Trauma

The history of empires provides no shortage of traumatic events and no dearth of commemorations either. What counts as trauma, how you remember a trau­matic event, and what you remember of it depends, of course, on who is doing the remembering.

Empire was welcomed by hundreds of millions, but many millions of others la­mented the loss and displacement that followed. Who was traumatized by the Morant Bay rebellion, the Mau Mau uprising, and the Indian Mutiny of 1857? The colonizers, the colonized, or both? To take the example of the Indian uprising, many in Britain had little doubt that the “Sepoy Mutiny” was an unjustified and violent provocation by Indians against the British, or that it needed to be stopped ruthlessly. A recent study, by Christopher Herbert, bears the title War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma and seeks to show that the response to the uprising of 1857 was multifaceted in Britain and that not every British commentary should “properly be read as anything like a confident allegory of British virtue and racial entitlement to rule.”^[1299] For Herbert, the uprising caused Victorian British writers to come face to face with the excesses of their own rule in India, with its racism, violence, and venality. He writes, “The shock of finding that they were despised by their supposedly grateful imperial subjects in India was in part the shock of finding that their national idealism and national self-esteem were self-deluding and mor­ally corrupting.”^[1300] Yet, Herbert's study itself has prompted a reviewer to observe, “The trauma of the traumatizers becomes a cause for great compassion, and their honesty about their participation in it a cause for tremendous admiration and, in­deed, forgiveness.”^[1301]

The impact of the uprising on the British, in South Asia and Britain, in the nine­teenth century, can scarcely be in doubt.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the uprising was an occasion for com­memoration and for acknowledging the bravery of those who fought on behalf of God and Empire. On December 23, 1907, 50 years after the uprising, the British survivors came together for dinner, at the Royal Albert Hall, in London, as guests of the owners of the Daily Telegraph. On the following day, “At the conclusion of Lord Roberts's speech the whole assembly stood while the ‘Last Post' was sounded by the buglers of the 1st Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, the defenders of Lucknow. Mr Ben Davies then sang ‘Recessional,’ and Mr Lewis Waller recited a commemo­rative poem by Mr Rudyard Kipling entitled ‘1857-1907.’ The proceedings closed with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ sung by Miss Muriel Foster and Mr Ben Davies, and enthu­siastic cheers by the veterans for Lord Burnham.”^[1305] The poem that Kipling wrote to accompany this characteristically British celebration of bravery was entitled “The Veterans” and went as follows:

to-day, across our fathers’ graves,

The astonished years reveal

The remnant of that desperate host Which cleansed our East with steel.

Hail and farewell! We greet you here, With tears that none will scorn—

O Keepers of the House of old,

Or ever we were born!

One service more we dare to ask—

Pray for us, heroes, pray, That when Fate lays on us our task We do not shame the Day!^[1306]

The classical and biblical echoes are not surprising from Kipling, who elsewhere wrote of the mutineers in pejorative terms. In this poem, the narrator salutes the soldiers who are present at the gathering, doughty soldiers who are said to have used their steel swords and “cleansed” the colony of its murderous rebels; the nar­rator asks that younger defenders of the Indian Empire similarly to rise to the task and not be found wanting on Judgment Day.

The distance of nationalist Indian commentators from this kind of tribute and from earlier treatments such as John Kaye’s History of the Sepoy War in India (1864-1876) can be measured by reading the title alone of Vir Savarkar’s Indian War of Independence (1909). Savarkar’s book was one of many Indian responses to the uprising; several took the nationalist line and preferred to see the events of 1857 as the stirrings of a widespread native demand for independence, rather than as a small mutiny by soldiers in the army of the East India Company. Savarkar wrote about “the brilliance of a War of Independence shining in ‘the mutiny of 1857’” and described how “out of the heap of ashes appeared forth sparks of a fiery inspiration.”^[1307] Prone to characterize the uprising also as a “Revolution,” he claimed, “The seed of the Revolution of 1857 is in this holy and inspiring idea, clear and explicit, propounded from the throne of Delhi, the protection of religion AND COUNTRY.”^[1308]

What was the uprising: a Sepoy Mutiny, a war of independence, or a revolution? The debate is familiar: it can be traced back to disputes of the Victorian period and unfolded in both Britain and India. It will suffice here to say that the legacy of this reception continues to be felt in the Indian subcontinent where school textbooks caution against an unqualified use of the word “mutiny” and also rec­ognize the contested nature of the historical record.

That the uprising was traumatic for nearly everyone involved in the action can hardly be in question. The repercussions were vividly felt, by Kipling, among others. Kipling was born in Bombay, in 1865, several years after the events, but he grasped like no other Anglo-Indian writer the fragility of the hold exercised by the rulers over the native population.

Consider the The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, which was published in 1885, and which remains what Angus Wilson, in The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, called “one of the most powerful nightmares of the precariousness of a ruling group, in this case of a group haunted by memories of the Mutiny not yet twenty years old.”^[1312] In Kipling's short story, the protagonist, Morrowbie Jukes, accidentally strays into a sandy crater with a low-lying encampment inhabited by the living dead, or as the narrator says, by “the Dead who did not die, but may not live.”^[1313] These were Hindu Indians who were believed to be dead and who showed signs of life just on the point of cremation but who could not be returned to the world of the living since the last rites had already been performed on them and were thus forced to live in badger­holes in the small village beside a river. The site's residents were prevented from fleeing by swampland, by high sand walls that enclosed the crater on the sides which did not open onto the river, and by a boat that patrolled the river all day. Jukes falls into the place by accident when his horse bolts and flies headlong into the crater so that both animal and rider find themselves among a group whose “filth and re­pulsiveness... [are] beyond all description.”^[1314] The only native to recognize Jukes in the village is a man called Gunga Dass, who used to be in charge of a telegraph office. But these natives are not prone to defer to their colonial masters, for instead of encountering the “civility from my inferiors” to which he had grown accustomed, “even in these days, when local self-government has destroyed the greater part of a native's respect for a Sahib,” Jukes is greeted with the sounds of cackling laughter, whistling, and howling.^[1315] Ultimately, Jukes's servant boy, Dunnoo, tracks the horse's hooves to the crater and hauls him out of the village of the dead and delivers him back into the world of the living.

In commenting on Kipling's work, Christopher Lane has suggested that “the co­lonial drive leads its subject inexorably toward ruin and death.” Lane adds, “When Freud likened the ego's regulation of the unconscious to ‘a man on horse-back, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse,' he unwittingly endorsed the most common allegorical structure of Kipling's fiction.”^[1316] Thus, Jukes's strange ride “over what seemed to be a limitless expanse of moonlit sand”^[1317] links the story, in Freudian terms, to colonial fantasies about “the convulsive bliss of self-sabotage—a jouissance ride into the hole of oblivion and the brink of the real.”^[1318] From this per­spective, Jukes's decision to saddle his horse and hunt down the “huge black and white beast” that is keeping him up at night can be read in the terms of a colonial psy­chodrama, made all the more pungent by the “delirium of fever and the excitement of rapid motion through the air” that marks the rider's journey over the sand dunes and into an abyss of inversion. And the crater, which lies across the sands and beyond the colonial outpost, thus comes to symbolize “Jukes' self-destructive fantasy.”^[1319]

Yet, Kipling indulges the fantasy of self-destruction only up to the point when Jukes is rescued by his servant, Dunnoo. The “normal” master/servant relationship is reasserted at the end of the story and the exploration of the troubling world is called off in a few sentences. What scares Jukes in the crater is not just that the worst elements of colonial India are all compressed into a small space—disease, filth, smells, lack of hygiene, the breakdown of hierarchy—but also that his own life may someday come to resemble his fearful experience. For Jukes, the crater in the sands bears witness to the breakdown of colonial rule and also offers a harrowing vision of life among the natives as an equal. It is not an experience that Jukes expects to suffer in the near future, but it may yet lie after that moment on the horizon which marks the end of empire.