For one thing, it is clear that Costello did not pick up Alum Bheg’s head on a whim. Nor was this an unprecedented act. Costello might very well have heard of the many feats and inventive acts of violence attributed to his fellow Irishman, John Nicholson—including the story of how he kept the head of a man he had personally killed on his desk. The story involved a notorious ‘freebooter’ who was active on the frontier near Rawalpindi. A large reward had been offered for his capture, but when Nicholson realised that none of the locals were going to turn the man in, he decided to take things in his own hands, as one of his fellow officer described:
‘“Saddle my horse,” said Nicholson quietly. When the horse was brought, he mounted, and rode off alone to the freebooter’s village, where, by some coincidence, the first person he met was the man he wanted. Nicholson ordered him to surrender, but he refused, and rushed at Nicholson, who thereupon cut him down. When the body was brought in, Nicholson had the head cut off and placed in Cutcherry3 beside himself, and he contemptuously asked every Malik4 who came to see him if he recognised to whom it belonged.’5
Displaying the head of an enemy was clearly not considered incompatible with the status and respectability of a gentlemanly colonial officer. On the contrary, it reflected a willingness to deploy ‘savage’ methods against savages, similar to the retributive logic so readily invoked by Cooper and others during the suppression of the Uprising. There was no pretence that the acquisition of the enemy’s head served a purpose other than the intimidation of the enemy, but, like the executions by cannon, this momentary lapse in ‘civilised’ behaviour was excusable, even commendable, within a colonial context. An early twentieth-century biography of Nicholson acknowledged the moral predicament of this act, but found it easy to justify with reference to the efficacy of such culturally specific violence: ‘It was a gruesome thing to do, perhaps, but it must be remembered that it was necessary to strike terror into the hearts of other evil-doers, to whom the freebooter in question had been something of a hero.’6
It was a well-established British practice to behead rebels and display their severed heads on pikes at the city-gates as a general warning—this had happened as recently as the suppression of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and also in the Caribbean during the early nineteenth century, where the beheading of ‘traitorous’ slaves assumed a culturally specific significance.7 It was accordingly not such an outlandish thing to do in 1857, as the British were fighting a new sort of rebels; the intended function of beheading was much as it had been in the case of Nicholson’s ‘freebooter’. Henry Dunlop, who fought with a volunteer cavalry unit in the region north of Delhi in 1857, described how they cut off the head of the local rebel leader, Shah Mall, and paraded it around the villages of the area:
‘We carried a small silken union-jack as the banner of the Volunteers, and on this occasion an ensign also, in the shape of Shah Mull’s gory head stuck on a long spear. This last was necessary, to prove to the country-people, who knew the sternly resolute features of the old ruffian well, that their leader was really dead.’8
Much like the spectacles of execution, the grisly display of the rebel leader’s severed head was used to restore order and, in this instance, to compel the local population to pay taxes. As a bloody symbol of power, next to the Union Jack, the severed head signalled the end of the popular rebellion and the restoration of colonial authority. The use of the notion of ‘necessity’ is also noteworthy, implying that it was the recalcitrant nature of the rebels, and the irregular circumstances of the conflict, which forced the British to take recourse to such extreme measures. Yet again the savagery ascribed to the rebels was used to legitimise British violence. Similar to the practice of scalping in north America, where it was popularised by Europeans as proof of kills, slain enemies were also beheaded in India during 1857 by both sides in the conflict as a means of claiming rewards. The severed heads of Europeans, for instance, were sent in by rebels to several of the local rulers, including Bhadur Shah, Nana Sahib and the Begum at Lucknow.9 When the noted rebel leader Maulvi Ahmadulah Shah was killed by a local raja in 1857, the Maulvi’s head was cut off and despatched to the British authorities for identification and so that the Rs 50.000 reward could be claimed.10
* * *
Costello’s decision to take Alum Bheg’s head moreover took place during a period when there was a keen interest in the human skull as a key site of scientific inquiry. Racial differences, in particular, were studied and established in reference to the size and shapes of peoples’ skulls, which were collected, measured and classified from all corners of the world. Exploration, conquest and collection went hand in hand within the European empires, and soldiers, medical personnel and colonial officials often doubled as amateur collectors and would-be scientists. In Europe, the posthumous dissection and the collection of body parts, had been reserved for executed criminals and the unclaimed corpses of the poor. In the imperial world, however, no such considerations existed, and the scale of this practice assumed much greater proportions. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, indigenous graves were robbed, colonial battlefields and execution grounds were scoured, while the trophies of ‘savage’ head-hunters were reappropriated to satisfy the demands of craniology and to populate the medical collections and ethnographic museums of the Western World.
Costello was certainly not the first colonial officer to help himself to the remains of the dead after an execution in colonial India. For instance, following the hanging of ‘Thugs’, alluded to in the previous chapter, a similar thing occured. Dr Henry Harpur Spry of the Bengal Medical Service was present at the execution in 1832, and described in a letter to his mother what happened after everyone else had left:
‘After the murders were taken down from the scaffold I had the heads of half a dozen of them taken off and have them now in course of preparation intending to send them with a history of each to the London Phrenological Society, but the other day I got a request from the Chief Secretary to Government to allow him to have charge of any I might have to take home to Combe at Edinburgh.’11
Spry was evidently inspired by the craze for phrenology, which emerged as one of the precursors to craniology and racial science during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Europe and America.12 The central premise of phrenology was that the mind was made up by a number of central faculties, such as ‘Cautiousness’ or ‘Inquisitiveness’, and their relative size and development effectively determined a person’s character. These faculties, it was further argued, could accurately be mapped and measured by the shape, bumps and dimensions of the skull, and the assumption was that an expert phrenologist could ‘read’ the personality of an individual—whether dead or alive. In order to prove the validity of their theories, phrenologists often relied on the skulls of criminals, since these would supposedly exhibit more pronounced traits of, for instance, ‘Secretiveness’ and ‘Destructiveness’, untempered perhaps by sufficiently developed ‘Benevolence’. Previously, the corpses of executed criminals had been used for dissection, which was indeed part of the punishment, and the availability of skulls of named murderers convicted for specific acts of violence enabled phrenologists to trace the corresponding faculties in the skull. As the craze for phrenology reached the outer reaches of the Empire during the 1830s, it was almost inevitable that the Indian ‘Thugs’, who were considered to be hereditary criminals, should also be subjected to this newly developed ‘science’.13
After removing the heads of the executed ‘Thugs’, it appears from Spry’s own account that he simply left them outside to be macerated by insects and exposure to the elements. Once the skulls were defleshed and dry, they were sent to Edinburgh for phrenological examination. Despite its popularity, phrenology was not uncontested as a ‘science’, and it is worth noting that Spry did not have official permission to remove the heads of the executed ‘Thugs’. The fact that he could do so with impunity, however, and later even publish his findings, reveals that the scient
ific framework within which the mutilation of the bodies took place mitigated, and implicitly legitimised, his actions.
Spry did not select the heads at random, and the seven skulls that were subsequently despatched to Scotland were supposedly those belonging to the most notorious ‘Thugs’, each of which accompanied by a detailed description of the individual and of the crimes for which he had been executed. Spry obtained this information from the trial-records, and when Robert Cox, an active member of the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh later examined the skulls, he referred back to these micro-biographies.14 Considering his reliance on the information provided by Spry, Cox’s conclusion was predictable: ‘it may be confidently affirmed,’ he claimed, ‘that so far as our information extends, the heads and characters of these seven “Thugs” exactly correspond.’15 This conclusion involved a significant sleight of hand, since phrenology was not an exact science, and without the accompanying biographies Cox’s analysis would have been impossible. The skulls of criminals were so useful to phrenologists precisely because they would know what personal characteristics to look for—phrenology could elicit no information from a skull independently of the profile of the individual. Similar to the note found with Alum Bheg’s skull, it was Spry’s micro-biographies that gave meaning and value to the skulls of ‘Thugs’.
If Spry had to contend himself with surreptitiously collecting the skulls of executed criminals in India, the battlefields at the peripheries of the Empire offered more fertile hunting grounds for the colonial head-hunter. In South Africa, the pervasive impact of racialised thinking meant that in many instances the indigenous population was considered simply as part of the natural fauna, meaning that their bodies could be treated like natural specimens.16 The presence of white settlers and the bitterness and brutality of the conflicts fought on the frontiers further contributed to a perception of those who resisted colonisation as primitive savages who could be hunted as animals.17 During the so-called Frontier Wars of South Africa, between 1779 and 1879, scientific collecting of human remains and the dehumanisation of non-white enemies in colonial warfare converged in the widespread practice of taking body parts as trophies.18
When the Xhosa chief Hintsa was shot and killed in 1836, for instance, the British soldiers and local settlers present not only pilfered the body for souvenirs—beads, ornaments and spear—but they also cut off and carried away his ears, teeth, testicles, as well as part of his beard.19 While there was no pretence of a scientific rationale for the mutilation of Hintsa’s body, any distinction between notions of loot, souvenirs, morbid mementos and ethnographic artefacts simply did not exist. One of Hintsa’s ears was reportedly offered up for sale, demonstrating the com-modification of this particularly grisly form of trophy.20 A decade later, during the Seventh Xhosa War in 1847, a British soldier in the 91st Highlanders commented on the price demanded for the skulls of slain enemies in Cape Town: ‘I have seen a [Xhosa] head for sale, I would have bought it but it was too dear so I shall wait till I can kill one myself.’ When the soldier was deployed in Xhosa territory, he even thought of turning it into a business opportunity: ‘I intend to make some money by selling [Xhosa] heads, which are very expensive in Cape Town.’21
These were not isolated cases, but common practices as British soldiers burned villages and indiscriminately killed or displaced the local populations. The Assistant Surgeon, and well-known anatomist, Robert Knox of the 72nd Highlanders, maintained a large collection of Xhosa skulls and when asked how he had required them, he responded wryly: ‘Why, sir, there was no difficulty in Caffraria; I had but to walk out of my tent and shoot as many [Xhosa] as I wanted for scientific and ethnological purposes.’22 Sadly, Knox was not bragging and another contemporary account describe the very process by which such ‘scientific’ collecting occurred:
‘Doctor A…of the 60th had asked my men to procure for him a few native skulls of both sexes. This was a task easily accomplished. One morning they brought back to camp about two dozen heads of various ages. As these were no supposed to be in a presentable state for the doctor’s acceptance, the next night they turned my vat into a cauldron for the removal of superfluous flesh. And there these men sat, gravely smoking their pipes during the live-long night, and stirring round and round the heads in that seething boiler, as though they were cooking black-apple dumplings.’23
It was not simply that the scientific paradigm permitted the collection of human skulls for a higher cause, but also that the very nature of what became known as ‘savage warfare’ involved a process of completely dehumanising the indigenous population. Much as was the case in India during the Uprising of 1857, British violence in South Africa was inspired by rumours and exaggerated stories of how local warriors mutilated the bodies of white soldiers and settlers. The macabre irony, however, was that, during the nineteenth century, the British mutilated far more bodies than did the various local groups of so-called ‘savages’ they fought in South Africa and elsewhere in the Empire.
If the British did not themselves directly kill those whose heads they collected, they were only too happy to purloin already prepared skulls. In 1859, during his travels in what is today Tanzania, the famous explorer Richard Burton described ‘passing though the poles decorated with skulls—a sort of negro Temple Bar—at the entrance Konduchi; they now grin in the London Royal College of Surgeons.’24 The reference to Temple Bar, the gate in London from where the heads of traitors were exhibited up till the 18th century, implied that Africans were still engaged in practices which had long ceased in Britain itself. Crucially, the fact that Burton had the skulls sent to a medical collection in London, suggests that, as far as he was concerned, this was a much more fitting resting place.25 The skulls may still have been grinning, but at least they were now being put to better use.
During the Lushai campaign of 1871–72, against so-called head-hunting tribes on the north-eastern frontier of British India, one officer noted the similarities between the British and their enemies’ obsession with skulls:
‘In fact all the medicos with us were quite as eager for Lushai skulls as any Lushai could have been for theirs; though, in the interests of civilisation, the Lushais’ heads would have reposed in glass cases on velvet cushions probably, while those of our friends would have been elevated on poles exposed to the wind and the rain.’26
The analogy between British and Lushai headhunting was acknowledged, yet quickly dismissed: for all the similarities, any real comparison of ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ practices was inconceivable to Victorians. It was indeed one of the basic assumptions underpinning imperialism that British collecting practices were rational by definition, whereas those of their enemies were simply deemed irrational. The close alignment between imperialism and scientific collecting nevertheless reveal the comparison between the British and headhunting tribes to be an apt one. As a putative object of knowledge, the human skull was indeed fetishised within Victorian society; the skull of a ‘Thug’, a Xhosa, or an Indian rebel of the ‘Mutiny’, was accordingly as much of a trophy to the coloniser as the head of an enemy slain in battle might have been to the colonised. The violence intimately linked to the collecting of skulls by colonial officers and medical personnel furthermore make the notion of a purely scientific endeavour inherently unsustainable. Collecting the skulls and other body-parts of indigenous people was as much an expression of power and brute force as executions or massacres were.
During the Indian Uprising, body parts of rebels were collected mainly as souvenirs and as part of the widespread looting and pillaging carried out by British troops and their local allies. Souvenirs from the massacres of European civilians, including locks of hair and other items found at Cawnpore, were also collected by British troops in the Victorian tradition of memento mori.27 Executions of rebels also produced souvenirs, as was the case when the famed rebel leader Tantia Tope was hanged in 1859:
‘He struggled very slightly, and the mehters28 were called to drag him straight. A sergeant of the
3rd Bengals acted as hangman. Thus finished the career of the rebel chief, Tantia Topee, with all due solemnities of British military routine. When the suspended body became motionless, the troops were all marched off, and the body remained hanging for the remainder of the evening. After the troops left, a great scramble was made by officers and others to get a lock of his hair, &c.’29
These types of souvenirs were not so different from those that spectators at public executions might collect in Europe, or even the more macabre mementos kept by collectors, including books bound in the skin of a murderer, or the death-masks of the famous and infamous alike.30
There was certainly no shortage of skulls belonging to Indian rebels available for the thousands of British troops who fought during the ‘Mutiny’. Photographic evidence shows skulls and bones spread out in the courtyard of the ‘Secundra Bagh’ at Lucknow, while William Henry Russell noted the ‘heaps of human bones’ found on the banks of the river near Satichaura Ghat at Cawnpore.31 One Englishman who was in Delhi just after the assault, described walking along the Jamuna river just outside the city, with the traces of the recent conflict everywhere:
‘dead horses and camels, and occasionally human remains, with portions of exploded shells, might be seen. The “Brahminee hawks” and vultures were still hovering around. I took up a human skull; it was that of a Sepoy for the marks of the pawn were still on the front teeth. A round shot or sword-cut had taken off the top of the head; death must have been instantaneous. I thought of the classic poet as I thus looked upon the most vivid realisation of them I ever saw, or ever expect to see:
The Skull of Alum Bheg Page 25