The Skull of Alum Bheg
Page 28
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By the time Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in 1899, the skulls of slain enemies, stuck on poles outside Mr Kurtz’ compound, had become morbid markers, not of African savagery, but of the violence and moral decrepitude of Western imperialism. Yet little more than a decade before, the famous artist, designer and, less famously, socialist, William Morris, had invoked an equally poignant inversion of the symbolism of the skull. In a withering piece of political satire, Morris skewered the self-congratulatory sentimentality of late-Victorian imperialism by listing some of the items that he felt had been left out of the 1886 Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London:
‘Examples of the last remains of the art of India which our commercialism has destroyed have been made to do duty as a kind of gilding for the sordidness of the rest of the show, and are a sorry sight indeed to one who knows anything of what the art of the East has been. But let that pass. There are perhaps, certain exhibits of examples of the glory of the Empire which have been, I think, forgotten. We might begin at the entrance with two pyramids, à la Timour, of the skulls of Zulus, Arabs, Burmese, New Zealanders, etc., etc., slain in wicked resistance to the benevolence of British commerce. A specimen of the wire whips used for softening the minds of rebellious Jamaica negroes under the paternal sway of Governor Eyre might be shown, together with a selection of other such historical mementoes, from the blankets infected with small-pox sent to unfriendly tribes of Red-Skins in the latter eighteenth century down to the rope with which Louis Riel was hanged last year, for resisting a particularly gross form of land-stealing. The daily rations of an Indigo ryot and of his master under one glass case, with a certificate of the amount of nourishment in each, furnished by Professor Huxley. The glory of the British arms gained in various successful battles against barbarians and savages, the same enclosed in the right eye of a louse. The mercy of Colonists towards native populations; a strong magnifying-glass to see the same by. An allegorical picture of the emigrant’s hope (a) on leaving England; (b), after six months in the Colonies. A pair of crimson plush breeches with my Lord Tennyson’s “Ode” on the opening of the Exhibition, embroidered in gold, on the seat thereof. A great many other exhibits of a similar nature could be found suitable to the exposition of the Honour, Glory, and Usefulness of the British Empire.’80
At first glance, the story of Alum Bheg’s skull may seem like little more than a curious anecdote with little bearing on the broader history of either the Indian Uprising, or of the British Empire and its legacies more generally. Yet the violence that produced Alum Bheg’s skull, and which was made explicit in the accompanying note, serves as a poignant reminder of the otherwise hidden violence implicit to the collecting, and exhibiting, of the human remains of indigenous people since the nineteenth century. There was nothing intrinsically interesting about Alum Bheg’s skull, and without the cursory trial and subsequent execution, the skull would not have been that of a rebel and a murderer and would have been of no appeal to Costello. Without the execution, it would moreover not have been possible for Costello to collect in the first place. It was accordingly the very process by which a skull had become ‘available’ for collecting that made it worthwhile as a collectable object—the basic fact that a skull could be collected is also the reason why it was collected. The story of the provenance, or micro-biography, of a skull thus served a crucially constitutive role in turning it into an object of significance and in this respect, there was much less difference between practices of so-called scientific collecting and the taking of war-trophies than is usually assumed. This raises a further question regarding the commonly perceived dichotomy between scientific collection and the taking of war-trophies as ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ practices respectively.
In the case of Alum Bheg, the taking of his head cannot be regarded as an isolated act pertaining only to the corpse of an executed enemy. If the execution by cannon was a culturally specific measure, the act of turning Alum Bheg’s skull into a trophy was merely a slight improvisation, and logical extension, of the formally authorised mutilation of his body. Deeply entangled with the forms and functions of colonial violence, Costello’s treatment of Alum Bheg was thus informed by the racialised logic that underpinned the imperial project. The fate that befell Alum Bheg was shared by thousands of indigenous people in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas. And that story is not inconsequential to our understanding of the encounter between the West and the non-Western world in a more general sense.
EPILOGUE
THE DEAD BODIES OF THY SERVANTS
The outbreak at Sialkot cast long shadows and had an indelible impact on the lives of survivors and relatives alike. Sarah Graham quickly left India, never to return. She was reported to have been so grief-stricken that she remained in her cabin throughout the voyage home, and she was dressed in mourning when she arrived at Southampton along with many other ‘refugees’ from the Uprising.1 Robert Hunter, the brother of Thomas, was also a missionary in India, and it was he who had originally encouraged Thomas to take up a career as a missionary. The death of his brother, however, deeply troubled Robert, and shortly afterwards he abandoned his divine calling. He had not given up the commitment to proselytising in India, he explained:
‘But I felt that, with my peculiarities of mental constitution, I could not hope again to be an effective labourer in the East. Nearly every object I beheld would call up the scene of the murders, and it would be in the last degree harrowing to my feelings to listen to panegyrics on the rebel party, by whom so many of those dearest to me had been barbarously murdered. If exposed to these influences there was imminent risk, either that I should be driven to an abatement of that strong love for the heathen, without which a missionary is useless, or that in the effort to resist this temptation, my mind would sink into a hopelessly morbid state. Could it have been assumed that the call of duty still summoned me to the East, it would have been a distrust of Divine grace to suppose that strength would not be afforded; but, believing the effects produced on my mind, by the terrible bereavement, to be such as wholly to disqualify me for labouring effectively in India, I viewed this as a providential intimation that my work there was over, and should have regarded it as presumption and not faith to go forward. There was thus no course open to me but the very painful one of resigning my office as a missionary.’2
The traumatic experience of losing his brother at the hands of the ‘rebel party’ had evidently not given Robert Hunter much cause for reflection as to exactly why a rebellion had taken place—nor what role missionaries may have played in fomenting such animosity. Andrew Gordon, too, felt vindicated rather than responsible following the outbreak at Sialkot:
‘We have no idea that England will give up India as long as she has any soldiers to send here, and we do not think she should, for the people are not prepared to govern themselves as they were in America. The petty kings here would only try to kill one another. Yet God has sent, for some reason, a terrible judgement on the ruling as well as the rebellious power. One thing is certain: they cannot blame it on missionaries. I hope they will attribute it to their indifference to Christianity and favour towards idolatry.’3
Dr Graham’s nephew, James, however, harboured an intense dislike of the missionaries and did indeed blame them for much of what had taken place. Shortly after he was informed of his uncle’s death, James wrote from India to his sister back in Ireland, describing what he perceived to be the main causes for the uprising:
‘It is also owing greatly to missionaries: poor illiterate country parsons who have never travelled twenty miles in their lifetimes, and whose minds are as narrow as their travels, come out here, and without the slightest respect for the religion of people who in their own words and deeds are infinitely their superiors, commencing preaching Christianity, not by showing in their acts, not displaying that charity to others which is its vital principle, but with the wildest abuse of all other sects and denominations. They inflame the minds of the people against u
s. These narrow minded padres never think that they are inciting the minds of 150 millions of people. They think only of their own pockets, and of how they will be able to cook up their next home report, which is a mass of fiction. Yes, my dear Sarah, know yourself and let all your friends know that by your subscriptions to missionaries you are purchasing the murders of your friends and relations…’4
James was not alone in this assessment. In the aftermath of the Uprising, the British were forced to acknowledge that the ‘Mutiny’ had been, in part at least, provoked by their own interference in local religious beliefs and practices. In 1858, control of India was transferred from the East India Company to the British Crown, and a policy of strict non-interference was maintained (in principle if not always in practice). One of the guiding principles of British rule in India was accordingly that the Government could never again be seen to interfere in religious matters, lest they alienate the local population. When Gordon and the American missionaries in 1858 sought to secure permission to build a church near the city in Sialkot, they ran afoul of this new policy. Their church was to be built on land next to the spot where a tahsil, or official revenue office was being constructed, and the fear was that, as Gordon put it, ‘the natives would be liable to suspect that the government was itself erecting a mission church, contrary to the recently-announced government policy of neutrality in religious matters.’5 After much bureaucratic wrangling, the Americans eventually got their permission, yet it was clear that the days when the interests of state and church might converge were well and truly over.
While Dr Graham’s nephew was largely despondent, claiming that ‘India will never be the same to me again,’ Dr Graham’s son, William, was seething with hate. ‘I can never have revenge sufficient to satiate my thirst,’ he wrote, ‘and it’s a thing I can’t and won’t do again, command black men of any sort.’6 As a captain in the cavalry, he was present at the taking of Delhi in September 1857, and shortly afterwards visited the imprisoned Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah. He described the meeting in a letter to a relative:
‘I saw the King of Delhi, and abused him like a pick-pocket, and treated him anything but as the Great Mogul. I saw his three sons also after they were killed, lying at the Kotwali, where the Europeans were treating their remains with every indignity.’7
Although Bahadur Shah had nothing to do with events in Sialkot, and had been no more than a figurehead at Delhi, he was considered the principal leader of the Uprising and thus became the target for much abuse.8 Brigadier Brind’s brother, Major James Brind, was also present at the taking of Delhi and he took a far bloodier revenge in the neighbourhood known as Kucha Chelan, where he personally oversaw the killing of as many as 200 locals who had been ‘identified’ as rebels. Those who were not bayoneted on the spot, were forced to clean the latrines in the British camp before they too were executed. The Indian poet Zahir Dehlavi described the slaughter, which included many Delhi luminaries:
‘Some were arrested and taken through the Rajghat gate to the river side and there were shot. The bodies were all thrown into the river. Meanwhile many of their women were so disturbed by what they saw that they left their homes with their children and jumped into the wells of Kucha Chelan were stacked with dead bodies. My pen refuses to describe this further.’9
Even from the distance of several years, the official historian of the ‘Mutiny’, John W. Kaye, nevertheless still found it possible to defend Brind’s actions:
‘There was not a kinder-hearted, as there was not a braver man in the Delhi army than James Brind; but he was a man of an excitable temperament, and he had been working day and night in the batteries, under a fierce sun, seldom or never sleeping all the time. And he had ever before him the memory of the fact that his brother had been killed at Sealkote by the treacherous connivance of his own servants.’10
While the violence of Indians was perceived as innate and treacherous, British brutality could be explained and even justified with reference to the climate, physical exhaustion and, ultimately, the savagery ascribed to their Indian victims. A few days before, John Nicholson, the scourge of the Sialkot rebels, personally led one of the columns during the final assault on Delhi. During the intense street-fighting that followed, he was shot in the chest and fatally wounded. Initially abandoned by the coolies who were supposed to take him to the hospital, Nicholson was eventually taken back to the British camp where he died in agony nine days later.11 His death came as a hard blow to the British, ‘in the hour of victory’ at Delhi. Herbert Edwardes telegraphed the news to Nicholson’s former colleagues in Punjab, gushing about the man’s greatness:
‘How grand, how glorious a piece of handiwork he was! It was a pleasure even to behold him. And then his nature was so equal to his frame! So undaunted, so noble, so tender, so good, so stern to evil, so single-minded, so generous, so heroic, yet so modest. I never saw another like him, and never expect to do so. And to have had him for a brother, and now to lose him in the prime of life. It is an inexpressible and irreparably grief. Nicholson was the soul of truth.’12
One can only guess, but it seems unlikely that those Indians at the receiving end of Nicholson’s so-called ‘tenderness’ would be able to recognise him in this eulogy. His death on the battlefield, and subsequent beatification, however, allowed Nicholson’s callous brutality to be conveniently glossed over and he became an instant Victorian hero, glorified in children’s books and commemorated in statues.
At Sialkot, the death of Thomas and Jane Hunter was commemorated with the Hunter Memorial Church, which was completed in 1865. Today, Sialkot today has a sizable local Christian community, and it is only because of the Scottish missionaries that the events of 1857 are at all remembered. Locals will point to the bridge crossing the Nullah where Thomas and Jane were killed, right next to the jail and court-house which are still located where they were during the Uprising. In general, however, there are few traces of the outbreak, and only a single bastion of the old fort still stands, crumbing and overgrown by vines. The ruins of Monckton’s grand house west of the cantonments are barely discernible amidst shrubs and bushes and will have disappeared in a few years.
Dr Graham’s nephew had originally wanted to move his uncle’s body to the cemetery in the cantonment and rebury him in a proper casket. He was nevertheless advised against this as Dr Graham’s body had apparently been highly decomposed at the time of its burial and none of the other bodies were moved either. The temporary burial site of Dr Graham, Thomas Hunter, Jane Hunter and the baby, in the small enclosure next to the fort, became their permanent resting place. The inscriptions on the graves read:
‘To the memory of James Graham Esquire, M.D., Superintending Surgeon One of the victims who fell by the hands of the native soldiery on the 9th July 1857, when they broke out into Mutiny and rebelled at this station
In memory of Revd. Thomas Hunter, M.A., Missionary of the Church of
Scotland 9th July 1857
“Faithful unto Death”
In memory of Jane Scott and Thomas, wife and son of Revd. Thomas Hunter
9th July 1857
“In their death—not divided”’13
The graves were still intact by 1983, when some of the Christian community in Sialkot took photographs of the small enclosure.14 Since then, however, the surrounding buildings have been expanded onto the small plot of the cemetery, and the gravestones themselves destroyed. While I was able to locate the site of the graves in 2017, I was not allowed to inspect them any further, as the local residents worried that the Christian community might reclaim the land that has been illegally encroached upon. Whatever remains of the graves of Dr Graham and the Hunters is today buried under trash in someone’s backyard.
When I visited the Hunter Memorial church in 2017, the old caretaker, who had been working there for almost 60 years, told me that he had heard stories about the man who killed the Hunters when he was a child: how the murderer had fled to Jammu, and how, when he was caught, his arms and legs we
re cut off. This was, as I found out, actually the true story of what ultimately happened to Hurmat Khan.15 The man who was responsible for the murders for which Alum Bheg was executed, had fled from Sialkot on 9 July 1857, and despite the Rs 1,000 reward offered for his capture, went into hiding just across the border in Kashmir. In 1862, a stranger was spotted in a small village on the British side of the border; he claimed to have been sent by one ‘Hurmat Shah’ to fetch the wife of a man named Fazla. Local officials had long been on the lookout for Hurmat Khan and knew that the wife of Fazla was the very woman with whom Hurmat Khan had quarrelled over with a court clerk, which had led to Hurmat Khan’s subsequent dismissal. The British at Sialkot were accordingly informed and with the assistance of the local authorities of Jammu, it was ascertained that this ‘Hurmat Shah’ lived in a hut near the city gate of the Jammu fort. A spy even managed to enter the hut, and when it was reported that ‘Hurmat Shah’ had a sword hanging on the wall, it was seen to prove that he was indeed the fugitive, Hurmat Khan.
Due to the reward, Hurmat Khan was nevertheless known to be extremely cautious and he had on previous occasions taken to the hills at the slightest alarm. According to Gordon, a scheme worthy of Kipling was devised to capture the fugitive murderer:
‘An English gentleman at Sialkot organised a sham marriage procession. Armed men were dressed as peasants would dress for a wedding, and were packed in yakkas (one-horse vehicles) in genuine marriage procession style. The Englishman played the part of the dainty bride, secluded from vulgar gaze in a covered and closely curtained ox-cart, as a native bride ought to be. The bells jingled merrily; the bridal party wended their way along the road leading to the murderer’s hut, amid noisy talking and laughter, without exciting any suspicion. Suddenly the wedding guests were transformed into a [164] body of armed men, who, headed by the bearded bride, surrounded the hut. Hurmat Khan, drawing his sword, stood at his doorway. Knowing his fate if captured, he made a desperate defence, holding forty men at bay for three hours, which was doubtless owing to the desire of his assailants to capture him alive if possible; but all their efforts to accomplish this failed. Finally, they all closed in upon him in a body, and he received a sword-cut in the loins which put an end to his life. His body was sent to Sialkot and identified on oath—in fact the whole city recognised it.’16