Writing on the Indian Mutiny of 1857–59 has for some time been heavily influenced by anti-imperial agendas. The judgment that colonial power was irredeemably malignant, exploitative, and racist has become an established feature of the relevant historiography, and the most striking features of the British response to the Indian Mutiny are usually thought to include detestation of the natives, a determination to punish them, and the glorification of British heroism. According to Gautam Chakravarty's The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (2005), Victorian historians of the Mutiny were basically propagandists for the British empire.
Christopher Herbert explodes this impression of the “monolithic, always self-consistent nature of imperialism” and shows that Victorian responses to the Mutiny abounded with “inner contradictions” (5). The Mutiny did not simply reinforce racial arrogance and the British sense of national greatness. Instead, there was skepticism about British rule in India, shame about the mistreatment of Indians, and an idea that the latter had good reasons for wishing to throw off foreign domination. Herbert's study, based on a careful evaluation of novels, journalism, histories, correspondence, and memoirs, takes us deep into the Victorian psyche. It is a fascinating journey. Herbert offers detailed comment on a range of relatively neglected sources, and many better-known ones too, including Charles Ball's History of the Indian Mutiny (1859–60), which Herbert, unlike many historians, does not regard as an exemplar of the self-justifying imperialistic school. Herbert builds up a mountain of evidence to illustrate his central point: thoughtful contemporaries in Britain were led by the Mutiny to a realization that there was something wrong with their culture and values.
The Mutiny was profoundly shocking and created a sense of moral crisis. Its main importance was psychological, for it was the “supreme trauma of the age” (3). Victorians had to face the fact that British rule was not acceptable to a large part of the Indian population. They also had to find a means of reconciling their concepts of civilization, justice, and progress with the harsh treatment meted out to Indian rebels and with the hysterical demand for revenge that arose within British society. Disillusionment spread. Victorian society suffered a “traumatic break (a sensation both of internal splitting and of a fracture in history)” (273).
Relying on various techniques, including psychoanalysis, Herbert traces the development of this trauma. Of central importance is the “compulsive imaginary reliving of unbearable experience” (54), as expressed in the many texts Herbert discusses. The same themes, events, and situations recurred repeatedly to challenge the stability of the Victorian moral order. Famous writers played their part. William Howard Russell, a household name after his reports on the Crimean War, was sent by The Times to cover the Indian Mutiny. He eschewed a straightforward good-versus-evil paradigm and pointed to flaws in the British imperial system. “His reportorial lens is an introspective and morally focused instrument,” Herbert argues. Russell made his readers look at themselves so that, in following the course of the Mutiny and its suppression, they would “examine their own souls” (66). Charles Dickens was writing Mutiny fiction as early as Christmas 1857. Herbert points out that historians have not fully appreciated the “Indian frame of reference” (214) in his Tale of Two Cities (1859), or its fixation with the moral confusion that resulted when humanitarian impulses were extirpated by ferocious bloodlust. For Dickens, the French Revolution was marked by “callous moral numbness with regard to taking human life” (221). The virulent anti-Indian sentiment evinced by many British people at the time of the Mutiny was equally disturbing, and Dickens added a prophetic note: further horrors were in store if the Victorians discarded the civilized values to which they claimed to adhere.
Punishment and vengeance loom large in the works cited by Herbert, as does the growing Victorian awareness of “the latent or subliminal dark side of British virtue” (133). Mary Elizabeth Braddon's melodramatic novel, Lady Audley's Secret (1861–62), receives a lot of attention. Slated by the critics but a great success with the Victorian public, the novel makes plain the “traumatic inner damage” (243) inflicted by the Mutiny. Lady Audley is threatened with blackmail, and, under intense pressure, thinks of murdering the man responsible. She does not want to do it; she does not intend to do it. Her deliberations are presented as something external to her, and Braddon is evasive on the matter, reluctant to explicitly attribute guilt. The heroine becomes a villain in a tale that is shot through with moral equivocation. Here is another sign of the disillusionment created by the Mutiny, of the break with the past (and with previous literary and moral assumptions), of “the ways in which potentially severe mental suffering comes to infest peacetime society in the aftermath of war” (251).
As for Victorian historians’ treatment of the Indian Mutiny, again Herbert uncovers the compulsive reliving of “a watershed event” (134). As well as Charles Ball, Herbert focuses on G. B. Malleson, R. Montgomery Martin, John William Kaye, and George Trevelyan, among others. Kaye contrasted British values with British excesses in India and stressed that it was not only Indians who committed atrocities during the Mutiny. Trevelyan questioned the accuracy of reports about the rape and massacre of British women and girls.
Some readers will protest that recent scholarship is not quite as monolithic as Herbert contends. Some will dislike his use of overblown rhetoric (rather in the manner of the novels he cites) and the questionable if not unhelpful comparisons with shocking phenomena of modern times (Nazi gas chambers, repressive police states, genocide and ethnic cleansing, Osama bin Laden). Nevertheless, this is an excellent book, admirable in its scope and depth, thoroughly enjoyable, and very thought provoking.
