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Rudyard Kipling’s Kim – that iconic novel of the Raj – first appeared as a serial in McClure’s Magazine in December 1900, a month before the death of Queen Victoria. At this point, the British Empire was arguably at its strongest.
The event that extended Victoria’s reign to India was the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, now referred to as the Indian Uprising or the Great Rebellion. After this, British rule in India passed from the East India Company to the British Crown.
Most references to the events of 1857-58 in Kim come from an old Indian villager, “who had served the [British] government in the days of the Mutiny as a native officer…”
He goes on to describe his loyal service for the Company army: “Nine wounds I bear; a medal and four clasps and the medal of an Order, for my captains, who are now generals, remembered me when the Kaisar-i-Hind had accomplished fifty years of her reign…”
Kaisar-i-Hind was the title Queen Victoria assumed as she was proclaimed the Empress of India in 1877. The queen marked the golden jubilee of her reign in 1887, at an event in which several Indian princes and soldiers participated.
Exactly a century after Kim, a young British author, born to a Jamaican mother and an English father, debuted with her bestselling novel White Teeth (2000), which turns 25 this year. By the time the English-speaking world woke up to Zadie Smith, the British Raj was, to quote Charles Dickens, as “dead as a doornail”.
Even the English men’s cricket team, for long a symbol of the Raj, had a captain who was born in Madras (now Chennai) and had an Indian father.
Yet, the “Mutiny” continued to haunt the multicultural Britons of White Teeth, in which a Bangladeshi immigrant named Samad Iqbal, who had fought for the British Indian Army in World War II, claims to be a great grandson of Mangal Pande, a soldier in the Company army often credited with instigating the rebellion of 1857.
The empire was instrumental in Britain’s rise as a modern nation state and, in the history of the British Empire, there are few events that left a mark as lasting as the Mutiny of 1857, as reflected in English fiction from Kipling to Zadie Smith. The “Mutiny”, in the shared histories of Britain and India, is today an enduring symbol of the horrors of colonialism for a contemporary Britain grappling with immigration from former colonies such as India.
Sitting in a castle in Scotland, a small piece of mutiny-era Lucknow bears the weight of this shared history.
A Scottish regiment
Trophies of the British triumph over the Indian “mutineers” occupy pride of place at the Regimental Museum of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, deep inside one of the several grey stone buildings of the Stirling Castle in Scotland. The Highlanders were a Scottish regiment that became famous as “The Thin Red Line” in 1854 during the Crimean War. Journalist WH Russell, who gave them this epithet, was also present in India as a correspondent of the Times during the latter stages of the Mutiny.
The Highlanders were instrumental in the British campaigns during the Indian Uprising, playing a major role in the Siege of Lucknow, when the British Residency there and its British and Indian inhabitants were besieged for several months by the sepoys. The siege began in June 1857, British reinforcements arrived in September, but fighting continued till the Residency was finally evacuated in November 1857.
The siege later inspired Alfred Tennyson’s 1879 poem The Defence of Lucknow, which also features the Highlanders.
The Regimental Museum of the Highlanders houses several exhibits from the siege as symbols of their military triumph. These include gallantry medals such as the Victoria Cross awarded for the “Relief of Lucknow”, memoirs by soldiers who survived, military uniforms, paintings of British attacks and weaponry such as bayonets and swords. One of the exhibits is a letter by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (who wrote Treasure Island and created Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) to Sergeant Forbes Mitchell expressing his sympathy and pride after reading the Sergeant’s memoir on the Mutiny.
The exhibits represent the power of British arms but are not beyond the troubling questions of the violence and exploitation experienced by the subjects of the Raj. How should an army acknowledge the effects and the implications of its actions? Can it commemorate its past in terms other than valour, sacrifice and an implied antipathy against the “enemy”?
Does it have an obligation to justify its actions, particularly when it fights for an empire – which, by its very nature, is an exploitative institution? In an age when war is consumed on prime-time television, how does an army, and more importantly, a society, make peace with war?
In their 2018 book, East India Company at Home, 1757-1857, historians Margot Finn and Kate Smith argue that British material culture and even its built environment were profoundly influenced by objects and designs that originated in the colonies. This took place within a larger network of the exchange of people and objects in the wake of imperialism.
The Stirling Castle reflects this due to its association with the English royal family, and can be considered a version of the English country house, which refers to mansions owned by aristocratic families in the English countryside. At the same time, the exhibits in the castle are material symbols of centuries of British political, military, cultural and commercial involvement through its empire in India.
In Stirling, perhaps the most poignant of these symbols of the Uprising is a small piece of masonry from the Lucknow Residency kept beside a musket ball.
While other objects such as uniforms, paintings and memoirs are attributed to individuals (the museum even has a flag seized from the “rebels”), there is a haunting sense of emptiness, of the ruins of war, in that pale red fragment of a building (considerably faded with time) and the small black sphere, almost like a pebble, which represents many others like it that had killed hundreds of British and Indians alike.
It is a fragment of Lucknow, a centre of Awadhi culture, which lives on behind a glass enclosure in a castle that was itself the site of centuries of bloody warfare between the Scots and the English.
Sunset of the empire
What conventional British history has termed the “Sepoy Mutiny” has for long been known to Indians as the “Indian Uprising” and even as an early struggle for independence.
Another layer to this is that exhibits in Stirling are part of the collections of the British Army, situated in Scotland, which continues to debate if it wants independence from Britain.
Museums across Britain are becoming increasingly conscious of the necessity of acknowledging uncomfortable aspects of British history such as slavery and imperialism. The Hunterian Museum, which is a part of the University of Glasgow, and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, also in Glasgow, highlight the contribution of slavery and colonialism in the establishment of these institutions.
No longer an empire on which the sun never sets, contemporary Britain (and the United Kingdom) finds itself having to acknowledge the violence that built the Raj at a time when 16% of the UK’s population was born abroad.
Even during the Mutiny, the Calcutta Review (a leading Anglo-Indian periodical) realised that the Siege of Lucknow would go down in history as a significant event, as much for the bloodshed as for its implications for the future of both Britain and India: “when much that seems brightest to us has been blotted by time out of the book of history, the page which contains the defence of Lucknow will remain as clear as ever.”
The author wishes to thank the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals for a travel grant, which allowed him to visit the UK. He also thanks Rod Mackenzie, the curator of the Argylls Museum, for permission to use the image of the exhibit.
Atul V Nair is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad. He works on Anglo-Indian periodicals of the long 19th century.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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