Remaking “Englishness” and Place: John Stapylton Grey Pemberton's Nineteenth-century Accounts of the Indian Rebellion Sites at Kanpur and Lucknow

Abstract

This article focusses on a trip made by John Stapylton Grey Pemberton in 1887 to two major battle sites from the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Memorial Well Gardens, Kanpur, and the Residency ruins, Lucknow. Both sites, despite being present in a foreign country, were invented and transformed after the rebellion in acts of national remembrance as places of ‘Englishness’. The selection of Pemberton's accounts are intended to explore how colonial spaces entered the discourse on ‘Englishness’, and how English colonists attempted to manifest their cultural identities and discipline the identities of their subordinates. By deciding to multiply its locations of identity beyond its own shores, the British Empire ensured that England would lose sovereign command of its ‘own’ spaces of identity. Kanpur and Lucknow were sites where England's narrative of belonging was de-stabilized and recreated, altered further by colonial subjects like Pemberton who came into contact with them. The idea of an autonomous English colonial space, separate from that of the colonised, needs to be replaced with a more fluid and mobile English subject.