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.

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.

The peak of high-imperialism brought with it a resurgence of commemoration aimed at the events of 1857. Portraying the mutiny as a victory won by archetypal Victorian soldier heroes, these new forms of commemoration witnessed in the 1890s and early 1900s are best understood as attempts to embolden the colonial community at a time when the rise of Indian nationalism seemed to make a 'Second Mutiny' more likely than ever before. Lionising the imperial heroes who had 'Saved India' in her time of greatest need, commemoration was designed to reassure the British whilst simultaneously inducing them to be ready to emulate the glorious deeds of a past generation. As is explored in this chapter, however, colonial sites of memory remained deeply ambivalent for the visitors who experienced them. When attention is paid to the travelogues and diaries written by British tourists who travelled to these sites during the ‘high noon’ of empire, it becomes apparent that the excessive triumphalism of commemoration over this period was in reality only ever superficial and belied deep-seated anxieties concerning the threat of further insurrection in the mould of the mutiny.