Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857 (review)

Given the imprint that the events of 1857 and 1858 left on the Victorian imagination, it’s not entirely surprising that studies of the period have focused almost exclusively on English reactions to the Indian Mutiny. And while scholars may be aware of the ripple effect that news, say, of the siege at Cawnpore had on far-flung observers of the Raj, even students of the uprising itself may be astonished to learn of the breadth and depth of response to it in non-English-speaking Europe. This collection features eighteen essays that canvass responses from France to Italy to Bulgaria, from Hungary to Spain to Czechoslovakia. Taken together, they offer an encyclopedia of views on 1857, reminding us what a lightning rod the Mutiny was for contemporaries of all political stripes. Shaswati Mazumdar and her collaborators—most of whom work in European universities or in departments of European literature—make the case that English narratives about the sepoys’ insurgency may have been self-referential but were hardly self-contained. Thanks to the tentacled apparatus of a precocious Anglo-global media, these narratives circulated widely, sponsoring counter-narratives and discursive challenges to both English accounts and British colonial power. As the Hungarian newspaper Pesti Napló observed just short of a decade after the tumult of 1848, “a suppressed nation never kisses the hand of an alien who annihilates his freedom . . . whoever that alien is” (qtd. in Mazumdar 94). The vehemence of this sentiment suggests what a palimpsest the Mutiny was for revolutionaries and their critics in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.

The book is divided in two parts, with the first, “News and Views,” focused on the ways in which newspapers covered the Mutiny. Hardly any European papers had foreign correspondents; most articles and editorials relied on the English press for details as events unfolded. This did not prevent German, Italian, and French writers from lambasting British rule and, in some cases, rejoicing in British setbacks. Some newspapers attacked East India Company rule; others prophesied the downfall of the whole British Empire; still others blamed the Mutiny on the Britons’ inability to inculcate the natives with Christian values. While contributors to Mazumdar’s volume are eager to catalogue European reactions, they also aim to track what Nicola Firth, in her essay on French counter-narratives, calls “the semantic metamorphosis” that terms such as mutiny and revolution underwent in the course of European newspaper coverage (53). The latter term carried considerable cultural baggage, and events in India were often absorbed into French understandings of insurrection and its cognates. Some of these usages were routed through French nostalgia for its own Indian Empire, though Firth does not speculate as to the relationship of these discourses, if any, to the French Algerian project (which began in 1830). In pre-unification Italy, democrats saw hope and promise in the Mutiny, while “the conservative press saw the revolt as an opportunity to denounce and delegitimize British . . . expansionism . . . and British moral guidance to those European patriots who were trying to subvert and overthrow the old monarchic regimes” (64). In Spain, the journalist Luis Estrada—who had very little actual news about India on which to draw—routed his commentaries through his knowledge of Spanish America, drawing attention to Spain’s own declining role as an imperial power in the process. In Czech representations of the Mutiny, meanwhile, the homologies worked differently. Coming as it did in the wake of failed Czech uprisings against the Hapsburgs in 1848, the sepoy rebellion enhanced the notion that the Czechs were the Indians of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Part two, “Fact and Fiction,” explores the plenitude of novels by Europeans that sought to capture various Mutiny battle scenes and characters. Nana Sahib was a recurrent figure. Not one but two essays argue that Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo had his origins in “Prince Dakkar,” an avatar of the Nana himself. Herrmann Ottomar Friedrich Goedesche—writing under the pseudonym...