Date of Award
Summer 2025
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
History
First Advisor
Sarah Waheed
Abstract
During the 1857-58 rebellion in India, British soldiers and civilians saw ample evidence of Indian belief in “magic”. Prophecies about the end of British rule were implicated in inciting rebellion. When a solar eclipse occurred during the British army’s campaign to regain control of Delhi, victory was attributed partially to Indian superstition. Much of the historiography of the 1857-58 rebellion has uncritically accepted British sources’ conceptions of Indian “magic”, dismissing it as superstitious, politically hindering, and divorced from material reality. Yet, British understandings of magic cannot be taken at face value. Instead, they must be located within broader colonial narratives that justified the subjugation of South Asian peoples by contrasting British rationality and Indian irrationality. Additionally, Indian knowledge systems and practices stigmatized as magic must be placed in their historical contexts to highlight the inaccuracy of this stigmatization. Attention to magic in 1857-58 suggests the limitations of colonial knowledge and ways of knowing, and points to how these limitations are reproduced in the study of history. By uncritically accepting British stigmatizations of Indian practices and knowledge systems as magic and excluding all that lies beyond the secular vision of reality, historians reproduce colonial ways of knowing. By both reading British colonial sources against the biased grain and drawing on underexamined Indian sources, historians can chip away at legacies of colonialism inherent in the archival record.
Rights
© 2025, Summer Bordon
Recommended Citation
Bordon, S.(2025). “Cruelty, Bloodshed, and Degradation from the Inauspicious Conjunction of Stars”: “Magic” in the 1857-58 Rebellion in India. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8465