One of the things I’m trying to do in my research on the 1857 revolt in British India is to show that unlike what the media and generals and politicians tell us, words like “insurgency” and “counter-insurgency” are not neutral terms but politically charged ones. What we think about the insurgents’ goals has a whole to to do with how we view their actions.
So many Indians–rebel soldiers and civilians–were hanged in the British retribution that their bodies lined thoroughfares like the Grand Trunk Road. It was said that mango trees often grew bodies, too. Left hanging until they deteriorated as warnings to others, some of the bodies hanging low to the ground provided meals to pigs and dogs.
The photograph below illustrates the brutality of other British counter-insurgency measures. The price of rebellion was high indeed.
Indian rebels of 1857 being tied to mouths of cannons
Wow… Where did you find this photograph? I’d love to show it to my students. Could you possibly email me a larger, better resolution version of it? Perhaps scan it in or something?
Must say your posts are really interesting these days. Hope you find the time to write more frequently!
Thanks, Nagesh. I found this in the souvenir put out by the 1857 Centenary Committee, formed by the Govt of India in 1957. This is an extremely fascinating document and, I think, crystallizes the way in which the 1957 period is really responsible for shaping the dominant nationalist narratives about the 1857 events today.
But when I looked on the web just now to see if the image is already out there, I found the same image on the following website, which says its a Russian painting about British tactics during a post-1857 rebellion: http://swagatam.wordpress.com/page/2/. So obviously I want to look into this a bit more.
You might consult some of the tiresome but necessary histories of military regiments to see if (for example) pith helmets were in use at that time, whether the uniforms actually match any regiment’s, etc. On my first view of the “photo” I was skeptical that it was in fact a photo–but mainly because of the melodramatic pose of the victim on the closest gun.
We can do better than wikipedia, but it seems clear to me that the image above is actually a copy of a painting by the Russian painter Vasili Vereshchagin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Vasilyevich_Vereshchagin).
I knew that at least one of these death-by-cannon episodes was conducted in full public view, though I was always a bit surprised that a photographer could get such a shot. Eyewitness accounts are there, though.
But the Vereshchagin info is interesting, too. It appears that he was depicting a scene from 1857 but that the soldiers are indeed in 1880s garb, making a statement about the ongoing violence of war.