Sensation, Sati, and Retribution in Mary E. Leslie's Sonnets on the Indian Mutiny.

Mary E. Leslie's thirty-six sonnets on the Indian uprising of 1857, composed in Calcutta during that year, are the most complex English-language poems about the rebellion and the most conflicted. In Leslie's poems, as in others by Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Whittier, tropes of rape and rescue, of British heroism and heathen barbarism, simplify and manage the violence of empire. For Leslie, female self-sacrifice, sati, and retribution shaped the story of the Mutiny. But Leslie was the daughter of missionaries. India was her only home, and violence could not be fully contained by common cultural tropes. In Leslie's volume Sorrows, Aspirations and Legends from India , the sonnet comes under extreme pressure. Leslie's laments are compared in a final section with the contemporaneous response of Mirza Asadullah Kahn Ghalib, the greatest of Urdu poets, who survived the siege of Delhi and whose letters and ghazals from the period provide an anguished voice from the center of the violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]