ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the rape of English women by Indian men were used to mobilize literary traditions about chivalry in service to the Raj. Stories about interracial rape were especially susceptible to redefinition by many of the technologies of gender at work in the nineteenth century. Rape narratives about English women raped by Indian men are familiar, in part, because of the popularity of British novels about what British historians usually call the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Mutiny novels written by British men and women who lived in India, in contrast to novels written by writers in the metropolis, reflected more of the tension and heat of life in this colonial “contact zone”. Mutiny novelists usually obscured these conflicts by presenting their narratives as “national epics” which typically valorized the heroic sacrifices of English men and women during this colonial crisis by alluding to Roman and Greek epics.
