Mutiny at the Margins

New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857

Series Editor: Crispin Bates

Volume 1
Anticipations and Experiences j n the Locality
Edited by Crispin Bates

Volume 2
Britain and the Indian Uprising
Edited by Andrea Major and Crispin Bates

Volume 3
Global Perspectives
Edited by Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

Volume 4
Military Aspects of the Indian Uprising
Edited by Gavin Rand and Crispin Bates

Volume 5
Muslim, Dalit and Subaltern Narratives
Edited by Crispin Bates

Volume 6
Perception, Narration and Reinvention: The Pedagogy and Historiography
of the Indian Uprising
Edited by Crispin Bates

Volume 7
A Source Book: Documents of the Indian Uprising
Edited by Crispin Bates, Marina Carter and Markus Daechsel
 iHuttnp
at tlje jftflargtnS
New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857

Volume 3
Global Perspectives

Edited by
Marina Carter
Crispin Bates

( ^ C A n F www.sagepub'lications.com
O / L m L os Angetes • London • N e w Delhi • Sihgapore • W ashington D C
Copyright © Crispin Bates, 2013

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Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Mutiny at the margins : new perspectives on the Indian uprising o f 1857.
volumes cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. India-History-Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858. I. Bates, Crispin, 1958- editor o f
compilation. II. Major, Andrea. III. Carter, Marina. IV. Rand, Gavin.

DS478.M87 954.03T7— dc23 2013 2013001632

ISBN: 978-81-321-1052-1 (HB)

The SAGE Team: Shambhu Sahu, Punita Kaur Mann, Nand Kumar Jha and Dally Verghese
Series Note

THE volumes in this series take a fresh look at the Revolt of 1857 from a variety
of original and unusual perspectives, focusing in particular on traditionally
neglected socially marginal groups and geographic areas that have hitherto
tended to be unrepresented in studies of this cataclysmic event in British imperial
and Indian historiography.
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Contents

List o f Figures ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction: Global Networks and Perspectives on the
Indian Uprising by Marina Carter and Crispin Bates xvii

1. International Press and the Indian Uprising 1

Peter Putnis

2. 'You Cannot Govern by Force Alone’: W.H. Russell,

The Times and the Great Rebellion 18
Chandrika Kaul

3. 'O ’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’: The Politicisation of

Legends in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 36
Projit Bihari Mukharji

4. ‘Clemency’ Canning, the Telegraph, Information and

Censorship during 1857 67
Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

5. Fenians, Sepoys and the Financial Panic of 1857 87

Mark Sullivan Hall

6. Bowld Irish Sepoy 98

R.J. Morris
viii Mutiny at the Margins

7. The ‘Russian Factor’ in the Indian Mutiny 120

Elena Karatchkova

8. General d’Orgoni and French Military Conspiracies in 1857 134

Marina Carter

9. ‘Vengeance against England!’: Hermann Goedsche and

the Indian Uprising 150
Kim A. Wagner

10. The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspora 170
Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

11. Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation:

Maulana Jafer Thanesri as a Convict 188
Seema Alavi

About the Editors and Contributors 216

Index 219
List o f Figures

2.1 W.H. Russell, Esq. L.L.D. 19

2.2 The Clemency of Canning 25
2.3 The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger 28
2.4 Justice 29

3.1 Fred Goodall’s Painting of the Jessie Legend 36

3.2 The Forrest Image 57
3.3 A Jessie Postcard 60
3.4 Jessie in the London Illustrated Times 61

8.1 ‘General Orgoni: Prince of the Empire’, 142

Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion,
13 January 1855, p. 20.
Preface

THE seven-volume Mutiny at. the Margins series published by SAGE is the
product of a research project of the same name undertaken at the University
of Edinburgh in Scotland, with funding from the UK Arts and Humanities
Research Council. Taking place 150 years after the Indian Uprising of 1857-
1858, the M utiny at the Margins project was created to challenge conventional
understandings of the uprising through thematic, collaborative research, a
network of scholars centred on Edinburgh and international conferences. This
innovative project aimed to confront some of the many myths surrounding
popular and academic conceptions of the revolt, to move beyond traditional
nationalist and imperialist perspectives, and to explore previously neglected
margins in the history of this tumultuous event.
Marginality is invoked in several ways throughout the series. It is presented in
the telling of tales that fall outside the mainstream historiography of the period
and pursued chronologically as the historical context of the Indian Uprising is
enlarged in an exploration of both the progenitors and consequences of 1857.
The series ventures into overlooked geographical margins, both within India
and overseas, with the global impact of the revolt being examined in Volume 3.
Finally, a core purpose of the series is to emphasise the critical roles played by
socially marginal groups in the uprising and to use this to highlight new areas of
current research.
Independent scholars from across the globe came together for the M utiny at
the Margins project. This collaboration fostered ground-breaking research, aided
by three international conferences held in Edinburgh, London and Jamia Millia
Islamia in New Delhi, and four workshops held in Edinburgh and at the Royal
Asiatic Society in London. Altogether, some thirty leading Indian and Pakistani
researchers, were involved, along with a dozen academics from the United States
and twice that number of participants drawn from universities across the United
Kingdom and Europe. A majority of the chapters in the series are the product of
the cooperative, committed and original endeavour of these scholars. The Mutiny
at the Margins project was accompanied by a high level of public engagement,
including a programme of public lectures, collaborative exhibitions, seminars
xii Mutiny at the Margins

and workshops in Edinburgh and London. A number of source materials were

published online, for the benefit of students and future researchers. These are to
be found at www.csas.ed.ac.uk/mutiny.
The original research carried out by the Edinburgh-based scholars of the
Mutiny at the Margins project forms a key part of the material for this series. It
led to new insights into the British experience of 1857 regarding the experiences
of white subalterns (men and women) and of the often overlooked British
communities in areas peripheral to the revolts, as well as British attempts to
explain the meaning of the uprising. The research of the Edinburgh team—
comprising Crispin Bates, Markus Daeschel, Andrea Major, Marina Carter and
Kim A. Wagner— addressed the involvement of Muslims and Dalits and the
long-term impact of the events of the mid-nineteenth century for the develop­
ment of Islamic political culture and identity. In addition, new investigations
scrutinised the role of Indian Adivasis (or tribals) in 1857 as well as the economic
consequences of 1857 in north India and in particular the huge impetus it gave to
labour migration within India and overseas in subsequent years. Kim A. Wagner
undertook further innovative work concerning the mutiny of the regiments at
Meerut in May 1857 and description of the impact of 1857 within European
literature.
The series comprises seven volumes, each with a distinct thematic focus:

• Volume 1, Anticipations and Experiences in the Locality, centres on unrest

and disorder in the long history of resistance to colonial rule (the belli
B ritannia) prior to 1857 and the impact of the revolt itself in diverse
localities within India.
• Volume 2, Britain and the Indian Uprising, looks at the varied responses
of British missionaries, colonial leaders and working-class voices and
how they reveal the multiplicity of British reactions to the revolt.
• Volume 3, Global Perspectives, widens the geographical remit of the series
and examines the global dissemination and portrayal of the events of the
uprising in the international press and literature. It also examines the
impact of the events of 1857 and the socio-economic impact of displaced
mutineers and their experiences in the broader colonial world.
• Volume 4, Military Aspects of the Indian Uprisings deals with how battles
were won and lost and how the army reorganised itself after the revolt. It
also touches on the thorny issue of how to define the events of 1857—a
rebellion, a national uprising or a small war of the kind experienced in
many colonial states.
• Volume 5, Muslim, Dalit and Subaltern Narratives, addresses the role of
marginal and Muslim groups, respectively. The first half of the volume
explores minority perceptions of the uprising, including Dalit narratives
and the use of 1857 in their invented histories; the second half looks into
 Preface xiii

the response and involvement of different Muslim social groups, from

civil servants, philosophers and logicians to the mujahidin, as well as
exploring the experience of indigenous participants in their own words.
• Volume 6, Perception, Narration and Reinvention: The Pedagogy and
Historiography of the Indian Uprising, moves into the territory of
hagiography, historiography and pedagogy. \It covers the reaction of
people to the revolt and the various ways in which historians and the
wider public in India have sought to understand, categorise, and at times
distort or exaggerate, salient aspects and particular events.
• Volume 7, A Source Book: Documents of the Indian Uprising, is both a
research tool and a teaching resource. This collection of documents
drawn from the extensive research conducted during the Margins project
employs images and texts to offer a unique range of 1857 sources, empha­
sising a subaltern perspective and designed to complement the previous
six volumes of the series.

Collectively, the series presents the most comprehensive collection to date of

historical writings on the Indian Uprising of 1857. It is hoped that it will provide a
benchmark of research to inform and inspire future scholars and encourage new
perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857 that are both respectful of previous
interpretations and permitting of re-imaginings of the past that are suited to the
twenty-first century. The body of research and writings contained in the seven-
volume set is much more than a collection about the ‘revolt’; it demonstrates
that the events of 1857 were, in their origins, progress and impact, vastly more
significant than is implied by the usual emphasis on a unique historical event,
with ramifications that reach forward into the present day.
Acknowledgements

THIS project was undertaken and completed with support from the UK Arts
and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Academy, the Royal
Asiatic Society of London, Jamia Milia Islamia, the Indian Council for Historical
Research, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the National Library of Scotland,
and the Centre for South Asian Studies and the School of History, Classics and
Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Personal thanks for assistance
with copy-editing go to Rosalind Parr, Lauren Wilks, Ben Thurman and Jessica
Robinson, and also to. the indefatigable group of researchers involved in the
Mutiny at the Margins project: Marina Carter, Marcus Daechsel, Andrea Major
and Kim A. Wagner. Thanks, finally, and above all, to the many scholars who
have contributed to this series, thereby making it possible, as well as to Sugata
Ghosh, Rekha Natarajan, Shambhu Sahu and other members of the extremely
patient and hard-working editorial team at SAGE, New Delhi.
Introduction
Global Networks and Perspectives on the Indian Uprising

Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

THE 150th anniversary of the 1857 Rebellion in India passed with little comment
in many of the countries which were, at the time, caught up in it, both direcdy
and indirectly. This most significant movement of resistance against British
colonial rule was recognised as such, around the world, in 1857 and 1858. Today,
it has faded from memory across the globe, except perhaps in India, where for
many it is yet little more than an afterthought for nationalists in the calendar
of the Indian freedom struggle. The events of 1857 nonetheless generated at
the time an enormous and virtually immediate written output, in the form of
press reports and eyewitness accounts, that was disseminated across the world
using newly developed communication technologies. Whilst it is the anglophone
world and anglophone literature that has been highlighted in most studies of
1857, sources in other European languages, and of course in Indian vernacular
languages, are equally, if not more, significant in the light that they throw upon
those events.
The purpose of the present collection is to bring together a number of
remarkable and original studies of news reports, media cross-fertilisation
and communications developments, and to show how these impacted upon
and were diversely interpreted by a range of individuals and groups, across
the world— from Irish nationalists in New York and Dublin to authors of
sensational fiction in Germany and the hundreds and thousands of ordinary
people locked into dependence on or transactions with the British Empire,
from South Africa to Australia and Canada. Within India itself, the events of
1857 spawned new movements of people and ideas, as participants and victims
faced exile, transportation and exclusion. This volume also draws upon their
experiences to add a further dimension to the constant reinterpretation and
transmogrification that the events of 1857 spawned and continue to inspire in
India and beyond. Collectively, they highlight the fact that 1857 was as seminal
xviii Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

as the 'year of revolutions’, which shook the foundations of European monarchy

in 1848, and the year 1947, which signalled the beginning of the end of the
European empires in Asia and Africa. The uprising marked the end of indirect
East India Company rule and the beginning of the second British Empire. With
this came an entirely new panoply of orientalist tropes and legitimating ideals,
which fostered the spread of formal empire across multiple continents. With
the expansion of empire came new technologies, the extension of trade and
vast migrations of people, especially of Indian merchants and labourers. This
expansion in turn stimulated a competition for territory amongst the European
powers, with dramatic consequences over the course of the next century. At the
same time, the situation of the Indian Uprising at the very inception of this great
wave of European territorial aggrandisement established a series of practical
and ideological battle lines between the West and the East. Many at home in
the metropole became critically aware of the dangerous, costly and violent
adventures being conducted abroad in the name of European civilisation. For
the first time, many of the colonised—otherwise geographically remote—found
both that they might share a common cause against British imperialism and
an inspiration to set about it. The vast and simultaneous movements of armies
and people began to knit India and the world together in ways that made such
common cause possible. Above all, for the first time, transnational ideas of anti­
colonialism began slowly to take shape and to receive expression in new and
burgeoning forms of community and nation.
The key to the spread of European power as well as the emerging critique of
European expansionism lay in technological innovation, in terms of production,
distribution and communication. This volume thus opens with the wide-ranging
chapter of Peter Putnis, which examines news production and distribution
mechanisms whereby the series of events in India beginning in 1857 became
‘global news’ and reveals the mechanisms through which reporting of the
unfolding events of the mutiny in Anglo-Indian newspapers like the Bombay
Times coloured subsequent news reports around the world. Putnis charts the
means through which such representations of the rebellion, and of the sepoys
involved, were distributed across the English-speaking world. The novelty of
news stories transmitted by telegraph itself contributed to the sensational impact
that events in India had on the public throughout the world. A war over telegraph
lines was a corollary of the general conflict of 1857. The British administration
attempted to restore telegraph lines as quickly as mutineers disabled them.
Another technical innovation that quickened the pace at which news was
transmitted globally was the steamship. These vessels played an important role
in transporting information between seaports not yet connected by telegraph
cables. Putnis demonstrates the extent to which these, and other forms of
transmission of information to a worldwide audience from India, in themselves
helped shaped the view of the mutiny as a series of ‘atrocity narratives’. He also
shows that from the outset there were influential men such as Lord Granville
 Introduction xix

who were sceptical about the usefulness of information transmitted solely by

telegraph. In 1857, there was not yet an undersea telegraph cable from Europe
to America, and the first news of the mutiny came by steamship, which did not
reach New York until July of that year. Putnis traces the route by which the
same sensationalist language that originated in India \vas transmitted to appear
almost verbatim on the other side of the world. First word of the mutiny also
reached Australia in the same month, but the infrequency of steamships meant
that some despatches regarding the situation in India had to come via London.
Putnis concludes that throughout the English-speaking world, the mutiny was
regarded as the most important event in 1857.
Chandrika Kaul’s chapter is focused on the famous war correspondent
W.H. Russell, who in 1857 was already an esteemed journalist due to his highly
influential reporting of the Crimean War. The very act of selecting him as Times
correspondent in India had important consequences, and not just for the way the
war was presented to the British public. His journalism affected both the ongoing
popularity of the Times and the ways in which the British government chose to
subdue the rebellion. KauPs chapter places Russell’s popular descriptions of the
mutiny in the context of journalism’s relationship to the state in the nineteenth
century. Kaul discusses Russell’s relationship with Lord Canning and Canning’s
fractious relationship with the press in general. ‘Clemency Canning’ took steps to
gag both Indian and English journalists. His general distrust of the profession did
not, however, prevent him from supplying Russell with confidential information
about military movements.
Russell spent about a year in India and did not arrive until after what appeared
to be the peak of the conflict, sending dispatches both by mail and telegraph.
Russell’s fame and respect preceded him and greatly eased his task. A crucial
feature of his success in India was the excellent relationship Russell enjoyed with
his editor in London, John Thadeus Delane. After his experience of the Crimean
War and its more formal military engagements, Russell was particularly struck
by the wanton brutality on both sides of the conflict in India. He questioned
his fellow countrymen’s assumption of the inferiority of Indians and their
civilisation, describing the splendour of Lucknow’s architecture as evidence of
a culture whose sophistication in some ways exceeded that of Europe. While
he had much praise for British generals, he condemned not only the cruelty
inflicted by the British on the Indians but, unusually amongst his peers, also
questioned whether or not India would be better off without the rule of the
British East India Company. These and other observations naturally brought
him into conflict with other Englishmen and other English journalists. Russell
was concerned not just with reporting the war but also felt it was incumbent on
him to suggest how British rule in India could become more effective and more
humane.
Russell’s compassionate perspective played a powerful role in persuading
leading figures in England to favour a more merciful and conciliatory approach
xx Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

to the rebels. Kaul explores how this influence was not expressed merely through
his public journalism but also through the manner in which Delane used
information provided to him by Russell to influence decisions being made by
officials in London about the war. Russell visited India again two decades after
the mutiny as part of a grand tour led by the Prince of Wales, who had specifically
requested the famous journalist’s presence. Russell received a knighthood from
Queen Victoria and gained further honours from the prince himself when the
latter ascended the throne as Edward VII. Kaul concludes by identifying Russell
as one of the leading figures among those advocating a more collaborative British
administration, which slowly began to emerge in the governance of India in the
aftermath of the mutiny, arguably rather more rapidly than might otherwise
have been case.
Not all stories of the mutiny were simply tales of unremitting violence, as is
shown by Projit Mukharji’s description of a popular saga of a probably fictional
Scottish woman caught up in the Indian Mutiny. Just as Peter Putnis points
out that there was a degree of scepticism as to the accuracy of the telegraph
as a means of transmitting the ‘true’ story of the mutiny, Mukharji observes
that contemporaries were deeply concerned with the accuracy and degree of
truthfulness of a romantic narrative that emerged from the rebellion and became
extremely popular. A vigorous debate ensued as to whether Jessie Brown— the
highland lass at the besieged city of Lucknow who heard the bagpipes of the
approaching relief army before anyone else—actually existed and if any of her
story was true. The saga was popularised by playwrights and poets and enjoyed
worldwide success. The debate as to the accuracy of the popular account and
speculation as to its origins continued throughout the rest of the nineteenth
century.
Mukharji’s chapter highlights another interesting offshoot of the mutiny saga
as it touched a global audience: its role in furthering the democratisation of news,
as letters to the editor sections of national news essays became awash with ‘eye
witness accounts’ of observers from a variety of backgrounds. His piece also reveals
how a single mutiny story could act as a means through which, across the world,
competing, and at times contradictory, views and aspirations are articulated.
Thus Jessie Brown becomes, in the German context, a means of expressing the
cult of volk-cultural nationalism; for others a vehicle for liberationist Scottish
nationalism; for American Quakers like Whittier, a demonstration of mystic
religiosity. Mukharji concludes, in agreement with Putnis, that technical
innovations in the printing industry played an important role in the way in
which the narrative of Jessie Brown was transmitted globally. While Putnis
contends that methods of distribution of information about the mutiny to global
news organisations tended to contract mutiny accounts towards a narrowed
emphasis on atrocity stories, Mukharji by contrast demonstrates how the spread
of the Jessie saga over both space and time led to a multiplicity of interpretations
of the original tale.
 Introduction xxi

A number of chapters in this collection deal with the role of rumours

and how these are disseminated both through the new communications
technologies of the day, as, for example, in Choudhury’s work on the telegraph,
and through non-Western networks, as are described in the essay by Kim
Wagner. Choudhury is concerned with the way in which the technological
innovation of the telegraph affected India and draws particular attention
to its impact upon Indian society before, during and after 1857. Writing in
Sanskrit, Kalidas Maitra attempted to explain the telegraph and other Western
innovations, while reminding his readers of India’s own rich technological
heritage. Maitra’s enthusiasm for new scientific accomplishments like the
telegraph did not prevent him from reminding his readers that—just like the
railway—these innovations were introduced to solidify British imperial rule.
However the British intended the telegraph to be used, as Choudhury points out,
in the first year of the system’s operation— a third of the telegraph messages sent
were transmitted by Indians. The railway and the telegraph were in some senses
seen by Indians in the same way that they viewed the cartridges greased with
animal fat—as a pretext for the commencement of the 1857 Mutiny. All these
innovations might be part of a grand British scheme to replace each and every
aspect of India’s indigenous Indian customs with a foreign civilisation. The lack
of secrecy in the early telegraph infrastructure revealed to the Indians that there
was justification for just such a fear, as it became known that the authorities
planned to refuse to recognise succession rights in states whose territories would
then be administered by the British. Conversely, the British became aware that
one of the main uses of the telegraph by Indians, rather more prosaically, was to
facilitate speculation in opium.
During and after the 1857 Rebellion, numerous individuals, both in India
and England, believed that tsarist Russia was somehow involved in instigating
or prolonging the mutiny against British rule. Elena Karatchkova weighs up
the evidence available from Russian archives in a discussion of the widely held
contemporary belief that the Russian Empire wished to use the insurrection
as an opportunity to further its own imperial ambitions in Asia. Karatchkova
reminds us that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the doomed
Russian Emperor Paul responded enthusiastically to overtures from Napoleon
Bonaparte proposing the formation of a joint Franco-Russian Army with the
specific purpose of completely expelling the British from India. After Paul I’s
assassination, this plan was scrapped by the new tsar, Alexander I, who instead
became one of the French Emperor’s greatest enemies. By 1857, another tsar,
Alexander II, was on the throne. According to Karatchkova’s analysis, his
generals did indeed see the growth of British India as a serious threat to Russian
interests in Asia. In April 1857, a report was prepared for the tsar in which the
prospects of an expedition to India were discussed. The advocates of such an
invasion were a distinct minority, however, and Alexander II rejected any idea
of invading India. Despite the timing of this report, on the eve of the mutiny,
xxii Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

Karatchkova contends that no one in authority in Russia at the time had an

inkling of the coming insurrection.
Despite having abandoned the idea of invasion, there were nonetheless still
individuals of influence in tsarist circles who insisted that the Russian Empire
should try to take advantage of British difficulties in Asia. The young and
dynamic Russian ambassador in London, Count Nikolai Ignatiev, had the ear of
the tsar and enthusiastically proposed various diplomatic and military initiatives
involving Persia, India and other places in Asia, which might somehow avenge
Russia’s recent defeat in the Crimean War. There were also various Indian
diplomatic missions to tsarist embassies in the aftermath of the mutiny, which
sought Russian support for attempts to overthrow the British. Karatchkova draws
attention to a document written by Raja Tula Singh for the Russian ambassador
in Persia that contended that the belief by Indian astrologers in an imminent
Russian invasion in support of rebellion against British rule was a factor in the
timing of the 1857 Mutiny. The chapter concludes with the assertion that there
was certainly a ‘Russian Factor’ in the 1857 Indian Mutiny: the mutineers’ belief
in an imminent Russian invasion helped spark the initial rebellion, just as the
inevitable disappointment at the failure of the tsar’s army to appear in India was
a possible factor in the timing of the mutiny’s failure.
Another possible saviour of the mutineers who conspicuously disappointed
any hopes that might have been vested in them were the French. However,
despite rumours of volunteers being recruited in Paris and being despatched to
Karachi, the potential for French support was always limited. The French in India
have indeed been deemed ‘subaltern colonisers’ because they could only operate
within the hegemony of another European power. This contradiction in terms
was forcefully brought out in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 when
French publications simultaneously sought to critique the British, sympathise
with their oppressed subjects and support French imperial ambitions. In an essay
on Anglo-French tensions at the time of the rebellion, Marina Carter assesses
reports of French-led attempts to further destabilise the British in India chiefly
through the activities of the truly larger-than-life General Maha d‘Orgoni. The
essay concludes with a discussion of the significance of the d‘Orgoni saga—
which incarnated for the French the noble tradition of adventurer-soldiers who
operated successfully in the eighteenth century India— and for the British, the
spectre of the marginal but dangerous renegade and the ghost of Napoleonic
French imperial ambitions in Asia.
A contemporary continental perspective on the mutiny is brought for the first
time to an English-reading audience through Kim Wagner’s analysis of a work
by the Prussian writer Hermann Goedsche. Wagner points out that Nena Sahib,
oder: Die Empdrung in Indien (Nena Sahib, or: The Uprising in India)1 contains
virtually every element associated with the emerging genre of the ‘Anglo-Indian
Mutiny novel’, ‘wallowing as it does in themes of treachery and revenge, inter­
racial marriage, disguise and identity, rape, indigenous conspiracies and religious
 Introduction xxiii

fanaticism, thereby anticipating an entire iiteraty tradition’. The novel serves as

a testament to the immediate impact of the events of 1857 outside of the two
nations directly concerned— Britain and India— and provides an interesting
insight into how the uprising was viewed in continental Europe. The dramatis
personae of Goedsche were no doubt designed and do appropriately reflect
a range of nationalities of individuals with reason t'o feel aggrieved towards
the British— an Irishman and a Frenchman among them. There is even an
enterprising incorporation of a ‘native American’ in the novel, in the form of a
tracker employed by the eponymous Nena Sahib.
Seeking to place Goedsche’s sprawling novel within the framework of the
various strands of popular nineteenth century European literature, Wagner
contends that not only was Goedsche the originator of the ‘contemporary
historical-political novel’ but that Nena Sahib is the very first of all the ‘mutiny
novels’. The novel was never translated into English but was very popular in
the continent. It is therefore interesting to speculate to what extent this work
of fiction, which clearly portrayed Indians as heroes and Englishmen as villains,
influenced the way the German-speaking world viewed the mutiny and British
India. In Goedsche’s tale, Indians described as thugs play a role which Wagner
believes is unique in Indian Mutiny literature. In the novel, Nena Sahib himself
desires to become a thug, as if it were somehow a noble and heroic category.
Wagner’s chapter further examines the colonial nightmares of the Western
imagination in relation to 1857, assessing the dissemination of information
and rumours and drawing attention to their diffusion by distinctively ‘non-
Western’ networks. He describes British fears of jungle drums and other native
means of communication outside Western cognisance. Nena Sahib is, therefore,
seen by Wagner as a reflection of the ‘European tradition of conspiracies’. He
compares the account of an English worldwide conspiracy in this novel with
other influential contemporary conspiracy theories, including that revolving
around The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,2 which Wagner shows owes much to
the description of a fictional Jewish conspiracy described in another novel of
Goedsche. The Protocols was employed for propaganda purposes by anti-reform
members of the Russian aristocracy, white Russians opposing the Bolsheviks and
the Nazis as a justification for the systematic destruction of Jewish property: ably
demonstrating the potential power of a simple and compelling literary trope.
A comparable contorted legacy may possibly be traced as well, he suggests, for
Goedsche’s fantasy of the Nena Saheb.
The chapters by Hall and Morris offer fascinating insights into how British
Mutiny propaganda disseminated aSross the world, almost sowing the seeds of
its own downfall by providing Irish nationalists a moment of hope. Mark Hall
discusses nationalist reactions to the 1857 event and the failure of a copycat revolt
planned by Irish and Irish American forerunners of the Fenian Movement. Like
Karatchkova, Hall identifies an intriguing historical ‘what might have been’. A
short, sharp economic downturn occurred in the United States just after the first
xxiv Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

news of the rebellion arrived by steamship in America in the late summer of 1857.
New York City was the centre of the Irish nationalist movement in America at
this time, and the Panic of 1857 affected America’s banking centre of New York
more profoundly than anywhere else. Proposals to arm and fund a rebellion in
Ireland were transmitted to sympathisers in Ireland itself just at the time the New
Yorkers learned of Britain’s imperial crisis in India. Despite the early enthusiasm,
the inability to raise funds from the American Irish community meant that no
arms or men ever arrived in Ireland to mount a rebellion. The American money
that did arrive in Dublin fell far short of expectations. The cash did, however,
help to launch a new organisation called the Irish Republican Brotherhood
(IRB). In future insurrections, the IRB would play a prominent role in Ireland’s
long struggle for independence. The term ‘Fenian’, to describe Irish nationalists,
came into general use shortly afterwards, and like the term ‘sepoy’, it became
for many British an emotive, derogatory term, implying barbaric or violent
behaviour. Hall concludes by demonstrating that the link between independence
movements in India and Ireland continued to inspire Irish nationalists such as
Patrick Pearse well into the twentieth century.
Bob Morris traces the means through which ‘sepoy ballads’ were employed
to inspire Irish nationalists and how the British authorities reacted to their
appearance in Ireland. A number of these ballads attempted to relate the
insurrection in India to the struggle by Irish nationalists against British rule in
Ireland, and their expressed sympathies with Indian rebels became the concern
of no less a figure than Thomas Larcom, who, as Under Secretary for Ireland, was
the most senior British official in that country. His administration attempted
to destroy printed copies of this insurrectionary literature and offered rewards
for the apprehension of the authors of the ballads. Morris shows how reactions
and interpretations of the mutiny varied from place to place in Ireland and
contrasts in particular the situations in Dublin and Belfast. He draws attention
to the fact that detailed news of the mutiny was received in Ireland not just by
newspapers and telegraphs but also through personal letters. Describing private
correspondence between Protestant Irish in India and Ireland, Morris remarks
upon the sympathy evinced for the idea that an underlying cause of the mutiny
was the insufficiency of efforts to convert Indians to Christianity. Protestant
Belfast viewed the mutiny through a religious lens that mirrored their own
struggle with the majority Catholic population of Ireland. Even as Catholics
wrote sepoy ballads that praised the mutineers, the stories of sepoy atrocities
gained such notoriety that both Catholics and Protestants began to use the term
‘sepoy’ as one of abuse. When the Catholic leadership in Ireland refused to show
sympathy for the besieged British and to demonstrate outrage at the atrocities
committed by Indians, Protestant observers attacked their ‘sepoyism’. Morris
contrasts the attitudes and coverage of the Belfast-based Catholic newspaper
the Ulsterman with the main nationalist newspaper in Dublin, the Nationy
and compares the Protestant paper the Belfast Newsletter with the more liberal
 Introduction xxv

Northern Whig. Like Hall, he concludes that the mutiny served as a very real
inspiration to those Irish who opposed British rule in Ireland, but he also notes
how reaction to the mutiny played an important role in the ways in which both
Unionists and Protestants in Ireland viewed their position and relationship with
the Catholic majority.
The Rebellion of 1857 set in motion a chain of events within India that had
an international significance in another, completely different direction: the mass
movement of people across the vast, affected region of northern and eastern India
that was sparked by the economic dislocation caused by the war, and later by the
unprecedented levels of repression by the British, produced, in turn, an upsurge
of emigration from India to the labour-hungry sugar colonies which had never
before been matched, or has been since. ‘Loyal’ and ‘disloyal’ alike were affected:
disbanded Bengal sepoys, hurriedly rounded-up Madras volunteers, fleeing
rebels, deported convicts and an unimaginably large mass of hungry villagers
were on the move across the subcontinent in 1857 and succeeding years, as the
threat of repression and the spectre of famine alike haunted the countryside.
The chapter by Marina Carter and Crispin Bates, the editors of this volume,
discusses the interest of labour-hungry colonies in importing mutineers as
unpaid convict workers and assesses socio-economic dislocation in India and
its influence on migration levels to the sugar colonies in the immediate post­
mutiny years. The authors provide a detailed description of British reprisals
against Indian villages thought to either harbour mutineers or to have otherwise
provided sympathy and support. These brutal attacks created a flood of refugees,
many of whom, the authors contend, joined the waves of Indians emigrating to
the sugar colonies in the years after the revolt. The situation of people living in
areas associated with mutineers remained precarious for months and even years
afterwards, particularly where the British authorities had difficulty formulating a
consistent amnesty policy. The desire to punish the former mutineers remained
strong and contributed to widespread unemployment and famine in areas
associated with rebellious sepoys. There was thus an enormous leap in overseas
emigration which peaked in 1858, driven by two main factors. Alongside the
economic and social dislocation caused by the mutiny, a rise in the worldwide
price of sugar created heightened demand for labour in British ‘sugar colonies’
such as Mauritius, Guyana and Trinidad. The authors discuss the evidence that
mutinous sepoys made up a significant proportion of this migrant labour boom.
Carter and Bates point out that difficulty in measuring the precise number of
former sepoys amongst the emigrants is in some measure due to the need to
conceal their identity as ex-rebels. Many of the British officials overseeing the
sugar colonies were former soldiers or administrators in British India. While this
Indian experience provided these officials with some advantage in dealing with
migrants from that country, it also made them suspicious of Indian emigrants
with military experience. The authors describe various incidents of crime and
unrest in the island colonies, which some local officials blamed on former sepoys
xxvi Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

amongst the migrant population. Carter and Bates conclude by pointing to the
need for further research to identify areas of India directly affected by the 1857
Mutiny and to track the internal and external migration which ensued in the
aftermath of the rebellion.
Seema Alavi’s final and insightful chapter in this volume looks at the
trajectory of another post-mutiny migrant, the convicted rebel, Thanesri, sent
to the penal colony on the Andaman Islands. Her article demonstrates how the
extraordinary scale of travel unleashed by the rebellion, and by the summary
justice of the colonial state meted out to men like Thanesri, had a deep impact
upon individuals and groups who found themselves caught between the warring
worlds of Islam and the West, as exemplified at that time by the British. She
points out that the Wahabi Movement had long been a source of suspicion
on the part of the colonial authorities, and of repression, but that the events
of 1857 made the 'mujahid Wahabi’ a singularly marked man, forced to flee as
far away as Arabia and South East Asia, or transported against his will to penal
colonies across the Indian Ocean, and perhaps also swelling the much-increased
flow of pilgrims reported to have undertaken the hajj, travelling to Mecca, in the
immediate post-mutiny years.3
Alavi’s discussion of Thanesri’s own journey, as derived from his memoir
Tawarikh-i-Ajaib,4 provides a sense of the enrichment of the subject through
travel, albeit enforced. Thanesri wrote of exciting new experiences as he
discovered the diversity of his country and a sense of empathy with the broad
range of Indians he meets— encounters which Alavi interprets as engendering a
sense of proto-nationalism that was an enduring and positive result that emerged
from the carnage of 1857. This fascinating tribute to the power of individuals to
subvert the aims of the colonial state even whilst enduring the full rigours of its
punitive legislation suggests a way forward fof future studies of the subaltern in
Indian history.
The contributions in this volume have underscored the interlinked and
important roles played by communication networks developed in colonial India
and across the world in the mid-nineteenth century and the mass migrations
of that era. Ironically, at the very time that colonial wars and colonial markets
pressured people to migrate, they simultaneously enlarged their horizons and
sought to demean and denigrate their being and actions. The 'coolie’, the
'Wahabi’, the ‘sepoy’—all were labelled and castigated and demeaned by an
empire-wide network of printed recriminations and categorised into stultifying
stereotypes that remain enmeshed in Western cultural tropes today. Yet, as
some of the contributions to the present collection have also shown, in the very
act of propaganda, the British unwittingly gave weapons to the weak and came
very close to shaking the foundations of their power. The year 1857 represented
both the dawn of a new era of global communications and the beginning of
the end of the unswerving Victorian belief in its self-worth, self-righteous and
God-ordained existence.
 Introduction xxvii

Notes and References

1. Sir John Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, oder: Die Empdrung in Indien (Berlin: Carl Nohring, 1858-1859).
I have retained Goedsche’s idiosyncratic spelling of Nena rather than Nana Sahib.
2. Anon., The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Moscow: 1903; English edition, 1919). Believed to
have been commissioned by the Russian Secret Police and used to incite anti-Semitism.
3. B. Metcalf, ‘The Pilgrimage Remembered: South Asian Accounts of the Haj\ in D. Eickelman
and J. Piscatori, eds, Muslim Travelers, Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination
(London: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 85-107.
4. Maulana Jafer Thanesri, Tawarikh-i~Ajaib (Karachi: Salman Academy, 1962).
 1

INTERNATIONAL PRESS AND THE INDIAN UPRISING

Peter Putnis

THE Indian Uprising, which began at Meerut in May 1857, quickly spread
throughout the Bengal Army in the northern and central areas of India.
Initially, the Indian soldiers were able to make significant advances pushing
back the British forces, capturing towns and placing British settlements under
siege. The British, with massive troop reinforcements sent from Britain and its
colonies, finally defeated the rebels in June 1858, and peace was officially declared
on 8 July 1858. Both the uprising and the subsequent British retaliation were
characterised by extreme and often indiscriminate violence. While historians
have judged that British reprisals far outweighed in volume the atrocities
committed by sepoys, it was the latter that dominated contemporary media
accounts. As Karl Marx noted in his correspondence from London for the New
York Daily Tribune, ‘It should not be forgotten that, while the cruelties of the
English are related as acts of martial vigour told simply, rapidly, without dwelling
on disgusting details, the outrages of the natives, shocking as they are, are still
deliberately exaggerated.’1 British shock at the actions of their native subjects,
as represented in press accounts, led to intensified racial discourses, which
emphasised notions o f‘native savagery’ and legitimised the British Army’s brutal
retaliation in the name of vengeance. As Alison Blunt has pointed out, press
accounts of sepoy atrocities centred on the fate of British women. She has noted
how, ‘through newspaper accounts, parliamentary debates and visual images,
the severity of the conflict came to be embodied by the fate of British women and
the defilement of their bodies and their homes’.2
This chapter examines reports of the outbreak of the rebellion and its early
phases in major English-language newspapers in India, Britain, United States,
South Africa and Australia. It takes the occasion of the Indian Uprising as
a vehicle for an examination of the prevailing conditions, in 1857, of inter­
continental news transmission and of the forms of news and pattern of news
flow these generated throughout the English-speaking world. This involves a
historical reconstruction of the news-related communication networks of the
day. The chapter also addresses the question of how news of the outbreak of the
2 Peter Putnis

rebellion and its early phases were reported and framed and considers the extent
to which common representations of the rebellion and of the sepoys involved
were distributed across the English-speaking world. The paper focuses on the
reporting of the uprising at Meerut and the subsequent occupation of Delhi by
the sepoys (10-12 May 1857). It draws upon an analysis of the timing and nature
of the coverage of these events in five newspapers in five different continents—
the Bombay Times, the Times (London), the New York Daily Timesy the Cape
Argus and the Argus (Melbourne).

The New Technologies of Communication

The 1850s was a decade of major advances in the development of interconti­

nental communication links involving steamship, railway and telegraph
technologies (see also the chapter by Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury in this
volume). By 1857, the year of the Indian Uprising, the contours of the future
global telegraphic network could already be seen. It was a time of excited
speculation about the globalisation of communication. The French poet and
statesman, Lamartine, envisaged an ever-increasing significance for journalism
in a world where before too long thought would ‘spread abroad with the rapidity
of light’ and be ‘instantly understood at the extremities of the earth’.3In practice,
however, major communication gaps still remained. India and North America
were not linked to Britain by a reliable telegraphic system till the mid-1860s,
while Australia only joined this international network in 1872. Steamship links
in the 1850s, while rapidly improving, also remained unreliable, particularly on
lengthy journeys that involved a number of critical shipping connections, as with
the route from Britain to Australia.
The developing global communication infrastructure provided conditions
whereby news of major crises could be distributed across the globe at an
unprecedented speed. However, the system was tenuous and fragile and, needless
to say, extremely slow by current standards.
The latest news from places connected by telegraph took the form of short
telegrams (often referred to as ‘electric news’), which, because of their brevity,
often generated as much uncertainty as to the nature of events being reported
as information about them. It was a commonplace observation that telegraphic
news tended to heighten rather than allay anxiety about events abroad and so
was, at best, a mixed blessing. Telegrams carrying news to the rest of the
world from India, it should be noted, travelled a good part of their journey by
steamship and train. If the message was urgent, the normal mail transit speed
was ‘accelerated’ on those sections of the route served by the telegraph.
In 1857, the bulk of news flow between continents took the form of news­
papers mailed from one centre to another. Many papers published at major
 International Press and the Indian Uprising 3

ports produced special ‘steamer editions’, printed on the eve of the departure
of the mail ship, which carried summaries of the news covering the period
since the departure of the previous mail. The Bombay Times and Calcutta
Englishman, for example, being dailies, also published bimonthly steamer
editions, which were eagerly anticipated in London as well as at ports of call
en route to London. There were also specialiseds newspapers, like Home
News and the European Times, which were published in Britain on the eve of
the departure of outward mails, especially for colonial readerships.4 In this
respect, London already functioned as a news hub and ‘clearing house’ for
international news.
The state of the overall global communication system and its influence on
the perception of major events will become clearer if we examine the most
important links in this emerging communication network as they operated in
the global distribution of news regarding the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in
Meerut on 10 May 1857.

The Bombay Times

With respect to the movement of news about the uprising within India, we
focus on the timing and nature of reports received by the Bombay Times. By
1857, India already had an extensive internal telegraphic network financed and
owned by the British imperial authorities. The telegraph was utilised extensively
by major newspapers in Bombay and Calcutta to obtain news from central and
northern India, though in the absence in this early period of any news agency
system, this was done on a fairly ad hoc basis. Most news in the papers of Bombay
and Calcutta from inland centres took the form of letters from correspondents
(mostly private individuals and military personnel rather than professional
journalists) and excerpts from local newspapers received by post.
Meerut was telegraphically linked to both Bombay and Calcutta via Agra
from the end of 1854. Saroj Ghose notes that ‘the earliest news of the mutiny
to reach the government came by an unofficial telegraph message from Meerut
received at Agra on 10 May’5 and that immediately after this the Meerut-Agra
line was cut by the mutineers. Next morning two telegrams reporting the
uprising were sent from Delhi before it too was cut-off by the mutineers, though
it was 14 May before the news reached Calcutta. In the subsequent course of the
uprising telegraph lines were destroyed wherever they came into the mutineers’
control, though the government spared no effort in restoring them as quickly as
it could.6
First news of the Meerut Uprising of 10 May reached the Bombay Times on
11 May. It appears that this newspaper was party to the private telegram noted
above by Ghose. The paper explained to its readers that ‘the Bombay Times
4 Peter Putnis

seems to have had earlier intelligence of it [the Meerut outbreak], by a telegram

from Agra ... than either the Bombay, Calcutta, or Madras Government\
It continued:

This dispatch was im mediately forwarded by us to the local government, and

as we knew we could rely upon our correspondent s com m unication we
awaited its confirmation by the Dak [the Indian system o f message transport
by a relay o f m en], or by Government intelligence, with m uch anxiety. On
Friday the 15th, four days later than our private dispatch, the Governm ent
received startling confirmation o f its correctness, with the further intelligence
that D e lh i... was in the hands o f the mutineers ... and that it was feared every
European o f the place was murdered. The Governm ent, perhaps with propriety,
kept the matter profoundly secret for som e days but the alarming news
becom ing widely known on M onday the 18th the substance o f the Government
dispatches was made public.7

The Bombay Times published the text of its original telegram— ‘The 3rd
Cavalry are in open mutiny. They have burnt down the lines and officers’
bungalows. Several officers and men have been killed or wounded’— on 12 May,
with the comment that it awaited its confirmation by dak with considerable
anxiety. It delayed publication of the confirmation it received on the morning of
18 May as it understood this would be the desire of the government, but gave a
full account on 19 May including the news that ‘at Delhi every man, woman and
child is said to have been murdered by the cowardly and fanatic crew’.8
Along with publishing its daily edition, the Bombay Times published a
bimonthly ‘steamer edition’ (also known as the ‘overland edition’ on account
of the fact that part of the mail route to London was overland) on the eve of the
departure of each mail for London. Such an edition was published on Monday,
11 May 1857. In its summary of news of the previous fortnight, it referred
generally to ‘the threatening attitude assumed by the Sepoys in connection to
the cartridge question’ but made no reference to the Meerut Uprising of 10 May
as such. However, the telegram from Agra arrived at the office of the Bombay
Times before the mail for London had left and the paper published an ‘extra’
titled ‘Mutiny at Meerut’. The ‘extra’ consisted of the statement: ‘We have just
received the following serious intelligence by electric telegraph from Agra’,
followed by the text of the telegram. So it was this brief telegram, with no further
explanation, which left Bombay by sea on 11 May destined for England.
The next steamer edition of the Bombay Times was published just a fortnight
later on 27 May 1857. Its eight broadsheet pages were almost entirely devoted to
the uprising. Excerpts from daily editions over the previous fortnight conveyed
the dramatic unfolding of a ‘horror story’ of massacres and atrocities. This
was supplemented by excerpts from other Indian papers including the Delhi
Gazette (published in Agra following the takeover of Delhi by the insurgents),
the Phoenixy the Mofussilitey the Telegraph and Couriery the Bombay Gazette
 International Press and the Indian Uprising 5

and the Poona Observer. Most telling were the published extracts from private
letters received from Meerut presenting accounts of events. All this material in
the body of the paper was summarised in its opening pages. First, there was a
general summary consisting of highlights in a form which would be suitable for
telegraphing. This was followed by a further summary article, doubtlessly written
close to the time of publication, which provided a distillation of the events of the
previous fortnight and their presentation as a continuous narrative.
The most detailed account of the events at Meerut was provided via a private
letter. The Bombay Times introduced the item commenting, ‘we are favoured
with the following extracts from a private letter dated Meerut, 16 May. They
but too fully corroborate the painful apprehensions excited by our telegraphic
intelligence.’ The letter itself, the author of which remained unidentified, related:

On Sunday the 10th when Meerut was supposed to be wearing its every day
dull aspect, a sudden and furious rise was m ade by the three native regiments
here, and the bazaar and the towns people joined them ... they murdered ladies
in the m ost brutal manner, burning them half and then cutting them up, and
stripping them naked and leaving them to be found by our men the next day.
They rushed into every house to murder every white face. W e escaped for our
lives to the European barracks. Our house escaped by a m iracle....9

Another private letter further personalised the tragedy by naming victims and
their circumstances:

It is indeed fearful to think o f the doings o f the past two days ... it was frightful
to hear o f the numbers who were killed and the inhum an and cold blooded
manner in w hich it was all gone through ... Mrs Courtney o f the hotel was
murdered, also her niece.10

The summary of events provided in the lead story of the steamer edition of
the Bombay Times of 27 May 1857 drew heavily on these letters, as well as on
excerpts from the Delhi Gazette of 20 May, to produce what is presented as an
authoritative, synthesised account. Its sources in the private letters are evident
in the language and the dramatic effects utilised. The Bombay Times wrote:

The evening o f Sunday the 10th while M eerut was wearing the quiet dull aspect
o f an Indian station on the Sabbath day, a sudden and furious rise was made
by the regim ent ... they were joined by the bazaar and townspeople ... the
terrified w om en and children o f our soldiers were in the hands o f the savage
and infuriate crew, who murdered them under circumstances o f unheard o f
barbarism.11

Along with emphasising sepoy atrocities, the Bombay Times' steamer edition
of 27 May projected the magnitude and historical significance of these events
to its (mainly) British audience noting that ‘the alarming intelligence which the
6 Peter Putnis

present mail carries to England has perhaps no parallel in the whole history of
our relations with India during the last hundred years’. It also presented the
events as a religious struggle o f ‘Christianity vs. Brahmanism’ and, in a further
iteration, ‘civilisation vs. barbarism’. The mutineers represented ‘an ungrateful
fanatic race insensible to the excellency of that rule and civilisation it [Britain]
has introduced’ in an attempt to check ‘the savage fury of Mussalman jealousy’
and ‘the delirious worshipper of the devil god’.12 As we shall see, these early
Anglo-Indian newspaper constructions of the events at Meerut and Delhi were
highly influential in framing perceptions of them throughout the rest of the
world. They also set in train a ‘press discourse’ in which the sensational atrocity
narrative, whether based on first-hand observation or hearsay, was afforded
editorial pride of place. Several months after the events in Delhi, the Ceylon Times
commented, ‘we continue to hear through visitors from Bengal accounts which
surpass credence that such monsters in human form as the Bengal Sepoys exist’.
The accounts may, in the view of the Ceylon Times, have surpassed credence, but
the paper published them nevertheless. To quote:

Children shut up in a box and burnt alive: ladies, w ithout a particle o f clothing,
strapped together and paraded in a cart through the streets o f Delhi, sub­
jected to every horror: another flayed alive ... every British soldier in India
knows o f the atrocities and we may well im agine the deep curse which he will
mutter through his lips over the murderer. ‘You showed no mercy to innocent
children and helpless w om en, and what can you expect in return?’

And that was not the end of the matter, for the Ceylon Times found its way
to Australia where its sensational contents were reprinted in the Melbourne
Argus,13 reflecting a pattern of international distribution of sensational news
stories which is explored more fully below.

News Links to London and Reporting in the Times

The steamer edition of the Bombay Times of 11 May, together with the ‘extra’
(the Meerut telegram), was dispatched from Bombay on the P&O mail ship
Nubia, which reached Suez at midnight on 28 May. Its mails were transported
across country to Alexandria where they were loaded onto the steamship Jura,
which left for England on 30 May. The mail reached Marseilles on 6 June from
where the London correspondent of the Times transmitted its most important
news by telegram to London.14 This was published by the Times in its second
edition of Saturday, 6 June, and included a verbatim copy of the Meerut telegram.
The overland mail itself arrived in London on the 8 June and its content was
reported in the Times of the 9th.
 International Press and the Indian Uprising 7

Much of the early reporting of the uprising was focused on the significance
of the Meerut telegram. The Times commented that ‘if the telegraphic news
which we published elsewhere is to be trusted, the most dangerous designs have
been formed among its native officers which ... demand prompt repression’.15
The arrival of the mail did little to clarify the situation. The Times* Bombay
correspondent, in a dispatch dated 11 May, noted, ‘as I write there arrives from
M eerut... a telegraphic message containing intelligence which rather mars that
profound tranquillity to which I have alluded as pervading the whole of India’.
He speculates, however, that while the telegram must have some foundation of
truth, ‘in traversing the country from Meerut to the telegraph station at Agra, the
extent and violence of the outbreak may have become unduly magnified’.16There
was also speculation in the British parliament on the significance of telegraphic
information with the Earl of Granville commenting of the telegram, ‘there is no
doubt that this great application of science is attended with this inconvenience,
that it is impossible to rely entirely upon the truth of any information which is
forwarded merely by telegraph’.17
Overall, the Times’ inclination was to doubt the seriousness of the situation
in India, since any concerted insurgency was inconsistent with its stereotypical
understanding of Britain’s Indian subjects. India, in its view, surrendered
easily to foreign masters. It commented that owing ‘to the gentleness of the
Hindu character, there never was a people so easily governed’ and referred to
‘the soft, ductile character of the Hindu’ easily subjected to influence because
of ‘a wonderful pliancy of temper’. ‘We have no fear of serious consequences’,
the Times concluded.18 In terms of hard information, the overland mail which
arrived on 8 June added little to the bald statement in the Meerut telegram.
The following mail, which left Bombay on 27 May, arrived in Marseilles on
27 June. On that day, the Times, in a second edition, published the following
telegram received from Marseilles:

Some native regiments have m utinied at Meerut, Ferozepore, and Delhi. At

Delhi they secured fifteen Lacs and proclaimed a king. A force is marching
sufficient to overwhelm the m utineers in every quarter. Oude is tranquil.
Troops from Ceylon have reached Calcutta, and the native princes are offering
their contingents.19

Just two days later, full reports of the events in India were published and the
scale and seriousness of the Indian Uprising was immediately evident.
Coverage of the event upon the arrival of the mail, and in the days immediately
following,-comprised the following:

• A dispatch from the Times’ own correspondent datelined Bombay,

27 May, which attempted to ‘digest into a continuous narrative as much of
the fragmentary intelligence ... as has been proved, or may be reasonably
8 Peter Putnis

conjectured to be true’. Of the events in Meerut, it comments that ‘every

house was fired, and every English, man, woman, or child, that fell in the
way of the mutineers was pitilessly massacred’.
• A dispatch from the Times' own correspondent datelined Calcutta,
18 May, gives a further account of these same events.
• Extended extracts from Indian English-language newspapers, which
included the summary from the steamer edition of the Bombay Times
of 27 May noted earlier, first-hand accounts taken from the steamer
edition of the Calcutta Englishmany a first-hand account originally
published in the Mofussilite but taken from the steamer edition of the
Bombay Times, and shorter excerpts from the Bengal Hurkuru, the Central
Star and the Telegraph and Courier. These extracts are also mainly drawn
from the compilations provided by the steamer edition of the Bombay
Times.
• An account of the Meerut and Delhi insurrection by the Rev. T.C. Smyth,
Chaplain of Meerut, provided to the Times.
• Reports of parliamentary proceedings relating to the news just received
from India.
• The Times' editorial commentaries on the situation.

It is noteworthy that most of the reports of the events in India comprise

extracts from English-language newspapers in India. Furthermore, the reports
of the Times' own correspondents appear to largely draw on these same sources,
though both the Bombay and Calcutta correspondents present a somewhat
less alarmist picture of the situation than the local newspapers themselves.
It is noteworthy that the steamer editions of two key Indian newspapers, the
Bombay Times and the Calcutta Englishman, are particularly influential as
sources for the coverage in the Times. These, of course, project the perspectives
and fears of the Indian colonial community and highlight especially (and with
great immediacy) notions of massacre and atrocity, especially against women
and children. It is not going too far to say that the reporting in the Times is
an echo of the reporting by the English-language press within India. Another
noticeable feature is the extensiveness of first-hand reports derived both from
the Indian press and by the Times itself. The Times warns in a leader that ‘so
much of what is related in correspondence from the spot must have been drawn
from imperfect information and care becomes requisite in the discrimination
and comparison of reports’.20 It nevertheless gives extensive space to these first­
hand accounts. Especially noteworthy for its graphic emphasis on atrocities on
women and children and its voicing of revenge sentiment is the account from
the Rev. T.C. Smyth. This repeatedly details instances of ‘frightful butchering’
naming particular individuals, commenting that the state in which bodies of
infants were found ‘defies description’. He notes that ‘the [British] soldiers
 International Press and the Indian Uprising 9

especially are burning to inflict summary punishment on these brutal murderers

of unarmed men, defenceless women, and innocent children’.21

Across the Atlantic and Reporting in the New York

Daily Times

The first opportunity for news of the crises in Meerut and Delhi to reach
New York from London was on the evening of 23 June 1857 with the arrival
in New York of the Royal mail steamship Persia, which had left Liverpool on
Saturday, 13 June, i.e., after the publication in England of the Meerut felegram.
The steamer brought with it one week’s later news from Europe, including
the announcement that the manufacture of the telegraph cable, which was to
be put in place that year to telegraphically link Britain with the United States,
had almost been completed. News also arrived on 16 April from Melbourne by
way of England, reporting the brutal murder of the Inspector General of the
Penal Department in Victoria. There were, however, no reports in the New York
Daily Times of events in India. Nor was the crisis noted after the arrival of the
next steamer from Liverpool at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 29 June from where
telegraphed messages of urgent news could be sent to New York. The first major
report, titled ‘Mutiny in the Native East Indian Army’, appeared in the New York
Daily Times on 6 July 1857 and appears to have been based upon information
received in the course of the previous week or more. It notes:

The Bom bay and Calcutta papers, received by late mails, contain accounts o f
a m utiny w hich, breaking out in the nineteenth regiment o f the infantry in
Bengal was spreading like an epidemic through the native cantonm ents o f the
British Army in northern India.22

The article sketches the background to the mutiny (including the cartridge
issue and the statement, which had not appeared in the Times, ‘that the contractor
who furnished the cartridges had indeed used bullocks’ fat’). The article includes
information which appears to have been derived from the Meerut telegram
referring, as it does, to the revolt and the murder of officers. However, full
details of this uprising and the subsequent events at Delhi are first presented on
the 8 July.
The Cunard steamship Arabia arrived in New York on the evening of the
7 July, having left Liverpool on 27 June, just after the arrival in London of the
mails from India. The Arabia carried with it a copy of the London Times of
27 June from which the New York Daily Times published a long extract about
the events in India including references to ‘the tiger like ferocity of the Indian’
and the ‘indiscriminate massacre of the Europeans’ and that ‘no tenderness
10 Peter Putnis

was shown for sex, no reverence to age; Delhi was turned into shambles'.23 In
the following week, the New York Daily Times continued to publish material
it had received via the Arabia and subsequently the Arago, which arrived on
13 July and brought news from London up to 1 July. Some aspects of the coverage
are localised. For example, there is discussion on the implications of the events
in India for the cotton trade. However, the emphasis, as in the London Times
and the Bombay Times, is on a racialised discourse prompted by the atrocity
stories. This is partly because of the extensive use made by the New York Daily
Times of excerpts from the London Times. Significantly, we also find, in the
New York Daily Times of 14 July, the graphic account of the Meerut and Delhi
insurrection by the Rev. T.C. Smyth, which had been previously published in the
London Times.
Coverage of these early events of the uprising continued through the end
of July, with each new mail providing fresh material. This included a dispatch
from The New York Daily Times’ own ‘East India correspondent’, whose story,
datelined ‘Steamer Alma, Bay of Bengal, 20 May, 1857’, was published by The
New York Daily Times on 15 July. The correspondence begins, ‘I am writing
this on board the steamer Alma, which left Calcutta on Monday, the 18th inst.
bound for Suez with the mails and passengers for England.’ He writes as the
ship approaches Madras where he intends to leave the ship ‘to prosecute a short
journey into the Neilgherries’. His report evidently draws heavily on the English
language Calcutta papers of 18 May. Speaking of Meerut he writes:

The frantic rebels ... turned upon the English residents o f the station with the
ferocity o f tigers ... the wives and children o f the English residents were flying
in terror before the blood-thirsty Sepoys. The scene is described as horrible in
the extreme, exhibiting the worst features o f Asiatic barbarity. Every English
officer that was discovered was instantly shot by the Sepoys. The defenceless
w om en and children were not only butchered, in attem pting to escape from
their burning dwellings, but their bodies were horribly m utilated and cut in
pieces on the highway, by these H indoo savages.... All the savage atrocities
at Meerut were repeated, with tenfold madness, on the Christian w om en and
children in D elhi.24

Press coverage of the Indian Uprising in the New York Daily News drew
heavily upon the London Times and English-language Indian newspapers. By
and large, it uncritically adopted the news frames and sensationalist language
utilised by these papers. Significantly, the language and framing of these reports
were incorporated into the paper’s own commentaries. Hence, the commentary
published on 15 July refers, in an all too familiar trope, to the rebellion being
‘accompanied by all those tiger like ferocities which had ever characterised
Asiatic warfare’ and, predictably, to the ‘butchering [of] every Christian man,
woman and child’.25
 International Press and the Indian Uprising 11

Across the Indian Ocean: Reporting in the Cape Argus

In 1857, news from London to the English colony at the Cape of Good Hope in
southern Africa took about two months to arrive. It travelled via the overland
mail route to Aden and was then dispatched via steamship to Mauritius with the
journey time from London to Mauritius being about thirty days. The journey
from Mauritius to the Cape took another twenty-five to thirty days.26 On this
reckoning, detailed news about the Indian Uprising at Meerut and Delhi via
London would have arrived at the Cape sometime after late August. However,
the news arrived considerably earlier because the Indian government had
dispatched a special mission to the Cape with important dispatches for the
governor seeking an urgent transfer of British troops from the Cape to India. The
screw steamship Madras left Bombay on 10 July, arrived at Point de Galle, Ceylon
on the 15th, Mauritius on the 27th and Cape on 6 August. This made, according
to the Cape Argus, an unprecedentedly quick passage of twenty-six days.27
The Madras carried extensive files of English-language Indian newspapers,
the contents of which are echoed in the Cape Argus. We learn of the sepoys’ ‘most
consummate treachery and most appalling atrocities ... during their sanguinary
orgies’. We are told that they

massacred their officers and the civilians and every European w om an and child
they could lay hands on ... they even slaughtered in cold blood the chaplain o f
the station, the Rev. Mr Jennings (well know n at the Cape) and his wife and
daughter in the presence and with the perm ission o f the King o f Delhi him self.28

The Cape Argus comments, ‘verily, the blood of our slaughtered countrymen
cries aloud for vengeance’. It supports the sending of British troops garrisoned
in the Cape to India, for ‘in a crisis like this, when the fate of India is trembling
in the balance, we must be prepared to fight our own battles’.29The Cape Argus
of 8 August carried extensive reports based on Indian newspapers up to 9 July.
It includes the narrative of events up to 12 June published in the steamer edition
of Bombay Times of that date and also relies heavily on the statement of the
Rev. T.C. Smyth, Chaplain of Meerut. Also included are excerpts from the
Bombay Commercial Gazette and the Calcutta Englishman. In its commentary,
the Cape Argus expresses imperial solidarity commenting, ‘India herself will
suffer but our hold upon her will eventually be rendered more secure than ever
it has been’.30 It also notes that ‘the inhabitants of Cape Town are personally
interested in the general fearful rebellion; the Indian connection of so many
years duration has linked many a Cape family with the distant East’.31
The first mail from England carrying substantial news of English reaction
to the uprising arrived at the Cape on Wednesday, 26 August, with news from
England up to 6 July. This arrived via the Armenian, the last of the line of mail
12 Peter Putnis

steamers to India via the Cape, the service being replaced from that month by
ships using the Suez route.32 A new line of mail steamers directly for the Cape
was due to commence in September. These vessels would only take mail to the
Cape and return again, with the passage on average forty-five days each way.
The Cape Argus notes that The latest advices from India received in England up
to the 8 July were by electric telegraph in anticipation of the overland mail of the
29 June’. It notes that, as on 8 July, ‘the insurgents had not been expelled from
Delhi’.

Via the Southern Ocean: Reporting in

the Melbourne Argus

In the 1850s, the flow of news from overseas to the Australian colonies was
entirely dependent on the vagaries of ever-changeable shipping routes and
schedules at a time when, at best, it took about two months for mail posted
in London to arrive in Melbourne. With respect to the efforts of British
and colonial governments to improve mail services from Britain, it was a decade
of ‘trial and error’ and continuous frustration amongst Australia’s colonists
at the unreliability of services. Competing routes to Australia (the Cape of
Good Hope, Suez, Panama) were mooted or trialled; the relative virtues of sail
and steam (and steam-assisted sail) were debated; mail shipping companies,
formed to secure British government contracts for the service, commenced
operation and went bust. It was also a decade when development in steam
communication to Australia was delayed by the diversion of limited steam
shipping resources allocated to the Australian route to the needs of British forces
fighting in the Crimea.33
Prior to the mid-1840s, mail to and from Australia took many months and
went by private ships in accordance with a British maritime regulation obliging
ship captains to take letters on board ship and deliver them to relevant port
authorities. However, in response to persistent complaints about the irregularity
and slowness of this system, and because of the growing importance of the
colonies, the British parliament authorised the British post office to take over
post arrangements. The post office organised a monthly departure of a sailing
vessel to carry mails from Britain to Australia commencing in February 1844. It
travelled via the Cape of Good Hope on the outward leg (with an average time
taken in 1846 of 124 days) and Cape Horn on the homeward leg (with an average
return journey in 1846 of 138 days).34 The service brought little satisfaction as
the trips took some twelve days longer than the average for private ships. This
led to increasing agitation for a steamship service either using a trans-Pacific
route via Panama, an all sea route around Africa or a route via Singapore linked
to the newly established P&O service via Suez to the Far East. In 1848, the
 International Press and the Indian Uprising 13

British government called for tenders’and the upshot was that two steamship
services— one every second month via Suez and Singapore and another every
second month via the Cape of Good Hope— commenced in 1852 with steaming
time from London estimated to be (depending on the route) between seventy
and seventy-five days. However, the Crimean War intervened. The General
Screw Steam Shipping Company, which operated the^Cape route, ‘was unable to
furnish a ship for the December [1853] sailing because of demand for transports
to carry troops to the Black Sea’. The Crimean War also put a stop to the service
of P & O via Singapore.35 As a temporary measure, sailing packets were resumed
and, in 1856, averaged eighty-four days for the outward voyage and ninety-
three days for the homeward voyage via Cape Horn. A steamship service was
resumed after a new tendering process, in which the European and Australian
Navigation Company was the successful tenderer in 1857 at a contract price of
£185,000 per year. The first mails using this service left London on 24 February
1857 and arrived in Melbourne on 14 May 1857. This service also proved to be
highly unreliable and only lasted for a year, after which the company, having
lost £700,000, found itself in the court of bankruptcy.36
First news of the Indian Uprising reached Australia via the third successful
outward mail of 1857, operated by the European and Australian Navigation
Company, which left London on 16 May and arrived in Alexandria on
26 May. After completing the overland section of the route by rail, it joined the
European and Australian Company steamer Columbian, leaving Suez on
28 May and arriving in Galle on 14 June. It left Galle on 15 June and arrived
in Melbourne on 6 July. At Galle it received mail from Calcutta up till 6 June
and from Madras up till 10 June. It should have been able to pick up mail from
Bombay up till 1 June, but the connecting ship, P&O’s Erin—bound for China,
ran aground 34 miles short of Galle.37Nevertheless, it did take on board Bombay
newspapers up to 30 May.
Reports of the Indian insurgency in the Melbourne Argus drew heavily on
English-language Calcutta newspapers. After referring to circumstances ‘of great
atrocity’, the paper provided an extended excerpt from the first-hand account
(‘on Sunday, the 10th, between five and six o’clock in the evening, I was in my
bungalow in the rear of the lines of the 11th N.I. where I have resided since my
arrival at the Station ...>38), which was first published in the steamer edition of the
Calcutta Englishman on 18 May and was also published in the Times (London) of
29 June. This particular report refers to atrocities but provides less graphic detail
than the report from the Rev. T.C. Smyth. It notes, at one point:I

I m ust now com e to the particulars o f the brutal outrages and assassinations
that mark this infernal outbreak premising however that a sense o f delicacy and
a regard for the harassed feelings o f surviving friends and relatives prevent m e
from entering into details, the relation o f which could only gratify a mind fond
o f horrors and atrocities.39
14 Peter Putnis

The Argus supplements this report with further excerpts from the Englishman
of 19 May, the Phoenix of 20 May, the Bombay Times of 30 May, the Colombo
Observer of 8 June and an undated extract from the Friend of India. The Argus also
publishes a private letter, dated 22 May, Agra, which had been sent by an officer
of the 67th Native Infantry to his brother in Melbourne. The letter referred to the
‘unheard of atrocities’ and commented, regarding the sepoys, ‘what dire revenge
our men will reek on them!’40
Following the arrival of the Columbian, there was a hiatus in the news
flow from India to Australia because of the breakdown of the next scheduled
steamship, the Onieda. Because of this breakdown, the next mail from England
was sent via the old Cape of Good Hope route and so entirely missed the
opportunity to obtain Indian newspapers at either Bombay or Colombo.
Instead, the next instalment of news from India published in the Argus was
actually news via London. On 21 August, the Argus extracted from the Times
(London) the dispatch of its Calcutta correspondent, which had been sent from
India prior to the seriousness of the situation becoming evident (‘the news of
the recent mutinies in the Bengal Army has been received in England with a
feeling of perhaps unnecessary alarm’) and which had been published in the
Times of 15 June 1857. On 25 August, the Argus published the Times' leader
of 8 June which, again, downplayed the significance of the uprising. Both these
items were, of course, written prior to the receipt in Britain of the accounts of
events from the Indian press, which had been published by the Argus back in
July.- Thus, there was a kind of ‘inverted chronology’ in the Argus' reporting,
which arose from the fact that its first instalment of news from India arrived in
Australia via a relatively direct route, while the second instalment arrived via
London.
Reporting in the Argus, in general, followed a similar pattern to that in the
other papers we have discussed. Initial reports were dominated by extracts from
the English-language newspapers in India. In subsequent reports, much use was
made of extracts from the London Times.

Conclusion

Extended reports of the first days of the Indian Uprising were published in
the Times (London) on 29 June 1857, the Argus (Melbourne) on 7 July, the
New York Daily News on 8 July and the Cape Argus on 6 August. It should
be noted that, while in the case of London, New York and Melbourne, news
was dispatched from Bombay around the same time, news for the Cape was
not dispatched till 10 July. While the telegraph played a significant role in the
transmission of news from Meerut to Bombay and from Bombay to London,
it did not play a significant role with respect to other news destinations. The
 International Press and the Indian Uprising 15

pattern of news distribution reflects India’s geographical position as well as its

positioning in relation to the developing global system of mail steamship routes.
It is noteworthy, in particular, that the recent introduction of a mail steamship
service from London to Melbourne via Suez resulted in an early arrival of news
from India in Australia—certainly a much earlier arrival than would have been
the case via the old route via Cape of Good Hope. '
It is also noteworthy that news of the Indian Uprising was regarded in each of
the centres as the most important international news event of 1857. The contents
of the news comprised extracts from overseas newspapers complemented, in the
case of the London Times and the New York Daily News, by dispatches from
the newspapers’ own correspondents. There is a great deal of commonality in
the coverage of the five papers analysed, both with respect to sources and news
frames. First-hand accounts of events, originally published in English-language
Indian newspapers, whose reliability was uncertain, played a particularly impor­
tant role in providing a dominant understanding of the uprising. The force
of these initial accounts was such that a racialised narrative of native atrocity
overwhelmed any other possible interpretive framework.
By 1857 there was a global communication system, primarily consisting
of regularly timetabled steamship mail services, complemented by a nascent
telegraphic system, which enabled the regular circulation of news of major
events throughout the English-speaking world. This was primarily a matter
of the international circulation of local newspapers, facilitated by special
‘steamer editions’ which, as well as providing a news service, were specifically
aimed at promoting the interests of local colonial communities in London.
Not surprisingly, key reports from these ‘primary sources’ appeared serially, in
accordance with shipping timetables, across the world. Newspapers at major
ports, such as New York and Melbourne, were a repository of files of papers
garnered from throughout the world. Hence, characteristically, the Melbourne
Argus commenced its report on the 5 September 1857 on the ‘progress of the
mutinies’ saying,

we have Calcutta papers to the 20 July; Bombay to the 30th o f the same
m onth; Ceylon to the 7 August; and Singapore to the 14 July. From the
various sources indicated ... we derive the subjoined narratives o f the painful
and exciting events o f which our East Indian possessions have been the
theatre.41

The points of initial arrival of international news, such as Melbourne and

New York,'became hubs for its further distribution. Hence we find a similarity
of framing and expression amongst stories, even as they are repackaged for
audiences separated by vast distances. From the perspective of international
news coverage of a major event, such as the Indian Uprising, it makes sense
already in 1857 (that is prior to the establishment of any global news agency
16 Peter Putnis

system) to look at newspapers published in major port cities as components of a

global news exchange system based around posted newspapers and, in particular,
the publication and distribution of special ‘steamer editions’ designed to link
communities across the English-speaking world.

Notes and References

1. K. Marx and F. Engels, The First Indian War o f Independence 1857-1859 (London: Lawrence,
1960), p. 83.
2. Alison Blunt, 'Embodying War. British Women and Domestic Defilement in the Indian
“Mutiny”, 1857-8*, Journal o f Historical Geography, vol. 26, no. 3 (2000), p. 403. For a detailed
analysis o f the role o f the press and communication technology in cementing imperial links
between India and Britain in a later period, see Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British
Press and India, c .l 880-1922 (Manchester. Manchester University Press, 2003).
3. Quoted in 'Journalism*, Age, Melbourne, 12 June 1857, p. 6.
4. Peter Putnis, ‘The British Transoceanic Steamship Press in Nineteenth-century India and
Australia: An Overview*, Journal o f Australian Studies, no. 91 (2007), pp. 69-79.
5.Saroj Ghose, ‘Commercial Needs and Military Necessities: The Telegraph in India*, in
Roy McLeod and Deepak Kumar, eds, Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical
Transfers to India 1700-1947 (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1995), pp. 153-176, p. 162.
6. Ghose, Technology and the Raj, p. 162.
7. Bombay Times, ‘Overland Summary o f Intelligence*, 27 May 1857.
8. Bombay Times, ‘Second Extra: Important Details by Telegraph from Calcutta’, Bombay Times ,
19 May 1857, p. 940.
9. Bombay Times, ‘North West Disturbances*, Bombay Times, 23 May 1857, p. 922.
10. Story from the Mofussilite, 17 May. Reprinted in the Bombay Times, 25 May 1857.
11. Bombay Times, ‘Overland Summary o f Intelligence*, 27 May 1857.
12. Ibid.
13. Argus , ‘East Indies*, Argus , Melbourne, 5 September 1857, p. 5.
14. The telegraphed message regarding the content o f the mail was, in this instance, sent from
Marseilles, thus, only anticipating the mail’s arrival in London by two days. As the development
o f the European telegraph system continued during 1857, greater savings o f time were made
possible as telegrams could be sent from Trieste to London and later from Cagliari in southern
Sardinia.
15. Times , ‘Leaders’, Times, 8 June 1857, p. 9.
16. Times, ‘India and China*, Times, 9 June 1857, p. 10.
17. Times, ‘Parliamentary Intelligence’, Times, 10 June 1857, p: 6.
18. Times, ‘Leader*, Timest 10 June 1857, p. 9.
19. Times, ‘India and China’, Times, 29 June 1857, p. 10. The telegram was originally published in
the second edition o f the paper on Saturday, 27 June 1857.
20. Times, ‘Leader*, Times, 1 July 1857, p. 10.
21. Times, ‘Indian Mutinies*, Times, 30 June 1857, p. 8.
22. New York Daily Times, ‘Mutiny in the Native East Indian Army*, New York Daily Times,
6 July 1857, p. 4.
23. New York Daily Times, ‘Important from India’, New York Daily Times, 8 July 1857, p. 1.
24. New York Daily Timest ‘Our East India Correspondence*, New York Daily Times, 15 July 1857,
p. 4.
 International Press and the Indian Uprising 17

25. New York Daily Times, ‘The Revolt in British India*, New York Daily Times, 15 July 1857,
p. 4.
26. This account is derived from the stories about the arrival o f news from England in the
‘English, China and Mauritius News’, Cape Argus , 23 May 1857, p. 3 and ‘English News’,
22 July 1857, p. 2.
27. Cape Argus, ‘India*, Cape Argus, 8 August 1857, p. 3.
28. Cape Argus, ‘Summary o f Events’, Cape Argus, 8 August 1857, p. !Z.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Cape Argus, ‘India*, Cape Argus, 8 August 1857, p. 3.
32. Cape Argus, ‘Latest News from England’, Cape Argus, 26 August 1857, supplement.
33. Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964),
p p .184-200.
34. Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas, p. 188.
35. Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas, p. 194. See also Peter Putnis and Sarah Ailwood, ‘The
Crimean War and Australia’s Communication and Media History’, in Margaret Van Heekeren,
ed., Australian Media Traditions 2007 (Bathurst, Australia: Charles Sturt University, 2007).
Available online at http://www.csu.edu.au/special/amt/publication/(accessed 15 October 2012).
36. Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas, p. 196.
37. R. Kirk, Australian Mails via Suez, 1852 to 1826 (Beckenham, UK: The Postal History Society,
1989), p. 16. Kirk notes that passengers, crew and mails on the Erin , as well as 400 cases o f opium
bound for China, were all saved.
38. Argus, ‘Military Insurrection in Bengal*, Argus, Melbourne, 7 July 1857, p. 6.
39. Ibid.
40. Argus , ‘India’, Argus, Melbourne, 8 July 1857, p. 7.
41. Argus, ‘East Indies’, Argus, Melbourne, 5 September 1857, p. 5.
 2

YOU CANNOT GOVERN BY FORCE ALONE’

W.H. Russell, The Times and the Great Rebellion
Chandrika Kaul

THIS micro-study examines the interaction of event and personality during

the severest crisis faced by the British in India by means of a focus upon W.H.
Russell, arguably ‘the first and greatest war correspondent’, whose copy in the
Times did much to challenge widely held British perceptions of the character
of the revolt and recommend a conciliatory policy in the aftermath of the
Crown takeover. The mutiny aroused widespread contemporary interest and
controversy in the public domain and raised questions regarding the nature and
sustainability of imperial rule itself. The Times was the seminal newspaper with
respect to Indian reporting, with an annual financial outlay as substantial as
£10,000 in the first half of the nineteenth century.1Russell towered as a colossus
over the world of foreign news reporting, and his coverage serves to highlight
the rich tapestry of mid-Victorian print culture vis-a-vis issues of religion,
race, militarism and imperial responsibility. Russell’s perspectives will be
contextualised within the official milieu of imperial politics and politicians,
which will serve to illustrate how the Times framed issues and discussed their
impact.

Russell’s Mission to India

Russell was born on 28 March 1820 in Lily Vale in County Dublin and raised
by a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. The family moved to Liverpool
when Russell was still a child and he studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and
briefly at Cambridge. He worked initially as a reporter covering elections in
Ireland as well as a Parliamentary reporter for the Times, but rose to fame as
 ‘You Cannot Govern by Force Alone’ 19

P U N C H 'S FANCY PO RTRAITS.—No. 52.

W. H. RTJSSELT,, E S Q ., L .L .D .
Oor Own Cor.Kespondbnt—Th e Man vob the Times.

Figure 2.1: W.H. Russell, Esq. L.L.D.

Source: Punch 33, 8 October 1881 (Wikipedia Commons).
Note: Caricature of the Times war correspondent William Howard Russell (1821-
1907).

its war correspondent, exposing the shortfalls in military, medical and logistical
support for the troops fighting in the Crimean War, coverage which aroused
widespread public condemnation contributing directly to the downfall of
a ministry (possibly the only reporter to be able to claim this distinction),
major political reshuffles as well as key reforms in the army. Thus, upon being
despatched by the paper to cover the events of the mutiny, he arrived armed
with a pen and an enviable reputation but with no direct experience of Indian
affairs. The Times had, however, already taken a leading role in reporting the
rebellion, being the most important carrier of Indian news, and its collection
20 Chandrika Kaul

of articles has been called possibly "the largest single non-official source’ of the
history of 1857-1858.2While there was a significant time lag in reporting, given
that a direct telegraph link had yet to be established— for instance, the news of
Meerut and Delhi massacres of 10 and 11 May 1857 only arrived in Britain by
telegraph on 26 June— British papers nevertheless often received breaking news
well in advance of the government. Thus, on 10 July 1857, Lord Lyveden, the
president of the Board of Control, complained to Lord Canning, the governor
general, about how John Walter, the Times’ proprietor, had brought telegraphic
accounts received at Trieste into the House of Commons to alert him to the
latest developments. Lyveden argued that some control over the telegraphs
should be instituted ‘as it makes us quite ridiculous being always anticipated
by the newspapers’.3 Canning, however, was not keen on putting restrictions
on the telegraphs.4 Indeed, it has been said that the telegraph saved British rule
in India, and the establishment of telegraph lines from every theatre of conflict
linked military commanders on the field with the governor general. Yet Canning
did take exception to the nature of the press reporting amid rising concerns that
newspapers were fuelling tensions and furthering animosities.
Why was Russell invited to go to India towards the end of 1857? The answer
lies in the nature of British and Anglo-Indian press coverage and the increas­
ingly fractious political climate within official circles. Viscount Stanley, who
succeeded Lyvden, contended that by November 1857, there were a spate of
‘bloody’ articles not just in the Times but also in most other principal papers like
the Daily News and Morning Herald and noted to Canning how, ‘not the least of
your difficulties will be to satisfy the public mind ... that Mercy is not weakness’.
He added, however, that ‘although they may think it their duty to question any
particular acts you have the unabated confidence of the Cabinet’.5 Such confi­
dence was not shared by the Times, where the editor, the Oxford-educated John
Thadeus Delane, as well as the manager, Mowbray Morris, had tried to ‘restrain
their correspondents, who were typical Anglo-Indians’, demonstrating an in­
discriminate desire for revenge and an aversion to any talk of clemency. Delane
had maintained support for Canning and his measured approach in the face of
mounting criticism in Whitehall and Westminster, as the seemingly cataclysmic
series of conflicts continued to unfold over 1857. However, during October,
whilst Delane was on leave, the paper—temporarily under Dasent—altered its
tone in line with the more aggressive popular opinion. Lord Granville, leader of
the House of Lords and a friend of Canning, in a bid to limit the damage done
by such attacks, made overt attempts to get Delane’s support upon his return to
the helm in November.6This included suggesting to Canning that he make some
move to advance the prospects of Delane’s brother, Captain George Delane, who
was serving in the governor general’s bodyguard. ‘It may seem shabby but I have
no doubt, if you can conscientiously do it, it is well to have The Times on your
side.’7 In the event, the paper did revert to its more moderate editorial stance
under Delane, who now took the decision to ascertain at first-hand from the
 ‘You Cannot Govern by Force Alone’ 21

pen of its most respected correspondent, the truth behind the atrocity stories
supplied primarily by its Anglo-Indian sources. Russell explained his political in­
clinations as those of a conservative with ‘independent Liberal principles’,8 and,
in his words, his mission was ‘to judge of the truth of the accounts of hideous
massacres and outrages which were rousing to fury the people of England’.9 He
left London on 26 December, reaching Calcutta on 19s January 1858. He was to
stay in India for over a year, arriving back in Britain in April 1859.
It is critical to note that, from the outset, Russell’s mission was accorded
a marked degree of respect within government circles. It was viewed with
trepidation in many quarters: Lord Clarendon, the foreign secretary, was
worried in case it resulted in ‘a second crop of Crimean laurels grown upon the
ruins of everybody’s reputation’.10 Granville took care to meet Russell prior to
his departure to reiterate Canning’s enormous contribution to empire, being
careful to emphasise that one would need to move beyond first appearances:
‘The better you know him the better you will like him.’11To Canning he was more
forthright: ‘you would be a born idiot not to be tolerably open, and decently civil
to R.’12 For the Times, Russell’s mission was a risky proposition. While up to the
mid-nineteenth century, the Times had sold at least four times as many copies
as all the other London newspapers combined, this ascendancy had begun to
be challenged by 1855, specifically by the conservative Standard and the Daily
Telegraph. The paper’s Official History claimed that the ‘Mutiny assisted The
Times’ in its circulation battles, but the competition from the Standard took its
toll, especially when the latter became an evening paper and began to be sold for
2d, half of what the Times cost.13Thus, where it began in 1858 with a circulation
of 55,000, it had fallen to 50,000 by the year’s end, no doubt due, in part, to
renewed competition from the Standard (selling now at Id) and the Telegraph.
However, it is possible that Russell’s coverage— so critical of his countrymen—
might well have also contributed to depressing sales during 1858. It was also
expensive to support Russell in India: within a few months of his arrival, his
sending of copy through the Indo-European telegraph company alone had cost
the paper £5,000, much to Morris’ consternation. Thus, both politically and
financially, it was a calculated gamble for the paper and a striking example of
the premium Delane placed on eye witness reporting on the ground. However,
it was to pay handsome dividends in the long-term consolidation of the Times’
reputation in the subcontinent. It was also to solidify Russell’s position as the
pre-eminent journalist of his age. Indeed, his obituary was to cite his coverage of
the rebellion as his greatest triumph.
By mid-century, the national newspaper press had clearly established itself
as the pre-eminent vehicle of information, especially on imperial and foreign
affairs, and a conduit between the reading public and Westminster. The
final shackles of taxation—the so-called taxes on knowledge—had yet to be
completely abolished. That would come in 1861, but the key steps towards
financial enfranchisement had been taken. Newpapers like the Daily Telegraph
22 Chandrika Kaul

were the penny dailies that rode the crest of this wave and began to reach out to
greater numbers than before. (The 1840s and 1850s also saw the establishment of
the popular weeklies which soon gained large circulations, but their raison d’etre
was entertainment rather than high politics.) More critically, it was via these
national papers that the political role of journalism had begun to be consolidated,
with newsmen striving to project an image of increasing professionalism
and to articulate their role as the Fourth Estate of the realm, a claim initially
popularised by Thomas Macaulay in 1828, when referring to the presence of
journalists in the reporters gallery in Parliament. Boyce has alerted us to the
largely self-serving basis of this claim.14 However, politics and journalism were
not mutually exclusive categories, and this recognition fed into the increasingly
intimate relationship between newspapers and the political establishment and
fulfilled diverse purposes. Such an association invested the press with ‘a new
vitality, and an implicit authority’.15 It also allowed politicians an expanding
medium to communicate with the public and often to test the waters for future
policy initiatives. For instance, in the aftermath of the rebellion, we highlight
how Russell’s and the Times’ backing of a policy of clemency impacted upon the
public mood and persuaded wavering officials of its viability.
The mid-nineteenth century was a circumscribed world wherein the press,
military and the government maintained an uneasy truce. Empire was a domain
that linked the Times and its leading luminaries with the worlds of Westminster
and Whitehall and the increasing militarism of the age. Britain fought more
small- and large-scale imperial wars in the second half of the nineteenth century
than ever before. The paper was led from the front by the towering figure of
Delane, who operated within an extensive network of political and social
contacts. His association with leading politicians like Palmerston was well
known, as was his ability to move across political boundaries in support of a
story. Delane’s genius also lay in his astute judgement in selecting the right man
for the job and then offering unstinting editorial support. During 1858, he used
Russell’s copy and collaborating lead articles as a platform for change in imperial
attitudes. Like Delane, Russell’s impressive credentials had helped forge many
symbiotic relationships with officialdom, which, in mid-Victorian Britain, were
the lifeblood of a reporter. In India, he found that the commander-in-chief
detailed to subdue the rebellion in its latter stages was none other than Sir Colin
Campbell, whom he had encountered in the Crimea. While earlier Campbell
had been antagonistic, in India he appeared to have learnt the lesson of adverse
publicity and responded more positively, assuring Russell a place in his camp,
access to preferential telegraph facilities and a chance to accompany his troops to
the theatres of conflict. Above all, he offered Russell exclusivity of information,
provided this was sent direct to London and not leaked in camp within India. In
the event, Russell travelled extensively across the subcontinent, encompassing
Calcutta, Benaras, Allahabad, Rohilkhand, Kanpur, Lucknow, Bareilly and Delhi
before succumbing to illness and recuperating in Simla for four months from
 ‘You Cannot Govern by Force Alone’ 23

June 1858. However, Russell did not interact only in privileged circles, and found,
to his delight, that amongst the troops too, he was well known and respected, and
a genial camaraderie prevailed in camp. Occasionally he even came across sol­
diers whom he had encountered in earlier campaigns, such as Sergeant Gillespie
and Sergeant William Forbes-Mitchell, both in the Crimea; the latter was also to
save him from almost certain death during a skirmish at Bareilly. Russell’s ability
to move easily between the worlds of the elite and the sepoy/subaltern was a
critical asset and stood him in good stead in the heat and dust and rumour-filled
milieu of India. His reputation preceded him everywhere, and even in Simla he
was never short of informants who came to form an unofficial durbar.

Canning and the Press

Lord Canning and public relations were not natural bedfellows, and his
relationship with the press—ambiguous at the best of times—was severely
strained during these years. He was sceptical of the value of news reporters
and had grown disenchanted with the output of the Anglo-Indian press even
in the short while that he had been governor general prior to the outbreak of
the rebellion. He was, however, alive to the power of the press to impact public
perceptions during a period of crisis such as was represented by the mutiny and
took infinite care to assist Russell, who noted how, despite being careworn, the
governor general was most accommodating, sharing details of military plans
and providing letters of introduction.16 However, as Russell was to astutely
observe after only his second meeting, while Canning’s ‘sagacity’ and ‘devotion
to work’ were unquestionable, ‘he is cold, haughty, reserved and despises the arts
of popularisation’.17 In the event, Russell’s balanced political views, and most
importantly his pleas for moderation, fell on the receptive ears of the like-minded
Canning.
Yet, Canning was sensitive to press critique, and his instinctive low regard
for press correspondents was never far from the surface, as is evident even in
response to Russell. For instance, writing to Lord Stanley, president of the Board
of Control (and from September the secretary of state), Canning noted how
on 4 June, a question had been asked in the House of Lords by the Marquess
of Breadalbane, based on the letter of the Tlm ei special correspondent (undo­
ubtedly Russell) dated 24 April regarding what he purported to be the ‘injudicious
interference of the civil with the military power’.18 The Marquess quoted at
length from the letter and demanded clarification of the principles underlying
the relation between the governor general and the commander-in-chief.
The Earl of Derby defended Canning, maintaining that his authority ‘must have
absolute supremacy ... which must extend over all matters, military as well as
civil’. Derby cautioned against ‘reading anonymous extracts from a newspaper
24 Chandrika Kaul

to raise any question calculated to create a difference’ between these two leading
figures.19Canning nevertheless felt compelled to reiterate his position against the
paper’s charge:

I do not know what The Times correspondent, upon whose letter the question
was founded, means by his allusion to the m ovem ents o f General Roberts and
Brigadier General Jones. The former has been left to act entirely upon his own
judgem ent both by the Commander in C hief and by myself; and the latter was,
at the time, under Sir Colin Campbell’s im m ediate com m and, and was never
interfered with by me. The explanation no doubt is that Mr Russell writes camp
gossip in which facts go for little.20

However, the bulk of Canning’s ire was reserved for the Anglo-Indian press,
particularly in Calcutta, and the wider European community that aided and
abetted the papers. The relationship between the European press in India and
the East India Company was often rather tumultuous and marked by attempts
on the part of officials to curb press intrusion and comment. On the whole,
however, they enjoyed a degree of freedom from censure, both political and
financial, which was unheard of in Victorian Britain. As Maclagan has argued,
Canning alienated his countrymen by his ‘reserved and proud nature’ as well
as ‘his refusal to discriminate between the races under his rule’.21 His mutiny
resolutions and the general demeanour of his government as well as his refusal
to kowtow to press criticism—his ‘aloof attitude to public censure’—won him
few friends.22 Papers like the Bengal Hurkaru and especially the ironically named
Friend of India displayed a marked degree of venom in attacking the governor
general. Punch encapsulated this sentiment, depicting Canning pardoning a
rebellious sepoy who was armed and bloody (Figure 2.2).
Canning’s attitude was based partly on his disdain for the press, fuelled in
India by the inaccurate and biased nature of its reporting, and partly because
he was convinced of the veracity of his arguments about the nature of imperial
rule and the relationship between rulers and ruled. A striking example of the
misleading and exaggerated nature of press attacks is provided in the book by
the editor of the Friend of India, Henry Mead, titled The Sepoy Revolt: Its Causes
and Consequences. As Henry Lawrence remarked, ‘No paper has done us more
harm than the Friend of India.’23 Canning passed a Press Act in the summer
of 1857, which restricted the press—both Indian and Anglo-Indian— for a year
from making scurrilous attacks against the government and forbade comment
and coverage that fomented hatred between the communities. There were no
racial distinctions made in law, and several prosecutions of both English and
Indian newspapers resulted under the new dispensation. The ‘gagging act’ came
to be hysterically condemned by white journalists and their sympathisers in Fleet
Street, who regarded it as an attack on the liberties of free born Englishmen and
a slur on their ‘loyal’ support during the mutiny. But their outrage stemmed far
 ‘You Cannot Govern by Force Alone1 25

Figure 2.2: The Clemency of Canning

Source: Punch 33, 24 O ctober 1857, p. 171.
N ote: B ent on vengeance, like m uch o f the rest o f the British press, Punch la m p o o n ed
the governor general’s attem pts to bring an en d to con flict by offering an am nesty to
those w h o gave up arms and su ccum bed to British authority.

m o re fro m th e fact th at C a n n in g a p p lied th e law e q u a lly across th e press. T h ere

w ere n o sp ecial reserv a tio n s for the c o n q u e r in g race. A s h e ex p la in ed to V e r n o n
S m ith , P resid en t o f th e B oard o f C on trol:

As regards the Native Press I shall be surprised if, even in England, there are
two opinions as to the propriety o f the measure. The m ischief which such
writings ... do am ongst the ignorant and childish, but excitable, Sepoys and
the fanatical M ahomeddans o f every class, will be easily understood; especially
when it is known that they are eagerly sought and listened to by the Native
26 Chandrika Kaul

Soldiers.... As to the English press it has no claim to exem ption. If it were read
only by English readers, som ething might be urged in its defence.... But the
Articles o f the English newspapers are translated into the Native Languages and
are read by all.... Such editors in such tim es as these and in this country need to
be controlled whether they be European or N ative.24

Thus, the ability of the press to influence the susceptible and to misinform
the public, and the role of information and news as an important paradigm
in imperial governance, was acknowledged. The expanding reach of the press
in India was also a cause for concern. The impact of the English-language
newspapers was no longer restricted only to the British, but translations found
their way into Indian hands, where the damage done to British reputations
was far harder to redress. Finally, the Anglo-Indian press exerted a potentially
disturbing effect on news reporting within Britain, the domestic press taking a
significant share of their Indian coverage from its pages.

Russell’s Rebellion: *1 wanted proof,

and none was forthcoming’

While Russell was privy to confidential information and military strategies from
Canning, Campbell, Sir James Outram and others, there is nothing to suggest
that his reports were doctored or his opinions censored in any form. In fact, it was
in the interests of the government to allow him full scope to report accurately,
given the desire to ascertain the accuracy of the atrocity stories emanating from
the subcontinent. As Russell wrote soon after his arrival:

the advantages to be derived from a truthful narrative o f what was done placed
before the public ... would be considerable, whilst that narrative [also] acted as
an effectual antidote to the erroneous statem ents which were made in India out
o f ignorance or malice, and thence reached England, where they caused great
anxiety and misapprehension.25
'i

The height of the military conflict appeared to be over by the time he reached
India and Russell did not question the larger episodes of massacre and killings
associated with Kanpur, Meerut or Lucknow. Rather, he directed his attention
to collating factual evidence about the ‘disgusting anecdotes glossed with still
more revolting insinuations' of heinous crimes which emanated relentlessly—
principally from Calcutta.26 Stylistically, his mailed despatches (which arrived
four weeks later) were literary and expansive, describing the entirety of the
landscape from his vantage point of the battle side. His telegraphed accounts
were far more vivid. He interviewed British soldiers, sepoys and officers alike
(including visits to the hospitals in Calcutta) in order to ascertain the realities of
military life, as well as painting a colourful picture of the country and its people.
 ‘You Cannot Govern by Force Alone* 27

As in the Crimea, what proved critical in terms of metropolitan impact

was the consistent and unequivocal support Russell’s despatches received at
Printing House Square. This seminal, and arguably unique, relationship between
correspondent and editor formed the backbone of the paper’s coverage and lay at
the heart of its influence and prestige. The full weight of the Times’ considerable
reputation was thrown behind its war correspondent whose conclusions were
ably reinforced by Delane who remarked to Russell on one occasion: ‘You
will have seen, I hope, how I have backed every one of your suggestions with
leading articles.’27 Of further significance was the fact that the political mood
as 1858 wore on became much more open to persuasion from a critical press.
As Delane reassured Russell: ‘[Y]ou have not, as you had in the Crimea, a large
party interesting in running you down and contradicting you.’28 Delane was
also a constant source of encouragement. Writing in April, he congratulated his
correspondent on

the perfect success with which you have sustained your fame. I feel myself, and
hear everybody saying, that we are at last beginning to learn som ething about
India, which was always before a mystery— as far removed from our sight and
which was as im possible to com prehend as the fixed stars.29

What were some of the central themes in Russell’s reporting as featured in

the Times and upon which he reflected in his Mutiny Diary, published in 1860
to instant acclaim? What do these tell us about the man and the moment in
British imperial and press history? Shortly after arriving in the subcontinent,
Russell had come to the conclusion that the rebellion and its suppression was
inextricably an issue of faith and race. As he reflected on 12 February: ‘[T]he
peculiar aggravation of the Cawnpore massacres was this, that the deed was done
by a subject race—by black men who dared to shed the blood of their masters,
and that of poor helpless ladies and children.’ The rebels attacked the white men,
women and children because they were oppressors and foreigners. The rebellion
was ‘a war of religion, a war of race, and a war of revenge, of hope, of some
national promptings to shake off the yoke of a stranger, and to re-establish the
full power of native chiefs, and the full sway of native religions’.30 In addition,
an evangelical Christianity was certainly manifest in the motivations and actions
of several British military commanders, and the response of the British public to
the traumatic nature of the rebellion was in turn shaped by the perception of it
as a vicious attack on the Christian faith.
The indiscriminate nature of the massacres in North India was particularly
striking for Russell, more used as he was to formal rules of war engagement:
‘Wherever the rebels meet a Christian, or a white man, they at once slay him
pitilessly.... Wherever we meet a rebel in arms, or any man on whom suspicion
rests, we kill him with equal celerity, and without any greater show of pity.’31
Equally indiscriminate was the predominant tone of the British press which
appeared to be solely advocating revenge through death, a sentiment captured
28 Chandrika Kaul

by an a n o n y m o u s letter to th e Punch: ‘[H ]a n g every S e p o y y o u can catch . A n d let

us h ave n o m o re id le d ep r e c a tio n o f th e p u b lic cry for v e n g e a n c e .... Let u s n o t
talk o f m ercy o r fo rg iv en ess to w a rd s a crim in a l w h ile w e th ro ttle h im . E x ec u tio n
is v en g ea n ce, w h atever w e m ay call it.>32
T h e tiger in th e c a rto o n (F igure 2 .3 ) is also sh o w n to b e a ttack in g a d e fen celess
w o m a n and ch ild — a n o th e r issu e ca lcu la ted to reverb erate in th e B ritish p sy ch e,
for th e c o n cern s th at m o st ex ercised th e m e tr o p o lita n m in d w ere th e safety o f
kith and kin as w ell as th e lo ss o f e c o n o m ic a n d fin a n cia l secu rity. T h e recap tu re
o f B ritish m ilitary su p er io r ity w as th u s a k ey m o tiv a tio n . H o w ev er, u n d e r ly in g
and eq u ally sig n ifica n t ap p eared to b e th e c o n c e r n o f re-e sta b lish m e n t o f
m oral su p eriority. For, in su b je c tin g th e ‘w h ite m a n ’ to d eath an d d efea t, th e
h u m ilia tio n in flicted b y ‘an in ferio r race’ w as as m u c h m o ra l as it w as p h ysical.
Y et, R ussell argu ed v o c ife r o u sly th at th e a n sw er d id n o t lie in th e b ru ta lity o f
th e su p p ressio n and su m m a r y p u n is h m e n ts m e te d o u t b y officers an d so ld iers,
w h ich sh o ck ed h im at every tu rn . Justice h a d to b e se e n to be d o n e , a n d if it

THE BRITISH LION’S U M m ON THE BBNOAl TIGER

Figure 2.3: The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger

Source: Punch 33, 22 A ugust 1857, pp. 7 6 -7 7 (W ikipedia C o m m o n s).
N ote: Calls for retribution from the British press were fuelled by stories o f Indian
atrocities against British w o m en and children. In this cartoon, the British lion fights
o ff the Bengali tiger that is ravaging the b od y o f a w h ite w om an .
 ‘You Cannot Govern by Force Alone’ 29

resu lted in e x e c u tio n s o f th e gu ilty , th e n th e rules o f w ar p e r m itte d su ch c o n d u c t.

H o w ev er, m in d le ss fero city c o m b in e d w ith racial h atred (ca p tu red in F igure 2 .4 )
w o u ld o n ly so w th e seed s o f future m istr u st, u n d e r m in in g th e ed ifice o f B ritish
im p erial a u th o rity still further.

J l ‘ S T I C K.

Figure 2.4: Justice

Source: Punch 33, 12 Septem ber 1857, p. 109 (T he V ictorian W eb).
N ote: T he British press depicted violen t retribution against the rebellious sepoys
as the just deserts o f their perfidy and atrocities against British w o m en and children.
H ere the fem ale figure o f justice avenges her co u n tryw om en against the rebels, w hile
in the background are the British guns that w ere used to execute captured rebels.
Significantly, sheltering beh in d the figure o f British justice are Indian w o m en and
children, suggesting that vulnerable m em bers o f the Indian p op u lation also b enefited
from British protection and justifying the reassertion o f British rule in term s o f their
‘civilising m issio n ’ to Indian w om en.
30 Chandrika Kaul

At various junctures, Russell also questioned how far this characterisation of

another race as ‘inferior’, based on its distance from British religion, culture and
modes of thought, was justified. Thus, rhapsodising about the architectural and
aesthetic splendour of Lucknow, he noted how it was

a vision o f palaces, minars, dom es azure and gold, cupolas, colonnade, long
facades o f fair perspective in pillar and colu m n __ There is a city more vast than
Paris, as it seem s, and more brilliant ... Is this the capital o f a semi-barbarous
race, erected by a corrupt, effete, and degraded dynasty? I confess I felt inclined
to rub m y eyes again and again.33

While remarking about the loyalty shown by the local chiefs to the Begum of
Awadh in her mission to uphold the interests of her young son Birjeis Kuddr,
he argued: ‘[W]e affect to disbelieve his legitimacy, but the zemindars, who
ought to be better judges of the facts, accept Birjeis Kuddr without hesitation.
Will Government treat these men as rebels or as honourable enemies?’34 He was
also quick to acknowledge the role of Indians in the survival of the British,* thus
remarking a year on from the attack on Delhi:

it must be admitted that, with all their courage, they w ould have been
quite exterminated if the natives had been all and altogether hostile to
them! The desperate defences made by garrisons were, no doubt, heroic; but
natives shared the glory, and by their aid and presence rendered the defence
possible.35

Russell’s refusal to tar all Indians as ‘traitors’, and his concern for the civilians
caught up in the maelstrom, is most clearly evident in his coverage of the assault to
relieve the besieged Residency in Lucknow. As he wrote to his paper on 4th March:
‘I cannot refrain from expressing a most earnest hope that these unfortunate
people, who are at most guilty of a forced neutrality, will not be handed over to a
very excited and irritated soldiery.... The time for indiscriminate blood shedding
must cease.’ This need to distinguish between the innocent non-combatant
and the armed rebels was also in evidence when Russell took exception to
legislation from the pen of the usually more circumspect Canning, whose Awadh
proclamation sought to punish residents by the confiscation of the proprietary
rights of the landholders unless they declared immediate loyalty to the British.
Russell objected to the unfairly punitive nature of this plan, a position which also
struck a chord with the home government as it appeared to be contrary to their
policy of justice with mercy. Unfortunately, the Earl of Ellenborough’s censure
of the intended proclamation was also made public with deleterious impact on
home opinion. It is rather ironic, therefore, that Russell himself felt no moral
compunction in partaking of the spoils of war during the wholesale looting of
the Kaiserbagh by the British forces, though admitting that ‘the scene of plunder
was indescribable’.36 His ideological stance was also combined with pragmatism.
 4You Cannot Govern by Force Alone1 31

He was convinced that a foreign power could not hope to maintain an army
"without the aid of a considerable portion of the population. We could not
march a mile without their assistance.’37 Wholesale reprisals would depopulate
and destroy the landscape and livelihood of communities whose goodwill was
essential to immediate military success but also necessary for the establishment
of a more cooperative relationship in the future. '
It was a deep-seated concern with the future of Britain’s imperial mission that
ultimately exercised Russell, and which formed the basis for the majority of his
writings in the Times as 1858 wore on. The visceral emotions that were brought
to the surface during these tumultuous years laid bare the ambiguity at the heart
of British rule. The balance between a moral legitimacy—the superior civilising
mission— and the necessity of military force in maintaining power, was difficult
to achieve. Russell’s reporting often exhibits this contrariness as well. ‘Force’ not
‘affection’ he acknowledged, lay at the foundational epicentre of British rule,
but in India it was even more insidious in being ‘exercised by a few who are
obliged to employ natives as the instruments of coercion’.38 Russell characterised
the ethics of a hundred years of company rule as criminal and driven by greed and
aggrandisement which had brought Britain to her knees, while at the same time
heaping lavish praise on the abilities of its military commanders in their fight
against the Indians. He zealously maintained that a superior Christian morality
underlay the best of British intentions, yet his writings also raised the spectre of
taint by association, a fear that the use of indiscriminate and prolonged violence
both in thought as well as in action would in turn vitiate British character more
generally and prove deleterious to the implementation of her civilising mission
in the future. Thus, after remarking upon an incident in which British women
and children had been killed without mercy at the hands o f ‘barbarous savages’,
he went on to categorise the British response in brutally murdering an innocent
relative of the Nawab of Farrukhabad in the same place ‘under circumstances of
most disgusting indignity, whilst a chaplain stood by amongst the spectators’, as
equally not the act o f ‘civilized Christians’. Further, this and all kinds of

vindictive, unchristian, Indian torture, such as sewing M ahom m edans in

pig-skins, smearing them with pork-fat before execution, and burning their
bodies, and forcing Hindus to defile them selves are disgraceful, and ultimately
recoil on ourselves. They are spiritual and m ental tortures to which we have no
right to resort, and which we dare not perpetrate in the face o f Europe.39

He also repeatedly questioned the extent to which India had become ‘better
for our rule, so far as regards the social conditions of the great mass of the
people’.40 For instance, though there had been attempts at tackling social ills
like widow-burning and female infanticide, poverty was endemic, a point he
reiterated when describing the wretched conditions in the countryside through
which he traversed. Russell’s negative image of his countrymen in the military
32 Chandrika Kaul

sphere was reinforced by his observations of their social exclusivity bordering

on paranoia, overt hostility and cruelty towards Indians (notably in their
treatment of servants), as well as their general contempt for Asiatics, all of which
he rated as significant contributory factors in the outbreak of the rebellion. These
themes are evidenced in his critiques of the Anglo-Indian community—as, for
instance, in the Times of 20 October in a piece titled ‘The Sahib and the Nigger’,
as well as the Anglo-Indian journalists who repeatedly ran grossly exaggerated
atrocity stories. The latter were quick to react to what they perceived as a Judas­
like betrayal. The Calcutta Review accused Russell’s judgement as flawed, based
as it was on too short an experience of Indian conditions and a lack of in-depth
historical readings, and suggested instead that the majority of Indians were in
fact far better off under the British.41
Overall, the effect of Russell’s reporting can be summed up as the awakening
of both the popular and official mind of Britain. As early as April 1858,
Delane could argue that ‘[t]he public feeling has righted itself more promptly
than was to be expected’. And even during Parliamentary debates ‘humane
instead of the most bloodthirsty sentiments’ were expressed.42 Having found
‘nothing to substantiate the more gruesome details’, Russell’s correspondence
had ‘a powerful influence in bringing the British public to sanity’.43 His criti­
cisms also served as a check on official actions— particularly those of junior
officers in the army, for instance, the indiscriminate executions and racially
motivated summary punishments inflicted in the aftermath of Kanpur—
whilst simultaneously serving to rebut the more extreme narratives of the
Anglo-Indian press. Russell’s more stringent critiques of army policies and of
personnel like Major Renaud, Brigadier Neill and Francis Cooper, the Deputy
Commissioner of Punjab, though not always printed in the Timesy found their
way to members of the government via Delane. Thus, for instance, Lord Stanley
was privy to Russell’s severe censure against the summary punishments enforced
in the aftermath of Kanpur, which Delane claims contributed to the government
order against indiscriminate executions passed soon after. Russell welcomed
the tone and spirit of Queen Victoria’s proclamation in November marking
the formalisation of Crown rule that he hoped would herald a new dawn in the
history of Indo-British relations. Undoubtedly, his response was, on occasion,
contradictory and ambivalent though he appeared, especially in his Diaryy to
be unaware of its significance. He attacked British cruelty and racism and was
disillusioned by the failures of the company government. Yet, he also praised
British heroism and projected an idealistic faith in the imperial mission (which
was irreconcilable with the popular cry for vengeance)— a sentiment that in
some quarters of contemporary postcolonial historiography might well be met
by cynicism, but needs to be accorded due historical weight as a reflection of a
significant segment of the mid-Victorian mindset. Finally, regarding the role of
newspapers in the public sphere, Robert Lowe had dramatically declaimed in
the Times of 6 February 1852, that for the press ‘there can be no greater disgrace
 ‘You Cannot Govern by Force Alone’ 33

than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We
are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences.’ Russell
exemplified and vindicated this ideal in his Rebellion coverage.

‘It is You Who Have First Made India Known to Us’

The above reflection was made by Delane in praise of his favoured war
correspondent. Indeed, Russell’s coverage of the rebellion and the establishment
of Crown rule represented the first detailed ‘expose’ of events in India by a British
journalist from the national press. A liberal pragmatism characterised Russell’s
outlook, and his ability to convey an historical overview as well as provide a
critical evaluation of Victorian values was also particularly striking. His frames of
reference were often held up as a template for future press encounters in British
India.44 Russell himself was to revisit India twenty years later when the Prince
of Wales specifically requested his presence as part of the royal entourage, to
chronicle his landmark tour at the time of the Delhi Durbar in 1876-1877. This
mark of favour for the Times caused great consternation in Fleet Street which
accused the government of favouritism and the paper of receiving in effect a
public subsidy. Russell was eventually allowed to proceed not as a member of
the press but of the royal staff, with the designation ‘Hon. Private Secretary to
HRH the Prince of Wales’. He was supplied with an official uniform but without
pay and curtailed from sending exclusive despatches for the Times.4S Russell
received a knighthood from Queen Victoria in 1895, and in August 1902 he was
also invested with the title of a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order by his
friend, the newly crowned Edward VII, who it was claimed remarked to the aged
veteran: ‘You must not kneel, Billy! Stoop!’
Russell’s incisive accounts and their political impact in mid-Victorian Britain
demonstrates the need to nuance historical coverage of the British press and
the Indian Rebellion, treatment of which still retains a somewhat bi-polarised
undertone—between the popular/imperialist (read sympathetic) contemporary
response on the one hand, and the subsequent revisionist/subaltern (read
critical) on the other. There were British voices— of which Russell’s was amongst
the most vociferous— raised in protest against the attitude and actions of their
compatriots across the seas well before the final suppression of the uprising.
As an embedded journalist, Russell was also successful in reflecting the mores
of the subaltern and sepoy, giving him the ability to convey the perspective of
both Indian and English rank and file soldiers. Further, he exposed the deeds of
‘subordinate’ officials in the army whose acts ‘resemble[d] the manifestations
of vindictiveness and fright rather than those of justice and punishment’.46 It was
largely through Russell’s coverage that the paper could claim to have cuse[d] its
power to refound the Indian Empire upon a new and humaner basis’.47
34 Chandrika Kaul

Russell died on 10 February 1907 in the fiftieth anniversary year of the outbreak
of the rebellion. In December of the same year, Lord Burnham, proprietor
of the Daily Telegraph, organised at the Royal Albert Hall a Christmas party
to commemorate this golden anniversary and honour the surviving veterans.
Perceval Landon, the India expert on the paper, undertook its management. The
proprietor’s seventeen-year-old son, who was to succeed him (and come to be
associated directly with Indian governance as a member of the Indian Statutory
Commission in the 1930s), recalled how:

The scene was set, the boxes and galleries were crowded, and in the arena
sat down over six hundred o f the gallant survivors. In the chair was Field-
Marshall Lord Roberts, a M utiny veteran and V.C. Lord Curzon made one
o f the greatest speeches o f his life, Lewis Waller with his fine presence and
golden voice declaimed Rudyard Kipling’s tribute to ‘the remnants o f that
desperate host that cleansed our East with steel’. And then came a thrill....
I will never forget and which moved that vast audience immeasurably. Faintly
in the distance came the skirl o f the pipes, ‘The Campbells are com ing’, the air
that first told the beleaguered o f Lucknow that relief was close, growing slowly in
volume as the pipers drew near, and in they swept led by Piper Angus Gibson o f
the Black W atch, the last survivor o f those who played in Colin Campbell’s men
on the great day o f 1857.48

In many respects the passage of time had not dimmed the emotions that were
uppermost in British minds during those fateful months. Yet, as both Curzon and
Roberts were at pains to stress, there was also an unequivocal acknowledgement
of the contribution of Indians to the survival of the Raj and that the policies of
clemency and cooperation—so favoured by Russell—had helped refound the
British Empire on a more secure basis.

Notes and References 1

1. Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India (Manchester Manchester
University Press, 2003), p. 59.
2. S.B. Chaudhuri, English Historical Writings on the Indian Mutiny (Calcutta: World Press, 1979),
p. 31.
3. R. Vernon Smith to Lord Canning, 10 July 1857, Canning Papers, MSS Eur F 231/4, India Office
Library and Records, British Library [hereafter CP/].
4. Lord Canning to Viscount Stanley, 22 Aug 1857, CP/15— as indicated on the Library notes.
Actual file misplaced.
5. Viscount Stanley to Lord Canning, 10 Nov 1857, Photo Eur 476, Lord Canning’s Indian Papers,
Harewood Archives, Leeds [hereafter Harewood]. By kind permission o f the Earl and Countess
o f Harewood.
6. The History o f The Times, Vol. II, the Times , London, 1939, pp. 312-313.
7. Granville to Lord Canning, 9 Sept 1857, cited in OH, p. 313.
 ‘You Cannot Govern by Force Alone' 35

8. Cited in A. Hankinson, M an o f Wars (London: Heinemann, 1982), p. 2.

9. Cited in J.B. Atkins, The Life o f Sir William Howard Russell, Vol. I (London: J. Murray 1911),
p. 275.
10. Maxwell, Life o f Clarendon, Vol. II, p.158, cited in OH, p. 316.
11. Granville to Russell, 8 Dec 1857, cited in Atkins, Russell, p. 273.
12. Granville to Canning, Nov 1857, cited in OH, p. 316.
13. The History o f The Timesyp. 298. *
14. George Boyce, ‘The Fourth Estate: The Reappraisal o f a Concept’, in G. Boyce, J. Curran and
P. Wingate (eds.), Newspaper History (London: Sage, 1978), pp. 19-40.
15. S. Koss, The Rise and Fall o f the Political Press in Britain , Vol. I (London: Hamish Hamilton
1981), p. 9.
16. W.H. Russell, My Diary in India (London: Routledge, 1860), Vol. I, 29 January 1858,
pp. 113-116 and 10 February 1858, pp. 152-154.
17. Hankinson, M an ofW arsyp. 122.
18. 4 June 1858, col 1511, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, Vol. CL, (London: Cornelius
Buck, 1858), [hereafter Hansard].
19. Hansard, cols. 1513-1514.
20. Lord Canning to Lord Stanley, 23 July 1858, Photo Eur 474, Harewood.
21. M. Maclagan, ‘Clemency *Canning (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 132.
22. Maclagan, Canningyp. 133.
23. Cited in Chaudhuri, English Historical Writingsyp. 7.
24. Lord Canning to Vernon Smith, 19 June 1857, cited in Maclagan, Canningypp. 102-103.
25. M. Edwardes (ed.), W.H. Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary (London: Cassell, 1957), p. 13.
26. Russell, Indian Mutiny Diary, p. 4.
27. Delane to Russell, 8 July 1858, cited in Hankinson, M an o f Wars, Ch. 13.
28. Delane to Russell, 8 May 1858, cited in Atkins, Russell, p. 328.
29. Delane to Russell, 8 Apr 1858, cited in Atkins, Russell, p. 311.
30. Russell, Indian Mutiny Diary, p. 29.
31. Ibid., p. 44.
32. Punch , anonymous letter to the editor, 10 Oct 1857.
33. Russell, Indian Mutiny Diary, pp. 57-58.
34. Ibid., p. 71.
35. Ibid., p. 150.
36. Ibid., p. 103.
37. Letter to the Times, 25 Mar 1858.
38. Russell, Indian Mutiny Diary, p. 37
39. Ibid., p. 161-162.
40. Ibid., p. 37.
41. Cited in Chaudhuri, English Historical Writings, p. 13.
42. Delane to Russell, 8 Apr 1858, cited in Atkins, Russell, p. 311.
43. The History o f The Times, p. 318.
44. See Kaul, Reporting the Raj, for details o f British press coverage o f India 1880s-1920s.
45. Chandrika Kaul, ‘Monarchical Display and the Politics o f Empire: The Princes o f Wales and
India, 1870s-1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 17, no. 4 (2006), pp. 464—488.
46. The History o f The Times , p. 319.
47. Ibid.
48. Lord Burnham, Peterborough Court (London: Cassell 1955), pp. 140-141.
 3

'O’ER THE CRUEL ROLL OF WAR DRUMS’

The Politicisation of Legends in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction*
Projit Bihari Mukharji

Figure 3.1: Fred Goodairs Painting of the Jessie Legend

Source: P.B. M ukharji.
N ote: Print o f Jessie’s D ream (The R elief o f L ucknow ) by Frederick G oodall. Original
painting dated 1858.

*1 am grateful to Crispin Bates for encouraging me to write this article. My sincere thanks are also
due to Mrs Angela Groth-Seary of the Templeman Library, Kent, for helping me track down Dion
Boucicault’s papers and the unpublished script of William Seaman’s drama. Monjita Mukharji’s
comments and patient hearings of previous drafts have helped to improve this article enormously.
Whatever inadequacies remain are solely mine.
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 37

THIS chapter is about Jessie Brown, a poor ‘highland lassie’ trapped in the Siege
of Lucknow. It is about the strength of her spirit, her hope, her faith and the
near-miraculous rescue that her faith and piety invoked. Apart from the blood
and gore usually associated with the mutiny, it spawned in its wake more than
its fair share of romantic lore: stories of love, hope and faith. To varying degrees
scholars have remarked on these since the days of the mutiny itself. Most of them
have sought to separate the fact from the fiction: the wheat from the chaff. In the
present essay, however, we are not interested in ascertaining the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’
of any of these narratives. Instead, what we seek to investigate is why and how
was this question of truth posed in respect to stories about the mutiny within a
‘global’ context? Why did it become so important to decide which were the true
stories and which were not? How did people come to frame this question?
On the one hand, the new and increased techno-economic capabilities of the
mid-Victorian era enabled an unprecedented narrative proliferation, while on
the other, there arose an almost simultaneous anxiety about the ‘truth’ of the
narrative. As telegraph lines and overseas correspondents increasingly globalised
narratives, thereby also breaking down conventional formats of writing, there
arose ever more strident efforts to delegitimise narratives thought to be untrue.
The blurring of the boundaries between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in mutiny narratives
and the numerous attempts to clarify the boundary happen in tandem. Projects
to tell ‘fact’ apart from ‘fiction’ commenced almost on the heels of the British
reconquest. Edward Leckey’s curious little book published in 1859 was devoted
solely to the identification and clarification of the ‘fictions’ associated with the
mutiny. Jessie Brown was one such ‘fiction’ that Leckey sought to dismiss.1
He was neither the first nor the last. Ever since, many—both in the popular
and the academic press—have sought to disprove the existence of Jessie. At the
same time, however, others have defended her and continued to disseminate her
narratives, images, etc.
The question we ask is, was there a necessary connection between these two
seemingly opposing tendencies? Peter Putnis’ chapter in this volume highlights
some of the political and techno-economic structures that instigated and
accelerated the flow of ‘information’ between different parts of the world. The
speed, variety and multi-directionality of these flows encouraged in its wake a
snow-balling effect. Narratives arrived rapidly in new homes across the world,
before being picked up by a variety of different people and relayed in turn on to
newer homes and newer registers of meaning. Printing became cheaper. Getting
published became easier—if nowhere else, at least in the letters to the editor
section of the ‘local rag’. At the same time, minor publishing entrepreneurs
sought to optimise the new opportunities by publishing for ever more diverse
tastes.2
Walter Benjamin has pointed out that in the age of the ever-expanding reach
of the press, everyman potentially became an author.3 Information could arrive
and be reformatted and relayed on with a speed which made mechanisms of
38 Projit Bihari Mukharji

control and conventions of coding difficult to enforce. Every point of narrative

consumption, in an age of heightened technological capabilities, also became a
point of narrative production and transmission. In short, the strict dichotomy
between narrative consumers and narrative producers was being replaced by
narrative prosumers who combined both roles.4As new technologies of narrative
duplication and new economies of narrative circulation increased rapidly, it
became ever more difficult to suppress or localise ‘Active’ or ‘illegitimate’ or
‘untrue’ versions o f‘what really happened’ from ‘factual’ or ‘authentic’ versions.
Alongside this expansion of narrative expression came a natural pressure
towards the politicisation of narratives. Since fixed conventions for narrative
production came undone and everyone became a potential producer of narratives
for circulation, these narratives increasingly came to represent the views or
anxieties of one particular section. In the absence of strict conventions, many
narratives flourished and they each bore the imprint of the world view of their
prosumers. But, so long as this democratisation of expressive potential remained
entombed within a feudal society that resisted any change to its inegalitarian
distribution of property— argues Benjamin—this politicisation was, and will
be, derailed towards an aestheticisation of narratives. An unequal society will
always, in Benjamin’s view, resist the capacity of the ‘masses’ to reproduce
their narratives. Such a society will try to throttle the capacities opened up by
the techno-economic capabilities of mechanical reproduction, by appeal to
‘aesthetic’ principles, which claimed to decide which narratives were worthy of
reproduction and dissemination and which were not. Myths and legends and
other such lore had probably always grown up around the major historical
events, giving voice to the experiences, dreams and anxieties of the marginalised.
These narratives, however, remained largely outside the historical archives. Since
there were strict narrative conventions and a small band of technically equipped
specialists (scribes, bards, etc.) who could code narratives within sufficiently
normalised structures to allow for their entry into the historical archive, most
of the narratives failed to enter. Instead, they remained as part of the group’s
mnemonic archive—until perhaps decades, if not centuries, later collected in a
depoliticised form by elite enthusiasts. We have in mind here the entire diverse
corpus of ballads, legends, ghost stories, etc., which existed for decades about
nearly every major event (especially wars)—until having been ‘collected’ by later
enthusiasts. The crucial difference between these and the mutiny narratives was
that in the case of the earlier narratives, what was political was the context of
their performances. They often ‘lost’ their political edge when they entered the
historical archive through later ‘collections’. Principally, this was due to the fact
that the original producers of these narratives had very limited techno-economic
capabilities to ensure the reproduction of the narratives and the versions of these
narratives that entered the historical archive were mediated by ‘others’, who did
not share the politics of the original producers. Good examples of this earlier
situation— in relation to the Jessie story—are the numerous romances, legends,
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 39

ghost stories, etc., which commemorate the Jacobite risings in the Scottish
Highlands a little over a century before the Highlanders marched into Lucknow
to save Jessie’s party. Yet, the only versions in which these earlier stories and
legends are available to us today are through the versions which were collected
by later ‘polite’ enthusiasts who did not share the politicos or the context of those
who originally created the stories. Available versions are, therefore, limited
both in terms of their variety as well as in bearing the imprints of their original
politics. In the case of the Jessie Brown stories, however, due to the facilities of
reproduction, from the very beginning there are numerous alternative versions
of the events— including those of course which deny that Jessie herself existed—
many of which have clearly been shaped by very distinct political sensibilities.

Jessie Brown: A ‘Letter to the Editor’

Jessie Brown was believed to have gone to Lucknow as the wife or the betrothed
of a poor British subaltern soldier, before getting trapped in the Siege of 1857.
Despite her low social rank, her good cheer and staunch faith are said to have
made her the throbbing heart of the besieged party. At length, however, even
her courage seeped out and as the besieged regiment prepared for the final
debacle—since their ammunition, it seemed, was at an end—she lapsed into a
fever-induced stupor. It was as if she physically expressed the despair of the entire
party. At almost the last instant before the British defenders gave up, however,
she stirred from her febrile stupor and shouted out, ‘Dinna Ye Hear It?’ The
surprised defenders were taken aback at first, but upon her further insistence
that she had heard the bagpipes of the highland regiment sent to relieve them, for
an instant they all strained their ears more in hope than in belief. No sounds were
heard and the party soon concluded that Jessie had lapsed into delirium. Having
for an instant seen a glimpse of hope, as they plunged once more into deeper
despair, just at that moment, someone actually heard the bagpipes playing.
Jessie’s hope, it seems, had not been unfounded and she had almost by a mystic
premonition anticipated their deliverance. The defenders of course fought now
with renewed vigour and held out till the triumphant forces of Henry Havelock
marched into the city.
This romantic story, though challenged by many and put down to being little
more than a piece of imaginative fiction by most authoritative writers on the
subject, travelled widely across the world. It was dramatised, celebrated in music,
commemorated in poetry, visualised in paintings and memorialised in popular
histories of the mutiny in lands as different as Germany, Australia, Great Britain,
Ireland, America and, of course, India.
We have written elsewhere about the provenance of the story and the context
of its popularity.5 What is of interest here is the actual form in which the story
40 Projit Bihari Mukharji

appeared. All versions of it, in the press or in various popular literary adaptations,
tended to attribute it to a letter published in a Parisian newspaper entitled Le
Pays and allegedly written by one M. de Banneroi, late physician to the Mussur
Rajah.6 Numerous press reports reproduced this letter in full, and even some
sheet music adaptations of the narratives were sold with a reproduction of the
letter as an introduction. The letter was also included in some printed versions
of the best-known dramatic adaptation of the story. Some actual performances
of the play were also said to have been preceded by a sombre reading of the
letter.7 The dramatic adaptations—particularly the version penned by the Irish
American sensationalist, Dionysius Boucicault—took the story across the world
to America and later Australia. De Banneroi’s letter went with it.
This form of the ‘letter to the editor’ has been mentioned by Benjamin as
being the most conspicuous site— and perhaps, we may add ‘symbol’— of the
expansion of potential authorship to the masses. Anyone could potentially get
their writings published through his/her writing of a letter to the editor of a
local newspaper. In form and symbol, therefore, it stood for the democratic
expansion of expression we mention above. Putnis’ essay too remarks upon the
choice of the ‘letter to the editor’ genre as one of the most favoured forms for
publishing mutiny news. Its value also lay in allowing the editor some leeway in
publishing unverified news and pandering to ‘popular’ tastes without alienating
readers with more ‘polite’ tastes. The Times, London, for instance— a ‘polite’ and
‘respectable’ newspaper by all accounts—published numerous pieces on Jessie
Brown, but nearly all were in the ‘letters to the editor’ section. It allowed the
paper the flexibility to publish such ‘popular’ stories without necessarily being
seen to pander to popular Victorian sensationalism.
Ironically, just as de Banneroi’s letter became an almost inseparable aspect
of the story’s social life—lending it credence and poignancy—its refutations
also came in the form of letters to the editor. Ironically, it was a letter to the
editor of the Nonconformist in Calcutta—the very place where the alleged ‘de
Banneroi’ was supposedly based—that was the first to challenge the veracity of
the story.8 Many later suggested that the story had originally been contributed
to the Jersey Times by a young governess who occasionally earned some extra
money by contributing pieces to the local newspapers.9 Irrespective of whether
this version of the story’s origin was true or not, the letter to the editor remained
by far the most conspicuous mode of challenging the veracity of the letter. When
the controversy erupted once more in 1889 and 1890, again numerous letters
appeared on the pages of the Notes & Queries and the Timesy London, both
supporting and opposing the truth of the story. Many of the participants of the
1889-1890 debate were in fact participants of the events in Lucknow—yet there
seemed to be no consensus on the matter. If anything, the appearance in print of
supporting versions only lent further credence to the believers. In 1859, Edward
Leckey, expressing his frustration at people continuing to believe a story that in
his view was wholly untrue, wrote that people ‘refuse to disbelieve a story that
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 41

they have once seen in print; state your oral objection as clearly and as truthfully
as you can, and the only reply you will receive from them is—‘Is it not in a
book?’10Thirty years later, F.J. Crowster could still write about the same legend
that, ‘The Highland lassie of Lucknow ... made the tour of the world of print,
and though there is not one word of truth in her, she probably, will not receive
her official and final contradiction until the Judgement Day.’11
The democratisation of narrative expression had, therefore, created clearly
both the context for the story’s popularity as well as that of challenging its
veracity. It was the possibility of lay-authors contributing to newspapers that
encouraged the narrative explosion both in support as well as in opposition.
None of the sources of information were innately more valuable than the other.
To the editor, each contributor was as correct as the next. In fact, the institution
of the ‘letter to the editor’ conspicuously avoided making the editor responsible
for the truth of the contents of the letter. That it emerged as a favoured
genre for mutiny news might—at least in part—have been due to this greater
narrative flexibility it allowed the editor, especially at a time when ‘reliable’
information may occasionally have been in short supply. Thus, the same
newspaper on the same day could carry both letters in support as well as in
opposition. Edward Leckey admitted that the only way the veracity of a story
that has appeared in print can be challenged was to keep printing its denials. He
had hoped that eventually ‘the weight of truth will help in some measure the
meagre p rint....’ Yet as the letters of those like Archibald Forbes, Marie Cutter
and others in the 1890s proved, Leckey was wrong, people continued to believe
in the authenticity of the story.
What had made its authenticity difficult to establish with certainty was the
story’s capacity to be infinitely reproduced and duplicated in print. The global
context only added to this problem. The story was always reappearing in some
form or the other at some place or the other. The methods used by those
challenging the veracity of the story to disprove it are, however, instructive about
the protocols of truth that they deployed. Leckey for one used the narratives of
Mrs Harris’ anonymously published Lady's Diary and G. Hutchinson’s Narrative
of the Mutinies in Oudh Compiled from Authentic Records as his primary sources
for contradicting the story. Others, writing later, drew similarly either-upon
personal memories, memories of those they trusted or ‘authoritative’ versions of
the events that had been put in print. One Shackleton Hallett, writing in March
1890, for instance, mentioned that the original letter on the basis of which
he now wrote to challenge the Jessie story was by a Scottish soldier serving in
Lucknow in 1857 and written to the ‘lassie he loved best (one of my sisters)’
and therefore-unlikely to lie or omit such a detail as the Jessie episode.12 Marie
Cutter of Knutsford, Cheshire who wrote in support of the story on the other
hand, also mentioned that the reason she believed the story was that Jessie
had been employed as a domestic servant in her mother’s house before falling
in love with a Scottish soldier and following him to India. Cutter claimed to
42 Projit Bihari Mukharji

have heard the Lucknow story from her mother, who heard it from Jessie
herself when she came to meet her old mistress upon return to Britain after the
mutiny.13 Many writers also gave details about themselves to show the reader
that they were present at Lucknow and had every opportunity of witnessing the
truth of the matter. George H. Hope, for example, stated that he was serving
in the 1st Madras Fusiliers at the time and ‘brigaded with the 78th Highlanders
in all actions antecedent to the relief of Lucknow’.14 The question of reliability,
therefore, clearly depended upon the reliability of the narrator as well as the
line of transmission between the original narration and the eventual recipient.
It had nothing to do with the structure of the narrative as such. But since print
had the capacity to ceaselessly disperse its narratives from their points of origins,
it was impossible to always know enough about the original narrator to be
able to judge his/her reliability. Lt. Gen. F.A. Wallis, who wrote in to challenge
Marie Cutter’s account, therefore, asserted that the Jessie who had come to meet
Ms Cutter’s mother was an ‘immense hoax’.15The generation of trust required a
certain degree of personal acquaintance with the life of the narrator. If one were
to judge whether another spoke the truth on a certain subject or not, one had to
know who the narrator was, whether she really had a chance of seeing the things
she claimed to have seen, whether he was in the habit of making things up, etc. It
was here that the alleged French connection of the story came into play. By being
French, de Banneroi already stood largely outside of British society and created
a plausible reason for people not knowing of him as such. In his letter, in turn,
de Banneroi mentioned having heard the story from an unnamed lady who had
personally witnessed the events in Lucknow. Since this lady was unnamed, the
possibility of judging her reliability was, thus, once again obscured. Alongside
the possibilities of reduplication of the narrative, therefore, the attribution of the
story to original narrators who eluded social recognition generated the crisis of
verification.
On the one hand, the very proliferation of the narrative depended upon the
dramatic expansion of the pool of potential authors. On the other hand, this very
expansion made it difficult to adequately know the narrator’s social identity,
upon which depended their ‘reliability’. Every author had their own truths and
each truth had its own ‘reliable’ genealogy. It was precisely in this choice of
different truths which confronted the average reader/audience that narratives
became political.

The Poetry of Change

Benjamin asserted that the possibilities of mechanical duplication wrenched

narratives out of their ritual and cultic affiliations and placed the distracted
masses in the position of critics. Since there was no authentic narrative any
 ‘O'er the Cruel Roll of War Drums' 43

longer—held in place through its ritual or cultic affiliations—the faceless

‘common man’ became the ultimate critic. But criticism was no longer a
specialised act requiring long and focused contemplation. Instead, critique
and appreciation, pleasure and reflection now combined in a new sensibility of
critical appreciation. As the narrative’s moorings to fixed structures of reliability
and meaning became unhinged, it became possible to reimagine and experience
the narrative in an infinite number of ways.
The task of constituting this new sensibility falls on the part of art proper.
Benjamin has suggested that in the age of mechanical reproduction, art becomes
inescapably political, for criticism and appreciation now become merged. We
have seen that the ‘news’ of Jessie— in its epistolary form in newspapers—was
not bereft of Active or artistic elements. Other more openly artistic adaptations,
however, also abounded. Ofthese, Jessie poems were perhaps the most prominent
in seeking to cultivate a new sensibility. Where the proliferation of Jessie ‘news’
had made multiple readings possible, the Jessie poems sought to structure the
appreciation of these narratives within a specific framework of sensibilities. In
other words, while the proliferation of narratives— as news—had loosened the
fixed meanings they had, the poems now sought to fix them once again to their
(the poet’s) own chosen framework of meaning and sensibility. To continue to
use Benjaminian terminology, where the epistolary form of the narrative had
freed the narrative from its cultic or ritual fixity, the poems sought to re-inscribe
it within new cultic or ritual structures of appreciation.
W. Shepherd’s broadside published from the Dundee Poet’s Box was one of
the first poetic adaptations of the narrative. The Dundee Poet’s Box was known
for its Jacobite sympathies and to have published Jacobite ballads in the past.16
Shepherd’s Jessie ballad conspicuously framed the narrative within a cult of
the romance of highland bravery. Of the six stanzas comprising the poem, the
first two are entirely devoted to the painting of an idealized picture of life on a
highland farmstead.

FAR awa’ tae bounie Scotland

Hae m y spirit taen its flight,
A n’ I saw m y mither spinni’
In our Highland hame at night.
I saw the kye abrowsing,
M y faither at the plough,
And the grand auld hills aboon them a
W id I could see them now.

Oh, leddy, while upon your knees

Ye held m y sleepin’ head,
I saw the little kirk at hame,
Where Tam an’ I were wed.
I heard the tune the pipers played
44 Projit Bihari Mukharji

I kenn’d its rise and fa*,

‘Twas the wild Macgregor’s slogan
‘Tis the grandest o’ them a \

Upon waking from the dream, Jessie immediately draws the contrast
between her tough highland childhood and the apparent comfort and luxury of
a ‘southern’ upbringing.

For in your Southern childhood

Ye were nourished saft and warm
N or watched upon the cauld hill-side
The risin’ o’ the storm.

The harsh climate metaphorically conspires in the construction of the

romance of the hardy highland life. It ends predictably in the celebration of the
cult of highland bravery, expressed through the icon of the ‘Havelock and his
brave Highlanders’:

To rescue us this day;

That He m y o ’er them spread his shield
Stretch forth his arm and save
Brave Havelock and his Highlanders,
The bravest o f the brave.17

This north/south, highland/lowland divide is of course not identical with the

Scottish/English divide. As Linda Colley points out, there is a tendency amongst
certain scholars who investigate the ‘national’ identities that constitute the later
British ‘national’ identity, to overlook or underplay the constitutive energies that
produced these ‘sub-British’ nationalisms.18 Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh
nationalisms themselves were also constituted from older notions of patriotism
and belonging which exist ‘below’ the level of ‘nations’. The highland/lowland
divide was much more relevant to some sections than either the Scottish/English
divide or the British/Indian divide. The little-known first dramatic adaptation of
the Jessie story, by a minor Edinburgh dramatist, William Seaman, for example,
devotes almost half the play in developing and articulating the conflict between
highland and lowland Scots.19
By contrast, the ballad published by the Taylor’s Song Mart in Brick Lane,
celebrated a British nationalist cult of ‘Queen and Country’. It began with the
line ‘O Britons at home, you have heard of brave Jessie’. Though the highlanders
and their bagpipes were not totally absent from the poem, their importance was
subsumed to the cult of Queen and Country:

All rise, give cheer to our Queen and our Country,

It echoed around as it w ent through the air.
 ‘O'er the Cruel Roll of War Drums' 45

They near us, they near us, and hark, their glad voices,
Bear out so nobly God Save the Queen!20

Where Taylor’s ballad subsumed the cult of highland romance within a

‘Queen and Country’ nationalism, the anonymous ballad titled Dinna Ye Hear
It? used a more prominent highland imagery to inscribe within a clearly Jacobite
sensibility of Scottish nationalism. Superimposed with a prominent woodcut of
a tartan-clad highland soldier, the ballad sang:

Mid the thunder o f the battle, the groans o f the dying

The wail o f weak w om en, the shouts o f brave men
A poor Highland maiden sat sobbing and sighing
As she longed for the peace o f her dear native glen
But there came a glad voice to the ear o f her heart
The foes o f Auld Scotland for ever will fear21

Though the queen is briefly mentioned in one of the closing lines, nowhere
is there mention of Britain. Instead, the highlanders are seen defending ‘Auld
Scotland’. To an audience with Jacobite sympathies, clearly the ‘foes of Auld
Scotland’ would conjure up English soldiers more readily than the distant ‘Indian
sepoys’. In fact, there were other Jacobite Mutiny ballads which openly invoked
the Battle of Culloden, amply proving that such associations were definitely
being made at some level or the other.
Leaving aside the broadside poetry of the street, we find a very different
inscription of the narrative in Thomas Ebenezer Webb’s adaptation. Webb
was the son of a Methodist Minister from Cornwall who went on to be elected
professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Dublin in 1857. He dabbled in
politics opposing Gladstone’s proposal for Irish Home Rule and writing against
giving the Irish peasantry a title to their land. He was also a keen hunter.22In every
way then he was the opposite of the authors who produced the broadside poetry
of the incident. Where broadside poetry was unquestionably political: seeking
to inscribe the story within a political structure of the time—be it Scottish or
British nationalism— in Webb’s poem, the narrative loses all semblance of overt
politics. It becomes purely aestheticised. At the very outset, Webb evoked this
aesthetic framework by invoking the dichotomy between Romance and Reason:

In her veins the red river is fast running high

The bale-fire o f fever is lit in her eye
And by Reason unmastered her truant thoughts roam—
Roam o ’er the ocean wave back to her hom e

Where romance and reason had joined in a seamless unity to call forth one
form of political solidarity or the other in the broadside poetry, here reason
and romance stand on opposite sides. Reason here must master romance or
46 Projit Bihari Mukharji

surrender to it. It draws moreover a temporal continuum that recedes back into
infinity:

What! dinna ye hear it! I hear it again

‘Tis the pibroch Diarmid played ages ago—
T is the slogan Clan Alpine still hurls on the foe

Time here is rendered mythic and the present merely the re-enactment of
times gone by. In so doing, it denies the agency of the present to break with the
past, to reverse the relations that exist in society through radical political action.
What we call the 'reactionary nature5 of Webb’s poetry lies not in his merely
choosing to support this or that specific cause. Indeed, it is much more serious
than that. The ‘reactionary5nature of the poem lies in Webb’s utter denial of any
agency at all to the Victorian subalterns. He reduces the Victorian subalterns to
the level of mere beasts be driven by larger forces, which they do not and cannot
control. In Webb’s version, even the bloody revenge of the highland regiment is
aestheticised and deprived of agency. Though the highlanders wreak revenge on
their foes, it is not really their doing. They are mere tools of supernatural powers.

Is it maid, is it matron, that pointeth the way?

Shamed— outraged— m aim ed— murdered— their phantom s arise,
But shrink in their sham e from their countrym en’s eyes!
By each w arriors side a child-cherub had stood
And it pointeth— “its bright hair” all dabbled with blood 23

The revenge is thus not the work of the brave highland soldiers so heartily
celebrated in the broadside poetry as the ‘heroes of the women at home’,
but of phantoms and ghosts of the dead past. The poor of the present are an
aesthetic curiosity incapable even of royalist/imperialist action. They exist
as sentimentalised images inextricably entrapped in the rhythms of the past,
worthy only of contemplation by aristocrats like Webb from an arm’s length.
Where Shepherd’s piece of a rural highland home had rested upon a sufficiently
detailed description of highland labour—where Jessie’s father was at the plough
and mother at the spinning wheel—Webb’s version reduces even military action
to workings of divine agencies.
It was perhaps no surprise then that it was Webb’s version of events that was
included in pedagogical texts like Nelson’s Advanced Reader (1865). The direct
usage of such texts within the pedagogical structure points towards their utility
in resisting change and in ideologically reproducing the Victorian orthodoxy
by reducing the interpretation to aesthetics and suppressing the agency of the
present underneath the dead-weight of the ‘long ago’.
Across the Atlantic in United States of America too, Jessie poems became
choice material for inclusion in pedagogical texts. There were in America two
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 47

quite well-known and independent poetic versions of the events. The two
versions, respectively, were Robert Traill Spence Lowell’s The Relief of Lucknow
and John Greenleaf Whittier’s slightly better-known The Pipes at Lucknow.
Though there were some similarities in the backgrounds of both men, there
were also significant differences. Whereas Lowell was born in an elite so-called
Boston Brahmin family and had a comfortable upbringing, going on to become
a protestant minister with an interest in rustic folk culture, Whittier had a much
harder life. Whittier had been born into a none-too-wealthy family of white
farmers and had to work as a shoe-maker for a while to complete his education.
Later in life he became a radical abolitionist, advocating the immediate abolition
of slavery and refusing to distinguish morality from political action. However,
central to Whittier’s beliefs was the Quakerism he had imbibed as a child through
the repeated readings of his father’s books on Quakerism. Like a good Quaker,
thus, he was interested in mystically inspired communal action, and it is this
mystically inspired, morally tenable communal action that he celebrates in his
Jessie poem.24

Like the march o f soundless music

Through the vision o f the seer,
More o f feeling than o f hearing,
O f the heart than o f the ear,
She knew the droning pibroch,

In stark contrast to the version of Webb, while Whittier too speaks of the
‘ancient’ music of the highlands, he does so only to assert that the music of
Lucknow—and of the present—is the sweetest.

Dear to the Lowland reaper,

And plaided m ountaineer,—
To the cottage and the castle
The Scottish pipes and dear;—
Sweet sounds the ancient pibroch
O’er m ountain, loch, and glade;
But the sweetest o f all m usic
The pipes at Lucknow played.

The present in Whittier is not a replay of the past—it stands independent of

the past and in contrast: its moral and mystical qualities elevating it above the
past and making it more worthy of celebration than the past. What is, however,
most remarkable in the Whittier ballad is the sensitivity of its depiction of the
Indian landscape and fighters. Where Webb had spoken of

All still as she lies, round the walls o f the dwelling

All wildly a host o f black dem ons is yelling
48 Projit Bihari Mukharji

And again:

And the bayonet gleams, and with yell o f despair,

At each thrust a swart dem on flies back to its lair.

Whittier wrote:

Round the silver dom es o f Lucknow,

M oslem m osque and Pagan shrine,
Breathed the air to Britons dearest,
The air o f Auld Lang Syne.
O’er the cruel roll o f war-drums.
Rose that sweet and hom elike strain;
And the tartan clove the turban,
As the Goom tee cleaves the plain.25

In Whittier, ‘war drums’ themselves are cruel. The ‘tartan’ and the ‘turban’
are equally respectable foes facing each other in a cruel encounter—there are
no ‘demons’. Instead of the undignified ‘dwellings’ and ‘lairs’, we have now
the beautiful imagery of the ‘silver domes of Lucknow’, ‘Moslem mosques’ and
‘Pagan shrines’.
Where Whittier is a prominent figure in American history, Rev. Robert
Traill Spence Lowell (not to be confused with his much better-known poet
great-grandson of the same name) was a very minor figure, mentioned
usually in reference to the many literary talents of much better renown
amongst his immediate family. He was born in one of the best-known and
oldest Boston families and had studied medicine at Harvard before finally
deciding to take his holy orders in the Protestant Episcopal Church. In the
church, he also acquired some ‘colonial’ experience during his first posting as
domestic chaplain to the Bishop of Bermuda and his later voluntary posting at
Newfoundland. His sole work of literary merit, the novel The New Priest of
Conception Bay published in 1858 was obscured by the unique literary fecundity
of a decade that produced such masterpieces as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
and Moby Dick (1851). Though Lowell was by all accounts a paternalistic
pastor using his medical training for the benefit of his poor parishioners,
his Boston Brahmin background, his proximity to colonial authorities in
Bermuda and Newfoundland and his voluntary acceptance of missionary
work clearly shows him to be sympathetic to a liberal vision of the
British Empire.26 As a well-educated classical scholar and university man
with an ambition for literary success and liberal but unquestionably
imperial politics, Lowell shared much more with Webb, than did Whittier. His
version of the narrative too bore marks of resemblance to Webb’s rather than
his more radical countryman W hittier’s. Our first glimpse of Jessie in both
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 49

the poems— of Webb and Lowell—for instance are remarkably similar. Where
Webb wrote:

There, where the gow an-gem spangles the lea;

There, where the laughing burn flits to the sea—
There is she waiting the set o f the sun. '
For the ploughm an’s return when the ploughing is done!
“Wake m e,” she said, “when the ploughing is done,
And m y father returns at the set o f the sun.”
Wrapped in her Highland plaid and sunk on the sod,
She sleeps— she is still— Is her spirit with God?

'Lowell wrote in very similar vein:

She lay on the ground, in her Scottish plaid,

And I took her head on m y knee;
“W hen m y father com es hame frae the pleugh,” she said,
“Oh, then please waken m e.”
She slept like a child on her father’s floor,

The similarity of the two stanzas could not be more pronounced. Their
difference from Shepherd’s use of what was essentially the same image of Jessie’s
father working the plough is equally clear. Where Shepherd had described
active rural labour in the first person, here both Webb and Lowell choose to
aestheticise manual labour by describing it in the second person. Whereas
in Shepherd, Jessie— and the audience/reader through her—could see her
father working, here we are only told that he (Jessie’s father) works. Later in
Lowell’s poem we are also told of Jessie’s mother’s work at the spinning wheel,
but once again where Shepherd had shown the mother actively at work, Lowell
writes:

In the flecking o f w oodbine shade,

W hen the house-dog sprawls by the open door,
And the m other’s wheel is stayed.

In fact, where the Shepherd broadside narrates the events in the voice of
Jessie herself, thus inviting the reader to identify with Jessie’s own perspective—
which also empathetically connects it to the world of rural highland labour— the
Webb and Lowell broadsides use a narrative voice which objectifies Jessie herself
as an aesthetic curiosity. Like a curious ethnographer, thus, Webb and Lowell
scrutinise every detail of the life of their subject. In contrast to Webb’s Jessie,
however, Lowell’s Jessie often speaks out in her own voice. But when she does
speak to her narrator/observer, her speech becomes yet another curiosity. Lowell’s
narrative gaze is comparable to that of an ethnographer, faithfully recording the
50 Projit Bihari Mukharji

quaint ways of the rugged and exotic highlanders. Where Webb’s Jessie hardly
spoke, therefore, Lowell’s Jessie spoke often—but, only one suspects, to flaunt
her quaint accent:

But Jessie said, KThe slo g a n ’s done;

But winna ye hear it noo?
£The Campbells are com ing ? It’s no a dream;
Our succors hae broken through!”

Or again:

“The Hielanders! Oh, dinna ye hear

The slogan far away
The McGregor’s. Oh! I ken it week
I t ’s the grandest o ’ them a’!
“God bless the bonny Hielanders!
W e’re saved! w e’re saved! ” she cried;27

While even the street-poetry of Taylor or the unknown author of Dinna Ye

Hear It? is known to have used a passive narrative voice, none of them turn Jessie
herself into an aesthetic curiosity to be described in ethnographic detail. But,
as E.P. Thompson has pointed out, the ‘paternalistic sensibility’ of the elite is
not capable of handling the ‘interior life of the poor’.28 The poetic sensibilities
of people like Webb and Lowell—despite all their celebration of the traditions,
speech and dress of the poor—are totally incapable of seeing the poor as anything
more than objects of aesthetic appreciation. Their inner lives only become
sensible in so much as they express the age-old habits and emotions. Lowell, for
one, was known to have a hearty interest in the rugged and rustic traditions of
his poor and rural parishioners. The inner lives, as also the labours, of the rural
poor are both obscured from the direct view of these poets. The emotions and
the labour of the poor only become visible through second-hand hints, through
age-old continuities and as ethnographic observations.
In Lowell’s case, the distance between the narrator’s life and that of Jessie, as
also Lowell’s own proximity to the heart of the empire, is brought out through
his insertion of a second dream sequence distinct from Jessie’s own dream. In
this second dream sequence, Lowell narrates the narrator’s own dream:

I sank to sleep, and I had m y dream

O f an English village-lane,
And wall and garden; — but one wild scream
Brought me back to the roar again.

Not only is the distance between the two of ethnic/national sentiment, i.e.,
English and Scottish, but it is also of class. Where Jessie’s home is a small hut in
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums' 51

the highlands overlooking the fields her father works, the narrator’s home is in
an English village with a walled garden. The contrast could not be starker. On the
one hand is the well-walled garden— clearly demarcated and private—and on
the other hand are the open fields marked by the toil of the highland peasantry.
The narrator’s home is memorialised as walled-in private property and Jessie’s
home is remembered by the marks of her family’s labour on open fields. It is this
distinction between those with walled gardens and those with only the capacity
for labour that Lowell’s poetic vision quaintly preserves.
Poetic adaptations, however, were not limited to the Anglophonic world. Just
as the story itself had migrated far and wide, so did the urge to celebrate it in
poetry. In fact, after a while the sheer aura that attached itself to the story, through
its more prominent poetic and musical adaptation, became a compelling force
inspiring and occasionally almost forcing others to try to write Jessie poems.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, German nationalism—driven by the
centralising politics of the Prussian state—was just coming into its own. One
of its most powerful intellectual traditions was the search for, preservation and
celebration o f ‘folk’ or ‘volk’ culture—which were held to express the ‘national
spirit’ of any nation. One of the leading figures of this tradition was Theodor
Fontane. Fontane was a great admirer of British balladry and was inspired
by the work of Sir Walter Scott.29 In 1860, he had also published Jenseits des
Tweedy Bilder und Briefe aus Schottland (Beyond the Tweed: Letters and
Pictures from Scotland), which he dedicated to his life-long friend Bernhard
von Lepel. Later, as Prussian imperialism grew, Fontane’s early sentimentalism
was replaced by a self-ironic realism.30 He later recalled how in the summer of
1859 the German intelligentsia had been competing with each other to
produce a Jessie ballad. Fontane himself had been consumed by a desire to
produce a ballad under the name ‘The Girl of Lucknow’ bringing out the
qualities he sought to celebrate, when his friend von Lepel embarrassed him by
asking ‘Warum nicht Jessie Brown?’ (Why not just Jessie Brown?) It was then
that Fontane recognised and was embarrassed by his sloppy sentimentalism and
gave up the project.31 Others however did try to produce a German Jessie within
the diktats of mid-century German Romanticism. Emmanuel Geibel produced
one that Fontane thought was weak, and Seitz Norden wrote one entitled Der
Entsatz von Lucknow. In Norden’s poetic adaptation, even the last semblance
of manual labour that Lowell and Webb had retained through second­
hand narrations disappeared. Norden writes of Jessie’s vision of her highland
home:

the Highland w om an,

Starts and screams, her arms extended,
“Look! I see! M y m other standing
On m y native loch and joyful
Beckons me into m y country”
52 Projit Bihari Mukharji

The image of the mother now fuses with the romantic image of the Scottish
landscape itself. Even more importantly, home is now equated to country. The
landscape and the maternal image do not just remind Jessie of her humble
home—it reminds her of the country as a whole. An organic link makes
the land and the mother metonyms eventually for the country itself. Norden’s
piece is also more dramatic in that it tells of Jessie hearing the bagpipes thrice. The
others of the besieged party only hear it after Jessie’s claims have been dismissed
as delirium twice before. By stretching out the narrative over a longer duration
and making it more dramatic, Norden’s poem insists on the persistence of the
‘national spirit’ which will eventually express itself despite all criticism. When
the bagpipes are finally heard, therefore, they seem to burst across the landscape
with an inexorable momentum:

Yes! It is the Highland warsong!

Through the thunder o f the canons,
Through the wailing o f the Seapoys,
Through the cracking o f the musket,
Through the hollow tune o f drumm ing,
Sounds o f the Pibroch o f the bagpipe
Cutting first and full o f vengeance
Softer then o f rescue’s message.

What cuts through the enemy lines and exacts its bloody revenge, therefore,
is not the highlanders nor Havelock but the embodiment of the ‘Highland
warsong’—the spirit of the nation. When the rescue party does finally break
through, the besieged:

Yells the Highland Marseillaise,

Roars the Scottish national hymn:
“Old acquaintance, ne’er forgotten!”32

What was in the opening stanzas the ‘country’ created through the fusion of
joyous, loving and beckoning maternity with the familiar beauty of the landscape
has, through the inexorable expression of the common ‘national spirit’, been
transformed into the ‘nation’ in the closing stanzas. The whole narrative here
is purely aestheticised— rendered as a thing of beauty and beyond the reach of
transformative politics. The only activity that can be expressed in the present is
the unstoppable realisation of the innate ‘national spirit’.
Once the democratic potential of epistolary newsprint had dislodged the
firm structures of experience thaf shaped what the narratives meant and how
they were to be experienced, the poets across the world sought to re-inscribe the
narrative within new cultic matrixes. Some chose here the cult of ‘Queen and
Country’, some that of liberationist strand of Scottish nationalist, some the cult
of mystic religiosity and yet others the cult of volk-cultural nationalism. This
 'O ’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 53

list is not exhaustive. It is merely symptomatic. But what even this symptomatic
exegesis amply brings out is that where epistolary newsprint created a narrative
explosion which made narratives lose all anchorage in reality, some poets sought
to exploit this ambiguity to propose a new vision of reality. That new reality
empowered the poor Scots in the case of Shepherd, it was mystical but at the
same time moral and political for Whittier and homogenous and nationalistic in
the case of Norden—but all of them sought to show reality in a new way, without
getting caught up in the debate about what was ‘real’ and what was not. On the
other hand, Webb and Lowell sought to use poetry to stabilise the vertiginous
explosion of narrative reality by reasserting its continuity with the past and
denying the potential for transformation.

Pedagogy versus Commerce

Various poets, as we have seen above, inscribed the Jessie narrative in a variety
of frameworks. Each of these frameworks cultivated a distinct sensibility that
imbued the narrative with a specific cultic meaning. The problems born out of
the ease of narrative duplication and dissemination, however, were not solved
by this. The different poems too in their turn could be as easily duplicated and
globally disseminated. Other structures were necessary to stabilise meaning:
to frame the poetic sensibility. It is here that pedagogy and commerce became
poised on opposing sides. Pedagogic texts continually sought to curb the semantic
excess and frame the narrative within an acceptable framework of meaning,
while commercial interests continually pressed for further dissemination and
duplication into new registers.
We have already briefly mentioned the incorporation of some of the poetry
within pedagogic texts. The earliest use of a Jessie poem for pedagogic pur­
poses was in Archibald Hamilton Bryce’s 1862 publication titled Readings from
Best Authors. Bryce used to teach at the Edinburgh High School and prefaced his
collection by clarifying that the book was essentially a teaching aid ‘as exercises
in Elocution for middle and junior classes’. Bryce also clarified the grounds on
which he had made his selection. First, he mentioned, the subject of the piece
included ‘should be one which boys can thoroughly appreciate, and which
may therefore largely enlist their sympathies’. Second, ‘that the subject be so
treated that the thoughts and imagery be readily apprehended and brought
home to the heart and feelings’. And finally, that ‘strongly marked rhetorical
peculiarities abound’.33 Even more interestingly, Bryce’s Reader which was
divided into separate ‘prose’ and ‘poetry’ sections, of which the poetry in turn was
divided into sections on ‘Historical and Descriptive’, ‘Domestic and National’,
‘Sacred and Moral’, ‘Miscellaneous Pieces’ and ‘Dialogues’. Of these, the Jessie
poem was inserted in the ‘Historical and Descriptive’ section. Its factual status
54 Projit Bihari Mukharji

was further asserted in the framing prose that immediately preceded the poem.
It was presented by quoting the alleged de Banneroi letter. It introduced the
piece with the lines:

The incident on which this spirited piece is founded is said to have occurred
while our countrym en were besieged in Lucknow, during the late Indian
‘M utiny’, and despair was at its height.34

It came as little surprise then that the poem chosen for the purpose was
Thomas Webb’s piece which had first appeared in the College Magazine of
Trinity College Dublin. As Bryce’s preface clearly stated the objective of the
piece was to tutor the young boys into a particular sensibility: to teach them
to ‘feel’ in a certain way considered appropriate. Moreover, by asserting
that the piece was ‘historical’ and by accenting the sympathetic connection
between the students and the besieged party through phrases such as ‘our
countrymen’, not only was the narrative presented as ‘real’ and ‘historical’
but a certain way of ‘apprehending’ or ‘feeling’ it was also put in place. The
function of the reader was, therefore, not only to present a particular version
of the events as real but to also frame its reception by young minds. Thomas
Webb’s adaptation, as we have seen above, was the most conservative
in denying the transformative potential of the present or the acceptance
of the Victorian poor as emotionally active men and women, engaged in real
labour and capable of—through their choices— transforming the present
reality.
A little under four years later, Webb’s piece was included once again in
Nelson’s Advanced Readers, which was presented as an invaluable aid to
teachers.35 Here the poem was placed amongst three pieces on the events of
the mutiny. First was a short poem celebrating General Havelock, taken from
Punchy second was an extract from an officer’s published diary on the ‘Relief of
Lucknow’ and then came Webb’s ‘Relief of Lucknow’. Its framing paragraph
was almost a word for word duplication of Bryce’s introductory comments.
It began with exactly the same line and coming right after the dated first personal
narratives extracted from Headley’s personal diary/journal, it further accented
the reality of the Jessie story. The introductory comments ended, however, with
a single tantalising and unexplained sentence that:

It is regretted that subsequent inform ation threw discredit on this romantic

story.36

It stops short of asserting that the story was untrue and in fact the framing
of the wistful last sentence leaves it ambiguous as to precisely what is ‘regretted’.
Is it the fact that proof of its untruth or the subsequent information which ‘threw
discredit on it’?
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 55

In America, the story made its appearance in pedagogic texts in the 1870s.
McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader published in 1879 included it.37 However,
instead of choosing a poem, it chose the letter of de Banneroi itself. Interestingly
though, the letter was edited and all reference to the French physician de Banneroi
was left out, as was the French paper Le Pays; instead, the extract appeared under
the introductory line: '

From a letter to the ‘London T im e s, by a lady, the wife o f an officer at Lucknow.38

In a reader where most of the other pieces were by such eminent authors as
Longfellow, Southey, Hawthorne, etc., the Jessie story had London Times put
down as the author. However, the assertion that it was originally written by a
‘lady’ and an ‘officer’s wife’ would have left the young children in little doubt
that the incidents described were indeed real. If any doubts about its factual
status remained, it would have been put to rest by ‘Notes’ following the text.
‘Lucknow’, it was explained, was a ‘city in the British possession of India. In
1857 there was a “Mutiny” of the native troops and the British garrison of 1700
men was besieged by 10,000 mutineers’. Kanpur was similarly described as a
‘city near Lucknow’ and the site where, ‘after surrendering, the English, two
thirds of whom were women and children, were treacherously massacred’. The
letter therefore became, for the American students, their main narrative of the
events of the mutiny. By asserting the piece’s appearance in the London Time$>
its authorship by a lady, wife of an officer, and by clarifying details through
footnotes, the reader clearly presented it as a real historical incident. It concluded
the section on the text by saying:

W hittier’s poem , ‘The Pipes at Lucknow’ and Robert TS Lowell’s ‘The Relief o f
Lucknow’ are descriptive o f this same incident.

In 1909, the Ministry of Education in Canada decided to include the story in

its own readers for school children. Once again, the story appeared in prose— in
an edited version of the de Banneroi letter, but, as in McGuffey, attributed now
to an ‘officer’s wife’.39
The most interesting pedagogic text to use the Jessie narrative, however, was
Henrietta Marshall’s 1876 book, An Island Story.40 Marshall did not present her
stories as being necessarily true or untrue. In fact, she actively blurred the line
between ‘historical fact’ and ‘romantic fiction’. Explaining what her book sought
to achieve, she wrote:I

I m ust tell you, though, that this is not a history lesson, but a story-book. There
are m any facts in school histories, that seem to children to belong to lessons
only. Some o f these you will not find here. But you will find som e stories that
are not to be found in your school books,— stories which wise people say are
56 Projit Bihari Mukharji

only fairy tales and not history. But it seems to me that they are part o f Our
Island Story, and ought not to be forgotten, any more than those stories about
which there is no doubt.
So, although I hope you will not put this book beside your school books,
but quite at the other end o f the shelf, beside Robinson Crusoe and A Noah's
Ark Geography, I hope, too, that it will help you to like your school history
books better than ever, and that, when you grow up, you will want to read for
yourselves the beautiful big histories which have helped me to write this little
book for little people.
Then, when you find out how m uch has been left untold in this little book,
do not be cross, but remember that, when you were very small, you w ould not
have been able to understand things that seem quite simple and very interesting
to you as you grow older. Remember, too, that I was not trying to teach you,
but only to tell a story.41

Of course things are not as clear cut. Despite her protestations, Marshall is
trying to teach through her stories. She is only doing it differently. A book such
as hers is clearly a part of the pedagogic project, though functioning outside of
the fixed school curricula. Also by actively blurring the line between ‘fact’ and
‘fiction* and by advising her young readers to postpone judgement till they were
‘grown-up*, she gave each of her stories a similar reality. Each of them was as
real as the next. William the Conqueror, Queen Victoria, General Havelock and
Jessie Brown were all equally real characters. Marshall presented her version of
the Jessie narrative in prose, but inserted within it Whittier’s poem. We have seen
above that Whittier’s poem inscribed the narrative within a field of mystically
inspired moral-political ethics, which did not demonise the Indians or take
overt sides in the conflict itself. Marshall’s incorporation of the story within a
prose narrative, however, repositioned its semantic potential. The emotional
framework within which Marshall sought to position the text can be gauged
from the opening lines of her book. She described an exchange between a father
and his two children. The father had just received a letter from England and the
exchange that followed between him and his children explained their— and by
extension the young reader’s— relationship to England.

“W HAT a funny letter, Daddy,” said Spen, as he looked at the narrow envelope
which had just arrived, and listened to the crackle o f the thin paper.
“Do you think so?” said Daddy. “It is from h om e.”
“From hom e!” said Spen, laughing, “why, Daddy, this is h om e.”
“I mean from the old country, Spen.”
“The old country, Daddy?” said Veda, leaving her dolls and com ing to lean
against her father’s knee, “the old country? W hat do you mean?”
“I mean, The little island in the west’ to which we belong, and where I used to
live,” said Daddy.
“But this is an island, a great big one, M other says, so how can we belong to a
little island?” asked Spen.
“Well, we do— at least, the big island and the little island belong to each other.”42
 ‘O'er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 57

It w as, th erefo re, n o su rp rise that th e Jessie sto r y w as p resen ted as an ep ic

struggle b e tw e e n ‘th e w h ite p e o p le ’ a n d th eir e n e m ie s. H a v e lo c k w as lo v in g ly
eq u a ted , in th is a c c o u n t, w ith O liver C r o m w e ll, sin c e b o th , it w as said , h ad
in sp ired th eir m e n to figh t an d pray. T h eir leg a cies h a d p ro v ed th e se e m in g ly
essen tial c o n n e c tio n b e tw e e n th e B ible an d th e sw o r d , in M arsh all’s a c c o u n t.
T h is o r ie n ta tio n also clarifies w h y sh e c h o se to u se th e W h ittie r p o e m rather
th an th e o th e r o n e . W h ittie r to o had m a d e a c o n n e c tio n b etw e e n r e lig io -m o r a l
causes an d p o litica l a c tio n . W h ere M arsh all w as m o d ify in g W h ittier, th r o u g h
her len g th y fra m in g tex t, w as in assertin g th at th is a c tio n w as n ecessarily m ilita ry
and b y ig n o r in g W h ittie r ’s Q u ak er in siste n c e o n d irect m ystical in sig h t. In
M arshall, re lig io -m o r a l a ctio n w as u n q u e stio n a b ly C h ristia n an d w h ite an d its
d efen ce n ecessarily req u ired m ilitary a ctio n (F igu re 3 .2 ).43

Figure 3.2: The Forrest Image

Source: P.B. Mukharji.
Note: ‘Dinna Ye Hear Them! Dinna Ye Hear Them!’ by A. S. Forrest in Unnumbered
Page between pp. 498 and 499 in H. E. Marchall, Our Island Story (London: TC &
AE Jack, n.d.).
58 Projit Bihari Mukharji

The contrast between Whittier’s sensibility and that of the Marshall text
becomes clearer in the visualisation of the narrative by A.S. Forrest. Where
Whittier had sensitively depicted a very visibly Indianised landscape, Forrest’s
illustration that accompanied Marshall’s text showed two white ladies in
flowing Victorian gowns fit more for a ballroom than a three-month siege.
The whole scene was moreover coloured in a dim-bluish hew suggesting a
light snowy New York winter, rather than a North Indian summer. The only
hint that it might not have been in New York was a vague smudged outline of
an Asiatic dome on the top left corner. But this hint of an Asian identity was
suitably vague and unobtrusive and did not threaten to challenge the central
vision of the scene as an episode in the history of greater Victorian England.
Where Whittier had tried hard to sensitively depict the Indian claim on the land
by repeatedly using Indian names for geographic features—such as the River
Gomti—or by drawing attention to the spiritual importance of the place to the
Indians through remarks on Muslim mosques and Hindu temples, Marshall
and Forrest had succeeded in removing the Indians altogether from their land.
Just as the ‘big Island’ (America) and the ‘small Island’ (England) both became
interchangeable, so too did the massive subcontinent of India. It belonged
to the larger family of the English— there was no place there for Hindus or
Muslims.
Where pedagogy sought to enframe the narrative and the emotional response
to it within what were essentially conservative registers of meaning, ironically,
it was commerce which constantly destabilised this inertia by forcing an ever
wider circulation of the narrative. Pedagogy functioned in the late nineteenth
century within largely feudal structures, where change was resisted and existing
social relations sought to be perpetuated. On the other hand, global capitalist
networks were beginning to encourage a fragmentation of the sense of reality
by allowing all sorts of narratives to circulate. Benjamin had suggested that in
the age of mechanical reproduction all narratives would become political. This
politics, however, was not the same for everybody. While capitalism generated
its own crises by continuously driving narrative duplication and thereby
its further politicisation, this politics itself was also becoming fragmentary.
The same narrative could thus be inscribed onto liberal, conservative,
radical, national, imperial and any number of other registers of meaning and
emotion.
The commoditisation of the Jessie story is a very good example of how the
process ensured the constant dissemination and diversification of the story.
Where pedagogical texts were highly selective about the particular versions
they chose and the way they framed it, the commoditised forms of the narrative
were highly eclectic. Shepherd’s seemingly more radical version of the narrative,
for instance, was produced primarily as a commodity to be sold for a penny.
Innumerable such commoditised Jessie verses appeared in London at the time.
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 59

Very few of these versions have survived today, but their existence at the time can
be proved by the numerous advertisements that appeared in the Times. Apart
from several advertisements by John Blockley for his musical compositions
of the narrative— Dinna Ye Hear It and Jessie's Dream, both being offered for
2s 6d and sold, respectively, from 210 and 201 Regent Street, there were also
advertisements for little known variants such as ‘Havelock at Lucknow or Jessie
and the Highland Pibroch’ written by Harry Pennell and set to music by J. Arthur
Owen, which was also offered for 2s 6d from Rudall, Rose, Cart and Co. of 20,
Charing Cross.44 Yet another advertisement for ‘Highland Jessie’ claimed that it
had been sung by a certain ‘Miss Poole’ with ‘rapturous encores’. It was priced at
Is 6d and came with a ‘splendid frontispiece’. ‘Jessie’s Wail, and Havelock to his
Warrior Band’ offered by the same advertiser was priced at 2s 6d and was ‘sent
free on receipt of stamps’ from ‘Chappell, Bond Street; Bale 340, Strand; and
William, Paternoster-row’.45
Not only did the commoditisation encourage the development of different
poetic versions, but also the dissemination of the narrative to new areas of the
world. One of Bleckley’s musical adaptations of the narrative, for instance,
became a huge success in 1860s Australia, inspiring in its wake several copies. At
least three versions of Blockley’s music, which used a poetic adaptation attributed
to Grace Campbell but bearing many marks of resemblance to Shepherd’s
version, were being sold in Melbourne at the time (Figure 3.3).46
By the 1880s, one Hernam Dass & Co. of Ambala, Punjab, put Campbell/
Blockley’s lyrics on postcards alongside Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s painting titled
In Memoriam.47 The original exhibition of Paton’s painting had been within the
carefully orchestrated confines of the Royal Academy. In fact the original painting
had even been changed in order to exclude possibly threatening interpretations
of it when it was exhibited at the Academy.48There would, however, be little or no
control over the social meanings that might have been attributed to Dass’ copies
of Paton’s painting, which appeared together with Campbell/Blockley’s verse. In
postcard form it could reach new audiences and new registers of meaning with
ease. Unlike the pedagogic texts, neither John Blockley nor Hernam Dass nor
their innumerable imitators were particularly concerned with what the verses or
the images meant to all who came into contact with them.
In turn this process of constant duplication spawned an ever growing number
of adaptations and innovations. Where Campbell/Blockley’s lyrics became the
widest known verse form of the narrative in places like Australia and India, the
frontispiece kept changing. Where Hernam Dass chose Paton’s image to visually
represent Campbell/Blockley’s verse, in Australia the most popular versions
produced copies of varying quality of an image that had originally appeared in
the London Illustrated Times. This image—with slight modifications—was also
lithographed by a certain G. Wilkinson for another English verse adaptation
by E. Bergman as well. Versions of this image vary only slightly but they show
60 Projit Bihari Mukharji

Figure 3.3: A Jessie Postcard

Source: P.B. Mukharji.
Note: Several sellers sold almost identical Jessie postcards in colour and black-n-
white. The image was Sir John Patton’s, In Memoriam and under it was printed
the John Blockley’s lyrics. This particular card was sold by Hernam Dass 8c Sons of
Ambala and printed in Saxony.

essen tia lly tw o rustic fa r m -w o m e n sittin g or sta n d in g n ex t to a fa rm -stea d an d

h u g e m ilk -tin s. In th is, th e se im a g es in sp ired b y th e Illu stra te d T im es sta n d in
stark con trast to F orrest’s w o m e n in flo w in g b a llg o w n s w h o sta n d a m id st m u c h
grander settin gs in M a rsh a ll’s text. T h e ru sticity a n d th e farm er m ilieu n o d o u b t
su ited th e A u stralian a u d ie n c e b etter th a n th e so p h istic a te d im a g es p r esen ted b y
Forrest (F igure 3 .4 ).
T h e c o m m ercia lly se n sitiv e V icto r ia n m e lo d r a m a w as a n o th er c o m m o ­
d itised form in w h ic h th e narrative travelled th e w o rld . D io n B o u c ic a u lt’s
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 61

Figure 3.4: Jessie in the Lond on Illu stra te d T im es

Source: P.B. Mukharji.
N ote: ‘Jessie B row n in L u k h n ow ’ in The Illustrated Tim es, 7 January 1858, p. 8.

p lay in th ree acts w as im m e n se ly su ccessfu l in B ritain an d th e U n ite d States o f

A m erica, as w ell as in A ustralia. It w as p e r fo r m e d w ith great su ccess at v e n u e s
as d iverse as D e a d w o o d , C o lo ra d o in th e U n ite d S tates o f A m erica , P ly m o u th ,
62 Projit Bihari Mukharji

Devon in Great Britain and Melbourne, Victoria in Australia.49 Once again,

however, the lure of possible profits encouraged piracy—which in turn ensured
further dissemination and adaptation. Boucicault himself was sued by a little-
known Scottish playwright called William Seaman, whose ribald dramatic
adaptation had appeared slightly before Boucicault’s.50 Seaman alleged that
Boucicault had stolen his plot and demanded financial recompense. In turn,
Boucicault himself took legal action against others who had illegally copied and
performed his drama. In a notice appearing in the Times, Boucicault announced
that:

Mr Boucicault begs to draw the attention o f the Managers o f Provincial

Theatres to the fact, that, during his absence in the United States, he permitted
all plays belonging to him to be performed in the Provinces free o f charge ...
Mr Boucicault, know ing the difficulty that struggling managers, especially in
those small theatres, have to gain a livelihood, made this concession, which he
regrets to find has n ot m et w ith, in m any instances, a proper return. Copyright
which Mr Boucicault especially reserved for his own use, have been stolen,
the titles o f plays altered to disguise them , so that their performance might
escape notice, and other means resorted to, very unworthy o f the parties
who have been kindly liberally treated. Thus, his drama Jessie Brown copy­
righted under the title o f The Tiger o f Cawnpore . .., [has] been used w ithout
his permission. It is m ost painful to appeal to the law to protect rights,
which the parties them selves, in com m on gratitude, should be the first to
respect.51

Counter-intuitively then we see that in this particular case and in the peculiar
context of the late nineteenth century, the pedagogical structures sought to
resist change and perpetuate existing social relations by cultivating particularly
conservative versions of narrative reality. By contrast, it was the proliferation
of commodity culture which encouraged dissemination and diversifications of
narratives ensuring, thereby, a crisis of monolithic, stable realities on the one
hand and generating multiple ways of experiencing and constructing reality on
the other.

Conclusion

The ease of technological reproduction of narratives and the market for various
different narrative-commodities instigated a constant multiplication of mutiny
narratives. The speed of duplication and the plurality of narratives, however,
also made narratives inherently political in the sense that each of them offered
myriad distinct ways of experiencing and interpreting events. The necessity
of choosing between different alternate ways of experiencing and reading the
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 63

events of the mutiny made the very act of the reader’s appreciation of narratives
a political act.
It was the task of poetry to seek to create new ways of experiencing the
events— once any settled experiential meaning had successfully been destabilised.
The politics of the poets, however, varied widely. Some sought to insert the
events into their own political sensibility—which itself varied from one author
to another—while others sought to resist the political nature of the narratives
themselves—seeking instead to reconstitute the stable meanings and the stable
but exploitative social relations they underwrote.
The ease with which the poetical narratives themselves were duplicated
and mechanically reproduced meant that politicisation could never become
homogenous. Various contending poetical narratives continued to propagate
their varied political sensibilities, ranging from the reactionary to the radical.
The insertion of certain— mostly conservative—poetical narratives into
pedagogical texts was aimed to bolster the conservative political vision and
perpetuate social inertia. Counter-intuitively, however, petty commerce played
in this case (to a limited extent) a politically radical role by constantly encouraging
further narrative multiplication and dissemination, which overwhelmed the
pedagogic efforts to consolidate socially reactionary politics.
Albeit, what remains a verity in all this is that narratives of the Indian Mutiny
were inescapably implicated in the politics of social change within a global
context to an extent that went well beyond the narrow confines of imperial
politics. In the end—as the cliche goes—it was not about whether one supported
the British Empire in India or not, it was about whether one was for social and
political change or the status quo.

Notes and References 1

1. Edward Leckey, Fictions Connected with the Indian *Mutiny’ (Bombay: Chesson 8c Woodhall,
1859), pp. 135-142.
2. Some idea o f the way publishing entrepreneurship inspired an unprecedented narrative
diversity and market expansion can be had from the life o f the nineteenth century London
printer and seller o f broadsides, James Catnach. After inheriting an impoverished business and
spending a lifetime selling broadsides on London streets, when he retired in 1839 his concern
boasted o f having 12,000 different titles in print, and he himself could buy his own house
at Barnet. At his death a few years later, his estate was said to be worth between £6,000 and
£10,000. Cf. Louis James, ‘Catnach, James (1792-1841)’, in Oxford Dictionary o f National
Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4897
(accessed 11 March 2008).
3. Walter Benjamin, Hanah Arendt (ed.), ‘The Work o f Art in the Age o f Mechanical Repro­
duction’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Harcourt, Brace 8c World, 1968),
pp. 217-252.
64 Projit Bihari Mukharji

4. The idea o f a ‘prosumer’ in whom the roles o f producers and consumers become increasingly
blurred has been developed and used by scholars and practitioners in a variety o f conflicting
contexts. The earliest and most basic form o f the term appears, however, in the writings o f the
futurologist Alvin Toffler in his The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1989).
5. Projit Bihari Mukharji, ‘Jessie’s Dream at Lucknow: Popular Memorializations o f Dissent,
Ambiguity and Class in the Heart o f Empire’, Studies in History, vol. 24, no. 1(2008), pp.
77-113.
6. For the full text o f the letter, see the London Illustrated Times dated 7 January 1858. An online
typescript o f the text, taken from the preface o f a very successful later Australian sheet music
adaptation o f the legend is available at http://www.pdmusic.org/1800s/60jdasotrol.txt (accessed
on 19 August 2008).
7. Dion Boucicault, Jessie Brown or the Relief o f Lucknow (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1858).
Text follows the exact pattern o f performance at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth.
8. Quoted at length in R.S.F., ‘Dinna Ye Hear It?’, Notes & Queries [Hereafter NQ], SV125 (1858),
p. 425.
9. R. Montgomery Martin, Our Indian Empire and Adjacent Countries (London: London Printing
8c Publishing Co., 1879), p. 470.
10. Leckey, Fictions, p. 135.
11. R.J. Fynmore, ‘Jessie Brown and the Relief o f Lucknow’, NQ, IIS.IV (1911), p. 416.
12. Shackleton Hallett, ‘The Relief o f Lucknow’, Times, London, 18 March 1890, p. 13.
13. Marie Cutter, ‘The Relief o f Lucknow’, Times, London, 13 March 1890, p. 11.
14. George H. Hope, ‘The Relief o f Lucknow’, Times, London, 14 March 1890, p. 14.
15. F.A. Wallis, ‘The Relief o f Lucknow’, Times, London, 18 March 1890, p. 13.
16. Cf. ‘Commentary on Jessie’s Dream in Lucknow’, The Word on the Street, http://www.nls.uk/
broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15105 (accessed on 19 August 2008).
17. Anonymous, ‘Jessie’s Dream at Lucknow’, available at the National Library o f Scotland,
Edinburgh, Shelfmark L.C.Fol.70(120b). Song was published by W. Shepherd, Dundee Poet’s
Box, 182, Overgate, Dundee.
18. Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, The Journal o f British Studies, vol. 31,
no. 4 (1992), pp. 309-329
19. William Seaman, Jessie Brown or the Relief o f Lucknow, unpublished MSS, Templeman Library,
University o f Kent, Shelfmark: PETT. MSS J25 Spec. Coll.
20. Anonymous, ‘Jessie Brown: The Heroine o f Lucknow’, Bodeleian Library. Oxford, Shelfmark:
Harding 15 (147b). Song was published by T. Taylor o f Taylor’s Song Mart o f 93, Brick Lane,
Spitalfields (Near the Railway Arch).
21. Anonymous, ‘Dinna Ye Hear It?’, available at the Bodeleian Library, Oxford, Shelfmark: Firth c
14(88).
22. R.Y. Tyrrell, ‘Webb, Thomas Ebenezer (1821-1903)’, in Rev. C.A. Creffield (ed.), Oxford
Dictionary o f National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/
view/article/36803 (accessed 22 July 2008).
23. TEW, ‘The Relief o f Lucknow’, The College Magazine (Dublin: William McGee & Co., 1858), pp.
214-125.
24. Lawrence Templin, ‘The Quaker Influence On Walt Whitman’, American Literature, vol. 42,
no. 2 (1970), pp. 165-810.
25. John Greenleaf Whittier, ‘The Pipes At Lucknow’, The Complete Poetical Works o f John Greenleaf
Whittier (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884), pp. 178-179.
26. Harold Blodgett, ‘Robert Traill Spence Lowell’, The New England Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4
(1943), pp. 578-591.
27. Eva March Tappan, ed., The World's Story: A History o f the World in Story, Song and Art, Vol. II
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), pp. 180-183.
 ‘O’er the Cruel Roll of War Drums’ 65

28. E.P. Thompson, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York: New Press, 1997).
29. Lambert A. Shears, ‘Theodore Fontane As a Critic o f the Novel’, PMLA , vol. 38, no. 2 (1923),
pp.389-400.
30. Fontane managed to combine his early admiration for Scott with an equally deep admiration for
Thackeray and Dickens. The resultant German Realism remained tinged with a Romanticism
sometimes perceived in its residual symbolism. German Realism was thus neither a ‘re-portrayal
o f reality’ nor its manipulation by imagination, but rather ‘in constant debate’ with reality in
an effort to get beyond it— a constant debate between concrete particulars and the search for
higher truths embodied in these particulars. G.H. Herding, ‘Reflections on the “Poetic Real”:
The Transcendent in Nineteenth Century German Realism’, Pacific Coast Philology , vol. 31,
no. 2 (1996), pp. 135-157.
31. Theodore Fontane, (1898), ‘Bernhard von Lepel*, Berlin. Available at www.literaturport.de
(accessed on 4 November 2007).
32. Seitz Norden, *Der Entsatz von Lucknow’, in Ludwig Herrig (ed.), Archiv Fur Das Studium
Neueren Sprach und Literaturen (Braunschweig: George Westerman, 1861), pp. 464-465.
33. Archibald H. Bryce, ‘Preface’, Readings from the Best Authors (London: Nelson and Sons,
1862).
34. Bryce, Readings, p. 98.
35. Nelson’s School Series, ‘Preface’, The Advanced Reader (London: Nelson and Sons, 1866).
36. Nelson’s, Reader, p. 148.
37. William Holmes McGuffey, Fifth Eclectic Reader (Revised Edition) (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1879), pp. 156-159
38. One reason for this change may have been that some o f the printed versions o f Boucicault’s
play presented the letter as such. In the original letter found in the early press reports, ‘de
Banneroi’ had claimed to be quoting from an unnamed lady’s letter. Some versions printed with
Boucicault’s play simply shortened the text by leaving out the initial lines. The Boucicault drama
had been enormously popular in America, and the pedagogic texts may have picked the letter up
through printed texts o f the play.
39. The Minister o f Education (Canada), The Ontario Readers (Toronto: T. Eaton 8r Co., 1909),
pp. 246-249.
40. H.E. Marshall, An Island Story: A History o f England for Boys and Girls (New York: Frederick A.
Stokes & Co., 1920).
41. Marshall, ‘How This Book Came to be Written’, Island Story.
42. Ibid.
43. Marshall, ‘The Pipes at Lucknow’, Island Story, pp. 496-499.
44. Advertisements, ‘Highland Rescue or Dinna Ye Hear It’; ‘Jessie’s Dream*; ‘Havelock at Lucknow’,
TimeSy London, 27 January 1858, p. 6.
45. Advertisements, ‘Highland Jessie'yTimest London, 12 April 1858, p. 6.
46. For full texts o f Australian editions ofBlockley’s music see http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vnl685816,
Digital Resource o f the Australian National Library (accessed on 4 November 2007).
47. Author’s personal collection.
48. JasanoffMaya, ‘Secret Signals in Lotus Flowers’, London Review o f Booksy vol. 27, no. 14 (21 July
2005).
49. Henriette Naeseth, ‘Drama in Early Deadwood, 1876-1879’, American Literaturey vol. 10, no. 3
(1938), pp. 289-312; Boucicault, Jessie Brown; Advertisement, ‘Jessye Brown’, Argust Melbourne,
1884, quoted in http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~melbear/1884.htm (accessed on 5 November
2007).
50. Anonymous handwritten draft, affidavit for use in Seaman v. Boucicault litigation in
Boucicault Collections, Templeman Library, University o f Kent, Shelfmark: UKC/BOUC/BIO:
0648729.
66 Projit Bihari Mukharji

51. Advertisement, Times, London, 12 June 1861, p. 8.

52. O f course it is cogent to remember that the multiplication and dissemination o f political
sensibilities that commercial entrepreneurship encourages also served to thwart political
consolidation and played thereby— some would suggest— a reactionary political role. We
have throughout this article sought to follow the Deleuzian position that the schizophrenic
fragmentation o f reality is co-extensive with capitalism itself. Its radicalism lies therefore not in
challenging capitalism as such but in making the crisis o f capitalism explicit. Cf. Giles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University o f
Minnesota Press, 1983).
 k

’C LEMENCT CANNING, THE TELEGRAPH, INFORMATION

AND CENSORSHIP DURING 1857
Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

THIS chapter examines the strategies adopted by Lord Charles John Canning
in Calcutta during the uprisings of 1857. Lord Canning (governor general and
viceroy of India from 1856 to 1862), a friend of his predecessor Lord Dalhousie,
spoke prophetic words at his farewell banquet hosted by the Court of Directors
in England before he left for India:

I wish for a peaceful term o f office. But I cannot forget that in the sky o f India,
serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, no larger than a m a n s hand, but which,
growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with
ruin.1

By the next year, various regiments of sepoys of the huge Bengal Army had
revolted and British rule between Delhi and Patna had ceased to exist.
The year 1857 was a series of events with many nuances and ramifications,
and the recent spate of writings on various issues commemorating its 150th
anniversary reflect this. These uprisings and mutinies cannot be limited to
the year 1857 and 1858, and they were still echoing in central India while the
professional and English-speaking literati were negotiating the founding of the
Indian National Congress in the port cities in 1885. The term ‘1857’, therefore,
has a much wider meaning in both content and extent than the evocation of
a single year indicates. This chapter continues a theme common to many
conferences on 1857, held in 2007, of investigation at the margins of 1857,2 but
it returns to central events and policies of the time. It continues investigations
at the margins in the sense that it focuses on Calcutta, far away from the grand
theatres of 1857, but as the capital of British India it was highly central to both
official and non-official European existence.
 68 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

Translating Telegraphy and Science in

Bengal before 1857

The period from around 1830 until 1850 was one of fundamental changes for the
colonial state. Over this period evolved the basic template for its attitudes and
policies towards the country the British had come to rule over. Though recovering
from the ‘Nameirite deluge’,3 the argument about continuities in South Asia
needs to be looked at afresh, especially in the sphere of history of thought. While
it has been argued4 that it was a limited state, the ways in which the colonial
state evolved were significant and fundamental. Science and technology became
institutionalised, the Asiatic Society took up orientalist research, and the tele­
graph language was exclusively in English. These changes had profound
consequences for the future of India. For example, the telegram became doubly
expensive since drafters of telegrams and their translators received their share of
the cost of manufacturing a telegram. The policy of using English created new
elites and rendered redundant older ones. More importantly, it created schisms
and divides between Indians. The transition from individualistic experimentation
to mass implementation also meant that India received very few spin-off effects
of industrial transfers and had limited opportunities of substituting technology.
Europeans and Indians made some significant attempts to diffuse and disse­
minate knowledge of the railway and the telegraph in the public sphere before
1857. The argument about Christian Science and orientalism needs also to be more
flexibly framed to incorporate changes in political and intellectual thought and
practice after 1835.5Indians did not just receive a proselytising science seamlessly,
but engaged in debate and differed from European writers by claiming a better
understanding both of indigenous public need and of the vernacular language.
Writers like Kalidas Maitra desacralised and reconstituted science, even to the
point of resacralising science according to ancient Hindu texts. For example,
Maitra attempted to prove that ancient Indians used steam power in Vaspiyakal
o Bharatiya Railway.6 Apparently, Raja Shallya, in one of the ancient texts, goes
to the master-mechanic, Moydanab, who gives him the Souvyantra to destroy the
Yadu kula. This contraption could travel in water, air and land, and had a tail of
smoke. Obviously, it was a steam-powered machine, and he quoted the relevant
lines in proof, of which the last two are: Kacchidbhoumo kacchidyomni girimuthi
jale kacchit, Alatchakrabat bhramyat soubhong taddurabsthitang. (Sometimes on
land sometimes in air, on tops of mountains in water sometimes, like a circle of
fire travelling the Soubhya rests there.)7
Kalidas Maitra of Srirampur published the first Bengali book on telegraphy
in 1855.8 Maitra, in his book on telegraphy, claimed that though authors like
M. Townshend, J. Robinson and Rev. J. Mack published articles on electricity and
chemistry9 in Tattobodhiniy Bibidhartha Sangraha and Satyapradip patrikas,his
- book was the first in Bengali or Sanskrit to cover the whole subject of electricity.10
 ‘Clemency' Canning, the Telegraph, Information 69

Starting fro m th e first p rin cip les o f m a g n e tism a n d ch e m ic a l rea ctio n , h e

p ro v id ed g u id es to ex p e r im e n ts th at c o u ld b e c o n d u c te d u sin g h o u se h o ld g o o d s.
Maitra called telegraph stations addas or, ironically for us, ‘chatting spaces’
and described O’Shaughnessy’s Single Needle Signalling Instrument in detail
over eleven pages, perhaps in the hopes of indigenous duplication.11 An early
writer (whose works failed to become prescribed text^ because the company’s
government refused to accept them) of textbooks on railways and telegraphy,
Maitra, perceptively, explained that the British state’s strategic need to convey
troops rapidly lay behind the establishment of railways in India.12 He admitted
taking his sections on steam, what constituted a steam engine, and its modern
history, from English books.13He asked the rhetorical question, ‘what is steam?’,
revealing a laudatory ability to get to the basics of his subject.14 Maitra was an
unabashed champion of these machines of modernity. He saw the space and
time contraction facilitated by railway and telegraphy as exemplars of modernity
and civilisation and urged his compatriots to learn from the European attitude
that time was money. His was a curious combination of early nationalist egotism
and conservative radicalism.
Maitra revealed a fundamental truth in his book: the dots-and-dashes sent had
no necessary connection between what they signified.15 He wrote, ‘Sanket aicchik
janiben ... atabata engraji aksharejeiroop sambad asiya thake tadroop bangala ki
parasya prabhriti bhashay sambad asite pare (‘Know that signals are arbitrary ...
therefore similar to how information arrives in the English alphabet, news can
come in Bengali or Persian or other languages’ [my Translation]).16 Both the
signifier and the signified coexisted in arbitrary though self-consistent systems,
that is, dots-and-dashes existed with their system of differences and could be
used to convey practically any information in any language based on a system
of internal differentiation. Maitra provided the skeleton outline of systems of
signalling Hindustani, Persian and Bengali alphabets alongside the English one.17
Early attempts to translate and diffuse knowledge of steam, railways, electricity,
chemistry and telegraphy became pointless as the colonial state created exclusive
racial preserves and the enclosure of technology shrouding it in secrecy. Secrecy
dominated the moral economy of scientific enterprise in British India, while
increasingly the bureaucratic principle dominated its structure. There was no
chance that knowledge of the technology would be diffused. The use of telegraphs
by Indians did not mean that they understood how it worked. Increasingly, the
railways and telegraphs became objects of satire, sites of pollution and symbols
of an oppressive modernity.18

Indians Using Telegraphs 1856-1857

The telegraph records are available in detail. In the first six months of its opening
to the public, the Indian telegraph sent a total number of 9,971 messages, of
70 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

which 8,533 were prepaid telegrams on private business. Of these, Indians

sent more than a third. It was recorded by the Telegraph Superintendent W.B.
O’Shaughnessy that while the

European com m unity are comparatively a very lim ited class, the native
merchants, bankers and fund holders and gentry, m ay be considered
innumerable. The num ber o f native correspondents is accordingly increasing
daily. N ot only do they use the lines for financial business, but on the very
m ost delicate and secret matters affecting fam ily arrangements, betrothals,
marriages, and other dom estic affairs, o f which they treat with absence o f all
disguise, which is alm ost beyond all belief.19

Some of the regular business correspondents were firms and merchants

of Bombay and Calcutta like Bomanjee Framjee, Gopauldoss, Cursandos,
Runchoordoss, Nusserwanjee and Company, Cama and Company, Parmanand
Parboodoss, Jootha Dial, Chaneeram Jairaj and Ramjee Madowjee.20The bulk of
the indigenous business was between Calcutta and Bombay. The department was
surprised at the ease with which Indians used the telegraph for personal matters
and admired the communication practices of indigenous business. One of the
possible explanations behind the seasonal fluctuations between May 1856 and
November 1856 is that the monsoon season frequently put the telegraphs out
of order. Another explanation would be that crops, including commercial crops
like opium, are harvested during May, July and September.
Commenting on the number of errors in the sent messages O’Shaughnessy
recorded that the ‘native merchant never attempts petty economy’ and contrasted
European complaints with ‘the safety and precision with which the vast number
of messages sent by native opium speculators, are transmitted between Calcutta
and Bombay’. They repeated important figures with words or expressed it twice,
for example, ?834 or twice 417. He argued that ‘if the European merchants
would adopt this practice, we could transmit their despatches as correctly as any
other kind of business we transact’.21
O’Shaughnessy noted that the ‘important mart’ of Mirzapur only returned
a monthly average of ?162.22 His extensive report suggests, first, that the
Indian business community, especially those engaged in opium speculation,
were more than aware of the shortcomings of the telegraph and devised
rational strategies in language and expression to avoid error. Second that the
larger indigenous community was willing to trust the government’s promise
of confidentiality and privacy. Finally, it is important to note the relative
lack of private commercial correspondence in the case of Mirzapur, a large
centre of indigenous banking, trade and finance; perhaps, a rational response
and choice reflecting different kinds of trade. Calcutta and Bombay were much
more concerned with sea-borne trade and opium speculations abroad. Between
May 1856 and April 1857 there were 18,628 messages sent by indigenous users
 ‘Clemency* Canning, the Telegraph, Information 71

Table 4.1: Breakdown of Private Messages from May 1856 to April 185723

Month Total of paid (private) Total number of Total number of messages

messages messages sent by Indians

May 1856 3,865 4,645 798

June 1856 3,151 3,801 1,127
July 1856 2,973 3,616 849
August 1856 3,363 3,870 1,377
September 1856 3,272 3,840 926
October 1856 4,161 4,717 1,550
November 1856 4,286 4,774 1,137
December 1856 5,083 5,800 2,049
January 1857 5,715 6,799 2,390
February 1857 5,093 5,934 2,079
March 1857 5,227 6,348 2,015
April 1857 5,344 6,397 2,331

out of a total of 60,541 messages worth ?3 10,384 in round figures (see Table
4.1). The increases in June and August reflected the lowering of the tariff for
commercial messages by about 25 per cent. Irfan Habib has suggested the
substantial involvement in the uprisings of 1857 of a class of impoverished
artisans faced with extinction as mass manufacturing begins to take off. To this
section of malcontents, from the telegraph records, might be added a section
of traditional indigenous banking and business that were increasingly placed
beyond the reach of the new technologies and commodities.
A look at the map provided by Mukherjee and Kapoor in their book25 shows
the way in which the unrest concentrated on telegraph lines and nodes, a point I
have made elsewhere.26The telegraph office at Barrackpore was burnt down: one
of the first victims of this aspect of sepoy strategy. Instead, rumours circulated

Table 4.2: The Regional Breakdown for Telegraph Messages from

November 1856 until January 185724

Lines Total number of messages Number of indigenous messages

Calcutta-Agra lirie 2,170 282

Calcutta-Bombay line 3,321 814
Bombay-Madras line 257 72
Madras line 745 186
Meerut-Punjab line 385 65
72 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

with the speed o f ‘electricity’.27Taken together, all this meant that ‘official’ news
took longer to travel and longer to confirm.

1857 and the Crisis of Information Surplus

The uprisings of 1857 were a major turning point in the history of British rule in
India and an equally major test for the telegraph system recently built in India.
Hunter, explaining the cause behind the mutinies and uprisings of 1857, wrote:

[Njative opinion throughout India was in a ferm ent, predisposing m en to

believe the wildest stories, and to rush into action in a paroxysm o f terror.
Panic acts on an oriental population like drink am ong a European m o b .... The
spread o f education, the appearance o f the steam -engine and the telegraph wire,
seemed sim ultaneous disclosures o f a deep plan to substitute an English for an
Indian civilisation.28

This was an early and prophetic view of the ‘clash of civilisations’ argument,29
which also clearly admitted that ‘[a]s a matter of fact, cow’s tallow had been
culpably and ignorantly used’ in preparing cartridges for the newly introduced
Enfield rifles.30 The governor general in council struggled to keep abreast
of information flows while at the same time checking the content of such
communications with other sources of official, semi-official, intelligence comm­
unication. There might be a large number of telegrams in the archives but the fact
remains that Agra, the headquarters of the newly created North West Province,
was isolated from Calcutta, the seat of British government. This isolation
continued at least until the fall of Delhi in September 1857. Telegrams were sent
from Agra to Bombay, from there to Madras and then up the Bay of Bengal
to Calcutta.31 Madras Presidency too did not see uninterrupted telegraphic
communication, and Indian ‘conspirators’ cut the lines near Chingleput.32
The crisis of information in 1857 meant the destruction of the claim of
telegraphy to annihilate time and distance. The primary problem facing the
company’s government at the onset of the uprisings was the containment
of information that was considered inflammatory. As rumours of routs and
massacres multiplied in Britain and India, the government was hard pressed to
control panics. As early as 1856, the containment of information had become a
serious problem. Dalhousie’s dubious policy of refusing recognition to adoption,
illegitimate sons and minors and extension of control over large parts of central
India led to rulers, chieftains and talukdars being anxious about their fixture.
For example, James Blacknight, in charge of the Bombay Telegraph Office,
precipitated a political crisis by leaking an important political dispatch from
the East India Company’s government in Calcutta, sent through the Bombay
 ‘Clemency' Canning, the Telegraph, Information 73

office to the Political Residents at Pune and Nasik. The telegram that was leaked
by Blacknight was amazingly summary: ‘Tell Major Davidson to acknowledge
no successor to the Gaekwar, to form a council of administration to carry on
the Government.... Major Davidson must carry out these instructions in such
a manner as to attract as little attention as possible.'33 The Bombay Telegraph
Courier published a premature editorial proclaiming: ^

W e can now confidently announce that the last o f the Gaekwars has been
gathered to his fathers. It is expected that this step [annexation o f Baroda] will
excite universal surprise and consternation in Baroda, but it is anticipated that
no emeute will take place in consequence.... It is the duty o f the Empire to
absorb all those petty states, where bloated hum an vampires com m it deeds
o f cruelty and oppression ... a leading article on the annexation o f Baroda
in the Times or the D aily News will dissipate all the froth and vapour, which
Baroda gold m ay purchase to disturb and annoy the British Parliament w hen it
assembles. W ith Oude sauce and other Indian condim ents, ministers are likely
to have som e severe labour during the ensuing season.34

This quotation illustrates the extent to which both sides, Indian and British,
could manipulate public and political opinion in Britain and India.35 There was
also a rabid and racial Anglo-Indian press that supported a mob mentality in
Bombay and Calcutta.
In his defence, Blacknight pointed out,

The Bom bay signal office is even now the great centre through which passes
m ost o f the im portant despatches from Bengal and the North W est Frontier
to Bombay and Madras and vice versa. This is also the great centre o f opium
speculation, and here, where secrecy is essential the duties have been carried
on in the presence o f twelve to fourteen hands on duty at a time, without the
slightest possibility o f secrecy.

He suggested that the authorities ‘build or create' some suitable building

where ‘secrecy can be endured'.36
Blacknight thereafter fled to Britain with the cash in the office. His parting
telegram stated that he would meet Sir W.B. O'Shaughnessy in London to
present his case.37 The government was not amused, and along with extradition
proceedings requested that the officiating director general report on the
measures adopted to preserve the secrecy of important messages pending the
introduction of a cipher being prepared by O’Shaughnessy.38 The outbreak
was upon the department before these procedures of containment were set in
motion, yet these concerns reflected the obsession of a ruling power with control
over information and the containment of information. Instances of information
leakage increased by the middle of 1857, and the telegraph was repeatedly cited
as very vulnerable to such leakage.39
74 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

Rumour and Its Circulation

There were several reasons behind the growing discontent of residents of Calcutta,
especially the European non-officials with Governor General Canning and his
council. A particular day of ‘panic* described in recent research by Professor
Basudeb Chattopadhyay40 illustrated a significant disjuncture between what
was being published in the newspapers and what was supplied by the East India
Company’s government in Calcutta as the official version. Panic breaking out in
Calcutta’s non-official and trading community became difficult to contain as it
demanded of Lord Canning’s government two crucial things: first, ‘authentic’
information as soon as the government had news of it, thereby to implicitly claim
to be a part of the government’s decision-making process, and second, provide
for its own security and that of Calcutta in general by raising groups of voluntary
militia. The first such offer to raise a volunteer corps came as early as 20 May
1857 from the influential Traders Association of Calcutta and was repeated on
21 May 1857 by the French residents and traders at Calcutta. The secretary to the
government in the home department replied to the petitioners that:

the m ischief caused by a passing and groundless panic had been arrested, and
that there was reason to hope, that in the course o f a few days, tranquillity and
confidence w ould be restored throughout the Presidency.41

These offers compounded Canning’s problems in several ways. It would be

a nightmare to any government to have fully armed private militias roam about
the city and its environs, possibly even to come to blows with the official arms of
the state. It would also imply a visible loss of the government’s control and erode
its authority. It would make the populace more panic-prone and might lead to
uncontrolled and unforeseen events at the core of the government’s rule and
come to symbolise a crisis of governance.
The major problem facing the government in Calcutta was the near complete
isolation of Agra, headquarters of the recently formed North West Province.
Agra was isolated from the first week of June.42 On the first of July, the Indore
outbreak took place, leading to the deaths of Butler, Avery, Bone and Brooke of
the Telegraph Department; the offices, lines and instruments were completely
destroyed.43This was the last line that had kept telegraphic communication open
between Agra and Bombay. By July 1857,400 miles of telegraph lines from Agra
to Indore, 180 miles from Kanpur to Agra and 178 miles from Agra to Delhi had
been totally destroyed. Between Allahabad and Delhi there was no telegraphic
communication; the Narmada River region was overrun; between Kanpur
and Allahabad there was nothing in terms of telegraphic communication.44
Charles Todd, Assistant Telegraph Inspector in charge at Delhi, was killed. The
Kanpur establishment was wiped out. Between Allahabad and Benares, where
 ‘Clemency* Canning, the Telegraph, Information 75

the merchants were relatively loyal, small damage was done, and though the wire
was cut several times, Mr Devere and Babu Thakur Prashad, employees of the
Telegraph Department, managed to restore communications.45
By September a camel dak, through Kutch and Rajasthan, secured commu­
nication between Punjab and Bombay.46 Telegraphers sometimes resorted to
burying the telegraph instruments to prevent them frohi being destroyed by the
opposing forces. In Alam Bagh, in Awadh, a temporary semaphore was built,
and the knowledge to do so came providentially from the Penny Encyclopaedia.47
During this period the Post Office, in charge of the Bullock Train and Tonga
dak, transported over 18,000 troops up country from Raniganj. In contrast, after
the monsoon, river transport managed to carry around 5,800 troops. The postal
workers scattered throughout the country were valuable sources of intelligence
about the movements of the rebel forces.48 Regular mail was disrupted between
Agra and Bombay until February 1858: a total of seven months and thirteen
days.49 Captain J.G. Medley, writing from the Punjab, noted in July 1857,
‘Beyond Delhi our knowledge was a blank. The whole country was in the en­
emy’s hands and our only means of communication was round by Bombay a n d '
Calcutta, where the ignorance of what was passing between Allahabad and Delhi
was as great as our own.’50
The concern for secrecy combined with the interception of communication
during 1857; both sides employed traditional as well as modern methods of
communication and propaganda.51 By October 1857, the government insisted
that magistrates refuse to transmit any telegram that gave news of losses to the
government before it was officially published. Signallers were to be imprisoned
and fined ? 200 for any disclosure of official messages. The government proposed
that private messages should be countersigned by a high official before they were
transmitted.52 Perhaps it is important at this juncture to examine the volume of
messages sent over the telegraph. The record until November 1856 shows that
the number of native messages sent was 1,137. The proportion of indigenous
users was small and probably concentrated around opium speculation, that is,
speculation on prices at the port cities and production information from the
hinterland, so the bulk of the information carried was over long distances.
The post office still carried the bulk of the mail of the country, and it was there
that the British government practised the most systematic interception. Letters
found in the Dead Letter office in Madras confirmed the suspicion that the post
was being used for ‘treasonable purposes’ and all magistrates were authorised to
open indigenous correspondence with discretion. Plots began to be unearthed
as far way as Chingleput and Coimbatore, while a seditionist was imprisoned in
Tanjore.53 The sole object of placing the post office under the supervision of the
civil authorities was to:

protect the public and private correspondence o f the country being tampered
with by any native D eputy Post Masters, who m ight be in com m unication with
76 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

the rebels ... a covenanted officer should be in a position to know whether native
letters, especially letters from the North W est, in Persian or in Hindi, are passing
through the district ... whether any printed pamphlets or native newspapers,
especially Persian or Urdu, are increasing in circulation; and whether, in short
there are any com m unications o f any sort, generating suspicion, and therefore
requiring to be checked.54

However, the judge clarified that the Bengali post master at Jessore was unlikely
to be in ‘correspondence with rebels, who have beaten and even slaughtered
his countrymen’.55 Two seditious letters— one in Sanskrit from the ‘notorious’
Muniram, hiding in Calcutta and addressed to a pundit in a government school,
signed in code with the key given in verse, and the other written by an Assamese,
but without signature or date—were intercepted. Orders were issued to arrest
Munshi Muniram of Assam, and the dethroned Saring Raja on charges of
sedition.56This illustrates both the extent to which an India existed across Indian
cultures and how quickly technologies such as printing and communication
systems were deployed in indigenous organisation. The diffusion of knowledge
about telegraphy needs to be distinguished from diffusion of use.
The strength and vitality of other modes of transmission and communication
emerged vividly in the course of the uprisings. During the spring of 1857,
rumours seemed to increase in virulence and numbers. Sir George Trevelyan
recorded that the

native society o f Hindostan presented that remarkable phenom ena which,

in an Asiatic com m unity, are the infallible sym ptom s o f an approaching
con vu lsion .... N o one can tell w hence the dim whisper first arose, or what it
may portend; for the Hindoo like the Greeks o f ancient time, hold Rum our to be
divine [emphasis m ine].57

Equally, like codes, prophecies and rumours abounded in 1857, and both the
British and the rebels listened earnestly to them. One prophecy that had wide
currency at the time was the prediction of Neamatullah Shah, whose mausoleum
was in Kashmir. It seemed to be uncannily precise:

W hen that [Muslim] King is dead and gone, in his house a fracture will take place
[And] the Clan o f Sikhs will exercise over the M ahom edans great tyranny and
oppression; for forty years this great tyranny and heresy will remain.
After this the Nazarene will seize the whole empire o f Hindustan
[And] for the space o f one hundred years, their sovereignty will remain in
Hindustan.
W hen in their time heresy and tyranny shall becom e general
For their assassination Shah Ghurbee [Western King] shall appear
[And] between the two will be fought desperate battles.
By the strength o f the Crescentader’s sword [beyjor-e-tej/taj-e-jihad] the King o f
the W est will be victorious.
 'Clemency' Canning, the Telegraph, Information 77

[Then] W ithout doubt the followers o f the Clan o f Jesus will be broken and
dispersed...,58

The printed copy of this prophecy was published at Delhi at the press of
Syed Jamalluddin, and its extensive circulation was achieved by slipping it in
as a supplement to the large number of vernacular papers published in that
city. It is difficult to put an exact date to it, but it was certainly circulating
before 1857.59 The year 1857 was the completion of the first hundred years of
the onset of British rule in India in Bengal from 1757. To the contemporary
official, the prophecy probably appeared to predict the intervention of the Amir
of Afghanistan. The British government had recently signed a treaty with the
Amir, but the Government of India mistrusted him. The links between Calcutta,
Delhi, Peshawar and Kabul were very strong and the memories of Nadir Shah
and Ahmad Shah Abdali still fresh. Some of the rebels and leaders hoped that the
Amir of Afghanistan would intervene to save their cause.
The famous passing of the chapattis is a classic example of an information
panic. Trevelyan wrote:

During the early days o f March, every ham let in the Gangetic provinces
received from its neighbour two chapattis, the staple food o f the population ...
mysterious sym bol that flew and spread through the length and breadth o f the
land confusion and questioning, a wild terror and a wilder hope.60

The extremist nationalist, Savarkar wrote that the chapattis ‘set the mind of
the whole country on fire by the very vagueness of the message’.61 Both authors
possibly exaggerated the extent to which the chapattis circulated, and some later
historians have indicated reasons other than the mutiny, such as the potential for
an outbreak of an epidemic disease such as smallpox, which might have caused
their circulation. The point is that rumour and news are not easily separable
and rumour as prediction often constituted news in this period. However, the
reading of such symbols became a British obsession after 1857. The excess and
wide variety of meaning that could be imputed to such mute symbols were a
nightmare for them, though they meticulously recorded and tried to interpret the
passing of similar signs and symbols throughout their rule; perhaps, ironically,
the British created their own breed of astrologers, readers of signs and portents,
prophesiers of the future, detectors of treason and sedition.

Censorship of the Press

The East India Company’s government in Calcutta ‘gagged’ the press after the
outbreak of 1857 not only to control the relatively docile vernacular press but
also to curb the strident and panic-prone Anglo-Indian press. The indigenous
78 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

press in both the Bengal and Bombay presidencies remained largely loyalist in
their tone. A series of pamphlets in Gujarati and Marathi, written by the loyalist
Indian manager of the Bombay Timesywere circulated in the Bombay presidency.
These compared the conditions of life under the Mughal, Maratha, Gujarati
Hindu and the company’s government to extol the virtues of the company’s
rule.62 In contrast to such supportive loyalism, the Anglo-Indian Hurkaru paper
was threatened by government prosecution in Calcutta because of a series of
letters from a person calling himself ‘Militaire’.
In a letter called ‘Our future rule in India’, symptomatic of the gratuitous and
alarmist expatriate propaganda of the period, ‘Militaire’ wrote:

N ow is the time to show the sepoys we can do w ithout them ... this can only
be done by bringing up Africans from the Cape o f Good H ope ... and before
next hot weather we shall have a body o f m en w ho can stand the sun as well
as the natives o f India, and w ho, with the Sikhs and Gurkhas, will relieve our
European soldier from all the com m on duties which involve exposure to the
su n .... But no time should be lost in beginning to form an army to replace the
Brahmins and treacherous M ussalmans.63

Such advice from expatriates, amounting to criticism of the government and

the implicit claim to be a part of it, was obnoxious to the increasingly rigidly
hierarchical officialdom of the Government of India. The government followed
a similar policy in the Punjab: censorship and disarming of the native regiments.
The shade of the American Revolution haunted the East India Company’s
government, perhaps, not without reason. There was a Kashmiri or Eurasian
madam of a brothel who was executed after the British returned to control for
taunting the sepoys at Meerut for being impotent in not saving their fellow
soldiers from dishonour. There is also the example of someone called Schmidt
who tried to convince the civilians and non-commissioned elements in the
garrison to rise against their superiors.64
There was also a widespread attempt by the media to voice a non-official
European demand, articulated and fanned in the press, to execute all Muslims
everywhere, if not all Indians, at least in Calcutta. This would not only further
threaten peace at the heart of British rule, but also would unduly provoke local
inhabitants and loyal supporters and endanger invisible networks and sources of
influence, stability, loyalty towards British rule and of valuable information. For
many, including the ashrafi, the uprisings were a bolt out of the blue: rastkhez-
i-beja (unseasonable turmoil).65 After all, not every Indian was a rebel, not every
Muslim a fanatical anti-Christian jihadi and, more crucially, not every European
was kindly disposed towards the East India Company’s government under Lord
Canning. Further offensive to them were two actions taken by the government.
First, the gagging of the press, including the Anglo-Indian press, on June
1857,66 shortly after Calcutta’s ‘panic Sunday’;67second, the Arms Bill passed on
 ‘Clemency* Canning, the Telegraph, Information 79

12 September 185768 calling for the registration of arms and ammunition and
which gave powers to the government to issue licenses for arms and seize them
where necessary. Why should the English press be gagged and Christians be
treated in the same manner as those who had rebelled against them, was the
demand in Calcutta.
What particularly disturbed the government was thaf the press was becoming
a vehicle for all sorts of gossip, information and misinformation and a potential
alternative to ‘official* information supplied from the government. For example,
on 13 June 1857 the Bengal Hurkaru reproduced a proclamation issued by the
sepoys, thus granting it increased exposure and circulation. The injunction of
the proclamation ‘to circulate copies ... in every place as far as it may be possible*
was further served.69 It had been earlier reproduced in Urdu in Doorbeen on 8
June and Sultanul Akhbar on 10 June 1857.
India was in an informational turmoil both at the level of the vernacular
and the English press, and through a world of proclamations and counter­
proclamations. As it would be trenchantly described later:

W e are so used to hearing, the day after the bazaar has gossiped about it, how
m ango trees have been sm eared.... Hardly a whisper can pass in the bazaar or
a piece o f “gup” circulate in the settlem ent, that the telegrapher does not know
it, and cannot transfer it to London if he so pleases.70

Information networks were not confined within India but travelled beyond.
French anxiety about their own imperial exploits was mirrored in the United
States, where extremely knowledgeable articles by Marx and Engels kept the public
informed on the daily action. While Calcutta might be immediately starved of news
from the North West Provinces, especially Agra, whatever news reached it was
catapulted into a global media market. News of the uprisings published in the Sydney
Herald was republished in the Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle. News
also flowed in via Colombo and the Colombian. Private letters supplemented these
news items, sometimes acting as corrective but more often providing exaggerated
accounts of alleged eyewitnesses. An empire of information was spinning beyond
all attempts at control. Several books were published in French soon after the
uprisings of 1857, with agendas of their own.71 Charlotte Canning wrote to Queen
Victoria72while England issued instructions and suffered a baying press.
Lord Canning’s taming of his government’s central space and public,
Calcutta, was crucial to the destruction of the other space that had raised another
standard at Delhi.73 India in 1857 was an information-rich world rather than a
world starved of information and networks of circulation,74 though this is the
initial impression one gets from official sources. Sepoys and the British engaged
in propaganda75 and, for example, bilingual proclamations were published
from a schoolmaster’s press in Kanpur.76 Allegedly, thousands of copies of the
notorious Brigade Order of General Neill were distributed in English, Urdu and
80 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

Hindi upon its issue after 1857, and many other proclamations by the rebels and
the British were circulating in the countryside even in 1887.77 It was only after
the suppression of the free press that Canning could announce to the general
public: ‘Delhi, the focus of the treason and revolt which for four months have
harassed Hindustan, and the stronghold in which the mutinous army of Bengal
has sought to concentrate its power, has been wrested from the rebels/

Lord Canning ‘Promoting’ Muslims and Indians:

The Case of Munshi Amir Ali

British rule in India was as much an exercise of fear and power as it was of
circumstance. Many jobs such as that of pleader established a class of men wholly
dependent on British rule and therefore necessarily loyal to it. Stokes showed
how responses to the uprisings varied in North West Provinces according to
the benefits of British land settlement: beneficiaries sided with the British
while those who had suffered or lost land sided with the rebels. He attempted
to go beyond broad categories of caste and religion. There were a number of
Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, such as Gauri Shankar,78Agha Jan and Mohan
Lai,79 corresponding and informing the British in secret from within the walls
of Delhi.80 This further nuances Ray’s comment based on war correspondent
Russell’s81 argument that British rule was one of racial distance and based wholly
on fear.82 A dependent and collaborating class of Indians had emerged after a
hundred years of expanding British rule. For example, the Government of India
congratulated the work of the Survey of India in 1859 for continuing its mapping
of Kashmir during the uprisings and for the loyalty of its Indian employees and
generally commended the department’s ‘work of science and peace’.83Along with
them, the whole non-official European sector had been vital to the expansionist
mission. They, most crucially, felt betrayed and distanced from the ‘master race’
and the decision-making process at this crucial juncture.
The non-official section comprising business, professional and other interests
managed to reach Queen Victoria through private channels. They demanded
Lord Canning’s removal and recall. First, he had issued the petition, which
in their understanding preached ‘clemency’ at a moment which demanded
revenge. Second, he had indiscriminately imposed press censorship rather than
targeting only the vernacular press. Third, he had passed a law making arms
licenses and registration mandatory and giving magistrates the right to seize
arms and ammunition as they saw fit. Again, this unfair law also applied to
Christians, allegedly at war with all Hindus and Muslims. Fourth, he had kept
information from the non-official European public and had refused their help.
The list of grievances was many. In this hour of war, grief, threat and revenge, a
major allegation was that his administration was actively promoting the interests
 ‘Clemency' Canning, the Telegraph, Information 81

of Muslims, who had butchered Christians and had risen against the Christian
yoke. Most importantly,

the English name and reputation are lowered, com m erce and trade are
paralysed, agriculture is interrupted, ruin and famine are im pending over those
escaped massacre, the treasuries o f the East India Com pany are pillaged and
exhausted, their credit is wholly gone, and their securities are so depreciated
as to be unsaleable at any rate o f discount...are directly attributable to the
blindness, weakness, and incapacity o f the local Governm ent o f India, o f which
the present Governor-General is the responsible head.84

In short, it was a crisis of governance combining with a crisis of faith in the

government.
With the utmost Victorian tact, the petition was sent to the Court of Directors,
who returned it to Canning and his council for comment. Canning replied that
he would not defend himself, but certain factual errors and misinterpretations
were pointed out in the margins while returning the petition to the Court of
Directors. In reality, this constituted a most comprehensive defence of his policy
and actions while denying any formal attempt to do so.
The petition mentioned a particular case and accused Canning of having
‘sanctioned the appointment of a Mahomedan, one Ameer Ally, to be Deputy
Commissioner of Patna, a place of great importance and trust". E.A. Samuells,
Commissioner of Revenue for Patna Division, defended his appointment to the
government. The Munshi ‘is a man whose interests are bound up with those
of the British Government". He was one of the leading pleaders at the Sadr
Court and employed in nearly every Behar case, and had acquired considerable
properties. Samuells pointed out that if the

present rebellion had succeeded, his professional practice would have been at
an end, and his estates would have reverted ... to the ancient proprietors ...
had any guarantee for his loyalty been necessary ... none better than those
furnished by his own circumstances and position.

His father was also a past government munshi, and Amir Ali had already been
for many years a government servant. After his appointment under Samuells,
the munshi was engaged in ‘conducting the extensive correspondence which I
have had with native zemindars and other affairs connected with the disturbed
state of the country, and in acquiring information for me on the state of feeling
in all parts of my jurisdiction". Samuells went on to add that Ameer Ali had
been ‘the object of ceaseless vituperation’ by the press of Calcutta and that ‘the
most treacherous motives have been imputed to him, and he has become in fact
the bete noir of the English Press’.85 The munshi’s experience, Samuells argued,
would deter other Indians from displaying similar signs of loyalty, information
and service. The munshi was a valuable government servant who was also an
82 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

important source of intelligence both in Bihar and in Calcutta about Indian,

especially Indian Muslim, opinion.

Conclusion

The telegraph did not save India; rather, India saved the telegraph, and
the uprisings of 1857 saved the telegraph in India. The year 1857 saved the
telegraph in India from an ignominious death, allowing reconstruction on a less
experimental level. At a general level, it provided telegraph technology with the
universal principle of duplication. The need to have alternate lines in case of
interruption was unquestioned after 1857. The myth of the overland telegraph
as saviour in 1857 renewed European and United States’ interest and investment
in telegraphy. Paradoxically, this interest was centred on submarine cable
telegraphy as the least destructible of systems, given unchallenged British naval
dominance during the period. The year 1857 was used to justify the need for an
imperial telegraph system and direct control by Britain over India, but the myth
of the success of the landlines was used to justify concentration on submarine
telegraphy as the most secure means of control.
The subtly varied defence, using different levels of argument, of Lord
Canning’s policies, especially his policy not to encourage indiscriminate violence
and murder against all Indians or to target a particular class of people, a religious
group or racial identity proved successful. Yet destiny did catch up with the more
notorious of the characters such as Major Neill, a son of General Neill, who was
assassinated thirty years after 1857 (in 1887) in revenge for his father’s actions at
Kanpur. In Bihar, the Wahabis were released ‘because there was literally nothing
against them’, Munshi Ameer Ali was rewarded for his service to the British
cause and Queen Victoria came out in support o f ‘Clemency’ Canning and his
policies, abolished the rule of the East India Company over India and appointed
him as her first viceroy in India. These were good examples of what W.B. Yeats
would later describe when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize as ‘a wise
piece of imperialism’.

Notes and References1

1. W.W. Hunter, The Indian Empire: Its People, History and Products, second edition (London:
Triibner and Co., 1886) [reprinted Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2005], p. 417.
2. For example, the sections ‘Marginal Communities in 1857’, and ‘Regions Beyond the North
Indian Gangetic Heartland* in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), Rethinking 1857 (Delhi: Orient Longman,
2007). Presented at a conference moderated by Indian Council for Historical Research in
December 2006.
 ‘Clemency’ Canning, the Telegraph, Information 83

3. See C.A. Bayly, ‘Eric Thomas Stokes 1924—1981’, in M. Hasan, N. Gupta (eds), India s Colonial
Encounter: Essays in Memory o f Eric Stokes, second revised and enlarged edition (Delhi: Manohar,
2004), p. 17, p. 24.
4. For example, briefly in C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: British Empire and the World 1780-1830
(London: Longman, 1989).
5. S. Sivasundaram, ‘A Christian Benares’: Orientalism, Science and the Serampore Mission o f
Bengal*, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 44, no. 2 (2007), pp.l 11-145, especially
his work on Reverend Mack; also M.S. Dodson, ‘Re-presented for the Pandits: James Ballantyne,
“Useful knowledge”, and Sanskrit Sholarship in Benares College during the Mid-nineteenth
Century’, M odem Asian Studies, vol. 36, no. 2 (2002), pp. 257-298.
6. Kalidas Maitra, Vaspiyakal o Bharatiya Railway: The Steam Engine and the East India Railway
Containing a History o f India, with a Chronological Table o f the Indian Princes, from Judister down
to the Present Time with a Description o f the Places and their Histories through which the Railway
Passes, with a Coloured map and Many Illustrations (Srirampur: J.H. Peters, 1855).
7. Ibid., pp. 4-5.
8. Kalidas Maitra, Electric telegraph ba taritbartabaha prakaran (Srirampur. J.H. Peters, 1855);
Kalidas Maitra, Vaspiyakal o Bharatiya Railway: The Steam Engine and the East India Railway
Containing a History o f India, with a Chronological Table o f the Indian Princes, from Judister down
to the Present Time with a Description o f the Places and their Histories through which the Railway
Passes, with a Coloured map and Many Illustrations (Srirampur: J.H. Peters, 1855).
9. J. Mack, Elements o f Chemistry (Srirampur, 1824).
10. Kalidas Maitra, Electric telegraph ba taritbartabaha prakaran (Srirampur: J.H. Peters, 1855).
11: Ibid., pp. 120-131.
12. Maitra, Vaspiyakal o Bharatiya Railway, p. 48.
13. Ibid., pp. 6-7.
14. Ibid., p. 3.
15. Maitra, Electric telegraph, pp. 135-149.
16. Ibid., pp.142, 146.
17. Ibid., pp. 141-145, passim.
18. Cf. Abdul Bismillah, ed., Bharatenduyugeen Vyanga (Delhi: Sandarv Prakashan, 1989). I thank
Dr Francesca Orsini for lending me this book and for other references.
19. V/24/4282. First Report on the Operations o f the Electric Telegraph Department in India from
1 February 1855 to 31 January 1856 , Calcutta: Thos. Jones, 1856; no. 350, from W.B.
O’Shaughnessy, Superintendent, Electric Telegraphs, to C. Beadon, Secretary, Home Depart­
ment, Government o f India, 3 September 1855. Oriental and India Office Collections, The
British Library [henceforth OIOC].
20. Ibid., pp. 36-37.
21. Ibid., p. 7.
22. Ibid., p. 4.
23. V/24/4282. Annual Report o f the Telegraph D epartm ent!859-1860. Appendix. Abstract statement
showing the total cash receipts, and pro-forma charges o f each month, on account o f Paid and
Service messages transmitted by Electric telegraph during the year 1856-1857; also the total
number o f messages sent by ‘Natives’. Compiled by Sheeb Chunder Nundee, In Charge, Office
o f the Officiating Superintendent, Electric Telegraph in India, OIOC.
24. Home Public Proceedings, Electric Telegraph, no. 1,20 March 1857, from Lieutenant P. Stewart,
Officiating Superintendent, to C. Beadon, Secretary, Home Department, Government o f India,
no. 228, 14 February 1857. National Archives o f India [henceforth NAIJ.
25. R. Mukherjee and P. Kapoor, Dateline 1857: Revolt Against the Raj (Delhi: Rolli Books, 2008).
The map is by Tanmoy Chakraborty.
26. D.K. Lahiri Choudhury, ‘1857 and the Communication Crisis’, Rethinking 1857 (Delhi: Orient
Longman, 2007), pp. 267, 274.
84 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

27. J.W. Kaye, History o f the Sepoy War, volume 1 (London: W.H. Allen, 1864-1880), pp. 491-492;
Mukherjee and Kapoor, Dateline 1857, pp. 16-17.
28. Hunter, The Indian Empire, p. 417.
29. See S.P. Huntington, ‘The Clash o f Civilisations?’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3 (summer 1993),
pp. 22-49.
30. Hunter, The Indian Empire, p. 418.
31. Choudhury, Rethinking 1857, pp. 261-282.
32. N. Rajendran, ‘The Revolt o f 1857: Rebellious Prelude and Nationalist Response in Tamil Nadu’,
Rethinking 1857 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 180-209, p. 202; Choudhury, Rethinking
1857, pp. 275-276; Home Public Proceedings, Post Office, No. 7, 30 October 1857. From E.
Maltby, Acting Chief Secretary to the Government o f Bombay, to C. Beadon, Secretary, Home
Department, Government o f India, No. 1334, 21 September 1857. NAI.
33. Home Department, Public Proceedings, Electric Telegraph (A), Nos. 8-12, 6 March 1857,
registered telegram no. 40, from G.T. Edmonstone, Secretary, Government o f India, to
Lieutenant L. Anderson, Government o f Bombay, Calcutta, 25 November 1856. NAI.
34. Bombay Telegraph Courier, 2 December 1856. NAI.
35. On the international response to 1857, see Yu Sheng-Wu and Chang Chen-Kun, ‘China and
India in the mid-nineteenth century,’ in P.C. Joshi (ed.), Rebellion 1857: A Symposium (Delhi:
People’s Publishing House, 1957), pp. 332-353; also P. Shastiko, ‘Russian Press on 1857*,
Rebellion, p. 332; Liliana Dalle Nogare, ‘Echoes o f 1857 in Italy,’ Rebellion, pp. 322-331; Charles
Fournian, ‘Contemporary French Press,’ Rebellion, pp. 321-313. The paper on China compared
1857 and the Second Opium War 1856-1860.
36. Home Department, Public Proceedings, Electric Telegraph (A), Nos. 8-12, 6 March 1857.
Blacknight’s deposition, No. 312 o f 1856, from J. Blacknight, Officiating First Class Inspector,
Electric Telegraph, to R.L. Brunton, Deputy Superintendent, Pune, 4 December 1856. NAI.
37. Home Department, Public Proceedings, Electric Telegraph (A), No. 30 o f 1857, from
J. Blacknight, Officiating First Class Inspector, Electric Telegraph, to R.L. Brunton, Deputy
Superintendent, Pune, 14 December 1856. NAI.
38. Ibid., No. 476, from C. Beadon, Secretary, GOI, to Lieutenant P. Stewart, officiating
Superintendent, Electric Telegraph in India, Calcutta, 6 March 1857. NAI.
39. Home Department, Public Proceedings, Fort William, No. 5, 16 October 1857. From Thomas
Ogilvy, Magistrate o f Dharwar, to W. Hart, Secretary to the Government o f Bombay, no. 894,
4 June 1857, citing several instances o f in formation incontinence. NAI.
40. Cf. Basudeb Chattopadhyay, ‘Panic Sunday in Calcutta: 14 June 1857*, Rethinking 1857 (Delhi:
Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 1 6 5 -1 7 9 .1 grieve to take note o f the sudden and tragic loss to the
world o f history o f this brilliant teacher and generous researcher, the news o f whose untimely
demise reached me even as I was writing this paper.
41. House o f Commons Papers, East India (Governor General), Return to an Order o f the House
o f Commons, 5 February 1858, Ordered by the House o f Commons to be Printed, 12 February
1858. NAI.
42. M.R. Gubbins, The Mutinies in Oudh (London, repr. Patna: Janaki Prakashan, [1858] 1978),
p. 360.
43. General Report for 1857-1858, p. 4. National Library, Calcutta [henceforth NL].
44. Home Department, Public Proceedings, Electric Telegraph, 14 August 1857, no. 5-6. From the
Acting Superintendent o f the Telegraph, to Secretary, Government o f India, 15 July 1857. NAI.
45. General Report fo rl8 5 7 -1858, p. 5. NL.
46. Iltudus Thomas Pritchard, The Mutinies in Rajpootana (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1860
[repr. 1976]), p. 192.
47. Gubbins, The Mutinies in Oudh, pp. 380-381.
48. The Indian Post and Telegraph Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1 (January 1920), p. 50. NL.
 ‘Clemency’ Canning, the Telegraph, Information 85

49. The Indian Post and Telegraph MagazineyVol. I, No. 3 (March 1920), p. 20. NL.
50. P.J.O. Taylor, A Companion to the ‘Indian Mutiny (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 327.
51. Bayly, Information and empire: intelligence gathering and social communication in India
1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 319-322.
52. Home Public Proceedings, Electric Telegraph, no. 6-7, 4 December 1857. From Lieutenant
Colonel R. Strachey, Secretary, Central Provinces, to C. Beadon, ^ecretary, Home Department,
Government o f India, no. 866,9 October 1857. NAI.
53. Home Public Proceedings, Post Office, no. 14, 30 October 1857. From E. Maltby, Acting Chief
Secretary to the Govt, o f Bombay, to C. Beadon, Secretary, Home Department, Government of
India, no. 1334, 21 September 1857. NAI.
54. Home Public Proceedings, Post office, no. 7, 30 October 1857. Endorsement no. 1119, from
the Junior Secretary, Government o f Bengal, forwarding a letter from the Judge o f Jessore,
8 October 1857. NAI.
55. Ibid. NAI.
56. Home Public Proceedings, Fort William, no. 4, 6 September 1857. From Captain C. Holroyd,
Principal Assistant Commissioner, to Colonel Jenkins, Agent to the Governor General, North
East Province. NAI.
57. George O. Trevelyan, Cawnpore, fourth edition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), p. 53.
58. Council o f India Minutes and Memoranda 1858-1947: C/137/ ff. 20-79. India Office,
30 April 1874. Lieutenant Colonel Owen Tudor Burne. Historical Summary o f the Central Asian
Question. Appendix VII, ff.76 (Translated by J. Fred. Hodgson, Lieutenant and Interpreter,
H.M. Bengal Army). OIOC.
59. Ibid. OIOC.
60. Trevelyan, Cawnporeyp. 55.
61. V.D. Savarkar, The Indian War o f Independence (London:, 1909 [reprinted Bombay: Phoenix,
1947]), p. 82.
62. Dosabhoy Framjee, The British Raj contrasted with its predecessors and an inquiry into the
disastrous consequences o f the rebellion in the North-West Provinces upon the hopes o f the
people o f India ([Manager o f the Bombay Times]y Londoti: Smith, Elder and Co., 1858). Indian
Tracts 1849-69. Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
63. Anonymous, Bengal Massacre! (London: printed for private circulation, n.d.); letter published
in the Harkaruy 5 September 1857. NL.
64. Taylor, A Companion to the Tndian Mutiny1o f 1857yp. 299.
65. Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Dastanbuy: A Diary o f the Indian Revolt o f1857y [dastanbu] trans.
by Khwaja Ahmad Faruqi (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1970).
66. Act XV o f 1857.
67. Cf. S. Bhattacharya, Rethinking 1857yp. xxxii.
68. Arms Act XXVIII o f 1857.
69. Bengal Hurkaru 13 June 1857; Syed Mahdi Hussain, Bahadur Shah Zafar and the War o f 1857 in
Delhi , first published 1958, reprinted by Aakar Books, Delhi, 2006, p. 9.
70. Souvenir o f the banquet and evening fete in celebration o f the 25th anniversary o f the establishment
o f submarine telegraphy with the Far East held at the Imperial Institute, London , on Friday, 25 th
July 1894yLondon: Private printing, 1894.
71. For example, the work by C.T. Mangin, la Revolte au bengale en 1857 et 1858 amongst others.
72. B. English, ‘The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt o f 1857*, Past and Presentyvol. 42, no.
142 (Feb. 1994), pp. 169-178, p. 175 fh24.
73. For a description o f the destruction see N. Lahiri, ‘Commemorating and Remembering 1857:
The Revolt in Delhi and its Afterlife’, World Archaelogyyvol. 43, no. 1 (June 2003), pp. 35-60.
74. Cf. M.H. Fisher, ‘The office o f the Akhbar Nawis: The Transition from Mughal to British Forms’,
Modern Asian Studiesyvol. 27, no. 1 (1993), pp. 45-82.
86 Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

75. Rizvi and Bhargava, Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh, pp. 7-8.
76. Trevelyan, Cawnpore, p. 98.
77. Augier papers. Appendix A: The history o f the murder o f Major Neill at Augur in 1887, p. 6.
Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge University.
78. Mutiny Papers, Collection no. 18,1857, NAI.
79. Hussain, Bahadur Shah ZafaryPreface, p. xviii.
80. Ibid., pp. xxix-xxx.
81. M. Edwardes, ed., W.H. Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary (London: Cassell, 1957).
82. Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘The Mentality o f the Mutiny: Conceptions o f the Alternative Order in
1857’, excerpted in B. Pati, ed., The 1857 Rebellion (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007),
pp. 281-294, p. 282.
8 3 .1.J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British M apping in India , c. 1756-1905 (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 136.
84. House o f Commons Papers, East India (Governor General), Return to an Order o f the House
o f Commons, 5 February 1858, Ordered by the House o f Commons to be Printed, 12 February
1858. Home Department no. 130 o f 1857. From the Governor-General-in-Council to the Court
o f Directors, 10 November 1857. NAI.
85. House o f Commons Papers, East India (Governor General), Return to an Order o f the House
o f Commons, 5 February 1858, Ordered by the House o f Commons to be Printed, 12 February
1858. Appendix E. No. 1167 from E.A. Samuells, Commissioner o f Revenue for the Division o f
Patna, to A.R. Young, Secretary, Government o f Bengal, Patna, 6 October 1857. NAI.
 5

FENIANS, SEPOYS AND THE FINANCIAL PANIC OF 1857

Mark Sullivan Hall

The time o f England’s downfall is at hand.

Ireland awake.
W ill you be up?
Long live N ena Sahib. D ow n with England.
Hurrah for liberty.
God save the people...
— Ballad, Belfast D aily M ercury, 2 November 1857.

WHY was Ireland's nationalist movement for independence unable to capitalise

on the British imperial crisis of 1857? By the middle of the nineteenth century, a
clear pattern had already emerged linking rebellion against British rule in Ireland
with external threats to Britain and its empire. The Sepoy Rebellion against
the British Raj in India and tension between Britain and the French Empire of
Napoleon III created a sense of impending peril to the prevailing political order
in the British Isles. "England's difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity' had long been
the rallying cry of Irishmen who wished to establish a nation independent of
Great Britain. Even though they had been biding their time for almost a decade
after the failed revolt of 1848, Irish nationalists in 1857/1858 were unable to
mount even a symbolic revolt at what appeared to be a moment of great peril
for the British Empire. It was in fact not until another decade had passed, in
1867, that the next serious revolt against British hegemony in Ireland took place.
Some of the reasons for this failure to mount even the semblance of a ‘rising’ lie
in the geographical and economic circumstances in which the Irish nationalist
movement found itself in 1857 and 1858, just at the time when international
events and news of the Indian Mutiny seemed most threatening to the security
of the British Empire.
88 Mark Sullivan Hall

The Irish Context

Eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ Irish history is punctuated

by a series of failed revolts against British domination which were all predicated
on revolutionary and military movements occurring outside the British Isles.
The abortive coup d’etat of Robert Emmet in 1803 was a reaction to the 1801
Act of Union, which saw the merger of Britain and Ireland into one political
entity and the dissolution of the Irish parliament; but the 1801 Act was a
consequence of, and a reaction to, the failed Napoleonic invasion of Ireland and
the ‘risings’ of 1798. The Young Ireland Movement of 1848/1849 was a reflection
of contemporary revolutionary movements in France, Sicily, the German states
and elsewhere. The year 1867 saw an attempted rebellion led by Irish Americans
who were veterans of either the American Civil War or the subsequent Irish-
American invasions of British-held Canada. A final failed rebellion before the
creation of the Irish Free State in 1921/1922 was the 1916 Easter Rebellion,
which was planned to coincide with the receipt of arms shipments from Imperial
Germany, Britain’s foe at that time in the First World War.1

A Moment of Opportunity: 1857

The latter half of the 1850s appeared to many Irish nationalists as a propitious
time to begin another attempt at independence. Anglo-French tensions were
heightened by Napoleon Ill’s naval build-up, as well as attempted assassinations
of the French Emperor by British-based malcontents. Despite the erstwhile
cooperation of Britain and France in the Crimean War, few doubted that there
loomed a real possibility of another Anglo-French conflict at this time. Then,
in May 1857, events in India brought alarm to the British and heartened the
empire’s opponents. A mutiny by sepoys (native Indian soldiers) against their
European overlords shook the very foundations of imperial rule.
The first news of the mutiny reached Ireland in July 1857, and the anti-
British press there immediately reacted with unconcealed glee and predictions
of the collapse of the British Empire. The leading Irish newspaper that sym­
pathised with the Indian rebels was Dublin-based the Nation. Its column of
4 July 1857 trumpeted ‘[n]ews of the most important character has been received
from India ... the rottenness spreading from its core has reached the surface,
new breaches will open from day to day, till at last the whole [Empire] sinks into
irreparable ruin’.2 In a similar vein, another nationalist newspaper, the Dundalk
People's Examiner and People's Journal, wrote on the same date that:

There is terror in D owning-street, consternation at the H om e Guards, and

a running to and fro o f governm ent officials through London. The Sepoy or
 Fenians, Sepoys and the Financial Panic of 1857 89

native Indian soldiers, to the am ount o f nearly 10,000 m en, have revolted
against the ‘great A nglo-Saxon/ and in their fury they massacred every
European w ho came w ithin the reach o f their h a n d s.... It appears, at all
events, that the crisis in India is looked upon in London as one o f the gravest
character, and in a few days no less than 14,000 troops will be despatched to
the scene o f conflict. Before their arrival their service^ may not be required,
for by that tim e the glory o f the British arms in India may have passed
away.3

For their part, Irish and English unionists, who opposed Irish nationalists
and wished to maintain the union of Britain and Ireland, began to infer
connections between sepoys and those Irish who favoured independence from
Britain. The Belfast Daily Mercury, a unionist newspaper, would refer to rival
nationalist publications as ‘sepoy journals’. It railed against the Irish supporters
of the mutiny and ventured to suggest that they were even more culpable than
the sepoys themselves: ‘But what shall we say of the Irish demons who gloat
over such atrocities as we have above indicated? Are they not worse than the
Sepoys? Have they not fouler minds and blacker hearts than any Sepoy?’4
The Mercury reprinted ballads reportedly sung by what it termed ‘Irish sepoy
patriots’ and noted how they cheered the ‘glorious news’ of ‘thirteen thousand
of our oppressors killed by the ... gallant sepoys’, and called upon their fellow
nationalists to ‘strike for your country and nationality’.5
For Irish nationalists, of course, at the same time that the word ‘sepoy’ was
being reclassified in the English language as a synonym for brutality in general
(just as the word ‘Amritsar’ would be used in the twentieth century Irish press
to refer to any massacre), connections between their cause and that of the
‘sepoys’ were enthusiastically noted. The Nation compared the Irish struggle for
independence with the Sepoy Mutiny throughout 1857 and 1858 and sought to
draw lessons from the experience:

The Indian insurrection has awakened in this country a w ondrously unanim ous
feeling that retribution has at last overtaken English filibusterism .... The Indian
revolt is a great lesson; it shows what a body o f armed or disciplined m en— like
the Bengal Native Infantry, or the M ilitia o f any country: France, Scotland,
England, or Ireland— m ay do.

Irish soldiers serving in the British Army, according to the Nation, should use
the mutineers as an example:

The Indian Sepoy ... has arisen from his thralldom; he has returned to his
allegiance to his country, he no longer strikes for his county’s oppressors, but
at them; he no longer upholds a foreign rule— he fights for his own ‘Immortal
Green’ and all the world admire and applaud him .6
90 Mark Sullivan Hall

The Kilkenny Journal also noted the impressive show of resistance in India:
‘Every day that Delhi holds out is a day of hope for India’, and drew parallels with
other colonial territories:

There are very few who do not believe that if Australia willed she could be free
in a w eek.... Either country has the way; all she wants is the will. That India is
show ing her will in this matter, there is no doubt; and though the struggle may
be long and desperate, we have little doubt that she will ultim ately su cceed .7

The Irish Nationalist Response in the USA

Most of the leaders of the Young Ireland Movement had gone into exile since
the 1848/1849 rising. Some went to Europe, but by 1857 most of the exiled
leaders were in United States, and the principal organisation advocating
an independent Irish state in the early 1850s was the New York City-based
Emmet Monument Association (EMA). This organisation was named for the
nationalist martyr of a half century before. Emmet had been sentenced to death
for leading a failed insurrection and was hung, drawn and quartered in Dublin
in September 1803. On the eve of his execution Robert Emmet famously asked
that no monument be raised to him until Ireland ‘takes her place among the
nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written’. In the
mid-1850s, Michael Doheny, a lawyer and himself a refugee from 1848, was
the chairman of the American organisation which took the famous martyr’s
name for its title. After the end of the Crimean War, the EMA was suspended,
but even without a formal organisation, nationalists in America still looked to
the New York-based Doheny as a leading figure in their cause. As Peter Putnis
has shown elsewhere in this volume (Chapter 1) in his paper on ‘1857 and the
International Press’, the first news of the Sepoy Mutiny against British India
reached New York via weekly steamship from London on 23 June of that
year. The sensationalist and sporadic nature of the information coming to
America about the mutiny easily lent itself to an interpretation of events in
India which emphasised the gloomiest prospects for the future of the British
Empire. Soon afterwards, the former EMA members decided to instigate an
armed rebellion in the British Isles to achieve independence for Ireland and sent
a messenger to Dublin to the man they thought best placed to lead the rebellion.
This was James Stephens, another 1848 veteran, who had recently returned
to Ireland after a period of exile in France.8 The New Yorkers could hardly
have chosen a more enthusiastic revolutionary, and Stephens entrusted his
reply to another nationalist who had already spent time in New York, Joseph
Denieffe.
 Fenians, Sepoys and the Financial Panic of 1857 91

Denieffe arrived in the USA in January 1858. According to his memoir, he

called first at Michael Doheny’s New York law office and was told that the former
EMA chief was in court. As he arrived at the courthouse, he spotted Doheny
emerging, and pursued him through the streets to deliver Stephens’ reply.
Doheny opened the letter on the spot, tears coming to his eyes, according to
Denieffe, as he read the message from Dublin. Immediate action against Britain
was promised by Stephens, assuming the funds and the men for an uprising were
available:

You m ust then be able to furnish from £80 to £100 a m onth, dating from the
departure o f the bearer, from N ew York. Had [I] a casting vote in your council,
I should moreover, suggest you sending 500 m en unarmed to England, there
to m eet an agent w ho should furnish each o f them with an Enfield rifle. This,
o f course, w ould involve considerable expense; but were it possible to stave off
suspicion that we m ight fall on them altogether by surprise. O f course, too, this
m oney should com e from you, and I beg o f you, if possible, to raise it and act
on m y suggestion.9

Denieffe, Doheny and other EMA members set about raising funds for an
insurrection. However, bearing in mind that the impetus for the planned revolt
had come from New York, Denieffe was surprised at the scarcity of funds
available in that city:

At the time it was extrem ely difficult to raise any m on ey for such a purpose.... It
took two m onths to raise four hundred dollars (£80). I was anxious to get back,
and proposed to the C om m ittee that I w ould start with that am ount, and they
could send the balance o f instalm ent later, which they agreed t o . 10

Returning to Dublin, Denieffe and Stephens set about planning a rising with
enthusiasm, while waiting for the promised money, men and arms to arrive from
across the sea. However, after a few months, their organising came to an end
because, as Denieffe recorded in his memoir, not a word was heard, nor a penny
received, from New York:

There had been no news from America since m y return, and it looked as if
our friends there had given up all thought o f u s .... The state o f inertia was
demoralizing. Stephens was unable to keep his appointm ents, and all
engagements had to be abandoned.... At last Stephens came to the conclusion
that I m ust go back again to America, but where was the m oney to take me
there? W e were all penniless, or nearly s o ....11

Somehow the Dubliners got the money together to pay for Denieffe to sail
again to New York, carrying a ‘hot letter’ from Stephens to the Irish-Americans.
On arrival he found that ‘they were just after sending the balance of the first
92 Mark Sullivan Hall

instalment, one hundred dollars (£20), and there was not another cent in the
treasury’. A month later, he returned with only £40 ‘which disappointed all our
friends. I told Stephens not to depend on America for further assistance’.12
In the 1848 Young Ireland rising, James Stephens had acted as assistant to
the insurrectionary movement’s leader, William Smith O’Brien. Stephens must
certainly have been aware, therefore, that John Mitchell, the Young Irelander
charged with fund raising in the USA at the time, had collected $40,000 from
Irish-American sympathisers.13Now that he was in charge, James Stephens must
have been hoping that the Irish diaspora would contribute funding of a similar
magnitude. So as the impetus for action in 1857/1858 had first come from the
New York Irish-Americans, the question arises as to why, within a space of
a few months, were the New Yorkers suddenly unable to come up with even
the minimum of funding they must have known was required for a successful
uprising in Ireland?

New York Irish Nationalists and the Panic of 1857

Unfortunately for the Irish nationalist movement, what for them was the
inspiring news of the 1857 Indian Mutiny against Britain occurred by complete
coincidence more or less at the same time as one of the worst financial crises ever
to take place in the entire history of the city of New York. The 1857 ‘monetary
collapse’14 meant that for a short period of time, far fewer Irish-Americans had
any spare cash to fund the independence struggle in the home country than
would have been the case at almost any other time. This brief financial panic
coincided with a continuing flow of news of the unprecedented threat to the
British Empire’s most important colony.
‘The Panic of 1857’, a short but severe economic crisis, began in late August
and reached its climax in New York in October and November of that year, at
about the same time that Irish-Americans first learned of the crisis Britain faced
from the Sepoy Rebellion. In September, ‘Stuyvesant Sepoy Sympathisers’ had
organised a large meeting in New York City’s Stuyvesant Hall to express their
sympathy for the mutineers in India.15The New York Times of 23 October 1857,
in an article denouncing Irish sympathy with the sepoy rebels, also reported,
in the very same column, on one of the central events of the Panic of 1857:
the sinking of the USS Central America, bound for New York with 30,000 lbs
of Californian gold, which the bankers of that city had been counting on to
back up their dwindling holdings of paper currency.16 That month, mobs of
tens of thousands of New Yorkers surrounded the city’s banks demanding to
withdraw their money. Bank after bank collapsed and all withdrawals of cash
from financial institutions in New York City, the heart of the Irish-American
nationalist movement at that time, were suspended.17
 Fenians, Sepoys and the Financial Panic of 1857 93

The Panic of 1857 brought all of America’s trade briefly to a halt. The situation
in New York City was uniquely grave, as it had already, by this time, become the
centre of the American banking industry. Workers sold their tools to trade for
food and then marched to demand jobs. Hunger then turned these protests into
bread riots. The crisis fell on the city’s women especially hard: ‘A thousand women
took to street whoring’ was how one source described the female population’s
response to the cash crisis. According to the leading organisation for poverty
relief, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, New York City,
in late 1857 ‘presented a more appalling picture of social wretchedness than was
probably ever witnessed on this side of the Atlantic’.18
By November, police surrounded City Hall and Federal troops were called
out to protect US Customs and Treasury buildings from rioters. Panic gripped
New York’s mostly English and Protestant establishments. Funding insurrection
in the home country must have been an extremely low priority in late 1857 for
immigrant groups like the Irish who found themselves blamed for these riots.
Drastic remedies were urged to bring the crisis to an end. One leading newspaper,
the New York Herald, called on the authorities to ‘shoot down any quantity of
Irish or Germans.... Rioters, like other people, have heads to be broken and
bodies to be perforated with ball and steel.’19

A Lost Opportunity

Denieffe returned to Dublin with the meagre funds from New York in 1858. The
idea for an 1857 insurrection had originally come not from Ireland but from
Doheny and the other Americans, and for the Dubliners America had seemed an
endless source of money. So Stephens and the other Irish nationalist Dubliners,
confidently expecting a stream of revenue to arrive from New York, created
a new organisation called the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (IRB). This
organisation would indeed play a central role in the Irish nationalist movement
over the following decades, and in the twentieth century included nationalist
leaders such as Michael Collins among its members. The IRB came into being
in Dublin on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1858. Drawing on a term for ancient Irish
warriors, Irish nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic soon afterwards began to
be called Fenians. James Stephens eventually became known as the ‘The Fenian
Chief’. Hope for an imminent insurrection in 1857 thus set in train the chain \}f
events which led to the formation of the IRB and a rekindled organisation for
which the term ‘Fenian’ became a well-known label describing the movement
for Irish independence from Britain. There would however be no revolt of
any significance in 1858, despite this having been the whole point to the initial
organising activities that resulted in the creation of the IRB.
94 Mark Sullivan Hall

When a serious rebellion eventually did materialise, Irish-Americans did

play a crucial role, as had been expected in New York and Dublin in 1858. The
‘Fenian raids’ into Canada led by Irish nationalist veterans of the American Civil
War were large-scale incursions involving thousands of soldiers. Numerous
raids throughout the late 1860s may have served to inspire anti-British sentiment
among Irish nationalists in both America and Ireland, but these invasions were
never of sufficient scope to have any important impact on Britain’s hold over
Canada. Discharged American soldiers of the Civil War also played a role in
the abortive uprising in Ireland itself in 1867. But in 1857, Doheny, Denieffe,
Stephens and the other Irish nationalists had acted with an urgency which
indicated that they hoped a serious rebellion would take place in weeks or
months rather than many years in the future.
The fact that an important moment had slipped by was not lost on the Irish
men and women who came to be known as Fenians. One of the most well-known
members of the Irish Fenian movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century
was Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, who, in the 1880s, would go on to organise the
first ever bombings by Irish Republicans of English cities. This famous attempt to
bring to prominence the cause of Irish Nationalism through violent explosions
in England came to be known as the dynamite campaign. On 2 January 1858, the
young O’Donovan Rossa gave his first ever public speech, at the same time that
Denieffe was arriving in New York in anticipation of massive funding for their
cause. Rossa’s remarks on that topic, a typical reaction of contemporary Irish
nationalists to the Indian Mutiny, brought him the greatest round of applause of
that occasion. He stated:

The time is gone when England could create fear; under present circumstances
she has still the power over Ireland in consequence o f all her internal elem ents o f
discord, disunion and disorganization, but not over any united or enlightened
people. Russia has proved this. America and Naples insult and defy her, and
India grasps her by the throat and cries: 'Robber, stand and deliver up your
b o o t / .20

O’Donovan Rossa was one of Stephen’s first insurrectionary organisers who

had joined the IRB at its inception in 1858, only to be recalled later that year
when the subsequent funding never appeared. In his memoirs, he expressed
his frustration that a sympathetic ‘rising’ in Ireland never happened, and he
despaired of the fact that most of his Irish compatriots supported the British,
and not the mutineers:

England was blow ing the Sepoys from the cannon’s m outh; and whenever
England won a battle there were days o f fasting and prayer declared
in England— and Ireland, too, to give thanks to God ... it was taken for granted
that God was on the side o f England— for England had the heavy cannon, and
the giant powder, and the mitrilleuse artillery.21
 Fenians, Sepoys and the Financial Panic of 1857 95

Conclusion

In times of ‘English difficulties’, Irish nationalists naturally sought to redouble

their activities against their perceived imperial oppressors.22 And it was in the
spring of 1857 that the British rule over its vast Indian Empire faced its most
significant threat in the entire nineteenth century, as thousands of sepoys
rebelled against their British officers and launched a movement of resistance
that was eventually to claim hundreds of thousands of lives and cause severe
economic dislocation. Britain was, at this time, also alarmed by developments in
Second Empire France, where, despite its recent cooperation with Britain in the
Crimean War, the regime of Napoleon III launched an expensive naval build-up
which was widely feared in Britain as the harbinger of an imminent invasion.
When tales of unparalleled atrocities by the mutinous sepoys reached England
by the summer of 1857, Whitehall was thrown into a panic. Lord Palmerston’s
administration feared the loss of the imperial grip not only in India, but—by
sympathetic reaction—in Ireland as well.
In Ireland itself, many of the principal players of the abortive Young Ireland
Movement of 1848, such as James Stephens and John Mitchell, were still extremely
active in the Republican Movement in 1857, travelling between Europe, Ireland
and America at about this time to further the revolutionary cause. Leadership
of the Irish nationalists in the USA was centred on New York City. And thus
a copycat rising in 1857/1858 failed to materialise. Insurrectionary activity in
the cause of Irish independence needed funding. That funding, in 1857, needed
to come from America, and more specifically from New York City, because in
this city lived the Irish-American leaders who would be most likely to finance a
revolt back in the mother country. The problem was that New York City, to an
extent unseen throughout the rest of United States, was in the grip of a sudden
financial crisis which occurred at the same crucial moment that Irish-Americans,
in sympathy with the Sepoy Rebellion, would have been most likely to donate
to a revolt against British rule in Ireland. Thus, any sympathetic insurrection by
Dublin-based and New York-funded Irish nationalists contemporaneously with
the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was precluded by the unique geographic and financial
circumstances of the American Panic of 1857.
Nevertheless, although a simultaneous, sympathetic ‘rising’ never happened in
Ireland, ultimately the Indian Mutiny came to be a symbol of British oppression,
used by Irish nationalists whenever they needed a suitable example of misrule by
their own hated colonial masters. The Saint Patrick’s Day meeting in Dublin in
1858 occurred in an atmosphere in which the Sepoy Rebellion inspired many Irish
nationalists. Soon afterwards a new term, ‘Fenian’, became popularised to refer
to Irish men and women who took to armed resistance to achieve independence.
Before the 1857 Rebellion, Englishmen familiar with the term ‘sepoy’ regarded it
as simply a term referring to Indian soldiers. Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of
96 Mark Sullivan Hall

Wellington, served in India earlier in the nineteenth century and was sometimes
referred to as the ‘Irish sepoy’, a phrase which reflected his Irish birth and his
Indian service and was not meant as derogatory. After the 1857 Rebellion in
India, the term ‘sepoy’ became for most people in the British Isles a disparaging
term denoting barbaric behaviour. ‘Fenian’ and ‘Fenianism’ were idioms that
would also come to inspire loathing throughout the British Isles for the great
majority who had no sympathy for the notion of an independent Ireland and its
advocates of nationalist struggle through violent means. Connections between
independence struggles in Ireland and India also inspired Irish nationalists in
the twentieth century. One of these was Padraic Pearse, the leader of yet another
failed Irish rising, the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Three years before this rebellion,
Pearse had paid grudging respect to the efficiency of the British in an article in
a journal called the Murder Machine, a title which no doubt revealed Pearse’s
attitude towards the empire:

A French writer has paid the English a very well deserved com plim ent. He says
that they never com m it a useless crime. W hen they hire a man to assassinate an
Irish patriot, when they blow a Sepoy from the m outh o f a cannon, when they
produce a famine in one o f their dependencies, they always have an ulterior
m otive.23

Perhaps Pearse thought too highly of the British, for his death by firing squad,
along with that of the other leaders of the failed 1916 revolt, may have been
a great strategic mistake by the British. These drawn out executions did much
to turn public opinion against British rule in Ireland, paving the way for an
unprecedented election victory for the nationalist Sinn Fein Party in the next
round of elections in Ireland. Similarly, the memory of sepoys being tied to
cannon and ripped apart continued to inspire the Indian nationalist movement
almost a century later when independence from Britain was finally achieved.
Indian and Irish nationalist movements continued to assist and inspire each
other well into the twentieth century, in their common struggle to create nation
states independent of British rule.

Notes and References1

1. R.F. Foster. The Oxford History o f Ireland (Oxford: OUP, 1972).

2. Nation, 4 July 1857.
3. Dundalk People’s Examiner and People’s Journal, 4 July 1857.
4. Belfast Daily Mercury quoted in J. Bender, ‘Mutiny or Freedom fight?: The 1857 Indian Mutiny
and the Irish Press’, in Simon J. Potter (ed.), Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain:
Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857-1921 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).
5. Belfast Daily Mercury, 2 November 1857.
6. Nation, quoted in Bender, Newspapers and Empire, p. 105.
 Fenians, Sepoys and the Financial Panic of 1857 97

7. Kilkenny Journal 4 December 1857.

8. Desmond Ryan, The Fenian Chief. A Biography o f James Stephens (Dublin: Gill & Son, 1967),
p. 87.
9. Denieffe Joseph, A Personal Narrative o f the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (Shannon: Irish
University Press, 1969) p. 89-90.
10. Ibid., p. 20.
11. ib id . '
12. Ibid., pp. 27-28.
13. Desmond Ryan, The Fenian C hief p. 37.
14. J.F. Huston, The Panic o f 1857 and the Coming o f the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisana State
University Press, 1987), p. 11.
15. New York Timesy23 September 1857.
16. New York Times, 23 October 1857.
17. Huston, The Panic o f 1857yp. 22.
18. E.G. Burrows and M. Wallace, Gotham: A History o f New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), pp. 842-851.
19. Ibid.
20. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Rossa’s Recollections, 1838-1898 (Shannon: Irish University Press,
1972), pp. 193.
21. Ibid., p. 346. The Mitrailleuse was an early version o f the machine gun.
22. See, for example, details o f Fenian raids on Canada: Hereward Senior, The Last Invasion
o f Canada: The Fenian Raids, 1866-1870 (Toronto: Canadian War Museum. Historical
Publications, no. 27, 1991), p. 16.
23. P.H. Pearse, ‘The Murder Machine*, in Irish Reviewy February 1913, p. 1. Pearse was the
President o f the Provisional Irish Government and was executed by the British in 1916 after the
failed Easter Rising.
 6

BOWLD IRISH SEPOY

R.J. Morris

IN the massive index to the Irish Chief Secretary’s Papers, there are a number
of references to ‘The Ballad of the Bowld Sepoys’.1 A major element of these
papers involved correspondence between Dublin Castle and the magistrates and
resident magistrates of Ireland. By the late 1850s, the bulk of the work in Dublin
was led by Thomas Larcom, undersecretary for Ireland, 1853-1869. He instructed
his magistrates to furnish copies of the ‘seditious ballads and pamphlets’ in
question.2 Larcom was a military man. He gained his commission in the Royal
Engineers in 1820 and made his name as a leading figure in the still controversial
activities of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s.3In the 1850s,
he consolidated the position of undersecretary as the leading non-political post
in the Irish administration.4 He was in effect the head of the Irish civil service, a
public servant who believed in the rule of law, the firm if restrained maintenance
of public order and a fair, inclusive and non-sectarian relationship to Ireland’s
majority Catholic population. Larcom was already aware of the sepoy ballads. In
December 1858, he wrote to the magistrates of Portarlington, just to the west of
Dublin, thanking them for the three ballads they had sent. Two were ‘not worthy
of observation, but that no.3 (Sepoy Song) should be seized and destroyed’.
The next day, George Morant Esq., J.P. of Shirley House, Carrickmacross,
was thanked for his letter ‘with the accompanying sheet of ballads and I am
to acquaint you in reply that ballads containing the “Sepoy Song” should be
seized and destroyed’.5 Despite Larcom’s efforts, this ballad survived to appear
in the collection of John Davis White (1820-1893) of Tipperary. From there it
found shelter in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, and was printed in full in
volume five of The New History of Ireland.6As a decade, the 1850s stand between
the trauma of the famine and the activities of the Young Ireland Movement on
the one hand and on the other, the purposeful and sustained challenge of the
Fenian Brotherhood.7Any appearance of tranquillity was deceptive and relative.
During 1856 and 1857, Larcom’s in-tray contained a mutiny by the Tipperary
militia, potato riots in Galway, massive requests for troops to protect voters
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 99

and polling stations during the general election and two nasty periods of street
rioting in Belfast.8Larcom recognised the Sepoy Rebellion was an inspiration for
disaffection and disorder in Ireland.
Enough material was printed in the newspaper press to indicate what he
was up against. By September, the news from India had entered popular and
oppositional culture in Ireland. The Clonmel Chronicle reported that someone
had

em ployed the hour o f the night in chalking upon the gateways and doors, in
one o f the leading thoroughfares, sentim ents the m ost treasonable and blood­
thirsty ... the w riting was bold and legible; and in various places rude drawings
o f pikes, cannon, flags, hum an heads and hearts, transfixed by swords and
pik es.... On one gate underneath two pikes was the following

“Hurrah for Ireland! - THREE CHEERS FOR THE SEPOYS!! D own with
England’s Queen and the Saxon N ation!” ...
“People o f Ireland - THE SEPOYS HAVE SET YOU AN EXAMPLE!” ...
“O’D oheny9 - Let us now strike for freedom! - Hurrah! - D ow n with the flag o f
England and bad luck to the English!”

In a fourth place was represented a heart pierced with a sword, and the words -

“THIS IS AN ENGLISHMEN’S HEART!” ...

“REFUSE THE SAXON SHILLING, and you will crush British power in
Ireland!”
“BLOOD! BLOOD! - A DO G ’S DEATH to the man who takes the Saxon
shilling!”
“D ow n with England, and hurrah for the PIKE! - Remember NINETY-EIGHT
and FORTY-EIGHT!”
“O ’D o h e n y -A n o th e r ’98! - Boys, GRIND YOUR PIKES WELL! Curses on the
Saxon!”
“JOHN MITCHEL10 - HURRAH FOR THE SEPOY, and GOD SPEED THE
M UTINY.”
“Arise and VENGEANCE O N ENGLAND.”
“Patriots o f Ireland, here is THE PIKE, and D O N ’T LET THE OPPORTUNITY
PASS!”11

A few days later the town commissioners of Carrick-on-Suir met and

denounced such ‘incendiary and mischievous placards’ and raised a subscription
and offered a reward for ‘the apprehension of the guilty party’.12 October’s
news brought even better opportunities for the graffiti artists and poster
men. Attention was drawn to the ‘Irish sepoys’ of Nenagh and their ‘disloyal
calligraphic performances’ which appeared on the corner of Chapel Lane:

Tipperary Men! Are you Men!! If you have the spirit o f Irishmen, do not neglect
Ireland’s opportunity! Up the Green!! Hurrah for the Indian Revolution!
100 R.J. Morris

On the shutters of an unoccupied house in the vicinity of the chapel appeared

Glorious News! England defeated! God bless the rebels o f India! Hurrah for
freedom! ...
The 7th October, a day o f Glory and Exultation! Success to the gallant Sepoys!
Irishmen! N ow ’s the time. Strike for your country! Success to the friends o f
Nationality!13

In Mitchelstown in County Cork different placards had been posted:

MEN OF MITCHELSTOWN
GLORIOUS N E W S !!
Your old and inveterate enem y the Saxon
bites the dust, India, 150,000,000 o f
Brave Sepoys have risen for their freedom
N O W IS IRELAND’S OPPORTUNITY
Let us imitate the example o f the brave Sepoys
and strike for freedom
You have only to unite with gallant Tipperary
and the Green Flag will soon wave o ’er the
GAULTIES
Three cheers for old Ireland
Three more for the Sepoys
Be silent and steady
and when the time com es be ready

A second was a response to the recruiting efforts of the British Army in late 1857.

INDIA ! ! ! INDIA ! ! !
MEN OF MITCHELSTOWN -
The gallant Tipperary Boys
Have responded to the call o f the
GLORIOUS SEPOYS -
To show John Bull that centuries
have not subdued the hatred o f
- Erins’s brave sons -
For her Saxon oppressors
Three Cheers for the brave Sepoys ! ! !
D on ’t take the bloody Saxon’s shilling
He who tears this is not an Irishman
Printed by an Irishman w ho remembers ‘the days o f old’.

Another placard from Carlow, close to Dublin, had similar sentiments:

M en o f Carlow
The time o f England’s downfall is near at hand
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 101

Ireland’s awake
W ill you rise up?
Long Live ‘N ana Sahib!’
D own with the English!
Hurrah for Liberty! God save the people!

There was more from Cavan and elsewhere.14 V

As under-secretary, Colonel Thomas Larcom was in an excellent position to
appreciate the impact of events in India upon the culture of Irish disaffection. The
Ribbonmen were the latest in a long line of Catholic secret societies, lodge based
and bound together by oaths and passwords. Originating in the early nineteenth
century, their ideology included the notion of an egalitarian independent Ireland
achieved by armed insurrection. Although their activities were exaggerated by
informers and spies, their challenge to the authority of landlords and British rule
was taken very seriously in Dublin Castle, and their dedication to challenging
Orange Order activities was especially disruptive in the northeast of Ireland.15
Between 1856 and 1858, the legal officers in Dublin Castle were engaged in
preparing a case against a group of Ribbonmen for trial at Lietrim Assizes. A key
element in such prosecutions was evidence of secret oaths and passwords which
were illegal. When the case was first put together in 1856, evidence included
passwords found on the floor in the backroom of a public house in Ballmamore.
The passwords were dominated by references to France and the United States.

May France and England disagree ...

by the aid o f America we will be free

By the time the matter was raised again at the Spring Assizes in 1858,
very different passwords were found ‘on the person of the accused on the
18th February 1858 in the town of Carrickonshannon\

The Indian war is going on

I think it will continue long
The English loss is very great
They should remember 98
Your temper is right
I am no Indian
May the Emperors o f Christendom unite
in our cause and exterminate
Heresy and its infernal laws

The same sort of list was also found on a man called Patrick Duffy in Belfast
on 18 March 1858.16
The impact of events in India during 1857 was not a simple matter of
supplementing the culture of opposition by providing an example of armed
102 R.J. Morris

insurrection against the British. The reports from India resonated with the
complex and developing political consciousnesses of Ireland in the late 1850s.17
Belfast was a very different world from the purposeful administration of the
servants of the ruling class in Dublin Castle. The divisions produced by rapid
industrial and urban growth magnified the complexity and divisiveness of the
Irish responses to India in 1857. This was demonstrated in the fractious and
disputatious press of Belfast during a year that was marked by two periods of
street rioting. The first involved opposition to the Orange Order celebrations
of 12 July and the second, in September, further Catholic opposition to anti-
Catholic street preaching in the new public space of Custom House Square
in Belfast. In most cases, political judgement and analysis of India evolved
into discourses for which ‘the mutiny’ provided a rhetoric that sharpened the
divisions of internal politics, developed identities and was incorporated into the
struggle for the support of public and policymaking opinion.
The Belfast Newsletter was an established paper. It represented a conservative
Protestant interest, and was especially close to the group which had not only
dominated Belfast Municipal Corporation since the start of ratepayer elections
in 1842, but had taken care to exclude both Catholic and liberal interests from
local government. They were very different in ideology from the Protestant
ascendancy of Dublin Castle, or even of the landowning gentry. They had a total
confidence in their own religious and moral superiority, coupled with a sense
of being subject to a perpetual threat of destruction. This led to the belief in the
need for the total exclusion of Catholics from all and any positions of power.18
By the start of July, it was evident that something very disturbing was happening
in the Bengal provinces of India. Considerable loss of life and a breakdown of
discipline amongst native regiments of the East India Companies army indicated
a significant challenge to the authority of the British Empire. The initial
reaction was quite relaxed. Sir Colin Campbell and some 14,000 British troops
were on their way. The editor gave his readers a lecture on Indian history and
culture and wisely claimed that warnings of trouble had been ignored but
the Newsletter gave the bulk of its attention to other matters, the disputes
over the recent general election, the Indemnity Bill (a local dispute involving
Belfast Municipal Corporation), a debate over the abolition of the post of Lord
Lieutenant for Ireland and above all the trial of Madeleine Smith in Edinburgh
for poisoning her boyfriend by putting arsenic in his cocoa.19As rioting in Belfast
intensified, the Newsletter reported that the mutineers had been ‘defeated’ and
‘news of the fall of Delhi was hourly expected’. There was some racialised bluster,
‘a European regiment can still hold its own against a myriad of these rabid
Orientals’.20
By late July and throughout the three or four months that followed, it
became clear that matters were more serious. The basic narrative of the mutiny
was evident by mid-August, the affair of the cartridges at Meerut, the march to
Delhi and subsequent siege, the massacre at Cawnpore and the siege of Lucknow.
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 103

What subsequent reports did was to add depth and detail to the story. Evidence
grew of the extent of the mutiny, the success against British arms and the
humiliation and killing of Europeans. For several months the failure to recapture
Delhi was headlined in the dispatches from India. The doubt and the detail
intensified emotion and sharpened analysis. The atrocity stories played a
key part in this process. Accounts of Delhi were taken from the Illustrated
London News, ‘one young lady is said to have been stripped of her clothes and
suspended by her hands to a tree. She was hacked to pieces with knives ...’2I There
were accounts of the massacre of missionaries at Cawnpore. An editorial talked
of the

murder o f English gentlem en o f unstained honour and high courage, shot

dow n like dogs, w ithout the English privilege o f defending themselves against
odds however great; o f English w om en— English ladies— young mothers,
young wives, fair sisters, butchered, with all the m ost frightful incidents o f
atrocity: cut dow n at their bedsides with their babies at their bosums; cut
dow n on their knees, with the prayer o f Christian w om en at their lip s....22 It
was claimed that European troops rushed into battle w ith the dreadful war
cry— “Remember the ladies, remember the babies'’— ringing in their ears.23

The Irish perception of the mutiny was fed by two streams of information.
The first was a familiar one, represented by the frequent heading ‘British and Irish
Magnetic Telegraph’. Official dispatches, Parliamentary Debates, copies of London
newspapers as well as the English language press from India were the source of cut
and paste material for the Newsletter. The news came by steamer from Bombay and
overland to Alexandria from where it was taken on by other steamers. Whilst the
mails ploughed onwards towards British and Irish ports, the outline of the story
was transmitted by ‘the scanty telegraph’ from the telegraph station on Sardinia.
Tension, anxiety and mistrust were only increased by the awareness that knowledge
of events as they were understood in Ireland was some weeks behind what was
actually happening. Reports published in Belfast on 1 July were dated Bombay,
27 May. But Ireland, especially Protestant Ireland, gained another and in some
senses, what was for many readers, a more authentic understanding from ‘private
friends’ in India. For many families the news was personal as they had members
resident and involved in Indian affairs. There was a stream of letters, many
obviously written with the intention of publication. Many of these came from
young officers who had direct experience of fighting. Several were published from
‘a young officer, a native of Armagh’. He wrote: ‘nine miles from Delhi ... MY
DEAR FATHER—Since I last wrote to you, we have had some fighting against the
enemy, whom we thoroughly thrashed out of the field.... We were all very jolly
until about four o’clock, when the alarm sounded.’ He described their considerable
losses, how the men suffered in the heat and admitted the high quality of artillery
work by the enemy.24His next letter included a clash on the road to Delhi, ‘The 9th
104 R.J. Morris

Lancers charged and killed a good number of the enemy as they retreated. It was a
very pretty sight.’25 If the disarming language of the fox-hunting ballad seemed to
trivialise what was happening in Bengal, then readers also had letters from a number
of missionaries. Dr Duff, ‘eloquent missionary of the Free Church’ and Dr Kay of
Bishop’s College, Calcutta, provided accounts of atrocities, which, from the point of
view of Newsletter readers, was far more authoritative than anything coming from
the mildly mistrusted London press.

One European family they caught, and, having stripped father, m other and
children, they chopped o ff their toes and fingers tied them to trees, and burned
them alive! Their treatment o f any European females that have fallen into their
hands has been too horrible to be expressed by me.

These letters played a crucial part in preparing the religious sectarian response
to the mutiny. Dr Duff finished his story with the words, ‘Truly God’s judgments
are awfully abroad in this land now. Oh, that its British inhabitants, at least,
would “learn righteousness!”’26 There was a sense in which India belonged to
Ireland or at least showed the virtues of a Protestant-led Ireland. When Henry
Lawrence was killed in the fighting around Lucknow, he was not just a British
hero, he was one of them; ‘It is with mingled pride and sorrow we recall that
this fallen hero is an honoured son of our own Province ... our lamentation over
this gallant knight of Ulster.’ Readers were reminded that his mother was from
Donegal and he was educated at the Diocesan School in Londonderry. He was
the ‘Lisburn hero’.27A specific twist in this account of the virtuous contribution
of Ulster to India was provided by the 1857 results of the examination for entry to
the East India Company Civil Service. The recently established and controversial
Queen’s College at Belfast provided candidates who came top, fourth and tenth,
whilst at eight was Mr Tracy of Trinity College, Dublin, son of Belfast’s Resident
Magistrate. Just the sort of people, claimed the Newsletter, who will undertake
the ‘regeneration and reconstruction’ of India and prevent ‘the disease of 1857’.28
As the sense of mutiny (‘disloyalty’), massacre and humiliation deepened,
so did the intensity of the Irish response. For the type of northern Protestant
represented by the Newsletter, there were two major dimensions to this response.
As they absorbed the initial shock of the news from India, the Irish, like the
British, began to look for causes and solutions. For many Protestants in and
around Belfast, their assertive and confident evangelical faith provided a potent
and decisive means of analysis. At times this could be as simplistic as the graffiti
and posters of Tipperary. Dr Duff s letters from Calcutta gave some strong hints.
As early as August, ‘one who has friends in India’ called for prayer and told the
Newsletter:I

I for one believe that national sins are now bringing their consequences in
national judgm ents for our treatment o f 130,000,000 o f the hum an fam ily.... I
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 105

feel sure, had we acted as we ought, and spread Christianity with its principles,
long ere this, The Gospel w ould have w on its way into the hearts and hom es o f
the H indoo.

A few days later, the Church of England Young Men’s Society held a meeting
in the Wellington Hall, Belfast attended by the Lord Bishop of Down and
Connor. They sang ‘an appropriate hymn, “God Moves in mysterious ways”’.
Then came an address from Rev William M’Hwaine. He

took a hasty glance at the progress o f British power in India— the little that
had yet been done for Christianising the natives, and the disinclination which
the Governm ent has shown for m any years for countenancing the missionary
m ovem ent. He believed that now they were receiving punishm ent for lost
opportunities, for they had too long pampered H indooism , and it was only in
1829 that Suttee was abolished....

He read harrowing accounts from missionaries’ letters. Rev. Charles Seaver

then read the meeting the ninth chapter of Daniel. Frequent references were made
to this text during the crisis; ‘We have sinned and committed iniquity.... ’29It was
very simple, if the missionaries had only been allowed to convert the ‘Hindoos’
to the true Christian faith, then all the trouble would have been avoided. The
missionaries’ letters were influential here. Dr Wilson blamed the preference
given to high caste Indians. John M’Kee, Irish General Assemblies Missionary
to India, was praised when he called for funding to send 100,000 copies of the
New Testament to India.30Protestant Belfast observed the national day of fasting
prayer and humiliation on 7 October with self-congratulatory enthusiasm. The
sermons delivered that day showed the full extent of the evangelical analysis.
At the Magdalene Church, Rev. Hartrick read from Isaiah, ‘... show my people
their iniquities’. It was clear that the ‘calamity’ that had befallen ‘our Indian
possessions’, just like ‘the sufferings of the Israelites in Jeremiah’s time’ were
‘God’s judgements’ inflicted for ‘national sins’. These sins included

the great want o f personal religion am ongst the masses o f the people ...
the deceit and fraud so sadly and frequently apparent, even in the circles
o f the educated and wealthy ... to these were added, the public desecration o f
the Lord’s D ay by the Post Office.

There were sins specific to India; ‘the East India Company were guilty in the
matter of the opium trade, in their maintenance of Hindoo temples, and erection
of Mahometan mosques and in their neglect to provide Christian and Scriptural
instructions for the natives....’ Morgan of Fisherwick Place Presbyterian Church
claimed that £20,000 had been spent supporting ‘idolatry’. He blamed the
supporting of ‘caste’. The Brahmins had been ‘flattered and pampered’. ‘The
conduct of England in India had assuredly provoked God’s judgments.’31Evident
106 RJ. Morris

to his audience would have been the analogy between this and the support by the
British State for the Maynooth College, which trained priests for the Catholic
priesthood.
As the summer moved towards autumn the 12 July riots gave way to
disorder around open air preaching, and the barracks of Belfast filled with
extra troops and constabulary. The judgments of the conservative Protestants
of Belfast became increasingly reflexive and recursive. India was judged in
terms of their own perception of Irish history. The Protestant position and
policy in Ireland was reassessed in light of the news from India, and, more
importantly, Catholic populations and leaderships were not only judged in
terms of that news, but also in terms of their response to events in India. In early
August, the Newsletter began to pick up the editorials and some bad poetry
from the Nation. By skilful rhetoric and selective quotation, the Nation was
identified with condoning atrocity and murder in India, and this was then
identified with the views of the whole Catholic population of Ireland, ‘The sepoy
rebellion, it would seem was a religious war, not only in the Brahmin, but in the
Ultramontane conscience\ Attacks on ‘sepoy journalists’ grew in September, and
quotations from the Nation were often placed alongside accounts of
killings and atrocities in India.32 The practice of identifying Hindoos with
Catholics grew throughout the crisis. An editorial headed ‘Romish SepoyisnT
noted: ‘Productions from the pens of Romish writers, expressive of the sympathy
of the authors with the Sepoys of India ... the feelings of a large number of
Romanists of this country are in favour of the mutineers.’ The identity was
sustained with great force; ‘the priests of Ireland, like their brethren, the
Brahmins of India, have been petted, patronized, and pam pered...’.33 The
argument was carried from the nationalists, to the Catholic population, to
the leaders of the Catholic Church and then to their liberal allies amongst the
Protestant population:

Protestant liberals o f Ulster and throughout the empire generally, witness the
liberal Roman Catholic opinion which you do not scruple to form alliance with!
Remember that this journal which advocates ... the murderer— violators o f the
ladies o f Ireland....34

The term ‘sepoy’ rapidly became a term of abuse. Sections of the Catholic
press were as ready to stick this label on opponents as their Protestant rivals. In
September, the Protestant rioters were called ‘The Orange Sepoys of Belfast’.35A
letter to the Ulsterman was headed ‘The Orange Sepoys of Belfast’:

the cowardly Orange miscreants in this town emulate them [Sepoys in India]
in every way. M en, w om en and even children have been brutally beaten that
have been considered Catholics; and those who w ould not curse the Pope, when
ordered....
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 107

‘These blood thirsty Sepoys1 attacked mill girls on their way to work. The
Munster News gave detailed accounts of Orange attacks on Catholics under
the heading ‘The Belfast Sepoys’.36 In the battle for the opinion of public and
policymakers, attaching the label ‘sepoy’, with its links to atrocity, massacre and
violence to opponents became an important tactic. ^
The Protestants drew on their history as well as current politics as they
related to and exploited the news of the mutiny to legitimate their own policy
of the exclusion of Catholics from power and influence. On 24 August, the
Christ Church Protestant Association met in the Mission Rooms on Durham
Street in Belfast to hear a lecture from Rev. Drew on the Mughal Empire. It was
Drew whose sermon to the Orangemen on the 12 July had sparked the first rioting
of the summer.37 His assured anti-Catholic rhetoric, in a style euphemistically
known as ‘controversial preaching’, was well known in Belfast. His analogy of
the Indian Mutiny with the massacre of Protestants during the Catholic rising of
1641 was a masterpiece of its kind.

Great are the atrocities perpetrated against m en, children, and especially
helpless w om en, w ho are stripped naked, flogged through streets and finally
hacked and hewn to pieces. (Sensation).... The variety o f m odes o f torture used
were, by a remarkable coincidence, strictly similar to those used by the Popish
Irish to Irish Protestants— in the fearful massacre o f 1641 .... The violations,
maimings, choppings, disembowlings, burnings, etc, in Ireland were exactly
similar those inflicted in the present year upon the British residents in India....
There are newspapers in this country to sympathize with these fiends, whether
o f India or Ireland.38

The message was extended when the association met again in October. There
was ‘year 1798 to remind the once credulous Protestants, then rebels in the
North of Ireland, how their fellow Protestants were slaughtered by the Popish
comrogues in the South....’ Disasters in India were ‘exactly, minutely and
horribly similar to those perpetrated by the Irish Sepoys of 1641’.39
Catholic leaders and opinion makers were tested in the Protestant
conservative press in terms of their reaction to the politics of the mutiny on the
‘home front’. There were three important issues here. The first was the militia
and military recruiting in general. Legislation to embody the militia was passed
through Parliament in August and the several Irish militia regiments were called
up in early September. Several elements of Catholic and nationalist opinion
were hostile to this. The reference to the Saxon shilling on many placards was
one expression of this opposition. When in early October, the UK government
declared a National Day of Fasting and Prayer it was observed in Belfast, said the
Newsletter ‘in a manner becoming a Christian people and a Protestant town’.
Services were listed in major and minor Protestant places of worship but Roman
Catholic Chapels ignored the call to prayer.40 The final test was the attitude
108 R.J. Morris

towards the India Relief Fund. Meetings were held in Dublin, Belfast and many
other Irish towns. There was considerable Catholic participation. The Newsletter
had the grace to admit that ‘several of our Roman Catholic merchants took part
in proceedings yesterday’.41 The real villains regarding both the Day of Prayer
and the Fund were Bishop Cullen, Cardinal Wiseman and the ‘sepoy journalists’,
especially the Nation; ‘of those who swear by Cullen and The Nation ... Oh for
one hour of Cromwell to punish these wretches ...’ who have sympathy with
‘the violators of female honour’; they are ‘the adorers of vitriol bottle throwing
and slave driving John Mitchell’. Wiseman and Cullen failed to join meetings
to condemn the sepoys and hence it was possible to conclude that ‘the priests
in their innermost souls sympathize with the murders of British Protestants in
India’.42 In fact, Wiseman had issued his own pastoral on ‘the revolt in India’,
warning against revenge and suggesting ‘be wise and moderate abroad ...
preventing religious strife’. He had appointed the first Sunday of October as a
day of humiliation and prayer for Catholics.43 When it came to subscriptions,
Wiseman suggested they should support Catholic missions in India and send
any surplus to the General Fund. Archbishop Cullen in Dublin was even more
cautious. He was deeply concerned for the integrity of the Irish Catholic Church
and anxious to build the resources, independence and discipline of the Church
as it emerged from the chaos of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.44
His Church had memories of funds collected by Protestant committees during
the famine and used in association with attempts to convert Catholic families.45
He had

advised Catholics to exact som e guarantee that their subscriptions to the Indian
Relief Fund would not be applied to the purpose o f proselytising the widows
and children o f Catholic soldiers ... as had been done with regard to their
contributions to the Patriotic Fund at the time o f the war with Russia.46

This was enough for the Newsletter to attack the ‘Sepoyism ecclesiastic of
Dr Cullen, and the Sepoyism national of the Nation :47
Catholic leadership and opinion in Belfast was even more fragmented than
that on the Protestant side, despite—or perhaps because of—the weak and slender
middle class.48 They had been keen followers of the constitutional nationalism
of O’Connell and this probably represented the position of secular leaders like
Bernard Hughes, the baker and William Watson, property developer, some
of whom would cooperate with the Protestant liberal leadership.49 There were
scraps of evidence of Ribbonmen active in the town.50The clergy had not yet built
the authority they were to gain in the 1860s. Attempting to serve these disparate
groups was an unstable newspaper press, represented in 1857 by the Ulsterman.
The editor Dennis Holland had founded the paper in 1852. He operated in the
uncertain nationalist politics that had followed O’Connell’s death and the defeat
of the Young Ireland movement in 1848. Holland had considerable sympathy
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 109

with the Nation, refounded by Charles Gavan Duffy in 1849 and— after the
emigration of a disillusioned Duffy to Australia— edited by Alexander Sullivan,
an unremitting propagandist for a nationalist Ireland.51 The narrative produced
by the Ulsterman was very much the same as that of the Newsletter. There was
a fairly factual presentation of Meerut, Delhi, Cawnpore and Lucknow, mostly,
culled from London newspapers. Readers were eveh offered some salacious
variants on the atrocity stories: ‘From India the accounts are most alarming. The
mutiny ... has been stained with some horrific crimes—such as the violation of
European ladies and the subsequent cutting off of their breasts!’52 Rape may or
may not have been a weapon of war, but stories of rape were certainly potent
weapons in the propaganda war. The paper defended and explained the action
of Cullen and Wiseman. It was in the area of analysis, explanation and evaluation
that the Ulsterman diverged from the Newsletter. From the start, the mutiny was
understood in terms of oppression:

the Indian troops are infam ously treated by their British Officers.... the natives
o f that gorgeous land are subjected to tyranny and oppression unparalleled
under the sway o f Britain.... the English in India treat natives as dogs: even
dogs will turn and bite w hen they are too cruelly treated .... Official testim ony
has shown to what frightful lengths o f torture, and even death, British tax
gatherers will go to force their im posts from the miserable people over w hom
they rule.53

In part blame centred on the East India Company: ‘They flung a great
Empire into the hands of a sordid commercial company to be plundered and
misgoverned.’54
The paper rapidly moved to identify Irish and Indian history:

W e have more than once written o f the crimes o f British rulers in India.... W e
have show n how like the system pursued there, is, in m any respects to the fierce
and sanguinary policy which desolated Ireland for so m any centuries.55

Protestant missionary activity was given especial blame. Some of these were
believed to be ex-soldiers, whom Holland rather fancifully called ‘veteran fanatics
who had turned to religion as a sequel to fast living’.56The Catholic experience of
men like Drew and M’llwaine lay behind this judgement,

the uncontrolled tendency to insult the belief o f every one w ho is not o f the
same creed with which Irish Catholics are familiar, are the distinguished and
disagreeable characteristics o f devout Protestant believers.57

Holland understood the mutiny in terms of ‘the vexatious and disgusting

system of proselytism at the very time when the military government were
organising means for the sensual indulgence of the soldiery’.58
110 R.J. Morris

The Ulsterman showed no distress at the threat and humiliation experienced

by the British Empire. The early news was greeted with some Ruskinesque
sentiments: ‘Rome and Britain have often been said to be similar in their
rise, we know the indications which preceded the fall of the former.../59 There
were frequent wry comments that matters were ‘not going as smoothly in India
as the government could wish’, although the paper anticipated the eventual
victory of the British:

The m utiny will be crushed o f course—these unfortunate native troops o f

D elhi will be cut to pieces by overw helm ing force. They will be made an
example o f to terrify others. But the slaughter o f the mutineers will not eradicate
disaffection....60

The Ulsterman warned that in the end in ‘some great revolution of the native
races, the domination of England will be swept away.... When that day comes
there will not be very many wet eyes within the shores of Ireland/61
Overall the judgement was an early variant of a late nineteenth century and
twentieth century Irish attitude to political violence, disapproval of the means
but support for the aims:

The insurgents do, indeed, appear to have com m itted grievous and horrible
excesses— though the accounts are o f course, exaggerated. But it is merely
the usual thing: whenever an oppressed and ill used people rise in desperate
resistance against their oppressors.... But the main responsibility for those
crimes lies on the tyrannous rulers w ho have driven them into rebellion ... they
are the crimes o f a wild, m addened, ungoverned mob.

Stories of atrocities by the sepoys were balanced by accounts of the mass

executions of native soldiers, which in some cases detailed descriptions of men
being tied to the mouth of a cannon and then blown apart by powder.62
The Ulsterman needed to take care in its sympathies towards the Sepoy
Rebellion, for a large portion of the East India Company and British Army was
recruited from the Catholic Irish; indeed the paper took pride in pointing out
that the British Empire depended on these men.63At the same time they claimed
the Irishman was no longer ‘driven by destitution to enlist under the banner of
English tyranny ... he need not expose himself to the persecution of his creed
which still prevails in the British army... / The raucous hostility of the placards
and ballads was avoided, but Denis Holland was happy to quote the Freemans
Journal, a respectable and assertively nationalist Dublin Catholic paper, to the
effect that Irish Catholics tempted to enlist should know

he is hired to trample down and slaughter the unfortunate H indoos who

have risen in rebellion because o f the oppression o f a sordid comm ercial
govern m en t... outraged by the coarse fanaticism o f England’s im becile officers
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 111

[who] drivellingly endeavour to talk and bully them into Christianity with the
cant o f a swaddling preacher.64

Amongst the complexities of Belfast and Irish opinion, the Northern Whig is
worth a brief look. Its core constituency was the liberal Protestant minority of the
north of Ireland. In part, they inherited the radical Presbyterian tradition of the
late eighteenth century together with the moderate and rational ideologies their
ministers had brought from their training in William Robertson’s Scotland.65
Many were from established merchant families. By the 1850s they sought a
non-sectarian, inclusive Ireland led by liberal Protestants like themselves but
offering power to Catholics prepared to join their project of modernisation.
The newspaper itself avoided the histrionics of the Newsletter and Ulsterman.
Again the basic narrative was the same, although more attention was given to the
economic consequences of the uprising in India. In September, they reported
‘that the prices of the first necessaries of life are enormously enhanced. The
immense masses of merchandise and manufactured goods were menaced with
destruction. The harvest must perish for want of labourers.’66 They gave the full
text of Cardinal Wiseman’s sermon delivered in Salford on 26 July. The full text
did show the Cardinal’s worries as he claimed that ‘it is almost impossible for a
Catholic soldier to have his children educated in his own religion and what is
more if he die, he can hardly reckon on them being brought up in it, so one sided
are the rules for the education of orphans’.67 Bishop Cullen’s letter also got full
coverage rather than the abuse or partisan support of the other two newspapers.
The letter warned:

it w ould be well to inquire how the fund about to be raised is to be managed,

and whether there is any danger that it m ay be applied by bigots to proselytizing
purposes.... In the year 1854, you subscribed to the Patriotic Fund, and you
were kind enough to hand in my contribution to the same object.... Catholic
clergymen in D ublin applied to the managers o f the fund in favour o f the
w idow s and orphans o f soldiers killed in the Crimea, yet, as far as I could learn,
not one shilling was then obtained by such application.68

The Whig was critical of this approach. It was ‘an unfortunate and foolish
letter, attaching conditions to the distribution of the fund, (and) could only be
viewed as intended deliberately, to embarrass the collection of much needed
money’. Many Catholic gentry and others had contributed to the fund, yet
‘their press and pulpit’ have given the impression that the Catholics of Ireland
‘do not intend to co-operate with the Indian Relief Fund’. They were pleased
when a meeting was called in Belfast to support the fund. This would show
they rejected the ‘Young Ireland point of view in Indian politics’ which ‘insists
on identifying half-clad women and hungry children with what are called the
“English oppressors of the Hindoo’”. Then in a phrase which summed up their
112 R.J. Morris

politics they claimed ‘here at least we are rational men, when not engaged in
local politics’. The Nation with its ‘phantom tradition of Irish independence’ was
dismissed as well as the ‘pettiness’ of Bishop Cullen.69
Their rationality was then devoted to an analysis of the faults and needs of
the governance of India. Fault lay in a history which left India to be governed by
‘a selfish oligarchy’, but like Ireland, ‘we are accursed by aristocratic imbecility’,
especially from leaders who ignored the views of the mainly ‘middle class’
public servants under their authority. The Whig had ‘no doubt that the British
people must be the masters of the people of Hindostan’, yet the British were
‘idle oppressors’. The salt tax and the failure to counter ‘the brutal heathenism
of the people’ were in part to blame for the revolt. The British had failed to
bring material prosperity. There were few steam railways and the ‘company’ had
deterred enterprise, especially in growing cotton and tea. As the Indian Empire
expanded, very few asked ‘Was this expansion profitable?’ The views of Edmund
Burke, the great ideologue of inclusive Protestant leadership for Ireland, were
quoted proposing that the benefits of ‘civil and religious liberty’ should be
extended to English conquests, especially Ireland.70 The Whig was convinced
that India must be ‘made to pay’, and gave an outline of the economic resources
available; ‘from India may be procured every variety of article needed for
manufactures’.71 The remedy was more railways. The Whig responded to India
with the virtues of modernising liberalism and did so with reference to their own
ambitions for Ireland, ‘... at least in Ireland, we can thoroughly understand the
efforts of subdued peoples to obtain good government’. The Hindus had simply
been badly governed by a commercial company. It was no surprise that the Whig
was delighted by the decision to abolish the East India Company.72 The Whig
analysis of India involved many of the evils attacked by liberalism— aristocracy,
monopoly and ignorance; the solutions were also those of liberal imperialism—
liberty, under the guidance of enlightened liberals like themselves, a market
economy and the modernity of railways and industrial development.
If Thomas Larcom, undersecretary for Ireland, held any political views in
common with the population of Belfast, he might have had some sympathy
with the Whig. He probably saw the evangelical conservative protestant readers
of the Newsletter, and their Orange Order allies, as being as great a threat to
his project of modernisation and civic order for Ireland as the Ribbonmen and
nationalists. When he reacted with such hostility to the ballad of the ‘Bowld Irish
Sepoy’, his concerns were practical as well as ideological and political. Ireland
had a key place in military recruiting. Military enlistment into the ranks of the
British Army and the East India Company was an important way out of poverty
for the mainly Catholic lower classes. Life as a military officer sustained status for
many young men from mainly Protestant gentry families.73 The military letter
books from the Kilmainham barracks, across the river from Larcom’s office in
Dublin Castle, showed how close the links with India could be. Little scraps of
people’s lives emerged for brief moments amongst the grander policy issues of
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 113

the military headquarters in Ireland. At the end of 1856, Mary Keating wrote to
the commander-in-chief requesting ‘Passage to Warley to enable her to proceed
to India with her husband who has (she believes) enlisted in the East India
Company Service or a pass for admission into any of the Military Barracks’.74
In February 1858, Catherine Stewart and Widow Robinson thanked Lord
Seaton for a distribution from the India Relief Fund, and later that month the
Reverend White forwarded a request for assistance from Mrs Henry, ‘her
husband serving in India’. Lord Seaton forwarded these to the Committee of
the India Relief Fund.75‘Soldier’s wives’ became a minor issue in the competition
to claim public virtue during 1857. Major Child, staff officer of pensioners,
Belfast, was the nearest thing British Army had to a welfare officer, he wrote to
the Newsletter.

Will you allow m e through your valuable paper to call the attention o f the
charitable and hum ane to a class o f unfortunate creatures, m any o f w hom are
now in this town. I allude to the wives o f soldiers who have been suddenly
ordered out to India, and, according to the order issued on the occasion, their
families have not been permitted to accom pany them , but have been placed on
an allowance o f 6d per diem . W ith this sum the poor w om an is supposed to
feed herself and family, varying in number from one to five. The consequence
is that som e have fled for refuge to the W orkhouse - but one m ore resolute and
perhaps m ore industrious than the rest, Mrs. Hillan, a corporal’s wife o f the 19th
Regiment, may now be seen, plying her needle— and by the sale o f a few apples
purchased out o f her first small pittance, endeavouring to keep herself and two
young children from starvation.
I have had occasion to sign the paper o f these poor w om en to enable them
to draw the miserable pittance alluded to, and, therefore, can testify to their
destitute condition.76

India entered the lives of many in Ireland. It was little wonder that even
aggressively nationalist and Catholic newspapers like the Ulsterman would act to
deter enlistment and then boast that the British Empire depended for its survival
on Irish soldiers.
For Larcom, the issues were very direct. Ireland was being stripped of troops
to send East. On 13 July, as the riots in Belfast gathered momentum, orders came
from Horse Guards to Dublin to prepare units for India. On the 20th, Dublin
was told that five regiments of foot, the Second Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and
two troops of horse were to go. At the end of the month, the transports arrived
at Kingstown and embarkation began. The loss of regiments continued throughout
August and September.77 This was a major concern given that an important
part of Larcom’s job was to maintain public order in Ireland. On a day-to-day
basis this was the task of the magistrates, especially the resident magistrates
appointed by Dublin, and the Irish Constabulary, but military back up was
crucial in times of tension such as the General Election and the Galway potato
114 R.J. Morris

riots. Indeed, the July riots in Belfast may well have got out of hand because
of delays in bringing troops, especially cavalry, into the streets. In September,
Larcom wrote to Kilmainham Barracks across the river from Dublin Castle:

I am directed by the Lord Lieutenant to acquaint you for the inform ation
o f the General C om m anding that His Ex. has reason to apprehend that the
disturbances in Belfast are as yet but im perfectly suppressed and m ay again
revive. I am therefore to express his Ex. hope that in the changes in progress
for the m ovem ent o f troops to the East it m ay not be necessary to weaken the
garrison o f that T ow n.78

The response from Lord Seaton, commander-in-chief for Ireland, was very
fall:

W ith reference to the inform ation com m unicated by you to C olonel W ood
yesterday evening, relative to the disturbances, which have occurred at Belfast,
I have the honour by desire o f General Lord Seaton to acquaint you, for the
inform ation o f His Excellency The Lord Lieutenant, that early this week the
garrison o f Belfast will be augm ented to two troops o f the 3rd Light D ragoons
and 660 rank and file Infantry, under the im m ediate com m and o f C olonel
Adair; 3 troops o f the 3rd Light D ragoons will also be stationed at Dundalk,
and two companies o f the 16th Regiment at Charlemont, and an equal force at
Enniskillen.
This distribution Lord Seaton thinks the best that can be made under
existing circumstances and his Lordship is persuaded, that it will be sufficiently
precautionary to check any disturbances o f the description to which you have
adverted.
After the embarkation o f the three Infantry Regiments under orders for
foreign service, five active Battalions, only, including the Guards, will remain
in Ireland for the garrison o f D ublin and the occupation o f the Curragh
encampment; but as the three Brigades com posed o f this force will be
concentrated, reinforcements can be speedily conveyed to the N orthern District
by railway, should riots be renewed in Belfast or its vicinity.
Lord Seaton trusts that this temporary arrangement, with occasional visits
by the General Officer C om m anding the D ublin D ivision will be considered by
His Excellency as satisfactory.79

Larcom had been assured a few days earlier ‘that the garrison at Belfast will
not be reduced by the movement of troops to the East’.80
One answer to the shortage of troops was to raise or ‘embody’ a number
of regiments of the militia, but this was a mixed blessing. In 1856, a mutiny
by the Tipperary Militia had required considerable military resources, and 1857
was to finish with the demands of suppressing rioting by the Wexford Militia.81
In general, the policy was to send militia from one district to serve in another.
The Irish regiments were ‘embodied’ in October and were ready to be sent to
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 115

Scotland and England in November. The 2nd South Down and the Antrim Rifles
were amongst those sent for service in England.82 A more important solution
lay in the railway and telegraph networks recently established in Ireland. Seaton
placed increasing reliance on this. He had adopted a policy of concentrating his
forces in Dublin, the Curragh and Cork with a smaller force in Belfast. He then
relied on the rapid flow of information and orders and\the rapid deployment of
troops made possible by the telegraph and railway.83 In July, once the seriousness
of the rioting in Belfast was recognised, extra cavalry had been sent by rail
from Dublin.84 The same thing happened when rioting again became serious in
September. Colbourne reported to Larcom

having received a telegraphic message from Col. Adair, com m anding the troops
at Belfast, this m orning reporting riots in the town, His Lordship has given
directions for a troop o f the 8th hussars and a troop o f the 8th Lancers to
proceed to Belfast to reinforce the troops under the com m and o f Col. Adair.

On this occasion Adair*was able to report, ‘the troops cleared the streets’.85
Nonetheless, the military demands of India left Larcom and Seaton feeling very
vulnerable.
Alexander Sullivan had been editor of the Nation in 1857. When he produced
his good-natured political memoirs in 1877, he devoted a short paragraph
to the Indian Mutiny. It ‘had greatly excited the revolutionary party among
Irishmen at home and in America’. Given the ‘perilous struggle’ and potential
‘overthrow’ of the English together with the fact that ‘Ireland was denuded of
troops’, they felt that ‘opportunities for revolt had been lost through want of
preparation’. This led to the formation of the secret society that would become
the Fenian Movement.86 The mutiny was clearly an inspiration to those who
opposed British rule in Ireland although there was as yet none of the prolonged
intellectual and political engagement between Ireland and India which was
to follow.87 The provocative ballads, placards and graffiti seem to confirm the
view that the mutiny was an inspiration for opposition but the response was in
fact more complex. The response to the mutiny reflected the complexity and
uncertainty of Irish politics and culture during the decade of the 1850s. The news
from India resonated with the many histories that the Irish carried into that
decade. The Catholic nationalist saw a history of oppression and the possibility
of response. At the same time, the news strengthened the Protestant sense of
an identity based upon superiority and being threatened. All sides developed a
solidly racialised discourse of Celt, Saxon and Hindu, of European and Asiatic.
The ‘orientalism’ of the street and newspaper office had none of the disarming
elegance of the academic orientalism.88 As the knowledge of the disaster and
violence in the East intensified, this not only presented practical problems for
those in Dublin Castle and Kilmainham Barracks but also increased the sense
of legitimacy and urgency amongst different ideological, political and cultural
116 RJ. Morris

positions. There was a reflexivity which seemed to affirm different approaches

to and understandings of Ireland; the need for rational, inclusive government
by the liberals, the necessity for evangelical conversion and the exclusion of
Catholics held by many Protestants or the nationalist drive to oppose oppression
and bring about fundamental nationalist changes in the governance of Ireland.89
The effect of the Indian Mutiny in Ireland was not simply to hold up a mirror to
varieties of Irishness but to deepen, strengthen and legitimise divided and hostile
politics and cultural ideologies.90

Notes and References

1.1 should like to acknowledge the British Academy Small Research Grant which assisted in
gathering material for this article which forms part o f a wider research project into the society
and culture o f Belfast in 1857.
2. Index to the Chief Secretary’s Papers, 1857-1858. Public Record Office o f Ireland. Unfortunately
despite the clear reference, the ballads in question are not in the box indicated by the nineteenth
century index. The references were dated 7 ,9 and 27 November 1858.
3. Gillian M. Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2004); Stiofen 0 Cadhla, Civilizing Ireland: Ordnance Survey, 1824-1842:
Ethnography, Cartography, Translation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007).
4. R.B. McDowell, The Irish Administration (London: Greenwood Press, 1964), p. 68.
5. Letter Books. First Division, 1851-1876. Chief Secretary’s Office LB 364. f. 183 and 184.
6. Denis G. Marnane, ‘The Ballad Collection o f John Davis White’, Tipperary Historical Journal
(2005), pp. 61-85; W.E. Vaughan, ed., A New History o f Ireland, Volume Five: Ireland under the
Union, 1801-70 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Plate 20.
7. In formal terms the ‘Fenian’movement began with the formation o f ‘The Society’ in Dublin in
1858, although much o f the momentum came from the parallel movement in United States.
8. These were all topics covered by the Index to the Chief Secretary’s Papers.
9. Michael Doheny was one o f the 1848 rebellion leaders (Irish Confederation o f 1846-1848), a
County Tipperary man and the writer o f a memoir entitled The Felon s Track and a haunting
song called ‘A Chuisle Gheal mo Chroi*— also one o f the founders o f the Fenian movement in
the States. He would be well remembered in the Clonmel area and along the Cork border, as the
1848 abortive ‘rising’ was at Ballingarry, not very far from Clonmel. Information from Maura
Cronin, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.
10. John Mitchel was leader o f the Irish Confederation a militant group which emerged from the
Young Ireland movement 1846-1847, an advocate o f a revolutionary nationalism as against
O’Connell’s constitutional approach. He was transported to Australia and escaped to USA in
1853.
11. Belfast Newsletter, 14 September 1857, reprinting from Clonmel Chronicle.
12. Belfast Newsletter, 19 September 1857.
13. Belfast Newsletter, 10 October 1857.
14. Belfast Newsletter, 2 November 1857. My thanks to Nick Gellatly for this reference.
15. Mdirtln 6 Cath^in, ‘Bullet Moulders and Blackthorn Men; a comparative study o f Irish
Nationalist Secret Society Culture in Mid-nineteenth-century Scotland and Ulster’, in
R.J. Morris and Liam Kennedy, eds, Ireland and Scotland: Order and Disorder, 1600-2000
(Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005), pp. 153-161.
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 117

16. Mr Hamilton, Belfast, to the Under Secretary, Dublin Castle, 4 August 1859, Chief Secretary’s
Office 7232, National Archives o f Ireland, Dublin.
17. R.V. Comerford, Ireland, 1850-70: Post Famine and Mid-Victorian, in W.E. Vaughan (ed.),
A New History o f Ireland, Vol. five, Ireland under the Union, 1801-70 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 372-414.
18. Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary, Belfast: Approach to Crisis: A Study o f Belfast Politics,
1613-1970 (London: Budge and O ’Leary, Macmillan, 1973); Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics o f
Enmity, 1789-2006 (Oxford: Bew, Oxford University Press, 2007) gives an excellent account
o f the variety and complexity o f the Protestant approach to ruling Ireland, especially the early
chapters, 1-263; C. Hirst, Religion, Politics and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin:
Hirst, Four Courts, 2002).
19. Jack House, Square Mile o f M urder (Edinburgh: 1961, reprinted in 2002 by Black 8c White
Publishing).
20. Belfast Newsletter, 9,13 and 16 July 1857.
21. Belfast Newsletter, 27 July 1857.
22. Belfast Newsletter, 3 August 1857.
23. Belfast Newsletter, 8 September 1857.
24. Belfast Newsletter, 22 July 1857.
25. Belfast Newsletter, 13 August 1857.
26. Belfast Newsletter, 7 August 1857.
27. Belfast Newsletter, 26 August 1857.
28. Belfast Newsletter, 18 and 19 August 1857; Scott B. Cook, ‘The Irish Raj: Social Origins and
Careers o f Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855-1914*, lournal o f Social History, vol. 20,
no. 3 (Spring 1987), pp. 50-529.
29. Belfast Newsletter, 6 and 11 August 1857.
30. Belfast Newsletter, 24 August and 9 September 1857.
31. Belfast Newsletter, 8 October 1857.
32. Belfast Newsletter, 7 August and 8 ,1 4 and 18 September 1857.
33. Belfast Newsletter, 21 October 1857.
34. Belfast Newsletter, 23 September 1857.
35. Ulsterman, 11 September 1857.
36. Ulsterman, 11 and 28 September 1857.
37. Rev. Thomas Drew, DD, GCGOL o f Ireland, ‘Sermon Preached before the Orangemen o f Belfast
in Christ Church’, Belfast, 12 July 1857 . [copy in Linenhall Library, Belfast].
38 . Belfast Newsletter, 26 August 1857. This form o f sexual innuendo was a speciality o f Drew.
He used the same strategy in his 12 July sermon.
39. Belfast Newsletter, 22 October 1857.
40. Belfast Newsletter, 8 August 1857.
41. Belfast Newsletter, 22 October 1857.
42. Belfast Newsletter, 8 August and 21 September 1857.
43. Ulsterman, 30 September 1857.
44. S.J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780-1845 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
1982).
45. Christine Kinealy and Gerard MacAtasney, The Hidden Famine: Hunger, Poverty and Sectarianism
in Belfast 1840-50 (London: Pluto Press, 2000).
46. Ulsterman 11 October 1857.
47. Belfast Newsletter, 2 November 1857.
48. Marianne Elliott, The Catholics o f Ulster: A History (London, 2000), pp. 327-331.
49. Jack Magee, Barney: Bernard Hughes o f Belfast, 1808-1878 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation,
2001).
118 R.J. Morris

50. Report o f the Commissioners o f Inquiry into the Origin and Character o f the Riots in Belfast in July
and September 1857 , Parliamentary Papers, vol. 9, 1857-1858, Q 7179.
5 1 . A.M. Sullivan, New Ireland: Political Sketches and Personal Reminiscences o f Thirty Years o f
Irish Public Life (Glasgow: Sullivan, Cameron and Ferguson, 1877); Jill C. Bender, ‘Mutiny or
Freedom Fight? The 1857 Indian Mutiny and the Irish Press’, in Simon J. Potter, ed., Newspapers
and Empire in Ireland and Britain, c. 1857—92 (Dublin: Potter, Four Courts Press, 2004),
pp. 92-108.
52. Ulsterman, 5 September 1857.
53. Ulsterman, 1 July 1857.
54. Ulsterman, 29 July 1857.
55. Ulsterman, 21 August 1857.
56. Ulsterman, 31 August 1857.
57. Ulstermany 11 September 1857.
58. Ulsterman, 10 August 1857.
59. Ulstermany 29 June 1857; The Stones o f Venice had been published in 1851 and 1853.
60. Ulstermany 1 July 1857.
61. Ulsterman, 19 August 1857.
62. Ulstermany 10 August 1857.
63. E.M. Spiers, ‘Army Organisation and society in the nineteenth century’, in Thomas Bartlett
and Keith Jeffrey, eds, A Miltary History o f Ireland (Cambridge: Bartlett and Jeffrey, CUP,
1996), 335-357; Keith Jeffrey, ed., An Irish Empire? Aspects o f Ireland and the British Empire
(Manchester: Jeffrey, Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 94; S.B. Cook, Imperial Affinities
(New Delhi: Cook, SAGE Publications, 1993).
64. Ulstermany 31 August 1857.
65. A.T.Q. Stewart, A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins o f the United Irishmen (Belfast: Faber and
Faber, 1993).
66. Northern Whig, 1 September 1857.
67. Northern Whigy 8 September 1857.
68. Northern Whigy 6 October 1857.
69. Northern Whig, 20 and 22 October 1857.
70. Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics o f Enmity, pp. 14-27.
71. Northern Whigy 22 October and 3 November 1857.
72. Northern Whigy 20 November 1857.
73. P.E. Razzell, ‘Social Origins o f Officers in the Indian and British Home Army, 1758-1962’,
British Journal o f Sociology, vol. 14, no. 3 (1963), p. 250.
74. Register ofletters received 1844-1860, ms 1290,8 December 1856, Kilmainham Papers, National
Library o f Ireland.
75. Ibid., 3 and 24 February 1858.
76. Belfast Newsletter, 18 September 1857.
77. Kilmainham Papers. Government ‘on points involving the civil authority’, Ms 1056 July 1856 to
June 1859, f. 183 (13 July 1857) and f. 195 and 198; Record register ofletters received, 1844-1860
Mss 1290 f. 365-372. National Library o f Ireland.
78. Larcom to the Military Secretary, 9 September 1857, Chief Secretary’s Department, Letter Book
163 f. 53.
79. Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers, 1857/7805; Letter was also recorded in Kilmainham
Papers. Government ‘on points involving the civil authority’, Ms 1056 July 1856 to June 1859,
Seaton to Larcom, 13 September 1857, f. 214.
80. Kilmainham Papers. Government ‘on points involving the civil authority’, Ms 1056 July 1856 to
June 1859, Seaton to Larcom, 10 September 1857 f. 214.
81. Kilmainham Papers. Government ‘on points involving the civil authority’, Ms 1056, 7 July and
31 August 1856 and for Wexford 18 December 1857.
 Bowld Irish Sepoy 119

82. Kilmainham Papers. Government ‘on points involving the civil authority’, Ms 1056, 20 oct 57
f. 236.
83. Kilmainham Papers, Commander in Chief Letter Book, Mss 1239. March 1856 to December
1858.
84. Kilmainham Papers II. Government ‘on points involving the civil authority’, Ms 1056 July 1856
to June 1859, 20 July 1857.
85. Kilmainham Papers II. Government ‘on points involving the civil authority’, Ms 1056 July 1856
to June 1859,7 September 1857, f. 213.
86. A.M. Sullivan, New Ireland , p. 200.
87. C.A. Bayley, ‘Ireland, India and the Empire: 1780-1914’, Transactions o f the Royal Historical
Society, vol. 10, no. 6 (2000), pp. 377-397.
88. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978).
89. This complex and reflexive response to challenges to the British Empire was a continued
feature o f Irish culture and politics. This was not only related to Ireland’s political and religious
divisions, but to an ambiguous identity as not quite part o f an imperial power, not quite colony,
nor even subaltern nation. Paul A. Townend, ‘Between Two Worlds: Irish Nationalists and
Imperial Crisis, 1878-1880’, Past and Present, vol. 194, no. 1 (February 2007), pp. 139-174.
90. My thanks to Professor Sean Connolly for wise comments on an earlier draft o f this essay.
My conclusions as ever remain my own.
 1

THE 'RUSSIAN FACTOR’ IN THE INDIAN MUTINY

Elena Karatchkova

W hatever be Russia’s designs upon India, whether they be serious and inim ical,
or imaginary and fantastic, I hold that the first duty o f English statesmen is to
render any hostile intentions futile, to see that our ow n position is secure, and
our frontier impregnable, and so to guard what is w ithout doubt the noblest
trophy o f British genius, and the m ost splendid appendage o f the Imperial
Crown.
— Lord George N. Curzon, Russia in Central Asia, 1889.1

The strangest thing is that English journals blame us for the Sepoy M utiny,
for treason am ong Princes and other native rulers, o f w hom we have barely
even heard.... Russia— despite the Paris Treaty2— remains a bogy for W estern
thinkers, am ong w hom the English are always and everywhere the m ost
prom inent.3
— From a letter dated 1 August 1857,4
written b y the Russian Ambassador to France,
C ount Pavel Kisilev to General-Major D m itry M ilyutin.5

ALTHOUGH the two quotations reproduced above are separated by over

thirty years in time, they speak directly to one another and to a great degree
summarise the two sides’ attitudes during the bitter nineteenth century rivalry
between Britain and Russia over influence in Central Asia. This rivalry, since the
publication of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, has been known as ‘The Great Game’,
reconstructed in detail ifi Peter Hopkirk’s famous study.6 Despite the stance
of hurt innocence, taken by Count Kisilev in the letter quoted above, archival
documents, published after the perestroika in Russia,7 testify to the fact that
India—‘the noblest trophy of British genius’—was considered by many high
ranking Russians the most desirable prize in this game.
Most contemporary historians (both European and Russian) agree that the
dramatic events of 1857-1858 in India were not directly instigated by Russians,
 The ‘Russian Factor’ in the Indian Mutiny 121

i.e., the mutiny was not really a part of ‘The Great Game*. Nevertheless, the
archival documents suggest that:

(a) Historical developments since the beginning of the century and up to

the mutiny gave the British plenty of reasons to be suspicious of Russian
intentions. For example, a project of advancing to Indian borders was
devised by a Russian military official of high standing right on the verge
of the mutiny.
(b) During the mutiny, high in the Russian state hierarchy designs were
conceived to use the event to Russia’s advantage.
(c) Rumours of Russian interference started circulating among the Indian
population even before the mutiny started— during the Crimean War
between Russia and Turkey (1853-1856). During the mutiny and long
after it was suppressed, these rumours kept spreading among the rebels
as well as among the civil population. The rumours inspired several
post-mutiny missions dispatched by Indian rulers to Russia or to Russian
outposts in Central Asia and, judging by the messengers’ testimonies,
added a distinct ‘Russian factor’ to the Indian Mutiny.

In this chapter I will first give a brief historical overview of Russian rulers*
projects regarding India from the beginning of the nineteenth century and up
to March of 1857, i.e., immediately preceding the mutiny. I will then discuss
a detailed report dated 26 July (7 August) 1857 on the events of the mutiny,
prepared by a Russian military agent in London for his superior officer. I will
conclude by describing a mission—one among several similar post-mutiny
missions—to the Russian Consul in Persia, undertaken by one of the former
Indian rebels, who sought interference and protection from the Russian Tsar.

A Brief Historical Prelude to the Mutiny

The earliest nineteenth century plan of a joint French-Russian military

expedition was devised in 1801 by Napoleon Bonaparte and Russian Tsar Paul I
(r. 1769-1801). In one of his letters to Paul, Napoleon wrote that the goal of the
joint project would be to ‘permanently expel the English from Hindustan, to
free those wonderful and rich lands from British yoke, to open new routes for
industries and trade of enlightened European nations, in particular of France’.8
Psychologically unstable and unpredictable, often referred to by authors
of historical novels as the ‘Russian Hamlet’, Paul I jumped to the opportunity
without much consideration. A published collection of documents (AD) contains
excerpts from correspondence—thirteen letters altogether9—between the Tsar
and the ataman (chief) of the Don Cossack Army General Orlov, regarding
122 Elena Karatchkova

the mobilisation of the Cossack forces for the expedition. In a letter^ dated
12 January (24 January) 1801 the Tsar addresses the Cossacks directly:

All the wealth o f the Indies shall be your reward. Such an enterprise will cover
you with im mortal glory, secure you m y goodwill, load you with riches, give an
opening to our com m erce, and strike the enem y a mortal blow .10

The project never materialised. As a result of a court conspiracy, Paul 1 was

murdered in March of 1801. His successor Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801-1835)
called off the expedition.11 Eleven years later, in 1812, Alexander’s army indeed
dealt a mortal blow to the enemy—to Napoleon and his armed forces— a blow
from which the latter never recovered.
Having driven Napoleon out of Russian territory back into Europe the
Russian Empire started its steady advance through the Caucasus into Central
Asia—-towards the ancient Muslim khanates of Khiva, Bokhara and Khokand.
Writes Hopkirk:

By the middle o f the nineteenth century Central Asia was rarely ou t o f the
headlines, as one by one the ancient caravan towns and khanates o f the former
Silk Road fell to Russian arms. Every week seemed to bring news that the hard-
riding Cossacks, who always spearheaded each advance, were getting closer
and closer to India’s ill-guarded frontiers.... Despite St. Petersburg’s repeated
assurances that it had no hostile intent towards India, and that each advance
was its last ... it was feared that the final advance w ould begin on India— the
greatest o f all imperial prizes.12

AD contain a set of documents,13 dated February-March 1857, i.e., imme­

diately preceding the mutiny, which testify to the fact that these apprehensions
cannot be dismissed as groundless paranoia. In these letters and reports, the
pros and cons of a Russian military expedition to India in response to Britain’s
advances in Persia and Afghanistan are discussed in detail and at the highest level
of the political and military hierarchy. Of particular relevance to the issues under
discussion are the following documents:

Document # 32

Document 32 is a letter dated 16 February (28 February) 1857, written by

Prince Alexander Baryatinsky—at the time the Tsar’s governor in the Caucasus
and commander-in-chief of the Caucasian Army, and addressed to Nikolai
Sukhozanet, the Russian Military Minister in 1856-1861. The document was
brought to the attention of Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855-1881), who carefully read
it and left his comments on the margins. The Tsar’s comments on Baryatinsky’s
letter are also reproduced in AD.
 The ‘Russian Factor' in the Indian Mutiny 123

Baryatinsky writes:

.. .as far as I understand the current state o f affairs, it m ay very well happen that,
despite our concessions and sincere wish to preserve peace, we shall soon and
against our will be dragged into another war ... the appearance o f the British
flag in the Caspian Sea shall n ot only deal a mortal blow to our influence in the
East and to our foreign trade, but a blow to the political sovereignty o f the
Empire.14 Something, which a year ago15 was considered an untim ely dream,
m ay now becom e indisputable reality. Before we even get used to the idea
o f confronting Britain in the East, our armed forces will be advancing to the
borders o f India.16

The front page of this letter bears a resolution written by Alexander II:

His apprehensions are quite substantiated. Therefore I find that we should

seriously prepare for the confrontation with England in Asia.17

Before stating his own opinion of Baryatinsky’s project to the Tsar, who
seemed to agree with the author, Sukhozanet must have circulated this letter
among military and political officials. The responses were soon to follow.
Not everyone in the military, and even fewer persons in the Foreign Policy
Department, shared Baryatinsky’s resolve.

Document # 33

Document 33 is a report dated March, 1857, prepared by General Major

Alexander Neverovsky—Chief, Caucasian Division of General HQ Depart­
ment.
In the report Neverovsky dismisses Baryatinsky’s plan arguing that Russia
simply does not possess adequate financial means either for conquering India, or
for liberating it by expelling the British. Both projects would be too burdensome
for the Russian Treasury:

The only bright side o f the march to India— the long-term elim ination o f
England’s influence in Central Asia— will hardly compensate for the enorm ous
losses, which Russia w ould have to bear to attain this goal.18

Document # 35

Document 35 is a letter dated 24 March (April 5) 1857, written by Prince

Alexander Gorchakov—Russian foreign minister in 1856-1882—to Nikolai
Sukhozanet.
124 Elena Karatchkova

Gorchakov was a particularly passionate opponent of Baryatinsky’s

plan, and his major concern was not so much with the financial burden,
but rather with the political consequences of Russian military conflict with
England:

N o t only the open preparations for the intended goal [i.e., for the advance to
the Indian borders— E.K.] but even the revealed contem plations o f the im plied
goal, in m y opinion, w ould be sufficient to accelerate the collision between
us and England. The scale and progress o f such collision is im possible to
calculate.... As far as I am personally concerned, before God, the Emperor and
the Fatherland, I shall n ot take upon m yself the responsibility o f supporting
such a project and facilitating it.... In Europe we have sympathizers but no
allies, especially o f that kind, w ho w ould stand for us, as for our enem ies not
finding such [allies— E.K.], I cannot vouch to that.19

Document # 36

Document 36 is a report dated March 1857, prepared by Military Minister

Sukhozanet for Russian Tsar, Alexander II.
After all the opinions were stated, Sukhozanet summarised them in a detailed
and carefully balanced report to the Tsar. On the one hand, he agrees with Prince
Baryatinsky that

grow ing influence o f England in Persia and Afghanistan is an extrem ely

unfavorable circumstance for Russian trade and even more so for our political
designs, and deserves full attention o f our govern m en t....20

On the other hand, he believes that before taking any action Russia should

precisely identify the potential threat and determine whether we have sufficient
m eans to counteract English designs.21

Sukhozanet’s answer to this question was: ‘we do not’. In the remaining

part of the document he discusses potential military pitfalls, as well as grave
economic and political consequences of direct Russian-British confrontation in
Asia.
The front page of Sukhozanet’s report bears Tsar Alexander’s resolution,
dated 31 March (12 April) 1857: ‘I fully agree with your conclusions’. Thus
the Tsar was won over, and the project of Russian military advance to Indian
borders was buried for the time being. It was resurrected twenty years later, in
1878, as the ‘Indian March’ of the Russian Army.22 But these later developments
lie beyond the scope of this chapter.
 The ‘Russian Factor’ in the Indian Mutiny 125

The Mutiny: A Russian View from London

Twenty-eight days after the Russian Tsar Alexander II inscribed his final
resolution on Sukhozanet’s report a powerful native rebellion—the Indian
Mutiny—broke out in Meerut. It spread fast all over northern India and lasted
for almost two years. The following excerpt from Sukhozanefs report testifies to
the fact that not only did the Russian government not instigate the rebellion—
it did not even believe in its feasibility:

Apprehensions, caused by the growing m ight o f Great Britain in Central

Asia, have been expressed for a long tim e now and served as pretexts for
m any projects, devised by Russians as well as foreigners, the essence o f which
[projects— E.K.] is that this m ight could be easily dim inished by the march o f
Russian army or an army corps to India. A ccording to m any travelers’ accounts,
the appearance o f a Russian bayonet on the shores o f Indus, or even in Herat,
w ould cause a mass rebellion am ong the native residents o f Indo-British
dom ain, who hate their oppressors, and which [the rebellion— E.K.] would
destroy this shaky creation o f London’s politics. But m any are convinced that
these accounts are extremely superficial, exaggerated, one-sided and biased....
W ithout a doubt there are m any, who feel oppressed and discontented, but it is
more than questionable, that this discontent would express itself in a rebellion.
[Italics added]23

Archival documents of the mid-nineteenth century, now thoroughly read

and researched by Russian historians, do not mention a single Russian traveller,
merchant or diplomat, who might have witnessed and experienced first-hand the
turbulent events of 1857-1859 in northern India. Therefore, it is safe to suggest
that the second best view on the Mutiny opened for Russians from London. This
view is presented in a detailed report dated 26 July (August 7) 1857, prepared
by a Russian military agent in London, Count Nikolai Ignatiev for his superior
officer—the Military Minister, Nikolai Sukhozanet.
The assignment to London in 1856 was the first diplomatic position for
Nikolai Ignatiev (1832-1908), who at the time was only twenty-four years
old. A long and brilliant diplomatic career still lay ahead of him. As one of
the major players in ‘The Great Game* he features prominently in Hopkirk’s
book:24

C ount Nikolai Ignatiev, a brilliant and am bitious young political, who

enjoyed the ear o f the Tsar, and burnt to settle his country’s scores with the
British.... W hile serving as military attache in London during the Indian
M utiny, he had repeatedly urged his chiefs in St. Petersburg to take full
advantage o f Britain’s weakness in order to steal a march on her in Asia and
elsewhere.25
126 Elena Karatchkova

Ignatiev starts his report to Sukhozanet discussing the reasons for the mutiny:

The rebellion in India is not a spontaneous m utiny o f several native regiments

against the Company; rather it is an expression o f this region’s will to free itself
from the hateful yoke o f foreigners. Signs o f discontent am ong the population
and especially in the armed forces were m any and kept accum ulating for
a long tim e.... It seems to me, th at personal grievances turned into general
discontent during the last war, when endless rumors o f our arm ed forces1 march on
India ... generated expectations o f the war spreading to the territories conquered
by the Company, thus presenting an opportunity fo r India to regain independence.
[Italics added]26

‘The last war’, which, in Ignatiev’s opinion, generated expectations of Russia’s

triumphant liberating march to India, was, of course, the Crimean War between
Russia and Turkey, in which Britain and France participated on the Turkish side,
but the war resulted in Russia’s defeat and signing of the humiliating Paris Treaty.
According to the Treaty, the Russian Empire lost some of her territories and
rights to establish naval bases on the Black Sea. Later in the document Ignatiev
identifies ‘the Russian factor’ in the rebellion even more clearly:

It seem s to me, that initially it was planned to start the rebellion during the war
with us27; when they [Indian rebels— E.K.] learned about the unexpected signing
o f the Paris Treaty by Russia, the rebellion was postponed until a more favorable
opportunity came up. The war between England and Persia26 and anticipated
Russian interference seemed to present such a favorable opportunity to resume
secret preparations. [Italics added]29

Further in the report, Ignatiev discusses the current state of affairs in areas
where the rebels were particularly active, i.e., Meerut, Delhi and Lucknow, and
describes steps taken by the British to suppress the rebellion. He concludes his
report suggesting measures that need to be taken by Russia to use the Indian
Mutiny to her military and political advantage. Both the content and the form of
Ignatiev’s proposals betray a worthy disciple of Machiavelli:123

1. ‘A European power, which enjoys direct influence on Teheran’, should

attempt to persuade the Persian Shah to postpone acting upon the peace
treaty with England, in particular, to refrain from submitting Herat.
2. ‘Were able European officers happen [to appear] in Persia’, they could
assist the Shah in reinforcing Herat and Mohamra and in training the
Persian army for another war with England.
3. ‘Should a talented and energetic person appear among the rebels’, he
could carry on with the defence of Delhi until the rainy season, head the
rebellion and spread it to all the Company’s territories.
 The ‘Russian Factor’ in the Indian Mutiny 127

4. ‘It would be desirable to make Dost Muhammad30 understand, that now

is his only chance to increase his domains, to reward himself for the loss
of Herat; and at the same time to assist the Indian natives by expelling
the British from Punjab, thus getting rid of an unpleasant and dangerous
neighbor—the Company’.31
v
Upon receiving and studying Ignatiev’s report Sukhozanet forwarded it to
Alexander II, recommending it as ‘highly remarkable’. The Tsar must have been
impressed because five days later he invited Ignatiev to Warsaw to address a
strategy meeting with a personal report on situation in India.32
The Tsar did not act on Ignatiev’s proposals. Instead, he chose to use
temporary British weakness to reinforce Russia’s position in Central Asia and
the Far East. Ignatiev played the central role in these designs. In 1858, he headed
a mission to Khiva and Bokhara; and in 1859— a mission to China. His mission
to China was particularly successful. Upon his return the young politician was
awarded with the Order of St Vladimir and the rank of General.
Soon after the mutiny was brutally suppressed Indian messengers started
arriving at the outposts of the Russian Empire.

After the Mutiny: The ‘Physician from the

North’ Does not Make House Calls

Quoting from Col. M. Terentiev’s famous ‘Russian Great Game classic’ Russia
and England in the Struggle for the Markets of Central Asia,33 Hopkirk writes: ‘The
Indian Mutiny—Terentiev maintained—had only failed because the Indians
lacked a proper plan and outside support. They continue to suffer from British
misrule and exploitation.’ ‘Sick to death’—Terentiev went on— ‘the natives are
now waiting for a physician from the North’.34
Indeed, after the rebellion was suppressed several Indian missions seeking
the interference and protection of the Russian Tsar attempted to reach Russia
or Russian outposts in Central Asia. AD contains documents pertaining to three
such missions:

Documents ## 41-43

Documents 41—43, dated 26 August 1858— 5 December (17 December) 1860 on

a mission of Rao Raja Tula Singh Bahadur of Rewari to the Russian Consul in
Reshte, Persia;
128 Elena Karatchkova

Documents ## 46-48

Documents 46-48, dated 1865—-23 July (4 August) 1867 on a mission dispatched

by the ruler of Indore to Alexander II;

Document # 49

Document 49, dated 20 May (2 June) 1866 on a mission, dispatched by the

Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir Ranbir Singh to Alexander II.35
For the purposes of this analysis I will concentrate on the first set of
documents, pertaining to the mission of Rao Raja Tula Singh of Rewari to
the Russian Consul in Persia. Reproduced in AD are three out of five relevant
documents, currently preserved as a separate file in the Foreign Policy Archives
of the Russian Empire (Moscow). All three documents are translations from
Persian into Russian. There are no Persian originals in the file. The translation
into Russian is contemporary to the documents, i.e., it was most likely made by
the Consulate translator. In AD the documents are reproduced with two sets of
notes: endnotes left on the document by the translator (henceforth, Translator’s
Notes—TN)and notes prepared by the compilers of AD (henceforth, Compilers*
Notes— CN).

Document # 41

Document 41, dated 26 August 1859 is a letter, written by the ruler of Rajputana’s
Princely State of Marwar (Jodhpur) Takht Singh (r. 1843-1873) and addressed
to the Russian Tsar.
A CN to the letter says that in the archival file there are two more letters
of similar content: one dated 30 August 1859, which bears the personal seal of
Sardar Singh, ruler of Bikaner (r. 1851-1872), and another, dated 4 September
1859, sealed by Sawai Ram Singh II of Jaipur (r. 1851-1880). TN to the letter
states that, ‘judging by the tone of the letter, and especially by the look of seals,
we can hardly expect that the letters are fakes’.36
In particular, the ruler of Marwar writes:

T oday the oppressive hand o f English governm ent is laid on H indus

and M uslim s o f India and, m ost notably, on the descendant o f Emir
Tim ur— the king o f D elhi, w ith such force that m y pen fails to describe his
co n d itio n .... Considering Your M ajesty to be our shelter and hope, the
ruling Princes o f India decided to dispatch one o f the worthiest am ong us
to travel to Russia and to seek patronage o f the Highest Court o f the true
Shahinshah.37>38
 The ‘Russian Factor’ in the Indian Mutiny 129

The letter concludes with a request to the Tsar to grant a personal audience
to Raja Tula Singh Bahadur and ‘to treat with confidence his words and
explanations, both written and oral’.39

Document # 42 y

Document 42 is a letter, written by Rao Raja Tula Singh to Alexander II. TN

to the document states that it was written on 5 December (17 December) 1860
‘under protection of Imperial flag1, i.e., on the territory of the Russian Consulate
in Reshte.40
The document is particularly relevant to this discussion because the author
directly connects his and other rulers’ non-cooperation with the British
before and during the Mutiny with rumours of the Russian military advance to
India:

Three years ago [i.e., in 1857— E.K.] rumors reached India that Imperial
army forces were marching on India through Turkestan; English sahibs
started enquiries am ong Indian rulers, whether they [the rulers— E.K.] w ould
collaborate with them [the English— E.K.] should the rumors happen to
be true. The latter [Indian rulers— E.K.], including Your faithful servant,
refused [to collaborate with] them , and cherishing hopes o f Your forces* victori­
ous arrival raised a m utiny and started a war [italics added], as your Majesty
knows.
Later on English sahibs took possession o f Your servant's lands, as well as
guns and other armaments and all [belongings]; and since Your victorious
army did not appear, the ruling persons o f India, who could n ot find either
justice or shelter, decided that the only thing left for them to do was to dispatch
som eone to the court o f Your Imperial Majesty and that the messenger should
be one o f the ruling persons.
I dare to hope that Your Imperial Majesty shall n ot deny m e a favor o f giving
orders to the Russian C onsul in Reshte to escort m e, providing m y fullest safety,
to Your highest royal capital.41

Document # 43

Document 43, not dated, written by Raja Tula Singh in Reshte ‘under the shelter
of the Imperial flag’ for the Russian Tsar.
In this eight-page document the author presents his views on two issues,
which he discusses under the following subtitles:

1. A Brief Essay on the Condition of Indians and How the Native Peoples
Were Enslaved by the English.
130 Elena Karatchkova

2. On the Causes of Indian Rebellion against the British and on (the

circumstances of) My Arrival Here with a Description of What Happened
to Me on the Way.

The document is extremely curious and deserves a most careful reading,

but for present purposes I will only reproduce the author’s testimony as to the
‘Russian factor’ in the mutiny:

In 1857 Indian astrologers announced that the English [rule] was com ing to an
end, and that victorious army o f the Tsar o f Tsars together with Persian [armed
forces] would com e to India and establish here a just and caring ru le.... Soon
the news came that the Tsar’s victorious army entered Khiva42 and the Persian
arm y conquered Herat43, and will shortly arrive to India. All newspapers wrote
about this ...
Indians, who were eagerly w aiting for this day to com e, decided to use
this opportunity and appealed to the King o f Delhi ... to be their leader;
they rebelled against the English, hoping a t the same time that the victorious
arm y o f the Tsar will come to their aid [italics added]. Indian chiefs with
general consent started to help the cause: som e— with m oney, others— with
armed forces, while m any landow ning maharajas remained waiting for
the arrival o f the victorious army. Suddenly the news spread that the English
signed a peace treaty with the Persian government, and that the Persian
governm ent returned Herat*4, that the T sars victorious arm y had never entered
Khiva. These rumors stroke a blow to the Indians’ hearts. B u t their cause
could not be stopped, unwilling they continued their fight and are fighting still.
[Italics added]45

CNs to documents ## 41-43 list the messenger on behalf of the three Princely
States of Rajputana and the author of the two out of three remarkable documents
as an ‘unidentified person’. Furthermore they state that ‘no traces of his fate were
found in Russian archives’.46 Luckily, the omniscient Wikipedia helped me to
identify the messenger and shed some light on his future fate.47 The content of
the article is based on research carried out in the 1960s-1970s by a prominent
Indian historian of Haryana, K.C. Yadav.48
There are good reasons to believe that Rao Raja Tula Singh Bahadur, who
showed up in the Russian Consulate in Reshte in 1860, was none other than
Rao Tula Ram—the hero rebel of Rewari—currently in the state of Haryana.
According to Yadav, in May of 1857 Tula Ram organised a rebel force, which
took possession of tehsil headquarters in Rewari and proclaimed his rule over the
parganas of Rewari, Bhora and Shahjahanpur. The rule lasted for five months.
In October, the British army reclaimed Rewari. Rao Tula Ram withdrew his
forces and confronted the British in the battle of Narnaul, which the rebels lost
too. After that he moved to Rajputana and joined the forces of another famous
 The ‘Russian Factor' in the Indian Mutiny 131

freedom fighter, Tantya Tope. Sensing the inevitable defeat of the Mutiny, late
in 1858 he sent a petition to Lord Canning seeking a pardon from the British
government. The pardon was denied to him as a ‘chief instigator and prime
mover of the revolt'. Therefore— concludes the article—‘he left India in 1862.
He went first to Iran; then to Afghanistan in the winter of 1862, where he died
of dysentery in Kabul on September 23, 1863 at the ydung age of thirty-eight’.
The only discrepancy between the life stories of Wikipedia’s Rao Tula Ram and
AD’s Rao Tula Singh is in these dates. The Consulate translator testified that
Tula Singh wrote his letter to the Tsar on 5 December (17 December) 1860,
therefore he must have left India for Persia two years earlier than the Wikipedia
article suggests.
Another CN to this set of documents informs us that there are no indications
in the archival files as to whether the Russian Tsar was even informed about
the Rajputana Princes’ petitions. A prominent Russian historian N. Khalfin,
who analysed these and other similar documents of Indian missions to Russia
before AD was published,49 indicates that such missions were invariably treated
with caution and even with suspicion out of fear of provocation against the
background o f ‘The Great Game’.50 He concludes:

The tsarist governm ent did not intend to use in its practical activity any pretexts,
excuses, or other grounds, obtained as a result o f such embassies, m issions, or
from single messengers . . . 51

Despite high hopes and expectations of the former rebels and native rulers
the ‘physician from the North’ flatly refused to make house calls.

Conclusion

The prevailing opinion among Russian historians on the role of Russia in

the Indian Mutiny is expressed by a prominent scholar Pyotr Shastitko in his
Foreword to AD:

The Indian rebellion created favorable conditions for Russia’s heightened

activity in Central and South Asia. Several projects o f Russian military
marches to Hindustan were devised. In this connection two theses are o f
principal importance. First: the goal o f these projects was not to conquer India,
but to expel the British from Hindustan. Second: these projects were rejected
by the Tsar’s court. There was never a real threat o f Russian conquest o f
India.52

This opinion, although accurate, does not take into account what I describe
as ‘the Russian factor’ in the mutiny—a distinct, if indirect, role that the
132 Elena Karatchkova

rumours of Russian advance to the Indian borders played in determining the

timing of the mutiny and adding to or taking away from the resolve of its parti­
cipants.

Notes and References

1. Quoted in Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 294.
2. The Paris Treaty was signed in 1856 after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War.
3. All translations from Russian, unless otherwise stated, are mine.
4. For the purposes o f this essay it is important to realise that all through the nineteenth century
and the beginning o f the twentieth century, until 14 February 1918, the Julian calendar was
applied in Russia. It was customary to use the Julian calendar for official correspondence even
on documents written from Europe (personal communication with the Director o f Military and
Historical Archives in Moscow). In the nineteenth century the difference between the Julian and
Gregorian calendar applied in Europe constituted plus twelve days, i.e., the letter quoted above
was written on 13 August 1857 according to the European calendar. From here on the Gregorian
date will follow the Julian date in brackets.
5. Reproduced in P.M. Schastitko, Russko-lndijskie Otnosheniya v XIX veke. Sbomik Arkhivnykh
Dokumentov i Materialov [Russian-Indian Relations in Nineteenth Century: A Collection of
Archival Documents and Materials] (Moskva: Vostochnaya Literature, 1997), p. 118.
6. Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990).
7. Russko-lndijskie Otnosheniya v XIX veke. Sbomik Arkhivnykh Dokumentov i Materialov
[Russian-Indian Relations in the Nineteenth Century: A Collection o f Archival Documents and
Materials] (Moskva: Vostochnaya Literature, 1997). From here on referred to as AD (Archival
Documents).
8. Ibid., p. 35
9. See documents 2-14 in AD, pp. 27-34. The original documents are stored in the Russian State
Military and Historical Archives.
10. Hopkirk, The Great Game, p. 28
11. See document 15 in AD, p. 34.
12. Hopkirk, The Great Gameyp. 4
13. See documents 32-36 in AD, pp. 87-103. The original documents are preserved in the Russian
State Military and Historical Archives.
14. Across from this phrase in the margins Alexander II wrote: ‘Quite fair*.
15. After the signing o f the Paris Treaty in 1856 Russia sustained heavy political and military
losses.
16. AD, pp. 87-88.
17. Ibid., p. 88.
18. Ibid., p. 89.
19. Ibid., pp. 83-94.
20. Ibid., p. 95.
21. Ibid., p. 95.
22. On these later developments see the recently published collection o f archival documents
uBoVshaya Igran v TsentraVnoi Azii: Indijskij Pokhod Russkoi Armii. Sbomik arkhivnykh
dokumentov. Sostavitel’, avtor predisloviya i primechanij Tatiana Zagorodnikova. [‘The
Great Game’ in Central Asia: ‘Indian March* o f the Russian Army. A Collection o f Archival
 The ‘Russian Factor’ in the Indian Mutiny 133

Documents. Compiled, forwarded and commented by Tatiana Zagorodnikova] (Moskva:

Institut Vostokovedeniya, 2005.)
23. AD, p. 96.
24. He also features as Count Nikolai Ignatieff—the sinister villain and main antagonist o f Sir Harry
Flashman in two novels by George MacDonald Fraser— Flashmati at the Charge and Flashman
in the Great Game. I am grateful to Carol Henderson, who brought this fact to my attention.
25. Hopkirk, The Great Gameyp. 296 N
26. AD, p. 105.
27. i.e., during the Crimean War.
28. The Anglo-Persian War o f 1856-1857.
29. AD, p. 107.
30. Dost Muhammad o f Kabul— in 1836-1863, the Emir o f Afghanistan.
31. AD, pp. 116-117.
32. N. Khalfin and P. Shastitko, eds, Rossiya i India [Russia and India] (Moskva: Glavnaya Redaktsiya
Vostochnoi Literatury, 1986), pp. 124-125.
33. In 1876. Terentiev's book was translated into English and published in Calcutta in two volumes.
34. Quoted in Hopkirk, The Great Gameyp. 363.
35. AD, pp. 121-128; pp. 139-141; pp. 142-143. The original documents are stored in the Foreign
Policy Archives o f the Russian Empire.
36. AD, p. 122.
37. The king o f kings.
38. AD, p. 121.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., p. 122.
41. Ibid., pp. 122-123.
42. In fact the khanate o f Khiva in Central Asia was conquered by the Russians much later— in 1873.
43. Persian armed forces occupied Herat in October o f 1856 during the Anglo-Iranian War o f
1856-1857.
44. The peace treaty o f 1857, when Persia acknowledged the independence o f Herat.
45. A D ,p. 125.
46. Ibid., p. 127.
47. See ‘Rao Tula Ram', http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rao_Tula_Ram
48. See, for example, K.C. Yadav, ed., Haryana: Studies in History and Cultrure (Kurukshetra:
Kurukshetra University, 1968), pp. 85-102.
49. Khalfin and Shastitko, Rossiya i India , pp. 141-164. In English, see N.A. Khalfin, Tndian
Missions in the Late Nineteenth Century and British Historiography o f International Relations
in Asia', M odem Asian Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (1987), pp. 639-646.
50. Ibid., pp. 146-147.
51. Ibid., p. 164.
52. AD, p. 9.
 8

GENERAL D’ORGONI AND FRENCH MILITARY

CONSPIRACIES IN 1857
Marina Carter

Introduction

FRENCH attitudes towards India and to the violent military upheavals of

1857-1859 cannot be understood without some assessment of that country’s
status, which has been well summarised as one of ‘colonisers who were them­
selves under the hegemony of another European power. France was thus a
“colonisatrice colonis£e” [a colonised coloniser], or, better, a “subaltern
coloniser’”.1The status of subaltern coloniser helps to explain the seeming con­
tradictions in French writings during the uprising. In some articles the stance
is one of fellow coloniser, adopting a disinterested tone in assessing British
failings in India, and thereby implying a common cause in the face of threat­
ening natives. In other publications a stridently anti-British voice is revealed,
and one which casts its sympathies squarely with the ‘oppressed’ of India.
Walking a tightrope which at once attempted to defend France’s position as an
ally, whilst simultaneously urging the French to usurp Britain’s imperial status,
strangely phrased articles were produced in droves in the late 1850s and early
1860s that sought to exaggerate the gains of the rebels, the better to chip away
at the edifice of the Raj. This chapter appraises French attitudes to the Indian
Uprising and assesses the real or perceived threat posed by France, through
the prism of the career and actions of one man, General Maha d’Orgoni.
He, perhaps better than anyone, symbolises French contradictions in relation to
the Indian Uprising of 1857-1859, and through him, the real or implicit military
threat posed by ambivalent nations such as France to British rule in India, can
be re-envisioned.
 General d’Orgoni and French Military Conspiracies in 1857 135

Anglo-French Tensions at the Time of the Rebellion

At the time of the Indian Uprising, relations between Britain and France were
far from cordial. Under Napoleon III, France had embarked on a programme
of shipbuilding which appeared to strike at the core\ of British power—its
naval supremacy.2 The harbouring—across the channel— of political refugees
from France was another source of tension, especially when it was found that
an assassination attempt against Napoleon III on 14 January 1858, by
Felice Orsini, had actually been planned in England. British policymakers
were well aware, moreover, that alongside his more moderate official
pronouncements, Napoleon III was actively commissioning, or even participating
in, the authorship of brochures and pamphlets of a decidedly hostile character.3
In 1857, an anonymous pamphlet was published in Paris which roundly
condemned British actions in India. The massacre of 700 disarmed sepoys by
the 10th Regiment was described, and extracts from contemporary British
Indian newspapers which detailed the executions of mutineers were reproduced.
The author of the pamphlet remarked that Britain ‘recognises the virtues of the
negro while denying those of the Indian; crying tears without number over the
miseries of black Uncle Toms while indifferent to the sufferings of 140 million
of its brown-skinned subjects!’. The pamphlet concluded by posing a rhetorical
question:

W ill England keep India? The English will probably stamp out the present
revolt, but the punishm ent already inflicted on the mutineers and those to
com e will increase the hatred o f the Indians. They will consider those who
m ount the scaffold as martyrs for the independence o f their country, and they
will swear to avenge them .4

A similar opinion was expressed by Amed£e de Gayet de C£sena who

predicted in an 1858 pamphlet that while England would be victorious, she would
henceforth be surrounded by dangers and only able to maintain control over
India by force. The revolt was characterised as having a double origin—religious
and national; and a double element—Hindu and Muslim; and as having exacted
a heavy price on India herself: from one end of India to the other ‘all is ruin
and despair’. The likeliest outcome, the author envisaged, was that Russia would
enlarge itself on the ruins of British power.5
These pamphlets perhaps excited more comment in England—where they
were routinely picked up and assessed by the press—than in France itself.6 As a
result, it has been argued that while their propaganda value in France was limited,
the ‘pamphlet policy’ actually ‘served to increase and heighten the existing
suspicion toward [France] by the other great powers’.7 The British newspapers
also took the trouble to translate the more extreme items that appeared in the
136 Marina Carter

columns of the French press. On 8 August 1857, for example, the Spectator noted
that the ‘Imperialist Estafette, which is almost considered a ministerial paper’,
had commented in the following terms about the Indian crisis:

There is a profound panic in London; for in the worst days o f its history
England has received no m ore violent check. In fact, the loss o f India w ould
be a deathblow to her com m erce and industry; and once driven out o f that
country, the former conquerors w ould find insurm ountable obstacles if ever
they should think o f returning.... T hey have to answer now a terrible account:
instead o f civilizing India, they have exploited it. They only wanted slaves, but
they have created Spartacuses....

In September 1857, the London Journal remarked:

The attitude o f the French press becom es m ore and m ore perfidious and ill-
natured every day touching In d ia.... It is irritating to the highest pitch to see the
way in which, both in the press and in general conversation, it is now affirmed
here that we ‘shall be utterly incapable o f subduing India w ithout the help o f
France’, and that to buy that help, we m ust pay the price o f all the colonies she
ever set foot upon!

The veiled ambitions of France were drawn attention to by the Times on

9 December 1859, which reproduced a translated extract from the French
publication Univers:

The first necessity for France is to m aintain her rank and influence in the world.
She would lose them if any one power were to possess Asia. W hat w e w ant is,
that the East shall remain open to all nations; that its riches shall n ot becom e
the m onopoly o f anyone ... if possible, and even probable, events should bring
about a partition o f the Asiatic continent, let us be am ong the forem ost to claim
our share’.

Xavier de Fontaines, writing in Le Monde, managed to conflate the

woes of India, France and Ireland in his diatribe against the cross-Channel
rivals:

England laughs with im punity at God and man. The gold o f which she is so
proud, and with which she pays European revolutionism — that gold is the
substance o f 100 m illions o f H indoos, the bread o f Ireland, the proceeds o f the
plunder o f 3,000 French vessels!8

Alongside the pamphlets and press coverage, the French were as quick as
the British to capitalise on popular interest in the momentous events taking
place in India, and a series of fictional and non-fictional works purporting to
shed light on the mutiny appeared in print in the years immediately following
 General d'Orgoni and French Military Conspiracies in 1857 137

its outbreak. The author of Les Anglais et Vlnde managed to get into print in
1857 itself at a time when, he noted, Britain’s means of retaining her Indian
Empire was ‘a question of great moment’. The conquest of India would
nevertheless remain one of the ‘grand pages of British history’, it was asserted.9
La Rivolte des Cipayes, published in 1860 by Paul Forgues, was principally
drawn from English sources and balanced examples showing how the British
victors had outraged ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’ with comments illustrating
that the Raj was ‘less tyrannical, less capricious, less violent than the insurgent
soldier/.10
Others offered a more critical perspective of the British actions. Charles
Martin’s 1859 book La Puissance militaire des Anglais dans Vlnde et Vinsurrection
des Cipayes managed to incorporate a sympathetic portrayal of Irish emigration
and to suggest that English misdeeds had deservedly brought the Indian
catastrophe upon their heads.11 In 1862, La Revoke au Bengale en 1857 et 1858
Souvenirs d'un Officier Irlandais purported to be the translation of an English
account by an Irish officer serving in the British Army. The book contains
numerous accounts of massacres by the British of sepoy prisoners (see especially
Chapters VI and VIII) and even a harrowing tale of the assassination of
a child by an English officer. Some of the material was evidently taken from
accounts of repression as witnessed by the Times correspondent, Russell, and
the cruelty of the victors of Lucknow, seized by ‘murder fever’, is depicted
in vivid detail.12 These books served as effective counters to British claims of
philanthropy in India, by underscoring the exploitation of Indian resources,
highhanded treatment of the natives, and the destruction of traditional ways of
life by the British.
The stinging attacks of pamphleteers, journalists and French authors of
diverse publications inevitably produced a backlash in similar vein in Britain.
In 1861, ‘a proprietor’ hit back with a booklet entitled Why is France Arming So
Largely? India Threatened! In it, the author asserted that India would be ‘the chief
spot to which the political vane points, and where the deadly struggle for the
mastery will occur...’. He warned British statesmen that although the rebellion
was stamped out,

you have only scotched the snake, not killed it.... Have a care she does not com e
again with powerful and unexpected assistance at her back.... Are you not
threatened by Russian gigantic encroachm ent on the A m oor river on the one
side, longing to revenge Sebastopol, and by France, stung by the remembrance
o f W aterloo, and sighing for glory on the other?

The pamphleteer remarked that the arsenals of France were ringing with the
forging of steel for plating ships and asserted that France stood ready ‘to take
advantage of your errors, ready to nudge the hand to draw’.13
138 Marina Carter

That old friend of England, De Toqueville, could nevertheless still be relied

upon to cast British imperial actions in a favourable light and to pour a soothing
balm on the troubled Anglo-French relationship:

N othing under the sun is so w onderful as the conquest and still m ore the
governm ent o f India by the English. N othing so fixes the eyes o f mankind on
the little island o f which the Greeks never heard even the nam e ... I believe
that England obeys an instinct, n o t only heroic, but wise when, already
possessing India, she resolves at any price whatever to keep it. I add, that
I am convinced that she will keep it, though, perhaps, on less favourable
conditions.14

Certainly, the British political elite probably cared little for the bluster and
bombast of the French pamphleteers, but there were assuredly a few moments,
particularly during the nail-biting months of mid to late 1857, when news from
India was anxiously awaited, that Lord Palmerston and his entourage must have
been on tenterhooks, lest their old adversaries seek, in reality, to take advantage
of the body blows being dealt the British Empire.

French Military Conspiracies and 1857

There were certainly rumours afloat that the French were involved in the ship­
ment of arms and military personnel to India to help the rebels in the autumn
of 1857. The Madras Athenaeum announced that its Parisian correspondent,
in a letter dated 3 August 1857, had reported that six French officers had left
the capital to journey to India in the service of the rebels. It was said that the
promoter of the scheme was a man named General d’Orgoni and that the matter
was considered important enough to be telegraphed to Sir Colin Campbell.15
On 8 August 1857, the Spectator reprinted information from a Belgian
newspaper Vlndfyendance Beige which provided further details about cTOrgoni:

D uring the beginning o f last winter, w hen the marriage o f General d’Orgoni
took place, he declared loudly and categorically, in all the salons where he had
the entree, in Paris and in Nantes, “That it was a great mistake to believe the
English dom ination in India settled; that the Native population had an
implacable resentment against the Com pany, that their anger w ould break out
on the first occasion; that a great num ber o f princes, apparently in subjection,
w ould lift up their head one day; that as far as regarded his ow n person he
had only readied his em inent post on account o f his personal hatred o f all
Englishmen, against w hom he had declared war w ithout mercy, so that he
w ould not lay his sword down before the last Englishman had been driven from
Indian soil”.
 General d'Orgoni and French Military Conspiracies in 1857 139

The Spectator castigated the British authorities for their seeming complacency
in the face of such threats: ‘while D’Orgoni was thus expressing himself in Paris,
the East India Company seemed to have no idea of the danger which threatened
the existence of their Indian empire’.16
British diplomats in France soon acted upon the information being circulated
about French military assistance to the rebels. A note was written to the British
Consul at Alexandria from Mr E. Monson, the secretary of the British ambassador
in Paris, on 10 September 1857, which relayed ‘private information’ that active
enlistment ‘is going on in France among old French officers who receive 5,000
francs per man for joining the Indian mutineers’. Those who enlisted were
reportedly furnished with Swiss passports, and a list of the recruits was obtained.
It was also stated that weapons were being sent by a separate route: ‘Barrels full
of revolvers have been sent overland from Liege for the insurgents according
to information we have received which is tolerably reliable.’ This information,
together with the list of names, was then forwarded from Alexandria to Lord
Elphinstone, the Governor of Bombay.17 These details were, in turn, forwarded
to the commissioner at Sind who was given instructions ‘to arrest and send back
any of the officers mentioned in Mr Monson’s communication who may make
their appearance at Kurrachee’. The existence of this correspondence is in itself
proof that the British were taking the rumours seriously.18
The attention of the authorities in India was alerted to the likely departure of
General d’Orgoni himself for India. The rumour that he was at the head of the
French force destined to join the rebels was now acted upon, and on 2 November
1857 the British government agent at Galle, a port town in Ceylon, received a
letter from the secretary to the Government of India. This advised the Indian
authorities as to the journey apparently being undertaken by d’Orgoni from
Europe to the East and requested that he be carefully watched. Believing that the
ship he was travelling on would stop at Ceylon en route to India, the agent there
was expressly requested

that you will place a policem an in close attendance on M onsieur d’Orgoni

should he com e to Galle with directions to note specially the persons with
w hom he com m unicates and to ascertain his destination on leaving the place,
which you will com m unicate to the Indian G overnm ent.19

News of the audacious mission of General d’Orgoni and his recruits travelled
rapidly around the western world. In December 1857, a magazine in Philadelphia
published a character sketch of the ‘celebrated General d’Orgoni, who has gone
to India for the purpose of aiding the war’. The readers of Graham's Illustrated
Magazine were informed:

D ’Orgoni is ... already half-way on his road to India, accom panied by several
young m en of family and education. Their exact destination is n ot known; but
no one doubts that it is D e lh i.... The departure o f General d’Orgoni, for the
140 Marina Carter

avowed purpose o f putting h im self at the head o f the rebellious m ovem ent
in India, has given rise to m uch observation am ongst us. This general’s well
know n hatred o f England, and the hobby which he has been riding for so m any
years, concerning the facility with which her power m ight be overthrown, by
attacking her through her Eastern possessions, have long given us cause o f
astonishm ent, both at his ignorance and bitterness. At the present m om ent
we cannot help feeling uneasiness lest he should succeed in reaching Delhi
before it has been taken by the British, as the very confidence inspired by
the presence o f the man whose nam e is familiar am ong the H indoos as that
o f the violent enemy o f British rule, cannot fail to bring with it trouble and
discouragement to u s .20

General d’Orgoni seemed to be at the heart of planned conspiracies against

the British in the summer and autumn of 1857 as the world waited for news from
India. It was reported that while Tsar Nicolas I was at Kissingen, in Bavaria, he
secretly sent for d’Orgoni,

in order to discuss the situation in India with him . Although Gortchakoff tried
to dissuade the Tsar from receiving d’Orgoni, he had him presented on the
prom enade o f the Kurhaus in full view o f the public. The general handed the
Tsar a m em orandum containing a detailed plan o f attack upon British India by
a Russian army.

As a follow-up to this meeting, the Tsar arranged to meet Napoleon III at

Stuttgart on 24 September 1857.21 The Times of London also began to track
d’Orgoni’s movements reporting that ‘General d’Orgoni has arrived at Marseilles
on his way to Rome’.22
D’Orgoni was said to have had an audience with the King of Oude and was
certainly on intimate terms with the Indian royals during their stay in France.
Following the Queen’s death on 24 January 1858, the American magazine
Harpers noted his presence at her funeral, and, in its report on the procession of
the mourners to the P£re Lachaise cemetery in Paris, remarked:

The coffin was carried by eight o f the chief members o f the suite to the hearse,
which was entirely covered with silver tissue, and drawn by eight white horses.
The hearse was preceded by a carriage containing the priest, and was followed
by the Prince Mirza Bahadoor, leaning on the arms o f General d’Orgoni and
Captain Lynch.23

Was the General not after all on his way to the East? What had his involve­
ment been during the uprising? Whatever the truth of his interest in and support
for the mutineers and their potential allies among the Great Powers, he had
by now attained almost mythical status, LittelVs Living Age, having assured its
readers, in December 1857, that d’Orgoni’s hostility to the British ‘must be
 General d'Orgoni and French Military Conspiracies in 1857 141

counted among the circumstances that contributed to embolden the Sepoys of

Bengal’.24

d ’Orgoni: The Man and the Symbol

\

General d’Orgoni was in fact a creation by a masterful self-publicist and a man

who represented the aspirations and hopes of many of his compatriots in an
era when the last gasp of Napoleonic grandeur for a moment seemed able to
wrest the imperial high-ground back from the British. The very name was an
invention. Graham's Illustrated Magazine informed its readers that

D ’Orgoni, w hose real name is D orignon, belongs to the old race o f Chouans
o f Brittany, and was deeply engaged in the conspiracy which had for its objects
the dethronem ent o f Louis Philippe, and the restoration o f the Bourbons, in
the person o f the “Regent Marie Caroline Duchesse de Berri,” for her son, the
D ue de Bordeaux. All around Laval and M arenne, in Jubelin, and through
the Bocage, marvels are still told o f the prowess o f the Chouan D orignon—
the farm he defended singlehanded against the whole garde nationale o f the
little village o f Bericq, is still show n— and its blackened walls yet remain to
testify to the fatal extremity to which the enem y had been reduced at last. It was
to D orignon that the Duchesse de Berri confided in safety, w hen com pelled to
fly from that part o f the country; and it was D orignon who escorted her through
the provinces, rendered dangerous by the occupation o f the king’s troops, and
the constant vigilance m aintained by the authorities. D orignon had been left
for dead in the ruins o f the sm ouldering farm, but a beam falling across his
body had crushed his lim bs, but saved his life; and he managed to escape to
St. Malo, whence he embarked for India with the avowed determ ination o f
seeking service with som e o f the native princes.25

The Independance Beige ran a slightly different story about d’Orgoni’s real
name and antecedents, advising its readers that

a French adventurer o f the nam e o f Girodon returned to France last winter, to

see his family and to marry a sweetheart at Nantes. An old soldier o f the school
o f D upleix and M ontcalm , a garde-du-corps o f Charles D ix in 1830, he became
a voluntary exile, with the intention o f fighting the English wherever he could
m eet them .26

Most sources agreed, however, that it was in Burma that d’Orgoni alias
Girodon alias Dorignon had made a name for himself. Indeed, an article about
‘General Orgoni’ complete with a dashing portrait of him in ‘Burmese dress’ had
already appeared in 1855 (see Figure 8.1). In this version he was ‘a French officer,
142 Marina Carter

GENERAL ORGONI, PR IN C E O P TH E EM PIRE.

Figure 8.1: ‘General Orgoni: Prince of the Empire’, B a llo u 's Pictoria l
D ra w in g -R o o m Com panion, 13 January 1855, p. 20.

Source: M .D . Carter.

who drilled the Burman troops’ and who had ‘been created, at the court of Ava,
a begie, that is to say, cousin of the emperor’. The General was more than happy
to regale the avid public with stories about ‘the curious country he knows so
well ...’ and, in the process, to weave an enduring legend. On this occasion,
readers were told:

The East is still a country o f adventure, and the history o f Orgoni is more
rom antic than m any fictions. At tw enty-two he had already been a captain
o f cavalry and knight o f two military orders. He was seized one day with a
curiosity to study the military and political organization o f that gigantic house
o f com m erce, which, under the name o f the East India Company, governed
a hundred thousand souls; and for this secret end he travelled, during m any
years, over Hindostan, thus preparing h im self for the struggle w hich, at a later
 General d'Orgoni and French Military Conspiracies in 1857 143

period, he was obliged to sustain with his counsels and his sword, against
the invasion o f India, under the standard o f the emperor o f Burmah. It was
to this perseverance— this fatiguing and dangerous work— that the ‘daring
Frenchman’, as he was called by the A nglo-Indian journals, owes all the
honor he now enjoys. It was thus that he rose at the age o f forty-three years,
from captain to general o f forty thousand m en and prince o f the Burman
empire.27

Subscribers to Allen's Indian Mail and Register of Intelligence^ however, would

not have been so impressed. They had been informed, in June 1856, that

General D ’Orgoni, o f whose swaggering our readers have before heard, is going
to Paris as a special ambassador from the Lord o f the W hite Elephant. His
suite is to consist o f fifteen persons, including, it is announced, “four or five
noblem en,”— i.e. Burmese noblem en, “o f high rank.” General D ’Orgoni, as
he calls him self, has no higher rank, and never had, than that o f captain in the
French army. But when such persons get away from the place where they are
know n, they do “bear their blushing honours thick about them ”.28

Most histories of Burma devote at least a few lines to a man who is generally
described as a ‘mysterious adventurer’ and who was certainly a resident of Ava
in the mid-1850s.29 His British contemporaries in the East, however, prior to
the Indian Mutiny, tended to dismiss him as insignificant. Sir Arthur Phayre
considered him ‘scarce worth mentioning’ as being a person who exaggerated his
influence with the Burmese king.30
Only in the fevered atmosphere of the summer and autumn of 1857 were the
British forced to think again and even briefly to take seriously the notion that
‘Monsieur Girodon’ might be capable of leading a force and bringing together a
hostile alliance which could damage British interests. For the French, he fanned
the dying flames of an Indian imperial fantasy. An obscure pamphlet published
in Nancy, France, in 1858 encapsulates both the dream that d’Orgoni inspired
and his casting of himself in heroic Napoleonic colours. The author, Prosper
Dumont, exhorted his countrymen to follow the example of the British who
had conquered India, and to take Indo-China. In this pamphlet, perhaps the
truest version of the biography of a man here named as Louis-Charles Girodon
is offered. Born on 20 March 1811, into a family who had fought the battles
of the Vendee, he is said to have followed Charles X into exile in Scotland and
England after the July revolution and later to have served the cause of Don
Miguel in Portugal. Following his marriage to the eldest daughter of Count
Bouvet de Lozier in 1836, Girodon is said to have left for Bourbon Island in the
Indian Ocean, where his wife died and he married his sister-in-law, who also
died very young. The bereaved Girodon is said to have travelled widely and then
to have spent some time in India before making his way to Burma where he was
reportedly received as a saviour at Ava, created general in chief and employed
144 Marina Carter

in organising defences. There he was credited with stopping the invasion of the
British and was promoted to ‘prince of the Burmese empire* on 4 January 1854.
He was then sent on one or more missions to France.31
Back in Paris, in 1857, the man now called d’Orgoni began to become a
subject of interest. In July, Vlndipendance Beige drew attention to his presence
and suggested his role in instigating the Sepoy Revolt. The Gazette de France
published a response in August asserting that ‘Ambassador d’Orgoni* was
‘exclusively occupied with industrial and commercial concerns*, at the same time
hinting that the General had indeed been approached on numerous occasions by
young men ‘with patriotic intentions*.32 The Gazette also asserted that the name
d*Orgoni had become ‘a sort of nightmare for the Governor General of Calcutta,
perhaps because it was equivalent to a “flag** in the Far East*. It was stated that
d’Orgoni did not need the permission of the English to take a group of French
officers with him to Burma, as a ‘small military colony*, and indeed the British
were reminded that the Sikh forces currently helping reassert control over the
mutinous forces owed something to the organisation of Ranjit Singh’s troops
by the former French officers Allard, Ventura and Avitabile. The article hinted
that the British would do better to turn their attention to the likely need to
defend their empire from the Russians.
In November 1857, letters purported to be written by d’Orgoni discuss his
having been received by the Pope, while those of his supporters complain that
the interest now being shown in him by the British press was ‘complicating his
position*. On 18 February 1858, still in Paris, d’Orgoni claimed to be waiting
for news from Rome about a further mission to Burma. Prosper Dum ont’s
pamphlet, however, concluded that the Sepoy Revolt was after all ‘providential*
and called upon the Ministers of Napoleon III to hold themselves in readiness
for action ‘not only in China, but also in India, the gulf of Bengal, Cambodia
and Tonkin*. The pamphlet ended with the publication of a letter the author had
received from d’Orgoni on 12 February 1858. This letter stated that he would
not be spending the month of April in France, but could not say more. Dumont
clarified that d’Orgoni had left Paris on 6 March 1858 and travelled to Marseille.
The Gazette du Midi subsequently reported that a deal had been brokered by
the General between the Burmese Emperor and two of the most important
commercial houses of Marseilles.
Over the next few years, d’Orgoni’s name continued to appear in periodicals
and news articles dealing with Burma. In a report for the French Geographical
Society in 1860, Malte-Brun reported approvingly on the ‘powerful influence
of one of our compatriots, General d’Orgoni* in Burma, which had resulted in
the industrial goods of France being admitted to the markets of that country,
and the free navigation of the Iraouaddy, enabling French ships to travel to the
heart of the kingdom of Siam.33 The 1862 issue of the Annuaire Encyclopidique
informed its readers of the opening up of the Burmese Empire as a result of a
decree orchestrated by the influential ‘g£n£ral Maha-d’Orgoni, Fran<;ais*. These
 General d’Orgoni and French Military Conspiracies in 1857 145

reports were taken up and echoed in English-language publications. The Times

reproduced a copy of the decree which accorded to "General Maha d’Orgoni the
privilege of introducing, under his patronage and control, French manufactures
by means of speculators and traffickers in all sorts of materials’.34 John Cook
warned of the danger of the French commercial treaty with the Emperor of
Burma with a rhyming couplet: \

This treaty is the Grecian w ooden warhorse into Troy—

Its w om b holds m ischief—bodes us little joy.

He added:

This Birmah Treaty, together with the subjugation o f Cochin China is a master
m ove on the political chessboard, and secures at once a firm ally and silent
enlarged footing and com m issariat in India for France, and a latent token that
Indian independent royalty shall n o t be annihilated; this political and wily
stroke, and the French hand o f fellowship with Russia, should make you look
twice to your Indian councils, for you do n ot know where it will end.35

The Eclectic Magazine informed its readers in February 1862 that "while we
possess Arracan, Prome, Rangoon and Pegu, the Emperor of Ava is upheld in his
capital of Amarapura by Mr Girodon or d’Orgoni “general of all his generals”,
and ""prime minister of all his ministers”’.36A less gushing but interesting personal
description and appraisal of the French General appeared in W.H. Marshall’s
account of Four Years in Burmah, published in 1860. Describing d’Orgoni as "a
French military adventurer’, he offered an account of a meeting with the General
and his suite "which consisted of two young French gentlemen, one of whom he
styled his secretary, the other being his aid-de-camp’.

The general was o f a m iddle height, between forty and fifty years o f age, but
looked considerably older. H is face was broad and bluff, his hair thin and
grizzled, and he wore a m oustache. H is air and appearance were decidedly o f
the French military order. His face appeared bronzed with travel, and he had
an ugly scar on the chin. He was not altogether a prepossessing-looking man,
and his conversation generally struck me as being bom bastic and egotistical.37

The United Services Gazette drew upon an article which had appeared in the
Moniteur de VArmie to further elucidate details of the General’s life and in order
to mock that journal’s attempts to "raise the merest freelance to the dignity of a
leader, a minister, and a prince!’. The Gazette managed to cast a slur on the name
change and on the apparent commonness of this affectation in French society:

Voyons. This D ’orgoni, to begin with, is not a D ’orgoni at all. His real name
is Girodon— o f which D ’orgoni is an elegant anagram. W hen people adopt
146 Marina Carter

aliases in this country a vulgar suspicion is cast around their proceedings, but
in France such transformations are m ade, as a matter o f course, to suit the
peculiar circumstances o f individuals.

After reprising, from the Moniteur s version, further details of Louis Charles
Giro don’s life—his support for the Duchesse de Berri in Vendee, his adventures
in Spain, where he was reportedly wounded at Oporto, his sojourns in England in
between these adventures, and wanderings following the deaths of two spouses
in Bourbon, the Gazette lingers on the time spent by the Frenchman in India:

D ’orgoni reached the Malabar coast, and sitting am idst the ruins o f the palaces
o f Goa, where everything spoke o f Albuquerque, he began to devote h im self
to political and military studies, with a view to the interests o f the people o f
India— ‘that people w hose future is as mysterious as their past.’ The Anglo
Indian Government, and the state o f Hindostan, particularly engaged his
attention. For som e years he remained at Bombay, but the M oniteur know s
nothing o f his romantic adventures in that dull Presidency. Here, however,
he seem s to have learned that D upleix was baffled by the English, and the
Portuguese power founded by Gama and Albuquerque in like manner upset
by the same bold people. So he dropped the H indoos, like a h ot potato, and
w ent o ff to Calcutta, en route to Ava, having had som e new dream o f white
elephants, Boondela and Buddh, all doubtless crying out to France to aid them
against oppressive England. His departure from Calcutta excited, o f course,
the m ost lively apprehensions in the b osom o f Lord Dalhousie. On dit— a
saving clause that— that a vessel was sent in pursuit o f the future Dupleix!
Lord Dalhousie tore all his hair off h is head— knocked down Mr. Halliday,
and strangled a Khetmutghar, in his rage at the escape o f the brave p^lerin.
All Calcutta began to arm— on dit. In the m eantim e, D ’orgoni reached the
Court o f Ava, and ‘stood between India and China!’— M agnificent attitude!
im penetrable barrier!

The United Services Gazette professed not to be unduly concerned about

D’Orgoni’s influence with the King of Ava, remarking that the Moniteur article
had failed to note that ‘our troops had heartily thrashed the Burmese and their
leader, and wrested from them Pegu, Prome, 8cc’ before their progress had
been checked by the French general. Adverting to the return journey made by
Girodon to the East (which had provoked the concern of the British) the Gazette
mentioned only that his destination was Burma: ‘A special steamer is to be in
waiting at Rangoon, to convey the General and Mrs. D’Orgoni—the “Prince and
Princess,” to Ava, if the waters of the Irrawaddy should be deep enough for so
precious a freight’.
Perhaps in order to deflate his pomposity further, in June 1862 the Solicitors'
Journal & Reporter took the trouble to comment on a recent judgement of the
Civil Tribunal of the Seine, Paris, which had condemned d’Orgoni alias Girodon
.to pay his father-in-law, a M. Bigi, a pension of 900f. in monthly instalments.
 General d’Orgoni and French Military Conspiracies in 1857 147

The statements of the counsel for the defence were carefully noted: ‘General
d’Orgoni’s counsel ... denied that the General possessed the enormous wealth
attributed to him, and said that he had so many just claims on his resources
that he was not able to meet them all.138 An 1868 edition of the New Monthly
Magazine also provided an interesting insight into the remnants of d’Orgoni’s
Burmese Empire and a footnote to the journey made by^the General and a group
of Frenchman at the time of the Indian Uprising. The author of ‘A Visit to the
King of Burma’ described a trip to the prince’s iron-foundry, which had been
constructed in 1860 by a French engineer named Chariet. That gentleman had
reportedly come to Burma together with ‘thirty or forty other artisans’ who had
been ‘promised numerous advantages by a French adventurer named D’Orgoni’.
Chariet was, reportedly, the only individual who remained of the French ‘colony’,
‘the others having either died or returned home disappointed’.39 Were these
the same m£n—now metamorphosed from ‘military officers’ to ‘artisans’—
whose journey had preoccupied Lord Cowley’s secretary in Paris a few years
earlier?

Conclusion

Louis-Charles Girodon, alias General d’Orgoni, was indubitably a figure in the

tradition of French mercenaries in the East, perhaps the last in a long line of men
who— in the eighteenth century—posed a real threat to Britain through their
alliances with, and military services to, hostile local powers.40 Such men, where
they remained in India in the nineteenth century, had been rendered essentially
marginal to the British Raj, often inhabiting a fringe-world between the ‘native’
and the ‘coloniser’, but resurfaced in the popular imagination at the time of the
Indian Uprising, often in the guise of the ‘renegade’. A typical example of this
character in mutiny literature appears in the second canto of ‘Augusta: A Tale
of the Mutiny’, published in 1866. Amongst a crowd of rebels and badmashes
appears a man who ‘seems of nobler race than many a Moslem’s son’:

Mark him — keen are his eyes and bickering blade,

But seem s from Christian faith a renegade:
That m an, misled by passion and by zeal,
W ill yet make m any a trembling spirit f e e l...
From France, that land o f liberty and love,-
W hence his brave sir, inclin’d to rove,
Had cross’d the main for India’s distant shore . . . 41

Just as the mutiny helped to resuscitate the tradition of the ‘renegade’, so too
did old rivalries between French and English—aggravated by the propaganda
campaigns of Napoleon III and his entourage— resurface during the tense
148 Marina Carter

months of mid and late 1857. In this context, the figure of Louis-Charles
Girodon alias General Maha d’Orgoni, his arrival in France, his courting of the
retinue of the King of Oudh, his possible meeting with the Tsar of Russia and his
mysterious return mission to the East briefly assumed a significance which lent
his pseudonymous name a familiar ring in the drawing rooms of the Western
world. For many French nationals, the Indian Uprising represented a momentary
indulgence in fadoesque nostalgia and dreams of imperial revivalism. What Jyoti
Mohan terms ‘an underlying hostility to British colonization in French port­
rayals of India—perhaps a continuing resentment at having lost an opportunity
for a French-Indian Empire’42 found in Girodon an unlikely fantasy figure, an
embodiment of Risorgimento, resistance and revenge. The ‘subaltern coloniser*
continued to see in Girodon’s Burmese activities a resurgence of French imperial
ambitions in Asia, while the British were overanxious to denigrate and ridicule
him, suggesting an underlying phobia in the face of renascent Napoleonic
military ambitions.

Notes and References

I.I.H . Magedera, ‘French-language Representations o f India" HAS Newsletter, no. 46 (Winter

2008), p. 18.
2. R.V. Comerford, ‘Anglo-French Tension and the Origins o f Fenianism* in F. Lyons and
R. Hawkins, Ireland under the Union: varieties o f tension (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press,
1980), p. 151.
3. N. Isser, The Second Empire and the Press: A Study o f Government-Inspired Brochures on French
Foreign Policy in their Propaganda Milieu (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), pp. ix-x,
pp. 48-51.
4. Anon., Des Sentiments de Justice et d’H um aniti de VAngleterre dans la Question Indienne (Paris:
J. Techener, 1857), p. 128, pp. 163-164.
5. Am£d£e de Gayet de C£sena, ‘L’Angleterre et la Russie" Paris 1858.
6. See, for example, the comments on French pamphlets in the Times 15,16 Nov 1858 and 17 May,
24 Oct 1860.
7. Issur, The Second Empire , p. 207.
8. Quoted in the Times o f 16 Oct 1860.
9. E. de Valbezen, Les Anglais et ITnde (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1857).
10. Paul Emile Daurand Forgues, La R&volte des Cipayes. Episodes et r£cits de la vie Anglo-Indienne
(Paris: Paris, L. Hachette, 1860), pp. 5-6. Taylor writes that Forgues was the French editor o f the
Delhi gazette and the author o f a number o f erroneous reports circulated about the progress o f
the mutiny: P.J.O. Taylor, A Companion to the Indian Mutiny (Oxford: OUP, 1996), p. 12.
11. Charles Louis Auguste Martin, La Puissance militaire des Anglais dans ITnde et Vinsurrection des
Cipayes (Paris, 1859). See especially chapters 17 and 18.
12. A. Mangin, La Rivolte au Bengale en 1857 et 1858 Souvenirs d ’un Officier Irlandais (Tours: Marne
et Cie, 1862).
13. John Cook, Esq., Why Is France Arming So Largely? India Threatened! A Second Voice from
the Tomb o f the late East India Company to the Crown, Parliament, and People o f Great Britain
(London, Richardson & Company, 23 Cornhill, 1861), pp. 7-21.
 General d’Orgoni and French Military Conspiracies in 1857 149

14. De Tocquiville, quoted in the Albion: A Journal o f News, Politics and Literature, 15 Feb 1862,
p. 83.
15. These details were reproduced in French newspapers across the Empire, for example, in
Le C em ien , 22 Oct 1858.
16. The newspaper reports were reproduced in ‘Europe on England's Difficulties in India', LittelVs
Living Age, 2nd series, vol. 55, no. 689, (10 October, 1857), Boston, pp. 113-114.
17. IOLR Mss Eur C 629 J Green Acting Agent Consul General, Alexandria, 19 Sept 1857 to Lord
Elphinstone, Governor Bombay.
18. Anderson Secretary to Government, to B. Frere, Commissioner, Sind, 6 October 1857 in ibid.
19. IOLR P/Sec/India/212 MacCarthy to Govt. Agent Galle, Colombo, 2 Nov 1857.
20. Graham's Illustrated Magazine, Philadelphia, vol. 51, no. 6 (December 1857), pp. 510-511.
21. These details are discussed in E. Corti, Downfall o f Three Dynasties (Freeport, N.Y: Books for
Libraries Press, 1970 [first published 1934]), pp. 95-96.
22. Times, 26 Oct 1857, p. 8.
23. Harpers, 20 Feb 1858, p. 118 and 27 March 1858 pp. 205-206.
24. LittelVs Living Age, vol. 19.
25. Graham's Illustrated Magazine, vol. 51, p. 510-501.
26. Quoted in Littell's Living Age, vol. 19.
27. ‘Burmah and its Inhabitants' Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion , 13 Jan 1855,
p. 20-21.
28. Allen's Indian Mail and Register o f Intelligence, vol. 14, no. 293, London, Tuesday, 3 June 1856.
29. See, for example, N. Tarling, Imperialism in Southeast Asia: A Fleeting Passing Phase (London:
Routledge, 2001), p. 96; J.F. Cady, The Roots o f French imperialism in Eastern Asia (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 180; D.G.E. Hall, Europe and Burma: A Study o f European
Relations with Burma (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), pp. 158-159.
30. D.G.E. Hall (ed.), The Dalhousie-Phayre Correspondence, 1852-1856 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1932), pp. 154-155, p. 363.
31. Prosper Dumont, Le General d'Orgoni, sa mission en France et &Rome, etplan de campagne pour
un croisade fran$aise en Indo-Chine eten Chine (Nancy: Vagner, 1858) p. 11-23.
32. Gazette de France, 26 August 1857.
33. M.V.A. Malte-Brun, ‘Rapport sur les travaux de la Soci6t6 de Geographic et sur les progrfcs des
sciences g£ographiques pendant l'ann^e I860’, Bulletin de la Sociiti de G6ographie, 4th vol. 20,
N ov-D ec 1860, pp. 310-376.
34. Times, 25 October 1860.
35. Cook, Why Is France Arming So Largely? India Threatened, pp. 37-38.
36. ‘Scientific and General Progress in France' The Eclectic Magazine, February 1862, pp. 22-233.
37. W.H. Marshall, Four Years in Burmah , vol. 2 (London: Charles J Skeet, 1860) pp. 107-119.
38. ‘Right o f a Father-In-law to Be Maintained by His Son-In-law', The Solicitors' Journal &
Reporter, 14 June 1862, pp. 599-600.
39. ‘A Visit to the King o f Burma' New Monthly M agazine, vol. 143, pp. 650-651.
40. The literature on these adventurers is substantial. For a recent overview, see S. Inayat A. Zaidi,
‘French Mercenaries in the Armies o f South Asian States, 1499-1803AD* Indo-French Relations:
History & Perspectives, Seminar Proceedings, New Delhi 1990, pp. 53-78.
41. T.B. Laurence, Augusta: A Tale o f the Mutiny o f 1857 in Three Cantos and Other Poems (Calcutta:
George Wyman, 1866).
42. J. Mohan, ‘British and French Ethnographies o f India: Dubois and His English Commentators
French Colonial History, vol. 5, no. 1, (2004), pp. 229-246.
 9

'VENGEANCE AGAINST ENGLAND!’

Hermann Goedsche and the Indian Uprising
Kim A. W agner

THE Prussian author of historical romantic fiction, Hermann Goedsche

(1815-1878), is today best known for writing the fictional extract that became
the source for the anti-Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which
allegedly proved the existence of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy. Goedsche’s
mammoth novel Nena Sahib, oder: Die Emporung in Indien (cNena Sahib, or:
The Uprising in India9) written in 1858-1859 under the pseudonym Sir John
Retcliffe, is, however, entirely unknown outside the German-speaking world.1
This chapter seeks to introduce this unique and fascinating work to a broader
audience and to examine the context of Western fears of indigenous conspiracies
as expressed in connection with the Uprising of 1857.2 Written during the
immediate aftermath of the uprising, Nena Sahib offers a rare example of
a Continental European perspective on 1857, which completely inverts the
British literary representations, while at the same borrowing heavily from the
conventional repertoire of Orientalist stereotypes.
The convoluted plot, which begins in 1851 and ends in 1857, plays out across
the world, on all the continents except for the Antarctic, and involves more than
two dozen main characters and as many subplots. These are too elaborate to
be summarised in detail here, but a brief outline of the key parts that impinge
directly on the depiction of the Indian Uprising maybe iftefixl. The many subplots
of the novel follow the fates of various individuals who have suffered at the hands
of the evil British Empire; only towards the end do the different strands coalesce
in India as the novel reaches its climax in the tumult of the uprising. Central to
the construction of the mutiny plot is a meeting, at the grave of Napoleon on
St Helena, of a variety of aggrieved future conspirators.3These include: the noble
Irishman, Captain Ochterlony, who had been unjustly accused of murder by the
British, and transported to Australia; the author’s alter-ego, the morally upright
German Dr Friederich Walding, who had been ‘press-ganged’ into the British
 4Vengeance Against England!1 151

navy; the Ionian freedom fighter Captain Grimaldi, who had been outlawed
by the British officials in Greece and who together with a French officer has
been sent on a mission by Napoleon III to ensure that the British are occupied
in India and do not interfere with the French political aspirations in Europe.
Completing this assembly of the disaffected are two Indians, the emissaries of
the dispossessed king of Awadh and of Nena Sahib respectively, on their way
to London to present a petition and reclaim the rightful possessions of their
masters. Captain Ochterlony recognises the common ‘aim of the various parties
and, by implication, presents the basic narrative framework of the novel in an
appropriately over-dramatic scene:

‘It is not coincidence but God’s will that has brought together India, Holland,
Ireland, France, Greece and even the German, on w hose shorelines England
enforces itself, to assemble here at the grave o f that country’s mightiest
enemy, Us, who have suffered the m ost from the English. M an’s fate is in the
hand o f God. Very well, let each o f us make their accusation against the tyrants
o f the W orld at this grave and enter into a holy union o f vengeance against
England!’
He put his hand on the railing o f the vault and began his tale in a m onotonous
voice. Lightning flickered above him as the thunder rolled and the storm raged!
One after the other followed his speech. As the last one finished, they all kneeled
around the stone, which had once covered the body o f the great emperor, and
placed their hands upon the cold black basalt and together swore:
‘Fight against England!’4

These conspirators, as we shall see, together with the eponymous Nena Sahib,
become the active instigators of the revolt.
At the beginning of the novel, Nena Sahib is a suave and educated Indian
prince, who falls in love with the Irish girl, Margaretha O’Sullivan, whom he
eventually marries and they become the ‘ideal’ interracial couple as she exerts
her temperate influence upon his fiery Oriental spirit. In India, the British are
ruthlessly exploiting their subjects, torturing the peasants to extract revenue and
sadistically violating their wives and daughters when they fail to pay.5This causes
much resentment among the native rulers, especially Tukallah, alias Tantia Topi,
who rules from the black castle of Malangher situated in a hidden paradisiacal
valley. Tukallah turns out to be the high-priest of the ‘Thugs’ and his Indian
Shangri-La is really a ‘Thug’-kingdom, which hides a subterranean temple where
scores of hapless victims are sacrificed to Kali in the most brutal manner.6
As the narrative reaches the year 1857, Captain Ochterlony and Grimaldi are
sowing the seeds of discontent as they organise the rebellion in the guise of Soft
the Dervish and the Sardinian Major Maldigri. In spite of having been wronged
by the East India Company, Nena Sahib harbours no enmity against the British
and thanks to his spouse he turns a deaf ear to those warning him against their
greed and treachery. The situation, however, changes dramatically as the British
152 Kim A. Wagner

officer, Lieutenant Rivers, kidnaps Margaretha to install her in his harem, where
she goes insane and dies. Urged on by the devilish Tukallah, Nena Sahib is
consumed by hatred, turning into the demonic scourge of the British as the call
for rebellion is sounded: ‘The tiger of rebellion was unleashed—the tiger had
tasted the blood of its masters and craved to bathe in an ocean of the intoxicating
red stream gushing from the veins of its enemies/7With his retinue of European
and Native American trackers, hunters and mercenaries, Nena Sahib turns into
an Oriental Edmond Dantes, relentlessly pursuing his revenge and bringing all
his wealth and power to bear upon this single objective. He even becomes the
liber-guru of the Thugs in order to harness the stranglers to his cause, and as
Nena Sahib assumes command of the rebellion, we hear in great detail of the
massacres of British men, women and children in Delhi and Cawnpore.
The novel’s depiction of India easily surpasses the mundane Orientalism
of, for instance, Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839), with a high-
strung combination of Arabian Nighfs-imagery and Eastern decadence and
debauchery, replete with snake-charming dwarves, dancing-girls, cobras and
tigers and sacrificial orgies in white robes. The reader is even treated to a sati-
scene, which occurs after the massacre at Cawnpore, when the female Thug,
Anarkalli, realises that the man she loves, the British officer Sanders, has been
crucified, blinded and mutilated to death by Nena Sahib’s men.8 The tragic
conclusion to this condemned love story presents a truly iconic image, as the
female Thug performs Sati with the body of an Englishman inside Wheeler’s
abandoned cantonment at Cawnpore.9 In all its overblown symbolism, which is
enough to threaten the post-modern literary critic with interpretational overload
and resulting analytic meltdown, this part of the story presents one of the few
truly touching scenes of the novel— a moving inversion of the most stereotypical
tropes of colonial India. The conclusion of the novel is even more gothic in
tenor: having fallen in love with a British girl whom he saved from the clutches
of the Thugs, the German protagonist, Walding, discovers her ravished body
in the infamous well at Cawnpore. In the dead of night and in pouring rain,
Walding brings the corpse of his beloved to the garden of the palace at Bithoor,
where Nena Sahib is sitting by the grave of his dead bride. Slung across
Margaratha’s grave is a white silken scarf drenched in the blood of the British
massacred at Cawnpore.
The novel ends abruptly, leaving several of the plots unfinished, probably
because of a disagreement between Goedsche and his publisher. Some twenty
years passed before the author returned to the subject in the novel Um die
Weltherrschaft (which might be translated as: ‘[the struggle] For World
Supremacy’) and picked up the plot where he had left off.10 In this belated
epilogue we hear of the brutal suppression of the mutiny, and as Delhi is retaken
by the British, the innocent inhabitants of the city are slaughtered in a manner
not befitting Christians. Captain Ochterlony and Tukallah remain in Delhi to
fight to the last, but are captured and blown from cannon along with scores
 ‘Vengeance Against England! ’ 153

of native princes. Some of the characters survive, and Captain Grimaldi, for
instance, returns in Goedsche’s later novels.11
Apart from the obvious grotesqueness and sheer exuberance of Orientalist
tropes, there are a number of interesting aspects concerning Goedsche’s novel.
As the publication of its first volume in 1858 predates tjiat of Edward Money’s
The Wife and the Ward (1859), Nena Sahib can with some justice be described
as the first mutiny novel.12 It furthermore contains each and every element
usually associated with the Anglo-Indian Mutiny novel, wallowing as it does
in themes of treachery and revenge, interracial marriage, disguise and identity,
rape, indigenous conspiracies and religious fanaticism, thereby anticipating an
entire literary tradition. The novel is, thus, testament to the impact of the events
of 1857 outside of Britain, and reflects the manner in which the Uprising was
reported and perceived in Continental Europe.13The popular and sensationalist
brand of exoticism favoured by Goedsche situates the novel alongside the work
of Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue, within the ranks of the penny-dreadful
and Victorian pulp fiction, and quite separate from German high-Orientalism.14
With its heavy reliance on French popular literature, it is difficult to discern a
distinctly German viewpoint in Nena Sahiby and even the blatant anti-Semitism
and high-strung Christianity belongs to general discourses common across
nineteenth century Europe.15 On one point, however, it does stand out: the
pervasive and permeating Anglophobia. This makes Nena Sahib a quintessential
mutiny novel, which nevertheless completely inverts the entire 1857 repertoire.
For Goedsche the conspirators of 1857 were the heroes while the British brought
the uprising upon themselves through their greed and tyranny.

Goedsche and the Western Conspiracy Tradition

Herrman Ottomar Friederich Goedsche (1815-1878) came from a Catholic

background and was a low-level functionary in a small peripheral town of
eastern Prussia who wrote romantic fiction to supplement his wages.16 When
the revolutions of 1848 broke out, he went to Berlin, and as a staunch supporter
of the Conservative party he became actively involved in politics and worked
for the reactionary newspaper Kreuzzeitung. Goedsche produced propaganda
of the most sensationalist kind and appears to have operated as an agitator
and agent provocateur during the political upheavals of the time.17 Taking his
inspiration from the literary world of Eugene Sue and Paul F£val, Goedsche
dreamt up Republican and Democratic conspiracies, and in 1849 he took part
in a forgery which involved an alleged plot by the left-wing politician Benedict
Waldeck to murder the King of Prussia.18 Goedsche was arrested, but thanks to
powerful connections, he only received a mild sentence, and in 1853 he travelled
to Turkey as a journalist. Increasingly, he turned to the writing of literature and
 154 Kim A. Wagner

his first major work was the 1,500-page novel Sebastopol (1855-1857), which
largely revolved around the Crimean War. Goedsche invented the concept of
the ‘contemporary historical-political novel’ and this in time became a series of
works which dealt with contemporary historical events in a heavily romanticised
manner. Nena Sahib of 1858-1859 was the second instalment and by far the
most popular of the thirty-five books the author wrote during his lifetime. The
first volume of Nena Sahib sold out and went into its second printing even before
volume two had been published and the novel became immensely influential in
popular German literature.19
In 1868, Goedsche wrote the novel which was to make his name forever
associated with conspiratorial anti-Semitism, namely Biarritz, which concerned
the European politics of Bismarck and Napoleon III, but also contained a chapter
entitled ‘At the Jewish Cemetery in Prague’. In this chapter, representatives of
the twelve tribes of Israel meet in secret in a cemetery at night to report on their
progress in assuming control over the world by various nefarious means; and it
is noteworthy that their deity manifests itself as a golden calf amidst blue flames
emerging from a tomb. In time this part of Goedsche’s novel was turned into the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, most likely by the Russian secret police, and used
to incite anti-Semitism and pogroms, and eventually it became part of the Nazi
anti-Semitic canon as proof of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.20What had been
a relatively insignificant part of Goedsche’s romantic oeuvre, thus, had terrible
consequences.
Goedsche had actually plagiarised a Active dialogue between Machiavelli
and Montesquieu, written by the French author Maurice Joly in 1864, and
turned a critique of Napoleon III and the Republic into a blueprint for Jewish
world domination.21 In doing so, Goedsche gave free reign to his anti-Semitic
sentiments, but he also relied on a much broader European conspiracy-tradition
which involved Jews, Freemasons, Jesuits and various secret societies such as
the Illuminati, as the malign forces that pursued their evil goals in secret and
caused wars and revolutions. Such beliefs were in fact commonplace in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel in 1844,
before he became British prime minister, in which a Jew describes the network
of influential Jews in powerful positions throughout Europe and informs the
protagonist: ‘So you see, my Dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very
different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the
scenes.’22 Conspiratorial paranoia was particularly widespread in France after the
Revolution, and in England following the Chartist movement and Swing riots,
the emerging workers’ unions were criminalised as secret societies.23By revealing
the real powers that secretly caused all events, a political world view, which was
dominated by the notion of conspiracies, brought order to an otherwise chaotic
world and made sense of what appeared to be confusion, thereby ascribing a
logic of cause and effect to history. A political poster, written by Goedsche in
' the summer of 1848, provides a perfect example of his propagandistic skills and
 ‘Vengeance Against England!’ 155

high-strung terminology and, one must assume, reflects, in part at least, the
manner in which he perceived the events of the time:

The snake o f rebellion is yet again lurking— its crown is the republic, its breath
is anarchy, its heart is com m unism and the theft o f property— Polish emissaries
with Slavic gold, French Jacobins, German Republicans and C om m unists are
already pursuing their self-serving aims and are creeping am ongst the people o f
the capital every evening, spreading their poisonous doctrines and whispering
m alicious agitation in the ears o f the unguarded crowd; already a red joker
is daring to m ock the Prussian colours, and with secret measures this party
prepares to strike .. .24

When Goedsche’s own political work was marked by such shrill conspiratorial
paranoia, it is no wonder that his historical fiction should involve, and indeed be
dominated by, the evil machinations of secret powers. Throughout his novels,
Goedsche returned to the theme of conspiracies and the threat to established
society posed by the various parties involved in the revolutions of 1848.
The fact that Goedsche wrote under a pseudonym, namely Sir John Redcliffe,
led to much obfuscation in connection with the Protocols, the provenance of
which has always been contested. When Goedsche’s account of the meeting in
the Jewish cemetery was published as a separate pamphlet in France in the 1880s,
the allegedly true account was attributed to either the English diplomat ‘Sir John
Readclif or the ‘Chief Rabbi John Readclif ,25 Thus Goedsche’s penchant for
charades resulted in further confusion as the original text was taken out of context
and copied and republished time and again and the authenticity of the forgery
seemed to be proven. When writing Nena Sahib, Goedsche also used his English-
sounding pseudonym, which was probably inspired by the British Ambassador
in Constantinople, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.26 Publishing the novel under
an English name provided it with a stamp of authority as it appeared to be an
insider’s description of the machinations of the British Empire. Yet the deceit
went further and the earliest editions of Nena Sahib were subtitled: ‘Original
English and German Edition’ although the novel was never published in English.
The text of the novel is also generously supplied with explanatory footnotes and
even references to non-existent sources; yet again giving the impression that
this was a work of some weight and not just a novel. In fact, several passages
of the novel are accompanied with footnotes explicitly assuring the reader of
the authenticity of the description. Goedsche’s account of the massacre at Sati
Chowra Ghat, for instance, is accompanied by the following comment: ‘The
terrible scenes which we have described for you, were recounted by only one
person,, an eyewitness, the Havildar Rudschur Dschewarri, who after the battle at
Cawnpore managed to make his way back to the British where his statement was
taken down by the authorities.’27 Similarly, Hindi words and Indian beliefs and
myths were referred to and explained in footnotes, thereby imbuing the text with
a further semblance of ethnographic value.28Thus Goedsche consciously sought
156 Kim A. Wagner

to blur the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction1, between history and romance;
and, one might say, the obfuscation of the framing of the novel constitutes a
continuum of the conspiracies within the story, as the author himself played the
same game of deception that he was describing.29

Thugs, Conspiracies and Communication

Right from the outset, the Uprising of 1857 was perceived in terms of a conspiracy
by local officials, military officers, government administrators, politicians,
and the Anglo-Indian and British public at large. In July 1857, Disraeli dismissed
the significance of the greased cartridges and argued that the Uprising was: c...
the consequence of a conspiracy long matured, deeply laid, and extensively
ramified/30 Secret oaths, rumours and the enigmatic distribution of chapattis
suggested hidden forces at work and various individuals and groups were pointed
out as the true ‘ringleaders’, most notably the Indian Muslims with the ageing
Mughal emperor at the head.31 There is in fact very little difference between
many historical accounts and the exposition of the conspiracy of 1857 in Mutiny
novels and thus it is hardly surprising that Goedsche should seize upon this
aspect and make it the focal point of his story. Nena Sahib is, however, unique in
the prominent role in the Uprising assigned to the Thugs, as the historical rebel
leader Tantia Topi is revealed to be Tukallah, the ruler of a Thug kingdom.32
When considering the notion of conspiracies in the context of colonial India, it
is practically impossible not to mention the Thugs, the alleged fraternity of ritual
stranglers who worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali.
The Thugs are to colonial conspiracy theories of the Raj what the Templars
are to their European counterparts: sooner or later one comes across them,
and this has always been the case.33 In 1854, a British doctor in India noted
that: ‘Insane patients very generally dislike natives and, when they suspect
conspiracies, notions of Thugs, & c. are very com m on/34 Fear o f ‘Thuggee’ was
not only limited to the colonial setting of India: the first workers’ unions in the
British Isles were often described as malevolent secret societies by the authorities
and Thomas Carlyle spoke of ‘Glasgow Thuggery’ in connection with the trial
of the Glasgow Spinners in 1838.35 The rhetoric associated with Thuggee also
invoked an entire arsenal of police and judicial measures that could be brought
to bear upon the Uprising of 1857—an extraordinary foe necessitated an extra­
ordinary response. In 1858 it was suggested in the London Quarterly Review that:
‘Mercy quite as much as justice demands that, “on the anti-Thuggee principle,”
every village, every haunt should be scoured, and not a man who fought against
“his salt” be left to propagate the idea of future crime.’36
Philip Meadows Taylor first introduced the Thugs to a European readership
in Confessions of a Thug of 1839, which became immensely popular in Victorian
 ‘Vengeance Against England!' 157

England, but also spawned a number of Continental European works featuring

Indian stranglers in various incarnations. In the highest selling novel of the
nineteenth century, Eugfcne Sue's The Wandering Jew published in 1844-1845,
the Thug prince Feringheea escapes British captivity and ends up in the service
of the Jesuits in France, while a German novel entitled Die Thugs, oder Indischer
Fanatismus appeared in 1845.37 Sue’s use of the Thugs iti his novel had been
confined to a few characters and a very brief description of their practices, and
thus it appears that Goedsche was the very first to assign to them a significant role
in the historical events of colonial India following their supposed eradication in
1838.
As early as 1812, during the very first British operations against Thugs, a
British official commented that:

It has been said that these people com pose a regularly organized and secretly
tho’ extensively connected society similar to that o f the Illuminati or other
bodies o f that description, the influence o f which is widely felt tho* the society
itself and its members were concealed by a veil o f mystery which none but the
initiated can draw aside.38

As it happened, the official in question did not concur with this description
of the Thugs, but the comparison was to become a recurring theme in colonial
accounts of Thuggee. A key element in the colonial representation of Thuggee
was in fact the geographical ramifications of the phenomenon and the elaborate
network of gangs supposed to be working in unison; according to a British
account of 1833: ‘. .. the Thugs have established a regular system of intelligence
and communication throughout the countries they have been in the practice
of frequenting, and they become acquainted, with astonishing celerity, with
proceedings of their comrades in all directions.’39At times the Thug informants
themselves reinforced this perception of their association and connections and
one claimed that ‘he could send a message to Calcutta, or any part of the country,
and receive an answer in much less time than the dawk [official mail].’40 One
of the key tropes concerning conspiracies is the alleged ability of conspirators
to communicate swiftly and in secret; the Frenchman Augustin Barruel
(1741-1820), who more than anyone contributed to the notion of a great Jewish
conspiracy, gave the following account of the manner in which the Grand Master
of Freemasons distributed his orders:

[F]rom neighbour to neighbour and from hand to hand the orders are
transmitted w ith incomparable speed, for these pedestrians are delayed neither
by bad weather, nor by the mishaps that normally befall horsem en or carriages;
a m an on foot can always get along w hen he knows the country, and that is the
case here. They stop neither to eat nor to sleep, for each one covers only two
leagues. The mail-coach takes ten hours from Paris to Orleans, stopping for an
hour; the distance is thirty leagues. Fifteen pedestrians, replacing one another,
158 Kim A. Wagner

can reach Orleans from Paris in nine hours, using short-cuts and above all
never stopping.41

One significant aspect of Barruel’s account is the notion of neighbours and

‘local knowledge’, which aids the conspirators in communicating with great
speed. This is reminiscent of the concept of the speed by which news travels
among Indians and even more so, how the chapattis were distributed prior
to the outbreak of Uprising in 1857. The mysterious chapattis were alleged
to travel 200 miles in twenty-four hours, double the speed of mail runners,
and the historian John Kaye stated that during the Uprising news travelled among
the natives in a manner ‘almost electric’.42 When compared to accounts of the
Thugs and criminal communities, indigenous means of communication and the
distribution of chapattis prior to the outbreak in 1857, the similarities between
European and Orientalist notions of conspiracies are immediately apparent. A
recurring theme within the colonial sphere is the image of the ‘jungle drums’
purveying hidden meanings undecipherable to the authorities or secret societies
planning to overthrow the colonial rule. There was a fear of things happening
just under the surface unknown to the colonial administration and kept secret
by the indigenous population. This perceived or real threat assumed alarming
proportions in times of unrest when the British found themselves unable to get
access and gather information from certain social strata of their Indian subjects.
In this context, the fears associated with the Thugs were merely a distillate of
common fears of the indigenous population more generally. Thuggee was only
the most sinister association in what might be described as a continuum of
secrecy within Indian society, which was in effect inaccessible to the British. The
Thugs and the mutiny embodied all that the British feared from their Indian
subjects more generally and when combined constituted the ultimate scenario
of colonial paranoia.

Counter-insurgency and Agency

Ranajit Guha and Gautam Chakravarty have both described the different stages
within the body of British accounts of the Uprising of 1857, with the two key
components being insurgency followed by counter-insurgency.43At the end of
most texts concerning 1857, order is restored in some form through the daring
acts of the British heroes, who usually disguise themselves as natives and engage
in counter-insurgency. Goedsche, however, has hundreds of pages leading up to
the outbreak, which only occurs in the last volume of the tripartite novel, and the
main focus is on the planning and execution of the conspiracy. As the original
novel ends after the massacres at Cawnpore, there is no counter-insurgency and
no re-establishment of order. In Nena Sahib, it is the European protagonists
 ‘Vengeance Against England!’ 159

who mediate between the world of the Indian rebels and the Anglo-Indian world
and function as the crucial instruments of insurgency. Goedsche has in effect
introduced a third party to the traditionally binary conflict of colonial India, and
through the use of disguises and aliases—key components of any conspiracy—
notions of identity are constantly blurred. In a manner of speaking, Goedsche
presents the reversal of the surveillance fantasy as Expressed within most
mutiny novels, since the heroes are the conspirators, spreading sedition and
planning the rebellion together with the natives.44 In 1857 yogis and fakirs were
reported to be the harbingers of revolt, and Britain’s ongoing conflict with
Russia, which found its expression in the ‘Great Game’, led to suggestions that
the Czar played a role in instigating the Uprising.45 In Nena Sahib the European
protagonists are the agents of foreign powers and following the coup d’etat
of 1851, Napoleon III dispatches Grimaldi on his mission to India with the
following orders:

For the tim e being, England determines the outcom e o f affairs in Europe,
and I do not know h ow this country will respond to the new turn o f events;
I m ust have it in m y power to paralyze its evil resolve and enforce its neutrality.
England’s weakest point is its colonies, especially India— its power is on a weak
footing and sooner or later there will be an uprising. Several Indian princes have
already offered to becom e the allies o f France— the Governor o f Pondichery is
asking for resolute and experienced officers, as observers, who can com m unicate
with the French, when they have managed to attach themselves to the courts o f
Indian princes. In a word— for the next five years, peace in India m ust be in
the palm o f m y hands— after that, com e what may; the power o f France will
be secured, and England will do m y bidding instead o f m y being subservient
to the London cabinet. This m em orandum , which contains the orders and
correspondence o f various Indian notabilities, provides sufficient inform ation
concerning the proceedings and necessary precautions.46

Unlike Russia, France has no design on the subcontinent itself and, according
to Goedsche, Napoleon III merely instigates the Uprising in India to tie the
hands of England in the context of European politics. Ultimately, the mutiny is
little more than a strategic distraction, while India simply provides a colourful
backdrop to the international politics of the major European powers. As much
as he sought to explain the rationale and justification behind the Indians’ hatred
of their British rulers, Goedsche diminished the agency of his native characters
by making the European protagonists the main instigators of the uprising. The
concept of conspiracy necessarily involves the notion of hidden forces at work,
of unknown ringleaders who pull the strings and manipulate people and events:
as such the understanding of 1857 as a conspiracy raises an important issue
regarding agency. Many British officials at the time found it hard to believe that
the sepoys or the Indian population more generally would rebel on their own
accord, and the uprising was explained as the work of a few who had spread the
160 Kim A. Wagner

spirit of sedition to the many. The sepoys were described as mere children who
had been led astray by the insidious Muslims or the superstitious Brahmins who
were pursuing their own agendas.47 This was in part a strategy to avert blame
from the British themselves, by ascribing the causes for the uprising to a minority
group of discontents, and also to facilitate reconcilement with the larger part of
their subjects after 1857. The notion of Indians as passive victims to superstition
and under the malicious influence of Brahmin priests was by no means new and
even the Thugs were supposed to:

conceive it necessary to propitiate the goddess Bhowanee, w hom they regard

as arbitress o f their destinies, and w hose mercenary and crafty priesthood,
ever ready to m inister to the weakness and superstitions o f her followers,
do not scruple to lend themselves to the vices o f these wretches, and w ink at
their horrible deeds. It is well know n that these priests give inform ation to
the thugs o f the m ovem ents o f travellers, and the despatch o f treasure. They
suggest expeditions, and promise the murderers, in the name o f their goddess,
im m unity and wealth, provided a due share o f the guilty spoil be offered up at
her shrine.48

In some colonial accounts, the priests not only provided ritual legitimacy to
the Thugs but were the sanctimonious masterminds behind their murderous
expeditions in what amounted to a conspiracy of superstitious assassins. The
more significant implication of the alleged involvement of the priests was that the
evil of the Thugs was seen to reflect on all Indians who, due to the caste system,
were thought to be held under the sway of Hindu priests: "How little astonishing
is it, then, that we find a class of fellow creatures, like the thugs, so sunk in the
depths of infamy, when the people are led by such unprincipled leaders.’49 A
very similar thing occurs in Goedsche’s novel, as Nena Sahib is initiated into the
brotherhood of the Thugs: instead of kneeling to kiss the holy pickaxe as part of
the ceremony, he seizes it and kills the iiber-guru, thereby assuming control over
the stranglers himself: ‘. . . I want to become a thug like you—not a murderer of
a few worthless humans, but the vanquisher and destroyer of all beings. I will
sacrifice an entire people on your bloody alter—only I must be the master of
Death and all its servants, lest I be its dirty slave!.... Give me the power, Tantia
Topi, give me the power!’50
As Thuggee had officially been declared suppressed by the end of the
1830s, no-one would seriously suggest that they played a role in 1857, and yet
it is one of the characteristics of the Thug as a literary figure that he could be
employed for any devious purpose. In The Wandering Jew> the Thug Feringheea
is enlisted to the cause of the Jesuits by the scheming clerk Rodin, who persuades
the Indian that ‘Kali and Rome are sisters’.51 By comparison, then, it is not so
farfetched that the Thugs should take part in the conspiracy of 1857; it is indeed
noteworthy that in the two major films depicting the Thugs, namely Gunga Din
(1938) and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984),
 ‘Vengeance Against England!’ 161

the Thugs are depicted as anti-colonial and are instigating a revolt against the
British. By imbuing Thuggee with a seditious anti-colonial agenda, such popular
representations confuse the historical acts of anti-colonial sentiments with what
is regarded as barbaric and superstitious acts. The aspirations of the Thugs and
the rebels of 1857, as well as revolutionary nationalists of the later nineteenth
century, are in effect conflated and reduced to similar expressions of irrational
Oriental fanaticism.52
If the Thugs become the tools of Nena Sahib in Goedsche’s novel, he is himself
also a slave to his Eastern passions and unruly temper. Educated and civilised,
Nena Sahib is only transformed into the infamous ‘Demon of Cawnpore’, when
the British, as represented by the evil Lieutenant Rivers, abduct his wife. It is
noteworthy that Rivers is depicted with all the negative characteristics of an
Oriental despot and that Margaretha is installed in his harem, which is full of
native beauties that he has lured away from their families. The classic story of
white women being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery, ending up in the
harem of an Eastern prince, is here inverted as a morally depraved Englishman
assumes the role of seducer, while Margaretha’s rightful husband is an Oriental.53
Once transformed, however, Goedsche’s Nena Sahib easily lives up to his
reputation in colonial lore: while besieging Cawnpore, his tent is surrounded by
poles carrying the severed heads of British defenders, and when he learns that
Rivers has escaped, Nena Sahib crushes the head of an innocent English child
with his clenched fist.54Typically of the romantic novel of the nineteenth century,
epic historical events are caused by personal motives, as the themes of love, hate
and revenge become the primal forces determining the course of history. In that
sense the Uprising of 1857 is the direct result of Rivers’ violation of Nena Sahib’s
white bride, as the final act of British tyranny, which unleashes the Oriental
demon that was hitherto chained by love and Western influence. This aspect of
the plot thereby embodies the entire novel’s inversion of the standard narrative,
as found in scores of mutiny novels, where Nena Sahib is the sexual predator
pursuing the British virginal heroines.55Usually no reason is given for the cruelty
of Nena Sahib, beyond his inherent Oriental bloodlust and though Goedsche’s
portrayal of the Indian prince can hardly be said to be sympathetic, the author
does provide some kind of explanatory context for the acts and motives of Nena
Sahib.56 Interestingly, the cruelty of Nena Sahib and the rebelling Indians, which
is a central feature of any fictional account of 1857, also introduces an element of
ambiguity in Goedsche’s novel.

Moral Ambivalence and the Spectacle of Torture

Although the European protagonists are aligned with the Indian rebels in
a righteous cause to bring down the British Empire, Goedsche is unable
162 Kim A. Wagner

to completely escape the Orientalist condemnation of Indian depravity and

brutality during the Uprising. The unholy alliance between justified anglophobia
and Oriental fanaticism leads to several moral dilemmas, and the noble
Grimaldi, for one, grows weary of the intrigues as he realises the true nature of
Nena Sahib’s plan: ‘I too fear that I have acted wrongly in igniting this fire ...
I will fulfil my duty to the Emperor [but] the horrors of an honest battle is in
itself enough, and there is no need to turn this into a Sicilian Vesper.’57It is also
through the personal intervention of Walding that the Sikhs remain loyal to the
British, thereby turning the struggle between ‘Hindu and Faringi’ into an
honest fight—the German hero may be anglophobic, but he is also chivalrous.58
Relinquishing their responsibility, the European conspirators eventually
renounce the madness of Nena Sahib’s revenge and the barbarism of the mutiny.
The ambiguity is even more pronounced in Goedsche’s depiction of the brutal
slaughter and murders committed by the rebels; at times they seem justified, at
times not. Mainly, they serve to shock the reader in the most voyeuristic manner,
and all pretensions at a moral lesson are lost amidst the screams of the tortured
and mutilated. Within the Anglo-Indian literature, the massacres at Delhi and
Cawnpore especially, offer the most obvious instances of melodramatic mayhem
and in many ways constitute the symbolic embodiment of 1857.59 In Nena Sahib
this is no different: In Delhi, the stereotypically haughty and scornful daughter
of the British Resident, Victoria, has struck a Hindu servant girl, in a fit of rage,
and the girl, in consequence, lost her caste and became an untouchable. When
the uprising erupts, the Hindu girl, named Auranga, seeks her out and drags
Victoria before the Mughal prince Akbar Jehan, whom she has once scorned by
rejecting his offer of marriage. As she begs for mercy and invokes the rank of
her father, Victoria is shown the severed tongue and head of the resident as the
prince gloats:

Akbar Jehan has sworn to defile the nam e and m em ory o f the proud Sahib
o f the Faringis! The dog w ho thought his blood too noble to m ix with that
o f Timur, shall yet in death be embarrassed by his own child. Rip off her
clothes, the hated dress o f the Faringis!"
Twenty hands held up the unfortunate girl and tore her clothes to rags.
In vain the girl defended herself and begged for mercy— mercy from tigers
in hum an form !... N ow she struggled and begged for death, but death
w ould have been an act o f mercy, and where does one find this virtue in
an Easterner once his passions have taken over? Her dress fell torn to the
ground, and wicked hands held dow n the virgin’s writhing body—
wild witches o f her own sex restrained the convulsing limbs as they tried
to break free. The prince dism ounted from his horse and threw him self
upon her, accompanied by the devilish m ocking laughter and hellish cheering
o f the crowd, which looked like w ildly dancing dem ons celebrating the
Bacchanal*60
 ‘Vengeance Against England!' 163

The scene ends in— for Goedsche— a typically exploitative manner as Victoria
begs for her life:

‘Have mercy, Auranga', the miserable girl m oaned, ‘Forgive me what I have
done, if one day you shall yourself hope for the mercy o f heaven.'
W ielding a knife in her right hand, the witch w ound th^ girl's long blond
hair around her left hand and pulled the victim's head further back. ‘Look,
Hindustanis,* she yelled, ‘how a Brahmin's daughter repays the disgrace
inflicted upon her by a Faringi!' As a circle o f hum an monsters cheeringly held
down the victim , Auranga made a deep incision with the knife across Victoria's
forehead and around her face, with all the skill o f a savage scalper from the
wastes o f the Rio-Grande. As the torm ented screamed piercingly, she then tore
the white blood-spattered skin from the face, which was now a bloody mass o f
flesh and blood-vessels.61

Victoria survives her ordeals, but soon after expires in the arms of two other
fugitives, a French nun and an English officer, who swear to save their last
bullets for themselves lest they fall into the hands of the rebels— an incident
which was widely reported in the press during the mutiny and which occurs in
several novels.62 Having been publicly humiliated and taunted, the British, as
represented by Victoria, are tortured by the inhuman Orientals, in a scene clearly
drawing upon the imagery of Christian martyrdom. Given the moral framework
of the story, however, the reader’s empathy is only invoked through the sheer
barbarity of the Indians— and only in death are the evil deeds of the British
redeemed. The anonymous British civilians who are massacred in Delhi receive
an equally horrible treatment at the hand of Goedsche, as a pregnant woman
has her unborn child cut from her womb while another has a gun discharged
into her sex—both having first been raped.63 Even when the English victim
has the obvious sympathy of the reader, as in the case of Walding’s love Edith,
the description of torment is painfully explicit: Edith is given to ‘a Herculean,
disgusting looking negro5who drags her back to his house and rapes this ‘white
dove of the icy mountains’ as he calls his victim with all the eloquence of a story­
book Oriental. By making Edith’s rapist a Negro, rather than an Indian, and a
Herculean one at that, Goedsche was obviously playing on a common Western
stereotype concerning the sexual prowess of African men and interracial
rape.64 The story of Edith’s death was probably inspired by the contemporary
account of Col. Wheeler’s daughter who murdered her would-be rapist before
committing suicide following her capture at Cawnpore—a story later found
to be unsubstantiated.65 Goedsche’s more or less explicit use of these stories
reflects the wide-ranging currency of the sensationalism invoked in connection
with the events of 1857 both in Britain and abroad. Sexual violence was a favourite
theme and practically an obsession for Goedsche—in a later novel he describes
how the Assassins force slave girls to mate with apes— and he was known among
164 Kim A. Wagner

his contemporaries for his frivolity and vulgarity.66 There was no shortage of
sensationalist accounts of the brutalities of 1857 in England at the time, and
James Grant’s First Love and Last Love: A Tale of the Indian Mutiny of 1868, for
instance, bears many similarities to Nena Sahib; yet few writers managed to reach
the heights of hysteria and depths of abasement that Goedsche does with such
obvious relish.67
Interestingly, these sexually explicit scenes mirror Goedsche’s earlier
description of the tortures inflicted by the British in connection with the East
India Company’s exaction of revenue, prior to the uprising, which emphasises
the themes of justice and retribution. When describing the recapture of Delhi
in the novel’s sequel, Goedsche very clearly represents the Uprising, and the
horrors it entailed, as the inevitable response on part of the Indian population in
the face of the un-Christian behaviour of the British:

But this cold-hearted and arrogant nation o f peddlers is forever a disgrace

to Europe and Christendom! ... It could be said that, in certain areas o f the
city, especially in Dauri Serai, one waded in blood, and the British sacking
o f D elhi com pletely outweighed the m urderous acts o f the fanatic, brutal
and wild Indians; this otherwise so servile and passive people had, after all,
been provoked by the outrages and indescribable tyranny o f the East India
C om pany.68

This justification for the Uprising is very close to that of Karl Marx as reported
in the New York Daily Tribune, which might in fact have been the inspiration for
Goedsche:

How ever infam ous the conduct o f the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a
concentrated form, o f England’s own conduct in India, not only during the
epoch o f the foundation o f her Eastern Empire, but even during the last
ten years o f a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say
that torture formed ail organic institution o f its financial policy. There
is som ething in hum an history like retribution: and it is a rule o f historical
retribution that its instrum ent be forged n ot by the offended, but by the offender
him self.69

If the Indians were barbaric and monstrous, it was the British who had made
them so, and thus in spite of the pervasive Orientalist prejudice, Goedsche’s
scalding indictment of the ‘Tyrants of the W orld’ remains the polemic focus of
his work. Where Ochterlony and the others’ quest for revenge against the British
is justified and righteous, that of Nena Sahib, however, is derailed by fanatic
barbarism. Goedsche therefore introduces a dual track within his revenge-story,
which turns 1857 into a romantic epic of what is essentially a European struggle
with an exotic subtext provided by India and the events of 1857.
 ‘Vengeance Against England!’ 165

Conclusion

If we read Goedsche’s authorship of the model for the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion back into Nena Sahib, we see that the British Empire represents the
physical manifestation of the world domination that the* Jewish conspirators
allegedly sought. The British are repeatedly referred to as evil merchants who
worship gold and who are incapable of producing anything of value themselves;
they are seen to be the cause behind industrialisation, capitalism, rationalism
and liberalism— in short, everything that Goedsche resented.70 In the mid­
nineteenth century, Germany had no colonial possessions to speak of, and
this marginal position during the age of imperialism influenced the manner in
which the British Empire was regarded. Goedsche could accordingly criticise the
British for their exploitation of the Indian population from a relatively neutral
position—and he certainly did so. Goedsche’s rhetoric is firmly embedded
within the imperialist project, and Nena Sahib has all the characteristics of the
most sensationalist and eurocentric literature of its day; and yet, due to the
author’s nationality and unequivocal Anglophobia, the moral framework is
inverted. To use the words of Patrick Brantlinger, Goedsche ‘dehumanizes both
the dominated and the imperialist dominators’ but he does so in a markedly
different manner from that of his contemporary British writers.71 Nena Sahib
is very much a ‘heroic adventure’ and a ‘conspicuous demonstration of racial
superiority’, but its moral thrust is essentially contradictory and ambiguous.72
As opposed to many of the accounts written during the immediate aftermath
of the uprising that call for revenge and in some cases even the extermination
of all Indians, Goedsche’s 1857 fantasy ends with the justified revenge of the
Indians— and only later followed up by the un-Christian revenge of the British.73
In line with much of the Anglo-Indian literature of the time, Goedsche focuses
on interracial relationships, and in fact every main character in Nena Sahib is
to some extent romantically involved with a person of non-Europan descent.
However, these liaisons inevitably end in tragedy, thereby reinforcing the racist
stereotype even as it seems to be transcending it.74
This chapter has sought to draw attention to the European tradition of
conspiracies as a possible source for key elements in a number of accounts
relating to the Uprising of 1857. While some of these elements are distinctly
Indian in origin and specific to the historical events, others seem to draw on
much wider fears of sedition, secret societies and malevolent conspiracies, which
hark back to the darker chapters in European history. In Nena Sahib, Goedsche
had the occasion to rehearse his later elaboration of the alleged Jewish conspiracy
as expressed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yet, as with so much else in the
novel, the conspiracy is inverted as the sympathetic anglophobic conspirators of
1857 are later turned into the evil Jews threatening the entire World. Nena Sahib
166 Kim A. Wagner

remains a deeply obscure work, which nevertheless reflects the impact of 1857
outside of Britain and draws attention to some of the more sensationalist aspects
of the mutiny repertoire.

Notes and References

1. Sir John Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, oder. D ieEm pdrung in Indien (Berlin: Carl Nohring, 1858-1859).
I have retained Goedsche’s idiosyncratic spelling o f Nena rather than Nana Sahib.
2. This essay was first presented at the ‘Mutiny at the Margins* conference in Edinburgh in 2007
and thus written before my more detailed account The Great Fear o f 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies
and the M aking o f the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang Oxford, 2010), which examines many
o f the same themes.
3 . 1 am here using ‘Mutiny* to refer to the literary construction o f the Indian Uprising o f 1857.
4. Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, vol. I, pp. 505-506. All translations by Wagner; due to the nature of
Goedsche*s writing and nineteenth-century German, it has been necessary to restructure and
reformulate some o f the quotes.
5. There are, among other things, very explicit descriptions o f the torture o f a young Hindu maid
who has her breasts crushed and pinched, see Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, vol. II, pp. 131-189.
6. One would think that Steven Spielberg had used Goedsche*s depiction o f the ‘Thug* temple
as inspiration for Indiana Jones and the Temple o f Doom (1984), but the depiction o f human
sacrifice in cavernous temple ruins is in fact a com mon image within Orientalist representations
o f Indian religion, see for instance Cynthia Ann Humes ‘Wrestling with Kali: South Asian and
British Constructions o f the Dark Goddess*, and Hugh Urban ‘India’s Darkest Heart: Kali: in
the Colonial Imagination’, both in J.J. Kripal and R.F. McDermott, eds, Encountering Kali: In the
Margins, at the Center, In the West (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 2002), pp. 145-168,
pp. 169-195. See also Kim A. Wagner, Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology o f Thuggee
(Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2009).
7. Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, vol. Ill, p. 98.
8. This incident is based on an account in The Indian Mutiny (London: Routledge & Co, 1858),
p. 148, written anonymously, see Edward Leckey, Fictions Connected with the Indian Outbreak o f
1857 Exposed (Bombay: Chesson & Woodhall, 1859), pp. 118-120. See also ibid., pp. 115-117,
for a contemporary report o f a Christian woman being crucified at Delhi. There were many such
stories circulating in Britain during the summer o f 1857, none o f them credible, but they are
indicative o f the general level o f public hysteria.
9. Retcliffe, Nena Sahib , vol. Ill, pp. 385-387.
10. Si/ John Retcliffe, Um die Weltherrschaft (Berlin: Verlag Richard Eckstein, 1906-1908).
11. Having wound up his unfinished novel and the Uprising o f 1857, Goedsche subsequently
reintroduced Nena Sahib as a ‘Gul’ or demon and the owner o f one o f the three rings which
hoid the power to rule the world as he eventually joins forces with the Jesuits!
12. See Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 109.
13. Parts o f Goedsche’s account strongly resemble some o f the journalistic articles written by Karl
Marx and Friederich Engels, for instance ‘Investigation o f Torture in India*, New-York Daily
Tribune , 16 Sept. 1857.
14. See K. Murti, India: The Seductive and Seduced ‘Other* o f German Orientalism (Westport:
Greenwood Press, 2000); and T.C. Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2004).
 ‘Vengeance Against England!’ 167

15. See G. Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth— Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
16. The main work on Goedsche is Volker Neuhaus’ D er zeitgeschichtliche Sensationsroman in
Deutschland 1855-1878: *Sir John Retcliffe3 und seine Schule (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag,
1980); but see also Ralf-Peter Martin Wunschpotentiale: Geschichte und Gesellschaft in
Abendteuerromanen von Retcliffey Armand, May (KOnigstein: Verlag Anton Hain, 1983),
pp. 21-47. '
17. Neuhaus, D er zeitgeschichtliche, p. 23.
18. Ibid., p. 28.
19. Apart from the general influence o f the novel, it was the direct inspiration for Egon Fels, Die
Rose von Delhi: Roman aus derZ eit des indischen Aufstandes unterN ena Sahib (Naumburg: Jena
und Leipzig, 1866); Karl May’s Die Juweleninsel (serialised in Filr alle Welt, 1880-1882), as well
as the novel Sophie Worishoffer and Georg Holmsten, Kreuz und Quer durch lndien (Dt. Book
Sales and Verl-Ges, 1950), see Neuhaus, D er zeitgeschichtliche, p. 200. A French novel, entitled
Nena-Sahib, ou ITnsurrection des Indes, was published in 1858.
20. See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth o f the Jewish Conspiracy and the Protocols
o f the Elders o f Zion (London: Eyre 8c Spottiswoode, 1967); and Cesare G. De Michelis, The
Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study o f the Protocols o f the Sages o f Zion (Lincoln: University o f
Nebraska Press, 2004).
21. There is also a similar scene in Alexandre Dumas* Joseph Balsamo (Fellens et Dufour [A. Cadot],
1846-1848), see Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1994), Ch. ‘Fictional Protocols’, pp. 117-140, p. 135.
22. Quoted in Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 1996 edition, pp. 36-37.
23. See Albert D. Pionke, Plots o f Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England
(Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004).
24. Quoted in Martin, Wunschpotentiale, p. 27.
25. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p. 42.
26. Neuhaus, D er zeitgeschichtliche, p. 37.
27. Retcliffe, Nena Sahib , vol. Ill, p. 365. See also vol. Ill, p. 183, where Goedsche in true hypocritical
fashion begs o f his female readership not to continue reading as he is about to describe deeds too
horrible for retelling and which are moreover not the products o f his fantasy, but historical facts.
28. See for instance Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, vol. Ill, pp. 130, 156 and 161.
29. See also Svetlana Boym, ‘Conspiracy Theories and Literary Ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and
the Protocols o f Zion’, Comparative Literature, vol. 51, no. 2 (1999), pp. 97-122.
30. Quoted in Pionke, Plots o f Opportunity, p. 86. See also G.B. Malleson, The Indian Mutiny o f 1857
(London: Seeley and Co, 1891), pp. 21-33.
31. See Alex Padamsee, Representations o f Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Pionke, Plots o f Opportunity, ch. 4.
32. In Meadows Taylor’s Seeta (London: Henry S. King, 1872), the rebellious sepoy Azrael Pande
is a former ‘Thug’, while the hapless Flashman runs afoul o f the resurrected ‘Thugs’ under
the direction o f Russian agents in George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Great Game
(London: HarperCollins, 1975).
33. See Umberto Eco, The Pendulum o f Foucault (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1989).
34. J. Macpherson, ‘Report on insanity among Europeans in Bengal’, The Indian Annals o f Medical
Science, vol. 1, no. 2, April 1854, pp. 704—705.
35. H.D. Traill, ed., The Works o f Thomas Carlyle, vol. 29 (New York: Scribner, 1896-1901), p. 120.
36. The London Quarterly Review, 18 January 1858.
37. Eugene Sue, Le J u if Errant (Paris: Paulin, 1844-1845); Carl Gottfried ROssler, Die Thugs, oder
Indischer Fanatismus. Historischer Roman (Altenburg: Schnuphase’sche Buchhandlung, 1845).
The title o f the latter translates as: The Thugs, or Indian Fanaticism: Historical Novel.
168 Kim A. Wagner

38. Halhed to Perry, 10 Dec 1812, in Perry to Dowdeswell, 15 January 1813, Bengal Criminal &
Judicial Proceedings, P /131/12, 30 January 1813 (no. 62), APAC, British Library.
39. The New Monthly Magazine, v ol. 38 (1833), p. 285.
40. See Pringle to Barwell, 9 May 1827, William Sleeman, Ramaseeana , vol. II (Calcutta:
G.H. Huttman, Military Orphan Press, 1836), p. 252
41. ‘Souvenirs du P. Grivel sur les PP. Barruel et Feller’, Le Contemporain, July 1878, pp. 67-70,
quoted in Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p. 36. See also Neuhaus, D er zeitgeschichtliche, p. 33, for
a similar story regarding the ‘13 Jews o f Konigsberg* who could communicate with a ‘telegraph­
like speed.’
42. See S.A.A. Rizvi and M.L. Bhargava, eds, Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh, vol. I, (Uttar
Pradesh: Publications Bureau, Information Dept, 1957), p. 392; see also Kim A. Wagner, The
Great Fear o f 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the M aking o f the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2010), pp. 61-69.
43. See Ranajit Guha Ranajit, Elementary Aspects o f Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1983).
44. See Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny, ch. 5.
45. See C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in
India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 316; David Urquhart, The
Rebellion o f India (London: D. Bryce, 1857); and Robert Stemdale, The Afghan Knife (London:
Sampson Low, 1879).
46. Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, vol. I, pp. 486-487. There do actually seem to have been rumours in India
in 1857 to the effect that the French were enlisting men and preparing shipments o f arms in
support o f the rebels, see Mss Eur C629, APAC, BL. Thanks to Dr Marina Carter for bringing
this to my attention.
47. See Pionke, Plots o f Opportunity, p. 83 and pp. 89-90.
48. Ibid, p. 514. See also W.H. Sleeman’s anonymous article in the Calcutta Literary Gazette,
3 October 1830.
49. H.H. Spry, ‘Some Accounts o f the Gang Murderers o f Central India, Commonly Called Thugs;
Accompanying the Skulls o f Seven o f Them’, The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 8 (March,
1834), p. 515. This was a commonly held view o f Indian society, as appears from another
contemporary description o f the ‘Thugs’: ‘It might be supposed, that a class o f persons whose
hearts must be effectually hardened against all the better feelings o f humanity, would encounter
few scruples o f conscience in the commission o f the horrid deeds whereby they subsist; but, in
point o f fact, they are as much the slaves o f superstition, and as much directed by the observance
o f omens in the commission o f murder, as the most inoffensive o f the natives o f India are in
the ordinary affairs o f their lives.’ Lt Reynolds, ‘On the Thugs’, The New Monthly Magazine,
vol. 38 (1833), pp. 277-287, p. 280.
50. Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, vol. II, p. 492.
51. In Goedsche’s account, the ‘Thugs’ might even be characterised as the Jesuits o f the Orient
in regards to the malign nature o f their brotherhood, their widespread networks, ability to
command loyalty and insidious means o f achieving their ‘fanatic* goals.
52. On a similar note, see Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910).
53. See for instance Ruth B. Yeazell, Harems o f the M ind: Passages o f Western Art and Literature
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
54. Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, vol. Ill, p. 327 and pp. 366-367. See also Leckey for similar accounts o f
children being murdered in various ways.
55. See for instance G.A. Henty’s, Rujjub the Juggler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1893).
56. There is a semblance o f justification for Nana Sahib’s acts o f rebellion in Hume Nisbet’s QueerCs
Desire: A Romance o f the Indian Mutiny (London: F.V. White, 1893),pp. 15-16 andpp. 185-186.
57. Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, vol. Ill, p. 53. Interestingly, the Sicilian Vespers is also invoked in Sir
George Trevelyan’s hysteric Cawnpore (London: Macmillan, 1865), pp. 69-70.
 ‘Vengeance Against England!’ 169

58. Vol. 3, p. 225, Retcliffe, Nena Sahib , vol. Ill, p. 33.

59. See also Patric Brantlinger, Rule o f Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914
(London: Cornel University Press, 1988), p. 203.
60. Retcliffe, Nena Sahib, vol. Ill, p. 186.
61. Ibid., vol. Ill, pp. 190-191. This incident is derived from The Indian Mutiny (Routledge &
Co, 1858), p. 40, and it also appears to have been printed in the British press, see Leckey, Fictions
Connectedy pp. 123-126 and 132-135. \
62. See Leckey, Fictions Connected> pp. 41-42. See also Edward Money, The Wife and the Ward
(London: Routledge, 1859), p. 371. There are other variations o f the same theme, including the
heroine o f Henty’s Rujjub the Jugglery who disfigures herself with acid to prevent Nana Sahib
from raping her.
63. Retcliffe, Nena Sahiby vol. Ill, pp. 192-193. The Bombay TimeSy 17 August 1857 reported a
pregnant woman having her baby cut out o f her belly in Delhi, see also Leckey, Fictions
Connectedy pp. 163-164.
64. On the subject o f rape in connection with 1857 see Jenny Sharpe, Allegories o f Empire: The
Figure o f Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis and London: University o f Minnesota Press,
1993); and Nany L. Paxton, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial
Imagination , 1830-1947 (London: Rutgers University Press, 1999).
65. See Andrew Ward, Our Bones are Scattered (London: John Murray, 1996), pp. 504-506; and also
Leckey, Fictions Connected, p. 109, pp. 112-113 and 154-155.
66. Neuhaus, D er zeitgeschichtliche, p. 52, p. 24.
67. See James Grants, First Love and Last Love: A Tale o f the Indian Mutiny (London: Routledge,
1868); and Trevelyan, Cawnpore.
68. Retcliffe, Um die Weldherrschafty vol. II, p. 200. The British retribution is also compared to the
terrors o f the French Revolution, ibid., p. 207.
69. New-York Daily Tribune , 16 Sept. 1857.
70. See Neuhaus, D er zeitgeschichtliche, pp. 118-121.
71. Brantlinger, Rule o f Darkness, p. 200.
72. See Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny, p. 6.
73. Charles Dickens was particularly vitriolic in his calls for revenge, see Charles Dickens (Walter
Dexter ed.) Letters, vol. II (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1937-1938), p. 889.
74. Meadows Taylor’s Seeta is probably the most obvious example o f the ‘failure’ o f the interracial
relationship.
 10

THE UPRISING, MIGRATION AND

THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA
Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

WHILE there have been a number of studies of the native armies during British
rule, particularly around the time of the uprising, few have devoted much space to
a consideration of the prospects and predicament o f ‘disbanded’ and ‘mutineer’
sepoys in the aftermath of the revolt, aside from those leaders and convicted
murderers who were killed or transported.1 For many disbanded sepoys, and
villagers in regions affected by the uprising, socio-economic dislocation resulting
from the protracted struggles surrounding the insurgency may well have played
as important a role as considerations of disaffection and fear of punishment in
the decision of unprecedented numbers of individuals and families to migrate
in search of employment and for many of them to leave India to work in sugar
producing colonies overseas.2 Any consideration of the role of the uprising in
fostering the marked increase in migration is complicated, however, by the issue
of overlapping geographies, in particular links between traditional regions of
recruitment for inland and overseas labour and those severely affected by the
military actions. The immediate post-mutiny years, when emigration to the
sugar colonies peaked, also coincided with an exceptional hike in the global
market value of sugar, thereby creating an unprecedented correlation in both
push and pull factors. With these caveats in mind, this chapter will propose some
conjectures and avenues of further research for the elucidation of the role of
migration in the aftermath of the 1857 Uprising.

Plunder and Destruction: Villages in the Conflict Zone

The 1857 Uprising impacted upon the lives of subaltern Indians in a number
of ways. Villages considered rebel strongholds were liable to be set alight and
 The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspor a 171

razed to the, ground by British troops, while those associated with loyalist
zamindars were routinely plundered by rebel forces. More generally, months of
conflict took their toll on the poor as traditional employments were disrupted,
dispossession and plunder wrecked rural livelihoods, and the fear of oppression
prompted the mass desertion of villages. There is abundant evidence of the
effects of the mutiny on ordinary village Indians, particularly those which can be
statistically shown to have provided significant numbers of internal and overseas
migrants.
In 1857, British retribution against village communities identified as having
ties to rebels was immediate and striking. The following report, by a British
judge, W. Wynyard, about the Rajput village of Bugheedand in the Azamgarh
district, was not untypical:

The village seem ed to me to be one o f which an example should be made, arson,

murder, theft, were all as clear as day against them ... the village was thoroughly
destroyed.... Large quantities o f plundered stores, the property o f Europeans
and the 17th Regiment Native Infantry were fou n d .... I cannot but regret the
loss o f life o f m any doubdess innocent people; but these are not tim es for m ock
hum anity, towards people w hose brethrens’ hands are still red with the blood
o f our countrym en, w om en, and their children.3

Lieutenant Colonel T.J. Wroughton who was also present at the surprise
attack on Bugheedand, on 25 August, reported that the ‘inhabitants were well
punished5 and that many had run away on their approach. According to him,
their offence was having ‘harboured the Pulwars’.4Wernyor Smith, Commandant
of the 8th Oude Irregular Infantry, who took charge of the Gurkha attacking
party, claimed that he had taken care to oversee the removal of women and
children previously ‘to firing the village’ and offered his assurance that ‘none
but men deserving it, met with death’. He reported a total of 60 men killed, and
16 taken prisoners.5
Some villages were destroyed despite little evidence of actual support for
insurgents. Captain Boileau, commanding a Gurkha force, reported to the
magistrate of Azamgarh on 8 September that he considered the destruction of
the village of Heeraputtee ‘imperative in a military point of view ... it is situated
close to the entrance to the town, is surrounded by dense jungle, entrenched by
the insurgents’. It was accordingly ‘levelled to the ground’. Boileau also requested
to be allowed to ‘remove’ the village of Murreea, it being ‘dangerously near our
southern entrenchment’, and, so he believed, had ‘long been a refuge for thieves,
and other bad characters’.6
In districts like Shahabad, where many sepoys in the Bengal Army had
originated, it was inevitable that ties with mutineers would be strong, and that
links with rebel groups would bring down British opprobrium, and the usual
firings. In describing his participation in the burning of the village of Mussar, in
172 Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

July 1858, the British magistrate of Shahabad remarked that it had ‘assisted and
harboured the rebels, and contains many sepoys’ houses’. To his distress, ‘owing
to the great size of the village and the uninflammable nature of the houses,
the burning was not so satisfactory as I could have wished; in fact not half the
village was fired’. On such occasions, some proof of rebel atrocities was usually
sought out, as justification of the action. In Mussar, reported Brodhurst, ‘a coat
belonging to a soldier of HM 35th, probably one of those who fell on April 23 rd,
an officer’s sword, a tent, of European manufacture were found’.7
The transfer of control of villages, previously under the jurisdiction of rebel-
supporting zamindars, to British loyalists was another likely cause of disruption
to villagers. One such beneficiary, Mr Peppe, an estate manager and indigo
planter in Gorakhpur, provided information about his own participation in the
destruction of villages linked to the rebels in order to strengthen his claim to
acquisition of new zamindari status. One of his statements read: ‘on 26th June
I attacked the village of Sauseepore, and destroyed it by fire.... On 3rd July
I destroyed the large village of Mowah Dabur ... a few days after this I went
and burned down the village of Tiljah.’ As a reward for his actions, he was led
to expect that three villages which the rebellion had placed at the disposal of
government would be leased to him.8 Another indigo planter in the Shahabad
district, R.W. Bingham, was granted the confiscated estate of Kutchoowur and
lease of the villages Ramdeeha, Perrureah, Sevahee and Kowreearee, all in the
Rhotas Hills, and formerly the rebel leader Amar Singh’s hunting grounds.
Mr Bingham was said to have boldly attacked and routed a body of rebels and to
have kept the troops ‘well supplied with guides and correct information of the
movements of rebels’.9 Of course, the loyalist Indians were rewarded at the same
time. The village of Nonore, also in Shahabad, was granted to Radhay Singh for
his assistance to Europeans in rebel hands. His property had reportedly been
plundered by the rebels. Radhay Singh was said to have always resided in the
village which his father ‘had in farm from Kooer Singh’. He became thereafter
the sole proprietor.10
Whilst attention is usually given to mutineer sepoys, many of the rebel parties
were joined by ordinary villagers. In the district of Shahabad, for example, John
Hamilton, reporting on rebel activities, described the marauders as a combination
of sepoys, and ‘badmashes’ whose numbers, in June 1858, were greatly increased
by recruits from nearby villages. Significantly, John Hamilton admitted that
when some villagers joined the rebels, others felt they had little option but to do
the same: ‘as they see they are let in for it by the conduct of a few, the whole of
the Gohmer and Barrah men are reported to be arming themselves, and intend
to fight, and are joining the sepoys at Gohmer.’11 By the end of July 1858, indeed,
it was reported that one of the local rebel leaders, Meghur Sing, had very few
sepoys with him. His followers, estimated at between 400 and 500, were ‘nearly
all villagers from the vicinity of Guhmar in the Ghazeepore district’.12 In August
1858, the Shahabad magistrate, Brodhurst, described the rebel force in Arrah as
 The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspora 173

consisting o f ‘about 200 sepoys, 6 sowars and 400 other budmashes, principally
residents of Tuppa Kurrumaree’.13
In areas where the rebels were strong, villagers could hardly be expected to
put up much resistance and suffered equally, whether local authority was vested
in the hands of British loyalists or their opponents. As the Metcalfs have pointed
out, ‘although many among the peasantry had won title to their lands in 1856, to
the dismay of the British they threw in their lot with their former landlords—to
have boldly confronted them would have been foolhardy’.14Landlords themselves
could do little against the depredations of rebels: noting that a number of villages
in Sirgoojah district had been plundered, J.S. Davies commented, in December
1858,

it w ould appear that the Zemindars unable to oppose the rebel sepoys, are
quite at their mercy, and are com pelled by force to furnish supplies, etc. W hen
the demands o f the rebels are n ot prom ptly met, the villages are forthwith
plundered w ithout hindrance; in fact that portion o f the district occupied by
them is entirely disorganised.15

An insight into the perceptions of villagers at this time was attempted in a

despatch from the magistrate of Shahabad to his superior officer:

N um bers have joined the rebels from a belief that they had established their
hold on the district; larger numbers still, because a course o f unchecked plunder
and license presents irresistible attractions to the Asiatics. The villagers are
beginning to think they may have m ade a mistake. Each time the Govt troops
defeat or even disperse a body o f rebels, m uch good is done. The prestige o f
the m utineers receives a blow, and the villager sees that his com panionship
involves danger and death, as well as lo o t and lawless liberty. Even now m any
villagers are anxious to avoid the com ing storm by returning to their hom es.
The fear that they will there be seized and hanged, alone keeps them aw ay.... At
present the sight o f a soldier em pties every village. W e are looked upon sim ply
as avengers, and get neither assistance nor inform ation.16

In a further statement, that rather supported the suspicions of the villagers

than the opposite, Money proposed that a list of rebel villages should be made
which he proposed should be ‘levelled to the ground’. The result, he continued,
would be that ‘the inhabitants would have to remain with the sepoys, whom
they have been with for months, and would share their fate’. With such a view
prevailing as late as the end of 1858, it is not difficult to imagine that scores
of the former residents of ‘blacklisted villages’ are likely to have been on the
move.
Another source of potential migrants would have been escaped prisoners.
One of the first acts of rebels on entering a town was to release those held in British
jails—as they did, for example, at Arrah in August 1858.17 Clare Anderson’s
174 Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

work clearly shows that only a small proportion of escaped prisoners were ever
recaptured— more than two-thirds of escapees in the North West Provinces and
over half of those released from prisons in Bengal remained at large several years
after the mutiny ended. Many were thought to have died in the disturbances,
and Anderson reports some evidence of liberated prisoners ‘being found
starving’. However, many more were widely believed to have migrated—both
within India, to ‘jungles bordering the Himalayas’, or beyond, perhaps joining
traditional Muslim pilgrimages, or by finding their way to the emigration depots
of the sugar colonies where few questions were asked in the drive to feed the
labour-hungry and lucrative plantations of the British Empire.18

Dealing with Rebels—the Gulf between

Policymakers and Practitioners

Almost as soon as sepoy regiments began to be disarmed, and ‘rebel villages’

retaken, British Indian officials began worrying about what to do with those
civilians and ex-sepoys whose loyalties were considered suspect. The minutes
of various officials reveal that policymakers were divided between the need for
‘setting an example’—usually entailing transportation en masse—and those,
generally more practical thinkers, who dreaded the organisational problems
and feared the consequences of attempting to punish such a large body of men.
The opinion of the President in Council, at Fort William in March 1858, is
illustrative of the latter view. Speaking of the disarmed sepoy troops at Barakpur
he noted:

They not only get their pay for doing nothing, but are obliged to be watched by
European troops to keep them out o f mischief. Yet they com m it no outward
and visible act o f m utiny or disobedience or even negligence that can justify
their punishm ent. They are sim ply incum brances with the power o f doing m uch
harm so long as they are kept together in organized bodies. Once discharged
I believe they w ould soon merge into the ordinary mass o f the p op u lation ....
It is said that these men are now in a state o f desperation, fearing punishm ent
for the general crimes o f the Native Army by not know ing what is to happen
to them . The effect o f gradual discharge w ould be to remove this feeling and
I think the measure would be useful in every respect. Universal punishm ent,
even if just, is sim ply im possible— the sooner we get rid o f men, we can neither
punish nor trust, in m y opinion, the better.19

Commenting on this opinion, J.P. Grant added his belief that the ‘worst’
of the ‘Hindustanee sepoys’ were not ‘more dangerous than many of their
village brothers’. A contrary view was expressed by J.B. Peacock, who felt that
disbandment was an inadequate solution. He protested that discharged sepoys,
 The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspora 175

allowed to return home, would actually endanger the lives of ordinary villagers:
‘a constant source of terror to the people and would endanger the peace and
tranquillity of the country’. More specifically, he envisaged them ‘robbing
and plundering the peaceable inhabitants, destroying the electric telegraphs
and secretly if not openly endeavouring to assist the cause of the rebels’. A counter
to this view was immediately filed by Grant, who contended that the spectre of
a mass of plundering ex-sepoys was more likely to derive from a proposal to
transport them en masse. He declared that confronted by the prospect of forced
exile, Vast numbers would escape, then indeed we should have the country
overrun with bands to be dreaded; composed not of men with a feeling of
security on their minds, going with their savings back to their homes but of men
driven mad by desperation’.20
It was the opinion and perspective of Grant and his ilk that won the upper
hand amongst policymakers, and attention turned to amnesty and quiet
dispersal rather than mass transportation. However, the terms of the various
proclamations issued to this effect were themselves the subject of exhaustive
scrutiny and reinterpretation, particularly at district level, where local officials
had to oversee the measures. In Shahabad, for example, with its large contingent
of sepoys, the practical means of dealing with mutineers promised an amnesty
if they would return to their homes and to ‘peaceful pursuits’ posed several
problems. The local magistrate, A. Money, contended that returning sepoys
had no interest in reporting themselves to the local authorities unless penalties
for non-compliance were invoked, and consequently, ‘I thought it necessary to
point out to sepoys at their villages that by retaining their arms, and failing
to comply with the conditions of pardon, they rendered themselves liable
to punishment’. Moreover, he wondered, how did the government propose
that he should act to disarm the ‘badmashes’ and ‘ryots’?21 E.A. Samuells, the
commissioner of Patna division, supported Money, explaining, in January 1859,
‘none of the villages which have been notorious during the last year and a half
for their adherence to the rebel cause have given up a single weapon under the
disarming act, though we know that every man belonging to them possesses
arms’.22 By the end of January 1859, Money had taken it upon himself to appoint
his European assistants to disarm the districts, with instructions to demand
information about arms in their villages from chowkidars— on pain of dismissal
and imprisonment, and by instituting police searches of villages where arms
were suspected of being concealed.
The question of how to deal with villagers in areas which had supported
the rebels continued to preoccupy British officials through 1859. The governor
general of India issued a circular, aiming to secure villagers from legal actions
launched by ‘their plundered neighbours’ by offering a general pardon to them,
‘it being implied that the acts of plunder were committed in a district where
rebellion was at the time uncontrolled’. Similarly village communities would
not be fined for offences committed, but might be required to fund the cost
176 Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

of restoring public buildings destroyed by them.23 What is not covered in these

documents, however, is the impact that the opinions and attitudes of the men on
the ground, like local magistrate Money, had on villagers with relatives amongst
sepoys and rebels, who had faced uncertainty and hardship during the long
months of open warfare and mopping up operations, and whose homes and
livelihoods were destroyed, or violently dislocated in an irreparable fashion.

The Socio-economic Impact of the Mutiny

Preoccupied as they were with crushing the pockets of rebellion which continued
through 1858 and into 1859, the British paid less attention than ever to the socio­
economic distress which swept across northern India in the wake of the uprising.
By July 1859, however, even the plight of the disbanded sepoys was exciting
sufficient attention to provoke some anxiety as to their future prospects. The
Magistrate of Sarun reported that ‘two sepoys came into his Court and begged for
employment, saying they were starving. Another sepoy gave a petition begging
the Magistrate to authorise a Zemindar to employ him5. Fergusson, commi­
ssioner of Patna district, added that a large number of former sepoys, mainly
resident in Shahabad and Sarun, were ‘without ostensible means of livelihood....
If they do not find honest occupation, suitable to their taste and habits, they will
become robbers and dacoits.’24 He explained that local zamindars and mahajans
believed that the law prohibited them from employing ex-mutineers and
suggested that magistrates be empowered to issue a proclamation declaring that
the crime o f ‘harbouring’ sepoys was no longer in effect. This was rejected by the
lieutenant governor of Bengal, who commented, ‘the one thing to be now of all
others most carefully avoided, is giving the pardoned Sepoys the least reason to
imagine that we are afraid of them’. What he went on to suggest, astonishingly,
amounted to a tacit move to condemn an entire class of the population of
India— a hitherto advantaged one—to a generation o f ‘pinching poverty’:

The great majority o f sepoys belong to fam ilies in one way or another connected
with the land. The loss o f service is to such m en doubtless a great and distressing
loss. But ... it will be o f political advantage to Governm ent, half a century
hence or more, if the pinching poverty which is the natural result o f the
ingratitude and unfaithfulness o f the sepoys o f this generation, should be such
as to becom e a bye word in the n e x t.25

The It. governor went on to stress that the attitude of the government should
be to implement the amnesty, ‘but not step beyond it’. As a result, officials
would only be instructed to explain, verbally, that the sepoys were pardoned
men, and therefore ‘all people are free to deal with them as with any other men
 The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspora 177

of any class whatsoever’ without being accused of harbouring criminals. It was

this very watered down policy that was also preferred by the Government of
India in response to requests for the provision of further written confirmation
of the amnesties announced in the previous year, summarised in a despatch of
8 August 1859.26
It is not difficult to conclude, from the above, that life for the rebels in Shahabad,
and other regions with formerly large sepoy populations, was never going to be
easy in the years following the revolt, and that the British undoubtedly pursued
a policy of, at best, neutrality with regard to the foot-soldiers of the mutiny.
Some idea of the numbers affected can be gleaned from accounts of magistrates
in the Shahabad district, who estimated that of a rebel force numbering 3,000
sepoys, and 10,000 general recruits to the cause in late 1858, about 1,000 had
been killed during the conflict, around 2,000 fled the district and the remainder,
some 9,000, returned to their homes. In the early months of 1859, small bands of
sepoys reportedly appeared in Sarun and Shahabad, but then were said to have
‘gradually melted away’.27
A better idea of the scale of misery can be found in petitions and other
vernacular sources. Hoormut Khan’s words convey a far more striking sense of
the devastation and desperation affecting the conflict zones than any number of
official reports and statistics. On 24 August 1859 he represented to the authorities
that

the N orth Western Provinces had been reduced to ruin and desolation, and that
hundreds o f people have died from starvation, while others have com m itted
suicide; that no-on e is in a state o f contentm ent, and that oppression is
daily on the increase; that Her Majesty's subjects have been brought to utter
ruin, and that it is to be regretted that His Excellency the Governor General
does not take any notice o f it; that notw ithstanding the prom ulgation o f
Her Majesty’s Proclamation o f pardon and amnesty, no confiscated estates
have been restored, nor are prisoners released, but that on the contrary
m any are thrown into prison; that from the promulgation o f Act IX [the
Forfeiture Act], the provisions o f which are entirely in opposition to the Royal
Proclam ation, it would appear that the Governm ent is inclined to support
oppression.28

The words of Hoormut Khan and others like him went unremarked— at least,
no orders were issued upon their receipt. By November of the following year,
famine was described as ‘severe’ in the region.29 As Bhattacharyya has noted,

after the Indian M utiny agriculture remained unsettled for several years
over a large part o f the country. The m onsoons during 1858-1860 were also
unfavourable. In 1860 a famine spread over the UP, Ajmer and the eastern
districts o f the Punjab and continued well into the next year. There was large-
scale unem ploym ent and starvation.30
178 Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

Having established sufficient causes—both political and socio-economic— to

indicate why large segments of the population would have been on the move,
seeking subsistence, it is now time to turn our attention to colonial attitudes to
the potential arrival of mutineers—whether as transportees or as escapees.

The Uprising and its Effect upon

the South Asian Diaspora

The 1857 Uprising, which created widespread socio-economic dislocation,

disrupted more than one important source of employment for the so-called
purbeeas—seasonal migrant labourers, of whom a significant number were
Bihari Rajputs. Naturally, many would have been pushed into overseas migra­
tion. Emigration officials in Bengal stressed the

unsettled condition o f the country, about Patna, Shahabad and Gaya, especially
during the last year when large bodies o f a [physically] superior class o f people
crowded into the D epots unaided and offered to emigrate, representing that
they were reluctantly driven to such a course from absolute want arising from
the difficulty in obtaining em ploym ent in their ow n country.

These voluntary migrants comprised many ‘higher-caste hindu people from

Shahabad districts’ who were believed to belong to ‘the disbanded native army
who were denied a job in the British Indian Army which was the only honourable
work to this people in the country’.31 Migration would have been resorted to
particularly from those districts where this was already a source of longer term
economic resort for certain members of the community. An indication of how
this occurred was provided by the official who oversaw labour emigration at the
port of Calcutta in early 1862:

Emigration, as now conducted, is by no m eans confined to the agricultural

population, as during the past two years a widespread im petus has been
imparted to other classes, who have been taught to look to Emigration as a relief
from the disturbing effects o f the M utiny, the disbandm ent o f the Native Army,
and, lastly, from the sufferings occasioned by the recent famine, all o f which
have m ore or less contributed to swell the list o f applicants for Emigration.32

The same official alluded to the high rates of wages obtainable overseas,
compared to India. Pointing out that the islands of Mauritius or Reunion could
be ‘often reached in the time occupied by a voyage to Assam or Cachar’, he
noted that migrants frequently returned to India after a stay of ten years with
savings of several thousand rupees, ‘a knowledge of this fact is sufficient of itself
to encourage Emigration’.
 The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspora 179

Table 10.1: Total Emigration through the port of Calcutta, 1856-1860

1856-1857 7,242
1857-1858 13,539
1858-1859 26,672 (21,273 to Mauritius and 5,158 to West Indies)
1859-1860 24,575 '

Source: IOLR P/188/62 Secy Govt India to Secy Govt Bengal, 13 Oct 1860; P/188/59
No. 23 Secy Govt Bengal, Return of Emigration 1858-1859.

Some indication of the enormous leap in emigration figures from India post­
mutiny, and of the overwhelming importance of Mauritius as a destination at
this time, can be seen from Table 10.1.
The Geoghegan Report on Colonial Emigration noted that the peak year
for emigration was 1858 and that in the years 1856-1859 an annual average of
31,000 emigrants left India, from which 27,000 went to Mauritius, chiefly from
Calcutta.33David Northrup states categorically that The strongest case for British
rule pushing people to emigrate can be seen in the correspondence between the
peak in migration overseas at the end of the l*850s and the widespread disruptions
associated with the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and its suppression’.34
The impetus given to emigration was not driven solely by factors originating
within India itself. Indeed, the emigration agent for Mauritius at Calcutta had
received requests to ‘send as many labourers to Port Louis as he could collect’
from early 1857.35 This was due to the sudden rise in world sugar prices, driven
up by a combination of factors, and which remained exceptionally high until the
early 1860s, producing a frenzy of land clearances and increased acreage under
cane, and competition for imported labour.36It was the combination of increased
demand from sugar producers with the disturbances occasioned by the uprising,
which produced the upsurge in migration. As Walton Look Lai has observed:
‘Mauritius was the main destination of the increased tide, but Demerara [British
Guiana] also experienced a significant jump in immigration. Trinidad was less
affected, but by no means totally immune from this politically inspired surge
in emigration from Calcutta’.37 A glance at the following figures (Table 10.2)
gives a good indication of the ebb and wane of migration in the immediate
post-mutiny years:

Table 10.2: Indian Indentured Migration to Principal Colonial Destinations

1857-1862

Year Total migrants Destinations

1856 14,555 Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Grenada

1857 20,805 ditto

(C ontinued)
180 Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

(Continued)

Year Total migrants Destinations

1858 45,838 Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Grenada, St Lucia

1859 43,057 M auritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Grenada, St Lucia, Jamaica
1860 22,838 Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, St Kitts, Natal

1861 31,493 M auritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, St V incent,

St Lucia, Grenada, Natal, Reunion

1862 14,766 M auritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Reunion

Source: Geoghegan Report on Colonial Emigration, Great Britain, Parliamentary

Papers 1874, p. 84.

Significant numbers of these migrants came from the particularly troubled

areas of Shahabad, Ghazipur and Shahebganj (Table 10.3).

Table 10.3: Regional Breakdowns in Emigration from Calcutta, Post-uprising

1 8 5 7 -1 8 5 8 1 8 5 8 -1 8 5 9

Total M igrants 9,864 20,166

N um ber from Shahabad 2,229 5,522

N um ber from Ghazipur 1,658 2,921

N um ber from Shahebganj 1,388 —

Num ber from Gya — 3,378

Source: IOLR P /188/60 Secy. Govt Bengal to Secy. Govt India, 29 Oct 1859.

Once the trend was in place, favourable reports of returnees and high wage
rates, together with the prospects of direct employment on particular sugar
estates in Mauritius where known kin and caste groups were working (through
colonial legislation passed in 1858) helped to sustain migration streams.38
When, in the 1880s, George Grierson conducted his report into colonial
emigration from the Bengal Presidency, he was able to conclude that "more than
nine tenths of the total colonial emigration from the Bengal Presidency comes
from the districts of Patna, Shahabad, Saran and the 24 Parganas'. In reference
to Shahabad, he remarked upon the fact that emigrant registers revealed that
‘higher castes do migrate in large numbers'. He found continuing trends there of
family migration of Rajputs. On a visit to the district, he met one Rajput family
awaiting departure from the local labour depot, consisting of ‘husband, wife,
2 children [infants] and 2 nephews, full grown.... The husband is a younger
brother of a well-to-do family owning 16 bullocks and corresponding ploughs
and land.' He added, by way of explanation, that the relationship between the
twcr brothers was strained, and that ‘two months ago two Rajputs returned to
 The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspora 181

their village from Mauritius, and in consequence of their success the family
determined to go there also, and walked 40 miles looking for a recruiter’. The
returnees were Ajodhya Singh and Dwarika Singh.39
Some Rajputs and ex-soldiers also went into the recruiting business. In
Dharbanga, Grierson found that the majority of both recruiters and recruits
were either Muslims or Rajputs, while in Alipur, he noted that one of the
Mauritius recruiters was Bahai Singh of Mirat, formerly a sowar.40 In the
North West Provinces and Awadh, a similar report was conducted in 1882 by
Major D.G. Pitcher. He also found that Azamgharh remained an important
recruiting district as a result of numerous returnees from Mauritius. A similar
phenomenon was evident at Gorakhpur, where, however, reports of declining
wage rates in Mauritius had prompted a recourse to alternative local and colonial
destinations.41
Many ex-British servicemen took appointments in the colonial service— it was
not uncommon for magistrates to be from ex-Indian Army, particularly in sugar
colonies like Mauritius and in the West Indies where the increasing proportion of
Indian as opposed to Creole workers on estates meant that knowledge of Indian
languages was a huge advantage. Hence, staff of the Immigration Department,
magistrates and possibly even their employers on sugar estates might all be
ex-adversaries of those migrants who had supported or been active with rebel
forces. Under such circumstances, concealment was paramount, and it is rare to
find documented cases of escaped sepoys post-uprising. Indeed, it seems likely
that officials charged with emigration did little to deter suspected mutineers
from leaving the country. For example, it was only following an enquiry into a
threat of mutiny amongst Indian migrants aboard the Clasmerden, which sailed
from Calcutta to Demerara (Guyana) in 1862, that the West Indies Emigration
Agent volunteered the information that ‘about twenty-five or thirty of these men
who possessed evidence of military training, may have probably belonged to
mutinous Regiments or the Rebel Force, a fact which ... was generally carefully
concealed by them’. Most of the migrants aboard the ship were from Awadh and
the North West Provinces.42
As we have seen, the governor of Mauritius at the time of the mutiny was
little concerned about the spirit of rebellion amongst his labourers, and no
measures were put in place to investigate the possibility of mutineers being
among immigrants at a time when high sugar prices made immigrant labour—
of any description—the chief priority. However, the suppressed knowledge
that mutineers were likely to be among the many thousands who left India
in the mid-1850s and early 1860s resurfaced from time to time whenever the
security of the West Indies or Mauritius was deemed under threat. For example,
when riots occurred at sugar estates in Guyana in 1869, and succeeding years,
migrant sepoys tended to be blamed.43 At one inquest into the deaths of five
men following police shootings at rioters, it was reported by several deponents
that ex-sepoys from India had been involved. This was never proved, but served
182 Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

to indicate the generalised suspicions of the presence of ex-mutineers in the

colony, with sensationalist press reports claiming that the rioters were intending
to recreate ‘on a small scale in British Guiana the part their country men played
in the terrible drama at Cawnpore, sixteen years ago'.44
In Mauritius, a decade after the uprising, in September 1870, when insecurities
in Europe and the threat of war again briefly loomed, the governor at the time
noted the presence on the island of ‘a vast number of Indians, some of whom
(indeed a considerable number) are known to have been among the mutinous
sepoys of India’; they were, he concluded, of ‘but doubtful loyalty, and in the
event of war could hardly be depended on’.45 A British official on the island with
considerable experience of dealings with the migrant community blamed the
presence of large numbers of ex-mutineer sepoys on Mauritius for high levels
of absenteeism among the immigrant workforce, in a statement made during a
police enquiry held in 1872:

I have m et m any old soldiers w ho, to m y personal knowledge, m ust have

been actively concerned in 1857 in the m utiny o f an army in which they and
their forefathers had for a century eaten the salt o f the Honorable East India
C o m p an y... it requires but little knowledge o f the Bengal sepoy and his history
to show he w ould not emigrate to work as a coolie from choice, on the contrary,
he w ould, if he did leave his country, naturally finding the work distasteful, I
m ay alm ost say im possible, run off, and pass his time vagabondising, preying
on his neighbours.46

The Catholic Bishop of Mauritius, Vincent Ryan, made another passing

reference to the presence of mutineers when he lamented the extent of criminality
among Indians in the colony, in a long, rambling letter to the Secretary of State
for the colonies, in September 1871:

Brought from all parts o f that peninsula— escaping in m any cases, as after
the M utiny, the consequences o f their crimes— with a small proportion o f
w om en to the men— becom ing possessors o f m ore m oney than they ever had
before, they form a population so troublesom e and lawless ... that there were
m ore murders com m itted in M auritius than in any other part o f the Q ueen’s
dom inions o f the same am ount o f population’.47

Ultimately, with British rule at its apogee in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, no systematic attempts were ever made to root out or investigate
the presence of mutineers among overseas Indian workforces, and instances
of suspected mutineers were usually only revealed when ex-British Indian
officials, like the Royal Commissioners inspecting sugar estates on Mauritius
in 1872, happened across instances of individuals who, when questioned, were
somewhat vague about past occupations in India. For example, on one sugar
estate, which had been purchased by a successful Indian indentured migrant—
 The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspora 183

Ramtohul—they came across ‘an old and sickly-looking man’ who said his name
was Parsad, but that it had been changed to Parushram, in Mauritius. The man
was from Ghazipur. cHe said he had left in 1859 or I860, been a short time in
the Bottlewallah’s service in Bombay, and then was deceived into coming to
Mauritius; a story suggestive of suspicion in itself.’ Enquiring into his case it
was found that he had arrived on 3 February 1860, and that his given name was
Parushram Benee at that time. On another estate, they interrogated Mahadoo,
who first declared that he came from Kolapore, but then changed his story,
saying his native village was Chiploon.

On being questioned as to his m eans o f livelihood in India, he admitted, after

som e prevarication, that he had been a sepoy, but that he could not remember
the num ber o f his regiment. There can be little doubt but that he had been a
sepoy; and from his story, it appeared very probable that he belonged to the
regim ent o f the Bombay army that m utinied at Kolapore.48

Geoghegan’s report on colonial emigration, published in 1874, stressed that

the bulk of immediate post-mutiny emigrants went to Mauritius. Noting that
some 90,000 emigrants left India in 1858 and 1859, he concluded

the increase was, we m ay say, altogether due to Mauritius. Inquiry was made
as to the cause, but with no very definite result. I believe the sugar plantations
were prosperous at the period, but it was shrewdly suspected that the m utiny
had m uch to say to it, and that m any o f the emigrants crossed the kala p a n i to
Mauritius to avoid a com pulsory sea trip to Port Blair.49

In 1882, Major Pitcher noted in the Mauritius depot at Benares ‘a fine

looking Muslim from the Punjab who had lately returned from the Andamans’.
Elsewhere he stated his conviction that ‘no small proportion of these wanderers
have left their own province or district under the shadow of some misdeed’.50
An additional* reason why sepoys would wish to conceal their military
background was because, increasingly, emigration agents and medical inspectors
at the ports of embarkation sought to weed out recruits without adequate
experience of the hard agricultural labour required on overseas plantations. In
the case of Guyana, Mangru has noted that following earlier riots ‘the tendency
of estate management was to cast aspersions on high-caste Indians or Sepoys who
might have landed under disguise. Consequently the planter-dominated local
legislature instructed the emigration agent at Calcutta to ‘prevent Brahmins,
Thakurs, Fakirs and other non-labouring castes from embarking for the colony’.51
Similarly, the emigration agent at Madras took pains to demonstrate that even
men pointed out as being ‘martial looking’ and those who admitted to being
ex-sepoys were put to a test of fitness. He pointed to the case of Mooneesamy,
who admitted that he had served
184 Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

seven years as an orderly boy in a regim ent, and five years as a sepoy but since
that, he has worked as a carter, and a field laborer, I have had him tested in m y
garden, where he not only ploughed, but did a good day's work in digging and
levelling.52

Of course, since many sepoys from both northern and southern India came
from rural backgrounds, military employment did not necessarily indicate an
unwillingness or an inability to perform agricultural labour.

Conclusion

Despite the evident problems of identifying ex-mutineers, escaping prisoners

and those hordes of ‘badmashes’— as the British tagged Indian villagers who
supported the rebels—from among men with every reason to conceal their role
in the mutiny, it is highly likely that participants in the 1857 Uprising figured
amongst the huge surge in post-mutiny migrants to colonial commercial
enterprises both within and beyond India’s borders. Amongst the thousands of
men, women and children who ended up on estates and plantations far from
home in the late 1850s and 1860s were surely to be found many victims of those
bloody events— families whose homes had been fired by the British or whose
livelihoods had been disrupted by the many months of lawlessness and disorder
in the conflict zones. Currently the literature has provided only supposition and
anecdotal evidence of the presence of mutineers overseas.53 The way forward,
therefore, as proposed here, is rather to identify those villages and communities
targeted during the uprising, or that suffered significant socio-economic
dislocation, and attempt to track their arrival overseas or their regroupment
elsewhere in India. In the case of overseas indentured migrants, one crucial
statistical source may be of help. Indentured migrants were registered both
on departure from India and on arrival in the colony, with details of names,
castes and villages of origin all recorded. Data from surviving registers in the
Mauritius and Caribbean archives may yet, therefore, yield up precious clues
to the resettlement abroad of villagers from particular areas within the conflict
zone. This research may shed light on some particular features of the indentured
migration streams. As we have shown, the British were determined to make of
the rebel sepoys a generation of disgraced, impoverished men, and in 1858-1859
many thousands fled to Mauritius from Shahabad and other regions known to
have been key recruiting grounds of the Bengal. Is this a key to understanding
the presence in Mauritius of a large and today prosperous community of
Bihari Rajputs (now known as Babujis) and other high caste immigrants?54
Certainly there are oral histories which speak of ancestors who fought with Bihari
 The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspora 185

rebel leaders before migrating to Mauritius.55 Further research into the timing
of these migrations and accompanying folk traditions may thus potentially
yield important new insights into the continually evolving story of the Indian
Uprising.
\

Notes and References

1. The systematic disarming o f the Indian people following the revolt is discussed in D. Hardiman,
ed., Peasant Resistance in India 1858-1914 (New Delhi: OUP, 1993) and T. M etcalf The
Aftermath o f Revolt: India 1857-1870 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965).
2. An interesting case o f an escapee is given in P.J.O. Taylor, Chronicles o f the Mutiny &
Other Historical Sketches (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 1992) pp. 39-40. He recounts how
Mainodin Hussain Khan spent three years in Arabia before returning to be tried as a mutineer.
3. IOLR P/188/49 W. Wynyard, Judge o f Goruckpore, to H.C. Tucker, 8 Sept 1857 end. in
H.C. Tucker, Commissioner 5th Division to Lt Col R: Strachey, Secy. Govt. Central Provinces,
11 Sept 1857.
4. Ibid., Lt Col Wroughton to C. Horne, Magistrate Azimgurh, 10 September 1857.
5. Ibid., Enel Wernyor Smith, late Commandant 8th Oude Irregular Infantry, attached to Goorkha
Force to Lt Col T.J. Wroughton, Jounpore, 10 September 1857.
6. IOLR P/188/49 Captain G. Boileau to Magistrate o f Azimgurh, 8 Sept 1857. The arbitrary nature
o f British attempts to distinguish between ‘rebels’ and ‘loyalists’ and to mete out summary
justice has been described in E.I. Brodkin’s often quoted article ‘The struggle for succession:
rebels and loyalists in the Indian mutiny o f 1857’ in M odem Asian Studies, vol. 6, no. 3 (1972),
pp. 277-290.
7. IOLR P /l 88/56 M. Brodhurst, Magistrate o f Shahabad, to E.A. Samuells, 24 July 1858.
8. P/188/60 Theobald to Private Secy, to HE Governor General, 5 July 1859, Enel Peppe to Lord
Canning, 22 June 1859.
9. IOLR P /l 88/62 H. Bell Under Secy, to Govt. Bengal to Grey, Secy. Govt India, 20 June 1860, Enel
H Ferguson, Commissioner o f Patna to A.R. Young Secy. Govt. Bengal, 24 May 1860.
10. Ibid., Bell Under Secy. Govt. Bengal to Grey Secy. Govt. India, 13 August 1860.
11. IOLR P /l88/56 Cecil Stephenson to Major A.G. Goodwyn, Consulting Engineer to Govt o f
India, Enel J. Hamilton to George Turnbull. 5 June 1858. Gohmer village is referred to in official
despatches with a variety o f spellings including also Guhmar.
12. E.A. Samuells, to A.R. Young, 23 July 1858.
13. IOLR P /188/56 Brodhurst to E.A. Samuells, 5 August 1858.
14. B.D. Metcalf and T.R. Metcalf, A Concise History o f India (Cambridge: CUP, 2002) p. 101.
15. IOLR P /l 88/58 J.S. Davies Asst. Commissioner Lohurdugga to Commissioner o f Chota
Nagpore, 27 Dec 1858.
16. Ibid., A. Money, Magistrate o f Shahabad, to E.A. Samuells, Arrah, 23 September 1858.
17. IOLR P /188/56 E.A. Samuells to A.R. Young, 6 August 1858.
18. Anderson C. The Indian Uprising o f 1857-8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London: Anthem
Press, 2007) especially Chapter 4.
19. IOLR F/4/2724 197966 Disposal o f men o f disarmed native regiments, Mar-May 1858, Extract
Military Letter from Fort William, 17 May 1858, no. 80; Minute by the Hon J. Douin, President
in Council 9th March.
20. Minutes o f Peacock and Grant, April 1858, in ibid.
21. IOLR P /l88/58 A. Money, Magistrate o f Shahabad, to E.A. Samuells, 18 December 1858.
186 Marina Carter and Crispin Bates

22. Ibid., Samuells to Secy. Govt Bengal, 15 January 1859.

23. IOLR P /l 88/59 Edmonstone Secy, to Govt India to Chief Commissioner Punjab, 13 December
1858.
24. IOLR P /l 88/59 H.D.H. Fergusson, Commissioner o f the Patna Division to Secy. Govt Bengal,
2nd July 1859.
25. IOLR P /l 88/59 Secy. Govt. Bengal to Secy. Govt India, 23 July 1859.
26. Ibid., Grey, Secy. Govt India to Young, Secy. Govt Bengal, 8 August 1859.
27. Ibid., Secy. Govt. Bengal to Secy. Govt India, 5 September 1859.
28. IOLR P /l 88/60 Proceedings 7 October 1859 No. 35 Petition o f Hoormut Khan, 24 August 1857.
29. IOLR P /l 88/62 Proceedings 7 November 1860.
30. D. Bhattacharyya, A Concise History o f the Indian Economy 1750-1950 (New Delhi: Prentice-
Hall, 1979) p. 54. The famine o f 1860 was intimately related to the exhaustion o f the countryside
in 1857-1858 and the resulting lack o f food grain reserves in rural areas. Some 19 million were
affected (13 million according to R.C. Dutt), over 25,000 square miles in the area o f Delhi, Agra
and Allahabad, with approximately 5 million suffering from serious starvation. The resulting
crisis was as bad as the great famine o f 1837, although the final mortality figures were lower. See
A. Loveday , A History o f Indian Famines (London, 1914; reprint New Delhi: Usha, 1985), p. 45.
31. The Officiating Emigration Agent to the Secy. Govt Bengal, No. 17, 24 October 1859, cited
in P. Saha, Emigration o f Indian Labour 1834—1900 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1970)
pp. 75-76.
32. IOLR P/15/77 Captain C. Eales, Protector o f Emigrants at the Port o f Calcutta, to Junior
Secretary to the Government o f Bengal, 29 January 1862.
33. Geoghegan Report on Colonial Emigration, Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers 1874, p. 75.
34. D. Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age o f Imperialism, 1834-1922 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995),
p. 66.
35. IOLR P/188/60 Secy. Govt Bengal to Secy. Govt India, 29 October 1859.
36. M. Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874 (New Delhi: OUP,
1995) and N. Deerr, The History o f Sugar, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1949-1950).
37. W.K. Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1993) p. 27.
38. For a detailed analysis-of the interplay o f these factors in indentured migration see L. Brennan,
‘The Geographic and Social Origins o f Indian Indentured Labourers in Mauritius, Natal,
Fiji, Guyana and Jamaica, South Asia: Journal o f South Asian Studies, Vol. XXI, Special Issue,
S. 39-72, 1998.
39. IOLR V/27/820/35 Report on Colonial Emigration from the Bengal Presidency, George A.
Grierson, Calcutta, 25 February 1883, pp. 1-33.
40. Ibid., p. 62.
41. IOLR Major D.G. Pitcher, Judge, Small Cause Court, Lucknow to Secy. Govt NWP and Oudh,
17 June 1882, pp. 84-87.
42. IOLR P /l 88/67 E. Eden, Secy. Govt. Bengal, to Secy. Govt India, 24 April 1863, Enel, Hunt
Marriott, Emigration Agent for Demerara, to S. Walcott, Secy, to Government Emigration
Board, n.d. (I am indebted to Dr Clare Anderson for drawing my attention to this report.)
43. See the discussion o f the 1869 riots in B. Mangru, Indenture and Abolition: Sacrifice and Survival
on the Guyanese Sugar Plantations (Toronto: TSAR, 1993).
44. George K. Alapatt, ‘The Sepoy Mutiny o f 1857: Indian Indentured Labour and Plantation
Politics in British Guiana.* Journal o f Indian History, 59 (1981), 295-314.
45. NA CO 167/528, Smyth to Kimberley 16 Sept 1870 (Conf).
46. Mauritius Archives [MA] BIB Report o f J. Gorrie on the dissent o f J. Fraser from the Police
Enquiry Commission, 1872.
47. NA CO 167/539 Vincent N. Ryan, Bishop o f Mauritius, to Earl o f Kimberley, 29 September 1871.
48. Royal Commissioners Report Appendix B visits to estate o f Mon Choix, Pamplemousses,
tU n ion , Moka, Parliamentary Papers 1875, September 1872.
 The Uprising, Migration and the South Asian Diaspora. 187

49. Geoghegan Report on Colonial Emigration, 1874, p. 75.

50. Pitcher Report, p. 13, p. 87.
51. Mangru, Indenture and Abolition, p. 86.
52. Mauritius Archives [MA] PL 41 Emigration Agent, Madras to Protector o f Immigrants, 3 June
1879.
53. See, for example, W.K. Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar. Chinese and Indian Migrants
to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993),
p 27; J.C. Jha, ‘The Indian Mutiny-cum-Revolt o f 1857 and Trinidad’, Indian Studies: Past and
Present, vol. 13, no. 4 (1972), pp. 419-430; and G.K. Alapatt, ‘The Sepoy Mutiny o f 1847: Indian
Indentured Labour and Plantation Politics in British Guiana’, Journal o f Indian History, vol. 59,
no. 1-3 (1981), 309-312.
54. A micro study ofbhumihar migration from Bihar to Mauritius provides some useful background
data about the post-Mutiny high caste exodus— Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff ‘From India to an
Indian Diaspora to a Mauritian Diaspora: Back-Linking as a Means for Women to Feel Good
Locally’ in Meenakshi Thapan, ed., Transnational Migration and the Politics o f Identity: Women
and Migration in Asia, vol 1 (New Delhi: Sage, 2005) pp. 63-98.
55. See, for example, the assertion o f T.S. Ramyead, in ‘O f India’s History and her Sepoy Mutinies’,
Mauritius Times, 17 Nov 2006 that ‘my grandfather used to remind me that our ancestor was
a sepoy mutineer who had fled for dear life from Bihar in 1859. He had fought under Kunwar
Singh’. Ramyead has traced his ancestors— the first member o f his family in Mauritius left Bihar
with his wife on Christmas day, 25 December 1858— and asserts that the family was from a
village fired by the British: ‘years later the husband would relate to his Mauritian born son o f the
acrid sulphur fumes the British pumped into the huts o f Kowarah village’: T.S. Ramyead, ‘The
Indian Sepoy Mutinies 1764-1859’, Mauritius Times, 1 December 2006.
 II

MUTINY, DEPORTATION AND THE NATION

M ariana Jafer Thanesri as a Convict
Seema Alavi

THIS chapter focuses on Maulana Jafer Thanesri (1838-1905) who spent

eighteen years as a convict at the penal colony in the Andaman Islands
(1866-1884). He was labelled a Wahabi1by the British administration, charged
for his supply of money to the Afghans in their war against the British and
known for leading a group of rebels in Delhi during 1857. He was released after
eighteen years. He subsequently relocated himself as a munshi (scribe) in the
Punjab administration. I discuss three important texts that he wrote from
1879s-1890s— a period that spanned his years in the islands, his release and later
relocation in the Punjab. These include two texts that he wrote after his release
from the Andamans—the Tawarikh-i-Ajaib (The Histories of the Wondrous)
and the Sawaneh Ahmadi (Biography of Syed Ahmed Shahid of Raebareli); and
a third text, the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, that is his Urdu translation of the History of
Port Blair (Tarikh-i-Port Blair) that he virtually co-authored with his English
master Major M. Prothero while on the island. This literature indicates how
Maulana Jafer Thanesri’s sense of belonging changed as a consequence of his
movement across the country as a marked convict. His writings reveal that
1857 precipitated for him a specific conjuncture that located him at the cusp
of two imperiums: the Islamic imaginary and the Western ‘colonial’. This
chapter goes on to show how the two apparently distinct worlds combined to
constitute Thanesri’s sense of self. This made him straddle both the markers
of a protonation and Islamic particularism with remarkable ease. Indeed, as
he strategically positioned himself both with and against the colonial masters,
he gave the Islamic global a regional veneer and painted the local with Islamic
universalism. Careers of men of religion, like Thanesri, make us rethink the ideas
o f ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ as they unfolded in the post-mutiny years of high
nationalism.
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 189

Historiographical Location of the Argument

The handling of the mutiny convicts in the cellular jail at the Andamans has
received much scholarly attention in the recent past. Satadru Sen's pioneering
study of the islands offers a brilliant exposition of the making of the ‘penal
colony' via a novel system of punishment. This aimed less at reforming and
relocating the offender in his community and more at recasting him as a loyal
subject whose labour was put to the exclusive service of the state. Sen uses
official records to show how race, caste and gender were reworked in the penal
colony, reflecting both the strengths as well as the cracks in the working of
the state.2 More recently, Clare Anderson’s work, on the British management
of prisoners during the jail breaks of 1857 has made the idea of imprisonment
and transportation of convicts to the settlement colonies in the Indian Ocean
central to the understanding of imperial expansion. Her research has shown the
critical role convicts deported to the Andamans, Mauritius and the islands in
South East Asia played in perfecting governance, expanding state control and
laterally connecting the colonies and the experiences of officials in the Indian
Ocean.3
Remarkable as has been the work of recent scholars, their principal insights
have nonetheless concerned the role of the state in ordering the disorderly. The
experiences of convicts are more difficult to capture. Satadru Sen has recently
examined the impact of convict experiences on domesticity, religion— seen as
Hindu-Muslim relations—and race viewed in terms of the white coloniser and
the black colonised.4 There has been relatively less interest in focusing on how
the experiences of convicts in their new identity as ‘transportable' ‘marked'
subjects transforms their own sense of belonging in a wider sense: both within
the territorial confines of British India and outside it. A notable exception is
Jamal Malik’s analysis of the prison literature of Maulana Fazl-i-Haq, a mutiny
convict, imprisoned in the cellular jail at the islands. But this too is more a study
of imprisonment than of long distance travel as a convict. Nevertheless, Malik
analyses the effect the cellular space has on Haq’s idea of belonging as he taps
the world outside via his prison writings. He sees in Haq’s predominantly Arabic
literature the attempt to create an ‘imagined community’ that spilt beyond the
territorial and connected to the Islamic imperium with Mecca as its pivot. Malik
interprets the preferred use of Arabic as Haq's language of writing, and the
dispatch of the text by Haq's son to Mecca, the hub of the Muslim world, as proof
of his desire to establish a transnational identity. He concludes that Fazl-i-Haq’s
writings in the universal language Arabic and their export to Mecca created a
historical memory that connected the territorial to the extraterritorial.5Following
Malik, this chapter similarly discusses the making of this new, late nineteenth
century sense of Muslim self via the career of Jafer Thanesri. Unlike Haq, who
190 SeemaAlavi

was locked in a cell from where he imagined a world beyond, our protagonist
discusses in detail his travel to the island and devotes considerable care to
describing his experiences within it. His observations are more ethnographical,
as he was not caged in a cell, but belonged to the category of convicts who were
integrated into the colonial administration as low level functionaries. He worked
as a munshi in the jail administration. He thus negotiated two worlds— the
British colonial and the Islamic imaginary—in order to fashion his identity. It
becomes important to factor this new post-mutiny sense of belonging into the
ways in which we have understood the defence of the ‘nation" in the high period
of nationalism.
There are no specific studies on 1857 Muslim convicts, but recent works on
the Muslim urbane, elite experiences of 1857 have looked at the more general
issue of their response to the changed circumstances. Historians have studied
Muslim reactions to British rule either through intellectuals who pleaded for
an adjustment to the new order; or tried to establish extraterritorial contacts
to safeguard their identity; or those who launched an internal critique on
community legists, urging Believers to return to the essence of Islamic humane
ethics as enshrined in the Quran.6 Other scholars focused on changes in the
Muslim sense of self via the reactions from religious seminaries that were
more guarded in their approach.7 In contrast, this essay looks at how Muslims’
sense of belonging changed also because of their unprecedented travel and
transportation as ‘marked convicts’ in the post-mutiny years. Through the
case study of Maulana Jafer Thanesri, I explain how this extraordinary scale
of travel via the networks laid out by the colonial state affected his sense of
belonging. I argue that the mutiny located him at the intersection of the British
and Islamic intellectual imperiums. The latter became more of a reality than
before because of the increased networks of transport, communication and
print culture that colonial rule made possible. Thanesri’s idea of homeland
(mulk) developed as he straddled these worlds with ease. His mulk now
had a wider geographical and territorial ambit than before, made possible
because of movement across the infrastructural grid laid out by the British
administration. And it had a particularistic cultural profile that emerged as
Thanesri negotiated colonial notions of race, religion and class with his own
historicised beliefs and prejudices that derived from his Islamic rooting. I
conclude that, paradoxically, the Islamic political and cultural imperium gained
a new lease of life in the late nineteenth century, as British colonial rule with its
expanded communication networks, infrastructure and print capitalism awarded
it a greater physicality. The intersection of the British ‘colonial’ and Islamic
cultural framed the politics of Muslim convicts like Thanesri. The launching of
the politics of the Indian National Congress, which forced Muslims to position
themselves vis-^-vis its set format, perhaps diluted the potential inherent in such
careers.
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 191

Jafer Thanesri: A Profile (1838-1905)

Jafer Thanesri was born in 1838 in Thanesar, in Punjab. His father was kaashtkar
(farmer). He was a disciple of the famous mujahid Syed Ahmed Shahid. Even
though he remained committed to the Wahabi Movement (tehreek) of Syed
Ahmed, he rose to status via service as a muharrir—clerk—and petition (arzi)
writer for zamindars and others in his locality. He was known as a qanun (legal)
consultant in his area and amassed considerable jaidad (property) by rendering
legal advice to clients.8
Thanesri participated actively in 1857. In Delhi he headed the mujahideen
who moved to the city and actively assisted their leader, Ianyet Ali, in exhorting
to rebellion the Nausherah and the Mardan regiments of sepoys posted on the
Afghanistan border. He returned to Punjab only after the defeat of the rebel
forces in Delhi. But even on his return, he actively supported the Wahabi
Movement against the British in the border areas. His home in Thanesar, in
Punjab, remained a headquarter, from where anti-British activities of the
mujahids were coordinated, and a conduit to send money and men for the
war in Afghanistan.9 He was arrested in 1863 for conspiring to smuggle funds
to anti-British mujahideen in Afghanistan. He was initially sentenced to death,
but his punishment was eventually commuted to life in penal transportation,
which meant deportation to the Andaman Islands. Beginning in 1866, he spent
nearly eighteen years in the penal colony where, on account of his knowledge of
Urdu and Persian, he was appointed as Naib Mir Munshi, muharrir—clerk—in
the office of the kutchehri superintendent and chief commissioner. In 1884 he
returned to the Punjab with a new wife, new children, and considerable wealth
and social status.
Thanesri was always keen to record his experiences and has several
publications to his credit. By his own account he began to pen his experiences
in 1862, on being harassed by the British in the post-mutiny decade. However,
his manuscript is said to have fallen into the hands of the government during
his court trial in Ambalah. William Hunter incorporated parts of it in his book
the Indian Musalman. He resumed writing afresh in the 1880s on his return to
Punjab after eighteen years in the Andaman Islands. His writings focused on
his life and time in the Andamans. His memoir was first published in the late
1880s as the Tawarikh-i-Ajaib.I0 Later, in 1895, incensed by Hunter's damaging
portrayal of his and other Wahabis' role in the mutiny, he wrote the first
comprehensive biography of the founder of the Wahabi Movement (tehreek)
Syed Ahmed Shahid of Raebareli. This was published as the Sawaneh Ahmadi.u
While at the Andaman penal colony, he began writing—along with Major M.
Prothero, the deputy commissioner of the island— a gazetteer style history of
the islands. This book started in the form of a title: Tarikh-i-Port Blair (History
192 SeemaAlavi

of Port Blair). Thanesri helped in collecting and compiling information on the

customs, religions, languages, flora and fauna of the islands, and later did an
Urdu translation.12 He translated it at the request of Sardar Ghail Singh, circuit
supdtt. Port Blair, and called the Urdu version the Tawarikh-i-Ajaib.

Thanesri and the Making of the Nation (Mulk)

The ‘Rule o f la w ’ and the T erritorial and

Spiritual Fram ing of the M u l k

British ‘rule of law5 rubbed on the everyday lives of people, even if it did not
always improve their lives. It coloured transactions that ranged from employment
opportunities in the army, lower level clerical jobs in colonial offices, courts of
law, payment of taxes, to matters of travel, law and order problems, redress of
social and inheritance grievances, etc. Even if employees were not transferred
across the country, the network of sarkari mulazmat (government jobs) created
an impression that similar offices and opportunities existed across the length and
breadth of the sarkari amaldari. This created a sense of belonging to something
more than immediate locality and the patrimonial agrarian patriotism of the
early nineteenth century. This sense of belonging that spilt out of the immediate
confines of locality was culled from the British administrative and legal
framework—sarkari amaldari— and its claims to uphold a just society where the
rule of law prevailed. Both the praise for the functioning of this colonial marked
edifice, as well as the critique of its non-functioning, served to reinforce the idea
of the individual being part of a proto-nation as carved out Jjy the administrative
frame of the colonial state.
Thanesri's 1880s memoir that he wrote after his release, The Tawarikh-i-Ajaib,
provides a critique of his own arrest in Aligarh, his travel to Delhi and Ambala
as a convict, the descriptions of the atrocities committed against his brothers,
children and wife that preceded it and the subsequent hounding of Wahabis.
This reflects how he had internalised the state's vocabulary of the rule of law and
often lamented its violation. The critique of the British legal and administrative
framework, operational as it was across a wide stretch of the country, at one level
served to define his own sense of belonging within a system that had a distinct
legal frame and wider territorial reach. Thanesri believed that it was relatively easy
for individuals to move across territorial confines as the legally marked territory
of British India was tightly knit through a network of administrative offices. And
thus he was confident that being a literate, experienced scribe of a Persian office
also meant that he had a wider belonging: he could obtain employment in any
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 193

other such office within British-controlled territory.13 And this administrative

frame with its standardised norms of service and conduct gradually framed his
notion of homeland.
However, Thanesri’s freshly construed sense of being part of an administrative
and legally defined homeland—protonation—was unfortunately riveted with
setbacks and apprehensions. Thus on arrival in Bombay, Karachi and Sindh,
the limitations of his new sense of connectedness became evident. As he says of
Karachi,

In this mulk, m unshis and clerks wear very high topis (caps) ... we had always
thought that in angrez amaldari there w ould always be an Urdu and Pharsi
daftar. And because o f our expertise in munshigiri we would get the job o f
writer anywhere and spend our jail years peacefully. But we were mistaken. In
M ultan, the Urdu and Pharsi daftar had finished. In mulk Sindh we saw only
daftar o f Sindhi zabaan. Even though the Sindhi alphabets are similar to Pharsi,
but we could not understand the language.

A disappointed Thanesri concludes that soon his ghoroor (pride) of munshigiri

disappeared.14
Nonetheless, the administrative and legal structure of the state became
the reference against which Thanesri defined his own sense of belonging.
Again, this was most evident at the time of his trial, when the battery of vakils
for the Wahabis asked for the trial to be abandoned on grounds that it was
illegal as the so called criminals had operated not from their home territory,
whose contours they identified clearly as the csarkari amaldari (government’s
administrative and legal ambit), but from Punjab, which was outside its purview.
The vakils for the Muslim convicts argued that Section (dafa) 121, therefore,
does not apply to them as it is not applicable for jang (battles) fought from
outside the sarkari amaldari.15 The rejection of their plea was seen by him as
yet another case of the hollowness of the British rule of law. Thanesri’s sense
of outrage at the violation of the rule of law was again illustrated when, at the
time of his trial at the session’s court in Ambala, the judge asked him to ask
for forgiveness and the matter would end there. An outraged Thanesri retorted
That he wanted insaaf (justice), that does not appear to be flowing from
you’.16
The violation of the rule of law continued to agitate Thanesri, both before
and after his trial. He was convinced that within the ambit of the colonial
administrative territory, with which he completely identified, the rule of law was
hollow and the system driven with coercion and corruption. His descriptions of
corruption and his passionate plea for something to be done about it conveyed
his sense of sorrow at the violation of his new-born sense of self framed within
British legal and administrative paradigms. This violation came from the very
system that underlined his sense of belonging. Both his mother and brother,
Mohammad Sayed were arrested and tortured. His younger brother, on
194 SeemaAlavi

being tortured and threatened with death by hanging, revealed his hideouts.
This triggered a wide scale harassment of his friends and relatives in Ambala,
including a search of the house of Muhammad Shafiq, his close associate.
Thanesri reveals how the criminal justice system was abused by arm-twisting
innocent people with dire threats until they complied with dictates and agreed
to give false evidence. His relatives, maulvi Muhammad Taqi and Muhammad
Rafi, were arrested and threatened with hanging if they did not reveal all. Later,
when they agreed to become mukhbirs (informers), they were freed. They
became, the sarkari gawah (witness) for the trial of Muhammad Shaft who was
falsely implicated and arrested in Lahore.17 Their help proved further useful in
arresting maulvi Yahya Ali, maulvi Abdul Rahim, Ilahi Baksh, Miyan Abdul
Ghaffar and other Wahabis.18 At Ambala, Thanesri himself was even given the
choice to be set free and bestowed with favoured position and status if he became
a government witness (sarkari gawah). His non-compliance resulted in physical
torture and threats of death by hanging.19His younger brother Muhammad Syed
was coerced into becoming the sarkari gawah for his trial. He was given money
and threatened with death by hanging if he did not comply. But at the time
of the trial he broke down and resigned from his position.20 Thanesri describes
how thousands were arrested in Bengal for being involved with Wahabis and,
more importantly, how many of them bought their release by bribes paid in
cash or by agreeing to become sarkari informers and witnesses.21 The best case in
point was that of Ishwari Prasad, the police inspector of Patna, who throughout
the trials of the Wahabis (1863-1873) remained loyal to the British. In return
for this he was made a deputy collector. Many like him amassed favours: jagirs,
zamidaris and fortunes, by being co-opted in the abuse of the rule of law.22 The
state’s corruption was commercialised. It was up for sale in the market. Thus, for
instance, one hakam (arbitrator) along with gawah (witness) was always ready
for service. He would sell his services to the best bidder, who would pay him
the largest bribe. And he would secure the evidence {gawahi) of his witnesses
tailored to the best interest of his clients.23
For Thanesri, the violations of the rule of law and the indignities perpetrated
on his companions across British India, whose legal confines he identified as
his homeland or mulk, could be understood only through the moral and
spiritual succour of Islam. Thus the sense of a territorially defined homeland—
mulk—was morally and spiritually framed in the Islamic way from the very
start. Commenting on his arrest, Thanesri says, ‘the 4 months in jail helped me
ruhaani taur par (spiritually)1. He adds that he ‘was grateful to Allah for putting
me through this test of sabr (patience)’. The unfairness of the corrupt system was
comprehensible to him only as a fight for cAllah kee raah (right path)’. He could
withstand its trauma only through his belief that it was a trial of his patience, and
perseverance. God had subjected him to this torture so as to test his commitment
to Islam.24 On May 1864 when the court announced his punishment as death
by hanging (phaansi)y he was happy at the thought that he would be a shaheed
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 195

(martyr) and thus acquire the highest possible status in the eyes of God. He told
the Europeans who enquired why he and his colleagues were looking happy
even after hearing their death sentence that ‘in our religion being tortured in the
service of Allah and killed gets us the status of martyr (shaheed). And that makes
us elated\25 Similarly, when the judge announced his death sentence, he retorted
by defining his sense of self not just as a member of the sarkari amaldari> which
for him was his nation, but also of another administration, that of Allah. The
two for him were inextricably connected. He said: ‘Jaan dena aur lenaa khudaa
ka kaam hait aapkei ikhtiyaar mein naheen. Woh Rab al izzat qadir hai kee merei
marrnei ke pehle tumko hallak karei (The work of giving and taking life is God’s,
and not in your hands. He is the Almighty who has the power to kill you before
my death).26His entire text is dotted with descriptions of the miracles and barakat
that happened in the prison as a result of the confinement there of so many
learned scholars of Islam with spiritual powers.27 This divine administration ran
parallel to that of the British legal and administrative frame, becoming more
pronounced each time the latter was perceived to be unfairly violated.

T ravel and. the Political Profile o f the M u l k

Travel of men of religion, defined erroneously as Wahabis by the British in

the early nineteenth century, across Hindustan and to and fro from Yemen
and South East Asia predates the era of European colonialism.28 The Islamic
political imperium that controlled the Indian Ocean until 1800 ensured that
such traffic continued with few obstacles. Indeed, men of religion and their texts
were very much part of the literary ecumene that knitted together precolonial
India to Iran and Central Asia.29 The travel of men, texts and ideas did not
abruptly end in 1800, a period generally regarded as the landmark decade of
Western global expansion over what was an Islamicate world order.30 Only the
scale, administration and mode of travel changed. Thus, in nineteenth century
India the consolidation of colonial rule meant that the conditions of travel and
its scale underwent marked transformations. If at one level the movement of
people increased in volume and expanse, it also became routinised, codified and
narrowly monitored. Most significantly, travellers began to be marked with the
new legally recognised identities of convicts, offenders, pilgrims with official
passes, etc. New identities inaugurated the era of novel experiences. Thus long
before the commencement of the passport regime, which inscribed the nation
state identity upon individuals, colonial subjects had already reworked their self
identities in remarkable ways as a result of these significant contextual changes.31
The travel and deportation of mutiny convicts, especially Muslims, is an
interesting case in point, as the crackdown on them was the heaviest. Indeed
from the 1830s, following the jihad call of Syed Ahmed Shahid of Raebareli, the
state was always suspicious o f ‘Wahabi’ movements. It arrested and imprisoned
196 SeemaAlavi

them in large numbers. This only intensified their movement across India,
especially from Bengal to the new resistance areas in the north-west regions and
Afghanistan. But the mutiny—Rebellion of 1857—introduced a new element
into this movement. It created a category of a ‘mujahid Wahabi convict’, a marked
colonial subject who now moved under the aegis of an administratively defined
colonial ambit, or else was a hunted individual as he attempted to flee as far as
Arabia and South East Asia. At the same time, legally sanctioned deportation
and transportation made him move across the length and breadth of India and
abroad, to the penal colony of Andaman and as indentured labour to the Park
Straits, Burma and the other islands of the Indian Ocean.32
Thanesri too travelled long distances that he had never traversed before. His
memoir The Tawarikh-i-Ajaib is like a travelogue that details his experiences as
he moved from Aligarh via much of northern and eastern India into the Indian
Ocean Andaman islands. He is impressed at the extraordinary amount of travel
he did as a British convict. He was excited at the new experiences he collected
covering a vast geographical space as a convict. In 1886, on his return to Ambala
after eighteen years of imprisonment in the Andamans he says, ‘I realised that
from here via Bombay to Kaala Paani, and then back via Calcutta to Ambalah,
I had covered 2000 miles’.33 This for him constituted the first time round tour
of what he had begun to define as his country and that he refers to as Hind:
lKul Hind ka tawaafho gaya thaa\M (I had circumambulated the entire Hind.)
Indeed, his new job in the Ambala magistrates office after his release and return
to the city enabled him to continue with his travels as far east as Calcutta, and
as far west as Lahore. In 1886 he was also contemplating travelling to London in
pursuance of a legal case.35
As we saw above, travel and transportation along the networks of rivers,
roads and railways spread out by the colonial state, and his transfer from one jail
and kutchehri (court) and its associated daftars (offices) to another, ensured that
he experienced different geographical and linguistic regions. It introduced the
idea of belonging to a wider, culturally diverse territorial confine; one that was
administratively framed and which he had begun to refer as Hind or Hindustan.
But travel across British India also lent a political orientation to Thanesri’s
sense of proto-nationalism. The anti-colonial fervour of the mutiny years that
triggered most travel gave this more embracing concept of belonging a distinct
political hue. This political profile was defined ironically in opposition to the
very colonial state that had made its realisation possible in the first instance. And
this political connectedness was far more durable and enduring than the infra­
structural linkages that had initially welded his sense of territorial belonging.
Thanesri’s text is like a travelogue that details his journey from the prison in
Ambala where he was locked up on being convicted in 1862, to the penal colony
in the Andaman Islands, moving across Lahore, Sindh, Bombay and Karachi.
At one level the journey by road, rail, boat and ship across the networks laid
outlay the colonial state offered Thanesri the first ever geographical tour of the
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 197

country and its diverse people. It helped reconfigure in his mind the territorial
and cultural contours of his belonging. But at another level the indignities that
he faced as a convict, the injustice and unfairness that he observed on account of
race and colour, the compromises that he had to make on his elite class status, all
combined to give his proto-nationalism a distinct anti-colonial political profile.
Travel as a convict across the country introduced hin\ to a range of people
with whom he felt connected through their shared sense of engagement, albeit
in different ways, with the colonial state. This experience of the crowd slowly
began to lend his sense of belonging, freshly culled from the colonial frame, an
anti-colonial proto-nationalism. Each time Thanesri and his colleagues were
shifted from one jail to another there were crowds of sympathetic people of all
religions who cheered in solidarity and support. As he says, describing his first
entry into jail in Ambala on being convicted by the session’s court of the city
in 1864, ‘Thousands of people men and women had collected in the kutcheri to
hear the verdict. They were shocked and crying, and many accompanied us to
jail’.36 In 1865, on his death punishment being commuted to life imprisonment,
he made a memorable journey by road from Ambala to Lahore. During his travel
by road, he breathed the fresh air and observed in detail the diverse flora and
fauna of the country. He purchased his favoured snacks from the street where
people gathered to greet and watch the marching convicts. Thus, he describes his
sense of enjoyment: charr din Eid aur harr raat shabe barat ho gayee37(every day
was as joyful as the festival of Eid, and every night as colourful and bright as the
festival of the night of the dead). Thanesri and his companions’ popular appeal
for being qaidis (convicts) was most apparent in the bazaars of Thane city near
Bombay. Here, during their march through the bazaar to the jail, the convicts
attempted to loot some sweet (mithai) shops. But far from being incensed,
the shopkeepers themselves handed over sweets to the qaidis (convicts), thus
apparently sympathising with them, even though they were by no means their co­
religionists.38If on the roads and cities through which he passed he felt connected
to the crowds that greeted him, the more personal individual encounters he had
with staffers of the jails and kutcheris he visited and fellow convicts gave him
an occasion to bond with people of regions and religions whom he had rarely
encountered prior to his arrest and movement across the country.
Thus in the Lahore central jail he was touched by the sympathetic welcome
and care he received from a Hindu Kashmiri daroga of the jail.39 In Karachi he
describes with a sense of bewilderment the new styles of head gear of Hindu
and Muslim munshis that he had never see before, ‘fss mulk mein barri barri
unchee topiyaan munshi aur clerk, aur barri barri unchee pagriyaan Hindu
,
mahajan pahantei hain .40 (In this mulk munshis and clerks wear tall caps and
Hindu mahajans wear high head gear.) He engaged with these people who
spoke different languages and had different cultural overtones from those which
he habitually associated with munshis. And on the ship that brought him to
Bombay he reserved special praise for a Muslim khalaasi (orderly) who served
198 Seema Alavi

him well because, as he says, "I was a maulvi\ 41 He reserves special accolades also
for a Muslim naib darogha at the Thane jail who looked after him carefully, and
also for the marine sepoys who escorted him with respect in the ship that took
him to the Andamans.42
Individuals of different religions and regions that he met during his travels
brought him close to the multifaceted nature of his protonation. And the crowds
on the streets, irrespective of religion, reminded him of the common thread that,
at least politically, knitted him to this diversity. The observations of the variety
of flora, fauna, languages, cultures that he observed, as he travelled on the newly
laid out networks of road, railway and ship, also brought home the fact that
there was a palpable anti-colonial sentiment which held this diversity together.
This connectivity surpassed the sheer physical connections established by the
colonial roads, legal offices, telegraph and railways. His enthusiastic reporting of
this diversity, peppered often by a critique of the colonial infrastructure, reflects
this sentiment at its best. Thus, he describes the pleasures of being in the fresh
air as he takes a boat ride to Karachi on the Darya-i-Sindh (River of Sind) and
observes with excitement the hitherto unknown plants and vegetables that he
sees on the banks. But Thanesri is also critical of the colonial infrastructure along
which he moves and with which he identifies. Thus his descriptions of the train
journeys are always full of complaints of the sheer number of people that are
stuffed into one compartment like *jaanwar43 (animals). The journey by ship
from Karachi to the Andamans is unpleasant for him too, as he always complains
of overcrowding and the sea sickness of fellow passengers.44 But despite these
complaints, which frame his territorial identity in the colonial infrastructural
grid, he reports excitedly on what he observes from the deck. Of course, Bombay
with its novel fruits and vegetables, styles of buildings, dresses, languages and
people never ceases to surprise and excite Thanesri. He appreciates the beauty and
the wealth of the Parsi men and women he first had the chance to meet in the city.
He says, 7s5 qaum kei loag bahut khoobsurat-gorra rangkei hotei hain.Aur maaldar
bhee. Yeah log aatish parast kee ummat sei hain.H5 He remarks on the high rise
buildings, the mounds of salt around (as that is a major local industry) and
the coconut trees and their fresh fruit, all of which he was seeing for the first
time. He describes with excitement the saree styles he sees in the city and the
head gear of the Hindus that he had never encountered before.46
Once in the Andamans, the flora and fauna, climate, seasons, people,
religions and lifestyles all serve as reference points against which he articulates
more sharply than ever before the territorial, ecological and cultural contours of
his administratively defined mulk. Not only does this mulk begin to be referred
to as ‘Hind’ by Thanesri, but it is given a specific location in the territorially vast,
administratively welded and culturally diverse mainland that he has left behind.
And this process of profiling the protonation happens by way of its ecological
and cultural contrast with the island on which the penal settlement is located.
Thus the home he has left behind, referred to always as ‘Hind’ from the time
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 199

he arrives in the Andamans, is contrasted to his penal colony in terms of its

topography and seasons that are different from those on the island. Describing
the hardships unknown on the mainland he says, ‘people of Hind often do not
realize the hardships that island people face../.47 He illustrates this by recounting
his own experiences of commuting between islands where only the power of
prayers {dud) saved him from the bad weather conditions) Again, Hind is defined
in terms of its flora, agricultural products and vegetation that are different
from that of the islands: ‘In the jungles here you get a variety of wood that is
different from the wood (lakrri) of our mulk.’48 The island is also different from
his mulk because it has a different ‘aab-o-hawd (environment). And that makes
it ‘sahat baksW (healthy) and less prone to the fevers and diseases that ravage his
mulk}9
Thanesri comments on the range of seasons in his mulk> which is in contrast
to the island’s weather which is consistent and similar to the chait and baisakh
season of Hind.50 The tribals of the island, described in derogative ways as the
forest dwellers (jangli), naked and wild community {dahshi nangi madar zaat
qaum), are contrasted to the relatively civil and cultured people of Hind.51
Indeed so conscious is Thanesri of the differences between the people, flora and
fauna of the island and the mainland, that he calls Hind, that as early as 1879
he translated into Urdu the English handbook, The History of Port Blair, which
he helped Major M. Protheroe prepare. This book was written with the desire
that ‘people of Hind’ could get to know about the life on the island.52 In this
Urdu text called Tarikh-i-Ajeebyas we will see below, he consistently refers to his
mulk as Hind. And it is always projected as a distinct administratively carved,
territorial and ecological entity that is culturally not just different but superior to
the island against which its profile is constructed.

Civilisation for the A ndam ans and Culture for the M u lk :

Civility, Race and Class

The involvement of the convicts in the ‘settlement’ and ‘civilisation’ of the

islands and their complicity in British ethnographic exercises ensured that
they too defined Hind using the official vocabularies of ecology, ‘civilisation’
and culture that were popularised by the British administration. However, even
though these concepts were used they were cannabalised in fresh ways that lent
them new meanings. Thus, unlike the British ethnographers who articulated
such categories via comparison with their homeland, Thanesri’s referent was the
mainland Hind as it compared to the island society. The Andaman islands, rather
than the East versus the West referent, lent to his territorial notion of mulk a
specific civilisational and racial profile different from that of his British masters.
This section uses Thaensri’s Tarikh-i-Ajeeb to show how he engaged with British-
derived notions of civility, race and class. He negotiated these by using both the
200 Seema Alavi

Islamic as well as the tribal society’s referents. In the process, British-sponsored

notions of civility and culture were ascribed with fresh meanings.
The History of Port Blair or the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb (History o f the Wonderous) is
very significant because it’s more than just an Urdu translation of an English
handbook. The English original, written in the format of a gazetteer, is clearly
co-authored by Thanesri. In an English letter, from Major M. Protheroe to the
chief commissioner recommending his release, which Thanesri reproduces in
the preface to his text, the authorship issue is more than clear. Protheroe writes:

I have received great assistance from Saikh Syed M oham ed Jaffer N o. 11450,
head m unshi in the southern district, in the preparation o f this work he
has labored m ost willingly at it during his leisure hours, and his intimate
acquaintance with the num erous Settlement orders o f the past 12 or 13 years
has proved very useful in its com pilation. He has also unaided translated the
whole o f the work from English into Urdu.53

The Urdu text, published in 1879, has 228 pages and is in two parts. The
first part is confined to incidents in the Andaman Islands, the customs, habits,
religions and languages of the people. It has maps, charts and sketches by Thanesri.
The second part is about the Urdu equivalents of the popularly used words and
phrases in the island. This was written with the intention that the British officers
and others in the Andamans should learn and become familiar with Urdu, and
the people of Hind be introduced to the life and customs of the island society. In
the text Thanesri’s description of the mulk evolves as a consequence of his active
involvement and participation in the British ‘settlement’ of the islands. Imperial
expansion both in terms of the expansion of agricultural land by cutting down
forests as well as in its ‘civilising’ quotient coloured Thanesri’s sense of self and
belonging in no small measure. As we saw above, his transportation across a
huge chunk of land before he entered the islands made him see his mulk as not
just his town but as the larger, administratively marked mainland that he had left
behind. And like his British officers he begins to call it Hind. And like them he
too defines it in geographical and ecological terms as different from the islands.
In the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb the ecological framing of the mulk reaches it culmination.
Very much like a British settlement officer, as he assesses the benefits of retaining
certain types of forests and the felling of others, he details the varieties of wood
and forest products available in the islands. In the process he defines more firmly
the ecological contours of his mulk against that of the islands. As he says, ‘here
the Samagango wood is as weighty and strong as the Saal and Sakhoo wood of
our country (hamare mulk)\ Similarly, noting the seasons he says, ‘the cold and
the hot seasons (sardi aurgarmi) are like our mulk’s chait and baisakh conditions
(sardi aur garmi hamare mulk kei chait— baisakh kee kaifyat rahtee hai)\54 Even
the mosquitoes of the islands are contrasted to those in his mulk. Again, he notes
th a t‘the luab i-ababeel (saliva of the swallow) is the specialty of this place and is
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 201

used by people of other countries (mulk) like China and Burma for enhancing
sexual prowess (quwat-i-baahy 55 In his discussions on diseases, he attributes
the recent diminution in occurrences of fevers and skin diseases (zakhm)
to the clearance of jungles and expansion of cultivation. While glorifying the
benefits of British imperial expansion for the health of the islanders, he defines
more clearly his mulk in terms also of the nature of diseases that frame it. He
notes that ‘infectious diseases (mutaadi bimaari) like smallpox, cholera, enteric
fevers that destroy our mulk (hamaara mulk kaa mulk tabaah) are not even heard
of here’. He contrasts the island to the mainland (mulk) in terms of the different
types of diseases he finds here: mainly diseases of the lungs and some cases of
fevers.56
Thanesri’s mulk is not just ecologically and geographically framed but
culturally envisaged as well. He is never reluctant to participate in the British
mission to ‘civilise’ the islanders. Like them, he too finds their appearance and
lifestyle not just different but loathsome. And thus he describes the people of
the islands not just by their appearance but also as culturally less civilised than
people of his mulk. Thus the mulk in his narrative emerges as an epitome of
civility. Being part of the British mission makes him codify and articulate more
firmly than ever the cultural contours of his own mulk as being civilised and thus
culturally superior. He uses the word wahashi (wild) to describe the islanders.
Both in their looks and lifestyle they reflect traits that are not found in the people
of his mulk. Describing their features he notes that people cover their face with
hair and are ferocious-looking (darawni shakl). He notes that it is not known
how and from where these ‘junglees’ came to the island. Commenting on their
lifestyle, that he calls wahshiyaana (wild) and their personality that he calls
bahayam sirat (wild, beast-like nature and character), he wonders if they were
born like that or at some time ‘like our people (misl ham logon kei) they too were
cultured and civilised (shayasta) \ 57
For Thanesri, the process o f ‘taming* and ‘civilising* such people is geared to
make them both loyal colonial subjects as well as acculturate them in the norms
of civility identified with his mulk. The former is handled politically. Thus while
describing the efforts at clearing and establishing the settlement at the Andamans
by its first superintendent Mr Walker, he describes how it was viewed by the
locals as an encroachment upon their ancestral mulk (abai mulk and mauroosi
mulk). However, the state was too powerful for them, and eventually these
‘wild beasts* (bahayam sirat) succumbed politically and became loyal subjects
(farmaanbardar). This meant joining the mainstream as represented by people
of his mulk: they began to learn English and Hindustani; they cultivated their
lands and some went to school, church and some others offered namaz.58Indeed,
the second half of the Tarikh-i-Ajeeb that lists Urdu equivalents to local words
is written with the purpose of providing an easy Hindustani self-learner to the
officers and locals of the islands. It is a text meant to facilitate their integration
to the ‘mainstream* society. Thus, Thanesri’s understanding of the ‘civilising*
202 Seema Alavi

and ‘settling' of the locals is borrowed both from the colonial view that linked
civility to the making of a loyal subject as well as from his own cultural and
civilisational paradigms. Paradoxically, his own identity as a convict not merely
framed his proto nation in the legal and administrative frame of British India but
also coloured his notions of what constituted the ‘mainstream’.
These overlaps notwithstanding, Thanesri's contribution to the hierarchy of
colonial knowledge on India is distinct and different from the British even as
it rubs shoulders with it. For instance, he has a particularistic and historicist
view on race. This lay in contrast to the British idea of race, which initially
derived from the success of political conquest, and later leaned on scientific
explanations to justify the dominance of the West. Instead, his was a historicised
understanding that explained the particularities of Asian societies in terms of
their specific historic experiences and long stretching genealogies. Thus, he
described the people of the mainland north India in accordance with their long
histories and genealogies that were contrasted to those of the island people. It
was in the backdrop of the islander ‘other* that the nature, ecological and racial
profile of Hind was produced. Thanesri categorised the Andaman society as one
of African slaves (habshi ghulam). This nomenclature was itself embedded in
and reflected Thanesri's knowledge of African slaves and their history of contact
with India, and more importantly it showed his awareness of a widely prevalent
view on their lowly antecedents and its corresponding physical identifiers:
physical features, skin colour, height, etc. Thus, Thanesri's particularistic racial
envisaging of the mulk was a complex process that lay entangled in what he saw
as the separate histories of the mainland and island societies.
Indeed, central to his views on race was his own Indo-Persianate obsession
with class that diluted his concern for race as a political or biological category.
Thanesri was always critical that discrimination along lines of class, with which
he had little issue, was being substituted in official circles by new referents of
race, viewed as political and genetic categories exemplified in skin colour. He
resented the favours given to low class mixed race Eurasians on grounds of their
lighter skin colour. He and his colleagues loathed white masters most, not when
they discriminated on grounds of colour, but when they mixed the low with the
high class irrespective of skin colour.
The Tarikh-i-Ajeeby very much like the British gazetteer, gives the minutest
details of the islander's physical attributes: height at four feet and six inches,
protruding eyes (aankhein ubhree)y dark skin {siyaahposh)y round head and
curly hair (ghutigrale baal). Thanesri, the ethnographer, refers to his subjects
as habshis (black African slaves). And like the average ethnographer, who
elaborates by making comparisons with other well known societies, he too sees
similarities in physical appearance between them and the real habshis. Such
comparisons show that Thanesri's view on race is not confined to the white
versus black obsession of his British colleagues. Instead, it is a deeply historicist
view that explains racial profile and difference with the knowledge of the long
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 203

histories and genealogies associated with subject populations. He even offers a

genealogical link between the islanders and the original African slaves (habshi
ghulam) that according to legend became stranded on the islands as their ship
broke down. He suggests that the islanders may have a genealogical link to this
stranded population. However, he cautions against a speedy conclusion, as their
language does not have any words from the habshi lexicon. Their lips too are
not as thick as those of African slaves. Thus in terms of racial profiling {nasi)
Thanesri says they have their own specificity despite their similarities with the
habshis. He says they are certainly different from, ‘any other mulk: Habsh or
Hind or Madras, or Burmah or Lanka etc’59. In the process of these comparisons
his mulk of course acquires a racial profile that is different from the islands. And
more importantly this difference is because, unlike the islanders, the people of
Hind do not have a genealogy connecting them to the ‘disdainful’ African slave
identity. The Andaman islanders are different also because they are not of the
particular kind of Indo-Persianate elite class with which Thanesri identified
the people of the Hind.
The concern for social class always intersected with Thanesri’s views on
race. In this he differed from his British companions. But very much like his
urbane contemporaries, Maulana Fazl-i-Haq, and the Delhi poets Mirza Ghalib
and Azurdah, Thanesri was critical of discrimination purely on the grounds of
skin colour. However, if the colonial notion of race, as colour entrenched in
iniquitous power relations, factored the issue of class then it posed little problem
to Thanesri. His own views on people of colour (.siyapoost), whom he defined as
distinctly low class and thus different from him, were no better than that of his
colonial masters. And he would not have hesitated to endorse any iniquitous
regulations on them were it not for the risk that he himself might mistakenly
suffer.
Thanesri was critical of British race discrimination mainly because it ignored
class. He lamented that colonial jails for instance clubbed together people of
colour, irrespective of class. He did not like the idea of being locked up with
Hindustanis of lower class and caste. He says, cHind keijail khaano mein sharifon
kee barri pareshaniyan hain ... hamarei desiyon kei madarij (classification) kaa koi
lihaaz naheen hai. Kaalei kaalei sab ek samajh kar Raja, nawab, mahtar, chamar
sabb ko ek hee laathi sei haanktei hain.'60 (The jails of Hind are inconvenient
as they do not show any sensitivity to class and club together the respectable
with the lowly). He envied the Europeans and Eurasians who even in jail were
treated like sahibs and not made to co-mingle with the lowly: ‘Magar kotpatloon
walon kee kahin bhe izzat hai. European aur doghlei donou mashal sahib logon kei
wahan bhee chain karr tei hain*61 Even in the Andaman island penal colony he
regrets that

muazas (respectable) Hindustanis w ho had hundreds and thousands o f servants

in their good days, for no reason were clubbed together with siyaah post (low ly
204 Seema Alavi

black people). And like the choore chamar (low castes) o f Hind they too were
made to eat left over bad food, and labour with ordinary people.62

Thanesri contrasted the dismal treatment of high-class Hindustanis to that

meted out to the Europeans and Eurasians (doghle kale kalootei). He regretted
that despite the ethnically mixed and, therefore, low origins of the latter and
often low class of the former they were treated akin to those in coat and trousers
(patloon) or the ethnically pure white men (gorre) who headed the regiments of
the black (kaaliya) Christians. He was envious that such fair skinned convicts
were allotted bungalows and servants, and upon obtaining a license they even
received a salary of ?50 per month. He said he often felt like crying when he
noticed that men like Mr Lamteer, who was black in the face, but had a European
name and dressed in coat and pants (patloon), began to be treated lavishly in the
island with a bungalow, a clerical job in the deputy commissioner kutcheri, and
more. By contrast a raja of Jagannathpri, because of his kaala chehra (black face),
had to labour and live with the ordinary choore chamar (low people).63 The racial
undercurrents of Thanesri’s proto-nationalism thus remained diluted with the
more pressing issues of class that bothered him continuously.
Thanesri’s mulk was indeed carved out of the colonial frame. Its racial and
cultural profiling was also influenced by the views of British officers. But his
notion of race was distinct. Unlike his British officers his ideas were riveted by
issues of historicity and class. Thus even though he acquired the professionalism
of the average British ethnographer as he worked in tandem with the colonial
administration, important differences remained. And by far the most important
difference was his religious conviction. Shunning all prevalent late nineteenth
century theories that had begun to offer feeble scientific explanations of racial
differences, Thanesri was convinced that in the ultimate analysis racial difference,
its historicity notwithstanding, could be explained, ‘only as the power and will of
God* (qudrat-i-khuda), which produced a range of different coloured creations
(makhlooq) all over the world (rang rang aur tarah tarah kei makhlooq jangah
jangah paida kiye).64 Underlining his distance from the colonial scientific grid of
explanations he added that cto understand and explain God’s creation through
the power of reason and seek proofs for it is useless’ (Iss maqam parr aql ko
daurana aur sabuton kaa talaash kamaa mahazfuzool hai).65 Indeed, not just a
belief in God in the abstract but a highly historicised Islamic view of belief, faith
and identity shaped his cultural and racial profiling of the mulk.
The Islamic frame, rather than the Western global intellectual and political
imperium, intersects with Thanesri’s ethnological observations and sociological
understandings. Indeed, he places the islanders’ version of their history and
genealogy in a Quranic frame. Thus, he writes that the habshis of the Andaman
islands believe in the Quranic revelations as well, which offer an explanation of
the continuation of life despite the mass destruction caused by floods. Indeed in
the islanders’ stories of migration to the island he sees fragments of the Quranic
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 205

view of the ongoing cycle of life66. He mentions a story that they told him about
their arrival at the islands. This reminds him of the cyclical view of life underlined
in the Quranic narrative of Noah’s ark. He says that the islanders told him about
the boats of their ancestors, which landed on the Andaman islands after they had
been displaced from their homeland following torrential storms and flooding. In
ways reminiscent of the prophet Noah, their ancestors purportedly made a boat
and remained on it for many days. When the water receded, their boat floated
and docked near the Andamans. Once on the islands they had no source of fire.
Their inconvenience was seen by a yellow bird, Lorotoot, which flew into the air
and reached the palace of Pagoga, the God. Pagoga was cooking on the fire at
that time. He picked up an ember (chingari) in his beak and began to fly back.
But it accidentally fell on the God who was burnt. In anger he pulled a burning
log from the fire and flung it in the direction of the bird. By chance it landed
on the mountain where the ancestors of the islanders were sitting waiting for
some source of fire. They were thrilled to get fire. And since then they are very
reverential to the bird Lorotoot who helped them.67

Thanesri’s Politics: The Interlocking of the

Islamic and the Western Global

The physicality which colonialism provided to the Islamic global imaginary

was more complex. At one level colonialism, with its print capitalism, greater
opportunities of travel across sea and land and wider networks of communication,
facilitated travel and access to Muslim cultures and made the Islamic imaginary
physically real, at least for the privileged. But this physicality also brought
home the reality that the global so far envisaged as the Empire of Islam had
given way to the Western-dominated global. This invoked envy as well as the
urge to access this novo global Empire that corresponded in terms of its sheer
scale and political influence to the Islamic imaginary. The fact that this Empire
was ‘colonial’ of course created its own dynamics for the Muslims. But their
take on it derived also from the ambivalence in their minds between an Islamic
global imaginary and the reality of life within its successor—the mid-nineteenth
century western Empire with its control on capital and culture. They used the
colonial infrastructural and intellectual grid, along with its legal vocabulary,
English language, print capitalism and political rhetoric to both access this new
Empire as well as reach out to the Islamic imperium. They hoped to contest the
colonial grid-once they were sufficiently fortified intellectually and politically via
their outward reach.
The strategy produced an Islamic identity that was culled from within the
networks of colonial rule even as it remained firmly rooted in the spiritual and
moral frame of Islam and its global appeal. The newly introduced print media was
206 Seema Alavi

used by Thanesri to launch hitherto marginalised Muslim leaders as ideal model

figures whose conduct would unite the community globally. Thus for instance,
the much maligned mujahid Syed Ahmed Shahid was recast as a non-aggressive
individual modelled on the universal figure of the Prophet. This was in contrast
to the myth created by British officers like W.W. Hunter and the later nationalist
ulema who projected Syed Ahmed as the aggressive anti-British rebel of Balakot,
whose movement against the Sikhs was a prelude to his jihad against the colonial
state.68 Instead, Thanesri’s biography of Syed Ahmed Shahid encased his career
in India in a compellingly benign mould. He framed him in global movements
of self purification like the Tarika-i-Muhammadiya (the Muhammedan path),
and modelled his charisma and lifestyle on the Prophet. By colouring such local
figures with the universal spiritual hue associated with the upholder of universal
peace, the Prophet, Thanesri challenged colonial propaganda against him and
his followers. By highlighting the de-territorial nature of their spiritual appeal
he alluded to the immense potential such Muslims had for mustering global
support in their engagement and fight for the acquisition of temporal power.
Indeed he argued that they combined exceptional Prophet-like spiritual appeal
and temporal ambitions that straddled Empires. Thus they needed to be handled
with care. Thanesri’s recasting of regional figures in universal frames began to
articulate a proto-nationalism that was subtly anti-colonial, territorially rooted
and yet outward looking and racially profiled even as it lay entangled in concerns
for class.69

The Conflict o f Tw o W orld Orders: Thanesri in

the British A dm inistration

Thanesri was a literate munshi before his arrest and deportation to the Andaman
Islands. He worked as a lower functionary in the administration of several
zamindars and local courts and helped people write their arzis (petitions). In
the Andamans, as a colonial convict, he learnt how to speak, read and write the
English language as well. In 1872 his teacher was one Ram Swarup, an English-
speaking person (angrezi khawan). His linguistic skills were perfected in the
company of the English officers to whom he taught Persian, Urdu and the Nagari
languages. Knowledge of English not only improved his status in the colonial
administration, but also his financial position. He was the only Muslim who
knew English, and thus he began to write arzis and the appeals of Muslims in the
English language. He earned thousands of rupees through this service. According
to Thanesri, he had a monthly income of at least ?100 from performing this
task.70 Apart from monetary benefits, this linguistic skill enabled him to help
Muslims represent their cases adequately and in the proper formats for the type
of petitions admitted into the proceedings of court trials (muqadama). As a result
of his valuable assistance many Muslims were acquitted and many had their
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 207

death punishments annulled.71 This made him very popular and much sought
after on the islands. It also imbued him with the spirit of fighting for the rights
and privileges of his people, using the assets he had acquired from the colonial
apparatus. So successful was he in this task that the British worried that he might
use it to incite people against them. On the day of his release the administration
issued an order forbidding any government functionary (sarkari mulazim) from
drafting petitions and helping the natives with their paperwork.72
Learning English triggered in Thanesri the inherent paradox that had been
introduced in his mind from the day he took service in the colonial administration
and sought to rise in status. Thanesri writes that English was attractive to him
and made him rise in the administration and in his accumulation of global
knowledge. It introduced him to a range of literature that was hitherto unknown
to him. Indeed it made him for the first time fully aware of the realities of world
power and dominance. Underlining the benefits of the English language, which
he saw as the window into world civilisation and history, and the instrument of
power and control, he says, Angrezi zaban ilm aurfanon kaa ghar hai. Jo angrezi
naheen jaanta who bilaa shubha duniya kei halaatsei bakhubi mahir naheen hai.
Aur bina angrezi seekhiepakka duniya dar naheen ho saktaP3 (English is the abode
of knowledge and scientific and other skills. One who does not know English can
never be an expert on world affairs. And without learning English no one can be
worldly wise).
The realisation of the power that the English language wielded and the new
world order that it upheld triggered in Thanesri a new fear of the detrimental
effect this would have on the Islamic world order, its cultural etiquette and moral
underpinnings. He saw literature in English questioning the Islamically framed
way of life that he identified with and defended, even as he zealously protected
his status and position in the colonial administration. He writes of English as the
language that is muzir (harmful) and ham qatil (murderous) for deen (religion).
According to him any individual who learnt English, would definitely—as in
his case—read all the available literature in it. And if he has not read his own
Koran, Hadith and texts on the Prophet, he will definitely go astray. As he says,
he will go behad azaad (independent), bad-deen (irreligious) and be-adab
(uncultured).74 Thanesri cites his own distractions from prescriptive Islam and
spirituality (ibadat) as a result of becoming influenced by English literature. He
says he began to miss his early morning (tahujat) prayers that he had always
offered with dedication all his life, and he even foregoes his Friday prayers.
He lost interest in the reading of the Koran and Hadith, and forgot the verses
and chapters that he had memorised earlier. According to him the only thing
he passionately wanted to keep doing was reading English books. Satan, he
says, had overpowered him, and he was just a small distance away from kufr
(infidelity).
Expressing his extreme tension on being conflicted between two great
civilisations, he once again resorted to the spiritual self within him to pray to
208 Seema Alavi

God to make him see the light: dua maangta kee aye aankh waalei mujh andhei
kaa haath pakar.75This worked, and finally the spiritual and moral frame of Islam
rescued him and brought him to the right path. On falling sick with a painful boil
on his leg he attributed his bad luck to his going astray from prescriptive Islam.
He prayed for his recovery and promised to return to the right path on being
cured. And as he became healthy he resumed his prayers and readings as per the
Islamic dictates for all believers. From then on he strived to maintain the delicate
balance between the colonial knowledge paradigm represented through English
and that of his tradition and moral reckoning.

C h allen ging C o lo nial Knowledge: Saw aneh A hm adi

(Biography o f Syed Ahm ed Shahid)

Thanesri’s politics were entrenched in the interstices between the colonial

discursive frame and that of global Islam. His proto-nationalism remained
embedded both in the colonial and Islamic frame. Through this brand of politics
Thanesri hoped to offer best service to the cause of Muslims. The latter he thought
had been harshly treated by the state, especially after the publication of William
Hunter’s damaging treatise The Indian Musalman in 1871,76Thanesri was always
perturbed by Hunter’s negative portrayal of the Muslims during the Mutiny,
and in particular with his remarks on the men of religion whom he derogatorily
labelled as the Wahabis. He lamented that even though Sir Syed Ahmed Khan
(of Aligarh) had also refuted the claims of Hunter, the latter’s text continued
to be influential and defined the English mindset concerning Muslims.77 It is
no surprise that one of the first books in English that he began to read once he
had mastered the English language was Hunter’s Indian Musalman. He says he
obtained with great difficulty the second edition of this volume from Calcutta for
?7. He says that a reading of Hunter convinced him that the British would never
release them from the penal colony. This was because Hunter had underlined the
fact that on release the Wahabis would return to Hind, and destroy the sultanate
angrezi (English government). He was even more disturbed when he learnt that
Hunter had been made the musahib (close associate) of the Governor General.
He was thus now in a position to influence policy decisions.78 Thanesri, after
reading Hunter, began to refute his comments on Wahabis killing the British
during the Mutiny. He cited cases of people like Nazir Hasan, who saved the life
of one Mrs Leeson in 1857.79
His most important measure, however, was to counter the Indian Musalman
by his publication in 1895 of the first elaborate Urdu biography of the mujahid
Syed Ahmed Shahid, the Sawaneh Ahmadiy whom the British regarded as the
founder of the anti-colonial Wahabi movement.80 The biography aimed to
‘correct’ British apprehensions about mujahids created by officials like Hunter.
This comprehensive masterpiece is divided into five parts, and details the life,
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 209

travel to haj and politics of the foremost mujahid of the early nineteenth century.
Unlike Hunter, Thanesri projects Syed Ahmed as a spiritual man with Prophet­
like universal appeal. This could be used for furthering temporal power as in his
war with the Sikhs. But he saw no direct connection between his travel to Arabia
for haj and the influence on him of the anti-British Arab Wahabi leader Abdul
Wahab, whom Hunter claimed triggered Syed Ahmad’s militancy against the
Sikhs and became the prelude to the Muslim jihad against the British.
The Sawaneh Ahmadi was written in direct response to Hunter, and with the
express purpose of trying to convince the government and the public that far
from declaring a war against the British, Syed Ahmed Shahid on at least twenty
occasions, exhorted his disciples and people not to oppose the English.81Thanesri,
through a reconstruction of the life and politics of Syed Ahmed Shahid, attempted
to convey to the British both the innocence of the men of religion that Hunter
had derided, as well as to indicate the immense potential they wielded in society
on account of their spiritual powers that had both territorial and extraterritorial
dimensions. Indeed the biography of Syed Ahmed Shahid sought to rehabilitate
him in the model of the Prophet, firmly linked to the global movement: the
Muhammedan Path or the Tarika-i-Muhammadiya. This global encasement of
Syed Ahmed had been carried out in his lifetime as well. The Sirat-i-Mustaqeem,
a compilation of his religious discourses written by his followers Shah Ismael and
Maulana Abdul Hayee prior to his haj pilgrimage in the 1820s, projected him
as an Imam in the likeness of the Prophet. But in the late nineteenth century,
when Muslim nationalists were creating the myth of his aggressive anti-British
posture, the stress on his prophetic piety was significant. This specific portrayal
challenged the traditional set-up (bidat)y the nationalist ulema and the colonial
state. Indeed, the text added fresh points of emphasis to the global appeal of Syed
Ahmed by focussing on his movement, Tarika> and additionally on his individual
spiritual and supernatural powers. The exceptional spiritual powers of Syed
Ahmed are the highlight of the book. According to Thanesri these individual
acts of miraculous powers underlined his extraterritorial appeal in ways that
went beyond the ambit of the Tarikay which itself was a global phenomenon.
Thus Thanesri rewrote the history of the foremost mujahid in India in a way that
both allayed British fears about the Muslims and simultaneously challenged the
colonial power by countering their construction of what was widely believed as
damaging knowledge concerning Muslims. It also displayed the global contours
of Muslim influence that could be given a political twist if required.
In terms of Urdu literary genre, the Sawaneh Ahmadi marked the beginning
of the writings of historical biographies that very much in the tazkira tradition
glorified their subject; but unlike the tazkira they focussed narrowly on the
individual rather than his entire genealogy. Further, it was written in the style of
medieval Islamic literature that did not always show reverence to the sources and
authorities from which it borrowed information. It was written in simple Urdu,
and used as its source unreferenced accounts of people who had lived in the time
210 SeemaAlavi

of Syed Ahmed. It was also written in consultation with English books, which
again are not acknowledged anywhere. It is noteworthy that the authenticity of
the works cited, their referencing and acknowledgement of sources, are thrown
out of the window by Thanesri all through the text. Indeed, he is honest in his
introduction when he says,

I have written this book with great effort and consultation with the different
writings (tehreer) which were written by those w ho have actually witnessed the
events ... whatever books I have consulted unfortunately I have not put the
dates and so I felt difficulty in arranging the events. But I have travelled a lot and
consulted som e English books also. Though I do not claim recording o f events
strictly date wise. Still I have made every effort to be correct in m y recording o f
events. But still there is no doubt that the book is m ore authentic on the subject
and better than previous biographies.82

The text effectively shifts the focus of Syed Ahmed Shahid’s life and career
agendas away from the British and towards the Sikhs in the Punjab. This was
significant, as most late nineteenth century Muslim writers were complicit in
creating the nationalist myth that underlined the anti-colonial stance of the
mujahid martyrs of Balakot. Thus Thanesri’s text begins with the atrocities of
the Sikhs against the Muslims that were so cruel that at the time of the birth of
the Syed, society was waiting for a saviour. The saviour appeared in the form
of Syed Ahmed, who was widely welcomed. Thus it followed that the Sikhs and
the rescue of the Muslims from their cruelty remained the foremost agenda of
the Syed. As he says, ‘the jihad of Syed sahib was only against the zalim (cruel)
Sikhs, who had wreaked havoc on the Muslims of Punjab’.83 And this fight too
was not to obtain the badshahat or political rule over the Punjab, but only to stop
them from torturing Muslims.
The text cleverly avoids discussion of the Syed’s anti-British activities, but
projects him as a universally popular leader whose powers lay not so much in
political wisdom as in his extraordinary role as reformer and a performer of
karamat, miracles and the fountainhead of barakat (blessings). This made him
popular across the length and breadth of the country and helped him consolidate
his temporal alliances. The biography deftly alludes to the political bent which
the Syed could give to the immense spiritual power and the popularity that he
attained because of that. But his political role is cleverly confined by Thanesri to
his interventions in Shia-Sunni disputes in Raebareli, Hindu-Muslim conflicts
in the area, and of course the Sikh atrocities on the Muslims. As he explains
through several undated anecdotes involving anonymous men in dialogue with
the Syed, the latter always explained to his clientele that he could not declare
jihad on the British because, ‘his main task was the spread of tauhid-i-ilahi, and
the sarkar angrezi allowed them to do that without any hindrance. There was
thus no justification for declaring jihad on the British.’84
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 211

Thanesri skirts entirely the anti-British role of the Syed in his narrative and
locates him instead as a Prophet-like miraculous healer and man of barakat
and supernatural powers. At the same time, Thanesri projects him, and by
implication the mujahids, as an individual who represented a formidable force
to the powers that be. Indeed he shows how the powers of the Syed were all
the more exceptional and fearsome because his spirituality linked his territorial
clientele to the world outside India—the extraterritorial. Inevitably the main
link here was the puritanical Tarika-i-Muhammadiya that he represented, a path
that was a global phenomenon because of its exhortations to follow the path of
the Prophet, a universally acceptable figure. Thanesri’s points of emphasis were,
however, more on his individual spiritual powers, which knitted him to an even
wider clientele than his puritanical Tanka could ever achieve.
The key to Syed Ahmed’s exceptional de-territorial appeal and potential
was explained by Thanesri by the fact that he combined the batini (spiritual)
with the zahiri (worldly) quwwat (stamina). The former was represented in his
powers of miracles and barakat that welded together a constituency of Shias,
Sunnis and even Hindus, and zamindars, native officials, traders and even some
English traders into his clientele.85 His services were often loaned by the officials
of Awadh in solving Shia-Sunni conflicts in the region. Hindu milk traders
[gwalas) of Tonk came for his ziyarat, and the pious of Benares were his murids.
The latter often requested him respectfully to leave the city when they feared
that his prayers and zikr (with which they personally had little issue) on the
city would anger their Gods.86 And such powers extended beyond India where
Thanesri shows how miracles happened in Aden when he needed assistance in
travel and on the ship when en-route to Jeddah to perform haj.87
Syed Ahmed’s vast and culturally diverse clientele had an extraterritorial
dimension, welded together through his spiritual powers, which lent him
immense power in worldly politics. Indeed, Thanesri says that he often used his
spiritual power for furthering his political ambitions and acquiring temporal
influence. Thus it is no surprise that the Syed in Thanesri’s account made a
trip for the holy pilgrimage or haj before he declared his political war (jihad)
against the Sikhs. The deliberately long winding travel across Hindustan with
many stopovers and meetings with people, and the equally eventful journey
by road to Mecca from Jeddah, enabled Thanesri to provide a description of
the Syed consolidating his social base. Throughout the journey he displayed
his exceptional spiritual powers of miracles and healing that drew him to a
range of people. According to Thanesri this combination of the spiritual and
the temporal, -rather than the influence of the anti-British Arab Wahabi leaders,
explains the strategic decision of Syed Ahmed and his followers to go on haj
before the Sikh campaign. Thus, Thanesri describes the long boat ride that he
took from Raebareli to Calcutta, adding murids and consolidating his cross­
country support on the way and using his spirituality to mobilise support for
212 SeemaAlavi

and reinforce his politics against the Sikhs. The Syed had made it clear according
to Thanesri that this haj was a necessary preparation for his jihad against the
Sikhs. But it was crucial for building social and political contacts rather than
being necessary because its spiritual prescription exhorted him to militancy. The
combination of the batini and the zahiri could thus not have been made clearer.
Indirectly, but substantially, Thanesri's Sawaneh Ahmadi challenged the wider
politics of the colonial state. It was of course written to protect Muslim interests,
but it went beyond that as it countered the very production of colonial knowledge
on which British power was dependent. The Sawaneh shows how print culture
and access to the English language and institutional resources made available by
colonial rule could be effectively used to generate fresh useful knowledge about
Islam and its leaders. This knowledge could be used to effectively counter the
colonial constructions of people, histories and events. Thus print capitalism and
access to wider linguistic domains of knowledge introduced through colonial
networks, enabled Thanesri to rewrite the history of Islam in nineteenth century
India. And both the colonial global print capital as well as the particularistic
rewriting of Islam's history in India that it shaped, offered an effective challenge
to the colonial constructions of Islam as illustrated for instance in W.H. Hunter's
Indian Musulman. The portrayal of Syed Ahmed in the Sawaneh as a leader not
unfavourably inclined to the British, stood in sharp contrast to his more popular
anti-British image, disseminated in colonial writings, and later nationalist
Muslim literature of the early twentieth century. Yet, the pro-British image of
Syed Ahmed notwithstanding, the text is extremely significant, as it challenged
the knowledge base of colonial rule by countering its basis through an attack on
texts generated by its officials. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had countered Hunter's
text as well through his writing of Asbaab-i Baghawat-i-Hind> and Sarkashi
zilla Bijnor. But Thanesri's attack was unique, because unlike Sir Syed Ahmed
he did not project the Muslims as inherently loyal subjects, with narrow vested
interests, who could be taken for granted once they were incorporated into the
colonial administrative system. Instead, by highlighting Syed Ahmed Shahid as a
global persona and by de-mystifying his overt anti-colonial aggression, he hinted
at their readiness to engage with British rule even as their vision and influence
exemplified a wider global orientation that straddled Empires. Both the colonial
and the Islamic global were thus critical to Thanesri's subtle anti-British fight.

Notes and References

1. ‘Wahabi* was a term used for Indian Muslim rebels by the British administration. They borrowed
the term from Arabia where it was used for the followers of the anti-British leader Abd-al Wahab.
See for Wahabis in India, Q. Ahmed, The Wahabi Movement in India (Calcutta: 1966).
2. S. Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands
(Delhi:X)xford University Press, 2000).
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 213

3. C. Anderson, The Indian Uprising o f 1857-58: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London: Anthem
Press, 2007).
4. See the manuscript essay of Satadru Sen, ‘No Place like Home: Maulana ThaneSari in the
Andaman Islands’; ‘Contexts, Representation and the Colonised convict: Maulana Thanesri
in the Andaman Islands’, Crime , History and Societies, vol. 8, no. 2 (2004), p. 117-139. Sen
looks at the experience of Thanesri more from the sociological point of view: The impact of
labour performed at the penal colony on his professional career and Social standing; and the
re-configurations of family, Hindu-Muslim relations and domesticity.
5. J. Malik, ‘Letters, Prison Sketches and Autobiographical Literature: The Case o f Fadl-e-Haqq
Kahirabadi in the Andaman Penal Colony’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol.
43, no. 1 (2006), pp. 88-89; S. Alavi, ‘Jihadi Muslims and Hindu Sepoys: Rewriting the 1857
narrative’, Biblio, vol. 12, nos 3 and 4 (March-April 2007).
6. A. Jalal, Partisans o f Allah: Jihad in South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008); A. Jalal, Self
& Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (Oxford University
Press, New Delhi, 2001); M. Hasan, A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in 19th Century
India (Oxford university Press, Delhi, 2005).
7. B. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1982).
8. Maulana Jafer Thanesri, Tawarikh-i-Ajaib (Karachi: Salman Academy, 1962), Introduction,
p. 36.
9. Ibid., p. 36
10. Ibid. Copies 11,000; price ?4 and 50 paise.
11. Maulana Jafer Thanesri, Sawaneh Ahmadi (Delhi: Matba-i-Faruqi, 1895).
12. Maulana Jafer Thanesri, Tarikh-i-Ajeeb or Tarikh-i-Port Blair, Urdu edition of History o f Port
Blair (Lucknow: Munshi Newal Kishore Press, 1879). Second edition inl892 is published from
Karachi. The sixth part of the book is deleted from the later edition.
13. Thanesri, Tawarikh, p. 130, pp. 127-128. On arrival at Andaman Island he was relieved to know
that here as well his services as a munshi would be needed in the sarkari daftars. But earlier on
arrival at Bombay, in Thane, he was surprised that the colonial daftars there used no Persian
or Urdu, but only Marathi. Thus despite his training in one daftar there were limitations to his
finding a job.
14. Ibid., p.123.
15. Ibid., p. 95. Of course the Governor General rejected this plea on grounds that even if this was
true the trial had to proceed as the convicts were a threat to the sarkari amaldari.
16. Ibid., p. 95.
17. Ibid., pp. 72 and 78.
18. Ibid., p. 79.
19. Ibid., p. 77.
20. Ibid., pp. 90-91.
21. Ibid., p. 79.
22. Ibid., pp. 80-81.
23. Ibid., pp. 82-83.
24. Ibid., p. 91.
25. Ibid., p. 103. Eventually, his sentence was converted from death by hanging to life imprisonment
because the English did not want him to achieve the status of a martyr.
26. Ibid., p. 97.
27. Ibid., p. 109.
28. Engseng Ho, The Graves o f Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (California:
California University Press, 2006).
29. M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age o f Discoveries 1400-1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
214 Seema Alavi

30. M.N. Pearson, The World o f the Indian Ocean, 1500-180: Studies in Economic, Social and Cultural
History (London: Ashgate, 2005). He seems to suggest that 1800 marked the end o f the Islamic
hegemony o f the world order.
31. For an excellent discussion on the conflict that earlier genealogically derived identities o f Yemeni
travellers had with those inscribed later via national passports see Engseng Ho, Graves of Tarim.
32. B. Metcalf gives a fascinating account o f heightened pilgrimage traffic in the post mutiny
period. See her essay, ‘The Pilgrimage Remembered: South Asian Accounts o f the Haj’, in
D.F. Eickelman and J. Piscatori, eds, Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious
Imagination (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 85-107; Anderson, The Indian Uprising.
33. Thanesri, Tawarikh, p. 211.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., pp. 215-216. In London he hoped to meet W.W. Hunter to apprise him o f the situation in
India.
36. Ibid., p. 97.
37. Ibid., p. 117.
38. Ibid., p. 127.
39. Ibid., p. 119.
40. Ibid., p. 123.
41. Ibid., p. 125.
42. Ibid., p. 129.
43. Ibid., p.122.
44. Ibid., p. 125.
45. Ibid., p. 126.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 151.
48. Ibid., p. 133.
49. Ibid., p. 134.
50. Ibid., p. 135.
51. Ibid., p. 136.
52. Thanesri, Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, Preface, pp. 3-4.
53. Ibid., Preface in English. No page number.
54. Ibid., p. 8.
55. Ibid., p. 6.
56. Ibid., p. 7.
57. Ibid., pp. 12-13.
58. Ibid, p. 15.
59. Ibid., p. 16.
60. Thanesri, Tawarikh, p. 128.
61. Ibid., p. 128.
62. Ibid., p. 147.
63.Ibid.
64. Thanesri, Tarikh-i-Ajeeb, p. 16.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., p. 17.
67. Ibid., pp. 18-19.
68. See the discussion o f this in Jalal, Partisans of Allah. See nationalist ulema biographies o f Ghulam
Rasul Mehr Kitab Manzil, Lahore, 1956, Syed Ahmed Shahid (reprint Lahore: Kitab Manzil,
1952); Maulana Syed Muhammad Mian, Ulema-i-Hind ka Shandar Maazi, voL 2, Delhi, 1957;
Maulana Syed Ali Hasan Nadwi, Nadwat-ul- Ulama, Lucknow, n.d.
69. See for an excellent discussion o f this in modem Muslim liberal thought, Jalal, Partisans of Allah:
Self 6-Sovereignty.
 Mutiny, Deportation and the Nation 215

70. Thanesri, Tawarikh, p. 175

71. Ibid., p. 175
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., p. 176.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., pp. 178-179.
76. Many other Muslims like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan also refuted Hunter’s charges on the Muslims.
77. Thanesri, Sawaneh, pp. 82-83. He laments that the British hate Wahabis more than they do
the Afghan maulvis who have assassinated many o f their officers. And all that is because o f the
influence o f Hunter’s text.
78. Ibid., p. 186.
79. Ibid., pp. 82-83.
80. Thanesri, Sawaneh, pp. 335-337.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid., p. 5.
83. Ibid., pp. 335-337.
84. Ibid., p. 91.
85. An English indigo trader o f the Raebareli area came for ziyarat to him and offered him food and
money. Ibid., p. 61. For traders of Mirzapur and zamindars see, pp. 62-63.
86. Ibid., p. 92.
87. Ibid., p. 75. Camels arrived on their own at the port o f Aden to carry him to the city. And then
disappeared before he could even pay them.
About the Editors and the Contributors

Editors

Crispin Bates is Reader in Modern South Asian History in the School of History,
Classics and Archaeology and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at
the University of Edinburgh. His recent publications include Subalterns and jftaj:
South Asia since 1600 (2007), Beyond Representation: Constructions of Identity in
Colonial and Postcolonial India (2005) and Rethinking Indian Political Institutions
(2005) with Subho Basu. Between 2006 and 2008 he was the Principal Investigator
in a major Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded research
project concerning the Indian Uprising, based at the University of Edinburgh.
Marina Carter obtained her doctorate in history at the University of Oxford.
She was a Research Fellow working on the Indian Uprising in the School of
History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and is currently
an Honorary Fellow of Edinburgh University’s Centre for South Asian Studies.
She has published extensively in the field of Asian migration and in particular
on the Mascarene Islands. Her publications include Abacus &Mah Jong: Chinese
Settlement and Socio-Economic Consolidation in Mauritius (2009) with J. Ng
Foong Kwong, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (2002)
with Khal Toorabully and Voices from Indenture: Experiences of Indian Migrants
in the British Empire (1996).

Contributors

Seema Alavi is a Professor in the Department of History, Faculty of Social

Sciences, University of Delhi, Delhi. She has twice been a Fulbright Fellow as well
as a Smuts Fellow at Cambridge University, from where her PhD was revised and
published as The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern
India 1770-1830 (1995). She has co-authored (with Muzaffar Alam) A European
 About the Editors and the Contributors 217

Experience of the Mughal Orient: The Ijaz-I-Arsalani (Persian Letters, 1773-1779)

of A.H. Polier (2001) and edited The Eighteenth Century in India (2002). Her
most recent publication is Islam & Healing: The Loss and Recovery of an Indo-
Muslim Medical Tradition (2007 and 2008). She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, and been a Harvard Yenching fellow and Radcliffe
Fellow at Harvard.
Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury is a Reader in History, Visva-Bharati University,
Shantiniketan, India. He is a historian of social and economic history with a
focus on the transnational communications including the fields of disease and
medicine. Educated at Presidency College, Kolkata, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
Delhi, and Cambridge University, where he was a College Junior Research Fellow,
he won the Ellen McArthur Prize at Cambridge (2002-2003) for his doctoral
thesis and held a postdoctoral Wellcome Research Fellowship at the University
of Oxford. His recent publications include Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and
Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830-1920, published in the Palgrave Macmillan Series
in Transnational History (2010).
Mark Sullivan Hall studied history at St Louis and Columbia Universities, where
he was an Assistant Teacher. He is currently an independent researcher and
historian, dividing his time between London, the USA and India. His research
interests include American trade, commerce and piracy in the Indian Ocean
region, and the Irish diaspora.
Elena Karatchkova (MA, Anthropology, Columbia University; PhD, South
Asian Studies, Moscow State University) is a Senior Research Scholar, Institute
of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. She has con­
ducted extensive research in Rajasthan on the ethnohistory of princely states.
Her current project is on oral traditions about the past among various religious
communities of Amber, the former capital of Jaipur kingdom. She has published
extensively in Russian, and in English she has authored ‘Ghost Towns and
Bustling Cities: Constructing a Master Narrative in Nineteenth Century Jaipur’,
in Carol E. Henderson and Maxine Weisgrau, eds, Raj Rhapsodies: Tourism,
Heritage and the Seduction of History (2007), pp. 27-45.
Chandrika Kaul received her doctorate from the University of Oxford and
currently teaches British and Imperial History at the University of St Andrews
in Scotland. Her monograph Reporting the Raj (Studies in Imperialism series
2003 and 2004), is the first detailed study of British press coverage of Indian
affairs. Her edited works include Media and the British Empire (2006) and
‘Explorations in Modern Indian History and the Media’, Media History, special
issue, Vol. 15, No. 4, November 2009. She is also co-editor of International
Communications and Global News Networks: Historical Perspectives (2011). She
is currently completing a book entitled Communications, Media and the Imperial
Experience: Britain and India 1858-1947.
218 Mutiny at the Margins

RJ . Morris now Emeritus Professor, held a personal chair in Economic and Social
History at the University of Edinburgh where he taught from 1968. He has written
extensively on urban history and on the history of social class and civil society. This
has led to his current research interest in Belfast in the nineteenth century. He was
President of the European Urban History Association, 2000-2002. His principal
publications include Class, Sect and Party. The Making o f the British Middle
Class, 1820-50 (1990), and Men, Women and Property in England, 1780-1870
(2005). With Liam Kennedy he edited Ireland and Scotland. Order and Disorder,
1600-2000 (2005).
Projit Bihari M ukharji is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
His research interests are mainly in the history of medicine in modern South
Asia, but he also occasionally writes on popular cultural histories of South Asia
in general and particularly involving issues of subalternity. He is the author
of Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine
(Anthem: 2009) and, along with David Hardiman, the co-editor of Situating
Subaltern Therapeutics: Medical Marginality in South Asia.
Peter Putnis is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of
Canberra. The focus of his research is on international communication and
media history, especially the political economy of international news production
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Between 2004 and 2008 he was
co-chair of the History Section of the International Association for Media
and Communication Research. He currently serves on the editorial board of
Media History. With Chandrika Kaul and Jurgen Wilke he edited International
Communication and Global News Networks: Historical Perspectives (2011).
Kim A, W agner is a Lecturer in Imperial and World History at the University
of Birmingham. He has worked on Thuggee and British rule in early nineteenth
century India, with particular attention to the use of informers’ testimonies,
interrogations and trial records. He is currently working on British fears
of indigenous conspiracies and secret modes of communication, colonial
intelligence gathering and state violence and counter-insurgency in India. His
publications include Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-
Century India (2007), Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee
(2009) and The Great Fear o f 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the
Indian Uprising (2010).
Index
African slaves (habshi ghulam), 202-203
agricultural labour, 183-184,200
Alexander I (Russian Tsar),xxi, 122
Alexander II (Russian Tsar),xxi, 122-125,
127-129
Allen's Indian Mail and Register of
Intelligence, 143
amnesty, xxv, 2 5,175-177
Andaman Island
cellular jail, 183,188-189,203
civilisation for, 199-205
Anderson, Clare, 173-174,189
Anglo-French relationship, at the time o f
rebellion, 135-138
Anglo-Indian newspaper constructions, 6
degree o f freedom, 24
anti-British mujahideen, 191
anti-colonial proto-nationalism, 197
anti-Semitism, 153-154
Arabian Nights, 152
Arrah, 172-173
Asbaab-i Baghawat-i-Hind (Ahmed Khan),
212
Asiatic Society o f London, xi, 68
Barakpur, 174
Barruel, Augustin, 157-158
Belfast Daily Mercury, 89
Belfast Newslettert xxiv, 102-104,106,
108-109,111-112
Bengal Presidency, 180
Benjamin, Walter, 3 7 -3 8 ,4 0 ,4 2 ,5 8
BiarritZy 154
Birmah Treaty, 145
Bombay Commercial Gazette, 11
Bombay Timesy3 -6 ,7 8
bimonthly ‘steamer edition’, 4
coverage o f event upon arrival o f mail
from London, 7-8
extracts from
English-language newspapers, 8
other papers, 4-5
private letter, 5
Meerut Uprising o f 10 May, 3-4
news links to London and reporting, 6 -9
religious struggle o f ‘Christianity vs.
Brahmanism’, 6
telegraphic reporting o f news, 3
uprising and reports in, 3-6
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 8 7-88,95,121-122,
135,140,144,147,150,151,154, 159
Bowld Irish Sepoy, ballad of, 98,112
Brantlinger, Patrick, 165
British Army’s brutalities, 1
British Empire, xvii-xviii, 4 8 ,6 3 ,8 7 -8 8 ,9 0 ,
92,102,110 ,1 1 3 ,1 3 7 ,1 5 0 ,1 6 5 ,1 7 4
British imperialism, xviii
British management o f prisoners, 189
British Raj, 87,147
Brown, Jessie, 37-38. See also
commoditisation o f Jessie story;
poems o f Jesse
Marie Cutter’s account on, 42-43
narrative expansion o f story on, 40-^12
in pedagogic texts, 53-62
poems, 42-53
state o f delirium, 39
story in from o f ‘letter to the editor’, 39-42
220 Mutiny at the Margins

Bryce, Archibald Hamilton, 53-54 Davies, J.S., 173

Bugheedand (Rajput village), 171 de Banneroi’s letter, 40
Burnham, Lord, 34 Delane, George, 20
Delane, John Thadeus, xix-xx, 20-22,27,
Calcutta Englishman, 3 ,8 ,1 1 ,1 3 32-33
Campbell, Colin, 2 2 ,2 4 ,2 6 ,3 4 ,1 0 2 ,1 3 8 Delhi, massacres at, 4 ,2 0 ,152,162-163
Canning, Lord, 2 0 -2 1 ,2 3 -2 6 ,6 7 ,7 4 ,1 3 1 Demon o f Cawnpore. See Nena Sahib
and case o f Munshi Amir Ali, 80-82 (Demon o f Cawnpore)
Cape Argus, press coverage o f the Indian Denieffe, Joseph, 9 0 -9 1 ,9 3 -9 4
Uprising in, 11-12 Die Thugs, oder Indischer Fanatismus (1845),
Carlyle, Thomas, 156 157
Cawnpore, massacres at, 27, 102-103, 152, Doheny, Michael, 90-91
158,162 d’Orgoni, General Maha, 134,138
cellular jail, Andaman Island. See kala pani courting o f King o f Oudh, 148
Ceylon Times, 6 hostility to the British, 140-141
Chakravarty, Gautam, 158 influence with the King o f Ava, 146
chapattis, distribution of, 77,156,158 man and the symbol, 141-147
Chartist movement, 154 mission to Burma, 143-145
Chattopadhyay, Basudeb, 74 as mysterious adventurer, 143
Clarendon, Lord, 21 real name and antecedents, 141
Clasmerden, 181 role in instigating the Sepoy Revolt, 144
Clonmel Chronicle, 99 visit to India, 146
Collins, Michael, 93 Dundalk People’s Examiner and People’s
colonial conspiracy theories, 156 Journal, 88
commoditisation o f Jessie story, 53-62 Dundee Poet’s Box, 43-44
Bryce’s account, 53-54
Forrest’s illustration, 58 East India Company, xviii, xix, 2 4 ,7 2 ,7 4 ,7 7 ,
McGuffey’s account, 55 7 8 ,8 1 -8 2 ,1 0 2 ,1 0 4 -1 0 5 ,1 0 9 -1 1 3 ,
Marshall’s account, 56-57 139, 142,151,164,182
story of, introduction in America and Emmet Monument Association (EMA),
Canada, 55-56 90-91
communication, 1850s, 2 Emmet, Robert, 88,90-91
developments, 2-3 English-language press within India, 8
newspapers, 3 European colonialism, 195
telegraph, 2 European monarchy, xviii
Confessions of a Thug (1839), 152, 156 European Times, 3
conspiracies, European tradition of, 165
contemporary historical-political novel, fakirs, 159, 183
concept of, 154 Fazl-i-Haq, Maulana, 189,203
Cook, John, 145 Fenian Brotherhood, 98
counter-insurgency and agency, 158-161 Fenian Movement, xxiii-xxiv, 93-96,115
court trials (muqadama), 191,206 First Love and.Last Love: A Tale of the Indian
Crimean War (1853-1856), xix, 13,19,88, Mutiny (1868), 164
90,95,121,154 Forfeiture Act, 177
Paris Treaty, 126 Four Years in Burmah (Marshall), 145
Russia’s defeat in, xxii, 126 Freeman’s Journal, 110
Crowster, F.J., 41. French attitudes to the Indian Uprising, 134
Cullen, Bishop, 108-109,111-112 Anglo-French tensions at the time of
Cutter, Marie, 41-42 rebellion, 135-138

military conspiracies, 138-141
pamphlet policy, 135
and political aspirations in Europe, 151
French Geographical Society, 144
French Revolution, 154
Geoghegan Report on Colonial Emigration
(1874), 179,183
Ghalib, Mirza, 203
Girodon, Louis-Charles. See d’Orgoni,
General Maha
Glasgow Thuggery, 156
global communication system, 2-3 ,1 5
Goedsche, Hermann, xxii-xxiii, 150
account o f massacre at Sati Chowra Ghat,
155
contemporary historical-political novel,
concept of, 154
on counter-insurgency and agency,
158-161
depiction o f slaughter and murders
committed by rebels, 162
on moral ambivalence and spectacle o f
torture, 161-164
on thugs, conspiracies and
communication, 156-158
and western conspiracy tradition,
153-156
Grand Master o f Freemasons, 157-158
Grant, James, 164,174-175
Granville, Lord, xviii-xix, 7,20-21
greased cartridges, significance of, 156
‘The Great Game’, 120-121,125,127,131,
159
Grierson, George, 180-181
Grimaldi, Captain, 151, 153, 159,162
Guha, Ranajit, 158
Guiana, 182
as destination o f labour emigration, 179
G ungaD iti (1938), 160
Hallett, Shackleton, 41
‘Havelock and his brave Highlanders*, 44
Hindu-Muslim relations, 189,210
Hindustanee sepoys, 174
History o f Port Blair. See Tarikh-i-Port Blair
(Thanesri and Prothero)
History o f the Wonderous. See Tarikh-i-Ajeeb
(Thanesri)
Index 221
H o m e Newsy 3
Hope, George H., 42
Hunter, William, 72,191,206,208-209,
212
Ignatiev, Nikolai, x^pi, 125-127
Indiana Jones and the Temple o f Doom
(1984), 160
Indian M usalm an (Hunter), 191,208
Indian National Congress, 67,190
Indian Uprising o f 1857 (Sepoy Rebellion),
xvii, xxi, 1,67. See also press coverage
o f the Indian Uprising
Anglo-French tensions at the time of,
135-138
areas o f India directly affected by, xxvi
British accounts of, 158
dealing with rebels, 174-176
Dr D uff’s letters from Calcutta, 104-105
French support for, xxi-xxii
greased cartridges, significance of, 156
international significance of, xxv
and Irish nationalist movement, 92-93,
99-104
Irish perception of, 103-108
massacres o f Britishers, 152
missionaries’ letters about, 104-106
peaceful pursuits o f rebels, 175
plunder and destruction, 170-174
Russian support for, xxi-xxii
Russian view from London, 125-127
socio-economic impact of, 176-178
South Asian diaspora, effect upon,
178-184
thugs, conspiracies and communication
during, 156-158
Irish nationalist movement
in America, xxiv
Indian Uprising o f 1857 and, 92-93,
99-104
Irish-Americans, role of, 93-94
July riots in Belfast, 114-115
Larcom’s views, 98-99
nationalist response in the USA, 90-92
press coverage, 108-116
Protestant missionary activity and,
104-109
Young Ireland Movement o f 1848/1849,
88
222 Mutiny at the Margins
Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), xxiv
Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (IRB), 93
‘Irish sepoys’ o f Nenagh, 99-100
Island Story, An (1876), 55-56
jail breaks o f 1857,189
Jewish conspiracy, notion of,xxiii, 150,154,
157,165
jihad (political war), 78,195,206,209-212
kala pani, 183,188-189
Kaye, John, 158
Kilkenny Journal 90
labour emigration, 178
Mauritius as destination of, 179,183
to principal colonial destinations,
179-180
regional breakdowns in, post-uprising,
180
through the port o f Calcutta, 179
Lady's Diary (Leckey), 41
La Puissance militaire des Anglais dans Tlnde
et Vinsurrection des Cipayes (Martin),
137
Larcom, Thomas, xxiv, 98 -9 9 ,101,112-115
La Revoke au Bengale en 1857 et 1858
Souvenirs d ’un Offi cier Irlandais
(1862), 137
Leckey, Edward, 37,40-41
LittelVs Living Age, 140
London Times, 9-1 0 ,1 4 -1 5 ,5 5
Lowell, Robert Traill Spence, 4 7 -5 1 ,5 3 ,5 5
Lyveden, Lord, 20
Macaulay, Thomas, 22
Maitra, Kalidas, xxi, 68-69
Marshall, Henrietta, 55-58,60
Marshall, W.H., 145
Martin, Charles, 137
Marx, Karl, 1,79,164
Mauritius, 178,183-185, 189
as British sugar colony, xxv
as destination o f labour emigration,
179-180
immigrant workforce, 182
news about the Indian Uprising, 11
wage rates in, 181
Moby Dick (1851), 48
Money, Edward, 153
Mo rant Esq., George, 98
Morris, Mowbray, 20
mujahids, 191,206,208-211
mujahid Wahabi, xxvi, 196
murids, 211
mutiny novels, xxiii, 153, 156,159,161
Napoleon III. See Bonaparte, Napoleon
Narnaul, battle of, 130
Narrative of the Mutinies in Oudh Compiled
from Authentic Records (Hutchinson),
41
neighbours and ‘local knowledge,’ notion
of, 158
Nena Sahib (Demon o f Cawnpore), xxiii,
151-166
Nena Sahib, or: The Uprising in India
(G oedsche),xxii-xxiii, 150-166
New Priest of Conception Bay, The (1858), 48
newspapers, 1850s, 3. See also Bombay
Times
Cape Argus, press coverage o f the Indian
Uprising in, 11-12
censorship o f the press, 77-80
excerpts from newspapers, use of, 3 ,4 -5 ,
8 ,1 0 ,1 1 ,1 4
Lord Canning and press, 23-26
mail steamers, use of, 6 -1 0 ,1 1 -1 4
Melbourne Argus, press coverage o f the
Indian Uprising in, 12-14
New York Daily Times, press coverage o f
the Indian Uprising in, 9-10
Northern Whig, xxv, 111
Northrup, David, 179
North West Provinces, 7 2 ,7 4 ,7 9 -8 0 ,1 7 4 ,
181
O’Brien, William Smith, 92
Orange Sepoys o f Belfast, 106
Oriental fanaticism, 161-162
O’Shaughnessy, W.B., 69-70,73
overseas migration, 178
Palmerston, Lord, 22,95,138
Paris Treaty, 120,126,132
Paul I (Russian Tsar), xxi, 121-122
 Index 223

penal colony in the Andaman Islands. See coverage o f rebellion and establishment o f
kala pani Crown rule, 33-34
Pitcher, Major, 181,183 early years, 18-19
poems o f Jesse, 42-53 on formal rules o f war engagement, 27,
Irish Home Rule and, 45 28-29
‘national* identity in, 44 ideological stance on reporting, 30-31
nationalism, 43-45 influence on others, 22
versions, 47-53 mission to India, 18-23
policymakers and practitioners, difference negative image o f his countrymen, 31-32
between, 174-176 political impact in mid-Victorian Britain,
President in Council, Fort William, 174 33
Press Act, 24 against racism, 30
press coverage o f the Indian Uprising reporting style, 27-33
Belfast Newsletter, 102 as war correspondent, 18-22
Bombay Times, 3-6 Russia and England in the Struggle for the
British press depiction on violent Markets of Central Asia (Terentiev),
retributions, 28-29 127
Cape Argus, 11-12 Russian Empire, xxi-xxii, 122,126-128
in Irish newspaper, 88-90 ‘Russian factor* to the Indian Mutiny,
Melbourne Argus, 12-14 xxi-xxii
misleading and exaggerated nature o f after the mutiny
press attacks, 24—26 Document 41,128-129
nature o f British and Anglo-Indian press Document 42,129
coverage, 20-21 Document 43, 129-131
New York Daily Times, 9-10 Document 49,128
print capitalism, 190,205,212 Documents 41-43,127
Prothero, M., 188, 191,199-200 Documents 46-48,128
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The French-Russian military expedition,
(Goedsche),xxiii, 150,154,165 proposal for, 121
purbeeas (seasonal migrant labourers), 178 historical prelude to, 121-122
Document 32,122-123
Quakerism, 47 Document 33,123
Document 35,123-124
race discrimination, 203 Document 36,124
Ranjit Singh, Maharaja, 144 ‘Indian March* o f the Russian Army, 124
Readings from Best Authors, 53 political consequences military conflict
Rebellion in India in 1857. See Indian with England, 124
Uprising o f 1857 (Sepoy Rebellion) Russian view from London, 125-127
rebels Ryan, Vincent, 182
dealing with, 174-176
villages, 173-174 Samuells, E.A., 81,175
Redcliffe, John, 150,155 Sarkashi zilla Bijnor (Ahmed Khan), 212
Rivers, Lieutenant, 152,161,196 Sati Chowra Ghat, massacre at, 155
Royal Proclamation, 177 Sawaneh Ahmadi (Thanesri), 188,191,
Russell, W.H., xix-xx 208-212
on accuracy o f atrocity stories, 26-33 Seaton, Lord, 113-115
on atrocities against British women and Sebastopol (1855-1857), 137, 154
children, 28-29 Sen, Satadru, 189
224 Mutiny at the Margins
sepoy ballads, xxiv, 98
Sepoy Revolt: Its Causes and Consequences}
The (Mead), 24
sexual slavery, 161
sexual violence, 163
Shahabad,171-173,175-178,180,184
Shahid, Syed Ahmed, 188,191,195,206,
208-212
Shastitko, Pyotr, 131
Shia-Sunni disputes, 210,211
Sikh atrocities on the Muslims, 210,212
Smith, Vernon, 25
Smyth, T.C., 8 ,1 0 -1 1 ,1 3
South Asian diaspora, uprising and its effect
upon, 178-184
Spielberg, Steven, 160
Stanley, Viscount, 2 0 ,23,3 2
Stephens, James, 90-95
subaltern coloniser, xxii, 134,148
Sue, Eugene, 157
‘sugar colonies/ British, xxv, 170,174,181
sugar estate, 180-183
Sullivan, Alexander, 109,115
Swing riots, 154
Tarika-i-Muhammadiya, 206,209,211
Tarikh-i-Ajeeb (Thanesri), 188, 199-202
Tarikh-i-Port Blair (Thanesri and Prothero),
188,191-192,199-200
tauhid-i-ilahiy 210
Tawarikh-i-Ajaib (Thanesri), xxvi, 188,
191-192,196
Taylor, Philip Meadows, 152,156
telegraphic communication, xxi
1850s, 2
Bengali book on, 68-69
Indian telegraph, 69-72
private messages, breakdown of, 71
regional breakdown o f messages, 71
regular business correspondents using, 70
rumours, issues with, 76-77
secrecy issues, 75-76
transportation issues, 74-75
uprisings o f 1857 and, 72-77
Terentiev, M., 127
Thanesri, Maulana Jafer, 188
biography o f Syed Ahmed Shahid, 206,
208-212
in British administration, 206-208
challenging colonial knowledge, 208-212
civilisation for Andamans and culture for
mulkt 199-205
concern for social class, 203
historiographical location o f the
argument, 189-190
homeland (mulk), idea of, 190
‘rule o f law* and the territorial and
spiritual framing, 192-195
travel and the political profile, 195-199
knowledge o f African slaves, 202
linguistic skills, 206
politics, 205-206,208
profile of, 191-192
proto-nationalism, sense of, 196-197,208
views on people o f colour (siyapoost), 203
thugs and criminal communities, 156-158,
160
aspirations of, 161
British operations against, 157
distribution o f chapattis, 158
Tipperary Militia, 98,104,114
Tope, Tantya, 131,151,156
Trevelyan, George, 76-77
Trinidad
as British ‘sugar colony’, xxv
as destination o f labour emigration, 179
Tula Singh, Rao Raja, xxii, 127-131
Ulsterman (Catholic newspaper), xxiv, 106,
108-111,113
Um die Weltherrschaft (Retcliffe), 152
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), 48
villages in conflict zone, 170-174
British retribution against, 171-172
effects o f mutiny on, 171
voluntary migrants, 178
wages, rates of, 178,181
Wahabi Movement, xxvi, 191, 195,208
Waldeck, Benedict, 153
Walter, John, 20
Wandering Jew (1844^1845), 157, 160
Webb, Thomas Ebenezer, 45-54
West Indies Emigration Agent, 181
White, John Davis, 98,113
 Index 225

Whittier, John Greenleaf, xx, 47-48,53, Wroughton, T.J., 171

55-58 Wynyard,W., 171
Why is France Arming So Largely? India
Threatened! (1861), 137 yogis, 159
Wife and the Ward, The (1859), 153
Wiseman, Cardinal, 108-109, 111 zamindars, 171-172,176,191,206,211
\