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Constructing and Deconstructing Myths of British Colonial Identity

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Constructing and Deconstructing Myths of British Colonial Identity Constructing and Deconstructing Myths of British Colonial Identity and Femininity in Mutiny Fiction Meadows Taylor’s Seeta (1872) and Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1897) JAINE CHEMMACHERY N 1857, THE M UTINY – which consisted in one popular Indian uprising against the English colonizers – deeply unsettled British power as well as I favouring the move from an economic mode of colonization carried out by the East India Company to a political one embodied by the establishment of the Raj. There were several reasons for this – not simply the generally acknowl- edged fact that the cartridges used in the army were greased with pork and cow fat which would have made Hindus and Muslims impure, as they had to bite them in order to use them.1 According to Indrani Sen, Several theories about the Revolt abounded in the nineteenth-century colonial mind. It was variously held to have been caused by religious fears of conversion, by sepoy unrest, disaffection among the peasants and talukdars – and not least of all, by a yearning for lost power among the ‘native’ princes.2 The Mutiny was referred to as “the Epic of Race” by the Victorians but also as “the first Indian war of Independence” by Indian nationalists or the “Indian 1 According to Flaminia Nicora, “Of course, the 1857 Rebellion is a much more complex event than the folkloric tale of the Enfield rifles and the cartridges greased with animal fat [. .. ] that threatened the religious integrity of the Indian soldiers. The causes of the insurgency are grounded in the economic and cultural impact of the colonial policy of the Company, more and more aggressive as time went on.” Nicora, The Mutiny Novel, 1857–2007: Literary Responses to the Indian Sepoy Rebellion (New Delhi: Prestige, 2009): 20. 2 Indrani Sen, “Inscribing the Rani of Jhansi in Colonial ‘Mutiny’ Fiction,” Economic and Political Weekly 42.19 (12–18 May 2007): 1754. 122 JAINE CHEMMACHERY # Rebellion of 1857,” among other designations.3 Such phrases underline the com- plex tangle of economic, social, and ideological factors – adding to the many imaginary and symbolic reconstructions – that were associated with the event. This essay deals with the construction and deconstruction of myths sur- rounding the 1857 Indian Mutiny in English fiction. The event that traumatized the British colonial power4 led to the production of a variety of English literary texts known as Mutiny fiction.5 In such fiction did history and romance inter- sect: “an incredible expansion was configured as at once a history that appeared to possess the character of romance, and a romance that was the speculum of a verifiable material history.”6 Moreover, Mutiny novels often relied on a polariza- tion between Indians and English, grossly presenting the former as violent and cruel and the latter as brave and manly.7 I will be examining Meadows Taylor’s Seeta (1872) and Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1897), which, according to Patrick Brantlinger’s seminal study, offer the most complex depictions of the Mutiny in the nineteenth-cen- tury British novel. I intend to analyse how these works stand out against the corpus of Mutiny novels with regard to the representation of women and of 3 “The Epic of Race” – Flora Annie Steele, “On the Face of the Waters” (1897), in A Raj Collection, ed. Saros Cowasjee (Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 2005): 226. The Hindu nationalist V.D. Sarvakar termed the event “The Indian War of Independence” in 1909, as Clare Anderson notes in The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London & New York: Anthem, 2007): 10. Marx and Engels also referred to it as “the first Indian war of independence” in their eponymous book. “Indian Rebellion of 1857” – Michael Edwardes, Red Year: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973): 11 (“a bloody and violent clash between the old and the new”). 4 For Christopher Herbert, “Other well-known events and characters from Mutiny history recur in book after book, weaving networks of texts together in a fabric of incessant repetition and dramatizing in this way the proposition that the Mutiny figures above all in subsequent Victorian existence as a thing – the thing – impossible to chase from the mind.” Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2008): 276. 5 “Between 1857 and 1900, more than fifty English novels about the Uprising were published and more than thirty more appeared before World War II”; Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 (Ithaca NY & London: Cornell UP, 1988): 199. Later, Flaminia Nicora referred to this corpus as “the subgenre of the Mutiny Novel” (Nicora, The Mutiny Novel, 10). 6 Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the English Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005): 75. 7 According to Steve Attridge, “Heroes are created in ways which also shape, either directly or indirectly, a view of the Indian, to the extent that the Indian only exists as servant, friend or enemy, through his relationship to the British, who are seen as epitomizing the sovereign con- sciousness.” Attridge, “Disoriented Fictions: Indian Mutiny Novels,” in Attridge, Nationalism, Im- perialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003): 153..
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