Rising Against English Imperialism
KATZ, DAVID H.
Rising Against English Imperialism The Great Mutiny By Christopher Hibbert Viking. 472 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by David H. Katz Assistant professor of Social Science, Michigan State...
...Christopher Hibbert, a widely acknowledged master of the genre, has now provided a full-length treatment of the Indian insurrection...
...the author plunges forward to report on the immediate circumstances surrounding the revolt...
...It also??gleefully and indiscriminately??murdered thousands of Indians while pillaging its way across the country...
...In all three situations, vastly outnumbered European occupiers were confronted, and initially overcome, by formidable indigenous resistance movements seeking to restore something resembling the pre-imperial status quo...
...Few episodes better revealed the true ugliness of imperialism...
...Leaning heavily on contemporary eyewitness accounts, Hibbert vividly recreates these horrors, and the equally horrific retribution that accompanied the restoration of British power...
...Assignment of caste-like inferiority to all members of a caste society was probably the Mutiny's main underlying cause...
...Nor does the author clarify the ambiguities surrounding attempts to Christianize the "heathen," a practice bitterly resented by Indians, especially since it appeared to have the endorsement of British authorities...
...The Great Mutiny can in fact serve as a case study illustrating the strengths and limits of popular history at its near-best...
...in less remote areas, peasants or villagers often staged small-scale spontaneous risings...
...Even in those places, survival was often only temporary: besieged and bombarded, they soon became charnel houses where death came in several forms??cholera, suicide, slow starvation or a quick, relatively merciful, bullet...
...Reviewed by David H. Katz Assistant professor of Social Science, Michigan State University Native rebellions were a regular feature of the Raj, Great Britain's two-century reign of power in the Indian subcontinent...
...Hibbert does considerably better when focusing on particular events...
...The butt of incessant slights, pranks and humiliations, Indians were to repay their tormentors in full when the time came...
...Neither "entertaining" nor analytically impressive, The Great Mutiny does serve as a grim, honest and well-documented antidote to more glamorized treatments of England's imperial past...
...The 1857 Great (or Sepoy) Mutiny falls into an altogether different category of reaction, one that also includes the Sudanese revolt of 1883-85 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900...
...These tragic and "colorful" episodes are prime material for the popular historian??as Alan Moorehead and Walter Lord have demonstrated in their partial treatments of the Sudanese and Boxer outbreaks...
...Wherever the Mutiny broke out, that story was pretty much the same: seditious rumblings in the ranks of native Army units culminating in open disaffection and the murder of British officers, administrators and their families...
...In the previous century, Britons had generally adopted a respectful attitude toward Indian culture...
...Responding with ruthless displays of force, the British usually had little difficulty quashing either type of disobedience...
...But the Europeans eventually regained the initiative and re-established their control, at least for the short term...
...by 1857, however, such cosmopolitanism characterized only a small minority, itself stigmatized for having "gone native...
...The regular British Army, strengthened by reinforcements from home and aided by still loyal Indian auxiliaries, made quick work of the rebels...
...Although a number of reasons for the change are hinted at, nowhere does the reader find a sustained analysis of this crucial and fascinating development...
...Because the actual extent of official complicity is never really assessed, the reader must again draw his own conclusions...
...So, too, is the period's un-self-conscious racism...
...untroubled by the need to explain, he can rely on his narrative flair to carry the story along...
...Hibbert makes this much clear, but does not probe the matter...
...Taking Indian inferiority as a truism, the British tended to view both rajahs and houseboys as "niggers" incapable of appreciating the achievements of European civilization...
...Hibbert's opening chapters exemplify the two qualities...
...Devoting a mere two and a half pages to the historical background??Moghul and imperial...
...On the famous Northwest frontier, mountain tribal chiefs aggressively contested the imposition of British authority...
...In clear, precise prose, he makes good on his prefatory promise to "evoke the sight and sound" of the conflict, while failing to throw much new light on his subject...
...Those who escaped immediate slaughter were either hunted down by marauding bands or, if very lucky, made their way to improvised bastions at Lucknow, Agra, or Cawnpore...
...The price of such misplaced paternalism was usually death...
...The leisurely lifestyle of British "sahibs and memsa-hibs," the troupes of ever-attentive servants, the enervating climate which (contrary to legend) intimidated Indians and Englishmen alike??all are expertly assembled, paraded and "evoked...
...Here and there a colonel had the foresight to disarm and disband his regiment, but much more typical were officers who refused to believe "their" men would join the rebellion...
...Indeed, it is for this reason that Hibbert's book deserves to be read...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 2
