The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (review)

Gautam Chakravarty's The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination comprehensively explores the generic crossovers that result from the intersections of literature and history in nineteenth-century literature of empire. He identifies accounts of the 1857 Indian Mutiny as a nodal point for understanding different phases of imperial ideology. Autobiographical accounts, contemporary histories by official and non-official observers, romances, and adventure fiction portray the British in India as triumphal, invincible, racially superior, and always already in control of the colony and its populations. Chakravarty introduces readers to unknown literary texts and argues that they constitute a significant archive; the volume also contributes to a new intellectual history of empire that delves into the complex administrative and bureaucratic concerns usually perceived as the monolith of "official ideology."

Tracking the transformation of chronicle into history, Chakravarty points out that "the spectre of guilt [for colonialism] returns with the trauma of the rebellion" (46) in official accounts such as Charles Ball's History of the Indian Mutiny (c. 1859), while it is entirely absent from popular accounts that reveled in the lurid and ultimately unsubstantiated accounts of murder, rape, and slaughter of British subjects by rebellious Indian sepoys. Chakravarty reveals that it was from the "hysterical popular media that counter- insurgency gathered energy and momentum" (40). In following the "aetiology of resistance" Chakravarty is at his most dense and most astute (58). He wrings complex readings of nationalist and colonial ideology from Vir Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence (1909) and J. W. Kaye's monumental three-volume The History of the Sepoy War in India (1864–76). He argues that Savarkar's text does not just express nationalist resistance to imperialism in its celebration of the rebellious sepoys, but "is also suggestive of a late nationalism swinging, sometimes erratically, between Eurocentric republicanism, and precolonial forms of political and social being" (53). Chakravarty points to similar elisions in the work of Kaye, presenting its depiction of "oriental" corruption, repression, and bankruptcy as the backdrop against which efficient British rule was justified. Even though Kaye criticizes British interference in the customary rights of the native aristocracy, his "criticism...is confined only to the reform of property and polity, while Christianity, English education and social reforms are an unambiguous good" (69). Kaye is thus able to ascribe both the sepoy insurgency and its ultimate containment to the superiority of English administration and its liberal reform of Indian society.

The last three chapters of Chakravarty's book study Mutiny novels. Following templates provided by adventure fiction, these novels generated idioms such as "armed fortitude" and "armed pacification" (78). Chakravarty establishes the hybridity of this genre in which "the historical novel and the colonial adventure novel, romantic orientalism, historiography and the pictorial cultivation of the oriental picturesque intersect" (92). Mutiny fiction progresses from an immersion in Anglo-India to "the text of India," "the dense texture of a life-world that at once justified yet resisted British advance" (112). H. C. Irwin's fictional With Sword and Pen (1904) follows the historical record closely, but it also "garnish[es]...the official gaze" by presenting the British as self-possessed and in control even in the worst moments of the Mutiny (130). This is in stark contrast to William Edward's memoir Personal Adventures during the Indian Rebellion (1858), which portrays vividly the fear, uncertainty, and helplessness of the besieged British officers.

Chakravarty expands on the compensatory functions of Mutiny fiction in his last two chapters, showing how fictional accounts of the Mutiny constructed India as a field of chivalric actions, dashing rescues, and swashbuckling victories. Such accounts allowed the middle classes to discover "a sonorous self-importance" in the archaic literary idiom of a feudal-aristocratic identity (155). This self-importance becomes full-blown, overweening imperial confidence in later novels where empire bases its strength on information about and surveillance of indigenous spaces such as the bazaar, the brothel, the temple, the...