book excerptise:   a book unexamined is wasting trees

The peasant armed: the Indian revolt of 1857

Eric Stokes and Christopher Alan Bayly

Stokes, Eric; Christopher Alan Bayly;

The peasant armed: the Indian revolt of 1857

Clarendon Press, 1986, 261 pages

ISBN 0198215703, 9780198215707

topics: |  india | history | british | mutiny


[In Lucknow, the rebellion still resonates...  Havelock's grave is still kept
neat and tended.]

At Kanpur (Cawnpore) fifty miles to the South, the historical tradition is
darker.
The Sati Chaura Ghat with its Siva temple still bears the ominous
title of Massacre Ghat, and the air seems loaded with menace. The site of
the Well, however, has undergone the most striking transformation, evincing
how deeply evocative ... p.3

see analysis in Rudrangshu Mukherjee's Spectre of violence
on how these remarks -- "the air seems loaded with menace"-- reveal the
fruits of a long and deeply entrenched British historiography on the
mutiny.


amitabha mukerjee (mukerjee [at-symbol] gmail) 2012 Apr 20