Mutiny And The Rebellion: Original Savagery

In the discourses surrounding the Mutiny and the Rebellion, Britons depicted rebels as having denied civilisation altogether – and its British specificities in particular – and resorting to their original savagery. In a brief article entitled ‘What Shall we Do with our Convicts?’ Punch suggests shipping Britain's ‘blackest criminals’ to India. There, authorities should ‘make them associate with the natives’ because ‘there is just a chance that they might civilise the Sepoys’ and ‘teach them acts of gentleness and other lessons of humanity’ (33:196). Although they are also morally corrupted, convicts are still deemed more socially acceptable than mutineers on the grounds of their nationality, as if the fact of having been born in Britain conferred
on them some degree of humanity despite their faults. Natives who remained faithful to the British rule were on the contrary approvingly seen as going against their supposedly natural bestiality to progress toward the British ideal of civilisation.