Paper Tiger: The Ghost of Nana Sahib in British Newspapers

This paper takes up an unexpected figure—Nana Sahib, the so-called ‘butcher of Cawnpore’, considered the mastermind behind the worst atrocities committed by Indians during the 1857 Uprising—and an unusual conception of ‘biography’. Drawing on newspaper accounts of the man over almost half a century, the essay argues that these news accounts, each risibly slim and riddled with errors, produced the closest thing to a life account of Nana Sahib available to nineteenth-century British readers, and that the palimpsestic biographical account of Nana Sahib thus offered by the press forms an accreted biography, with a build-up of deposits formed over a period of years, the natural outcome of a culture of reprinting that created a long ‘tail’ for reports. In examining the accreted deposits of Nana Sahib as biography, this essay expands our understanding of forms of life writing in the nineteenth-century and describes how the British press capitalised, deliberately and unashamedly, on these sensationalised biographical accounts, transforming Nana Sahib from bogeyman to commodity in the literary market.