Introduction

Indian Diamonds 113
times. The stereotype of the Indian now includes innate and unreformable savagery
to explain the Mutiny (Sharpe 201). Post-Mutiny writing is thus governed by
binary oppositions of “good and evil, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice,
moral restraint and sexual depravity, civilisation and barbarism” (Brantlinger, Rule
200).
Nana Sahib’s massacre of women and children in Cawnpore is the most enduring
moment of the Mutiny in British fiction and came to stand for the Mutiny
as a whole, with Nana Sahib representing the quintessence of Indian cunning and
Oriental cruelty (Brantlinger, Rule 204; 222). In the British public, the fact was
suppressed that Nana Sahib’s massacre at Cawnpore might not have been an act
of gratuitous violence, but a retaliatory action for atrocities the British had committed
in Benares and Allahabad (201). Patrick Brantlinger argues that the preeminence
of Cawnpore in the British imagination of the Mutiny is a symptom of a
much larger reduction of the Mutiny. Crime rather than politics is seen to be at
the root of the rebellion, and Cawnpore supersedes all other accounts of the Mutiny,
including British violence and actions of revenge (201-204). The massacre at
Cawnpore also confirmed and propagated the fear that English women especially
are in danger of being the victims of Indian violence and sexual predation (Free
357-358). Rumours of mass rape were readily accepted as truth in England and
entered official history (Sharpe 65). In the criminalisation of the Mutiny, the figure
of the rebel was conflated with the earlier image of the Thug as representing the
natural criminality of Indians (Mukherjee 102-103, ftn. 26).
For imperial ideology, the protection of innocent women and children after
the Cawnpore massacre played an important role as it provided a just cause for
action: The call for revenge for the murdered women and children was used to
justify the extreme violence of the ‘devil’s wind’, and in presenting the political
cause of the Mutiny as a (sex) crime, it became devoid of any political intent
(Sharpe 65-66).
Opium
Partly coinciding with the Mutiny, Britain fought another colonial war with China.
China had tried to stop the influx of opium, and enforced restrictions which led to
the ‘Opium Wars’ fought in 1839-42 and 1856-58, to force the Chinese market
open to British opium from India. After the second war, which Great Britain
fought in alliance with France, China was forced to completely legalise the import
of opium. Other European colonial powers also profited from the sale of opium:
France established a government-held monopoly in Indo-China, an example
which the Netherlands copied in Indonesia in the late nineteenth century (Van
Ours 141).
By the middle of the century opium was, alongside tea, one of the most important
products imported from India and was sold profitably abroad and consumed