ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 reads Flora Annie Steel’s Mutiny novel On the Face of the Waters as a retrospective evaluation of the Sepoy Uprising of 1857 that employs post-Mutiny discourse on India’s physical and human geography to critique the imperial future of British India. The chapter explores the significance of Delhi’s urban geography as constructed by Steel in the novel, and uncovers how androcentric and gynocentric narratives of the Siege of Delhi involving British subjects are impacted by mobile and mutinous natives who defy or manipulate colonial policies of sedentarization, while prefiguring the rise of Hindu nationalism.
