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[h=2]The 1857 Kanpur Massacres[/h]
http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/mukherjee-1998-spectre-of-violence.html
More at the link:Mukherjee's thesis, which appears to have escaped Indian historiography so far, is to establish the role of violence in establishing the British superiority of the Indian native. The systematic violence exhibited while repelling the mutiny is shown by Mukherjee to be a reaction to the audacity of the native to overturn this "monopoly on violence". He argues that the violence exhibited by the insurgents during the mutiny was cut from the same cloth, and was no less horrific than the spectacle of forty live men being blown off from cannon, their flesh and bones spreading on the observers. .
Mukherjee highlights the violent methods by which Britishers (East India Company) had imposed its dominance on the peasantry, hanging any suspected criminal from the nearest tree, forcing native women into sexual subservience, and redistributing large tracts of ancestral property based on revenue assessments that were often ill-informed, harsh and unbalanced.
Every native that appeared in sight was shot down without question, and in the morning Colonel Neill sent out parties of regiment . . . and burned all the villages near where the ruins of our bungalows stood, and hung every native that they could catch, on the trees that lined the road. Another party of soldiers penetrated in to the native city and set fire to it, whilst volley after volley of grape and canister was poured into the fugitives as they fled from their burning houses.though British historians, including http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/mukherjee-1998-spectre-of-violence.html#BEa responsehttp://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/mukherjee-1998-spectre-of-violence.html#BE by Barbara English to anearlier paper by Mukherjee, attempt to portray Neill and some others asoutliers, Mukherjee claims that they were the mainstream, and far from theexception.Surprisingly, there has not been much written on the violence committed byathe British state on its Indian subjects. It is not that historians wereunaware of the violence - indeed,this underlying violence appears between the lines as the unspokenassumption of colonial historiography, taken as a justified step againstthe dark immoral forces of thuggery and lawlessness. This continued atradition. The driving compulsion behind these acts was a sense ofdifference, the backwardness of the natives, requiring the civilizingmission of colonialism (see Thomas Metcalf, http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/metcalf-1995_ideologies-of-rajIdeologies of the Rajhttp://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/metcalf-1995_ideologies-of-raj, Newcambridge history of India v.III.4, 1995). Brutal aspects of despotic ruleand wealth generation by force are largely suppressed or presented aspart of the civilizing impulse or as justifiable acts of retribution.In the colonial myth that aligns such acts with a national ideology steepedin the ideas of nationalism and liberalism, the heroic acts of thecolonizers are constantly being undermined by the dark intrigues of thenatives. Whereas violence against the natives is routine, violence againstthe ruling class calls forth the strongest emotion. Particularly whencomparatively insignificant numbers of Britishers are killed or attacked,particularly if it is the women whose honour have to be safeguarded,it becomes a source of the fiercest indignation: can pen describe the nameless horrors of the time—gently nurtured ladies outraged and slain before the eyes of their husbands, children and helpless infants slaughtered — a very Golgotha of butchery, as all know who have read of the Well of Cawnpore? [Griffiths and Yonge, A Narrative of the Siege of Delhi]Mukherjee's argument is that in the colonial narrative, violence against thenatives is never a concern, and the focus is exclusively on the violenceagainst the perpetrators of systemic violence, the ruling British.A second objective of the work is to highlight the inadequacy of evidenceunderlying colonial narrative of events in Kanpur. But this part of thestory is hard to extract from his ineffective writing style.[h=4]Abysmal writing[/h]
Unfortunately the objective is to array a series of arguments and detailedanalysis, without much regard to the story. The dense, bristling argumentsdefeat any attempts to follow the story (even of the historiography) bythe reader. The book is impossible to "read" in any commonly understoodsense of the term. In the middle of the action, he will suddenly withdrawto pontificate on Hegel and Foucault, leaving the reader stranded as towhat happened next.It's as if the book was written for those who already know the mainlinenarrative, only the extras need to be given.For example, we find on p.68 the first mention of MowbrayThompson, who was part of the first two boats that got away; down river he swam to the shore and was rescued by a landed magnate".Disconcertingly, nothing appears earlier about two boats being able to getaway. Also, we are left wondering what happened to others on these boats.Much later, on an insignificant aside, you find that the British claimed"that these two boats were chased and most were shot down." Was theBritish claim impugned or not? You never find out. You are left wallowingin the ganges mud on these and many other questions.Revisionist historiography is not a new enterprise. I can see John Keegantaking the same narratives, and skewering mercilessly the substance-lessromanticism and uniformity and implausibility of the stories (seehttp://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/keegan-1976-face-of-battleThe face of battlehttp://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/keegan-1976-face-of-battle) while still weaving a fascinating narrative.Mukherjee is good in his trench-work, but one wishes the narrative wasstated with greater clarity...[h=3]History[/h]
In the early months of the rebellion at Kanpur, nearly four hundred Britisherswere killed by the Indian rebels. This act was viewed with extreme horrorby the British, who in the words of Mukherjee and other subaltern authorslike Ranajit Guha, were accustomed to a monopoly on violence as the rulingpower. Earlier events such as the Black Well of Calcutta (which appears tohave been an exaggerated account), had been similarly melodramatized. To theBritish mind, these incidents related to violence against a handful ofbritish, were the focal point of the mutiny narrative, and a large body ofBritish historiography focused on this episode. Gautam Chakravarty, in hishttp://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/chakravarty-2005-indian-mutiny-britishThe Indian mutiny and the British imaginationhttp://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/chakravarty-2005-indian-mutiny-british (2005), demonstrates thatwith 70 odd full-length novels dealing with the mutiny (from 1859 to 1985),the mutiny fired the imagination of the British public like no other event of19th century imperial expansion.
However, in an earlier book on the mutiny, _Awadh in Revolt 1857-1858: AStudy of Popular Resistance_, Mukherjee completely ignored the episode atKanpur. This was not viewed kindly by the traditionalists, as seen in this1991 response from Barbara English: 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. ... In 1984 Rudrangshu Mukherjee published a history of the 1857 revolt in the kingdom of Oudh, of which Cawnpore had formerly been a part. His book contained no mention of the massacre... [But Mukherjee points out that at the very outset of _Awadh in Revolt_ he had said he was going to focus on the Lucknow region. ]One of the questions that Mukherjee seeks to unravel in this book isprecisely how this incident came to become the "best-known". He analyzesthe various descriptions, the process of collecting evidence, uncoveringseveral contradictions, particularly regarding the massacre at Satichauraghat. Then he traces the process of English narrative construction,analyzes three texts in detail, and then moves on to the several earlierIndian histories.Thus, while his primary aim is historiographical, he also seeks to underlinethe extreme violence prevalent in the British rule. The violenceperpetrated by the Indians, while treacherous and ghastly, is on a farsmaller scale compared to the violence inflicted by the state. This view issomewhat obscured in the book by the larger attempt to analyze thehistoriography of the event. In a 1990 [past.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/citation/128/1/92|paper] by Mukherjee, he writes: British rule in India, as an autocracy, had meticulously constructed a monopoly of violence. .... 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.
http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/mukherjee-1998-spectre-of-violence.html
