Q1.
Note how the Santhals are depicted in the 1856 sketch (Fig. 4.17) drawn from an artist’s imagination: observe their complexion, dress, weapons and draw your conclusions as regards the image this depiction would create in the popular mind in Britain.
Answer
What is actually in the picture. Look at the two sides separately — the contrast is the whole point of the drawing.
| The Santhals (left and centre) | The sepoys (right) | |
|---|---|---|
| Complexion | Drawn dark, with heavy shading | Drawn lighter, in the distance |
| Dress | Almost naked — only a loincloth; bare feet; long, loose, unkempt hair | Full uniform — jacket, cap, white trousers, belts |
| Weapons | Bows and arrows, one raised sword | Muskets, being fired in a volley — smoke drifting across the field |
| Formation | Scattered, crouching, lunging, individual | A straight, disciplined line |
| Condition | Many already lying dead or wounded in the foreground | Untouched, at a safe distance |
The conclusions to draw. Nothing here is neutral reporting. The artist never saw the event — the caption says the sketch was drawn from an artist’s imagination — and it was printed in the Illustrated London News for readers in Britain. So the picture is evidence about British opinion, not about Santhal warfare.
- It stages ‘civilisation versus savagery’. Clothed, ordered, modern on one side; near-naked, disordered, primitive on the other. A British reader in 1856 was being shown, without a word of text, that these were the ‘primitive’ people the chapter says the British called tribals.
- It makes the killing look inevitable, even natural. If one side has muskets and the other has arrows, the outcome needs no justification — it looks like the working of a natural law rather than a policy decision to burn villages and kill thousands.
- It removes the cause. Nowhere in the picture is a moneylender, a landlord, a tax demand or a land record — and those were the reasons for the rising. The Santhals rebelled against moneylenders and landlords who were taking their ancestral lands with British support. Strip out the cause, and rebellion looks like mere wildness.
- It flatters the ‘civilising mission’. Readers who saw such pictures every week would conclude that Britain was restoring order among savages — the exact belief the chapter identifies at the start as the cover story for colonialism.
What the sketch does show honestly: the caption itself calls it “an unequal confrontation”, and the drawing does not hide the inequality — bows against guns, bodies on the ground. Read against the grain, the same image is evidence of how one-sided the repression was. The Santhals under Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu declared their own government and vowed to ‘fight to the last drop of blood’; the British burned entire villages and killed thousands. A picture drawn to prove British superiority ends up recording British force.
Tip for the exam: with any colonial-era image, always ask three questions — who drew it, for whom, and who is missing from it? Here: a British artist, for a British magazine, with the Santhals’ reasons missing.