This paper revises Antoinette Burton’s claim arising from her work on British feminists in England that mid-century onwards, Victorians were increasingly imagining England and India “concentrically” rather than constrastively [Burton: 35]. Burton shows that British feminists by making the “uplift” of Indian women their special province, a task necessary for the moral good of the empire, re-imagined the national public space as a national-imperial one. This allowed them to argue for an extension of this space to include women in an enhanced public (yet still within the traditional female) role. Thus Burton argues, Victorians widened the circumference of the national space and drew India within it. While I agree with Burton that India was being imagined as an extension of the national space, reconceived as a national-imperial one, I show that this space was not a uniform space circumscribed from a fixed centre (metropole), as Burton’s geometric analogy suggests. Instead, this space was differentiated, comprising of an active, masculine metropolitan and a passive, feminine, colonial space, a difference that created a “centre” and lent dynamism to it.

Thus, just as the passive figure of the Indian woman lent a dynamism to the feminist discourse, the figuration of the feminised Indian land 1860 onwards lent mobility to the colonial discourse. This feminised land, however, marks a shift from the late 18th and early 19th centuries picturesque and romantic figurations of it, where the “feminine east”, stood in varying degrees of opposition to the masculine west and stalled or questioned its expansive thrust. The picturesque in the late 18th and early 19th centuries painted a feminised, unthreatening, nostalgic landscape. Images of fading, classical grandeur sublimated by temporalising present confrontations but worked as an oppositional “Other” to a dynamic, expanding Britain, albeit in limited ways. In romantic figuration, best expressed in Lady Morgan’s 1811 novel, The Missionary, the feminine east, both in the Indian priestess, Luxima, and the exotic locale of Kashmir, serves as a counterpoint (even if a deceptive one) to the masculine west (here the Portuguese missionary, Hilarion) with the power to subvert it by seduction.2 The Mutiny novel, by yoking this opposition (romantic of masculine Britain to feminised India) and quasi-opposition (between the picturesque fading grandeur and vigour of British expansion) into a domestic framework, not only bound east to west in an ideologically necessary relation but also made one party subservient and passive. Furthermore, any subversive potential of this feminised land was erased by depicting its picturesque and exotic beauty not as a property of the land but of the British eye. The feminised post-Mutiny India, unlike the earlier romantic or picturesque feminine, is closed in on itself and inert.

On May 10, 1857, soldiers of the Bengal army in Mirath, India, revolted and killed their British commanding officers. The soldiers then marched to Delhi and entreated the by now titular Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to head the revolt against the British. This appeal was followed by revolts by several other native regiments in north India, who congregated in Delhi and in other Indian courts, like that of the court of the (recently deposed) Nawab of Awadh in Lucknow. The British, who had been completely taken by surprise, recuperated quickly, and by late September 1857, the city of Delhi was retaken after a prolonged siege. The fall of Delhi was a decisive blow to the mutineers but fighting continued well into 1859 as the struggle was continued by peasants under local landlords and rebel leaders.

In March 1858, the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was put on trial, found guilty of “treasonable design of overthrowing and destroying the British government in India”, and exiled to Burma (Noorani: 19). In November 1858, Queen Victoria’s proclamation enacted the transfer of power from the Mughal emperor (with the East India Company as protectors) to the Crown and granted pardon to all those who surrendered who were not guilty of murdering an Englishman or woman. The document used the language of benevolent maternalism with Victoria as a sort of mother figure, willing to grant “mercy” and “take back” her subject-sons.3 Begum Hazrat Mahal (the queen who kept up resistance to the British in Lucknow) rebutted the proclamation and rejected the offer of surrender, pointing out that this “maternalism” was misleading at best and disingenuous at worst. Not only was there no possibility of fair trial (or any trial at all, in many cases) for those who surrendered but the offer dispossessed all those who rebelled. Moreover, entrance into the domestic body of the British empire was founded on the punishment of “a whole army and people”4 for a rebellion against a government that did not exist prior to it.

Acting on both the past and present, the proclamation and trial heralded the domestic body of the empire. The “our government” of the trial and proclamation appeared to pre- rather than postdate the Mutiny, retroactively creating the “legal conditions” for the king to be put on trial for “treason.” Furthermore, by not simply dispossessing the Mughal ruler but making him appear in court on charges of sedition, the very symbols of the past were put on trial to legitimate the present and change the shift of ruling powers: from an act of usurpation to a lawful procedure. Thus, while British counter-insurgency operations in which rebels were blown from guns and hung on trees, while villagers were burnt followed the classic Foucauldian paradigm of leaving traces of its brutality in “spectacles” to make British power visible, in discourses of the law, politics, and fiction another kind of memory formation was enacted: to erase the traces of violence and create the past as illegitimate. Since the violence of the “counterinsurgency” operations was directed against the sovereign body of the Mughal ruler, it could not function as the legitimate in discourse, unless the old law was itself put on trial and discredited.5 The purpose of discourse, thus, was to convert violence into the form of the Law that could perform important retroactive ideological work on the past and the immediate present. Ultimately, what this discourse stands testimony to, therefore, is a usurpation and “appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who once used it”.6

This paper focuses on one element of that discourse, Mutiny fiction, and examines two Mutiny novels, Seeta and On the Face of the Waters, to outline the ideological work these novels did for the empire. I show that the novels created a gendered, domestic space of India that in a move similar to the proclamation, erased the revolutionary potential of the Mutiny and created the empire’s normativity. This was achieved in two ways: by structuring the novels as a movement from adventurous, disordered space to a domestic ordered one, and using the Mutiny to make the historical law (the historical need of the Indians for the British) visible. The latter is achieved by racialising aesthetics and the land, such that both become evidentiary and reveal this law. Like the proclamation, therefore, the novels transform the Mutiny, from a contested time-space to a transparent event that reveals India’s “need” for Britain.

Philip Meadows Taylor (1808-1876) was born in Liverpool, and set out for India in 1824 at the age of 15. He worked for the Nizam of Hyderabad and served him in several capacities: as interpreter on courts martial, assistant police superintendent, in the army, as magistrate and collector in his territories [Taylor 1986]. Taylor was one of the old school men like Skinner and Lawrence, who unlike the “competition wallah” and the Indian Civil Service (ICS) men, mixed with Indians and adopted some modes of their life. Ideologically as well, he was closer to the utilitarian reforming zeal of the 1830s. Seeta forms the third part of a trilogy, comprised also of Tara and Ralph Darnell, the former being set in 1657 and depicting the rise of the Marathas (which in part led to the weakening of the Mughals in the 17th century), and the latter in 1757, the year of the battle of Plassey. Seeta, set in 1857, and recounting a tale of the Mutiny, completes and “fulfil” the story of British ascendancy in India.

Seeta, first published in 1872, though a post-Mutiny novel is written from a perspective that was largely unfamiliar to, even condemned in the post-Mutiny era. Most markedly, the novel depicts an inter-racial marriage, something that though accepted in the early 19th century was virtually anathema post-Mutiny.7 The marriage is central to the plot, which is as follows: Cyril Brandon, the young magistrate of Norpoor, falls in love with Seeta when she appears in court to identify the assailant, Azrael Pande, her husband’s murderer. Defying convention, Cyril and Seeta get married. Soon after marriage, Cyril realises that though their marriage is happy and Seeta an accomplished woman (in Sanksrit scriptures), she will never be the kind of companion that an Englishwoman could be. He finds himself attracted to Grace Mostyn, his friend’s sister-in-law. Seeta also faces trouble in the form of caste excommunication, exclusion from Cyril’s English life and friends, the pressure to become Christian, and finally the realisation that her marriage will not be recognised as legitimate under English law. Any children born of the union will be debarred from the right of inheritance (on Cyril’s side). The domestic troubles coincide with the coming of the Mutiny, and one day when the rebels, led by Azrael Pande, attack the house, Seeta is shot trying to save Cyril. She dies, Cyril and Grace return to England, where they get married and eventually inherit Cyril’s ancestral property.

The novel uses the picturesque to create India as a domestic space and mark the difference between British and Indians, in order to delegitimise the latter’s claim to the land. The picturesque is pitted against the Indian’s “sacred” consumption and activation of the land. The picturesque and the sacred landscape aesthetics were in fact dominant modes of depicting the land by the British and Indians respectively in the early 19th century. The picturesque, where one viewed the land “as in a picture”, derived pleasure from this act, and recorded the view in journals or sketches, was a prominent mode of consuming India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by the British. The sacred landscape aesthetic, practised by Indians in the same period, is a more inclusive term, comprising of several landscape styles (such as the Mughal, the courtly) but all were characterised by nonrealistic and hieratic depictions of the land. In the novel, the picturesque retains some of its specificity as a landscape aesthetic but the sacred landscape aesthetic transforms into the general term “sacred” denoting various kinds of engagement with and on behalf of the land – from religious worship to rebellion (guided by religious motivation). The novel, however, historicises and racialises both aesthetics. Thus instead of being modes of imaging, negotiating, and mapping oneself on to the land, they become markers of “states of civilisation”: the picturesque of the modern and civil and the sacred of the static and non-modern. The final reification takes place towards the end of the novel in a “trial scene”, where the picturesque and sacred are pitted against each other and the sacred loses. Like the trial of the emperor, however, this is also a staged event in which one party has lost even before entering the court.

The very opening paragraphs of the novel set up the opposition between the picturesque and the sacred. The novel begins with a picturesque description that moves into a description of how the land is the repository of layers of civilisation and ancient memory:

It was nearly midnight. A slight passing shower had just fallen, and the moon, nearly at its full, shone out with brilliant luster over a scene at once strikingly beautiful and impressive. At the head of one of the long ravines which descend westwards from theplateau of central India, was a deep, lonely glen, the upper end of which was closed by one of those abrupt precipices of basalt, which everywhere a small stream, swelled somewhat beyond itswont by showers of the rainy season, now poured a considerable body of water with a dull continuous roar…At the foot of the fall, and bordering part of the pool, was however an open space, now covered with soft green sward, the only level spot in the glen for some miles of its course, where, on one occasion in each year, the people of the country round held a kind of fair, bathed in thewaters of the pool, and worshipped the local deities to whom it was held sacred. At other times, indeed, the place had an evil reputation, and was carefully avoided. At the back of this level spot, grew a vast peepul tree of enormous size and remarkably picturesque though peculiar character. (1-2) The above leads into a description of a banyan tree, the site ofHindu worship, and the sacred character of the tree reached far beyond that, to a period when it was probably adored, together with the image of the rudely carved twisted snakes which lay at its foot, by the ancient tree and snake worshipping tribes of the country. By the side of the snake-image, too, rested a pile of stones, smeared with vermilion and lampblack. This had existed from rudetimes, even beyond those of the snake-worshippers... Nor was the spot destitute of other ancient religious associations. Two thousand years ago, perhaps, a Boodhist fraternity of monks or devotees had selected this spot, as they did hundreds of others, for its wild beauty and absolute seclusion, and with infinite pains and labour had excavated from the trap-rock a small Vihara or monastery…It consisted of a square hall, at the end of which, in an apse or recess, was a large statue of Boodh in a sitting posture,…and it seemed as if the mild, placid features ever looked out benignly into the beautiful glen, and over the sparkling waters of the stream. (2)

Yet another activation by the rebels is also suspect, and is given in our first introduction to them: about 20 men “whose savage appearance betokened a hard, lawless life” are congregated around a fire in the cave, “and as the flames leaped high, occasionally almost to the roof, they lighted up the fierce faces around, and the great image behind with it its soft, placid features, in strange contrast with each other”. (3) Just as the figure of Buddha sanctioned the narrator’s gaze previously, now the figure condemns these men. The men are bandits (who will eventually become rebels), and their image, which is at odds with the calm one of Buddha, makes them internally dissonant with the landscape. The bandit rebels are the reverse of the threshold figure. Not only do they not gaze like the narrator but they are at odds with and their presence unsanctioned by the very “landscape” (on behalf of which they will later fight). Their entrance into the social body – the village of Shah Gunje, in which the novel is set – is also conceived as an infection and a threat, which is neutralised only in their deaths at the hands of Cyril and Mostyn. The community is now “rehabilitated” and is like a fair.

There were no such scenes of rejoicing in the years of 1857-58; in fact, when the British did re-establish authority, it was often at great cost to the native populations of the individual cities and villages, and their return was accompanied by fear. Here, of course, entire Shah Gunje, rather than the mere market, is a “fair”, and there is rejoicing “as had never been remembered before” (Seeta: 398). This “restitution” of the communal space does to memory what the counter-insurgency operations did to the land, which is to wipe out the “clinging to the memories of old rulers and old systems of government” (Seeta: 425). The novel obfuscates memory by showing the rebellion to be not part of the communal body at all. The rebels are an infection, and the rebellion the “evil year” that had to run its course, rather than a year of possibility to which were tied the hopes and aspirations of many people. What was remarkable about the Mutiny was precisely its communal nature: how, despite lacking a common cause and unitary organisation, it was taken up by diverse groups of people and its hopes adopted by even the spectators. As Kant points out in his discussion of the French Revolution, the historical potential of a revolutionary event lies not with the actors but with the spectators’ reaction to the event.9 Taylor, in denying that the Mutiny had a social spectatorial aspect – that it was even tied to the social in any significant way – by making it merely an act of personal, misguided vengeance, cuts away at the historical potential of the event for Indians.

Not only is the event of the Mutiny denied a spectatorial aspect but the Indians themselves emerge as incapable of spectation. We saw this in the opening scene, where only the narrator and the proxy figure of the Buddha were capable of gazing. The rebels lacked a gaze even of a disturbing animalistic kind (as we find for instance in Conrad). It is not only the undesirable but also the “good” subjects who are unable to spectate: Seeta, the exemplary subject, accomplished and civilised in her own right, is unable to spectate as well, and finally marks the “fact” that it is not the Indians but the British who have a claim over the land. The connection between visual purchase of and actual proprietary claim over the land is made in an incident that takes place in a “trial scene” towards the end of the novel: Seeta, Cyril, and Grace all find themselves in a temple on a hill, on the side of which a river runs. Seeta is engaged in an act of worship, and Cyril and Grace admire the prospect by picturesque gazing and sketching. It is only the latter two who are able to “properly appreciate” the land: Seeta, herself, is engaged in quite another act, and when she does cease worshipping, she becomes the subject of Grace’s sketch that Cyril completes.10

The scene dimly echoes one in Northanger Abbey, where Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland are on Beechen Cliff overlooking the city of Bath, and Henry gives Catherine a lecture on picturesque viewing [Austen 86-88]. Though Austen is partly satirising the picturesque craze in the above, the scene also establishes the kind of companionship their marriage will be: one between not quite intellectual equals, but where one – only too willing and able to learn – can be “tutored” into the proper companion. In the scene on the hill in Seeta, the picturesque also marks the legitimate pair and the nature of heterosexual companionship. It “unites” Cyril and Grace, as they share in the pleasure of spectation, and marks that they are the legitimate pair. It shuts Seeta out by pointing out that she is not capable of being tutored into picturesque gazing (the entire novel chronicles the attempts and failure of Cyril to make her into a Victorian wife). It is not simply the possibility of conjugal happiness and “equality” of relation that the picturesque marks but also the kind of citizenships all three are capable of. Cyril and Grace because they can engage in picturesque gazing, have a greater purchase on the land than Seeta. She is not a “spectator” herself, and according to Taylor’s logic, lacks the adequate modern understanding equated here with visual consumption of the land that is the pre-requisite of being a citizen. In a re-adjustment of the alignment of the actual ownership of property and proprietary viewing of the landscape in England in the early 19th century that Helsinger has pointed out [Helsinger: 103-25], here, although Seeta is the heir to a substantial amount of property, her lack of proprietary viewing (that the idea of landscape encourages) signals an inability to participate in the kind of citizenry of the empire open to the English pair. Her own worship and person can be the subject of the picturesque gaze and sketch but like the idols in the opening paragraph, is meant to merely inhabit not possess and own the landscape.

Taylor uses the picturesque to create the desirable object of the land, to prove the undesirability or inertness of the Indians’ consumption and activation of it, and thus genderises as well seals the social body from within, with respect to its capacity for mobility on its own. It is finally in the scene on the hill, where the picturesque and sacred are put on “trial” – a staged event as well as a moment of a differend – that sacred and picturesque aesthetics are reified into stages in history, and the fate of the social body limited to the sacred is sealed. By equating the picturesque with modern sensibility and the right to citizenship, Taylor calls on the liberal-reformist thought of J S Mill, which rests political morality on the institutions of modernity and makes full citizenship contingent on the possession of a modern sensibility, but renders static the pedagogic dynamism of this ideology (where at the end of the road, India would be tutored into civility and modernity) by making the inability to spectate an intrinsic attribute of Indians.

In the next novel, the picturesque is used sparingly and is coded differently from Seeta. Instead of allowing for the attachment of affect to land created as desirable object, the picturesque appears (when applied to Indian land and buildings) as the sign of the immoral and the intellectually deficient. Steel works with a Ruskinian religious-moral understanding of aesthetics, where art and architecture speak not only to the states of civility but of moral and intellectual capabilities. This allows her to read Indian objects and land as revelatory of racial characteristics, a reading that allows her to conclude that India requires an autocratic colonial master. The liberal-reformist trajectory of Seeta (albeit a stalled one), therefore, transforms into a despotic, static colonial system in On the Face of the Waters.

Both novels create a gendered domestic body of the empire. It is the elision of the “gaze” of the land, however, (apart from a narcissistic one) that marks a major shift from early 19th century romantic and picturesque figurations of India and creates land as not only feminised, as in the past but determined and bound to its master. This imagination of the empire was popular, as the sheer number of Mutiny novels (around 40) published in the latter half of the 19th century indicates, and heralded the major Anglo-Indian novel form, the “station romance”, that came into its own and dominated the second half of the 19th century. It was also, however, a fantasy – of obliteration of the revolutionary historical potential of the Mutiny, and of a “new” post-1858 space in which no traces of the past would linger. In this it parallels other colonial discourse from the times, which also set out, ambitiously and fantastically, to create a blank slate of India.

A brief example will suffice. In June 1858, Lord Canning, the last governor-general of the East India Company and the first viceroy of the crown, issued a proclamation to confiscate all proprietary rights in the land of Awadh, so that that once the land had been cleared of all previous titles, it could more easily be awarded to the new proprietors as a “free and incontestable grant from the paramount power” [Metcalf: 147]. In reality, Canning’s fantasy of obliterating past titles could not be acted out. James Outram, commissioner of Awadh, was aware that such a move would prolong the rebellion and realising that the country could not be restored to peace without the help of the old taluqdars (landlords), sent out the proclamation with a cover letter granting a one-on-one settlement of lands with the landlords, thus limiting the force of Canning’s proclamation. Ultimately Canning himself came around and was instrumental in creating a powerful body of taluqdars, with increased rights in the land in Awadh, serving as a bulwark for the empire against the unrestful agrarian, peasant population [Metcalf: 150-56].

Memory transformation and even erasure did take place but not in the initial ‘tabula rasa’ fantasy of Canning or of the Mutiny novel, which effectively creates a blank slate of Indian memory. The reinstatement of the taluqdars took place by disregarding all customary rights of the peasants in the land, which had hitherto given them negotiating power with the landlords. The taluqdars, therefore, continued, not as mere revenue collectors of the Mughal emperor or the Awadh nobility but as magistrate and landlord all rolled into one [Metcalf: 150-54]. What appeared to continue from the past, therefore, the taluqdari system, only resembled it in name, and in fact concealed massive ground-level changes. What was lost and erased did not manage to make its way into narrative and legal discourse, except for occasional concerns expressed by British and Indian champions of peasant rights. British policy, post-1858, generally followed the trend of Canning’s revised decision and was consistently characterised by “noninterference” and a preservation of “tradition.” This “tradition,” however, was a creation of colonialism. Its “preservation” only led to a hardening of previously fluid institutions.

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Mutiny or the past for Indians, historicism transformed the very medium of expression of the resistance when it came.

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