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On the Bonfire Night of 1857, Guy Fawkes was joined in the flames by effigies of a new national enemy who attracted curses and excited condemnation from crowds across Britain. This newcomer was an Indian prince, represented in London by an immense model at least five times larger than life, 'dressed up in the most extravagant style of theatrical finery, with a blackened face, and a huge placard on his back, with the words "Nana Sahib, the murderer of women and children at Cawnpore"'.1It is a name almost entirely forgotten in Britain today, but for much of the nineteenth century Nana Sahib had a good claim to being the nation's most widely reviled foreign enemy as a result of his role in the Indian Rebellion. In the summer of 1857, sepoy troops across northern India mutinied against their British officers in an uprising which was joined in many areas by civilian populations and local princes. Among the rebel nobles was the Maratha prince Dhondu Pant, known as the Nana Sahib, whose hostility towards the East India Company stemmed from its refusal to grant him the pension and titles he was entitled to have inherited. Initially believed to be an ally of the British, he became the arch-villain of the Mutiny in their eyes after presiding over the events at Cawnpore, a formative imperial trauma in which some 900 British men, women, and children were besieged by rebels in a poorly prepared entrenchment for three weeks. With supplies dwindling and casualties high, they accepted an offer from Nana of safe passage down the Ganges to British-held territory. Despite this agreement, the British were fired upon as they boarded the boats on 27 June, and the riverside ghat became the scene of a slaughter. The women and children left alive afterward were imprisoned, only to be killed on 15 July as a British army approached to recapture the town.
The first reports of the massacres to reach Britain were embellished by shocking rumours of rape, torture, and mutilation which aroused public anger to fever pitch, and Nana, the 'Tiger of Cawnpore', was quickly identified as the epitome of oriental treachery, cruelty, and predatory lustfulness, whose capture or death...