Insurgent Empire

Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

Priyamvada Gopal

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781784784140
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. The possibility of reverse influence has been largely overlooked. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom and who could be free. Insurgent Empire examines dissent over the question of empire in Britain and shows how it was influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. It also shows how a pivotal role in fomenting dissent was played by anti-colonial campaigners based in London at the heart of the empire.

PART I

CRISES AND
CONNECTIONS

1

The Spirit of the Sepoy Host:
The 1857 Uprising in India and
Early British Critics of Empire

Our rule has been that of the robber and the bandit and we are suffering from the natural result – insurrection.

Malcolm Lewin, Judge in the East India Company

Despite the enduring myth of a nineteenth-century Pax Britannica, British rule in India and across the empire was punctuated by revolts, rebellions, insurrection and instability. So endemic were such challenges to British imperial rule that the events of the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857 have been described as ‘unique only in their scale’.

Andrea Major and Crispin Bates, Mutiny at the Margins

In 1925, nearly three-quarters of a century after the event, the writer Edward Thompson addressed the topic of what he called ‘Indian irreconcilability’ – the ‘unsatisfied, embittered, troublesome’ attitude that marred Britain’s relationship with the jewel in the imperial crown.¹ Like almost any other colonial writer, Thompson was confirmed in his belief that British rule had done India a great deal of good. Yet it was impossible to deny that in that country the British name aroused a great deal of hatred, a ‘savage, set hatred’ that could only be accounted for through widespread popular memories which, at any time, could flare up again in the face of resurgent discontent with colonial rule in India.² What accounted for ‘the real wall, granite and immovable’, which the Englishman encountered in India?³ The answer, for Thompson, lay in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, a fountain that was ‘sending forth a steady flood of poisoned waters’:

This case, unfortunately, is that of the one episode where we were really guilty of the cruellest injustice on the greatest scale. If we desire to eliminate bitterness from our controversy with India, we certainly have to readjust our ideas of this episode – the Mutiny … Right at the back of the mind of many an Indian the Mutiny flits as he talks with an Englishman – an unavenged and unappeased ghost.⁴

While Thompson repeats the familiar colonial canard that ‘Indians are not historians’, adding for good measure that ‘they rarely show any critical ability’,⁵ he also notes that the English interpretation of the events of 1857 has had an unjust sway on history; no other significant episode had been ‘treated so uncritically or upon such one-sided and prejudged evidence’.⁶ He was largely right, of course, about the dominance of one-sided readings of the two-sided brutalities of 1857, and the powerful hold they exercised upon the British imagination well into the twentieth century. The vast majority of British accounts of the revolt in its aftermath were steeped in sanguinary patriotism, a sense of imperial destiny saved from peril. Public opinion was, we know, similarly shaped by retaliatory bloodlust and outrage, fuelled by a ceaseless raking up of Indian brutalities. Thompson, no ‘extreme’ critic of the imperial project as he repeatedly stresses, nonetheless reads the uprising as ‘another of the world’s great servile revolts’,⁷ on par with those in Demerara (1823) and Jamaica (1865), and one which drew an equally harsh retaliatory response that has never been subjected to critical historical scrutiny. For him, subsequent colonial severities were a consequence of this lamentable failure.

We know that Thompson was also correct about the overwhelmingly racialized British response to the 1857 uprising that told the story in the Empire’s favour. A ‘great crisis in our national history’, as one of its earliest and most famous historians put it, the uprising in 1857 produced, in the first instance, conflicted and diverse responses in Britain, often along party lines.⁸ Relatedly, there was plenty of criticism of the follies and failures of the rule of the East India Company, which of course ended after the uprising and the takeover of India by the Crown in 1858. There was also a substantial amount of public agonizing on causation – on what had gone wrong and whether the unexpected scale and bloodiness of the uprising spoke to a lethal failure to understand India and Indians. One consequence of the uprising – and the crisis of rule that it undoubtedly provoked – was a debate about how best to undertake and manage the project of empire in India so as to minimize the possibility of revolt. The sanguinary horrors routinely evoked by accounts of the ‘Mutiny’ were not generally warnings against imperial rule, but cautionary notations about its dangers. Jill Bender has noted that the uprising in India also came to constitute a master-narrative, providing ‘a model for understanding and responding to subsequent crises’.⁹ Explicit comparisons were made between, for instance, the rebels of Morant Bay eight years later, and the ‘treacherous’ sepoys of north India. It remains, then, an unavoidable starting point for any examination of nineteenth-century crises of rule and their implications for Britain.

Much of the historical scholarship on 1857 appears to agree that the moment ‘would mark the decisive turning away from an earlier liberal, reformist ethos that had furnished nineteenth-century empire its most salient moral justification’.¹⁰ The distinguished historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee, among others, has argued that one of the consequences of 1857 was that the ‘velvet glove of liberal rhetoric had to be abandoned for the mailed fist’.¹¹ Certainly, relations between British colonial representatives and Indian subjects on the whole manifested a hardening of racial, religious and cultural boundaries, with extreme otherness re-inscribed on the bodies of the ‘fanatical’ insurgents. In place of liberal policies, ‘the principle of complete non-interference in the traditional structure of Indian society’ would be enshrined alongside a clear racial hierarchy.¹² After the uprising was brutally crushed by early 1858, the British in India ‘were able to dictate a settlement from a position of unquestioned mastery, and to enforce their will upon a subdued and chastened people’.¹³ At the same time, not least for fear of further insurrection, they would, in the words of Queen Victoria’s 1858 Proclamation, ‘disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects’. Post-rebellion unease, Christine Bolt has argued, produced ‘a new awareness of the difficulties involved in understanding the Indian mind’.¹⁴

The ‘Indian’ or ‘native’ mind’ was of course at the very heart of the question of the future of British India, and relevant too to the more general question of how the multihued subjects of the Empire were to be dealt with. The liberal and humanitarian position – steeped in principles of paternalist tutelage or ‘improvement’ – was that Indians, while not exactly equal, could be educated into self-government, or at least the native elites could be. For others, the mistaken view of political liberals – ‘that all men were alike, entitled to identical rights and fit to be governed identically’ – was itself culpable of having inspired the revolt, and had to be decisively repudiated in the post-1857 era.¹⁵ There was, however, a third possibility, explored by a small number of thinkers, which came into view for a time. Reading the rebellion as a text, against the grain of discourses of counter-insurgency that dominated the British public sphere, this minority asked a different set of questions. What if neither the racial alterity touted by the hard-line approach nor the assimilative paternalism of the liberal tutelage model constituted the right response? Might there be a way to think about relations with India and its inhabitants that steered a course outside of this binary? For some in Britain, the rebellion presented itself as a text that necessarily asked for a different kind of reading, one that threw open other, more dialogical possibilities. If the dominant political shift, as Karuna Mantena has it, was from ‘a universalist to a culturalist stance’, those who undertook more self-reflexive and critical assessments of the British presence in India did not so much reject universalism as express their sense that the relationship between the universal and the particular was a complex one.¹⁶ Could it be that universals were not so much for export from Britain to its colonies as necessarily and already embedded in the particular? Moreover, what might Britain (or, more frequently, ‘England’) learn from, and how might it reconstitute itself in response to, the rebellion? In some of the most thoughtful metropolitan engagements with the rebellion, resistance was read as self-assertion, which opened up possibilities for a more reciprocal – and incipiently egalitarian – form of engagement with distant peoples who were making claims upon and against Britain. In these readings, Britain’s subjugated Indian subjects could neither be relegated to pure otherness, as they were in the absolutist conservative response, nor simply yoked to the project of reformist improvement, in the liberal mode. For dissident English writers like the Chartist Ernest Jones and the Positivist Richard Congreve, the rebellion prompted a rethinking of their own premises and manner of engagement with the non-European; they invited their readers to think through the possibility that the cultural-particular and the humanist-universal were not entirely at odds with each other. The text of insurgency, in other words, threw open the problematic of engaging with subjugated others with whom common ground might be forged without eliding differences. If, for the official mind, one consequence of the uprising of 1857 was that a professed universalism ‘easily gave way to harsh attitudes about the intractable differences among people, the inscrutability of other ways of life, and the ever-present potential for racial and cultural conflict’, for some of a more dissident bent, it opened up rather more dialogical possibilities.¹⁷ The native-in-revolt, as we shall see, was not always figured as inscrutable or irrational, but rather as staking claims upon a history they intended to make themselves, if in circumstances not of their own choosing. Partly in response, a small but distinct body of dissident discourse developed in Britain which sought to invoke a degree of sympathetic understanding for the rebellion, as well as a critical disposition towards the imperial project.

Beyond the Sepoy War

Since our interest is in how the events of 1857 in India shaped an emergent critique of empire within Britain, I will not devote much space here to discussing the uprising itself. An historical episode that has received a great deal of scholarly attention from the late nineteenth century onwards, the uprising continues to be revisited and debated in salutary ways.¹⁸ In a volume produced by the Indian Council to commemorate the 150th anniversary of those events in 2007, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya notes rightly that the literature on the subject is ‘dauntingly large’ and includes important new revisionist work examining formerly overlooked aspects such as gender, the role of tribal and Dalit communities, and its representations in popular culture, making use of Indian-language sources as well.¹⁹ Initially a point of contestation in British debates, it became clear that the insurgency was more than a military mutiny, and involved ‘considerable participation by the civilian population’, and diverse elements of that population.²⁰ It is also clear that a complex chain of causation extended well beyond the legendary ‘greased cartridges’ for the Enfield rifle, and indeed beyond religious identities and sentiments alone, even if those certainly played a determinate role. Our interest here is in how an understanding of causes and causality – and the predictable ferocity of the counterinsurgency – shaped dissent around the imperial question back in Britain.

The briefest of overviews then: the uprising – or the ‘Ghadar’ as it is known in Urdu – formally broke out on 10 May 1957. The ostensible ‘last-straw’ provocation for it has traditionally been attributed to the controversial cartridges for the new Enfield rifle, which had been provided to the native regiments of the East India Company’s army, greased, it was rumoured, with pig and cow fat – thereby violating the religious sensibilities of both Muslim and Hindu infantrymen. The iconic cartridges, as Jill Bender has noted, ‘provided a convenient explanation for the rebellion, one that did not openly challenge the legitimacy of British colonial control or validate Indian unrest’.²¹ Rumour itself, of course, played a key role in the fomenting of the uprising, often acting, as in the instance of Meerut, as the match which lit a dry haystack. There were manifold other problems which caused soldierly discontent, including poor pay, loss of allowances, and insistence on overseas service. We know that soldier violence, one element of the uprising of 1857, was not in itself unprecedented; a contemporary observer notes that there ‘had previously been several mutinies in the native army … but they had been suppressed with little difficulty’.²² Troubles had in fact been rumbling from February 1857 onwards when in May, the troops at Meerut rose against their officers, shot them dead, freed imprisoned fellow troopers and set off for Delhi. (One of the most famous figures associated with the rebellion, the infantryman Mangal Pandey, had already been executed on 29 March for firing at and wounding his commanding officer at his barracks near Calcutta.) Once the rebels reached and captured Delhi, they were joined by the 54th Bengal Native Infantry, which, ordered to fire at them, had refused to. Violence then spread across northern India into other cantonments as well as civilian areas, with government officers, telegraph lines, post offices, treasuries and local courts – the apparatus and infrastructure of colonial rule – unsurprisingly being targeted for destruction, in addition to books in English, maps and instruments.²³ As more than a dozen cantonments fell over that hot summer, hundreds of British officers and civilians perished in the rampage; their violent death...