And so it turned out that the murder of Thomas and Jane Hunter and their baby was avenged after all. By that time, however, Alum Bheg was long dead and his skull somewhere in Britain. Between the time that Costello picked up the still-bleeding head on 10 June 1858, and its discovery as an old skull in a pub in 1963, we know nothing of the whereabouts of Alum Bheg. The pub, which opened in the early 1860s, was named The Lord Clyde after Sir Colin Campbell and his association with the Indian Uprising might explain why the skull ended up there in the first place. In the early twentieth century one of the proprietors of the pub was furthermore named Monckton and he may have been related to Henry Monckton, the Deputy Commissioner of Sialkot in 1858.17
After all these years, however, it is high time for Alum Bheg to return home. What he knew as home, of course, no longer exists, and while he was probably born in what is today India, he was executed in what is now Pakistan. The Uprising of 1857 also does not hold the same significance in Pakistan, as it does in India, where the commemoration of so-called ‘freedom-fighters’ is a fraught issue and thoroughly politicised. When the bodies of the 282 sepoys massacred by Cooper at Ajnala were discovered in 2014, the Indian Government showed no interest whatsoever, and it was locals who eventually excavated the bodies and cremated them.18 A Sikh shrine has since been built at the site next to the well, known as Kallianwala Ku or ‘black man’s well’, and it is still possible to see human bones, including pieces of skull with bullet-holes. Neither a murderer, nor a martyr, Alum Bheg nevertheless deserves better than to end up in a display case, or to be pressed into the service of some political agenda that he himself would not have recognised. Repatriation is, however, a complex and bureaucratic process and can only take place between institutions, which means that I cannot legally return the skull as a private individual. Unlike repatriation to indigenous communities in South Africa, New Zealand or Australia, there are no South Asian activists calling for the return of human remains from Western museums and collections. I hope with this book to have at least made people aware of the existence of these issues.
It is worth bearing in mind that the manner of Alum Bheg’s execution was deliberately intended to deny him his funeral rites and, for what it is worth, I think the peaceful site of the Battle of Trimmu Ghat, on the island in the Ravi River, which today marks the border between India and Pakistan, would be a fitting place to bury him. Ultimately, that is not for me to decide, but whatever happens the final chapter of Alum Bheg’s story has yet to be written.
‘That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once:
how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were
Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder!’
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1.Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, orig. 1899, Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition; New York: Norton, 1988, pp. 57–8.
2.See Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Found, London: Granta, 2015.
3.Ricardo Roque, ‘Stories, Skulls, and Colonial Collections, Configurations, 19, 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 1–23, 18.
4.I am much indebted to Dr Heather Bonney for being so generous with her time and expertise.
5.Costly DNA tests would not have been helpful without a sample to match with the results.
6.See for instance Saul David, The Indian Mutiny, London: Viking, 2002, pp. 277–8.
7.The encyclopaedic work of Kaye and Malleson provides a more detailed account, see John Kaye and GB. Malleson (ed.), Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny, I-VI, London: Allen, 1888–9, II, pp. 471–5. For more recent references to the outbreak at Sialkot, see Frances Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny, London: Viking, 1996, pp. 179–83; and Nile Green, Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 40 & 84–5.
8.Report by Brevet Colonel G. Farquharson, 11 July 1857, in ‘Report regarding the mutinees of the 14th and 46th Regiment Native Infantry at Jhelum and Sealkote’, National Archives of India (NAI), Military Department, 15 July 1857, 83 A.
9.F. G. Cardew, A Sketch of the Services of the Bengal Army, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1909, p. 444. See also G.H.D. Gimlette, A Postscript to the Records of the Indian Mutiny, London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1927, pp. 157–9.
10.See for instance ‘Chancery’, Dublin Evening Post, 14 Sept. 1833; and Information provided by the Royal Dragoon Guards Museum, with thanks to Daniel Greenhough.
11.See ‘Diary of William B. Armstrong 4th Dragoon Guards and 7th (Princess Royal) Dragoons’; and ‘Diary of 7th Dragoon Guards 1851–1859’, Royal Dragoon Guards Museum.
12.‘Queen’s Troops’, Allen’s India Mail, 4 Oct. 1858, p. 808.
13.‘Passengers Departed’, Allen’s India Mail, 6 Nov. 1858, pp. 885 and 890.
14.Information provided by the Royal Dragoon Guards Museum. See also ‘Mayo Assizes’, Mayo Constitution, 13 March 1866.
15.See for instance ‘Landed Estates Court: In the Matter of the Estate of Arthur Robert Costello, Owner and Petitioner’, Mayo Constitution, 1 July 1862; ‘The Allegation Against Mr Murrough O’brien’, Irish Times, 30 Nov. 1883; ‘The Land Commission’, Dublin Daily Express, 1 Aug. 1884; and ‘Common Pleas Division’, Jan. 26’ Dublin Daily Express, 27 Jan. 1885.
16.http://skehana.galwaycommunityheritage.org/content/people/sample-page-1-article-images—last accessed 2 Aug. 2017.
17.‘The Overland Mail’, The Morning Post, 4 Sept. 1858.
18.‘Diary of William B. Armstrong’, entry for 10 July 1858.
19.‘A Ghastly Memento—A Protest’, The Sphere, 4 Feb. 1911. Nothing further is known about this skull, and its whereabouts today remain unknown. The disapproving tenor of the piece in The Sphere is indicative of the fact that the collecting of such mementos was a contentious issue, even during the high-point of British imperialism. This is further discussed in the final chapter.
20.No. 3365: ‘Skull’, Official Catalogue of the Royal United Service Museum, London: J.J. Keliher & Co., 1914, ‘Additions to Museum Catalogue’, p. 1. The murder of an English Lady, i.e. Jane Hunter, is explicitly mentioned. See also ‘Diary of William B. Armstrong’, entry for 14 Aug. 1858.
21.A.T. Harrison (ed.) The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers, Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1980. A selection of Thomas Hunter’s letters are reproduced in John F. W. Youngson, Forty Years of the Panjab Mission of the Church of Scotland, 1855–1895, Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1896.
22.Andrew Gordon, Our India Mission: A Thirty Years’ History of the India Mission of the United Presbyterian Church of North America, Philadelphia: Andrew Gordon, 1886. The original letters from Gordon and the other American missionaries to their church in the United States are reproduced in Evangelical Repository, 16 (1857), pp. 29–505.
23.The only published account focusing specifically on Sialkot is Gregory Rich, The Mutiny in Sialkot—With a brief description of the Cantonment from 1852 to 1857, Sialkot,1924, and it relies overwhelmingly on Gordon’s account in Our India Mission.
24.The reference here is obviously Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009.
25.See for instance Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1983; and Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York: Basic Books, 1984.
26.Syud Ahmed Khan, The Causes of the Indian Revolt, orig. 1858, Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1873; ‘A few words relating to the late Mutiny of the Bengal Army, and the Rebellion in the Bengal Presidency, by Shaik Hedayut Ali, Subadar and Sirdar Bahadoor, Bengal Sikh Police Battalion, commanded by Captain T. Rattray, who has translated this paper from the original Ooroo’, Kaye Papers, H
/727(a), 759–66, APAC, referred to in the following as ‘Shaik Hedayut Ali’ with the pagination as found in the online version: https://books.google.com/books?id=xoQIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=shaik+hedayut&source=bl&ots=3AiK8Rf6sa&sig=DvqXTvX7F6mKgYnGAi_z6ytmDI8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjmguet37zVAhUBzmMKHc5xAk4Q6AEIQzAI#v=onepage&q=shaik%20hedayut&f=false—last accessed 4 Aug. 2017.
27.See Alison Safadi, ‘From Sepoy to Subadar/Khvab-o-Khayal and Douglas Craven Phillott’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, 25 (2010), pp. 42–65; and Gajendra Singh, ‘Finding Those Men with Guts: The Ascription and Re-Ascription of Martial Identities in India after the Uprising’, in Crispin Bates and Gavin Rand (eds.), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, Vol. 4: Military Aspects of the Indian Uprising, London and New Delhi: Sage, 2013, pp. 113–34.
28.Kim A. Wagner, ‘“In Unrestrained Conversation”: Approvers and the Colonial Ethnography of Crime in nineteenth-century India’, in Roque, Ricardo and Kim A. Wagner (eds.), Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011, pp. 135–62.
29.See also Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising, Oxford: Peter Lang Oxford, 2010.
30.See also Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014; and Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
31.Eric Stokes (C. A. Bayly ed.), The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986; Tapti Roy, ‘Visions of the Rebels: A study of 1857 in Bundelkhand’, Modern Asian Studies, 27, 1, (Feb. 1993), pp. 205–228; Tapti Roy, The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt 1857–1858: A Study of popular Resistance, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; and Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counterinsurgency’, Subaltern Studies II. Delhi, 1983, pp. 1–42. Reprint: Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, G.C.(eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies, New York: 1988, pp. 45–88, which I personally much prefer to his better-known book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
32.See Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 13.
33.Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London: Penguin, 2003; Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006; Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt, London: Verso, 2011.
34.Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, London: Hurst, 2017.
1.THE HOT WIND OF AN INDIAN MAY
1.Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 129.
2.Youngson, Forty Years, p. 86.
3.Ibid, 87.
4.R. Kipling, Kim, orig. 1901, Norton Critical Edition, New York: Norton, 2002, p. 57.
5.A. Brandreth to G.F. Edmonstone, 10 July 1857, Government Records, Vol. 7:1—Punjab: Mutiny Records (Correspondence), Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1911, p. 200. Hereafter referred to as Mutiny Records 7:1.
6.Denzil Ibbetson (ed.), Gazetteer of the Sialkot District, 1883–4, Lahore: Civil and Military Press, 1884, pp. 100–102. See also Rich, The Mutiny in Sialkot, p. 14.
7.Rich, The Mutiny in Sialkot, pp. 2–7.
8.A.A. Roberts to R. Montgomery, 20 March 1858, Government Records, Vol. 8 :1—Punjab: Mutiny Records (Reports), Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1911, p. 226. Hereafter referred to as Mutiny Records 8:1.
9.Gazetteer of the Sialkot District, 104; and G. Dodd, The History of the Indian Revolt and of the Expeditions to Persia, China, and Japan, 1856–7–8, London: W. and R. Chambers, 1859, p. 202.
10.H. Monckton to A.A. Roberts, 2 Feb. 1858, Mutiny Records 8:1, p. 278.
11.‘The Indian Revolt’, The Derby Mercury, 21 Oct. 1857.
12.Ibid. See also H. Monckton to A.A. Roberts, 2 Feb. 1858, Mutiny Records 8:1, p. 278.
13.Kaushik Roy (ed.), 1857 Uprising: A Tale of an Indian Warrior (Translated from Durgadas Bandopadhyay’s Amar Jivancharit), Delhi: Anthem Press, 2008, p. 45.
14.Christopher Wilkinson-Latham, The Indian Mutiny: Men-at-Arms Series 67, London: Osprey Publishing, 1977; Ian Knight, Queen Victoria’s Enemies (3): India: Men-at-Arms Series 219, London: Osprey Publishing, 1990; Michael Barthorp, The British Troops in the Indian Mutiny 1857–59: Men-at-Arms Series 268, London: Osprey Publishing, 1994.
15.A.A. Roberts to R. Montgomery, 20 March 1858, Mutiny Records 8:1, p. 226.
16.Roy (ed.), 1857 Uprising, p. 43.
17.Gimlette, A Postscript to the Records of the Indian Mutiny, pp. 157–159.
18.Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethno-history of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770–1830, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.
19.W.H. Sleeman, On the Spirit of Military Discipline in our Native Indian Army, Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1841, pp. 22–23.
20.Ibid., p. 71.
21.Ibid., pp. 5–6.
22.Ibid., p. 40.
23.For a recent overview, see Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, London: Simon & Schuster, 2016.
24.Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy.
25.Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company; and Douglas M. Peers, ‘“The Habitual Nobility of Being”: British Officers and the Social Construction of the Bengal Army in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 25, 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 545–569, 551.
26.Gavin Rand and Kim A. Wagner, ‘“Recruiting the ‘Martial Races”: Identities and Military Service in Colonial India’, Patterns of Prejudice, 46, 3–4 (2012), pp. 232–54.
27.Muslim recruits from places such as Rohilkhand, on the other hand, aspired towards the Mughal ideal of the warrior gentleman, and consequently came to dominate cavalry recruitment, see Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company.
28.Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company; and Green, Islam and the Army in Colonial India.
29.See also Sabyasachi Dasgupta, In Defence of Honour and Justice: Sepoy Rebellions in the Nineteenth Century, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2015.
30.Peers, ‘“The Habitual Nobility of Being”’.
31.E. Martineau to J. Becher, 5 May 1857, Kaye Papers, H/725(2),1057, APAC.
32.See Crispin Bates, ‘Some Thoughts on the Representation and Misrepresentation of the Colonial South Asian Labour Diaspora’, South Asian Studies, 33 (2017), pp. 7–22.
33.Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company, pp. 77–78.
34.Thanks to Crispin Bates, Dilip Menon and Katherine Schofield for suggestions and input on this subject.
35.Peers, ‘“The Habitual Nobility of Being”’, p. 553.
36.The most detailed account of this affair is in P. Bandyopadhay, Tulsi Leaves and the Ganges Water: The Slogan of the First Sepoy Mutiny at Barrackpore 1824, Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi and Co., 2003.
37.Peers, ‘“The Habitual Nobility of Being”’, p. 547.
38.Cited in Bandyopadhay, Tulsi Leaves and the Ganges Water, p. 101.
39.Peers, ‘“The Habitual Nobility of Being”’, pp. 547–8.
40.Ibid.
41.See David, The Indian Mutiny, pp. 23–24. Gurkha battalions had already been established after the Company’s war with Nepal in 1814–16, and following the Sikh Wars of 1845–6 and 1848–9, both Sikhs and Muslims from Punjab entered the Bengal Army in increasing numbers.
42.Ibid.
43.‘Shaik Hedayut Ali’, pp. 6–7.
44.Ibid., pp. 15–17.
45.Sleeman, On the Spirit of Military Discipline, p. 18. Italics and parenthesis in original.
46.Roy, The Politics of a Popular Uprising, pp. 24–25.
47.Kaye’s and Malleson’s History, I p. 310.
48.Ibid., pp. 31
2 and 313–15.
49.See also Roy, The Politics of a Popular Uprising, pp. 25.
50.See also Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, pp. 1–63.
51.‘Shaik Hedayut Ali’, p. 5.
52.Ibid., p. 6.
53.Mainodin Hassan Khan, in C. T. Metcalfe (trans.), Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi, Westminster: A. Constable and Co., 1898, p. 37.
54.Ibid., pp. 37–8.
55.‘Shaik Hedayut Ali’, p. 2.
56.Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 129.
57.Dr Graham to J. Graham, 8 May 1857, The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers, p. 17.
58.Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 135; and letter by A. Gordon, 16 July 1857, Evangelical Depository, p. 314.
59.Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 135.
60.Dr Graham to J. Graham, 8 May 1857, The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers, p. 17.
61.Ibid.
62.See Youngson, Forty Years, pp. 70–7.
63.Letter from T. Hunter, 2 April 1856, Youngson, Forty Years, pp. 78–79.
64.Ibid., p. 78.
65.Ibid., p. 89.
66.Gordon, Our India Mission, pp. 89–90.
67.Ibid., p. 128.
68.Ibid., pp. 128–9.
69.Letter from T. Hunter, 24 Jan. 1857, Youngson, Forty Years, pp. 92–93.
70.Ibid., p. 93.
71.Letter from T. Hunter, 28 Feb. 1857, ibid., p. 94.
72.Gordon, Our India Mission, p. 129
73.Ibid., pp. 129–30.
74.Ibid.
75.Edward Vibart, The Sepoy Mutiny; as seen by a Subaltern from Delhi to Lucknow, London: Smith Elder and Co., 1898, p. 262. For the story of Delhi during the Indian Uprising, see William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi 1857, London: Bloomsbury, 2006.
The Skull of Alum Bheg Page 29