Abstract
Before I turn in detail to the correspondence, it is useful first to sketch out a rough framework for the role played by social fantasy in Lyall’s apprehension of the Muslim ‘fanatic’ in 1857. While Christianity is one of the starting points for his reflections on native hostility — and a rhetoric of fanaticism quickly comes to shape his descriptions — the characterisations constructed during this correspondence are far more complex than the simple essentialised hostility towards Indian Muslims perceived both by his biographer and more recent historians.1 These complexities are most cogently expressed by Lyall in a letter of 1857 in which he considers characteristics of insurgent native responses:
There is always something very laughable to me in the way these Hindoos will walk off with their enemy’s property the moment that he is down. Plunder always seems to be their chief object, to obtain which they will perform any villainy, whereas the Mahometans only seem to care about murdering their opponents, and are altogether far more bloody-minded. Those last hate us with a fanatical hate that we never suspected to exist among them, and have everywhere been the leaders in the barbarous murdering and mangling of the Christians.2
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Notes
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pyschoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, repr. 1977; 1973), p. 103.
Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 21.
T Metcalf, Ideologies, pp. 44–6. Some recent critiques of the subsequent literature of rebellion that came to preoccupy Anglo-Indian writers over the next 50 years, have suggested that the violence of that response by the British appears to have re-inscribed, rather than erased, the disjunction between despot and progenitor of liberal values. See Maire ni Fhlathuin, ‘Anglo-Indian after the Mutiny: the Formation and Breakdown of National identity’ in Stuart Murray (ed.) Not on Any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality and Cultural Nationalism (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), pp. 67–80; see also, Wurgraft Imperial, pp. 68, 95–100.
Clifford Geertz, ‘Ideology as a cultural system’, in Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson (eds) Religion and Ideology: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 81.
Letter to his father, 30 August 1857; letter to Mr Holland, 13 March 1858; letter to his mother, 19 March 1858; letter to his father, 14 May 1858; letter to his mother, 26 September 1858; letter to his father, 24 November 1858; letter to Mr Holland, 27 March 1859. Lyall’s rhetorical conversion of Nana Sahib’s followers should by no means be regarded as isolated: for his highly successful ‘Mutiny’ play, Jessie Brown; or the Relief of Lucknow, Dion Boucicault converted the Nana himself. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988) p. 206.
Thomas S Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, repr. 1996; 1962), pp. 10–34.
Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: the Making of an Image (Oxford: Oneworld, repr. 1997; 1960), p. 304.
Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, trans. Roger Deinus (London: I B Tauris, 1988), pp. 8, 18.
Daniel, Islam, p. 304; Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, repr. 1996; 1991), pp. 19–22.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Chatto and Windus, repr. 1992; 1960), p. 649. Lyall’s perception of contemporary decadence in the Anglican church is certainly influenced by his reading of Gibbon’s portrait of the early Christian church (letter to his mother, 21 May 1858).
Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate Pub, 2000), pp. 10–11; Charles Mills, An History of Muhammedanism Comprising the Life and Character of the Arabian Prophet and Succinct Accounts of the Empires Founded by Muhammedan Arms (London: Black, Parbury and Allen, 1817); Mills, History of the Crusades (London: Longman, 1820). It is worth noting here that Mills’ History of Muhammedanism was dedicated to and encouraged by the orientalist and Governor of Bombay, Sir John Malcolm, marking one instance of the permeable boundaries running between popular Metropolitan literature, the specialised world of the British Orientalists, and Anglo-Indian governance. Others that may be cited with reference to Crusade historiography during the first half of the nineteenth century include: the biography of the seminal seventeenth-century poet of crusader lore, Torquato Tasso, by the Bishop of Calcutta, R Milman; and James Burnes, the Physician General of India, who published A Sketch of the History of the Knights Templar (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1837).
Charles Mills, An History of Muhammedanism Comprising the Life and Character of the Arabian Prophet and Succinct Accounts of the Empires Founded by Muhammedan Arms (London: Black, Parbury and Allen, 1817)
Mills, History of the Crusades (London: Longman, 1820). It is worth noting here that Mills’ History of Muhammedanism was dedicated to and encouraged by the orientalist and Governor of Bombay, Sir John Malcolm, marking one instance of the permeable boundaries running between popular Metropolitan literature, the specialised world of the British Orientalists, and Anglo-Indian governance. Others that may be cited with reference to Crusade historiography during the first half of the nineteenth century include: the biography of the seminal seventeenth-century poet of crusader lore, Torquato Tasso, by the Bishop of Calcutta, R Milman; and James Burnes, the Physician General of India, who published A Sketch of the History of the Knights Templar (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1837).
C A Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1989), pp. 229–33.
Martin Lynn, ‘British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in Andrew Porter (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume Three: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 111–12, 117–20. Hereafter cited as OHBE 3.
Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chapter 1; Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the East (London: I B Tauris, repr. 1996; 1994), pp. 214–74.
See for instance H B Edwardes, Our Indian Empire: Its Beginning and End (London: Young Men’s Christian Association, 1861).
D A Washbrook, ‘India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism’, in Porter (ed.) OHBE 3, p. 416.
John William Kaye, History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857–8 (London: W H Allen, 1864), Volume 2, p. 208, quoted in Wurgraft, Imperial, p. 97.
Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 246–7.
Rev J Cave-Browne, The Punjab and Delhi in 1857. Being a Narrative of the Measures by which the Punjab was Saved and Delhi Recovered During the Indian Mutiny (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1861), p. 7. My italics.
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© 2005 Alex Padamsee
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Padamsee, A. (2005). Fantasy and Civilian Identity. In: Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512474_8
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