4 - The Mutiny of 1907

Summary

As the Golden Jubilee of 1857 approached, memories of the rebellion which circulated around this anniversary combined with news of ongoing protests against the 1905 Partition of Bengal and unrest in other parts of the country, including the Punjab, to result in widespread fear that 1907 would witness a ‘Second Mutiny’. Though these issues would have been of great concern at any time, imperialist commentators in Britain thought them all the more serious given domestic political changes that had resulted in the defeat of the Conservative-Liberal Unionist coalition at the ballot box in 1906, and the apparent decline of the British martial character which had been blamed for many of the failings during the Boer War. As this chapter will show, these anxieties played a considerable role in shaping how the mutiny was remembered in 1907, as well as how it was commemorated at the end of the year. In this respect, commemoration was an anxious response from hard-line imperialists who wished to reaffirm the values that had helped underpin colonial rule in the late Victorian era and yet were now thought both necessary to combat growing unrest in India, and yet sorely lacking within Britain.