95:(1886), recounts the "impudent fabrication" that occurred after the Siege, with the "elastic memory" of "witnesses who will swear to anything" resulting in claims ranging from, on one hand, having seen Miss Wheeler emerging from Ali Khan's quarters carrying a sword and proclaiming her triumph over him, to on the other hand having witnessed her "taken out, dead and swollen" from the well into which by some accounts she cast herself after killing her captors. Trevelyan, identifying Ali Khan as the source of the rumour of Miss Wheeler's defeat of her captor and subsequent suicide, lambasts the "ready credence" with which these varying stories were received in England, "the imaginations of men... excited by a series of prurient and ghastly fictions." Trevelyan states that whilst these heroic stories circulated Miss Wheeler was in fact "living quietly in the family of her master under a Mohammedan name".
195:(W. & R. Chambers, 1859, pp. 139- 140) in describing the variety of accounts existing in the propaganda vein: "In another version, she shot down five sepoys in succession, with a revolver, and then threw herself into a well to escape outrage; in a third, given by Mr Shepherd, this English lady, being taken away by a trooper of the 2nd native cavalry to his own hut, rose in the night, secured the trooper's sword, killed him and three other men, and then threw herself into a well; while a fourth version, on the authority of the ayah, represents the general's daughter as cutting off the heads of no less than five men in the trooper's hut. These accounts, incompatible one with another, nevertheless reveal to us the true soldier's daughter, an English gentlewoman, resolved to proceed to any extremity, in defence of her own purity."
102:, "with a sowar who had taken her from Cawnpore", Fitchett being tasked with reading to them extracts from the English newspapers the rebels received from Calcutta. Fitchett claimed she "had a horse with an English side-saddle", and that she "rode close beside" the sowar "with her face veiled". He claimed that when the British came to Futteghur in 1858, "orders were sent to the sowar to give Miss Wheeler up, but he escaped with her at night." Per Trevelyan, following police inquiries, a conclusion was reached with the "strong conviction" that she had been carried along with the flight of the rebels, and "after being hurried about from camping-ground to camping-ground, had died a natural death in a corner of
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suicide to avoid sexual assault. This version of events was viewed as a heroic act of courage, and was widely described in
British press during the Indian rebellion, in which she was praised as a heroine. An image was made of her "Defence of honour", depicting her as a heroine who killed her aggressor (accounts differing between using a sword or a pistol) and then committed suicide while defending herself against rape, and this image was reprinted numerous times and became well known. Margaret Wheeler thus became a prominent figure in the British war propaganda.
46:. Her subsequent actions unknown, a rumour (possibly started by Ali Khan himself) was spread that she valiantly executed her captors and subsequently committed suicide to preserve her honour; this was used as war propaganda by the British press. Other accounts suggest her death in Nepal after fleeing with the Indian rebels, or her survival until 1907 having spent her life in seclusion at Cawnpore as wife of Ali Khan, who "was kind to her". Her ultimate fate was never confirmed.
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Per one account, in 1907 a missionary doctor was called to a Muslim household in the
Cawnpore bazaar, where an "old, dying native woman" requested the attendance of a Roman Catholic priest. The woman, "speaking cultured English", claimed to be Miss Wheeler and to have married the Indian who saved her
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When the
British retook Cawnpore, they were informed by an Indian witness that she had survived the Satichaura Ghat massacre. However, the British did not know what had happened to her after her abduction. A rumour was spread that she had killed her kidnapper in self defense, thereafter committing
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She experienced the Siege of
Cawnpore with her parents and her sister Eliza Matilda Wheeler. Her brother was killed in battle during the siege. During the Satichaura Ghat massacre, her parents and her sister were killed. She was however abducted ("either captured or rescued") by the
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Anderson, C. (2012). Subaltern Lives: Biographies of
Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790-1920. Storbritannien: Cambridge University Press. p. 147
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Anderson, C. (2012). Subaltern Lives: Biographies of
Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790-1920. Storbritannien: Cambridge University Press. p. 147
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Leckey recounts that "a
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and his wife
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Spilsbury, J. (2008). The Indian Mutiny. Storbritannien: Orion.
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