Abstract
Between 1857 and the early twentieth-century Coronation Durbars held in Delhi, India, the events of the Indian Uprising were commemorated through poems, short stories, novels, political cartoons, histories, survival stories, newspaper articles, letters to the editor, souvenirs, and travelogues. British success during the Uprising was also celebrated during the durbars when spectators watched Indian men who had remained loyal to Britain march during the official proceedings. This recognition and remembrance of one of the most prominent instances of anti-colonial sentiment in the subcontinent at a Coronation celebration may seem strange because of the loss of both British and Indian lives and the stress it placed on the colonial government. Despite this conflict, the commemoration through imperial propaganda developed historical memories for Britons that reminded white imperial subjects of the importance of loyalty to the empire and the role they served in protecting its continuity.
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Notes
- 1.
The government commissioned artist Mortimer Menpes to paint pictures of the durbar. Dorothy, his wife, wrote the text that accompanied these paintings in their illustrated work The Durbar.
- 2.
Bernard Cohn (1983) explains that durbars were first used by the ancient Mughal rulers to recognize the relationship between a ruler and his subjects. The two parties exchanged gifts, and the exchange represented the loyalty that each party held to the other and established a hierarchy among the ruler’s subjects. Though Mughal durbars established hierarchies, the rulers also pledged loyalty to their subjects. As the durbar evolved into a British colonial institution, the reciprocity between the British ruler and the Indian subject dissipated.
- 3.
Despite the fact that these events provide historians with easy to enumerate beginnings of the Uprising, the circumstances that caused the rebellion were diverse and considerably further ranging than gun cartridges greased with animal fat. The increasing Westernization of princely states and customs, such as an influx of Christian missionaries and legal rulings over religious customs like suttee, growing numbers of Britons in the subcontinent, and increased control over princely states—whether through puppet leaders or direct imperial control—all contributed to growing unease and discontentment in the subcontinent; see Wilson (2016).
- 4.
- 5.
I use the term “Anglo-Indian” in its historical context. Here, Anglo-Indian refers to a person of British heritage who had lived in or was raised in India. As the twentieth century progressed, Anglo-Indian was used to refer to a person of both British and Indian descent.
- 6.
To maintain consistency with the historical documents, this chapter uses the nineteenth-century spellings of Cawnpore (Kanpur) and Cashmere (Kashmir).
- 7.
That the Union Jack was never lowered at the Residency is an important reminder of the role that the Residency played during the Uprising. In 1857, Lucknow was under siege for four months, during which a number of British women and children survived in the Residency. These women and children, alongside the British soldiers stationed outside the city, held Lucknow—contrasting it with Nana Sahib’s destruction of the encampments at nearby Cawnpore. The never-lowered Union Jack represented the consistency of power.
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Nielsen, D. (2020). Remembering the 1857 Indian Uprising in Civic Celebrations. In: Grenier, K., Mushal, A. (eds) Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_10
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