Bibighar
Bibighar ( Hindi : बीबीघर , bībīghar ; women's shelter ) was the name of the house in Kanpur , in which 73 women and 124 children were initially imprisoned during the Indian uprising in 1857 and massacred on July 16, 1857. It is considered to be the worst massacre of British civilians during the uprising.
course
Most of the detained in Bibighar were survivors of the siege of Kanpur and the massacre of Sati Chowra . This British garrison town had been able to successfully oppose the rebellious Indian troops for several weeks. In view of the onset of the rainy season, the English accepted Nana Sahib's offer , who promised them free withdrawal if they surrendered. However , the insurgents opened fire as they boarded the boats on Sati Chowra , from which they were supposed to go down the Ganges. The surviving English men were killed on the spot. About 125 women and children were brought back to Kanpur and imprisoned in Bibighar. The total number of those detained in this relatively small house was over 200 people. Most of the other prisoners, almost all women and children, were refugees from the siege of Fatehgarh . They had fled Fatehgarh because they believed they would find refuge in the larger garrison of Kanpur.
The conditions in the completely overcrowded house resulted in almost 25 people succumbing to diseases within the first week. When General Henry Havelock and British troops approached the city, Nana Sahib had the prisoners murdered. The few men were shot by insurgent sepoys . These Indian soldiers, who were formerly part of the British troops, also refused to murder the women and children. Five people not belonging to the sepoys were then employed, including two butchers from the Kanpur bazaar and one person who belonged to the Indian prince's bodyguard. In the Bibighar they killed the people held there with axes, hatchets and sabers. The murder of British civilians dragged on for several hours.
Some of the women survived the night, according to the later official British report. They were taken out of the Bibighar together with the corpses. Most of them were pulled out of the house by their hair, so that the British troops who arrived later found a clear dragging track from the house to the well in which most of the bodies - and, according to the British report, the few who still had their serious injuries were not succumbed - were thrown. Previously, those who were still wearing recyclable clothing had been stripped of them.
impact
British troops arrived in Kanpur shortly after the massacre and found the house with numerous references to the massacre. All the floors in the house were smeared with blood, and there were bloody handprints on the walls. Blood-smeared rags of clothing, hats and shoes lay everywhere. The British soldiers described what had happened in numerous letters to their families in Great Britain. Many of the soldiers assured their relatives that appropriate vengeance would be taken for this massacre. James Neill , to whom Henry Havelock gave the command of Kanpur, which is now back in British hands, took the incident as an opportunity to justify very harsh retaliatory measures. Almost every sepoy who fell into the hands of British troops was executed, although the evidence that they were involved in the uprising or in the previous massacres was very thin. Prior to their execution - most of them were hanged - they were forced into acts that resulted in a loss of their caste or religious purity. Several cases have been reported of British soldiers forcing sepoys to lick the blood-smeared floor in Bibighar before being executed.
Contemporary writings on Bibighar
The Bibighar massacre is considered to be one of the events during the Indian uprising that assumed traumatic significance for the British public. According to contemporary British ideas, women and children were particularly worthy of protection. The fact that those who saw the bodies in the well described them as naked has been equated with rape and desecration of women. Those who pointed out that the undressing and dismemberment of those imprisoned in Bibighar only happened after their deaths were considered naive defenders of brutal butchers. The execution of the defenseless people in Bibighar therefore often played a special role. Thus, referring to the Bibighar massacre, British contemporaries called for the complete destruction of Delhi and the execution of all who were in any way associated with the crime. The contemporary descriptions and depictions are often unusually bloodthirsty for the Victorian era . Christopher Herbert even calls them semi-pornographic, because they also depict rape or abuse of women in great detail. The monograph “Cawnpore” by Sir George Trevelyan from 1865 is one of the few more objective representations .
Single receipts
- ↑ Dalrymple, p. 303
- ↑ Herbert, p. 62
- ↑ Hibbert, p. 207
- ^ Ward, p. 428
- ^ Herbert, p. 155
- ^ Ward, p. 436
- ↑ Dalrymple, p. 303
- ^ Herbert, p. 182
literature
- William Dalrymple : The Last Mughal - The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857. Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2006, ISBN 9780747587262 .
- Saul David: The Indian Mutiny: 1857. Penguin Books, 2003.
- Niall Ferguson : Empire. The Rise and Demise of the British World Order. 2003, ISBN 0465023282 .
- Christopher Herbert: War of no pity. The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2008, ISBN 978-0-691-13332-4 .
- Christopher Hibbert: The great mutiny: India 1857. Penguin Books, London [u. a.] 1988.
- Denis Judd: The Lion and the Tiger. The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600-1947. Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-280358-1 .
- Andrew Ward: Our bones are scattered - The cawnpore massacres and the indian mutiny of 1857. John Murray Publishers, London 2004, ISBN 0-7195-6410-7 .
Web links
- Current photo on Panoramio with a short description
Coordinates: 26 ° 27 ′ 31.1 ″ N , 80 ° 22 ′ 50.8 ″ E