Introduction to Part III

For contemporary British observers, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, as Don Randall, Steve Attridge, and others have argued, was not so much about India as it was about Britain. ¹ Though modern historians still debate whether the Mutiny represented an eruption of nationalist consciousness in India, ² there is widespread agreement that the event inspired an intensely nationalist reaction at the imperial center (Randall 2003: 8; Peck 1998: 72). Public responses to the event (in the form of sermons, news reports, illustrations, novels, and plays) sounded the depths of Britishness itself, reappraising the nation’s relationship with India and interrogating—and consolidating—Britain’s own political and cultural identity (Randall 2003: 12–15; Killingray 1999: 16; Paxton 1999: 111). If Britain’s imperial consciousness was rooted in the nation’s military establishment, then the military crisis that the Victorians knew as “the Mutiny” did more than cast doubt on the nation’s ability to maintain expansive territorial boundaries and to permanently subdue a foreign population; Britain’s very identity as an imperial power was at stake.