‘William Peppé's Petition to Lord Canning (1859):

Self-Fashioning, Grievance, and the Literary Rhetoric of the Settler-Colonial Subject’

Abstract

The petition of 22 June 1859 of William Peppy, now on the files of the Government of India of the Home Department, in Public Letter No. 105, and delivered to the Home Department on 16 September 1859, is an example of a most exquisite piece of rhetorical polish on the part of the non-official European landowners in the North-Western Provinces after the rising in 1857. Well past a simple demand of material compensation and reward, the letter is a carefully managed act of settler colonial virtue at which Peppé is casting himself in sharp contrast to salaried officials, mutinous sepoys, and opportunistic Natives who have come around to the eleventh hour. The petition has been analysed by the classical rhetorical quadrum; exordium, narratio, confirmatio and peroratio, with the structure of the letter being disciplined in that it switches between deferential address and the bitterness that is reluctantly voiced. Ethos is achieved in the exordium by calculated egotism of self-depreciation; the chronological narrative of the narratio elevates a personal landholder in a land of uniformity into an essential element of order, and the documentary evidence thus amassed together with simultaneous portrayal of rival Indian claimants as unworthy is capped by a triple declamation, - I have served your Government, I have served my country, and my Queen, - as a means of establishing the name of Peppy in the annals of imperial history. Systematic reframing can be seen through cross-reading the petition against the very letters of instruction that Wynyard had written (June–July1857). Orders to cut them up at once and take no prisoners, to destroy Mahua Dabar so that not a single stone of it is left upon another, become, in the retrospective history of Peppé, the disciplined patriotic duty, instead of the extralegal frontier violence, which they truly were. The paper locates the petition against the particular military and political history of GorakhpurBasti in 185759 and claims that this type of document can help illuminate the cultural situational position of non-official Europeans in colonial India as well as the literary conventions within colonial patronage that settler colonial actors attempt to establish themselves.