This is the time of year when my thoughts turn to Cawnpore and the events of 1857 and I’m reposting something I wrote three years ago.
Although the British had been establishing themselves in India for some time before 1757, the battle of Plassey is often seen as a turning point, marking the beginning of British rule in the country. This was certainly a view shared by many Indians and the idea had grown up among some but British rule would last for 100 years, ending in the summer of 1857.
In the early years of British rule, colonial officers were surprisingly well assimilated into Indian society. Many took Indian wives. In some cases these were little more than mistresses, but a lot of officers formed Indian households and raised children in the country. There was genuine interest in the local customs and religions, which were generally respected. Many parts of India were ruled by people who were not originally from that area and the change from an Indian overlord who had conquered their region to a European one meant little to the locals. Over time, though, the nature of British rule changed. European women travelled out to India in search of potential husbands and the custom of taking native wives was frowned upon. The Church saw India as fertile ground for new converts and preachers arrive who denounced local customs and religions. The country was flooded with new officials who saw a job in India as a way to make a fortune and who were little interested in the culture of the country, often despising the natives and their beliefs.
By the mid-19th century, many Indians were fractious and resentful of the British. Yet at the same time the British were so confident of their apparently inalienable right to rule that the majority of the soldiers employed to maintain British power in the sub-continent were, in fact, Indians. Furthermore, Indian troops were seeing a reduction in the respect and privileges that used to be accorded to them in the earlier years of British rule.
Throughout the spring of 1857 there were indications of growing Indian discontent and calls for revolt, yet when the first Europeans were killed by mutinying Indian soldiers – in Meerut on 10 May 1857 – it seems to have taken the authorities by surprise.
“The Sepoy revolt at Meerut,” from the Illustrated London News, 1857
Once the mutiny had started it spread rapidly from regiment to regiment. The revolt spread to the civil population too, taking on the character of a general uprising, though some Indians never turned against the British and those who did were riven by factional in-fighting.
Soon much of north-west India was rising against the British, but many of the Europeans stationed in India struggled to believe that it was really happening. Officers often implored their troops to stay loyal. Some troops did, others shot their commanders down. In Cawnpore (now Kanpur), a town about 250 miles from Meerut the local British commander, General Wheeler, did not expect any trouble even after news of the Mutiny reached the town. His military force was negligible and the local ruler was thought to be sympathetic to the British.
In the event, Wheeler (himself married to an Indian) proved horribly mistaken. The siege of the British at Cawnpore and the massacre that ended it was one of the darkest single incidents of 1857.
This is the background to the second of the John Williamson stories, Cawnpore. Cawnpore is set during a particularly vicious war, but it is not a war story. The book centres on John Williamson, the narrator of The White Rajah. (The story stands alone and you don’t need to read The White Rajah first.) His life in the Far East has left him more comfortable with the princelings of the local Indian court than with the class-ridden Europeans he works with. He has friends on both sides of the conflict and struggles to stay true to them all. In the midst of a war that is fought with terrible ruthlessness, he tries to remain a decent person.
Cawnpore is a story about idealism and reality; about belonging and exclusion. It looks at the British colonial project and how it went so horribly wrong. It makes most people cry.
At the time that I wrote it, my son was serving in Afghanistan, in a conflict that can trace its origins back to the 1850s and before. Yet again, British troops were fighting and dying for a way of life they didn’t understand. Researching Cawnpore made me realise that the important thing about the war in Afghanistan wasn’t that it was right or that it was wrong: it was that it was futile.
Cawnporeis my favourite of all the books I’ve written. I do hope you read it.
There’s no escaping Christmas now. The Christmas advertisements are out, the shops are full of Xmas products and the Christmas lights are everywhere. Everywhere including Seven Dials, where I was out last night to dance tango and stopped on my way to take this photo.
Cynical old curmudgeon as I am, I still really like the lights here. It’s lovely that they’ve made the Seven Dials sundial the centre of the illuminations. When Seven Dials was originally laid out in the early 1690s the Seven Dials column was put at the centre with all the roads in the development radiating out from it. It was originally seen as a desirable place to live but, as the city moved westward, Seven Dials was left behind. It became a notorious slum and the column was viewed by the authorities as a meeting place for gangs of rogues, so it was demolished. The existing column is an exact reproduction of the original, unveiled in 1989. It is London’s only column sundial.
Seven Dials is the setting for my book, Back Home. It is the end of a trilogy of books following the adventures of the (fictional) John Williamson and his travels to Borneo and India before returning to London in the mid-19th century. The books are very different to the Burke series and look at questions of Empire during a tumultuous time (including an account of the siege of Cawnpore during the Indian Mutiny/War of Independence). Although the stories all feature a lot of excitement and incident, they also ask more serious questions about the relationship between colonisers and colonised and how this reflected power relationships back in London. They’re not as much fun to read as the Burke series but, I like to think, more rewarding. The paperbacks are cheaper too, because I really want people to read them. I’m so fond of them that the first in the series, The White Rajah, is the only one of my books that you can buy in hardback. All three stories are standalone, although you will probably get more out of them if you read them in order. Perhaps, given the Christmas theme, you might consider The Williamson Papers as Xmas gifts. I’d love it if you did.
There has been a lot of talk lately about how people in Britain don’t know anything about the history of the British Empire. The ‘Empire Project’, people say, should be looked at afresh. The British should face up to the reality of the things that the country did in the past.
The problem is that it’s an uncomfortable thing to do. Partly because from a 21st century liberal perspective much of the Empire Project was morally objectionable, but also because it means questioning some of the same 21st century liberal thinking about heroes of the liberation struggle.
My book, Cawnpore, was first published in 2011, long before the recent resurgence of interest in Empire. It’s set in 1857 and we are immediately mired in controversy.
I refer to the events of 1857 as the Indian Mutiny because my ‘Empire’ stories are written in the first person and that’s what people called the fighting in India then. (For the same reason, I write about Cawnpore rather than call it by its modern name of Kanpur.) Indians tend to refer to the same conflict as the First Indian War of Independence. The Indian name is slightly more accurate but both are misleading. It was definitely not a mutiny, but nor was it a war of Indians vs Europeans. In today’s terminology, it was probably best described as an insurgency.
If there is controversy about the name of the place the book is set and what to call the events at the heart of the story, that’s nothing to the differences in the way that the people in the story are viewed. (Except for my fictional narrator, almost everybody in the book is a real person.)
The story of Cawnpore, whoever tells it, is a tragedy. British forces, surrendering after a long siege, were massacred. The Indian commanders attempted to save many of the women and children who had been trapped in the siege. Later, though, all the women and children were massacred in their turn.
It was, by any standards, utterly appalling. It was used by the British to justify reprisals all across India, with the mass murder of men, most of whom were nowhere near Cawnpore and many of whom were not involved in any rebellion.
The Memorial Well on the site of the massacre, photographed in 1860
Both Indians and Europeans have much to be ashamed off. Yet until late in the 20th century, Cawnpore was taught in British history books as a story of native savagery. There was little discussion of why British troops were in India in the first place and nothing about the horrific reprisals against civilians. Now the pendulum has swung. The memorial on the site of the massacre has been removed and the park where it was has been renamed after the man responsible for the killings, Nana Sahib. He has been hailed as a hero of the liberation struggle. His image has even appeared on postage stamps.
The trouble with discussions of the rights and (multiple) wrongs of the Empire Project is that the issues are seldom as ethically clear-cut as modern commentators would like and the details of particular events have often been lost or lack context. In many ways, works of fiction can raise these issues more easily than history books. In my case, Cawnpore describes the events of 1857 as seen by a European who was there but who was horrified by the actions of both sides. The reader sees things as my fictional narrator saw them and then has to draw their own conclusions as to where their sympathies lie.
I’ve been posting a lot about India over the past few weeks. I think people are getting a bit bored of it by now. (Let me know if I’m wrong. I have several hundred more photos to share.)
Part of the reason for writing is just that, having finally made it to the sub-continent, I was blown away by it and wanted to share some of my experiences. Another reason, though, is the hope that you might be drawn in to want to read more of my writing about India, but this time looking at my historical novels. I’ve mentioned a few times that my personal favourite of my books is Cawnpore, a story set during the events of 1857, usually referred to in England as the Indian Mutiny. It’s one of a trilogy of books that looks again at the glory days of the British Empire and asks if they were as glorious as many people like to think. They’re far from revisionist history and they are full of excitement and battles, love and betrayal. But they are, I hope, a bit more nuanced than a lot of novels set in the Age of Empire.
I knew when I wrote them that they would never have the commercial appeal of my books about James Burke, cheerfully putting the damn French in their place half a century or so earlier. But it has always saddened me that, though they’ve had some lovely reviews, the Williamson Papers (as the trilogy is called) have ever had the readership I like to think they deserve. So here is an unashamed plug for the books. They are each just £3.99 on Kindle, so you can buy the whole series for less than £12. That’s got to be exceptional value for money.
The Williamson Papers
[NB There are major spoilers here, so don’t read on if you don’t want any idea of how things end.]
The first book of the Williamson Papers is The White Rajah. It introduces us to John Williamson, a young man who runs away from farming life in Devon to go to sea in search of adventure. He finds it when he becomes the companion of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak.
James Brooke is an amazing figure. (I’ve written about his real-life history HERE.) Brooke arrives in Sarawak (in Borneo) in 1839 and is made ruler by Muda Hassim, the Bendahara of Brunei. He starts with nothing but the most liberal and humane of intentions, yet goes on to preside over a massacre so terrible that it leads to protests half a world away in London. It’s a fascinating story of how the high ideals of some Europeans produced such terrible outcomes when applied to other peoples’ countries.
WHY READ IT? It’s got pirates and headhunters and battles and loads of excitement. This is the background for a story about a good man who ends up doing terrible things and how this affects the man who loves him. There’s a lesson for today in the story about good and evil in the mid-19th century.
In Cawnpore, Williamson leaves Borneo, unable to live with what he has seen. He sails for India and takes up a post with the East India Company. He is sent to Cawnpore, where he finds himself at the centre of the events that will lead to the siege of the city and a massacre of Europeans unprecedented during colonial rule in the subcontinent. As with The White Rajah, the background to the story is closely based on real historical events. Williamson, ever the outsider, flits between the Indian and European camps, passing himself off as an Indian amongst the sepoys (something that we know Europeans managed to do during the Mutiny). Again, Williamson struggles to reconcile his own liberal principles and the realities of colonial life. This time it is the Europeans who are (in Cawnpore, at least) on the losing side. Williamson becomes one of a handful of people to survive the siege and its bloody aftermath. The experience marks him, though. He has watched his Indian friends massacre women and children without mercy and then been rescued by European soldiers who strike back with awful savagery. Once again he turns his back on a European colony, this time to return to England, where he hopes at last to find peace.
WHY READ IT? The siege of Cawnpore is one of those bits of colonial history that we have decided to forget about but it’s an amazing story – even if nobody involved comes out of it looking good. This lets you top up your historical knowledge and enjoy a good read at the same time. And I can’t help thinking that if more people had known anything about the history of the region, some recent foreign policy adventures might have been given a bit more thought.
Although Cawnpore is my personal favourite, some people prefer Back Home, which brings the cycle back to England. It’s on a much smaller scale than the others, with most of the action set in London’s Seven Dials, but it features the same themes. Williamson finds a country he hardly recognises. Industrialisation at home and military expansion abroad have made Britain into a dynamic political and economic power that dominates the world. Yet Williamson finds the same divide between the poor and the rich that he saw in the Far East. A friend from his youth has tried to escape his poverty by entering a life of crime in the slums of London. Faced with threats of war with France and concern about Communist terrorists, the government needs to smash a foreign plot – and if they can’t find a real foreign plot, they’re quite happy to invent one. Williamson’s friend is caught in the machinations of a Secret Service determined to prove him an enemy agent and, in his attempts to help him escape, Williamson is once again caught between the machinations of the powerful and the resistance of the powerless.
Back Home ends with Williamson back in Devon where he started out in The White Rajah. But will he finally find happiness there?
When we were in India last month, we kept seeing signs in the various historical sites we visited suggesting that a lot of good stuff had been taken by the British in the 19th century and was now tucked away in various London museums. Back home, we decided to go to one of these London museums and see what we could find.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A to its many friends) has a collection celebrating the arts of South Asia (that’s India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) which it claims is “recognised as one of the largest and most important in the world”.
The amount of material on display is limited, but it is very beautiful. According to Wikipedia, the V&A is “the world’s largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design”, so I suppose I should not have been surprised at that beauty seems to be the main consideration in organising the display.
It looks very pretty but this assemblage of objects lacks any coherence
The V&A claims that their collection reflects “the rich heritage of South Asia and its complex history of global trade, immigration and colonial rule”. Sadly, I could see little evidence of this. For example, there are some illustrations from the 16th century Akbarnama, a volume commissioned by Akbar, arguably the greatest of the Mughal emperors, to celebrate his rule. The sumptuous pictures are shown without any of the text.
Akbar Receiving an Ambassador
In fairness to the V&A, they were probably removed from the book when it was “acquired” by the Commissioner of Oudh in 1859-62. I did like that “acquired”. The annexation of Oudh (or Avadh, as the pesky Indians of the time called it) was one of the precipitating factors in the Indian Mutiny. The Commissioner’s acquisition might reasonably be described as “loot”. The V&A rather shies away from that detail. To add insult to injury, one of the five pages on display is in a completely separate display case where, presumably, the curators felt that it looked prettier alongside other pictures rather than sitting with the other four where it logically belongs.
There are some important examples of Indian culture, like this picture of details of the decoration inside the Taj Mahal – all the more interesting because it shows parts of the upper galleries which are not visible to the public. Even here, though, the detail sits alone unsupported by even a photograph of the famous tomb. There is an example of how gemstones are fitted into marble – a key element of the Taj’s decoration – but, again, this is in a separate display with nothing linking the two.
Drawing showing detail of decoration in the Taj Mahal
A photograph I took at the Taj Mahal.
A significant amount of the display space isn’t even, strictly speaking, Indian art. Presumably it is the V&A’s interest in the “complex history of global trade, immigration and colonial rule” that accounts for so many items that have been made specifically for the export trade, like the Fremlin carpet, made around 1640 and incorporating the coats of arms of William Fremlin, an official of the East India Company. The label tells me that it would have been used as a table covering in England, rather than being put on the floor, which is interesting but tells us nothing about how carpets were used in India. (Hung on walls and used as curtains as well as, presumably, on the floor, since you ask.)
The Fremlin carpet
Outside the main room is a corridor where Hindu, Jain, Muslim and pagan religious images again make an attractive display. Time periods, geographical location, and faiths all mingle in Victorian confusion. They’re lovely to look at but tell you little about the cultures that gave rise to them.
I’ve never been a great believer in returning items to the countries they came from, but looking at this distinctively colonial approach to display here, I think of all those notices about Indian artefacts that vanished to England and I wonder if I should change my mind.
What do you think?
A Word from our Sponsor
After most of a lifetime of wanting to visit India, I’m happy to write about it for ages. But the reason for posting these pieces on my blog is to encourage people to read my book, Cawnpore, set during the Indian Mutiny/War of Independence of 1857. People who’ve read it have been very nice about it, but not nearly enough people have read it. I have kept the Kindle price at just £3.99 so as to make it easily affordable. Buy it and let me know what you think.
