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 | War of No Pity: |
On May 11, 1857, Hindu and Muslim sepoys massacred British residents and native Christians in Delhi, setting off both the whirlwind of similar violence that engulfed Bengal in the following months and an answering wave of rhetorical violence in Britain, where the uprising against British rule in India was often portrayed as a clash of civilization and barbarity demanding merciless retribution. Although by twentieth-century standards the number of victims was small, the Victorian public saw "the Indian Mutiny" of 1857-59 as an epochal event. In this provocative book, Christopher Herbert seeks to discover why. He offers a view of this episode--and of Victorian imperialist culture more generally--sharply at odds with the standard formulations of postcolonial scholarship. Drawing on a wealth of largely overlooked and often mesmerizing nineteenth-century texts, including memoirs, histories, letters, works of journalism, and novels, War of No Pity shows that the startling ferocity of the conflict in India provoked a crisis of national conscience and a series of searing if often painfully ambivalent condemnations of British actions in India both prior to and during the war. Bringing to light the dissident, disillusioned, antipatriotic strain of Victorian "mutiny writing," Herbert locates in it key forerunners of modern-day antiwar literature and the modern critique of racism. Christopher Herbert is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University. He is the author of three previous books, including Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery. "War of No Pity is a vital and vitally important work of literary, cultural, and historical criticism, one that no student of the Victorian period can afford not to know."--Stephen Arata, Victorian Studies "Christopher Herbert has done postcolonialists, Victorianists, and indeed anyone interested in modern violence a remarkable service in reading a vast amount of Mutiny literature and returning to tell the tale of it. War of No Pity explicates the kind of violence that can ensue between any us and any them, given the recurrent conditions of empire, in all of its forms and fictions."--Elaine Freedgood, Criticism "A most impressive study of colonial relations and India is Christopher Herbert's War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma that, in great and significant detail, does away with as many presuppositions as possible."--Ann C. Colley, Studies in English Literature Endorsements: "This gripping book is about an irrepressible mutiny that occurred within the Victorian imagination. The Sepoy rebellion and its ruthlessly vindictive putting-down proved two sides of a Möbius strip that, obsessively fretted by the Victorians themselves in a long agony of conscience, disclosed intolerable continuities between their dreams of virtue and their nightmares of abomination. Herbert's attention to a range of journals, histories, and novels is so scrupulous, sympathetic, and unflinching as to put to shame the doctrinaire anti-imperialist scholarship that is still prevalent within the field."--Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia List of Illustrations xi Subject Areas: | |||||
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