xi INTRODUCTION: REVOLTING BODIES, LABORING SUBJECTS Published only a year after the end of the Indian Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–1858, The History of the Indian Revolt and of the Expedition to Persia, China, and Japan, 1856–7–8 by George Dodd begins by recount- ing the supposed motivations and conspiracies of the “native sepoys” when Indian soldiers (sepoys) deied their British of icers and, along- side Indian peasants, princes, and escaped prisoners, rose up against the British Empire. Discussing “the spread of disaffection” across North India, Dodd pauses to show that the key sites of the holy city of Benares (present-day Varansi) and the Ganges River, which lows through that city, were relatively unaffected by the events of that year, despite their strategic military importance. In the midst of disparaging the Indian “mutineers” for underestimating that region’s signiicance as a cen- tral route of commerce and “military movement” during the rebellion, Dodd pauses to note that the landscape of the Ganges in Benares has been, in a parallel vein, foolishly overestimated by Indian artists, who “have delighted to portray the beauty and animation” of life on the ghats (steps) of this holy river. 1 Yet in so doing, these artists “cannot, if they would, reveal the hideous accompaniments—the fakeers and ascetics of revolting appearance” that blight its landscape. 2 Almost midway through his monograph, Dodd briely summarizes his history thus far: he has shown his reader various “tribes of India revolting against British author- ity”; native princes uncertain of their role in the rebellion; formerly trusted native soldiers betraying their British superiors by rising against them in search of plunder; and English women and children hunted “like sheshalatha.reddy@howard.edu