"It is very difficult to assess the extent of the reprisals simply because we cannot say for sure if some of these populations did not just leave a conflict zone rather than being killed," said Shabi Ahmad, head of the 1857 project at the Indian Council of Historical Research. Misra's casualty claims have been challenged in India and Britain. In one incident Misra recounts how 2m letters lay unopened in government warehouses, which, according to civil servants, showed "the kind of vengeance our boys must have wreaked on the abject Hindoos and Mohammadens, who killed our women and children." There is a macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. The third source involves British labour force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a fifth and a third across vast swaths of India, which as one British official records was "on account of the undisputed display of British power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days - millions of wretches seemed to have died." Two are records pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed - either Islamic mujahideen or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving out the British. His calculations rest on three principal sources. But its scale has been kept a secret," Misra told the Guardian. Indians who stood in their way were killed. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. "It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. ![]() This is remarkable, he says, given that in an age of empires, nothing less than the fate of the world hung in the balance. ![]() ![]() The author says he was surprised to find that the "balance book of history" could not say how many Indians were killed in the aftermath of 1857. Conventional histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order, claims Misra.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |