Abstract
This book investigates the multiple and contradictory ways in which the Great War tore at the gendered ideologies of the Indo-British relation-ship. It is my contention that the war of 1914–1918, along with the intense stress it placed on the British Raj’s dominant notions of colonial masculinity and femininity, ultimately culminated in the killing or wounding of over 1,600 Indian civilians by Gurkha soldiers under the command of General Reginald Dyer at the Punjab town of Amritsar in April of 1919.1 The killings at Amritsar marked a defining moment in Anglo-Indian relations, but too often the event is portrayed only as a catalyst for a triumphant interwar march toward Indian independence, or alternately as a singular lapse of judgment by one man, General Dyer, that undermined generations of generally well-intentioned colonial leadership in South Asia. I take issue with both of these views in that Amritsar is best viewed from the other direction, not as a beginning but as a tragic coda to the accelerating social and political anxieties that wracked the late-Victorian and Edwardian imperial and domestic public spheres just prior to the war.2
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Notes
John Keay, India: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 475–77. The soldiers fired 1,650 rounds. They killed or wounded an almost equal number. The number of dead varies, yet just fewer than 380 seems to be the most accurate count.
Barbara Ramusack, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire: Dissolution of a Patron–Client System 1914–1939 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), 10, 13.
Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 15. See for example Max Boot’s piece “The Case for American Empire,” Weekly Standard (October 15, 2001): 27. Boot suggested that the “troubled lands” such as Afghanistan “cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”
Purnima Bose and Laura Lyons, “Dyer Consequences: The Trope of Amritsar, Ireland, and the Lessons of the ‘Minimum’ Force Debate” Boundary 2, 26 (Summer 1999), 200; I am also referencing Mike Davis’ harrowing, although polemical, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: Verso, 2001)
and Priya Satia’s “The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia,” The American Historical Review 111, 1 (February 2006): 17.
For a study on imperial violence between the 1750s and 1850s see Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression, and Revolt (New York: Verso, 2011).
Ivan Evans, Cultures of Violence: Lynching and Racial Killing in South Africa and the American South (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 21.
Cited in Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (London: New Press, 2003), 51.
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 1996).
See Susan Bayly, “Caste and ‘Race’ in the Colonial Ethnography of India,” in Peter Rob, ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995) 165–218;
and Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, 1 (1999): 47–93;
and “Masculinity and the Bangash Nawabs of Farukhabad,” in Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, eds, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) pp. 19–37.
Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 1988).
Dow cited in Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8.
George Clarke, 1st Baron Sydenham of Combe(Gov. of Bombay 1907–1913), My Working Life (London: John Murray, 1927), 219, 282.
Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13–15. As Chowdhury further notes, the Tagores put forward their program in the pages of the National Paper, first published in 1867. Devendranath Tagore, the father of Nobel Prize winner Rabindranth Tagore, had assumed leadership of the Brahmo Samaj in 1843 and exercised great influence among the Bengali middle-class.
For a pioneering text on colonial gender see John Roselli’s “The Self Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in 19th Century Bengal,” Past and Present 86, 1 (1980): 121–148.
See also Victor J. Seidler, Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1994), 71.
Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 26. The Mill quote is also from Adams.
See Roger Long, The Man on the Spot: Essays on British Empire History (Westport: Greenwood, 1995).
Quoted in Vidya Dhar Mahajan, Leaders of the Nationalist Movement (New Delhi: Sterling, 1975), 159. See also Ghose entry in Sachchidananda Bhattacharya, A Dictionary of Indian History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 373.
See also Ghose entry in Sachchidananda Bhattacharya, A Dictionary of Indian History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 373.
David Knopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton University Press), 1979. Ranganathan Magadi, The Literary Works of Ranganathan Magadi (Raleigh, NC: Lulu.com), 595.
Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Madras: Macmillan India, 1983), 88.
Valentine Chirol, The Indian Unrest (New Delhi: Light and Life, 1979), 210–212.
Cited in Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 207.
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© 2014 Robert McLain
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McLain, R. (2014). Resituating Gender and Violence during the Great War. In: Gender and Violence in British India. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448545_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448545_1
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