Memorial Artifacts and Portable Sovereignty
I was puzzled. A box arrived at my desk in the reading room of the British Library, but I had requested a manuscript. I inspected the label and confirmed that this indeed was my “manuscript,” and not a clerical error. I opened it to find a surprise object—a cross.
That small object, its construction and context of circulation in the British empire, is my entrée into thinking about the relation between portable artifacts and sovereignty. When objects move, particularly those that have a commemorative function, what claims to political identity and belonging do they bring alongside or leave behind in their wake? What worlds do they help construct and narrate? How are these mobilized to produce political effects?
The box contained two pieces: a horizontal 4½-inch square base with a narrow rectangular groove and a vertical element 3-inches tall and 3/16-inch thick. At the base of the vertical element was a tongue to be inserted into the groove in the pedestal in order to form the cross. These formal attributes implied the crafts-person meant for it to be assembled as one piece, appropriate for the mantel or side table. One side of the cross face is plain but the other side is inscribed (Figure 1):
Figure 1. Back of wooden replica of memorial cross. British Library shelfmark: Mss Eur F630/8. © British Library Board.
Figure 2. Bottom of pedestal of wooden replica of memorial cross. British Library shelfmark: Mss Eur F630/8. © British Library Board.
My eye lingered over the word “slaughtered.” It appeared again. At the bottom of the pedestal was pasted a handwritten note on frayed paper:
Model of a monument near the well … from a design by the chaplain of Cawnpore is made from the wood taken from the house in which the women and children were slaughtered. The base is made from the door, the cross from the tree which stood in the (center) of the interior court. The model as well as the original accurately [represents] scale one and ½ inch to the foot. The wood of the tree is very much split. It was with great difficulty that anything as large as this would be made without many flaws…[1]
The condition of the paper at the base of the cross suggests it was well-used (Figure 2). The notion that this could be a blood-stained object was unexpected and unsettling.
Although neither the owner nor the maker is identified in the British Library’s descriptive catalog, the handwriting on the note pasted to the base helped me identify the object as one that once belonged to the Reverend Thomas Moore and his wife Dorothy. Among the other possessions of the Moores in the British Library are letters. On January 15, 1858, Thomas Moore had written to his mother:
In the center of the Court was an orange Tree, against which the heads of the children were dashed—this was cut down when I saw it—a few days back I got a branch of this tree, and a piece of the back door thro wh the bodies were dragged, and I have several little models of the mount wh was placed nr the well by the men of the 32nd...[2]
The incident and artifact refer to the massacre that took place in a building called Bibighar in Kanpur (Cawnpore), India, during the Sepoy Rebellion (1857-1859). The rebellion against the English East India Company commenced when the sepoys (siphahis) or soldiers of the army mutinied in May 1857.[3] By the middle of that year the rebellion became a wide-spread insurgency against British rule in a futile bid to reinstate the lost sovereignty of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II. On 15 July 1857, following General Hugh Wheeler’s failed resistance against the rebels, some 200 European women and children were murdered in the Bibighar in Kanpur, their bodies thrown into a nearby well (Figure 3).
“The small crosses were not mere representations of a memorial, they were relics of the massacre site.”
Figure 3. Map of British India showing location of Kanpur (Cawnpore) and Lucknow, Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1909.
Thomas Moore arrived in Kanpur as a chaplain in the East India Company’s army in October 1857. The next month, the men of the 32nd European Regiment who were passing through Kanpur, built a modest cross near the well to memorialize those women and children. The well itself had been filled with dirt and enclosed by a wooden fence (Figure 4). The miniature cross I was looking at is a replica of that first commemorative marking on the site.
Figure 4. The well in Kanpur before the building of the Kanpur Memorial Well Monument. The 32nd’s memorial cross is within a fenced rectangular enclosure. Photograph by Robert Tytler and Harriet Tytler. © British Library Board. Photo 193(21).
But Moore’s letters reveal more of this story. Moore had twelve such model crosses made in Kanpur and sent to England as mementoes of the Bibighar massacre. They were made of wood from the site. In the center of the courtyard stood a tree, which was presumably splattered with the blood of those massacred. The building’s doors and windows also received that blood, and like the wood of the tree, they too were “harvested” before the building itself was demolished in December 1857 by the British authorities. Thus, the small crosses were not mere representations of a memorial, they were relics of the massacre site. Thomas Moore seemed to value the crosses both for their tragic provenance and their future worth as relics. He wrote to his mother that he had collected other artifacts belonging to the murdered women as well:
I will send some of these models for my friends will value such a standard memo of this memorial place—10 yrs hence they will be worth a deal—now they cost me 6d to make—and I picked up several pieces of the dresses, etc—but all were burnt in my house, except one piece wh I have sent to Calcutta to be forwd to you.
The idea of blood-smeared artifacts as collectibles may appear cynical, but surely there is a long history of collecting such artifacts of “martyrdom.” If we are to surmise from Thomas’s statement that the miniature crosses were only a plan to make money, we would miss something crucial: Thomas and Dorothy’s affective investment in producing “mutiny” artifacts and narratives.
While those directly affected by the death of relatives and friends during the rebellion sought to come to terms with their loss through various modes of mourning and private commemoration, pictorial sketches of the rebellion, many of them sensationalized to arouse imperial fervor, flourished in the popular press of the British empire, in particular in Britain.[4] One of these was a sketch of the Bibighar by Lt. C. W. Crump, which led to dozens of renditions. Crump represented the interior of the building as covered with blood, littered with shards of earthen pots, bits and pieces of clothing — hats, lace, handkerchief, as well as bloody handprints and texts pledging revenge scrawled on the walls by British soldiers. Thomas Moore himself described in graphic details the site, being keen on setting down the “truth’” of the events. In a letter dated January 15, 1858, Thomas drew a plan of the Bibighar and sent it to his mother so that she could get a sense of the “wretched place:”
The scene was indeed well calculated to arouse the worse passions and as such, I am glad had disappeared—the walls were everywhere scribbled over by the soldiers some professing to be written by the unfortunate women calling for vengeance—but none I fancy genuine, as far as I cd see—I have never talked with anyone who noticed them when they first came into the place—some of the scrawlings were utterly heartless & unchristian.[5]
And yet the Moores produced their own version of Crump’s sketch (Figure 5). It is possible that since Crump arrived with the second relieving force, he did not see the site immediately after the killings, and therefore his representations are less than accurate. Whether it was Crump’s or Moore’s sketches, irrespective of their accuracy, these architectural and pictorial renditions retained and reproduced what was soon to disappear, and thereby continued the task of anchoring the emotive content connected to the event. It seemed desirable that some sites and markers of the violent event disappear, while others were collected, curated, and designed.
Figure 5. “Slaughter House” or “Bibighar,” a panel from the Mutiny Scroll, British Library, Add Ms 37153. In the Public Domain.
These artifacts now reside in the British Library, alongside invoices and lading lists, probates and government reports and other remnants of British power over the Indian subcontinent. What struck me in view of the larger corpus of the Thomas and Dorothy Moore’s mutiny collections in the possession of the British Library is that these artifacts asked to be touched, felt, and admired close at hand. A cloth map, for example, shows British military positions in and around Lucknow, the capital of the former princely state of Awadh in northern India. Created ca 1890, the map provides a narrative of three separate advances to relieve the besieged British garrison at the Lucknow Residency during the rebellion. It highlights General Henry Havelock’s September 1857 march by marking the line of advance with a gold.[6] The use of zari, known for its use as gold decoration in clothing and furnishing in the Indian subcontinent, suggests an exceptional investment in producing this commemorative artifact. That golden path, in relief on the map’s flat surface, tarnished in the hundred odd years since its creation, remains an invitation to touch that path of attack and feel the campaign. Sitting in the controlled space of the British Library some 8,000 miles and 170 years distant, amid these remains of empire, I experienced a visceral grasp of Thomas and Dorothy Moore’s investment—they wanted their claims to Britain’s imperial endeavors to be recognized.
It is in this desire for recognition that I read an effort to craft a vision of their place in empire. Such an act of “placemaking” is not fixed to a site but formed in the context of moving among different locations in the Indian subcontinent and Britain. Belonging to a peripatetic coterie of colonial functionaries of empire, portable artifacts, often of little monetary value, became potent vehicles for claiming identity.[7] Movable artifacts such as the miniature cross enabled a sense of portable sovereignty, a sense of being-in-empire made real by articulation through images, objects, narratives. The commemoratives, in connecting the observer to war events in far-away sites, and to other actors who carried such artifacts, created a shared sense of sovereignty. The artifacts helped concretize their collective stake as citizen-subjects of empire.
“Movable artifacts such as the miniature cross enabled a sense of portable sovereignty, a sense of being-in-empire made real by articulation through images, objects, narratives.”
While the soldiers of the 32nd sought to mark the place of the victims, the imperial government supplanted that rustic and modest gesture with a monumental construction in 1863 as a conspicuous mark of the sovereignty of the Raj. To facilitate its construction, the regiment’s cross was displaced to an adjacent site. The small cross erected prior to the construction of the grand monument and its replication in miniature thus conveyed an aspect of sovereignty that was functionally different from the one espoused by the colonial state. This characteristic of sovereignty emerges when ordinary functionaries of empire feel empowered to take upon themselves the mantle of authority that properly belongs to the state, because they feel the state has failed or is failing to exercise its sovereignty. It is thus their “natural right” as sovereign subjects to exercise the power in lieu of the state. Such sovereignty is portable and travels with the people and objects across empire. In this case, an ordinary employee of the colonial government, along with his wife, without any direct intervention from the colonial state, took upon themselves to produce objects that narrated the story of empire as successful territorial occupation, loss, victory, and vengeance—transforming a series of military conflicts into an aesthetically and emotively saturated landscape.
Figure 6. Memorial cross of the 32nd Regiment in the yard of the All Souls’ Memorial Church, Kanpur, shrouded in grass. In the foreground is another memorial to the “women and children of the late ill-fated 1st Comp. 6th Battalion Bengal Artillery” killed on the 18th July 1857, raised by “a non-commissioned officer who formerly belonged to the 1st Company 6th Battalion.” Neither memorial “marks the spot” that they originally sought to commemorate. Photograph: Swati Chattopadhyay, October 2022.
In 1950, three years after India’s independence from British rule, all the commemorative structures around the wellhead were moved far from the sepulchral well in Memorial Monument Park to the premises of the All Souls’ Church within the Kanpur cantonment at the behest of the U.K. High Commission.[8] In October 2022 I visited the church site. The regiment’s cross now rests amid tall grass in the churchyard removed from its original context and even less capable of persuading the visitor of its memorial message (Figure 6). The original well site has been re-occupied by Indian nationalist authorities.[9] The most tangible connection with the original site remains packed away in a small box in the archive.
I thank Jeremy White for his feedback on the article and to Sumit Chakraborty for accompanying me in search of the remains of the memorials in Kanpur.
Citation
Citation: Swati Chattopadhyay, “Memorial Artifacts and Portable Sovereignty,” PLATFORM January 29, 2024.
Notes
[1] Bottom of pedestal of wooden replica of memorial cross. British Library, Mss Eur F630/8.
[2] Thomas Moore to Mrs. Moore, British Library, Mss Eur F630/2.
[3] Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the East India Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770-1830 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[4] Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
[5] Thomas Moore to Mrs. Moore, Cawnpore, Jan 15, 1858. British Library, Mss Eur F630/2.
[6] British Library, Add Ms 37152 A.
[7] In this context see Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999).
[8] Historical Monuments in India: Mutiny Memorial Well at Cawnpore, March 1948—1951, British Library IOR R/4/84, File 11/1b.
[9] See Stephen Heathorn, “The Absent Site of Memory: The Kanpur Memorial Well and the 1957 Centenary Commemoration of the Indian ‘Mutiny’,” German Historical Institute London Bulletin Supplement (2009) 73–116.
