© 2010 Gautam Basu Thakur SCRIPTING ANXIETY/SCRIPTING IDENTITY: INDIAN MUTINY, HISTORY, and the COLONIAL IMAGINARY, 1857-1911
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© 2010 Gautam Basu Thakur SCRIPTING ANXIETY/SCRIPTING IDENTITY: INDIAN MUTINY, HISTORY, AND THE COLONIAL IMAGINARY, 1857-1911 BY GAUTAM BASU THAKUR DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Nancy Blake, Chair & Co-director of Research Associate Professor Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Co-director of Research Associate Professor Wail S. Hassan Assistant Professor Anustup Basu Professor Rajeswari Pandharipande ABSTRACT Scripting Anxiety/Scripting Identity examines the impact of the 1857 Indian Mutiny on British and Indian cultural consciousness and collective memory. I focus on anxious articulations about material objects, racial and sexual identities, and religion to argue these are symptomatic of a greater problem in mutiny narratives. Namely, the failure to situate the event, write or define it, in context of grand narratives. I show anxieties about objects, identities, and religion can be read from two corresponding directions. First, as discursively representing the dangers posed by the rebellion to political hegemony and established symbolic systems. And, second, as symptomatic of desires for reclaiming authority and re-constituting subjectivities. My task has been one of accentuating the tension between these two, suggesting their responsibility in the construction of the event’s affective dispensations in the Anglo-Indian mindscape, and finally, presenting a hypothetical theorization on the relationship between subaltern insurgency and colonialism. This dissertation is the centerpiece of an active research agenda that looks at, first, representations of the Mutiny in “postcolonial” British and Indian writings in comparison to colonial narratives; and, second, how anxiety-ridden articulations about the Mutiny map onto present-day transnational concerns over “homeland” insecurities as manifested in literature, film, and new media. ii To Maan Kumar Basu Thakur Martyr, Royal Indian Naval Mutiny 1946 Granduncle & My Grandparents iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to begin by thanking the members of my Dissertation Committee without whose support, encouragement, and guidance I could not have completed this project. I want to thank the Graduate College and the Program in Comparative & World Literature for the two Travel grants that helped me do archival work in England and India during Spring and Summer 2008; and the School of Literature, Culture, and Linguistics for the Dissertation Completion Fellowship 2008-2009 that gave me time out of teaching to complete my dissertation manuscript. I want to thank the staff at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign library, the British Library, The University of Warwick library, the National Library of India, Jadavpur University library, the State Archives, and Center for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta for their cooperation. My work has benefitted greatly from conversations with people in three continents. Some of them have been a source of tremendous inspiration and intellectual support for over a decade, while others I have made acquaintance in the course of researching and writing my dissertation. I want to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to them: Professors Supriya Chaudhuri, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Amlan Dasgupta, Santanu Biswas, Abhijit Gupta, Abdul Kafi, Sibaji Bandopadhyay, Rini Mehta, Parama Roy, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, John Fletcher, Patrick-Colm Hogan, Donald Thomas, Antoinette Burton, Michael Palencia-Roth, Ellie Ragland, Todd McGowan, Charles Shepherdson, Jonathan Lamb, Jed Esty, Robert Rushing, Lilya Kaganovsky, Prashanta Chakravarty, Rajarshi Dasgupta, Crispin Bates, and Marina Carter. I must also thank Prof. Karen O’Brien and Warwick University for hosting me as a Doctoral Visiting Scholar in 2008. iv Thanks also go out to my friends and colleagues at Illinois. Big thanks to Sandeep Banerjee, Manisha Basu, and Prashant G. Mehta. To Sanchari and Rishab for helping me endure London. Very special thanks to Kasif Muhammad and Anwar Hussain for helping me out with Urdu translations. Thank you to Ratul-da; he has been there for me through thick and thin. I want to thank my family for tolerating me. To Reshmi Mukherjee I owe more than thanks. It is not possible to even begin listing how many times and in how many ways she has been my unflagging support system. Thank you Reshmi for being a trenchant critic of my work and for introducing me to subaltern theory. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS USED……………………………………………………………………....vii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER I: Objects of Empire, Things of Panic: Indian Mutiny, Anxiety, & Victorian Imagination …………………….………………………………………………………………..29 CHAPTER II: Scandals of the State: Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and the Historical Contexts of 1857………………………………………………………………………………....76 CHAPTER III: Menacing Desire: Sexuality, Zenana, and the Rebellious ‘Rane’ in Colonial Mutiny Fiction………………………………………………………………………………….135 CHAPTER IV: Retrieving Lost Selves: Mutiny, Nationalism, & Anxiety in Bengali Literature and Consciousness……………………………………….…………………………………......162 CHAPTER V: Unequal Partners: Rabindranath Tagore, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and the Mutiny of Fifty-Seven………………………….……………………………………………….217 CHAPTER VI: In the Deen of the Mutiny: The 1857 Insurrection, Jihad, and the Question of Subaltern Consciousness………………………………………………………………………..268 EPILOGUE: The Phobic and the Fetish Object: The Indian Mutiny Today…………...………322 APPENDIX: Reading Bhabha, Reading Lacan: Towards a Theory of Colonial Anxiety……..326 WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………………………….359 vi ABBREVIATIONS USED IOR ……………………….India Office Records, British Library. IOR/MSS …………………India Office Records, Manuscripts. FSUP ……………………..Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh. BB …………………………Bankim Rachanaboli. RR …………………………Rabindra Rachanaboli, Vishwabharati. RRWB ……………………Rabindra Rachanaboli, West Bengal Government. SE …………………………Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. SL …………………………Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore. M&P ………………………The Mahatma and the Poet. Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915-1941. ARA ………………………The Advice of the Royal Army. vii INTRODUCTION One of the most brutal conflicts fought between a colonizing power and colonized peoples in the history of the British Empire began in the summer of 1857, when Indian Sepoys of the British East India Company’s army mutinied. In what was to become, soon, a full-fledged and bloody war between the colonial state and the civic populations of Northern and Central regions of the subcontinent, each side outweighed the other in rampant displays of barbaric violence and gory massacres. The conflict raged on for over two years before British control was reestablished, and rebel resistance losing its organized structure morphed into various local and, at times, global pockets of resistance against British imperialism.1 History named the events of 1857 variously as the ‘Indian Mutiny,’ ‘The First War of Indian Independence,’ ‘The Sepoy War,’ ‘The Great Rebellion,’ ‘The 1857 Uprising.’ The fascination with the Mutiny, however, did not subside with the defeat of the mutineers. In the last hundred and fifty years, hundreds of books have been written on the Uprising in India and Britain alone. These include histories, memoirs, diaries, correspondences, fictions, and more recently films, video games, and graphic novels. The fascination with the Mutiny, however, did not subside with the defeat of the ‘mutineers.’ In the last hundred and fifty years, hundreds of books have been written on the subject in India and Britain. These include histories, memoirs, diaries, correspondences, fictions and, more recently, films, video games, and 1 Contrary to opinion current in the West that the Mutiny lasted for only one year, a completely fallacious notion based on claims made by nineteenth century British writers, Indian historians show that the Mutiny was not successfully put down before end of 1859. Documentary evidence also suggests that after 1859, rebels continued to resist and harass the British administration on their own and, at other times, by joining resistance movements in neighboring areas like the North-West Provinces in the West and the Taiping rebels in the East. Researchers also identify subsequent peasant and tribal movements against the British government in South Asia as bearing tell-tale signs of the Fifty-seven mutineers. Military strategies adopted and social demands voiced by the peasants during these local conflagrations appear to have drawn strongly from those of the 1857 rebels. See, Sengupta ভারতীয় মহািবেdাহ [Bharatiya Mahabidroho/The Great Indian Revolution]; essays in P.C. Joshi edited Rebellion 1857: A Symposium; and the recent two volume work by Amaresh Misra, War of Civilisations. See, also the 1857 chronological table prefixed to M. Ikram Chaghatai edited 1857In Muslim Historiography 9-12. 1 graphic novels. According to one scholar, more than 80 novels were published between 1857 and 1970 in Britain alone, and more than half of these appeared in the nineteenth-century thus inaugurating the genre of “mutiny fiction.” Indeed, given the large number of historical and fictional works on the Mutiny, and the repeated references in colonial and postcolonial geopolitical history to the Rebellion as an event of tremendous affective import, it is