“Pregnant with the Interests of Life and Death”: Family Correspondence and the British Imperial News Sphere during the 1857 Indian Rebellion

Abstract

In September 1857, extracts from letters written in Gwalior and Agra, India, by an elite British “lady,” Wilhelmina “Minnie” Murray (1834–1912), were published as part of the “correspondence” sections of The Times's coverage of the 1857–58 Indian Rebellion. Through the letters she documented her escape from Gwalior to Agra. She described encounters with the maharajah and “fanatic” “ghazis,” and her experience navigating inversions of racial and class hierarchies at the Agra and Gwalior forts, as a displaced fugitive. Someone (unknown) designated these letters as “publishable,” and they became part of early interpretations of the “mutiny” in the imperial news sphere. Comparing the original copies with their various printed copies, and with texts written by the rest of her Gwalior-Agra cohort, indicates how knowledge of the uprisings was disseminated through the ways in which letters were circulated, repurposed, edited, and sometimes censored. As this article maps, the letters shaped British understandings and public imagination of India, the East India Company's response to the “imperial crisis,” and the events of the Rebellion itself. It contends that reconstructing deeper genealogies of intertextual narratives about empire in this way renders personal correspondents, and often, imperializing women, formative to the early discursive terrain and meaning/memory-making surrounding mid-century colonial conflict.