Description
THE causes, nature and meaning of the Indian Uprising of 1857 have long been the subject of controversy, with the opposition between British imperialist and Indian nationalist interpretations often dominating the debate. The ideological agendas behind these conflicting historiographies has led to a degree of internal homogeneity, with the British imperialist historians tending to see 'The Indian Mutiny' as limited in scope and meaning,' while Indian nationalists presented 'The First War of Indian Independence'2 as a proto-nationalist conflict with wider socio-political significance within the history of India's transition to independence. Such divisions along racial/national lines are the retrospective impositions of defined imperial and national political projects, the homogenising tendency of which has obscured the heterogeneity of immediate reactions to the events as they unfolded, both in Britain and India. More recently, the emergence of subalternist perspectives in Indian historiographical method has led to the recognition of the multiplicity of identities, motivations and meanings that insurrection and resistance could have, depending on the various social, economic, religious, regional and circumstantial situations of the participants.3 Moreover, developments in postcolonial theory, and the emergence of more critical approaches to the study of colonialism, have helped to reinterpret the British response in terms of its relationship to the practical, ideological and discursive expediencies of the imperial project.' Far from immediately coalescing in an organised and unified national response to the crisis, British reactions to and interpretations of events varied considerably, both over time and between groups from different political and ideological backgrounds. Indeed,. as Gautam Chakravarty has pointed