The Great Rebellion of 1857 in India : Exploring Transgressions, Contests and Diversities

Abstract: K atherine Bartrum, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Somerset, had been living in India for less than a year with her husband Robert, an assistant surgeon, when the Indian Rebellion began in May of 1857. In June, Bartrum and her infant son joined other British women and children in leaving the military station at Gonda for the Residency buildings in Lucknow. She remained there during what became known as the siege of Lucknow. In the following months, she suffered the death of her husband in combat and nursed her son through cholera. When the siege ended in November 1857, Bartrum traveled with other British survivors to Calcutta, where her son Bobbie died days before she set sail alone for England. For Bartrum and many other British participants in the Great Rebellion, the deaths of family members, particularly children, revealed not only the violence at the heart of the imperial project but also the ultimate instability of British domestic life and identity within the imperial context. During the worst moments of the conflict, the frequency of child death

Abstract: Like every civilized society, India also had a crime and criminal justice system since ancient times. Specifically after the 1857 rebellion, the British reformed the whole penal law and introduced forensic science for scientific certainty in the criminal justice system. The present paper attempts to understand the historical roots of forensic science in India with emphasis to explore the circumstances which prompted the British to initiate forensic science in India, perception of crime developed by the colonial rulers and finally the historical consequences of the development of forensic institutions in different parts of colonial India. Finally the study reveals that introduction of forensic science for crime investigation and institutionalization of crime came as a new colonial discourse.

Abstract: This essay looks at how the question of late-Victorian imperial decline is contested, formulated, and framed within Guy Boothby's A Prince of Swindlers – a popular, yet critically-overlooked, collection of detective stories set in Calcutta and London, that appeared in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. There is, of course, a familiar critical narrative about the Victorian fin de siecle that characterises the era as a particularly fraught period “of mounting complexity and contradiction” with regard to empire (Dixon 2). The Berlin Conference of 1885, the failure of British Troops at the Siege of Khartoum, the so-called scramble for Africa, the undermining of Britain's steel manufacturing superiority by German and American competition, and the decline of the Royal Navy relative to the navies of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy all underscored the fragility of British imperial dominion. As Patrick Brantlinger puts it, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230).

Abstract: Karl Marx and the Chartist leader, writer and poet Ernest Jones developed a close intellectual and political partnership from the late 1840s through the late 1850s. Their friendship invites attention because it places Marx in the company of one of Chartism’s leading anti-colonial advocates, precisely at a time when he was simultaneously moving in that direction. This article explores the ways in which Marx and Jones converged in their estimation of the 1857 Indian uprising. It is argued that the shift in Marx’s thought, whereby the dialectics of colonialism and anti-colonialism are integrated within his materialist conception of history, was not independent of Jones’s influence.