“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 By 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. Copyright © 2014 by Stefanie Babb All rights reserved One must claim the right and the duty of imagining the future, instead of accepting it. —Eduardo Galeano iv 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 v 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. vi 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. 1 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. 2 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. 3 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.