor, to sign an agreement that stated the Company would comply with the new Nawab’s conditions.

Although signed under forced conditions, Siraj and his men did not subject any of the

Company’s servants to violence and left the Company’s assets untouched, a diplomatic move on his part.139 Watt’s remarked that “a proof that the Nabob’s intent was to accommodate matters, was that he touched none of Company’s effects at Cossimbuzar.”140 When Governor Roger

Drake refused to accommodate Siraj, and fortified the fort at Calcutta, the Nawab personally led a force of thirty thousand men into the city. After three days of battle, Siraj’s troops took Fort

139 Chatterjee, Black Hole, 13.

140 Letter from Watts and Collet to Council at Fulta, Chandernagore, July 8, 1756 in Hill, Vol. 1, 61.

William only to find it deserted by Drake, and left to the defense of 150 men led by John

Zephania Holwell.141

Siraj immediately allowed some people to leave the Fort including Indo-Portuguese,

Armenians, Indians, as well as fifteen Europeans, differentiating between the militarized men and the other refugees. Holwell and his men were placed in a jail within the Fort that was previously reserved for unruly Company servants. The jail was packed so tightly with men that by morning, 123 of them had suffocated to death. Holwell barely survived the ordeal and owed his survival to his own mental health and the humanity of some of the native soldiers who brought the imprisoned men water throughout the night. As disturbing as the cases of cramped captivity and suffocation might be, Holwell was sure to exonerate the Nawab from any blame in his memoir of the incident. He stated that the Nawab had “repeated his assurances to me, on the word of a soldier, that no harm should come to us; and indeed his orders were only general, that we should be secured; and that what followed was the result of revenge and resentment in the breasts of the lower Jemmaatdaars, to whose custody we were delivered, for the number of their order [were] killed during the siege.”142 The surviving men were released from the jail and set free in the morning and Holwell was taken to Murshidabad as a prisoner, only to be released days later by Siraj.

The predominant theme of Holwell’s Narrative is centered on his own strength and character and not the brutality of the Nawab and his men. Siraj is portrayed as impatient and determined at times, but never uncompassionate. Even the soldiers that imprisoned Holwell and his men are oftentimes described as humane components of the terrible incident. Siraj’s

141 Chatterjee, Black Hole, 15.

142 John Zephania Holwell, A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen, and Others, Who Were Suffocated in the Black-Hole in Fort William, in Calcutta, in the Kingdom of Bengal; in the Night Succeeding the 20th day of June, 1756 (London: A. Millar, 1758), 392.

68 diplomatic, yet forceful, actions in Kasimbazar, followed by his release of refugees upon taking

Fort William and Holwell’s subsequent release in Murshidabad, would have been considered extraordinary exceptions during the 1857 Rebellion, as we will see. This is because between the

Black Hole of Calcutta incident and the 1857 Rebellion, there was a key shift in the methods of domination and military and political tactics used by the British to assert their developing colonial ideologies that were then after mirrored by the Indian rebels. The Black Hole incident clearly demonstrates Indian military strategies used toward prisoners of conflict in the mid- eighteenth century and contrasts the violence that was used a hundred and one years later by the rebels.

Progressively over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these modes of isolation were in fact powerful methods of both abstractly and realistically insulating the European and South

Asian communities from one another based on generalities of culture, skin color, and gender.

The consequence of these modes and their subsequent “othering” effects were civilian casualties during the 1857 Rebellion. During the Rebellion, the English indiscriminately attacked Indians after categorizing them not by their religion, gender, or race alone, but by the multifarious entity comprising the attributes that labelled them the “other.” As with all dualistic terms, one cannot have an “other” without first having a “self”—and the Europeans in India defined a communal

“self” by categorizing the South Asians as the “other” through these socio-political reforms, colonial attitudes and racial characterizations. One of the results of these ideologies was the indiscriminate attacks by rebels on the entire European population; both the military and civilians were targeted as the “enemy.” Let us turn now to the cases of the mutiny in Meerut, the subsequent march on Delhi and the massacres at Cawnpore to explore European civilian casualty

69 experiences in relation to the ideologies and policies established as British India’s “modes of isolation.”

CHAPTER THREE

Lines Drawn

The culmination of the social and political practices and policies of the early nineteenth century was outbreak of mutiny in Meerut. On 10 May 1857, members of the 11th and 20th

Bengal Native Infantry turned on their British officers in the South Asian city of Meerut only 40 miles north-east of Delhi. Their actions, incited by several years of imprudent Westernization by the British—including the annexation of the powerful province of Oudh and the cultural insult of being given rifle cartridges greased with animal fat—led to the yearlong mixture of rebellions and massacres that exhibit engendered racial and religious tensions, which helped shape the development of the war in relation to its civilian victims. The British used the power of

“othering” to support their Westernizing mission of colonization. We will see that the rebel’s intentions of destroying the British “group” worked within the confines of generalization—the same power structure used by the British during the previous century of early colonization. A display of violence towards European civilians is present in both the cases of Meerut and Delhi followed by Cawnpore and we will look more closely at the civilian victims’ experiences during these two events in relation to the modes of isolation set forth in Chapter One.

Outbreak in Meerut [and the Siege on Delhi]

On 24 April the 3rd Light Cavalry was ordered to fire the newly issued Enfield rifles on the parade-ground in Meerut. Out of the ninety sepoys, eighty-five refused to open the cartridge packages and fire the rifles. The eighty-five defiant sepoys were subject to a court inquiry and were convicted and sentenced to ten years with hard labor. On 9 May the 3rd Light Cavalry,

71 having been convicted of insubordination, were stripped of their uniforms and shackled in front of the rest of the troops in Meerut including the 11th and 20th Native Infantry.143 The following evening, Sunday 10 May, rumors spread in the Suddar Bazar that European troops were coming to deprive the native troops of their weapons and ammunition. Sepoys who were at the Bazar fled to the garrison causing a stir among the units. British officers tried to keep the men under control, but the uproar spread to the cavalry lines. The cavalrymen then rode off toward the jail where the convicted men were being held to break them out. By the time their comrades were rescued, the 11th and 20th native infantry units were completely out of control, and had shot their

British officers. Soon after, the mob at the Bazar started rioting around the European bungalows.144

After liberating their fellow soldiers, the cavalrymen rode through the streets calling on the crowds to join them in rebelling. The inflamed mob, made up of civilians and sepoys from the two infantry units, began attacking off-duty British soldiers in the Bazar. They then turned to the British cantonments burning the bungalows and murdering every British person with whom they came in contact.145 Around fifty European civilians were murdered in Meerut in the first few hours of the revolt, including 15 women and children.146

By 1857, mental and physical divisions between Indians and Europeans were apparent in the military. A sepoy, Sita Ram Pandey, recalls how the relationship between officers and the native troops deteriorated over the years prior to the outbreak.

143 Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India, 1857 (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 77-79.

144 J.A.B. Palmer, The Mutiny Outbreak at Meerut in 1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 71-72.

145 James, Raj, 239.

146 Palmer, The Mutiny Outbreak, 104.

In those days the sahibs could speak our language much better than they do now, and they mixed more with us. The sahibs often used to give nautches for the regiment, and they attended all the men’s games. Nowadays they seldom attend nautches because their padre sahibs have told them it is wrong. These padre sahibs have done, and are still doing, many things to estrange the British officers from the sepoys. I know that many officers nowadays only speak to their men when obliged to do so, and they show that the business is irksome and try to get rid of the sepoy. One sahib told us that he never knew what to say to us. The sahibs always knew what to say, and how to say it, when I was a young soldier.147

By time the mutiny broke out, most Europeans, not just the military, had physically isolated themselves within English towns, away from the native sectors. Through this tangible segregation, they made themselves easy targets for the rebels. Lady Canning noted the conspicuous separation of cultures in her journal, an observation made by an elite member of

British Indian society. However, even the lowest English members of the East India Company separated themselves from the Indian sectors and fortified a hierarchical structure of power in

South Asia. Lieutenant Frank Ashley Cubitt, an unmarried officer living in Dum-Dum, had a typical bungalow in the English style and section of town. “Every article in an Anglo-Indian household bears witness to the fact that Englishmen regard themselves but as sojourners in the locality where fate and the quartermaster-general may have placed them.”148 Cubitt alone had thirteen servants to attend his needs.149 The mistreatment of servants by Englishmen often occurred. William Howard Russell, the Irish journalist, observed in the mid-nineteenth century that servants were often beaten for being careless, noting that he was shocked to see “two native servants, covered with plasters and bandages, and bloody, who were lying on their charpoys

147 Sita Ram Pandey, From sepoy to subedar: being the life and adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, a native officer of the Bengal army, written and related by himself (Vikas Publications, 1970), 24-25.

148 George Otto Trevelyan, Cawnpore (London: Macmillan and Co, 1865), 9. The term “Anglo-Indian” used by Trevelyan in this excerpt meant an Englishman living in India. Only later was the term used to mean an English person born in India or a person with mixed parentage.

149 Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 30.

73 moaning.”150 The boundaries between the English and the Indians, both spatially and mentally, militarily and domestically, allowed for a swifter categorization of “enemy” by the rebels during and after the initial mutiny. The British were used to and expected reverence, or at least a decent simulation of respect, from Indians. When the sepoys challenged the existing framework of domination and submission, the British “other” immediately became vulnerable targets for the rebels.

The Europeans in Meerut did what they could to avoid their fate, but some could not escape in time. One pregnant woman was brutally murdered in her home. Another tried to disguise herself as an ayah, but was exposed by the mob of mutineers and civilians as being

European and was immediately killed.151 Two other civilians, husband and wife, who were both veterinary surgeons, were slaughtered while confined in bed, suffering from small-pox. The murderers shot the man, but then burned the woman to death.152 The separate treatment of the female victim by the rebels is a remarkable reflection of the gendered hierarchies of power in

India at this time. There was more vicious handling of European women during the Rebellion, clearly demonstrated by the later slaughter of the women at Cawnpore. This violence is directly linked to Britain’s masculinist ideology on the treatment of women within society as markers for civilization. The Governor Generals of India, motivated by British morality, were fixated on improving the treatment of indigenous women by Indian society, and the East India Company’s

150 William Howard Russell, My Diary in India in the Year 1858-9 (New York: Routledge, 1859), vol. 1, 190.

151 An ayah is an Indian nanny, housemaid, nursemaid, or lady’s maid.

152 A.R.D. Mackenzie, Mutiny memoirs being Personal Reminiscences of the Great Sepoy Revolt of 1857 (Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1891), 22-23.

74 policies reflected these concerns.153 The rebels’ more vehement treatment of European women echoed the notion that British honor also resided in their women. The degradation of European women, through violence, symbolically destroyed British men and their civility, and therefore their basis for domination. Regardless, even as women were being differentiated through the method by which they were murdered—underscoring the importance of a gendered power structure that was understood by both the British and the Indians—they were still ultimately murdered for being part of the enemy group. Following the frenzied evening of murder and looting the sepoys feared revenge from the British units. Meerut had the largest British garrison in the region and so the mutineers’ only option was to flee the city by morning. They headed toward the Red Fort in Delhi to summon the eighty-one year old, opium-addicted Mughal emperor for support.154

In Delhi, the mutinous sepoys imprisoned and killed more European, men, women, and children. Some European women were able to escape to Meerut and have provided ample accounts about their experiences. Harriet Tytler was an Englishwomen who was married to a

British officer stationed in Delhi during the mid-nineteenth century. The particular choice of terminology in her memoirs of the Rebellion offers an example of the embedded racial ideology of Europeans in India. In her account of the mutiny at Meerut, she recalls a story circulating about a British officer who had lost his mind because his wife and infant had been murdered in their bungalow. She states that the husband begged to be allowed to go after the murderer, but his “brother officers” held him back. Following this story, Tytler recollects the events of 11

May, when rebel forces entered the city of Delhi, where she resided. The British officers warned

153 Ward, who was the missionary and advocate against sati both domestically and in India only did his research on upper class Hindu women and did not really have an understanding of the general indigenous women’s experience.

154 James, Raj, 239.

75 their men of what might happen to them if they followed their “brother soldier[s’],” example of disobedience.155 Her language relating British officers as “brothers” and sepoy soldiers as

“brothers” articulates the cultural division in mid-nineteenth century Euro-Indian society and in her individual racial philosophy.

In a conversation with her four year old son, Tytler expressed another sign of the racial dynamics involved in the killing of civilians, even if the actual conversation was fabricated to emphasize her personal sentiments about the attacks. Her son asked if the rebels were going to kill his father and then kill him. She wrote in her memoirs what had she thought to herself as she looked at her “fair”, “blue-eyed” son’s “little white throat”: “My poor child, that throat will be cut ere long, without any power on my part to save you.”156 Tytler demonstrated her own racial character in specifically noting the color of her son’s throat, directly linking her fear and understanding of why the rebels would attack her and her son to their “race.” It was this type of engrained racial identity that set Europeans apart from the rebels, before the mutiny as superiors and after the outbreak at Meerut as targeted objects.

The expression of European superiority was prevalent in most European accounts of their time spent in India. Julius George Medley, Captain of the Bengal Engineers, made a racially charged and generalizing statement in his book about his service in India. Medley stated that the

British soldier is a “splendid fellow...Feed him well, do not over-work or over-march him, and bring him into the open with any number of enemies against him, and he will thrash them.”157

Continuing in his explanation of why a “mixed force” of European and Indian troops is better

155 Harriet Tytler and Anthony Sattin, An Englishwoman in India: The Memoirs of Harriet Tytler, 1828- 1858 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 113.

156 Tytler, An Englishwoman in India, 118.

157 Medley, A Year’s Campaigning in India, 206.

76 than just a European one, he declares that the Europeans are “in fact, not a good campaigning animal. Now this is just what the Indian soldier is: with a bag of flour, and a brass pot to draw water from the wells as he passes…will march at the rate of 30 miles a day. It is clear, therefore, that for many purposes he is invaluable, if only to save the lives of the Europeans.”158 Just as the

Europeans “cannot get on without good food and liquor, or without proper shelter,” Medley implies that the Indian “animal” can easily go without good food or shelter because of certain innate qualities.

Robert Wallace Dunlop, a British Magistrate serving in Meerut when the mutiny broke out wrote in his memoir that “we [the British] can impart ennobling qualities to races by generation of culture, as we impart hereditary excellences by instruction to our aids of the lower animal creation.” 159 Dunlop’s prejudices exemplify the racial ideology that attempted to “other”

Indians. His reference to the “lower animal creation” was an attempt to dehumanize the entire

Indian population, a method specifically used by the British to try and justify their civilizing mission. The British’s ideology of governance emphatically linked British rule to the Indian body (and the Indian body to inferiority), as seen in the examples of the East India Company’s nineteenth century social reform agenda and the regulation of Indian women’s bodies and both men and women’s personal religious traditions. This was a time when the British asserted power through the physical denigration of the Indian body. Indian women were coerced into being mistresses of European men and Indian servants received beatings for carelessness. According to a British resident in the North-Western Provinces,

a sepoy is esteemed an inferior creature…He is spoken of as a ‘nigger’. He is addressed as ‘suar’ or pig, an epithet most opprobrious to a respectable native. If this conduct of

158 Medley, A Year’s Campaigning in India, 206-207.

159 Robert Henry Wallace Dunlop, Service and Adventure with the Khakee Ressalah or Meerut Volunteer Horse, During the Mutinies of 1857-1858 (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), 157.

European officers in relation to the sepoys were rare…it would scarcely be worthy of notice. Such conduct, however, is the rule…an evidence of spirit and a praiseworthy sense of superiority over the sepoy to treat him as an inferior animal.160

Dehumanization, vindicated by Britain’s acceptable and extensive racial attitudes, colonial ideology, and Victorian morality, was a powerful rung in Britain’s—and by extension the East

India Company’s—construction of colonization. Through this colonizing scheme, the British set themselves apart as superior “others” in India, which consequently led to the massacre of civilian

Europeans. The embodiment of Britain’s ideology of governance was present in European civilians, especially women and children. In the act of eliminating them, the rebels reflected a spectacle of power against their own dehumanization by the British.

The popular support for the mutineers was fueled by the underlying fears of the sepoys and the Indian civilian population, which were triggered by the religious and social reforms of the British. If the British had not set themselves apart as “superior” or even as inherently different from the Indians through these policies, even the chaos of rebellion would not have allowed space for violence against civilians. Nevertheless, the killing of civilians during the outbreak in Meerut and the conquest of Delhi marked a turning point for the mutiny. These actions demystified the racial authority and “untouchability” of the British. The civilian murders in Meerut specifically set aside all Europeans as targets for future uprisings by breaking down the barrier of “white” superiority, which the British spent years developing for themselves, whether consciously or not.

160 Anonymous British resident, Cause and Effect: The Rebellion in India, by a Resident in the North- Western Provinces (London: John Farquhar Shaw, 1859), 34.

The Cawnpore Massacres

The June and July massacres of European hostages at Cawnpore, following the outbreak in Meerut, clearly demonstrate the racial and religious tensions that acted as impetuses for the murder of European civilians, as well as anxieties surrounding the gendered hierarchy of power in nineteenth century South Asia. Cawnpore was an important garrison and trading post on the

Ganges and its European residents numbered around 1000 before fighting started.161 Sir Hugh

Wheeler, commander of the Cawnpore division, began to take precautions against the sepoys at

Cawnpore after they mutinied there on 4 June 1857, burning and looting British property.

Wheeler stocked some barracks with weapons and provisions, and ordered all Europeans to enter the entrenchment. The British remained there until 27 June, day and night being fired upon by the rebels. The infamous Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the Peshwar of Maratha and victim of the “Doctrine of Lapse” policy, fought against the British during the siege at Cawnpore.162 Nana

Sahib had promised the Europeans safe passage to Allahabad if they laid down their arms.

Without much choice, Wheeler accepted the terms. On 27 June, the remaining 450 Europeans were led to the Satichaura ghat, where they were to board the boats awaiting them.163

When the Europeans reached the boats, the rebels opened fire, shooting hostages and setting their boats ablaze. Chaos ensued as Cawnpore’s indigenous community watched on with acceptance and praise. They feasted and distributed sharbat (sherbet) to celebrate their

“liberation” from the British. The European men were separated out from those who survived

161 See Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 168-197.

162 James, Raj, 251-252.

163 W.J. Shepherd, A Personal Narrative of the Outbreak and Massacre at Cawnpore, during the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 (Lucknow: London Printing Press, 1879), 21. For an extensive history of the massacres at Cawnpore see Andrew Ward, Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (New York: H. Holt and Co, 1996).

79 the initial attack and were then brought to the shores to be executed.164 The remaining women and children were taken prisoner and placed in a room known as the Bibighur meaning “house of the ladies.” They were joined by other European women and children hostages from Fatehgarh, together totaling seventy-three women and 124 children.165 Having been informed about the events in Cawnpore, Mayor-General Henry Havelock, marched toward the city with a relief force. On 15 July, before Havelock’s arrival, Nana Sahib gave orders for the remaining women and children to be murdered.166 A group of native professional executors carried out the massacre. They were sent in with swords and long knives, cut up the prisoners and then threw their bodies—some still said to be moaning with life—into the well.167 Again, as we saw in the case of the murdered veterinary surgeon and his wife in Meerut, the women—this time on a much larger scale—were separated from the men, but were ultimately killed in a more violent way.

Minnie Blane, a new mother who fled to the uncertain safety of Lahore during the

Rebellion, wrote in a letter to her mother that “no punishment is too great for those inhuman monsters. When I think of the pretty elegant girls and their charming mothers, and the brave men I met in Cawnpore…and their terrible fates, it makes me want to shoot every Indian I see.”168 Blane’s sentiments were shared and expressed by the British relief force in Cawnpore when they retaliated mercilessly and indiscriminately against the local men, women, and children

164 Mukherjee, “Satan Let Loose upon Earth,” 99, 102.

165 Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, 408.

166 It is not clear if it was Nana Sahib or one of his advisors that gave the official order.

167 Mukherjee, “Satan Let Loose upon Earth,” 114. See Nanak Chand’s diary of events in Kanpur printed as “Translation of a Narrative of Events at Cawnpore” and “Synopsis of the Evidence of the Cawnpore Mutiny,” in G. W. Williams, Narrative of the Events in the NWP in 1857–58 (Calcutta, n.d.).

168 Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj (New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 112-113.

80 living in the city. Lord Canning proposed that the sepoys and other rebels captured should be tried and convicted before being sentenced, but punishment was generally swift and violent.

Though earning the title “Clemency Canning,” Lord Canning refused to be pressured by the blood-thirsty Europeans and enacted the Gagging Act, which suppressed inflammatory publications, and the Clemency Order, which ensured the fair treatment of captured sepoys.169

Canning’s actions, however, were often in vain, especially following the events at Cawnpore.170

Some sepoys were blown apart by cannons, while others were forced to lick the blood stains off the floor in the Bibighar before being executed.171 Private Charles Metcalfe of the 32nd wrote that after entering the Bibighar, the Highlanders, led by Sir Henry Havelock, knelt and “took an oath that for every one of our poor creatures who were thus slain…the enemy should bite the dust.” He added that “they kept their vow.”172 Captain of the 90th, Garnet Wolseley, maintained that the Englishmen wanted “blood for blood…barrels and barrels of the filth which flows in these niggers’ veins.”173

These violent reprisals are directly linked to the entrenched gendered divisions and stereotypes that existed in the mindsets of the colonial white man. Throughout history, gender has played a significant role in the formation of colonialism. As Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette

Burton point out in their introduction to Bodies in Contact, “women’s bodies (and to a lesser degree, men’s) have been a subject for concern, scrutiny, anxiety, and surveillance in a variety of

169 Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 166-167.

170 See Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 210-211. Following General Havelock’s leave from Cawnpore, Brigadier General James Neill went against the orders of Lord Canning and enacted a punishment that he claimed “suits the occasion well.” His martial law and indiscriminate punishment of Indians lasted for over three months following the events at Cawnpore. Also see, Kaye, History of the Sepoy War, Vol. 2, 269-270.

171 Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 211; MacMillan, Women of the Raj, 113.

172 Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, Mu n al-D n Hasan Kh n, Munshi J vanal l , and Esther G. Eddis Metcalfe, Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi (Westminster: A. Constable & Co, 1898), 68.

173 Garnet Wolseley, Wolseley Papers, quoted in Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 212.

81 times and places across the world.”174 In our case, European women living in mid-nineteenth century India, demonstrate how imperial officials managed and manipulated the female body in order to stabilize the colonial structure of political and social power. Captain Wolseley also stated, after seeing the walls of the Bibighar soon after the incident, that his sword was “thirsty for the blood of these cursed women slayers.”175 White women encompassed a multifaceted identity in the colonial framework. To the British colonizer they represented the weaker sex but also the civility of the metropole. White women acted as agents of empire, and therefore paternalism, but were also victims to the gendered power structure of colonialism. Scholar of

Women’s Studies, Penelope Tuson, argues that “Memsahibs, as they came to be known, were expected to be a problem even before they arrived [in India], largely because by the 1850s they were expected to behave in a certain way and to require certain attentions and formalities of social etiquette.”176 Their role as semi-imperialists, nonetheless, factored into their categorization as the enemy by the rebels. Their representation of British morality and civility is what incited the hostile response from not just the British military fighting in India, but the entirety of British society. Indiscriminate retribution by British soldiers, because of the treatment of European women by native rebels, shows how engrained the gendered stereotypes about white women were in the male colonialist mindset.

European women in India, only beginning to arrive in large amounts in the mid- nineteenth century, caused concern for the governing male elite. European women were often blamed for the deterioration of race relations in India because they upset the established

174 Ballantyne and Burton, Bodies in Contact, 4.

175 Wolseley, Wolseley Papers, quoted in Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 212. Emphasis mine.

176 Penelope Tuson, “Mutiny Narratives and the Imperial Feminine: European Women’s Accounts of the Rebellion in India in 1857” Women’s Studies International Forum 21, no. 3 (1998): 293-294.

82 relationships between European males and native females. According to a Sikh Police officer in

1858, these liaisons were integral to the communication between sepoys and European officers.

He blames the extent of the Mutiny on the arrival of European women.

In former times the [European] Officers used to keep native women…These women exercised a good deal of influence in the Regiment. By acting in this way the Officers did good service to the Government, because they became better acquainted with the character of their men, and what was going on in the lines. Now the Officers marry English ladies, there is less in common between the Officers and Sepoys; of late years the Sepoys have not confided in their Officers. The consequences of all this has been, that when the Mutiny broke out, the Officers were misinformed as to its extent.177

In addition to interrupting the established order of communication in South Asia by “hasten[ing] the disappearance of the Indian mistress,” European women were also accused of “fostering the development of exclusive social groups in every civil station” and “were thought by Englishmen to be in need of protection from lascivious Indians.”178 Of course, European women were typically contained, so to speak, by their European homesteads and could not have perpetuated such racial divisions, at least not on a large scale outside of the elite sectors. Their purpose in

India was political and they were meant to preserve the “civilized standards” of their male counterparts. Mostly, however, white women seem to have been used by male politicians as convenient scapegoats for the earlier social and political incompetence of the East India

Company and later as a pretext for advancing Britain’s imperial agenda.

Tales of rebel brutality and the lascivious Indians saturated British reports and letters back home. Many officers reported seeing bodies of white men, women, and children with their limbs severed, but it was the rumors about sexual atrocities that were reported as facts back in

177 Shaikh Hedayut Ali, Bengal Sikh Police Battalion, A few words relative to the late Mutiny of the Bengal Army and the rebellion in the Bengal Presidency, trans. Captain T. Rattray, British Library (Oriental and India Office Collections), IOR H/727 (1858), 759-768, selection reprinted in Tuson, 293-295.

178 Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793-1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1980), 5.

England, spurring vitriolic racial sentiments surrounding the treatment of women.179 Public opinion was spawned by reports by male officers and soldiers to their families, but no personal female accounts actually describe rape.180 Stories of white women being raped were used by government officials as propaganda tools for the further colonization of India after the Rebellion, but most importantly, these stories express contemporary male attitudes about female sexuality in Victorian England.181 It was the idea of a white woman (and all she represented) being overpowered by an Indian that sat uncomfortably with the British public in the metropole.182

Special Commissioners and Magistrates who tried to find evidence of torture and rape could not.

Even Lady Canning questioned the rumors of torture and rape.

A child who was said to have been killed slowly, bit by bit cut off, was certainly killed at once with a tulwar… People on the spot say the stories going around are not true of that place but happened elsewhere, and so on. Those who have gone from place to place never find evidence of the horrible treatment everyone here believes.183

In fact, even William Muir, Secretary of the North-West Provinces’ Intelligence Department, stated that he did not believe the native rebels would have raped European women, not because

“the colour of European females is repugnant to the oriental taste” or because Hindus might lose caste from such an act, but because the “object of the mutineers was…not so much to disgrace

179 Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 212-213.

180 This is not to imply that rape did not occur during the Rebellion, but it does mean that the idea of white women being raped by Indians was exaggerated by the male community, which begs the question as to why.

181 Tuson, “Mutiny Narratives and the Imperial Feminine,” 295.

182 See Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

183 Charlotte Canning, Canning Papers, quoted in Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 213.

84 our [the British] name, as to wipe out all trace of Europeans, and everything connected with foreign rule.”184

From the onset of the Rebellion, the British as an entity, to include anything that represented the presence of Britain’s structure of rule, were specific targets for the rebels and mutineers. The cities attacked by rebels were chosen because of the British influence within them. All of the buildings that were owned by the British or represented anything European were destroyed by the sepoys as markers of foreign domination. Azimullah Khan, Prime

Minister to Nana Sahib, clearly defines his goal as a rebel when he stated in an Ishtahar

(proclamation) to the Indian people that

We natives have made ourselves, so quietly to surrender our country to a handful of tyrannical foreigners, who are trying in many ways to deprive us of our religion and our privileges! It behoves [sic] us, therefore – and I call upon you all to join heart and hand – to extirpate our enemies, root and branch, from the face of all India. Let not a soul escape, let not the name of a Christian be ever named in Hindoostan.185

Not only does Azimullah imply that the eradication of all representatives of the “tyrannical foreigners” is his ultimate goal for the Rebellion, but he also blurs the lines between religion, race, and nationalism, creating stronger superficial boundaries between Indians and Europeans.

Immediately following the events at Cawnpore, rebels from neighboring villages flowed into the city. The sepoys, who tore off their British dispensed uniforms, and other rebels, who had previously been civilians but who took up arms during the Rebellion, were now blended into an indistinguishable fighting unit.186 The Rebellion was no longer a conflict between sepoy and officer, but between indigenous and “white” and whatever “white” encompassed.

184 William Muir, Memorandum containing the result of enquiries made by desire of the Governor General into the rumours of European females having been dishonoured during the late mutinies, 30 December 1857, OIOC: IOR H/725, 663-664, selection reprinted in Tuson, “Mutiny Narratives,” 295.

185 W. J Shepherd, A Personal Narrative of the Outbreak and Massacre at Cawnpore, During the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 (Lucknow: London Printing Press, 1879), 42.

Once the British were set apart as an entity the lines between “friend” and “foe” hardened. The differences between separate indigenous groups began to deteriorate, creating two basic inclusive groups with which individuals were required to identify. These groups were based on certain (assumed by individuals to be shared) characteristics that were constructed through Britain’s own understanding of their racial and moral superiority. In Orientalism, Said characterized what it meant to be a “White Man.” He believed it was an “idea and a reality.”

Every idea being expressed by European racists like Mill and Arthur De Gobineau about the binding of “us,” simultaneously banished another “outsider.” Nineteenth century European culture was constructed around the categorization of “others” and the contrasting realities—be they cultural traditions, religion, or skin color—that they had with “white” intellectuals.187

While early nineteenth century scientific racism was being developed in Europe, the reality of a racial hierarchy was being practiced in India. A sepoy in Cawnpore remarked to an East India

Company employee prior to the June mutiny, “you are serpents, and not one of you shall be spared.”188 Another sepoy, out of his regimental dress, threatened a sergeant’s wife with the words, “You will none of you come here much oftener; you will not be alive another week.”189

“You” was now understood by the rebels to be a select group, which is paradoxically what the

British had intended by creating a “self” image and “othering” the Indians through their differences with that “self”; but “you” had now become the enemy and “you” encompassed every white soldier and civilian regardless of rank, sex, or age.

186 Mukherjee, “Satan Let Loose upon Earth,” 99, 107.

187 Said, Orientalism, 227-228

188 Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, 11.

189 Mowbray Thomson, The Story of Cawnpore (London: R. Bentley, 1859), 29.

Both phases of the Cawnpore massacres exhibited the Indian community’s manifest racism and the execution of a type of reciprocal “othering” by the participants. The first phase of the massacre—the carnage at the ghat and subsequent shootings on the shore—as Mukherjee suggested, represent the “communal code” of violence; the second phase, the slaughter of women and children, is what he deemed “criminal.” The first phase of violence was a community event that conveyed an entire society’s sentiments against the “other,” in this case represented by the British. It was symbolic of both the power of the rebels, but also the civilian community’s rejection of foreign rule. Although an assumed unified racial ideology was essential for the mass participation in the massacre, the “criminal” activities of the butchers who slaughtered the women and children are also tinged with racial dynamics and communal influence. If the goal of the Cawnpore insurrection was to demolish anything intrinsically

“British,” than the butchers were just mirroring, in the private sphere, the racialized sentiments of the rebels and common people in the public sphere.

The dynamics of the racial impetuses for the civilian murders are evident in the 1858 statement made by Times correspondent W.H. Russell, who visited India soon after the

Cawnpore massacres:

[the] aggravation of the Cawnpore massacres was this, that the deed was done by a subject race—by black men who dared to shed the blood of their masters, and that of poor helpless ladies and children. Here we had not only a servile war and a sort of Jacquerie combined, but we had a war of religion, a war of race, a war of revenge, of hope, of national promptings to shake off the yoke of a stranger, and to re-establish the full power of the native chiefs, and the full sway of native religions…Whatever the cause of the mutiny and the revolt, it is clear enough that one of the modes by which the leaders, as if by common instinct, determined to effect their end, was the destruction of every white man, woman or child who fell into their hands.190

190 W.H. Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, ed. M. Edwardes (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1970), 29-30. Emphasis mine.

Amelia Horne, who survived the massacre, made an overtly racist remark about the perpetrators of the massacre:

While we were endeavoring to embark the shore was lined with spectators, who were looking on and exulting like so many demons, as they undoubtedly were, over our distressing condition, taunting and jeering at us for having at last fallen into their hands. The black devils grinned like so many apes, keeping up an incessant chatter in their monkey language.191

While her statement was perhaps exaggerated by feelings of resentment toward her attackers, her chosen terminology undoubtedly characterizes European racial sentiments brought to India through the East India Company. Horne’s comments use racialized language similar to other

Europeans at this time, though her account was recorded years after the initial event. She refers to the Indians as “black,” a term that is typically used for people of African descent in the history of British colonialism. She also applies the stereotype of being “monkey-like,” which again is traditionally associated with Africans but also the Irish in this period. Because of this, Horne’s language could be interpreted as a post-dated trope of savagery related to subalterns taking up arms, but in comparison to East India Company language that pre-dated the Rebellion, is it clear that this racial discourse already existed in South Asia’s European community prior to 1857 and at most is an exaggerated form of the racial sentiments that were present during her attack.

______

As seen in the examples of Meerut and Cawnpore, race, religion, and gender intersected during the course of the 1857 Rebellion and demonstrate the complexities of the social hierarchies that are present in the colonial landscape of nineteenth century South Asia. Ronald

Hyam, in Empire and Sexuality, underscores the connection between race, sex, and imperialism.

He states that “sex is at the very heart of racism”—not to say that racism is simply caused by

191 British Library, London. Add. MS 41488, Papers relating to the Indian Mutiny, i, Amy Haines’s [Amelia Horne’s] Narrative, quoted in Mukherjee, 109. Also see “Ten Month’s Captivity after the Massacre at Cawnpore,” The Nineteenth Century (Jan.-June 1913): 1212-1234; ibid. (July-Dec. 1913):78-91.

88 sexual apprehensions, but notes that the emotional hostility derived from sexual encounters between “black” men and “white” women engendered the concept of race.192 Furthering Hyam’s assertion, I add that British morality was at the heart of sex, sex was at the heart of racism, and racism was (and still is in many ways) at the heart of imperialism. These three social constructions, along with many others, contributed to the categorization of people into groups and their subsequent treatment by the opposing group. The social and political policies enacted by the British in the years prior to the outbreak of rebellion, because of these Eurocentric ideologies, deepened the latent racial and religious tensions in India. The attacks on white women during the Rebellion, as representatives of a dominating foreign order, underscores how race, religion, and even nationalism, traverse the gendered understandings of colonial construction. Civilians, therefore, were not seen as separate targets from the military. In a most basic sense, all Europeans and representative qualities of European power were seen as the enemy by the rebels and removed as such; for instance, the case of eight American missionaries who were murdered at Farrukhabad by rebels for being white and Christian and therefore a representation of the “other” and its form of control.193 The Americans were not British or militarized and did not identify themselves as being part of the foreign ruling order; but nevertheless, they exhibited enough of the “other’s” traits to be lumped into the enemy group and targeted by the rebels.

Examples of race and religion’s intersectionality are extremely apparent when viewing the 1857 Rebellion through the lens of civilians. Mrs. Aldwell, who resided in Delhi with her

192 Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 203.

193 Sir William Muir, Records of the Intelligence Department of the Government of the North-West Provinces of India during the Mutiny of 1857, ed. William Coldstream, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902), 14- 15.

89 husband, witnessed firsthand the importance of religion, race, and developing national identity, to the rebels during the siege. When the rebels began attacking and murdering the Europeans in

Delhi, Mrs. Aldwell dressed herself and her three children as natives and hid in Mirza Abdulla’s

(one of the Emperor’s grandsons) house. They were initially accepted by his wife and sister, but within a day were told that if they did not leave the house, Abdulla would have them murdered.194 Mrs. Aldwell convinced them that she would leave and asked one of the native servants for help. He told her that the Emperor was sheltering Europeans in the palace as prisoners, and had guaranteed that they would not be killed. Mrs. Aldwell and her children were escorted to the palace by the servant, even though he had taken an oath to “murder every

European.”195 On arrival to the palace, they were taken as prisoners and put in confinement with around 50 other captured European civilians including men, women, and children. They were all placed in one room, “very dark, with only one door, and no window,” and according to Mrs.

Aldwell, “not fit for the residence of any human being, much less for the number of us that were there.”196 Unlike the refugees of the Black Hole of Calcutta who were set free before imprisonment, or if they survived the night, the following day, on 16 May 1857, the entire group of Europeans—with the exception of Mrs. Aldwell and her three children—were taken out of the prison cell, tied together with ropes and murdered by the Emperor’s private guards.

Mrs. Aldwell was spared from this fate for one reason. Before she was escorted to the palace, she had written a petition to the Emperor stating that she and her children were from

Cashmere and that they were Muslim. She wanted to present it to the Emperor in person, but it

194 Mrs. Aldwell’s statement (n.d.), in Proceedings on [sic] the Trial of Muhammad Bahadur Shah (1858) reprinted in Nayar, 1857 Reader, 93-96.

195 Mrs. Aldwell’s statement, in Nayar, 1857 Reader, 93.

196 Mrs. Aldwell’s statement, in Nayar, 1857 Reader, 94.

90 was taken from her by the sepoys upon her imprisonment. While imprisoned, Mrs. Aldwell and her children were given separate food from the rest of the Europeans, which she surmised meant the soldiers read and believed the letter. Cleverly, she also learned and taught her children the

Muslim confession of faith as soon as she heard about the mutiny in Meerut.197 After the other

Europeans were killed, Mrs. Aldwell and her children were released by the King’s servants and escorted to a safe place outside of the palace that night. The King’s guards escorted them after dark, because if they were seen during the day “the sepoys or city people would murder” them.198

Mrs. Aldwell and her children were allowed to live because they were seen by the King and his guards as part of the allied group, a classification determined by their perceived religion. When

Mrs. Adwell no longer represented an obvious marker of British authority, that is, Christianity, she was no longer categorized as the enemy. However, to the “sepoys or city people” she and her children were classified by the most obvious marker of British authority, the color of their skin and would therefore be marked for death as the enemy.

Racial and religious categorization by both the British and the Indians during the

Rebellion were intimately linked. Anglo-Indians, with “mixed” parentage, tended to define themselves by their religion. Anglo-Indians who were Christian tended to fight for the British and Anglo-Indians who were either Hindu or Muslim, fought for the rebels (though there are exceptions.) Race and religion sometimes run parallel with each other, but are not always thought about as being different. Race, being a more visual marker, however, is inclined to incorporate religion as a category of identification within the context of the Rebellion and on a larger scale, imperialism in general. For instance, Indian Christians were no longer seen as allies during 1857 and were left to fend for themselves in the wake of the Rebellion. Such as the case

197 Mrs. Aldwell’s statement, in Nayar, 1857 Reader, 94-95.

198 Mrs. Aldwell’s statement, in Nayar, 1857 Reader, 96.

91 of Sikandra, a settlement north of Agra, that contained nearly a thousand Indian Christians in a self-sufficient community. When the rebel sepoys marched on Agra the European residents took refuge in the Agra Fort, but when their Indian Christian counterparts tried to follow them, the

Europeans closed the gate. After much pleading by the Indians and Thomas Valpy French of the

Church Missionary Society, the Indians were finally allowed to enter, but this demonstrates that the British favored race over religion when identifying the “other.”199

An example of the variability of race and religion as markers of identity is validated by

Dr. Chaman Lal, a personal physician of the Mughal Emperor who had to be pointed out by his neighbors as a Christian (otherwise his skin would tell a difference story and consequently save his life). As soon as he was named as a Christian, he was shot in the street as an enemy.200

Race and religion are indistinct again in the case of Ram Chandra, a former Hindu turned

Christian who fled Delhi during the sepoy’s siege. He returned after it was recaptured by the

British, thinking his Christian ties would keep him safe. He was violently attacked by the British and wrote that his faith no longer gave him comfort “when a native Christian is in danger from

Christian officers themselves, merely because he was not born in England and has not white skin.”201 Race and religion were respectively the most visible and forceful markers of identification that were used to categorize participants into two distinct groups during the

Rebellion. As we have seen, in spite of the transient boundaries between these two opposing groups, they are still strong enough to incite atrocious behavior toward all participants.

199 Muir, Records of the Intelligence Department, Vol. 1, 14-15.

200 Llewellyn-Jones, “The ‘Other’ Victims,” 4-5.

201 William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 414-416.

Violence, which is inherent in all rebellions, is what reinforced “the formation of a united front against a common enemy,” as expressed by Mukherjee.202 This process is cyclical in that violence encourages group formation (in its most basic sense to provide individual protection); groups then imagine common underlying factors to strengthen their ties, leading to deceivingly mutual characteristics created by contrasting illusorily collective representations of the opposing group. These communal representations also lead to the construction of a social hierarchy based on those assumptions. This consequently results in further grouping, eventually causing indiscriminate violence and so the cycle continues. The ideology of governance—that was constructed and managed by the British through the East India Company’s policies emerged from Britain’s developing ideologies on morality and race (the social constructions caused by a shared illusory mindset). This resulted in the regulated “othering” of the Indian native. In order to “other” the Indians—a necessary tactic for strengthening their civilizing and colonizing mission—the British first “othered” themselves by measuring India and its inhabitants against their own erroneous distinctiveness. This left them, as an entity, vulnerable to attack by the rebels and created opportunities for violence against civilians, both Indian and European. But we have seen that although these abstract boundaries are powerful incentives for violence and are later used to justify attacks on civilians, they are ephemeral; therefore, civilian casualties during the 1857 Rebellion also need to be briefly examined through Brubaker’s and Anderson’s respective theories on “groupness” and “imagined communities” to intellectually grasp the forces behind the abstract nature of communal identity.

202 Mukherjee, “Satan Let Loose upon Earth,” 106.

Changeable Realities

Rogers Brubaker argues in Ethnicity Without Groups that ethnicity or “groupness” is a variable in history as opposed to the presupposed idea that boundaries are constant, unchangeable realities. These theoretical concepts can be problematized within the field of imperial history and the history of the 1857 Rebellion. Brubaker’s theory contends that

“groupness” and boundaries are unsustainable and because of their vacillation in definition and exercise, can never be seen as assumed, even in what might seem to be obvious historical cases.

By applying a more theoretical approach to the topics of nationalism and ethnicity, Brubaker’s efforts strove to create the tension needed to produce new insights on fields of history that had already been thoroughly analyzed by empirical research. His concept is useful in this case to explain the abundance of civilian victims during the 1857 Rebellion.

“Groupness” has been examined in interdisciplinary scholarship for decades, mostly in the form of ethnicity and nationalism. Ernest Gellner, social anthropologist and philosopher, claims in his 1964 book Thought and Change that “nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”203 Indians and Europeans did not wake up one day to find their latent ideologies infinitely meshing with their neighbors. Over time, however, shared ideologies emerged through shared experiences—though as we will see these shared ideologies are deceptive. Gellner’s arguments align themselves with Brubaker in that theoretical sense that the “nation” is ipso facto arbitrarily constructed. Opposing Brubaker, however, Gellner most definitely uses a constructionist approach by claiming the nation is constructed out of nationalist ideology that existed prior to the nation; just as the British Empire in India was constructed from the imperial ideology that existed prior to the Rebellion. In

Gellner’s book, Encounters with Nationalism, published thirty years later, the author maintains

203 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), 169.

94 his argument that the political concern of the people is concerned first with how the state aligns itself with their cultures in order to protect, maintain, and perpetuate those traditions.204 This theory is beneficial in that it reveals the connection of a constructed group’s identity to the building of state policy and in what way the state manages the cultural traditions of the society.

The East India Company’s policies, while placing limitations on Indian cultural traditions and interfering with personal law, also assisted in fabricating a more homogenized Indian community that reflected the “othering” tactics of the British.

More closely related to Brubaker’s theory on “groupness” are Anderson’s theoretical concepts on community. In Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, Anderson claims that nationalism “is an imagined political community.” By “imagined,” Anderson does not mean constructed; rather, that most members of a community will never know, meet, or understand the realities of their fellow members; yet, these members insist on a shared image of their community. The rebels of 1857, as understood by most historians, did not agree on or even know what the overall objective of the insurrection was; but, because of their “imagined community,” shared a sense of common identity, which placed them in an actualized group as allies. There was a common understanding of the need for the eradication of Europeans from

South Asia, but there was not a congruent plan of attack. Important to note, however, is that even though their intentions were scattered, there was a general sense that the British ruling structure was ludicrous and foreign. There was a harking for change by the presumed leadership and the populous, which led to some agreement in the rebellious Indian community regarding a native hierarchy of power.205 Although ultimately powerless, perceived leaders like Nana Sahib and Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah were chosen not because their ruling tactics were seen as

204 Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford [England]: Blackwell, 1994), 8.

205 See Mukherjee, “Satan Let Loose Upon Earth,” 105-108.

95 superior to the British, but because they were seen as familiar, or even “natural.” These tendencies grew stronger as the Rebellion continued and existed because of the underlying need to self-identify with others, and in an effort to understand the enemy, identify others by particular features. So, although the rebel’s efforts to overturn the foreign ruling order were stilted by the fact that their goals and strategies were not coordinated, their views on and treatment of the enemy was congruent.

All communities beyond the small tribe living and communicating face-to-face (and sometimes even these), Anderson argues, are imagined. Communities are determined by a particular identifying factor; one in which an individual imagines most others in their group also relate to the most. Within this theory, the individual rebels would uncover the underlying key factor of their own identity and apply it to their fellow rebels. So even if the key factor was different for each rebel, the impression that it is the same is what created and strengthened the community. Anderson, like Gellner, also stresses the connection between the cultural group and the state and the state’s management of cultural affairs to the formation of an imagined community.

The Rebellion was the catalyst that solidified the imagined community of rebels, and the

Rebellion was caused by the social and political policies enacted by the East India Company. By strict deduction, it was the social and political policies, motivated by the religious, racial, and gendered ideologies of the British that created an “insider/outsider” environment in South Asia, leading to the homogenization of all people into two groups and indiscriminate attacks against civilians. These shared identities, in other words, are completely illusory and therefore, the group’s boundaries are fluid.

Examples of the fluidity of group boundaries are prevalent during the Rebellion. For instance, Anglo-Indians were targeted by both the British and the rebels—victims of their formerly ambiguous categorization by the British, perhaps.206 During the first stages of the uprising, “sides” emerged and in whatever way Anglo-Indians were categorized, they were certainly not considered British, at least by the British. However, after the Emergency Act of 20

November 1857 was passed, regarding the carrying of arms and ammunition in India, Anglo-

Indians were accepted as honorary Europeans.207 This shows how arbitrary and fluid the lines between “races” actually were; yet, as fickle as they may be, they were powerfully responsible for the violence against civilians. After the arms and ammunition act, Anglo-Indians were suddenly projected into the role of “enemy” by the rebels because the British officially categorized them as Europeans. Individual Anglo-Indian self-identification would not have changed overnight because the British finally accepted them socially, but their communal identity, and how that community was perceived, shifted rapidly. Many Anglo-Indians continued to fight for the rebels, however, which was an expression of their own imagined identity and is an example of the flexibility of communal boundaries.

An even more lucid example of the fluidity of group boundaries and the illusory markers of identity is the case of Mees Dolly, a “purebred” European woman who “turned sour” after the death of her sergeant husband.208 Mees Dolly became a prostitute who was later hanged by the

British for helping to arrange the outbreak in Meerut. Apparently, Mees Dolly murdered two

Eurasian prostitutes for warning some Europeans about the impending mutiny and she was

206 “Anglo-Indian” in this context refers to persons who were born of European and Indian parents.

207 Llewellyn-Jones, “The ‘Other’ Victims,” 2.

208 William R. Pinch, “Prostituting the Mutiny: Sex-Slavery and Crime in the Making of 1857” in Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, vol. 1, ed. Crispin Bates (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2013) 62-63.

97 accused of prodding the Bengal Army’s calverymen, who had not been jailed for refusal to use the cartridges, on the night of 9 May. An account by Special Commissioner J. Cracoft Wilson states that Mees Dolly and her prostitute associates ridiculed the men that evening, “Your brethren have been ornamented with these anklets and incarcerated; and for what? Because they would not swerve from their creed; and you, cowards as you are, sit still indifferent to their fate.

If you had an atom of manhood in you, go and release them.”209 Mees Dolly imagined herself to be an outcaste or dissident and identified more with the rebel community; therefore, she acted according to her own convictions as such. It cannot be said whether or not she was accepted by the rebels as an ally, but her own belief of being part of the rebel group is what drove her actions against the opposing group.

Similar features of boundary volatility are evident in the case of Sita Ram, a sepoy who remained loyal to the British by warning his commander of the discontent among the ranks.

When captured by the rebels, however, he was not murdered, most likely because of the perceived communal mindset that Sita Ram was still Hindu and did not exhibit any outward characteristics of British domination. Had Sita Ram been Christian, he may not have survived.

Nevertheless, Sita Ram remained so loyal to the British that when the revolt ended, he was charged with executing rebellious sepoys, including his own son.210 It is because of the abstract nature of imagined communities that Mees Dolly and Sita Ram were able to join an otherwise

209 John Cracroft Wilson, Narrative of Events Attending the Outbreak of Disturbances and the Restoration of Authority in the District of Moradabad, in 1857-1858 (London: Anglo-American Times Press, 1871), 2. Interestingly, Mees Dolly was paradoxically held responsible for the outbreak in Meerut and the survival of British rule in India. Because of her taunting, the mutiny supposedly came a few weeks earlier than the other rebellious sepoys had expected, causing them to begin the Rebellion in an unorganized state thus preserving British rule. See William R. Pinch for more information about the role of prostitutes and prostitution in the 1857 Rebellion.

210 Joseph Coohill, “Indian Voices from the 1857 Rebellion” History Today 57, no. 5 (May 2007): 53-54. For a full account of Sita Ram’s experiences see Sita Ram Pandey, From sepoy to subedar: being the life and adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, a native officer of the Bengal army, written and related by himself (Vikas Publications, 1970).

98 enemy group, but it is also the conviction with which these individuals believed themselves to be part of their respective groups that formed the power behind each communal ideology and their own subsequent actions toward the opposition. Sita’s case also shows the importance of perception and perspective. He was defined by his captor’s understanding of who he was, not by his own. Their violent tendencies were not inflamed by Sita’s self-identification, but it was

Sita’s self-identification that inflamed his own violent tendencies following the rebellion. There is a palpable forcefulness embedded in “groupness” and it is important to deconstruct those dynamics, particularly those influences that drive human beings to die or kill for their own imagined community. The forcefulness behind “groupness,” is evident in the killing of civilians and in the willingness of others to die before rebuking their own markers of identification connecting them to their respective imagined community.

Brubaker pushes Anderson’s claims of an “imagined community” further in that he argues the impossibility of a communal ideology entirely. Even if the whole of the group, for example the rebels or the European community, at one exact moment shared ideology and practice in every way, that moment is fleeting and will never be a constant within society. Even though I agree that there cannot be an actualized, lasting communal ideology, I argue that individual ideologies that form an imagined community are still powerful enough to create actual responses within a society. In the collection of essays in Ethnicity Without Groups, Brubaker questions how the construction of these social groups work through the example of ethnicity.

Simply put, social constructivism, in a post-modernist context, explains ethnicity as such: if someone believes they are part of a particular group, then they are—a mere state-of-mind. As we see with the cases of Mees Dolly and Sita Ram, their belief as being part of a particular group did not mean that others in that group accepted those beliefs. Or, in the case of Mrs. Aldwell,

99 her internalized self-identification as a European Christian was overshadowed by her captor’s categorization of her as a Muslim—luckily for her and her children. Early scholars of ethnicity believed ethnicity to be an applicable or “real” category created by mutual understanding within the group. Obviously, these basic explanations are unsatisfactory and Brubaker seeks to deconstruct these perceptions through his essays by reconceptualizing the definition of

“groupness” and questioning how ethnicity functions. We can apply Brubaker’s paradigm for

“groupness” to the question of civilian victims, or for my more concentrated study, European civilian victims, during the 1857 Rebellion. Brubaker argues that ethnicity

Works not only, or even especially, in and through bounded groups, but in and through categories, schemas, encounters, identifications, languages, stories, institutions, organizations, networks, and events. The study of ethnicity…should not, in short, be reduced to, or even centered on, the study of ethnic groups.211

If applying this theoretical methodology to the analysis of European civilian victims within the framework of imperial formation, accounts of these victims must not be seen as a distinct civilian experience, but should be viewed through the intertwined schemas of race, religion, and gender, and through the institutions, organizations, and encounters produced by these ideologies. By using this methodology in my research, different and often times more substantial reasoning emerged beyond the superficial and simple understanding of mere violence as a characteristic of warfare and hence an explanation for civilian deaths.

Case in point: Britain’s domestic public as well as Europeans living in India identified the victims (or themselves) as civilians. But consistent with Brubaker’s theory, this group did not actually exist. Accordingly, the “civilian victims” had multiple identities and were civilians, victims, culprits, and aggressors, simultaneously. This manifold identity, changeable through alternating perspectives, allows for a deviation in what would be considered typical warfare

211 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4.

100 tactics, thus permitting “civilian” victims. The same individuals, who were believed by the

British to be innocent civilians, were identified as the embodiment of the enemy by the opposing group, and therefore legitimate targets during the Rebellion.212

Brubaker also engages with the concept of identity. In an essay co-written with Frederick

Cooper, Brubaker grapples with what he calls an ambiguous term that has “hard” and “soft” meanings. Similar to ethnicity, identity is divided into what Brubaker terms “groupist assumptions” and “constructivist qualifiers.”213 Here too, Brubaker contests that “identity” needs to be broken down into less loaded terms that can be used together to more easily (for lack of a better term) identify the nuanced meanings of “identity” so that work on the subject can become more applicable and in a roundabout way, less abstract. Deconstructing loaded terms like “civilian” and “victim” deepens our understanding of imperial history and the history of civilians in warfare, demonstrated in the cases of Mees Dolly, the women and children at

Cawnpore, and Mrs. Aldwell, who convincingly and conveniently glided between various

“groups.”214

Conclusion

Race, religion, and gender intersect within the framework of empire; nevertheless, as we have seen, there are cases where one sphere of ideology encompasses or overshadows another or remain inconsequential at some points during the formation of empire. Therefore, race, religion,

212 By legitimizing the civilian victims as targets, we gain a different understanding about the entire nature of the Rebellion. An understanding that if recognized by contemporary forces could have changed future events that resulted as a reaction to civilian murders, such as domestic support for the subsequent colonization of India. This scenario might seem a bit speculative, but it shows that theory can sometimes offer more satisfactory results than traditional and oftentimes presentist historical methods.

213 Brubaker, Ethnicity, 4.

214 The distinctions between the contentions on “groups” made by scholars like Gellner, Anderson, and Brubaker, demonstrate the usefulness of theories in breaking down larger historical themes.

101 and gender should be treated together as analytical lenses, but should not be lumped together as particularly analogous or symbiotic phenomenon. Not to be misconstrued, these ideologies all imply “inclusion” or “exclusion” and deal with the question of identity, the process of

“othering,” and the formation of groups.

As we have seen, “groupness” acts as an anchor for other organizing themes in the framework of empire and traverses myriad analytical spheres. The social construct of race influences the illusory identities of “groupness.” Like ethno-nationalism, race becomes a facet of identity through which individuals in a particular group choose to associate. This distinction, in turn, helps to promote a shared communal identity, as well as prejudiced tendencies.

“Groupness” is also formed through religious ideology, in which the distinguishing characteristics of a particular “imagined community” are centered on the idea of a perceptible, if not actual, shared religious belief. The dynamism of “groupness” exists in history; however, in a backward approach, by removing the more abstract and vague divisions between bounded groups and acknowledging the fluidity of the “imagined communities” of mid-nineteenth century South

Asia, we can begin to understand their origins and formation in the larger context of imperial history. By incorporating theoretical methods in the analysis of European civilian victims of the

1857 Rebellion, we can see that the formation of groups and the process of “othering” was gradually shaped by realized state policy and the state’s management of cultural traditions.

Civilians—whether Indian or European—were no longer defined by others within their broader homogenous “group” or by their own self-identification; during this time of upheaval, they were defined by and as the “other,” and were treated as such.

102

Conclusion

In September of 1857, just months after the mutiny broke out in Meerut, Karl Marx stated that: “However infamous the conduct of the sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India…There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself…”215 Attacks on European civilians did not begin with the sepoy’s sword, but began with England’s ideology of domination and governance, an ideology that encompassed

Britain’s moral ethos, and saturated the social and political policies and practices of the East

India Company in South Asia. By creating a self-identity the British “othered” themselves from the Indians—they chose to highlight their differences; they chose to homogenize themselves so that they could separate and generalize the Indians, in order to formulate and more effectively exact their imperial intentions, an objective that became obvious following the “Mutiny.”

Unfortunately, the racial and moral tensions so evident in the carnage of 1857 were only exacerbated by the Rebellion. Following the events of 1857 even harsher lines were drawn between the “groups” in India. In British Magistrate Robert Dunlop’s 1858 account of the

“Mutiny,” he implored his fellow British to take on the “glorious task” of educating Indians, “by generations of patient effort, to our own level, but do not let us commit the folly of declaring them to be or acting as if they were, what they are not.”216 He continued to justify the government’s imperial appropriation of India following the Rebellion by stating, “I trust the

215 Karl Marx, “The Indian Revolt,” The New York Daily Tribune, 16 September 1857, 152-155, in Nayar, 1857 Reader, 281.

216 Dunlop, Service and Adventure, 157.

103 insight this revolt will give our English friends into the weak and childish but cruel and treacherous native character, may prevent the mistake of legislating for them…as our equals.”217

The justifications and explanations for imperial expansion become buttressed by the developing field of racial science, which was supported by “Mutiny” propaganda, following the advent of scientific racism in the mid-nineteenth century. Existing accounts of the Rebellion saw it as a momentous event in British history, even though European casualties were relatively low compared to other contemporary campaigns involving the British. Henry Setton Merriman, in

1858, has the narrator of his novel Flotsam call it “a year truly of woe and distress and unspeakable horror…so long as the world should remember the English race.”218 Lieutenant governor of the North-Western Provinces, John Colvin, stated that the “safety of the Empire was imperiled,”219 and according to another contemporary novelist, Henry Kingsley, the “Mutiny” was “our greatest and most fearful disaster.”220 The “Mutiny” changed the way Empire in South

Asia operated and even stricter laws were put in place by the British. The new government sought to gain intelligence by issuing a formal census, and placed generalizing restrictions on the

Indian population. Although European casualties were comparatively small, the Rebellion quickly became a justification for the direct rule of a more activist government in South Asia because of the importance placed by nineteenth century Britain on perceived universal moral understandings of civilizational hierarchy.

In England, shocking stories of white women being raped by Indian men, which were obsessively romanticized in nineteenth century literature, helped to further bond the “white race”

217 Dunlop, Service and Adventure, 156.

218 Henry Seton Merriman [Hugh Stowell Scott], Flotsam: The Study of a Life (London: Smith, Elder, 1909), 144.

219 Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, Vol. 3, 275.

220 Henry Kingsley, Stretton: A Novel, Vol. 3 (London: Tinsley, 1869), 274.

104 while simultaneously excluding others. 221 England’s obsession with race-based purity was displayed in the perpetuation of the rape myth. Concerns about miscegenation would soon follow, but contemporary anxieties centered on protecting the moral dignity of the white female against the ravages of a racially inferior male. Tales of women being “dishonored” ran rampant in the metropole. Legends, like that of Miss Wheeler—who supposedly stole her abductor’s sword while he slept and used it to kill him and his family before throwing herself down a well— idealized women’s honor and perpetuated the notion that women were better off dead than to be defiled by someone with inferior blood.222 The reinforcement of the terrorized and helpless white woman occurred in Mutiny literature and popular accounts on a large scale and eventually became part of Britain’s collective memory. After India became a British colony, the British in

India began to eradicate all things “Indian” from their homes, tables, and closets and followed distinctly British traditions in order to create or reinstate a “racial barrier” to protect them from the newly colonized subjects.223 Racial and religious ferocity towards Indians following the

Rebellion continued as South Asia ushered in a new era of control, now directly under the British

Government.

The examples analyzed in this thesis are just snapshots of the overall situation in South

Asia during the mid-nineteenth century. There are hundreds of accounts that reflect similar experiences and sentiments in both the European and rebel milieus and explain the nature of events surrounding the civilian experience, particularly the European civilian experience, during

221 Catherine Hall, “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections of the Nineteenth Century,” in Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 72. There are a great deal of works on nineteenth century literature containing tales of rape and inter-race relations in India during the time of the Mutiny. It became a fascination of nineteenth century imperial ideology following 1857. See Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1999).

222 MacMillan, Women of the Raj, 111,113.

223 Hall, “Of Gender and Empire,” 73.

105 the Rebellion. For the sake of brevity, I was unable to cover more cases to offer an even broader understanding of the Rebellion in terms of racial, religious, and gendered notions of “groupness” in regards to civilians in warfare. Something else that needs to be further explored is the different types of warfare that were present during the Rebellion and that inform the way military historians typically view the civilian experience.

One of the most intense battles during the Rebellion was the siege on the Europeans in the Residency at Lucknow, who unlike the Europeans at Cawnpore, were rescued by Sir Colon

Campbell’s relief force. In addition to the European civilian experience in Lucknow that would have offered more insight into the concept of reciprocal “othering,” is the experience of some

1000 African slaves who were sold to the Nawab of Oudh in Lucknow during the 1840s. The slaves—such as “Bob the Nailer,” so named by the British because of the amount of people he shot and killed from the upper window of a house near the Residency—willfully fought for the rebels during the Rebellion.224 In addition to the racial intricacies of their experience, which support my assertion that boundaries based on superficial constructs are abstract, there is a gendered complex. Both African men and women fought against the British in Lucknow. One female sniper killed hundreds during the fighting, and according to a British officer, the “African negresses…fought like wild cats, and it was not till after they were killed that their sex was even suspected.”225 African experiences are nearly neglected in the historiography of the Rebellion and need to be deconstructed, especially within the framework of “groupness” and empire.

Like the African men and women in Lucknow, children are also neglected in Rebellion history. Indian children are rarely mentioned in the available historical sources, and European

224 See Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, “Africans in the Indian Mutiny,” History Today 59, no. 12 (December 2009): 41.

225 Llewellyn-Jones, “Africans in the Indian Mutiny,” 41.

106 children are generally lumped together with women when discussed, something I regretfully do as well. The most obvious group of people missing from this thesis are Indian civilians. Indian civilians are also rarely mentioned in the sources, especially as individuals, and it is nearly impossible to count the number murdered by the British during the Rebellion. A more thorough investigation into the civilian experience during the Rebellion would include Indians; though, by using European civilians, along with their more comprehensive yet emotionally charged accounts, I support my argument that “othering” is reciprocal and that individuals have plural identities, based on varying perspectives and perceptions.

______

Compliant with Queen Victoria’s sentiments surrounding 1857, Captain Medley states in his memoir that “madness produced by fanaticism is so strong as to outweigh any other feeling.”226 The “mad fanaticism” observed by the British as having taken over the “once so gentle” Indians, works within the theory of “groupness”; that the feeling of approval and belonging to a particular group—though completely abstract—outweighs feelings of human compassion and sensitivity; however, this same fanaticism was an element of the British ethos that allowed for the racially and morally imbued policies and reformations in India; it was developed as part of Eurocentric ideology from the seventeenth century and was no longer recognizable to the British except when working against them, such as in the case of the

Rebellion. They were blind to their own fanatic and uncompassionate treatment of the Indians and only recognized the negative effects of the power of generalization—a by-product of the process of “othering”—when the rebels indiscriminately attacked Europeans during the

Rebellion.

226 Medley, A Year’s Campaigning in India, 201.

107

Social and political reforms of the early nineteenth century were a major factor in the perpetuation of British ascendancy as well as the popular support of the Rebellion, but the construction of particular groups, built on colonial ideology and bolstered by British morality and racialization that were inherent in these policies, were the primary factors for attacks on

European civilians. If the English had not separated themselves as being religiously and racially superior to Indians then the breaking down of their hegemonic status might not have allowed a space for violence against their civilian population. Incidences of racially and religiously spurred violence are exhibited in the cases of Meerut and Cawnpore and demonstrate that

European civilians were direct targets for attacks by the rebels, but that the rebels did not identify the civilians as such; instead, they were viewed as perpetuators of colonialism and representatives of the aggressive foreign ruling order. Obviously there were caste, ethnic, and religious differences in India before the Europeans, but the racial and religious ideology brought into India through the East India Company, that is, how those specific philosophies manipulated and influenced Indian understandings about their own imagined community in contradiction to the European imagined community, blurred the lines between “enemy soldier” and simply

“enemy.”

108

Appendix A

Maps

Fig. 1 Map of Northern India showing distribution of British and Native Troops http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40900/40900-h/40900-h.htm

109

Fig. 2 Map of India 1837 and 1857 showing British East India Company Territory http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/9848/india1837to1857.jpg

110

Fig. 3 Map of India, 1835-1858 http://www.sdstate.edu/projectsouthasia/Resources/images/GreenMap.jpg

111

Fig. 4 Southeastern Cawnpore Cantonments, Including Entrenchments and Sati Chowra Ghat http://www.britishempire.co.uk/images4/cawnporesiege.jpg

112

Appendix B

Timeline of Indian Rebellion 1857-1858

1857

January Protests at Dum Dum over greased cartridges February 26 Sepoys of the 19th Native Infantry at Berhampore refuse rifle practice March 29 At Barrackpore, in Bengal, Mangal Pandey wounds two British officers during mutiny of 34th Native Infantry April 8 Mangal Pandey hanged at Barrackpore May 8 Troops of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry found guilty by court-martial and sentenced to 10 years hard labor May 10 Outbreak at Meerut, troops head towards Delhi May 11 Europeans and Christians killed in Delhi May 13 Bahadur Shah Zafar proclaimed new Mughal emperor May 30 Muttra and Lucknow regiments rise May 31 Rohilkhand and Bhurtpore regiments rise June 5 Cawnpore regiments rise June 6 Cawnpore Siege begins; Allahabad regiments rise June 25 Nana Sahib offers terms to Wheeler from Cawnpore June 27 Massacre at Satichaura Ghat, Cawnpore June 30 British defeat at Chinhat; Lucknow Residency besieged July 1 Indore regiments rise July 4 Sir Henry Lawrence dies at Lucknow July 7 Havelock's force leaves for Cawnpore from Allahabad July 12 Havelock defeats rebels at Fatehpur, en route to Cawnpore July 15 Massacre of women and children in the Bibighar at Cawnpore July 15 Havelock defeats rebels at Aong and Pandu Nadi, near Cawnpore July 16 Nana Sahib defeated in first battle for Cawnpore July 29 Havelock's victory at Unao July 31 Lord Canning issues his 'Clemency' resolution August 5 Havelock's victory at Bashiratganj August 14 John Nicholson arrives at Delhi Ridge August 16 Havelock victory at Bithur September 5 Sir James Outram's arrival at Cawnpore September 14 Wilson's assault on Delhi begins September 19 Havelock and Outram march to Lucknow September 20 Delhi captured and cleared of rebel troops September 21 Bahadur Shah Zafar is captured and surrenders September 22 Hodson executes Bahadur Shah Zafar’s sons September 25 First Relief of Lucknow, siege continues October 10 Agra rebels defeated November 9 Thomas Henry Kavanagh escapes from Lucknow

113

November 17 Second Relief of Lucknow by Colin Campbell November 19 Women and children evacuated from Lucknow November 24 Havelock dies of dysentery December 6 Tatya Tope defeated at Cawnpore by Campbell

1858

January 27 Trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar begins March 9 Bahadur Shah Zafar found guilty, exiled March 21 Hugh Rose arrives in Jhansi; Lucknow captured by British April 3 Jhansi captured and sacked by British June 12 James Hope Grant wins at Nawabganj in the final decisive battle in Oudh June 17 Battle of Kotah-ki-Serai, death of Rani of Jhansi June 19 Battle of Gwalior November 1 Royal Proclamation replacing East India Company with British Government and offering unconditional pardon to all not involved in murder or the protection of murderers

114

Bibliography

Ball, Charles. The History of the Indian Mutiny: Giving a Detailed Account of the Sepoy Insurrection in India; And a Concise History of the Great Military Events Which Have Tended to Consolidate British Empire in Hindostan. London: London Print. and Pub. Co, 1858.

Ballantyne, Tony and Antoinette M. Burton. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.

Ballhatchet, Kenneth. Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793-1905. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1980.

Bandyop dhy a, ekhara. From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004.

Bates, Crispin, ed. Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, vol. 1. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2013.

Brubaker, Rogers. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Bhadra, Gautam. “Four Rebels of Eighteen-Fifty-Seven.” In Guha and Spivak, 129-175.

Brahma, Hrishikesh. “The Charter Act of 1833: A Study” the Echo, vol. I, issue IV (April 2013): 208-222. http://www.thecho.in/files/Hrishikesh-Brahmma.pdf (accessed January 10, 2014).

Burke III, Edmund, and David Prochaska. Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Canning, Charlotte and Charles Allen. A Glimpse of the Burning Plain: Leaves from the Indian Journals of Charlotte Canning. London: M. Joseph, 1986.

Cassels, Nancy G. “Bentinck: Humanitarian and Imperialist – The Abolition of Suttee.” The Journal of British Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (November 1965): 77-87.

Cause and Effect: The Rebellion in India, by a Resident in the North-Western Provinces. London: John Farquhar Shaw, 1859.

Chatterjee, Partha. The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012.

115

Chatterjee, Partha. “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India” American Ethnologist, vol. 16, no. 4 (November 1989): 622-633.

Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Cohn, Bernard. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton: University Press, 1996.

Coohill, Joseph. “Indian Voices from the 1857 Rebellion.” History Today, vol. 57, no. 5 (May 2007): 48-54.

Dalrymple, William. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in the Eighteenth-Century India. New York: Viking, 2003.

Dalrymple, William. The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Dirks, Nicholas B. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

Dirlik, Arif, Vinay Bahl, and Peter Gran. History After the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

Dunlop, Robert Henry Wallace. Service and Adventure with the Khakee Ressalah or Meerut Vollunteer Horse During the Mutinies of 1857-1858. London: Richard Bentley, 1858.

English, Barbara. “The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857.” Past and Present, no. 142 (February 1994): 169-178.

Gellner, Ernest. Encounters with Nationalism. Oxford [England]: Blackwell, 1994.

Gellner, Ernest. Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964.

Ghosh, Durba. Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Gould, Stephan Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton and Company, 1981.

Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Hall, Catherine. “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century.” In Levine, 46- 76.

Herbert, Christopher. War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008.

116

Hibbert, Christopher. The Great Mutiny: India, 1857. New York: Viking Press, 1978.

Hill, Samuel Charles, ed. Bengal in 1756-1757 A Selection of Public and Private Papers Dealing with the Affairs of the British in Bengal During the Reign of Siraj-Uddaula. London: J. Murray, 1905.

Holwell, John Zephania. A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen, and Others, Who Were Suffocated in the Black-Hole in Fort William, in Calcutta, in the Kingdom of Bengal; in the Night Succeeding the 20th day of June, 1756. London: A. Millar, 1758.

Hussain, Shafqat. “Forms of Predation: Tiger and Markhor Hunting in Colonial Governance.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 46, no. 5 (September 2012): 1212-1238.

Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.

James, Lawrence. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Kaye, John William. A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857-1858. London: W.H. Allen, 1880.

Levine, Philippa. Gender and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie. “The ‘Other’ Victims of 1857.” Center for South Asia Studies. Edinburgh, July 2007. http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/mutiny/confpapers/llewellyn-paper.pdf (accessed December 1, 2012),

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, John Clive, and Thomas Pinney. Thomas Babington Macaulay: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Mackenzie, A.R.D. Mutiny memoirs being Personal Reminiscences of the Great Sepoy Revolt of 1857. Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1892.

MacMillan, Margaret. Women of the Raj. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1988.

Majumdar, R. C. The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963.

Malcolm, John. The Life of Robert, Lord Clive: Collected from the Family Papers Communicated by the Earl of Powis. London: J. Murray, 1836.

117

Malthus, Thomas Robert. Statements Respecting the East India Company College, With an Appeal to Facts, in Refutation of the Charges Lately Brought Against It, in the Court of Proprietors. London: John Murray, 1817.

Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Medley, Julius George. A Year’s Campaigning in India, March 1857-March 1858. London: W. Thacker and Co., 1858.

Mehta, U. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in the Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1999.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: Orion Press, 1965.

Metcalfe, Charles Theophilus, Mu n al-D n Hasan Kh n, Munshi J vanal l , and Esther G. Eddis Metcalfe. Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi. Westminster: A. Constable & Co, 1898.

Mill, James and William Thomas. The History of British India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Mill, John Stuart. Considerations on Representative Government. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958.

Muir, Ramsay. The Making of British India, 1756-1858, Described in a Series of Dispatches, Treaties, Statutes, and Other Documents. Lahore: Pakistan Branch, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Muir, Sir William. Records of the Intelligence Department of the Government of the North-West Provinces of India during the Mutiny of 1857, ed. William Coldstream, vol. 1. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902.

Mukherjee, Rudrangshu. “’Satan Let Loose upon Earth’: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857.” Past and Present, no. 128 (August 1990): 92-116.

Nayer, Pramod K., ed. The Penquin 1857 Reader. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2007.

Oakley, Ann. Sex, Gender, and Society. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1972.

Palmer, J.A.B. The Mutiny Outbreak at Meerut in 1857. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

118

Pandey, Sita Ram. From sepoy to subedar: being the life and adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, a native officer of the Bengal army, written and related by himself. Vikas Publications, 1970.

Pati, Biswamoy. The 1857 Rebellion. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Pinch, William R. “Prostituting the Mutiny: Sex-Slavery and Crime in the Making of 1857.” In Bates, 61-87.

Russell, William Howard. My Diary in India in the Year 1858-9. New York: Routledge, 1859.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar. The Indian War of Independence, 1857. New Delhi: R. Granthagar, 1970.

Schürer, Norbert. “The Impartial Spectator of Sati, 1757-84” Eighteenth Century Studies, vol. 42, no. 1 (2008): 19-44.

Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Category of Historical Analysis.” The American Historical Review vol. 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-1075.

Shepherd, W.J. A Personal Narrative of the Outbreak and Massacre at Cawnpore, during the Sepoy Revolt of 1857. Lucknow: London Printing Press, 1879.

Sherer, John Walter. Havelock’s March on Cawnpore 1857: A Civilian’s Notes. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1910.

Spear, Thomas George Percival. The Nabobs; A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Sramek, Joseph. Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765-1858. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Surtees, Virginia. Charlotte Canning: Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria and Wife of the First Viceroy of India 1817-1861. London: J. Murray, 1975.

Thomson, Mowbray. The Story of Cawnpore. London: R. Bentley, 1859.

Trevelyan, George Otto. Cawnpore. London: Macmillan and Co, 1865.

119

Tuson, Penelope. “Mutiny Narratives and the Imperial Feminine: European Women’s Accounts of the Rebellion in India in 1857.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 21, no. 3 (1998): 291-303.

Tytler, Harriet, and Anthony Sattin. An Englishwoman in India: The Memoirs of Harriet Tytler, 1828-1858. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Ward, Andrew. Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. New York: H. Holt and Co, 1996.

Wilson, Charles Robert, ed. Old Fort William in Bengal A Selection of Official Documents Dealing with Its History. London: J. Murray, 1906.

Wilson, John Cracroft. Narrative of Events Attending the Outbreak of Disturbances and the Restoration of Authority in the District of Moradabad, in 1857-1858. London: Anglo- American Times Press, 1871.

Wolpert, Stanley A. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Woodward, E. L. The Age of Reform, 1815-1870. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

Woollacott, Angela. Gender and Empire. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.