Abstract
As Kim Wagner tells us, the skull of Alum Bheg was found by John Mantle, the landlord of The Lord Clyde public house in Walmer, Kent, when he was clearing out his lumber room, in 1963. It was identified by a slip of paper inserted in an eye socket. According to this note the skull was that of Alum Bheg, an 1857 mutineer, who had been executed for the brutal murder of four British civilians including a mother and her baby daughter. How the skull ended up in The Lord Clyde is unknown, but having found it, the publican put it on display, a grisly colonial trophy decorating the bar. One can only imagine the outcry if the skull of a British soldier had been similarly put on public display in a comparable establishment somewhere in India. It only came into Wagner’s possession in 2014 when the then possessors of the relic passed it on to him. He resolved to uncover Alum Bheg’s story, his part in the Great Rebellion, the manner of his death and to return the skull to India. His intention was to restore ‘some of the humanity and dignity’ that had been stripped from Alum Bheg when he had been executed and his head had been taken as a trophy, to ‘allow him to finally find some peace’. Certainly, his marvellous book does Alum Bheg at least some justice at long last.
What is interesting is that, right from the very beginning, Wagner makes clear that in writing the book he had no intention of making any sort of contribution to an anti-imperialist history. He was determined to ‘avoid yoking Alum Bheg to a political agenda that would have been completely foreign to him’. His book, he insists, is ‘not a critique of the Empire which would be about as meaningful as yelling at the television (although that never stopped my father)’. I have to admit that my sympathies rather lie with Wagner’s father here. He rejects the idea of simply countering the ‘anachronistic and unashamedly Whiggish celebrations of the Empire’ perpetrated by the likes of Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts. Instead, he presumably intends to tell it like it was, at least as far as the evidence can take us. He is, of course, deluding himself and whether he likes it or not he has written a book that makes a powerful and important contribution to anti-imperialist history. The very idea of restoring ‘humanity and dignity’ to the likes of Alum Bheg challenges the colonialist mentality that is still widespread in British politics and society and even in the academy. It was this mentality, for example, that made possible Britain’s fourth Afghan War and the second or perhaps third invasion and occupation of Iraq. Wagner’s book might not shout at the television, but it certainly argues with it.
Wagner provides an excellent account of the causes and progress of the Great Rebellion. His focus is very much on events at Sialkot. Here, he emphasises, ‘there were no angry mobs chasing European civilians, no random lynching of isolated sahibs, no sexual attacks on memsahibs and no mutilation of their corpses’. There were, he writes, numerous opportunities for the rebels to have raped white women, ‘but it never happened’. Indeed, in Sialkot there is enough evidence to suggest a determination not to kill British officers and civilians. According to Wagner, the killings that Alum Bheg was accused of were not the work of the Sialkot rebels at all. At the time, however, the reports that circulated among the British and that appeared in the press were of rape, murder and mutilation, which conveniently provided justification ‘for any retributive violence visited on the rebels’. And ‘retributive violence’ there certainly was on a truly horrific scale.
It is Wagner’s remorseless chronicling of this ‘retributive violence’ that marks his book out and that, whether he likes it or not, will establish it as a classic of anti-imperialist history. The Sialkot rebels were ‘annihilated’ at Trimmu Ghat, with all those rebels taken prisoner shot out of hand. Wagner quotes one contemporary observer to the effect that the Sialkot rebels had ‘protected their officers’ and ‘hardly deserved annihilation, but the holocaust was necessary’. There could be no mercy, only ‘butchery’. Such retribution was absolutely necessary for the maintenance of colonial rule. A terrible example had to be made. Mass executions were the order of the day with the British convinced of the justice of their cause and secure in the belief that God was on their side.
As far as most of the British were concerned, in the circumstances ‘there could be no question of undue severity’. They refused to acknowledge that the rebels, indeed that anyone even suspected of being a rebel, possessed ‘any trace of humanity’ as they killed them ‘by the hundreds and thousands every day’. Violence was ‘the only language Indians understood and mass-executions by cannon enacted this particular logic in a highly systematic manner’. Strapping prisoners to the mouth of a cannon and blowing them to pieces was, as Wagner puts it, ‘a spectacle of power … the performance of state power’.
Not all the Sialkot rebels died at Trimmu Ghat, however. Alum Bheg was among those that escaped the massacre. He was relentlessly hunted by the British, captured, tried on 9 July 1858 and executed along with two others early the following day, blown from the mouth of cannon. His head was collected as a trophy by Captain Costello of the 7th Dragoon Guards, who took it back to England with him when he returned home. Somehow it ended up in The Lord Clyde.
Wagner concludes with an interesting discussion of the collection of body parts as trophies in colonial wars. Indeed, although this is not something he mentions, as recently as 1971 a paratrooper in Belfast was using a piece of the skull of a driver he had shot by mistake, when his car backfired, as an ashtray. The ‘humiliation and desecration of the body of the enemy, whether dead or alive’ is, Wagner acknowledges, ‘hardly a thing of the past’, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown. Today though, he thinks that the trophies are more likely to be preserved on smart phones than kept as ‘physical souvenirs’. I am not so sure.