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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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The British were not kind to India. I don't really know any specifics on what all horrible things they did, though I am familiar with the "Blowing from Guns in British India" painting that depicted the punishment they gave for some rebellion or other.

The painting is an exaggerated 'Tales of India' depiction painted 30 years later by a Russian for a Russian audience. The practice of 'blowing from guns' did happen, however, and was a Mughal (i.e. pre-British) punishment adopted by the British in retaliation for the Satichaura Ghat massacre and Bibi Ghar massacre, both following the Siege of Cawnpore.

The siege of Cawnpore was a key episode in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The besieged East India Company forces and civilians in Cawnpore (now Kanpur) were duped into a false assurance of a safe passage to Allahabad by the rebel forces under Nana Sahib. Their evacuation from Cawnpore thus turned into a massacre, and most of the men were killed and women and children taken to a nearby dwelling known as Bibi Ghar. As an East India Company rescue force from Allahabad approached Cawnpore, around 200 British women and children captured by the rebels were butchered in what came to be known as the Bibi Ghar massacre, their remains then thrown down a nearby well.[1] Following the recapture of Cawnpore and the discovery of the massacre, the angry Company forces engaged in widespread retaliation against captured rebel soldiers and local civilians. The murders greatly enraged the British rank-and-file against the sepoy rebels and inspired the war cry "Remember Cawnpore!".

To be more specific, the Satichaura Ghat massacre occurred when the surrendered British forces plus wives and children were told that there were boats waiting to take them down the river but that these boats could not be moored to the bank, forcing the British to wade into the river to get to them. As the British entered the river:

Controversy surrounds what exactly happened next at the Satichaura Ghat, whether the signal was a bugle or three shots[5] soon afterwards thousands of sepoys emerged from hidden places on shore to shoot at the boats while they were peppered with artillery. Only three boats managed to set off, men, women and children suffered the same terrible deaths, but the women were spared a massacre of the survivors on shore.

(...)

Three boats had been able to set off General Wheeler's boat, Major Vibarts and a third which was holed beneath the waterline by a round shot fired from the bank. Two boats drifted to the north bank and the occupants slaughtered. From the crowds being burned, shot and sliced to death some survivors set out to desperately swim to the boats. Mowbray recounts how Vibarts boat took on the survivors from the second, while severely damaged and still being shot at.[10]

The surviving boat had around 100 people aboard, twice the amount there was space for. severely damaged it, without a rudder, it was being pursued along the riverbanks by the rebel soldiers, by midday they were clear of fire as the artillery bullocks had grounded in the mud. The boat frequently grounded on the sandbanks subjecting the survivors to further attacks. The rebels launched a pursuit boat which also grounded and a burning boat hoping to catch the refugees on fire which was defeated by the refugees.[17] On one such sandbank the pursuers struck again. The dying Major Vibart ordered Lieutenant Thomson and two other officers and 11 privates to make a defence while they tried to refloat the boat. After defeating the enemy, Thomson and his men returned to the boat but it had gone.[18]

Meanwhile, the rebels had launched an attack on the boat from the opposite bank. After some firing, the 80 surviving refugees on the boat were recaptured. Returned to Cawnpore the men were all shot dead along with one woman and one infant who refused to leave her husband. The other wives t were pulled away.[18] Nana Sahib granted the request of the chaplain Moncrieff to read prayers before they died.[19] The women and children were confined to Savada House, to be later moved with other survivors to the Bibighar

The Bibi Ghar was a house in which:

Initially around 180 women and children were confined to Bibighar. A group of European women and children refugees who survived the Fatehgarh massacre and a others later joined them. In total there were 4 men, around 200 women and children in Bibighar.[23]

Nana Sahib placed these survivors under the care of the servant of his favourite concubine, earlier a concubine of his brother. Called Hussaini Khanum (or Hussaini Begum) she was highly abusive and made sure no servants could help them. Without soap, clean clothes or bandages for their wounds cholera and dysentery began to kill them. Without any material comforts they could only sing and pray.[22] Every day they would be led out to grind corn - not to eat, but as it was symbolic of the work of a slave to humiliate them.[24]

Fed one meal a day (by the lowest caste) they had no furniture of any kind (already emaciated from surviving the siege). It is said that orders from Delhi were received to improve treatment, a doctor was assigned and they were allowed to go out on the verandah.[22]

(...)

At 4 in the afternoon they came for the 3 male refugees from Fatehpur, the merchant and his son and a 14 year old boy. Nana's men led them out on the short walk while the women were confined in the house. Nana had assembled a crowd, sitting in rows while he sat beneath a lime tree wearing a gold turban, All of his advisors were there. Jwala Persad, Tantia Topee, Azimoolah and Bala Rao. As they reached the gate they were shot dead. Their bodies were thrown on the grass and mutilated by the crowd. This continued for half an hour before the Begum informed the women they too were to be killed.[28]

One of the ladies went to ask the commander of the guard if this were true. He said no. He would have been told. One of the guards told the Begum "Your orders will not be obeyed. “ Who are you that you should give orders?" Upon which the Begum went to talk to the Nana. The guards discussed this in her absence and pledged to never murder the women.[28] It is possible that the guard - Yusuf Khan actively pledged to save them (possibly to ensure their own survival when the British arrived.[24] The Begum returned with five men carrying sabres. Two Hindus, one young, one old. Two butchers wearing white and a member of the maharaja's bodyguard wearing his red uniform, named Survur Khan, from a distant province.

The guard sepoys were ordered to fall in. Half a dozen obeyed. They raised their muskets, but shot high at the ceiling of neighbouring apartments.[30][18] It was the gloaming dusk and the 5 killers entered. In the gloom Survur Khan stepped out of the house, his sword broken, to fetch another, then another. By the time darkness fell the men left and locked up the house. The screams had stopped, but the groans continued until the morning. The next day the sweepers came to throw the bodies into the well.[28] Many of the children had survived and tried to escape, children of 5 or 6. A crowd looked on and the children cried for help. No one helped them. When one went into the crowd they grabbed them and through them down the well.[30][26] Three women had survived enough to talk and were also murdered.[18]

An alternative account is that after the men were murdered, some of the sepoys only agreed to remove the women and children from the courtyard when Tatya Tope threatened to execute them for dereliction of duty. In this account Nana Sahib left "the building" (his position outside the courtyard under the tree) because he didn't want to be a witness to the unfolding massacre.[4]

The British females and children were ordered to come out of the house but they refused to do so and clung to one another. They barricaded themselves in, tying the door handles with clothing. In "Our Bones are Scattered" Ward writes that the soldier could not be compelled to pull them out, so they decided to kill them inside the building. The lack of spectacle making Nana leave.[31]

At first around twenty rebel soldiers opened fire from the outside of the Bibighar, firing through holes in the boarded windows. The soldiers of the squad that was supposed to fire the next round were sickened by the violence caused and discharged their shots into the air. Soon after, upon hearing the screams and groans inside, the rebel soldiers threw down their weapons and declared that they were not going to kill any more women and children.[4]

An angry Begum Hussaini Khanum denounced the sepoys' act as cowardice and asked her aide to finish the job of killing the captives.[4] Her lover hired butchers, who murdered the captives with cleavers, leaving when it seemed that all the captives had been killed. However a few women and children had managed to survive by hiding under the dead bodies. It was agreed that the bodies of the victims would be thrown down a dry well by some sweepers.

No one survived the massacre.[5]

The page also describes the aftermath, unfortunately but naturally this report is from the perspective of the arriving British forces:

They came to the house at first expecting the captives to be alive, instead finding only blood. Jonah finally came in to look for his family. Some Highlanders followed the tail of blood towards the trees to find Bhudree Nath leaning against the well. Following his gaze they found the bodies. "..the whole of the bodies were naked and the limbs had been separated.." a "mangled heap" of bodies, limbs in various states of putrefaction. A Highlander vomited.[33]

As more soldiers arrived they wandered sobbing through the house, "...ankle-deep in blood. The plaster was scored with sword-cuts: not high up, as where men have fought; but low down, and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid the blow.[32] Brigadier General Neill wrote at the time; "the bodies of all who died there were thrown into the well of the house, all the murdered also. I saw that house when I first came in. Ladies’ and children’s bloody torn dresses and shoes were lying about, and locks of hair torn from their heads. The floor of the one room they were all. dragged into and killed was saturated with blood. One cannot control one’s feelings. Who could be merciful to one concerned ? Severity at the first is mercy in the end. I wish to show the Natives of India that the punish¬ ment inflicted by us for such deeds will be the heaviest, the most revolting to their feelings, and what they must ever remember"[34] In the courtyard, the tree nearest the well was smeared with the brains of numerous children and infants who had been dashed headfirst against the trunk and thrown down the well.[35] Soon the people of Cawnpore were fleeing down the road to Delhi en masse, not waiting to think whether they could establish their innocence or not.[32]

Neill wrote; "Whenever a rebel is caught he is immediately tried, and, unless he can prove a defence, he is sentenced to he hanged at once: but the chief rebels or ringleaders I make first to clean up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep in the shed where the fearful murder and mutilation of the women and children took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to the high-caste natives. They think, by doing so, they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so. My object is to inflict a fearful punishment for a revolting, cowardly, barbarous deed, and to strike terror into these rebels. The first I caught was a soubahdar, or native officer, a high-caste Brahmin, who tried, to resist my order to clean up the very u blood he had helped to shed but I made the provost-martial do his duty, and a few lashes soon made the miscreant accomplish his task. When done, he was taken out and immediately hanged, and, after death, buried in a ditch at the road side."[32] Kaye records him writing; "a Mahomedan officer of our civil court, a great rascal, and one of the leading men: he rather objected, was flogged, made to lick part of the blood with his tongue".[34]

A later text, written by an eye witness but published decades later writes; "On the date of my visit a great part of the house had not been cleaned out; the floors of the rooms were still covered with congealed blood, littered with trampled, torn dresses of women and children, shoes, slippers, and locks of long hair, many of which had evidently been severed from the living scalps by sword-cuts. But among the traces of barbarous torture and cruelty which excited horror and a desire for revenge, one stood out prominently beyond all others. It was an iron hook fixed into the wall of one of the rooms in the house, about six feet from the floor. I could not possibly say for what purpose this hook had originally been fixed in the wall. I examined it carefully, and it appeared to have been an old fixture, which had been seized on as a diabolic and convenient instrument of torture by the inhuman wretches engaged in murdering the women and children. This hook was covered with dried blood, and from the marks on the whitewashed wall, it was evident that a little child had been hung on to it by the neck with its face to the wall, where the poor thing must have struggled for long, perhaps in the sight of its helpless mother, because the wall all round the hook on a level with it was covered with the hand-prints, and below the hook with the foot-prints, in blood, of a little child."[36]

The incident marked a significant downturn in the relationship between the British and Indians, which obviously hadn't been fantastic to start with but had been at least somewhat collegial, certain parts of India being entirely happy to point the British at other parts they didn't like and earn plunder and British coin in the process. To their credit, many of the Indian soldiers involved refused to take part in the massacre, although I'm afraid I doubt it got them much when the British returned.

I apologise for posting atrocity porn, even with sources, and would put the quotes in an expandable section if I could. But if we are going to have a thread discussing downstream whether the 1800s British were the official Worst People In The World in conjunction with the Nazis, Stalin, Mao and slavers, or merely just very bad, could we please have a bit more providing of sources and a bit less of 'everyone knows'?

I can understand why India was happy to see the back of us, and I imagine that similar stories could be told from the other side. I also get that the OP was complaining about overly-exaggerated portraits of British awfulness. Most ethnic grievances can point to a tit-for-tat spiral. But it seems relevant that British 'unkindness' in India largely post-dates the kind of stuff that is at least as bad as anything Hamas or ISIS did.

From my own brief research: India's GDP did not decline during British rule, their percentage share of the global economy reduced because the Industrial Revolution was happening in Europe. As for the Benghal famine, I claim no detailed knowledge but as far as I can tell the worst allegation is that Britain (in 1943 i.e. in wartime siege) did not attempt to alleviate a natural famine because they were busy being under siege by Nazi Germany, which to my eyes makes it pretty different to something like the Holodomor or famines under Mao.

Following up on the famine, it seems that the case against Britain is that although there were supply shortages everywhere (remember that Britain was under rationing at the time!), the British managed to supply food to most places except Bengal, which allegedly they neglected out of racism or a desire to punish.

The case for the British is that they begged the Americans to help because they couldn't spare supplies or shipping (Roosevelt apologetically said they were too busy) which doesn't sound much like the behaviour of racist oppressors, and that they were unable to commit further transport ships because they were needed for D-Day and there was too much chance of them being sunk:

Experts' disagreement over political issues can be found in differing explanations of the War Cabinet's refusal to allocate funds to import grain. Lizzie Collingham holds the massive global dislocations of supplies caused by World War II virtually guaranteed that hunger would occur somewhere in the world, yet Churchill's animosity and perhaps racism toward Indians decided the exact location where famine would fall.[230] Similarly, Madhusree Mukerjee makes a stark accusation: "The War Cabinet's shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour travelling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India. Those assignments show a will to punish."[231] In contrast, Mark Tauger strikes a more supportive stance: "In the Indian Ocean alone from January 1942 to May 1943, the Axis powers sank 230 British and Allied merchant ships totalling 873,000 tons, in other words, a substantial boat every other day. British hesitation to allocate shipping concerned not only potential diversion of shipping from other war-related needs but also the prospect of losing the shipping to attacks without actually [bringing help to] India at all."[232] Peter Bowbrick elaborates further on the British government's delay in shipping food, stating that Linlithgow's request for food shipments in December 1942 was half-hearted and that it was made on the assumption that Bengal already had a food surplus but that it was being hoarded, which is why it was ignored by the British metropolitan government. Further delays after April 1943 stemmed from the refusal to divert ships away from the preparations for Operation Overlord, whose failure would have been disastrous for the world and whose success was as a result prioritised above aid to India.[233]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Famine,_disease,_and_the_death_toll

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