ABSTRACT
Two incidents of violence at Kanpur in 1857, one at the Satichaura Ghat on June 27, the other at ‘Bibighar’ on July 15, compose the story of the ‘Kanpur Massacre’. 1 The extreme act of aggression was a catalyst, perhaps as no other event of 1857, in its impact on colonial policy and race relations in British India and the construction of the imperial discourse. 2 This essay explores the representation of the event in three Italian narrative texts in relation to the prevalent version. The primary sources on the massacres are patently one-sided, originating mostly from the British side: state papers, the letters of the officers, the accounts of the British survivors, the diaries of the loyalists and the depositions filtered by the state machinery. Sources on the rebel side are not available; voices silenced by the trail of mass executions or not admitted to record, the other point of view thus cancelled out from historical memory in the ensuing ninety years of British rule. As Rudrangshu Mukherjee observes: ‘A position thus entrenched could hardly recognize in the massacres a show of rebel power; to do that would be to recognize the legitimacy of the rebellion.’ 3 In this context it would be worthwhile to compare the official version with the accounts of writers from the non-English-speaking countries of Europe. Each of these texts represents a different narrative genre: Relazione sulla insurrezione dell’India britanna, a missionary report compiled by Ignazio Persico, Scene dell’insurrezione indiana, a historical fiction by Aristide Calani, and ‘L’olocausto di Cawnepore’, a text drawn from the travel narrative, Verso la cuna del mondo: lettere dall’India by the poet Guido Gozzano. 4 The first two are contemporary accounts, published in 1858, and the third is an early 20th-century narration, written almost fifty years after the event.
