6 - Remembering the Mutiny at the End of Empire: 1947–1972

Summary

Tracing the fate of British mutiny monuments over the course of the first twenty-five years that followed formal Indian Independence in 1947, as well as the practices of commemoration employed to mark the conflict’s centenary in 1957, Chapter 6 is concerned with how Britain and India were forced to renegotiate the past within the dramatically transformed present. As this chapter shows, British and Indian official memory largely dovetailed over this period. Animated by questions of legitimacy at the international and domestic levels, the uprising presented an awkward moment for official British and Indian memories of empire, and thus both governments settled on an attempt to forget 1857 within the sociopolitical context of this period. However, as this chapter will further show, despite the ideological inducements to forget the uprising of 1857, it remained an important component for many groups in Britain but especially in India during this period, where memories of the conflict continued to help define what empire meant.