War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma by Christopher Herbert

Author:Christopher Herbert
Format: epub

TREVELYAN'S HOMERIC EPIC

Ball and Martin pursue drastically different agendas in their Mutiny histories, but each author registers the shock of 1857 in the form of a kind of textual neurosis that powerfully affects his work at the level of style and rhetoric. In Ball’s case, this effect of emotional instability resides in the almost tongue-tied denunciations of sepoy cruelty that seem in fact symptomatic of the author’s painfully unresolved ambivalence about the cruelties of the British; in Martin’s, it manifests itself in the reckless virulence of his heretical critique of British imperialism and British war policy, a critique that seems to reflect his deeply conflicted loyalty to his own British identity. The two works imply from opposed polemical angles that the Indian upheaval was too acutely traumatic, and, a year or so afterward, too fresh in memory, to be accessible to narration in balanced, disinterestedly explanatory historiographical prose.¹⁸ Sir George Trevelyan’s famous monograph Cawnpore (1865) seems at least initially to inaugurate a new era of historical studies of the Mutiny. Trevelyan tells the story of the three-week siege of the British garrison at Cawnpore, some one thousand souls, by mutinous sepoys under the command of Nana Sahib; the ambush and massacre of the survivors, who had surrendered under a pledge of safe passage down the Ganges from the Sati Chowra ghat (landing place); the ordeal (from which four men somehow emerged alive) undergone by those aboard a couple of boats that managed to escape the ambush; the slaughter in the Bibighar two weeks later of two hundred women and children captives; and the retaking of the city by the British the next day. The book is as sleekly and elegantly organized, and as lucidly written, as Ball’s is tortuously impacted, amorphous, repetitious, and self-contradicting. The sometimes half-pornographic luridness that gave the works of the other two historians their aura of hysteria and horror has dropped away. Moreover, Trevelyan seems orthodox and, from a Victorian point of view, sanely respectable in his interpretive outlook. His narration of the Cawnpore drama seems securely anchored in the official mythology of British valor and projects a view of British India that allows no room for painful doubt about the imperial enterprise and its sustaining ideology.

Much of this system of mutually reinforcing effects comes from Trevelyan’s decision to frame his account of the most notorious episode of the war not as a political or, as it were, historical study (in the sense of a study aimed at deciphering deep historical causes) but as a moral parable, with the clarity and abstractness of thematic pattern dictated by such an intent. The dense facticity and the layered massing of sometimes dissonant testimony that mark Ball’s and Martin’s books have no place in Trevelyan’s scheme. He offers just enough discussion of underlying historical causes of the rebellion and of Indian hatred of British rule to furnish a prologue to his drama depicting “the most terrible tragedy of our age” (3), “the great disaster of our race” (9). He

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.