Brutal colonial butchery paraded as ‘bravery’

In September, a team of retired British Army officers and descendants of British Army officers who suppressed the revolt of 1857 came on a tour of various sites of the 1857 war. It was no private mourning – it was a brazen public attempt to celebrate the British Empire’s ‘victory’ over the ‘mutineers’ of 1857. At Meerut, where the war first broke out, they attempted to erect a plaque in memory of the “bravery and distinguished service” of the 1st Battalion of the 60th King’s Royal Rifle Corps between May 10 and September 20, 1857.

The 1857 uprising was crushed in a bloodbath, replete with scenes of racist humiliation and cruelty – tying rebels to the mouth of cannons and blowing them up; forcing them to lick blood off the floor; hanging them on display from the trees and so on. For British ex-soldiers to come to these sites, not to offer an apology but rather to celebrate the colonial cruelty without a shred of remorse is incredibly audacious.

The leader of this team, one Roy Trustram Eve, a former soldier of the Kings’ Royal Rifles Corps, declared that 1857 had not been “a war between English and Indians , it was war between the English and a majority of the population of the subcontinent versus the mutineers.” Sir Mark Havelock Allan, descendant of the notorious Sir Henry Havelock and inheritor of the title ‘Baronet of Lucknow’ conferred on Havelock posthumously after the Siege of Lucknow, expressed “enormous admiration” for Havelock and his fellow colonialists; said the Raj had been a “good thing”; and claimed that India’s stable democratic system was attributable to the British Raj!

This habit of viewing the empire through a rosy racist haze is perhaps not so surprising in the descendants and admirers of the colonial soldiers. More serious is the question: how come they were allowed by the Indian Government to hold this public tour and go around trying to put up offensive plaques? Why was their visa not cancelled as soon as the purpose of their visit was known?

Well, no doubt, they were made bold by the fact that India’s own Prime Minister, on British soil, had already declared the Raj to have been a ‘good thing’ – a fundamentally benign act of “good governance”, responsible for Indian modernity and democracy!