In September 1857, extracts from letters written in Gwalior and Agra, India, by an elite British “lady,” Wilhelmina “Minnie” Murray (1834–1912), were published as part of the “correspondence” sections of The Times's coverage of the 1857–58 Indian Rebellion. Through the letters she documented her escape from Gwalior to Agra. She described encounters with the maharajah and “fanatic” “ghazis,” and her experience navigating inversions of racial and class hierarchies at the Agra and Gwalior forts, as a displaced fugitive. Someone (unknown) designated these letters as “publishable,” and they became part of early interpretations of the “mutiny” in the imperial news sphere. Comparing the original copies with their various printed copies, and with texts written by the rest of her Gwalior-Agra cohort, indicates how knowledge of the uprisings was disseminated through the ways in which letters were circulated, repurposed, edited, and sometimes censored. As this article maps, the letters shaped British understandings and public imagination of India, the East India Company's response to the “imperial crisis,” and the events of the Rebellion itself. It contends that reconstructing deeper genealogies of intertextual narratives about empire in this way renders personal correspondents, and often, imperializing women, formative to the early discursive terrain and meaning/memory-making surrounding mid-century colonial conflict.

1857 年 9 月，英国精英“女士”威廉敏娜·默里（Wilhelmina “Minnie” Murray，1834-1912 年）在印度瓜廖尔和阿格拉写的信件摘录作为 《泰晤士报 》报道 1857-58 年印度叛乱的“通信”部分的一部分出版。通过这些信件，她记录了她从瓜廖尔逃到阿格拉的经历。她描述了与大君和“狂热”“加齐”的相遇，以及她作为流离失所的逃犯在阿格拉和瓜廖尔堡垒中穿越种族和阶级等级颠倒的经历。有人（未知）将这些信件指定为“可出版”，它们成为帝国新闻领域对“叛变”的早期解释的一部分。将原件与各种印刷本以及她在瓜廖尔-阿格拉的其他同伴所写的文本进行比较，可以看出起义的知识是如何通过信件的传播、重新利用、编辑和有时被审查的方式传播的。正如本文所描绘的，这些信件塑造了英国人对印度的理解和公众想象、东印度公司对“帝国危机”的反应以及叛乱本身的事件。它认为，以这种方式重建关于帝国的互文叙述的更深层次的谱系，会使个人通讯员，而且往往是将女性帝国化，形成围绕本世纪中叶殖民冲突的早期话语领域和意义/记忆创造。