19th century AD

Past & Present, Feb, 1994 by Barbara English, Rudrangshu Mukherjee

The best-known incident of the "Indian Mutiny" or "First Freedom Struggle" of 1857 was the massacre of Europeans at Kanpur -- or, as the Victorians invariably called it, Cawnpore. There were three interrelated phases of killing. The outnumbered and ill-equipped garrison of about a thousand Europeans (half were women or children), besieged at Cawnpore in June 1857, surrendered on the promise of a safe passage and boats to take the survivors to Allahabad.(1) After the Europeans had left their defences and had begun to board the boats at Satichaura Ghat on the Ganges, they were ambushed, and the boats were set on fire. Of approximately four hundred and fifty men, women and children at the ghat, more than half were killed in and around the boats on 27 June. Later the same day the surviving men were shot on the river bank. The remaining members of the garrison, about two hundred women and children, were taken back to the town and imprisoned in a building called the Bibighur, and there, on 15 July, as a relief column approached Cawnpore, those that had not already died were cut to pieces and, dead or dying, were thrown into a well. From the prisoners in the Bibighur there were no survivors. The outline of the story is clear; the detail, because of the difficulty in obtaining and verifying evidence, has always been blurred.(2)

In 1984 Rudrangshu Mukherjee published a history of the 1857 revolt in the kingdom of Oudh, of which Cawnpore had formerly been a part.(3) His book contained no mention of the massacre, and it is to this that he has returned, in a recent article in Past and Present, which seeks to explain the killings in sociological terms.(4) Quoting Hegel, Gramsci, Foucault and, on the particular circumstances of 1857, Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, he sees the first two phases of the massacre (at the river) as a public spectacle of total communal involvement "when a body politic struggled to recover its totality by destroying the body of its dominant other", while the third phase (at the Bibighur) was the secret and criminal act of the rebel leadership.(5) The killings were based, his argument continues, on two different codes of violence, the code of peasant insurgency governing the first phases and the code of the criminal governing the last: "the criminal may be said to stand in the same relation to the insurgent as does what is conspiratorial (or secretive) to what is public (or open), or what is individualistic (or small group) to what is communal (or mass) in character".(6)

Mukherjee's approach connects the nature of British rule in India with the particular events at Cawnpore. He rightly emphasizes among the causes of the revolt the significance of British administrative and social reforms, provoking Indian anxieties about caste and religion.(7) Although armed revolt was endemic in British India, in 1857 the Indian troops of the Bengal army joined with the disinherited nobility and with landowners and peasants driven by economic pressures. To these well-documented grievances, however, Mukherjee has added the violence of British colonialism: "Violence, it must be emphasized, was an essential component of the British presence in India"; "British rule in India, as an autocracy, had meticulously constructed a monopoly of violence"; "Imperial rule in India could only perpetuate itself by a deployment of terror". The linkage between colonial rule and the Cawnpore massacre follows: "the terms of their violence [at Cawnpore] were thus derived from that very structure of power against which they had revolted".(8) More specifically:

It was an era of brutal floggings and of Indian women being forced to

become mistresses of white men; of recalcitrant elements being blown

from cannons so that their bodies were effaced and the onlookers covered

with blood and fragments of flesh. British rule thus visibly manifested

itself by marking the body of the Indian.(9) The use of "body", in this and other passages, presumably derives from Foucault.

Mukherjee draws from the alleged violence of British rule the rationale for the first and second stages of the Cawnpore massacre (but not the third). The earlier stages are described (it is not always easy to distinguish Mukherjee's own opinion from that of his sources) as "divine retribution"; "the work of God"; "this tremendous display of force and power"; "an entire society's war against a common enemy"; "an expression of an entire society's hatred and rejection of an alien order"; and, in a reworked quotation from Foucault, "the very excess of the violence employed in the massacre . . . was one of the elements of its glory".(10) Glory?

The present discussion takes four aspects of Mukherjee's evidence in turn: British brutality in India; British attitudes towards Indians; the atrocities committed by the British in 1857; and the total communal involvement in the Cawnpore massacre of 27 June.

Evidence of British violence in India in the 1850s can undoubtedly be found. Of the three specific aspects cited by Mukherjee, however, it might be noted that flogging of Indian soldiers in the Bengal army had ceased by the 1850s, while it was retained for British soldiers until 1881; in this as in other matters the Indian troops were more privileged than the European. Being blown apart by cannon was not a method of execution invented by the British, but was used by Indian powers such as the Marathas, and possibly by the Moghuls: it was practised by the rebel forces on fellow Indians within Cawnpore.(11) Of the recruitment of mistresses by force there are no official records.