British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion Sheshalatha Reddy British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects Sheshalatha Reddy Department of English Howard University Washington, DC, USA ISBN 978-3-319-57662-6 ISBN 978-3-319-57663-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57663-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940349 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover Design by Jenny Vong Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No work is produced in isolation and many people deserve thanks for their support throughout the process: Ji-Hyae Park who took time from a very busy schedule to read extensive drafts and offered brilliant suggestions that helped me clarify the argument of the book; Curdella Forbes, without whose invaluable expertise on the Caribbean in gen- eral and the Morant Bay Rebellion in particular I would be well and truly lost; Parama Sarkar for her thoughtful questions on South Asian literature and the Sepoy Rebellion; Christopher Shinn and Elisa Oh for their considered and thought-provoking comments on the Abstract and Introduction; and Alice Weinreb for her continual advice and sugges- tions during the entirety of the process. The critiques of the anonymous reviewers here and elsewhere provided crucial guidance for revision. I would like to thank my colleagues at Howard University more gener- ally, especially our always supportive chair, Dana Williams, and the always encouraging Thorell Tsomondo. Thanks are also due to the Summer Faculty funding opportunities pro- vided by Howard University, which allowed me to spend uninterrupted time researching and writing this book. The University of Pennsylvania Mellon Humanities Forum seminar “Color,” under the guidance of Chi- ming Yang and Jim English at the University of Pennsylvania, provided me a forum for discussion for the literature of the Fenian Rebellion and afforded me the opportunity to rethink and revise my work on it. I am grateful to the panelists and audience at a number of conferences I attended as well to all the graduate students I have had the pleasure of teaching these v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS last few years; their comments helped me think through various aspects of the texts under study and brought much-needed fresh perspectives. I am also more grateful than I can say for a loving family whose sup- port has always been evident in ways both large and small. I would like to thank the extended Reddy clan on the West Coast and all along the upper East Coast, as well as the Matthews in California and the Mathais in Arizona. I would not be where I am today without my parents, Vanamala and Srinivasa Reddy, whose unconditional love and understanding, food and comfort sustained me throughout the many years that I have spent on this project. My sister Veena always allowed me to vent when I became frustrated and always reassured me that the book would someday come to fruition. This book is dedicated to my best interlocutor and my true partner, Sabu Mathai, whose “Pandora’s box” of questions forced me to question my own presuppositions and talk through ideas I found especially diffcult and challenging, and without whose help in reading, editing, formatting, designing, and listening, this work would never have taken on its fnal shape. This book is also dedicated to another labor of love, our daughter Kaavya, who was also born this year. CONTENTS List of Figures ix Introduction: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects xi Imperial Biopower and Biopolitics xiv The Revolting Body and the Laboring Subject xvii Reform, Resistance, Rebellion, Revolution, and Failure xxii Why Rebellion, Why Now? xxiv Organization of the Book xxvii 1 Rise of the Machines: The State, Its Subjects, and the Sepoy Rebellion 1 Historical Background 6 Technê/ology: Plotting, Emplotment, and Machinations 13 The State Is War 24 The Debt Trap 35 Rage Against the Machines 44 Coda 58 2 Inspiriting Flesh/Fleshing Out Spirit: Bodies, Bondage, and the Morant Bay Rebellion 73 Historical Background 78 Gothic Hauntings 85 vii viii CONTENTS Shadows and Spirits 101 Spirit of the Age: Creole Nationalism 114 Coda 128 3 Cellular Structures, Boundaries, and Networks: Tracing the Fenian Rebellion 145 Historical Background 150 Biological as/and Commodity Cells 157 Framing Prisons 173 Terrorist Mutations 186 Coda 199 Conclusion: Bodies in Labor, Bodies as Revolt 213 Feminism and Marxism 217 Producing the Disposable Re/Productive Woman 219 Embodying Resistance 232 Bibliography 239 Index 263 LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1.1 Felice Beato, Henry Hering [Interior of Secundrabagh After the Massacre], 1858–1862 32 Fig. 1.2 Felice Beato, [Retribution, Hanging Mutineers], 1858 34 Fig. 3.1 Thomas Larcom Collection, “Photograph #56” 174 Fig. 3.2 Thomas Larcom Collection, “Photograph #51 [John Byrne]” 175 Fig. 3.3 Thomas Larcom Collection, “Photograph #43” 175 Fig. 3.4 Thomas Larcom Collection, “Dennis Duggan; James Byrne; John Devoy; Thomas Chambers” 177 Fig. 3.5 Thomas Larcom Collection, “Jerh. O’Donovan Rossa; Bryan Dillon; Thomas Duggan; Chas. Underwood O’Connell” 178 ix INTRODUCTION: REVOLTING BODIES, LabORING SUBJECTS Published only a year after the end of the Indian Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–1858, The History of the Indian Revolt and of the Expedition to Persia, China, and Japan, 1856–7–8 by George Dodd begins by recount- ing the supposed motivations and conspiracies of the “native sepoys” when Indian soldiers (sepoys) defed their British offcers and, along- side Indian peasants, princes, and escaped prisoners, rose up against the British Empire. Discussing “the spread of disaffection” across North India, Dodd pauses to show that the key sites of the holy city of Benares (present-day Varansi) and the Ganges River, which fows through that city, were relatively unaffected by the events of that year, despite their strategic military importance. In the midst of disparaging the Indian “mutineers” for underestimating that region’s signifcance as a cen- tral route of commerce and “military movement” during the rebellion, Dodd pauses to note that the landscape of the Ganges in Benares has been, in a parallel vein, foolishly overestimated by Indian artists, who “have delighted to portray the beauty and animation” of life on the ghats (steps) of this holy river.1 Yet in so doing, these artists “cannot, if they would, reveal the hideous accompaniments—the fakeers and ascetics of revolting appearance” that blight its landscape.2 Almost midway through his monograph, Dodd briefy summarizes his history thus far: he has shown his reader various “tribes of India revolting against British author- ity”; native princes uncertain of their role in the rebellion; formerly trusted native soldiers betraying their British superiors by rising against them in search of plunder; and English women and children hunted “like xi xii INTRODUCTION: Revolting BODIES, LABORING SUBJECTS wild beasts” through roads and forests by those very native soldiers.3 Such perfdy on the part of the Indian sepoys is summarily dealt with after some 200 pages, which meanwhile detail the various outbreaks, bat- tles, and military expeditions of the year-long campaign. Dodd is then fnally able to recount the murderous “justice” meted out to the rebels by the British military after the fnal suppression of this “mutiny.” His narrative ends with the British Parliamentary hearings in the metropole that would determine the transfer of this colony from the possession of the East India Company to the British Crown. While Dodd’s second-hand account, full of righteous indigna- tion against the temerity of the colonized in resisting imperial rule, is not unique in its depiction of the Sepoy Rebellion or the actors involved, it highlights a key term for British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (hereafter referred to as Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects). Dodd’s use of the word “revolting” describes not only the Indians themselves (their appearance, their beliefs, their habits, their idleness), but also the colonized Indians’ active rebellion against British authority. British imperial ideologies had long constructed colonial populations as repellent (revolting) for reasons of race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, abilities, and appearance, thereby justifying rule over them. Colonized populations at key moments actively and collec- tively resisted (revolted against) imperial control of their labor and their land. In other words, “revolting” functions in these imperial discourses, as well as in this book, as both adjective (an imperial descriptor of the colo- nized) and verb (an action against imperial authority by the colonized).