Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India

Two. Anaesthesis and Violence: A Colonial History of Shock

73 two Anaesthesis and Violence A Colonial History of Shock The constantly encountered assertion that savages, blacks, Japanese are like animals, monkeys for example, is the key to the pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—“after all, it’s only an animal”—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is “only an animal,” because they could never fully believe this even of animals. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia “A Glorious Sight” You are looking at another photograph from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857–58 (Figure 2.1). The massive building confronting us and extending offframe to the left is still imposing in its ruin, and it takes a blink of the eye to discern the litter of shattered skulls, decomposing bodies, and skeletons—only one complete—that extends into the space where a camera and now we stand. The faces of the remaining native onlookers are virtually indistinguishable, the focus of their gaze ultimately indiscernible, though some appear to stare directly back at the lens of camera and eye. Only the horse, its face turned away from us, has moved and blurred. This photograph’s most common archival caption, The Interior of the Sikanderbagh after the Slaughter of 2,000 Rebels, describes what it shows; it is an image from Lucknow, taken not long after the Sepoy Revolt. In Figure 2.2 we see another image taken by the same camera, captioned in one collection The Ruins of Sammy House Surrounded by Scattered Bones of Sepoys Killed in Action.1 Again, the eye adjusts to see the traces of material and human destruction that survived the suppression of the Sepoy Revolt. These massacres were milestones in the British victory. To “see” the full extent and implications of this imaged event, we need to turn, as we tend to do, from the visual to the written, but only in order to return to anaesthesis and violence 74 the photographs in a new light and discern the nature of the (in)visibility of violence laid out before us. At the start of the revolt, Karl Marx, in his London exile, interrupted work on The Grundrisse to write for the New-York Daily Tribune on September 4, 1857: The outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India [are] only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-seated rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of Figure 2.2. Felice Beato, The Ruins of Sammy House Surrounded by Scattered Bones of Sepoys Killed in Action, 1858. Wellcome Library, London. anaesthesis and violence 75 historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.2 Marx refers here to the revolt (or “mutiny,” as the British were pleased to call it) that had started that May in Meerut. Its overdetermined causes included the discontent of some Indian landowners at losing estates to the British under the policies of Governor-General Dalhousie, the hyperexploitation of peasants through taxation and land “reforms,” and the unequal treatment and abuse of Sepoys (Indian recruits in the British Army) by British officers and enlisted men. One particular incident consistently cited in nineteenth-century sources as the spark for the hostilities was the issuance of the new, faster-firing Enfield .303 rifle to all Sepoy regiments. In the course of their nomadic wanderings, fakirs and sadhus apparently spread the rumor that the new cartridges were greased with the fat of pigs and cows, thus defiling Hindu and Muslim Sepoys alike.3 Refusing to use the new cartridges, the Sepoys took up the older discarded arms and aimed them at their British superiors. The major centers of resistance quickly spread throughout the north, from Bengal to Haryana, with Meerut, Cawnpore, Delhi, and Lucknow being the regional centers of the most sustained battles, which were initially won by the insurgents.4 In his writings on what...