![]() Indeed, each of the three key episodes in Britain’s centuries-long conquest of India inspired dramatic productions of some sort: the defeat of Tippoo Sahib, Sultan of Mysore, at Seringapatam in 1792 the conquest of the Punjab and the final settlement of India’s northwest border in the mid-1840s and the Mutiny of 1857 and the subsequent transfer of power from the Company to the Crown. In the first half of the nineteenth century, theatrical reproductions of Britain’s overseas military engagements were both common and popular (Russell 63). Set loose upon the theatrical stage, the sharp juxtaposition of these collapsed racial and cultural identifications helped to transform an imperial crisis into a metropolitan project of nationalist reconstruction.ģ The dozen-or-so plays that took up the topic of the Mutiny collectively constitute just one small subspecies of a much larger theatrical genus: the Victorian military drama. Through a peculiar, though consistent, cultural compression, plays about the Mutiny deploy kilts and bagpipes as emblems of a culturally inclusive, heterogeneous Britishness while simultaneously reducing India’s distinct ethnic groups to a culturally undifferentiated, and inassimilable, mass. Britain’s status as an imperial power was at stake, raising broader questions about the nation’s identity and destiny.Ģ In the face of this colonial rebellion, British playwrights produced images of metropolitan cultural consolidation, mobilizing Scottish characters to forge a broader, Celtically inflected British identity that ideologically aligned the people of England and Scotland in clear opposition to the mutinous hordes of India. For if, as Douglas Peers has argued, British 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. ![]() 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 12–15 Killingray 16 Paxton 111). 2 But if the Mutiny did not represent an eruption of nationalist consciousness in India, it became an intensely nationalist moment within Britain (Randall 8 Peck 72). 1 Dismissing the perception that this was a nationalist revolt, most contemporary commentators insisted that the event was a localized expression of dissatisfaction within the Anglo-Indian military organization. See, fo (.)ġ For contemporary British observers, the Mutiny, as Don Randall, Steve Attridge, and others have argued, was not so much about India as it was about Britain. 2 Historians still debate the extent to which the Mutiny constituted a nationalist rebellion.1 For the sake of readability, I have chosen to disengage from quotation marks the word “Mutiny” and (.). ![]() Set loose upon the theatrical stage, the sharp juxtaposition of these collapsed racial and cultural identifications helped to transform an imperial crisis into a metropolitan project of nationalist reconstruction. ![]() In the face of this colonial rebellion, British playwrights produced images of metropolitan cultural consolidation, mobilizing Scottish characters to forge a broader, Celtically inflected British identity that ideologically aligned the people of England and Scotland in clear opposition to the mutinous hordes of India. Yet the theatre was committed to visually recreating the conflict for a deeply concerned domestic British audience. Theatrical representations of the mutiny have been given far less critical attention than the novels, historical accounts, and periodical articles that were inspired by the conflict. The following essay examines the culturally introspective nature of the “Mutiny plays” and their persistent exploration of British nationalism. For contemporary British observers, the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was not so much about India as it was about Britain. ![]()
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