Jenny Sharpe, ‘The Unspeakable Limits of Rape’, in Genders, 10 (Spring 1991), pp.25-46* [various passages].

[...]

‘Upon retreating from Cawnpore before an approaching British army, the Hindu rebel leader Nana Sahib ordered that his two hundred hostages, all of them women and children, be executed. The British army subsequently preserved Bibighar (the house in which the women were killed) with its dried blood and rotting remains as a kind of museum for passing troops to visit. Locks of hair from the dead women’s heads were carried off as mementos and passed from hand to hand as the fetish objects of an erotic nightmare. Thus began the mythic invention of the dying women’s torments, as soldiers covered the walls with bloody inscriptions in the hands of the ‘ladies’ directing their men to avenge their horrible deaths. Nana Sahib has since been vilified in colonial historiography for having committed the unforgivable crime of desecrating English womanhood. Barr exhibits a predictable understanding of the Cawnpore massacre when she writes that there, ‘one of the most revered of Victorian institutions, the English Lady, was slaughtered, defiled and brought low’. The occurrence of even one massacre such as Cawnpore endowed all the tales of terror with their reality effect. British magistrates who were entrusted with investigating the stories, however, could find no evidence of systematic mutilation, rape and torture at Cawnpore or anyplace else.’ (228.)

Some English readers did question the validity of the reports, while others, ,more sympathetic to the plight of the rebels, protested the brutal methods used for quelling the uprisings. [See also ftn. 26: It is perhaps worth noting that the Irish supported the Sepoys and criticised the British army for its attacks on the Indian peasantry. The London Times makes a point of expressing its disapproval of the “foolish fanatics in Ireland who write Sepoy sentences, and paste Sepoy placards on walls and gate-posts, calling upon Ireland to awake, and rise up, and “give 3 cheers for old Ireland, and 3 more for the Sepoys.” (8 Nov. 1857.)

Karl Marx, reporting for the New York Daily Tribune, pointed out that the story came from a “cowardly parson residing at Bangalore, Mysore, more than a thousand miles, as the bird flies, distant from the scene of the action.’ The clergyman’s letter as has also been identified as fictitious in an 1858 publication representing the attempt of one Edward Lecky to provide a “credible history” to the rebellions. Variations on the basic structure of, in this case, an invented story - the humiliation, sexual assault, torture and death of English women - recur again and again in Mutiny accounts. Its plotting belongs to a discourse of rape, a specifically sexual form of violence which has as its aim the appropriation of women as “the sex”. This appropriation takes place through the objectification of women as sexualised, eroticised and ravaged bodies.’ (229.)

When he began writing A Passage to India after a visit to India in 1913, Forster conceived of its plot as an illicit romance between an Indian man and an English woman. By the time he completed the novel after a second trip in 1921, the story of an interracial love mired in cultural difference was out of step with the events and tensions between a dissenting native population and a defensive European minority. The India of the 1920s, with its demonstrations, general strikes and civil disturbances, reminded the ruling white minority of those earlier crisis-ridden years of 1857-58. One event that especially revived the Mutiny memory was the 1919 massacre at Amritsar, where General Dyer ordered his men to fire on unarmed protesters attending a banned meeting. Approximately five hundred Indian men, women and children were killed and fifteen hundred wounded. The name of Amritsar was for Indians synonymous with massacre in the same way that “Cawnpore” resonated with the murder of innocents with the Anglo-Indian community. (234)

*Rep. in Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman, ed., & intro., Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader Publisher (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993), pp.221-43. [Coleraine South JV51.C73].

ENG312C2 - University of Ulster