topics: |  india | history | mutiny

Early doubts on the mainstream colonial narrative

this obscure text challenges closely analyzes many of the so-called
"eye-witness" accounts of the mutiny and reveals them as being full of
contradictions and absurdities.  One story calls for a bamboo that is longer
than the largest bamboos of india.  Another has details that have clearly
been inserted for effect.

yet the main point of this book today is how it has been completely ignored
in the mainstream literature.  this is because it violates a unspoken norm,
what Gautam Chakravarty in The Indian mutiny and the British imagination,
2005, calls the "dominant interpretation":

	on one hand the elite literature - parliament debates, leading
	newspapers and magazines, as well as the histories - serious texts
	meant for informed readers, and on the other hand the large body of
	popular fiction - the vulgate literature - that informed the newly
	literate masses - both operated according to a "dominant
	interpretation", a pattern enforced without "explicit censorship or any
	conscious plot to deceive".  This dominant interpretaation presented a
	series of plots, redactions and myths that underlie the colonial
	enterprise.

Chakravarty says of this text:
"Leckey’s scepticism was largely ignored ... and it is a forgotten
and obscure volume; a penalty, perhaps, for transgressing" the dominant
interpretation.

about the text itself, he says:
an indignant review of contemporary journalism and the reliability of its chief
source, the ‘eye-witness’ account. Leckey singles out for special attention
popular narratives such as
 - Indian Rebellion (Calcutta, 1858) by the Reverend Alexander Duff, and
 - Sepoy Revolt, its Causes and Consequences (London, 1858) by Henry Mead.