Focusing on commemoration over the course of the first twenty years which followed the uprising, this chapter argues that official commemoration was a direct and often conscious attempt to mollify the British population which anxiously anticipated further insurrection. With elevated levels of intercommunal antipathy characterising the post-conflict colonial relationship, this chapter shows how commemoration was designed to produce a conciliatory memory of the uprising consciously shaped to soothe tension and reassure the colonial community about the stability of British India. Responsible for a greatly sanitised memory of 1857, commemoration attempted to mould the conflict into a heroic narrative in which British and Indian soldiers fought side by side to win a magnificent victory in the name of empire. As this chapter further explores, however, despite the enormous ideological energy expended by the administration over this period, fears of further insurrection tied to memories of 1857 were never far from the surface during these practices of commemoration and could still erupt in ruthless outbursts of colonial violence even decades later.

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.

Focusing on Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s commemorative painting, In Memoriam, this chapter traces British responses to the uprising over the course of the conflict itself. Painted at the height of the insurrection, In Memoriam originally depicted the Cawnpore Massacre and was therefore part of a broader discourse which had dramatic material implications for British counter-insurgency by legitimising the ruthless acts of violence used to suppress the rebellion. A continued focus on this artwork reveals, however, the extent to which this depiction of the conflict quickly became unacceptable in its aftermath. With the spectre of armed rebellion haunting the colonial psyche, popular sentiment convinced Paton to make a number of significant alterations to his commemorative composition which transferred the imagined space of the painting from Cawnpore to Lucknow. Employing a range of methods including the use of X-ray and ultraviolent light, this chapter uncovers what the original painting would have looked like at the same time as analysing what the final composition can tell us about the prevalence of colonial anxiety in the years that followed the uprising.