Alfred Lyall: A Writer of the Known and the Knowable

Abstract

The next two chapters will concern themselves principally with the ‘Mutiny’ correspondence of Alfred Lyall. In this chapter, it will be argued not only that Lyall’s perception of the question of Muslim ‘conspiracy’ during the events of 1857–59 was a typical product of his generation of ICS officers. But that the development from the intemperate language of the besieged young official of the correspondence to the judicious prose of the senior elder statesman may be taken, in regard to his descriptions of Indian Muslims, as symptomatic of that generation. In this respect, Lyall’s later reputation for reasonable analyses of Indian society casts a useful retrospective light on his characterisations of Indian Muslims in 1857. Since his views formed on this subject during the ‘Mutiny’ ‘remained with him to the end of his life’, the lurid rhetoric of the correspondence may well conceal a fundamental framework for his own mature considerations on the Muslim constituency of Indian society.1 But they would also seem to indicate a similar consistency of investments and assumptions by his later, approving contemporaries as well. Following on from the reflections made here on his later reputation, this point will be taken up again in detail in Chapter 11 through situating those essays as part of a broader progression in Anglo-Indian discourse from ‘Mutiny’ to ‘Wahabi conspiracy’. In order to further argue their relevance to a wider spectrum of Anglo-Indian opinion in 1857, Chapters 7 and 8 will carry forward some of the conclusions derived from Lyall’s ‘Mutiny’ correspondence into other official accounts of the period.