Prostituting the Mutiny William R. Pinch, 26 June 2007 Draft: Not for Circulation Or Quotation Without Permission
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Prostituting the Mutiny William R. Pinch, 26 June 2007 Draft: not for circulation or quotation without permission 1. Meerut on the Margins. The Mutiny at Meerut possesses many interesting and important features, but perhaps most important of all is the fact that without Meerut, 1857 would have unfolded quite differently. This is because a crucial ingredient of all subsequent garrison mutinies was the arrival of the news of the Meerut uprising and the 40-mile dash of the mutinous 3 rd Light Cavalry and 20 th Native Infantry to the ‘puppet’ Mughal emperor at Delhi. More than simply emboldening infantry and cavalry malcontents, the arrival of the news of Meerut at each cantonment in north India served to cement the growing distrust between Briton and Indian. The subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle precautions that the British took in the wake of Meerut lent to the unfolding of ‘The Mutiny’ a kind of pre-ordained, inexorable quality, which, I would argue, served to further inscribe 1857 as an ‘event’ in imperial and national memory. Yet Meerut has received almost no sustained attention from historians. The main exceptions are G. W. Williams in 1858 (who, though a police superintendent, was an early proponent of detective work and historical forensics) and J. A. B. Palmer in 1969.1 Both were concerned with the ‘why’ of the Mutiny, and whether there was a conspiracy behind the event. Williams argued that there was not: that the uprising was the result of bazaar rumor in which the figure of a ‘cooks boy’ loomed especially large. Palmer argued that while there may have been a broader conspiracy, there is little evidence that supports; however as for a conspiracy specific to Meerut in early May after the arrest of eighty-five skirmishers of the 3 rd Light Cavalry for disobedience over the cartridge issue, he inclined toward the positive and felt that the peculiar sequence of events did point to some local premeditation. Both Palmer and Williams’ accounts make clear the importance of local ‘rabble’ to the contingent nature of the unfolding mutiny on 10 May in Meerut. Gujars, butchers, servants, cooks boys, and other ‘creatures of the bazaar’ played a leading role in the initial violence that shattered the calm of Meerut on 10 May. In this paper I examine one additional kind of ‘bazaar creature’, the prostitute, both because she was thought by some to be central to the unfolding of the military uprising on May 10 th , but also because she reveals much about the nature of British India in the mid nineteenth century. 1 J. A. B. Palmer, The Mutiny Outbreak at Meerut in 1857 (Cambridge 1966). I discuss Williams in greater detail below. Prostituting the Mutiny 2 WRPinch, 26-Jun-07 2. On the margins at Meerut . Page 216 of P. J. O. Taylor’s Companion to the Mutiny of 1857 (Delhi 1996) has five entries: Mean Meer, Meer Mehndee, Meer Mohammed Hussein Khan, Meerut, and Meerut District. Page 217, by contrast, has only one entry: Mees Dolly. And the entry for Mees Dolly extends on to page 218. Who was Mees Dolly to merit such an unusual degree of attention from the greatest Mutiny buff of the late twentieth century?2 As it turns out, Mees Dolly was a pivotal figure (in Taylor’s opinion) not simply to the uprising at Meerut, but to the history of 1857 and the ultimate fate of the British Empire in India. According to Taylor, relying on a letter from Henry Norman, Adjutant General of the Delhi Field Force, Mees Dolly was a ‘pure-bred’ European woman, the widow of a sergeant in the British army who had ‘turned sour’ and pursued a living by running a ‘house of refreshment of sorts’ in the Meerut bazaar. Taylor explains: ‘in those days if such a widow did not re-marry, she had a hard time of it to survive. Mees Dolly had declined all offers of marriage, had got into trouble, probably for theft, and drifted to the bazar.... It seems certain that Mees Dolly was no better, as the saying is, than she should be, ran an establishment in which there were girls working for her and, enraged by the cold shoulder shown to her on all sides, was ripe for mischief and the fermentation of any kind of trouble that would let her get back at those she felt had left her friendless and deserted.’ According to the letter from Norman, a fortnight after the uprising in Meerut ‘Mees Dolly fled from the Sudder Bazar and hid herself in a near-derelict bungalow at the government stud-farm at Hapur not far outside the city. There she was apprehended by a patrol of European cavalry, in the act of driving off in haste. She was brought into Meerut under escort. She was wanted for helping in the murder of two Eurasian girls and, significantly, for “egging on the mutineers”.’ She was eventually ‘hung [sic] at Meerut, being implicated in the arrangements for the first outbreak.’ But, according to Taylor, Mees Dolly did more than spark the Mutiny: she also served to doom it to failure. Important to Taylor’s logic here is an account of the Meerut uprising by J. Cracroft Wilson, Special Commissioner in Moradabad Distritct in the Meerut Division. For Wilson, the ‘frail ones of the Meerut bazaar’ were the unwitting saviors of the British Empire. By taunting the cavalrymen of the 3 rd Bengal Light Cavalry for being ‘cowards’ and failing to liberate their brethren in chains, they sparked a premature uprising in Meerut. This allowed the British to regroup after initial losses, after which the uprising was doomed to eventual failure. In the words of Wilson: ‘From this combined and simultaneous massacre, planned for 31 May 1857, we were, humanly speaking, saved by Lieutenant-Colonel Smyth commanding the 3 rd Regiment of Bengal Light Cavalry [who ordered the ill-fated firing parade on 24 April that led to 2 A slightly less detailed version of Taylor’s entry under ‘Mees Dolly’ appeared in his Chronicles of the Mutiny and other Historical Sketches (New Delhi 1992) and, before that, in The Statesman (New Delhi), 6 October 1989. I am grateful to Clare Anderson for bringing Mees Dolly to my attention. Prostituting the Mutiny 3 WRPinch, 26-Jun-07 the famous court martial of the eighty-five skirmishers on the 9 th of May], and the frail ones of the Meerut bazaar.... Eighty-five men of the 3 rd Light Cavalry were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, and, having been put in fetters, were escorted to the Meerut jail, which is situated on the road to Delhi. And now the frail ones’ taunts were heard far and wide, and the rest of the regiment was assailed with words like these: – “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.” The mine had been prepared and the train had been laid, but it was not intended to light the slow-match for another three weeks. The spark which fell from female lips ignited it at once.’ 3 Ever the dramatist (not to mention a columnist for the Statesman ), Taylor could not help asking: ‘What if the “female lips” were those of Mees Dolly? Then she may be said to have saved, quite inadvertently, the British Raj in India: with hindsight perhaps the authorities might not have hanged her!’ The image of the British Empire saved by the fury of a fallen woman wronged is so powerfully iconic that it almost obscures an interesting detail: the murder of the two Eurasian girls. Taylor offers no clue as to why these girls were murdered or even who they were, let alone why Mees Dolly might have been entangled in the crime of their murder, but given the context of the events of 10 May and its aftermath it seems likely that they had somehow fallen afoul of the mutineers and their supporters. A series of depositions taken by G. W. Williams in 1857-1858 adds plausibility to this supposition and suggests, in addition, that the Eurasian girls may have themselves been prostitutes. According to Williams, one of the early targets of the mob violence that erupted following the outbreak of mutiny was the surgeon of the Veteran Establishment, one Dr. Smith. Smith was killed in his bungalow, situated opposite the Sudder Bazaar. He had been warned of the impending violence earlier in the day by Golab Jaun, described in the depositions as a ‘Cashmerian’ or Kashmiri. According to her deposition, Golab Jaun resided with Smith and had received the news from her mother, who had learned it from a ‘Cashmerian girl, named Sophie,’ who had heard it from a sepoy at about 2 p.m. Smith’s misfortune was that he dismissed the news as just another bazaar report, ‘void of foundation.’ Golab Jaun’s mother Zeenut, who resided in the Sudder Bazaar, was also deposed. She gave a slightly different version: Sophie had told her own mother, Mehonee, of the impending massacre. Mehonee had passed this information on to Zeenut, who ‘did not believe it,’ but mentioned it to her daughter Golab Jaun anyway. Finally, Golab Jaun reported that the mob turned Sophie out of the bazaar and knocked down her house. Sophie, however, told a different story in her deposition: she 3 John Cracroft Wilson, Narrative of Events attending the Outbreak of Disturbances and the Restoration of Authority in the District of Moradabad, in 1857-58 (London 1871), 2.