“The Major-General feels assured that British pluck and determination will carry everything before them, and that the blood-thirsty and murderous mutineers against whom they are fighting, will be driven headlong out of their stronghold or be exterminated,” reported the Barbadian on December 5, 1857.
“We have a mighty, highly motivated army. And it faces enemies who have lost any shred of humanity, must not again be underestimated, must themselves be surprised by us this time, must be vanquished,” stated an article in the Times of Israel on October 17, 2023.
The Revolt of 1857 and the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict might seem worlds as well as centuries apart, yet they share certain patterns. The Revolt of 1857 was one of the first major attempts to gain independence from British control. It was an event that lasted close to 18 months, resulting in the infliction of a great violence against both the British and Indians. The early successes during the rebellion such as the capture of Delhi elevated it from a sepoy mutiny to a wider scale rebellion as it resulted in civilians joining the cause. The British or rather the East India Company naturally became anxious, as the revolt had the potential to dethrone them. Their response was initially hesitant but soon became swift and brutal. After besieging Delhi and regaining control, they reconquered all rebel-controlled areas one by one. It was finally on July 8, 1859 that the British government declared peace.
There are different estimations of just how many died during the duration of the Revolt. According to historian Irfan Habib, the death toll on the Indian side must have numbered in “the hundreds of thousands”. One can see in British reports just how disproportionate the number of Europeans killed was, as compared to Indians. For example, on July 21, 1857, a military operation was carried out in Meerut district in which “all males found in the village were killed”. A popular panorama programme known as Description of a View of the City of Delhi, with an Action Between Her Majesty’s Troops and the Revolted Sepoys was exhibited at Leicester Square for a year, from January 1858 till February 1859. Within its programme narrative, the exact number of British officers that were harmed is mentioned as “upwards of two hundred officers and four hundred men were killed or severely wounded”, while the deaths of revolting Indian sepoys is said to “have been enormous”.
Let us juxtapose this with the current death toll in Palestine where, as of March 7, 2025, the death toll stands at 62,614 Palestinians and 1,139 in Israel. The current conflict and death toll has come after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel-controlled territories and the subsequent devastating Israeli response.
When examining the Revolt of 1857, it is important to question and understand just how the British managed to mobilise the level of support that they did in order to launch a decimating attack against the Revolt. One important aspect in this regard is how the East India Company and different British newspapers managed to create very particular and gruesome narratives of the Revolt. In a collection of penny books known as Narrative of the Indian Revolt: From its Outbreak to the Capture of Lucknow by Sir Colin Campbell, there are depictions of sepoys taking over Delhi from British control. This takeover is described as consisting of “unspeakable atrocities committed on our betrayed countrymen, and their women and children – of these latter being facetiously tossed in the air and caught upon bayonets – of their flesh being cut from their bodies and forced into the mouths of their parents – of a daughter made to drink her father’s blood – of English mothers and wives driven naked through the streets, and then given up to the wretches hounding after them”.
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There is an immediate evocation of violent imagery in the depiction of the Indian sepoys, giving them a villainous form as a narrative of horror and great crisis is constructed. In Barbados, which was a British colony at the time, the Barbadian reports on the siege of Delhi in an article titled ‘The Indian Mutiny, the Capture of Delhi’. Within this report it explains how “Major General Wilson need hardly remind the troops of the cruel murders committed on their officers and comrades, as well as their wives and children, to move them in the deadly struggle.”
Throughout the Revolt, the British never failed to create ahistorical accounts of cruelty and violent action that were apparently committed by Indian sepoys as a way of justifying their own genocidal actions. In London, the Morning Herald republished an article from the Saunders’s News-Letter, a popular newsletter published in Dublin. This article is titled ‘The Militia’ and states that “Thursday last our county regiment of militia was embodied” in favour of active service in India during the time of the revolt. The writer argues, “Many such courageous and loyal spirits, actuated with feelings of sympathy for the sufferers from the sepoy mutiny, and revenge for the hitherto unheard of cruelties it has caused, will be found to swell the ranks of the militia regiments of Ireland, as they are embodied.”
More soldiers were being mobilised and people were actively volunteering to take part in the fight due to these narratives of cruelty and the suffering of the British in India. Again and again, these narratives were produced, creating categories of murderous, barbarous and cruel sepoys while the British remained courageous, loyal and the bringers of justice against the apparent cruelties of Indians that were revolting against a colonialist power. The language that has been deployed, as seen in the examples above, is an imperialist and colonialist one. It seeks to justify not only British or Company rule, but also the slaughter of Indians.
When we turn to the Israeli government and Israeli news organisations, a similar deployment of colonialist and imperialist language becomes apparent. Immediately after the October 7 attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced: “Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Not an operation, not a round [of fighting], at war! This morning Hamas initiated a murderous surprise attack against the state of Israel and its citizens.” In a September 8, 2024 press release, he stated, “In recent days, abhorrent terrorists murdered six of our hostages and three Israel Police officers in cold blood. The murderers do not differentiate between us. They want to murder us all, right and left, secular and religious, Jews and non-Jews, until the last one.” In an article titled ‘This is Israel’s 9/11 – comment’ published by The Jerusalem Post, Hamas is described as “entering Israeli territory to murder, maim, and kidnap Israelis” and “too hellish, too ghastly to be real”. Similarly, another newspaper report stated, “It also said that children who were taken hostage were forced to watch videos of the October 7 massacre, hostages underwent surgeries without anesthesia or proper medication, others were forced to soil themselves, and female captives were treated as slaves.”
One cannot deny the losses suffered by Israel, just as one cannot deny the losses that the British suffered during the time of the Revolt. However, attention must be paid to the kind of narratives that are being constructed and circulated around the event itself. In the same vein as the “murderous” and “barbarous” Indian sepoys, we see a creation of “murderous” and “abhorrent” Palestinians. In the same way that British children were apparently “tossed in the air and caught upon bayonets – of their flesh being cut from their bodies and forced into the mouths of their parents”, we find here claims of “horrifying photos of babies murdered and burned by the Hamas monsters”.
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The statements by Israel are also echoed by Britain, France and the United States. In response to the October 7 attack, then UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated, “The attacks in Israel last weekend shocked the world. Over 1,400 people murdered one by one; over 3,500 wounded; almost 200 taken hostage; the elderly, men, women, children and babes in arms murdered, mutilated, burned alive”. In 2023, the US President Joe Biden declared that “I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children”. The White House later admitted that President Biden had not seen any such photos – they did not exist. Yet these statements have continued. A year later, President Biden highlighted how October 7, 2024 marked “one year of mourning for the more than 1,200 innocent people of all ages, including 46 Americans, massacred in southern Israel by the terrorist group Hamas. One year since Hamas committed horrific acts of sexual violence.”
As Indians, with our own history and experience of colonial oppression under the British state, should we not be critical of the actions and words of the Israeli state and its supporters? In the same way that the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indians was justified, we find a similar justification from Israel for the annihilation of the Palestinian people. How different really were we at the time of the Revolt as compared to the Palestinians that are now suffering immense decimation at the hands of a state that deploys the same exaggerated and graphic colonial narratives as the one that once suppressed us?
Zafar Habib is a third year undergraduate history student at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi NCR.
