The Skull of Alum Bheg

by Kim A. Wagner

  The timeline was somewhat troubling. Costello and his regiment only arrived in India at the very tail-end of the conflict, long after the outbreak at Sialkot, and Costello himself left the subcontinent after just ten months. The method of executing rebels by blowing them from cannon was used extensively during the suppression of the Uprising, but mainly during the feverish summer months at the height of the fighting in 1857. Three discrete discoveries made during my research nevertheless confirmed the accuracy of the note left in Alum Bheg’s skull and spurred me on to write this book.

  While searching nineteenth-century newspapers online for any mention of Sialkot (sometimes also spelled Sealkote), I came across one article in The Morning Post of 4 September 1858. It reproduced an eye-witness account of an execution that had taken place at Sialkot on 10 July 1858, when three Indian soldiers of the 46th BNI were blown from guns.17 The 7th Dragoon Guards were listed among the regiments present at the execution. I searched in vain for more detailed accounts of the 7th Dragoon Guards, and of their time in India, and on a whim I emailed the archive of the Royal Dragoon Guards Museum, which allows you to submit a query related to an individual, usually a great grandfather who served in one of the world wars, for a fee of £15. I soon received a reply informing me that very little material existed from the nineteenth century, but the archive just happened to have a diary from an officer who was stationed with Costello at Sialkot in 1858 and who mentioned him in several places. The diary had been transcribed and was sent to me as an electronic document. The entry for 10 July 1858 was brief but significant: ‘Witnessed the execution of the three Sepoys, they were blown into a thousand pieces in the most expeditious manner’.18 There was, in other words, little doubt that Costello had in fact been present at the execution of mutineers from the 46th BNI, and it also seemed highly likely that that this was indeed Alum Bheg’s execution that was being referred to. Following the initial outbreak in July 1857, Alum Bheg would accordingly appear to have evaded capture for almost a year. The final discovery, which to me really seemed to clinch the matter, was a brief notice, accompanied by a photograph, that I came across entirely by accident during yet another online newspaper search. Under the headline ‘A Ghastly Memento—A Protest’, the illustrated newspaper The Sphere in 1911 reported on a remarkable exhibit in London:

  This ghastly memento of the Indian Mutiny has, we are informed, just been placed in the museum of the Royal United Service Institution at Whitehall. It is a skull of a sepoy of the 49th Regiment of Bengal Infantry who was blown from the guns in 1858 with eighteen others. The skull has been converted into a cigar box as we see. The Indian Mutiny is a thing of the past. While we may be able to understand all the savagery of the terrible time—the cruelty of the natives and the cruel retribution which followed—is it not an outrage that a memento of our retribution, which in these days would not be tolerated for a moment, should be placed on exhibition in a great public institution? We hope that a question will be asked in Parliament and that the War Office or the India Office, whichever has the power to act, will order the immediate removal or destruction of the relic.19

  Although the report and the RUSI catalogue both refer to the 49th BNI, that is evidently a misprint, and the skull most likely came from one of the eighteen sepoys of 46th BNI whose execution in September 1858 was also described in the Dragoon Guards diary.20 It is unclear who originally acquired this particular skull, but the fact that another war-trophy from Sialkot existed, in many ways so similar to that of Alum Bheg, removed any doubts I may have had about the accuracy of the note. What I had was in fact the skull of Alum Bheg, and it was furthermore not the only trophy taken from executions at Sialkot during the aftermath of the Uprising.

  The narrative arc of the book came together when I found the letters of Alum Bheg’s alleged victims. The correspondence between Dr Graham and various family members, which are held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, have actually been published, as have the letters from Thomas Hunter to his church back in Scotland.21 Surprisingly, the letters and memoirs of the American Presbyterian missionary, Andrew Gordon, also turned out to be crucial in piecing this story together.22 Gordon lived in Sialkot before and after the outbreak, he knew both Dr Graham and the Hunters personally, and he was, as incredible as it may sound, also present at the execution of Alum Bheg.23 The final written words of the people Alum Bheg was supposed to have killed, and eyewitness accounts of Alum Bheg’s own final moments, offered me a glimpse of several life-stories that were intimately connected, and whose historical entanglement was captured in the note and the skull. This book is accordingly not just about Alum Bheg, but also about the experience of ordinary people, from across the world, whose lives were so dramatically transformed, or simply cut short, by the maelstrom of fear, panic, and violence of the Indian Uprising. The story of the outbreak at Sialkot and its aftermath has never really been told but I hope to show that there is some value in looking beyond the well-trodden paths of the big events, and beyond the famous men and women who we are told shaped these events.

  This book was written not just against the grain, but also against the scarcity of evidence.24 Where the classics of microhistory have been able to rely on extensive trial records or detailed pamphlets and memoirs, I have had to trace an outline of Alum Bheg against his archival absence (but in his physical presence).25 In trying to piece together an account that was not exclusively dependent on British material, I have relied extensively on the letters, petitions, proclamations and statements made by Indian rebels, sepoys and others before and after the outbreak of May 1857. I have also drawn from the later published accounts by Indians who worked within the British colonial administration, including those of Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Shaik Hedayut Ali.26 The attentive reader will notice that I do not rely on the so-called biography of Sita Ram, From Sepoy to Subedar, first published in 1873, which has for generations been cited whenever historians of British India required an ‘authentic’ sepoy perspective. Sita Ram, however, is clearly a literary construct and an example of colonial ventriloquism in the style of Meadows Taylor’s loquacious ‘Thug’, Ameer Ali, from Confessions of a Thug.27

  This fragmentary evidence obviously has to be used with great care and the usual caveats concerning issues of translation and the power dynamics inherent to the colonial archive must be kept in mind.28 I make no claims to have recovered the authentic voices of Indian rebels of 1857, but this book is characterised by a commitment to reflect the multiplicity of experiences and the ambiguity of historical events.29 Rather than a biography in the conventional sense, my reconstruction of the life and death of Alum Bheg is thus more a collective study of Indian sepoys and their common characteristics, what scholars would call a subaltern prosopography. 30 Readers familiar with the historiography of the Indian Uprising will recognise in my account and analysis how much I owe to the work of Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Tapti Roy, Eric Stokes and even Ranajit Guha.31 I have studiously tried to steer clear of the worst clichés and avoid yoking Alum Bheg to a political agenda that would have been completely foreign to him. The story of Alum Bheg is also the story of thousands of Indian soldiers in British service whose names have been lost to history, and whose existence was recorded only as a number when they deserted, were executed, or killed on the battlefield. Consequently, there are no heroes in this book, only victims.

  This book is in many ways about violence and death—as a story about the Uprising of 1857, and about colonial practices within the British Empire, it could hardly be any different. Yet before the ‘post-colonially melancholic’ choke on their tea (claret, or whatever else), I wish to point out that I did not write this book to show that British rule in India, or the Empire more generally, was ‘bad’—nor that it was ‘good’ either. This book is, in other words, not a critique of the Empire, which would be about as meaningful as yelling at the television (though that never stopped my father). My agenda, to the extent that I have one, is merely to suggest that those to whom the red blotches
on the world map represents nothing more than the spread of progress and liberalism to the eternal glory of Britannia might want to look more closely.32 By the same token, those who believe that the actions of indigenous people and subalterns are invariably noble, and that their violence is inherently legitimate, might also want to reflect on this again.

  In my view, the biggest stumbling-block to constructive debates about the history and legacies of the Empire today is the overwhelming reliance on the notion of the so-called ‘balance-sheet of Empire’. The idea that the complexities of the past can be so easily reduced to a moral binary, of either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, is both analytically inept and intellectually parochial. Simply countering Niall Ferguson or Andrew Robert’s anachronistic and unashamedly Whiggish celebrations of the Empire with a litany of colonial massacres, as Richard Gott does, lead us exactly nowhere—and leaves the past as opaque as ever.33 Shashi Tharoor’s more recent book on the iniquities of the Raj similarly fall woefully short of making a meaningful, let alone empirically accurate, intervention.34 Tharoor’s subtitle, ‘What the British Did to India’, ignores the fact that the Empire-project was never uncontested among the British themselves and that it was always riven with internal contradictions and inconsistencies. More importantly, this narrative deprives Indians of any agency whatsoever, making the colonised the passive victims of history and mere foils to other peoples’ actions. Mindless empire-bashing is as tedious as jingoistic empire-nostalgia and while it might make for good politics, which is indeed what it is, it makes for poor history. And I am sufficiently naïve to still believe that a critical and more nuanced understanding of the past is required if we truly want to address the enduring legacies of the Empire and of imperialism that are still with us today.

  My particular take on the events of the Indian Uprising will not appeal to everyone, and for those who prefer their Raj Nostalgia or Indian nationalist mythology unchallenged, there are literally hundreds of books that will provide reassuring and politically edifying narratives. This book is not one of them.

  1

  THE HOT WIND OF AN INDIAN MAY

  In the late afternoon of 13 May 1857, a rider galloped across the plains of Punjab, leaving a trail of dust in his wake. Although the worst part of the day was over, the dry heat still lingered like the waft from an open oven. By the middle of May, the onset of the hot season could no longer be denied, let alone ignored: ‘the wheat and barley-fields reaped close to the bare clay, exposed their surface to the sun’s perpendicular rays; hot air quivered over the plain, and the atmosphere was all ablaze.’1 Whipping the horse to keep up its desperate pace, the rider passed by the small villages of clay-coloured huts scattered along the road, not even stopping at the dak chaukis, or post-stations and travellers’ bungalows, that were located at stage intervals. The rider carried an urgent message destined for Sialkot, a military cantonment station at the foothills of the Himalayas. Travellers approaching Sialkot would marvel at ‘the grand and glorious wall of the Himalaya mountains, on which the sky seemed to lean […] The mountains are far away, but between them and the eye there is a wide flat plain.’2 Even miles from the base of the mountain-range, ‘there is nothing to hide the entire range, except here and there clouds in the horizon; and even these are pierced by the summits, and serve only to add variety to the magnificent view.’3 By the time the rider reached Sialkot, night had fallen, ‘changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and brining out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood-smoke and cattle and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes.’4

  Though little more than seventy miles from Lahore, the centre of the British colonial administration in Punjab, Sialkot was an isolated station. Located twenty-five miles off the Grand Trunk road that connected Lahore to Peshawar and the North-West Frontier, it marked the end of the line, and the border with the independent states of Jammu and Kashmir were just a few miles to the north-east. By 1857, the station was not yet connected by telegraph, the proud measure of imperial ‘progress’. Telegrams from Lahore would be wired to Jhelum, sixty miles to the north, written out and then physically carried by messenger south again to Gujrat and Wazirabad, and only then onwards to Sialkot.5 In the aftermath of the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–49), the British had established a military cantonment in this northern outpost of their Indian territories and by 1857 Sialkot looked virtually identical to any number of such colonial stations throughout the East India Company territories: a British cantonment with military barracks and expansive bungalows, built along wide, ruler-straight roads and then, quite separate, the old ‘native’ town with its medieval lay-out and crooked, narrow lanes. Seen from the air, the impression was roughly that of a large rectangle balancing precariously above an egg.

  The ‘native’ city, with its bazaars and local temples and shrines, was clustered around a small fort that commanded the intersection of the main roads. Built on a mound formed by the debris of an older settlement, the fort of Sirdar Teja Singh was the highest point in the area and from its round bastions one could survey the entire town and surrounding countryside.6 To the south, roads forked off towards Gujranwala and Lahore, and Amritsar, and to Gurdaspur, respectively. Due west, the road would take you to Wazirabad and then either south to Lahore, or north towards Jhelum and eventually Peshawar. Immediate to the north of the fort, four roads opened up in fan-shape to connect the town with the cantonment and civil lines on the other side of the Palkun Nullah, or creek. On the western side, two roads led north, past the courthouse, the treasury, and the jail, to the scattered bungalows and police barracks of the civil lines. Due north, two roads led straight up to the cantonment, the eastern-most passing through the extensive Sudder Bazaar, or market, that served the troops, before entering the well-ordered lines of the military station. The centre-point of the station was undoubtedly the imposing Holy Trinity Cathedral Church, built in the ubiquitous Victorian style found all over India, and which had only just been completed in January 1857. Next to it stood the Catholic Church of St James. Just outside the cantonment, there was also a small French convent of the order of Jesus and Mary, as well as the mission of the American Presbyterians south of the old city, adjacent to the road to Gujranwala.7

  With a garrison of almost 4,000 British and Indian troops, Sialkot was a busy station in 1857. There were three full infantry regiments. The Queen’s 52nd Oxfordshire Regiment consisted exclusively of British troops, while the 35th and 46th Bengal Native Infantry (BNI) regiments were composed of Indian soldiers, or sepoys, commanded by British officers. Additionally, there was an Indian cavalry regiment, the 9th Bengal Light Cavalry (BLC), and two artillery batteries, one British, one Indian.8 When the officials of the civil administration, priests and doctors, as well as wives and children, were included, Sialkot had a permanent European population of several hundred. The number of sahibs and memsahibs was nevertheless dwarfed by the local population, who in the old city and immediate environs alone numbered as many as 20,000.9 To this should be added the thousands of camp-followers and denizens of the cantonment bazaar, as well as the innumerable clerks and servants associated with the British establishment at Sialkot in one capacity or another. While the Indian population in the old city was local to Punjab, composed mainly of Muslims and Sikhs, most of the Indians in British service were Hindus from the Gangetic plain who had arrived along with the British forces and administration after the defeat of Ranjit Singh’s Sikh kingdom in 1849.

  It was past midnight when the rider, a British officer, could finally deliver his message to Deputy Commissioner Henry Monckton, the highest-ranking civil official in Sialkot and Chief Magistrate of the district.10 Monckton had just prepared his application for sick-leave, having ‘long been ailing’, but the message compelled him to remain in his post, regardless of his health. Most of the population, English and Indian, was by this time sound asleep, and yet it did not take long for the news to seep out. A British officer of the 52n
d recalled being woken up by the bugle sound of the rouse or ‘short reveille’, and stumbling out of bed just a few hours later in the early morning of 14 May:

  ‘the moon was shining brightly and I looked at my watch, it was just three or about one hour and a half before the usual time. Immediately after the rouse, the bugle sounded for orders; I rather wondered what was wanted so early in the morning, but in a few minutes down came one of my corporals, and I heard him ask for me. I called out to him, to know what he wanted, when he answered, the regiment parades in ten minutes with ball ammunition. I jumped out of bed and dressed as quickly as I could, and then galloped off to the parade, where the men were falling in.’11

  Half-awake British troops were then issued forty rounds of ammunition, in addition to the usual twenty they carried, and were left waiting while an officer rode down to the lines of the Indian troops. Soon after, he returned, informing the men that they were no longer needed, but had to remain alert and prepared to turn out at any moment when the bugle was sounded. They were then dismissed. Afterwards, they discovered that the 35th Native Infantry had suddenly, without orders, turned out at 2.30am, fully armed. Their officers nevertheless managed to get them to return to their lines and nothing further occurred. As a precautionary measure, the British officers moved the guns of the native battery into the barracks of the British troops, and a company of the 52nd was sent down to protect the guns in the artillery barracks. Control of the guns was of paramount importance to ensure the safety of the British in the station.12