ABSTRACT
High above the seaside town of Brighton, on a remote and windswept eminence of the Sussex Downs above the hamlet of Patcham, stands the Chattri (see Figure 13.1). 1 It is a simple white structure fashioned from Sicilian marble, with a domed roof supported by eight slender columns. Such a refined design seems at first sight drastically at odds with its rustic surroundings, and today cattle and sheep graze undisturbed around its base. Situated in a landscape that is the very epitome of Englishness, the Chattri has come to resemble the picturesque gazebo, ruin or folly, a central trope of English painting and landscape gardening. English Romanticism was preoccupied with the cultural inscription of historical events through a process of association, exemplified by Battle Abbey: The Spot where Harold Fell from J.M.W. Turner’s engraved series of Views in Sussex (1818–20; see Figure 13.2). In a bucolic scene bounded by historical ruins a hunting dog chases a hapless fox across the site where William the Conqueror defeated the last Saxon king in 1066. Erected only miles away from that site, centuries later, the Chattri likewise inflects the meaning of the landscape through a process of historical association. A quiet but insistent signifier of the inescapable presence of India in British history, and of Britain in India’s, the Chattri, unveiled in 1921, acknowledges the involvement of Indians in the First World War. It commemorates the Hindu and Sikh soldiers of the Indian Army who died in the hospitals of Brighton as a result of wounds received in the French and Belgian battlefields, and it is located at the spot where they were cremated. This chapter will argue that the hybrid architectural form of this unusual memorial poignantly encapsulates the paradoxes of imperial participation in the Great War, revealing the British Empire’s ambivalent attitude to its colonial subjects.
