The Skull of Alum Bheg Read online

  It should be no secret that I felt an immediate urge to recover something of the life-story of the man who once looked out through those eye-sockets and chewed with those teeth—the man who in so many ways inhabited the skull as ‘the palace of the soul’ (to use Byron’s words). Alum Bheg never imagined that, more than a century and a half after his death, the remains of his head would still be around, and furthermore be probed and prodded by perfect strangers thousands of miles from where he died. There is indeed a sense of intrusion in handling the skull of an individual who never consented to such an intimate touch, not to mention that Hamletesque realisation of one’s mortality, that someday this could be myself (it also doesn’t help that I am Danish).

  To be the custodian, however temporarily, of the remains of another human being is a serious responsibility. I am keenly aware that I am only the latest in a long line of people who have held the skull of Alum Bheg and that it is for me to break the cycle of humiliation and ignominy that he has suffered. Both the manner of his execution, and the subsequent collecting of his head as a trophy, were acts of physical and symbolic violence intended to dehumanise Alum Bheg. In this book, I set out to restore some of the humanity and dignity that has been denied him by telling the story of his life and death during one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of British India. Very few people ever really knew that his skull existed: it was never exhibited in a museum, it is not described in the history books, and there are no descendants clamouring for its return. But returned he should be, and with this book I hope to have prepared the ground for Alum Bheg to finally find some peace, albeit 160 years late.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First of all, I would like to thank Dee and John for the serendipitous foresight they had in contacting me about the skull in their attic in autumn 2014. They subsequently trusted me to look after Alum Bheg, and none of this could have happened without them.

  Writing this book has been an intense yet also fun process. I sent the proposal to Michael Dwyer at Hurst on 11 December 2016, proposing a 2018 publication-date. Michael immediately countered with an offer of publication if I could deliver the manuscript in seven months. Two days later I had the contract in hand and somehow I managed to finish on time. Thanks to Michael for seeing the potential in this project. Thanks also to Jon de Peyer and the rest of the staff at Hurst, and Ranjana Sengupta at Penguin India, who have been amazing to work with. Two anonymous readers cleared the way for the US imprint, and I appreciate their generous feedback which was based on only a few rough chapter drafts. Research for this book has been generously supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship Programme.

  During the short but hectic period I have worked on Alum Bheg’s skull, I have collected many debts of gratitude. I owe much to my friends and colleagues including, in no particular order: Sarah Longair, Clare Anderson, Doug Peers, Steven Wilkinson, Vijay Pinch, Michael Vann, Saul Dubow, Erica Wald, Jon Wilson, Will Jackson, Crispin Bates, Kama Mclean, Harald Fisher-Tiné, Michael Mann, Gautam Chakravarty, William Gould, Matt Shutzer, Chris Cowell, Sarah Morton, Katherine Schofield and William Dalrymple, as well as Stephen Casper and everybody else at the ‘Phrenology, Anthropometry, and Craniology’ workshop at Clarkson University in 2015.

  I am very fortunate to have close friends who work within the same subject area, broadly speaking, and with whom I have been able to share and refine my ideas over the years—a heartfelt thanks to Mark Condos, Gavin Rand, Gajendra Singh, John ‘Balu’ Pincince, Ricardo Roque and Derek Elliot (thanks also for the company during researchtrips, the illegally downloaded pdf’s, the post-panel drinks, the laughing-fits and the smoked salmon. Sincere apologies to anyone we annoyed or offended along the way). Mark had the dubious honour of reading and editing the first and very rough draft of the manuscript, and he did a beautiful job turning my inchoate ramblings into readable prose—any remaining Danishisms are no fault of his. Hopefully I will be able to return the favour, Bandar-ji!

  I am much indebted to fellow head-hunter Jeremiah Garsha for sharing his work and thoughts—he read the completed manuscript in just a few days and made numerous insightful suggestions. I cannot say I am not envious of his project on Mkwawa’s head and I look forward to much more ‘skulduggery’ in the future. Thanks also to Gajendra for so proficiently, and patiently, helping translate the odd Hindi and Urdu words and sentences I would throw at him at all hours of the day. Jacob Smith helped me out with additional research in London and I have relied heavily on his excellent thesis on the hunt for Nana Sahib and the aftermath of the Indian Uprising.

  Dane Kennedy hosted me at George Washington University and has been a generous and amazing interlocutor during my time in the US. Dane is living proof that it is possible to be a nice person, and all-round good-guy, despite the corrupting influence of power in Washington, DC. I would also like to express my gratitude to Ammar Ali Jan, Tabby Spence and the Jan family who made my stay in Lahore truly memorable. In Sialkot, I was extremely fortunate to have Shaloom and Solomon Naeem as my guides. They, and their family, went above and beyond what can reasonably be expected from perfect strangers and helped me get the most out of my visit.

  I am grateful to Heather Bonney at the Natural History Museum, London, for taking the time to examine Alum Bheg’s skull and for providing me with enough scientific certainty to let me pursue this research with some degree of confidence. Another debt is owed to Frances Larson, author of the highly recommendable Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, which has been a great source of inspiration. On a similar note, Simon Harrison’s Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War was also extremely useful as I was working on the manuscript—readers who want to know more on this grisly subject are strongly encouraged to consult their books.

  Many thanks to the editorial board of Past & Present for permission to use material from my article ‘Calculated to Strike Terror: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’. Thanks also to the staff at the Gelman Library, George Washington University, the National Archives of India in Delhi, and the Asian & African Studies Reading Room and Map Collections in the British Library. I could furthermore not have written this book from a small town in rural Maryland without hathitrust.com, archive.org or any of the nineteenth-century newspaper databases.

  The environment in which one works while writing is crucial to the creative process and I would like to express my deep-felt appreciation to the following musicians who have, unknowingly, provided the soundtrack for my work over the past many years: Eluvium (Matthew Cooper), 36 (Dennis Huddleston), Thom Brennan, William Basinski, Stray Ghost (Anthony Saggers), Rafael Anton Irisarri, and the late Lucette Bourdin. Also thanks to the distilleries of Islay.

  I owe an apology to Ada and Max, and further away, to Sigrid and Gustav, for having been so absentminded while writing this book—and thanks to Netflix for stepping in when I should have been parenting. Thanks also to Elaine and Pop-Pop for letting us stay with them in Maryland. Finally, I cannot begin to express my love and gratitude to my beautiful wife Julie, who may be my harshest critic, but who has been a patient and constant source of support—tak, min elskede!

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  INTRODUCTION

  ‘And then I made a brusque movement, and one of the remaining posts of that vanished fence leaped up in the field of my glass. You remember I told you I had been struck at the distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen—and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids,—a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.’

  ‘I had no idea of the conditions, he said: these heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were—rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks.’

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)1

  When today we encounter human skulls, it is usually within the context of a natural history museum or perhaps a medical collection, or even an ethnographic display. Such skulls rarely retain the name of the individual to whom they belonged, but are anonymised and referred to by a catalogue number, which renders them ethically more palatable. A skull in the doctor’s office might affectionately be referred to by a name, but it is really meant to represent humankind and supposed to show what a generic human cranium looks like. The anatomy students also do not need to know who the person they are dissecting was, nor how he, or she, died. Trying to determine racial categories in the past, the anthropometrist similarly did not care for individuality, but on the contrary sought to identify the broadest possible categories based on statistics of measurements. This sanitised presentation of skulls hides the sad and sordid past of the individuals whose remains ended up on the dissection table or in the display cabinet. The collection of human body parts indisputably entails some degree of violence, whether it was the posthumous dissection of the unclaimed corpses of criminals and the poor two centuries ago, the emptying of graves in far-away places a century ago, or the decapitation of a donated corpse today. And even when that violence is explicit in the exhibit, as is the case, for instance, of the tsantsas or shrunken heads displayed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, neither the name of the individual, nor the exact circumstances under which they died, are considered significant.2

  A trophy-skull like that of Alum Bheg is different. Where a scientist’s collecting of a skull is not supposed to be about violence, that of a trophy-skull is irrevocably linked to a narrative of violence. The trophy in that sense becomes meaningful by highlighting the circumstances of its taking—as opposed to scientific museum specimens, whose presentation in glass cabinets deliberately obscures any trace of the human being and the circumstances of their death. Without a story, it ceases to be a trophy. While provenance is obviously important for all human remains, in order for them to be considered of value, in the case of a trophy, this is the only thing that really matters. On their own, both the skull and the note are meaningless, and would probably have been discarded. To use the words of one of my colleagues, Alum Bheg exists only as a ‘composition of actual bone and historical narrative’.3 The note is accordingly central to the ‘making’ of the skull of Alum Bheg, and, in that sense, this book is as much about the note as it is about the skull.

  Taking the meagre information contained in the note—little more than 150 words in total—as my starting point, I have sought to sketch out a biography of the skull. My ambition was to uncover as much as possible of Alum Bheg’s journey, in life and in death, from trusted ally of the East India Company in the nineteenth century to forgotten war-trophy in a pub in Kent a century later. The first things I had to do was to confirm that the skull itself matched the story. If, for instance, it turned out to be that of a 90-year-old woman, then that would have been the end of it—there would have been no book to write. Analysis of the skull carried out by Dr Heather Bonney of the Natural History Museum, London, suggested that the age was consistent with a mid-nineteenth century date, that it was definitely from a male who was probably in his mid-30s, and who was likely of Asian ancestry.4 There was no sign of violence, which one would not necessarily expect to find in the case of execution by cannon, where the cause of death is blast trauma to the torso. There were, furthermore, no signs of cut marks from a tool, which would indicate that the head was defleshed either by being boiled or simply by being left exposed to insects. While the examination did not provide as much certainty as I had perhaps hoped for, there was nothing about the skull that was incompatible with the story of its provenance and I decided to proceed with the research.5

  It did not take long to discover that the 46th Bengal Infantry Regiment—BNI for short—mutinied on 9 July 1857 at the military cantonment station of Sialkot in what is today Pakistan. Despite the considerable historiography devoted to the Indian Uprising, the outbreak at Sialkot has not attracted any real attention, from either British or Indian scholars, and is only mentioned in the most cursory fashion, if at all.6 To the extent that the outbreak at Sialkot is described, it is usually in reference to the Europeans who were killed, which included Dr Graham and Thomas and Jane Hunter and their child—the very victims described in the note.7 The basic facts were thus easily confirmed, though that alone did not provide enough material on which to base a book.

  My biggest challenge was that I never found Alum Bheg’s name in any of the original documents, reports, letters or memoirs from the period. I searched long and hard in archives and libraries, in the UK and in India, and even had friends and colleagues look for me. I scoured online newspaper databases without success and neither trial records and official reports of executions, nor regimental lists of recruits, have survived for this period. The only names of Indian soldiers serving in the 46th BNI at Sialkot in 1857 that have been kept for posterity, are those of three non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who remained loyal to the British, and Alum Bheg was evidently not one of them.8 The most that can be said on the basis of Alum Bheg’s name, properly transliterated as Alim Beg, is that he was probably a Sunni Muslim from northern India. The 46th BNI had originally been raised at Cawnpore, in what is today Uttar Pradesh, and it seems likely that Alum Bheg and most of the men of his regiment came from that particular region within the traditional recruitment area of the Bengal Army.9

  As I continued the research, I turned my attention to Captain Costello, described in the note as being present at the execution of Alum Bheg, and also the person who allegedly brought the skull back to Britain. Costello was easy to identify and although there was not an awful lot to go on, I was able to establish some sort of biographic outline. Arthur Robert George Costello was born in 1832 to a major landholding family in County Mayo, Ireland. Although the fortunes of the Costellos were on the wane, and the family plagued by numerous creditors, Arthur was able to purchase a commission as a cornet in the illustrious cavalry regiment, the 7th Dragoon Guards, in 1851.10 He had never seen action by the time he purchased his captaincy in June 1857 and later that year the 7th was deployed to India. By the time Costello landed in Karachi in January 1858, most of the actual fighting was already over
, and the regiment was subsequently posted to Sialkot. Much as they had back in Britain, Costello and the 7th Dragoons spent most of their time with parades and drill exercises.11 By August 1858, Costello had apparently had enough and retired from his commission.12 He boarded the P&O steamer Ganges on 9 October 1858, and reached Southampton little more than a month later.13 The following summer, Costello formally left the 7th Dragoon Guards, but retained the informal title of ‘Captain’ for the rest of his life.14 He built a large house in the style of a Scottish manor at his ancestral seat of Edmondstown in 1864, but in doing so incurred serious debts. By the 1880s he was forced to sell most of his extensive landholdings to the tenants.15 Costello had married in 1862, but never had any children, and when he died in 1891, his gravestone stated that he was ‘last Dynast and Baron De Angulo’.16 None of the historical records relating to Costello makes mention of a skull in his possession, nor would he seem to have had any connection with The Lord Clyde in Walmer.