Officer posing in front of memorial well, Kanpur

In 1857 Indian soldiers revolted against the East India Company's authority. This bloody uprising— sometimes called the Indian Mutiny by the British and the War of Independence by the Indians—was the catalyst for the imposition of direct British rule over India. This war is still as controversial as in the period it occurred. In 1862 a railing and memorial were raised by the viceroy Lord Canning at the well in Kanpur, a site of British and Indian massacres where dismembered bodies of British civilians had been thrown during one of the episodes of the war. The memorial stood at the center of a park no Indian was permitted to enter until after independence from colonial rule had been achieved (1948). The war was experienced by the British people as a major crisis in their national history, and the Kanpur Memorial Well became a highly charged symbolic monument. It not only served as a pilgrimage destination for British travelers but also implicitly claimed the Indian landscape into British history by reaffirming the sacrifices entailed in the "civilizing" colonial effort. The officer's gesture of placing his hat on the lowest step of the memorial and the monumentality, stillness, and sobriety captured in this photograph are telling expressions of the complex nature of the colonial enterprise.