Embodying war: British women and domestic defilement in the Indian 'Mutiny', 1857-8

The 'mutiny' of 1857-8 posed an unprecedented threat to British rule in India. In newspaper accounts, parliamentary debates and Visual images, the severity of the conflict came to be embodied by the fate of British women and the defilement of their bodies and their homes. This paper concentrates on the contestation and spatiality of embodied and domestic discourses of defilement by focusing on representations of British women at the time of the conflict. It begins by studying the use of domestic imagery in depicting the severity of the uprising, its embodiment by British women, and the contestation of such representations in a newspaper addressed to women readers. Then, turning to written accounts and visual images of the British women who died at Cawnpore and who survived the siege of Lucknow, the paper examines how and why these discourses of defilement were place-specific. By contrasting images of British women as victims and as survivors of the uprising, the paper contends that their ultimately unrepresentable fate was spatially inscribed through their paradoxical embodiment at, and displacement from, different sites of conflict. (C) 2000 Academic Press.