Suttee Ghat, Cawnpore

John Murray

1858 · Albumen silver print from paper negative · Photographs

This photograph memorializes the site of the most shocking event of the Indian Mutiny. Choosing the safety of civilians over honor in battle, a besieged English detachment at Cawnpore (Kanpur) surrendered to rebels on June 26, 1857, on the promise that they and the European families who had taken refuge in their barracks would be granted safe passage. Instead, soldiers and civilians alike were fired upon as they boarded boats at this very spot, and the two hundred women and children who survived were led back to Cawnpore, slaughtered, dismembered, and thrown down a well. These horrific events, in turn, led to gratuitously brutal acts of retribution by the British. In Murray's bleak, harshly backlit photograph, there is something ineffably sad about the two native figures whose solitude no longer conveys human scale but rather the physical and emotional distance that had come to separate the Indians and the British.

Artist

John Murray

Date

1858

Medium

Albumen silver print from paper negative

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gilman Collection, Purchase, Cynthia Hazen Polsky Gift, 2005