With the field of operations established, Thomas Hunter now had to face the reality of his project. The formerly ambitious Reverend Hunter had to explain to his church how the actual situation differed from what he envisaged:
‘I had hoped to lay before you our plan of operations: it is not matured; let, me therefore, beg a little time. The end, the conversion of souls, is indelibly impressed; the means for the accomplishments of the glorious object have not yet come fully before me. This is a time when, we hope, prayers will ascend by us and for us, that the Lord Jehovah would manifest His own glory.’70
Thomas and Jane Hunter thus found themselves settled at Sialkot with much to prove to their congregation back home. Thomas had to go back on his disavowal of teaching, as a means to proselytise, and soon established two small vernacular schools, one for boys and one for girls. Additionally, they held a Sunday service in Hindi for an audience consisting mainly of their own servants, as well as services for the British officers and troops at the station.71 These activities occupied all their time, and despite the fact that they had a nine-month-old son, a trip to the cooler climate of the hills in the summer was a luxury they could ill afford. Neither could their friends in the American mission who lived on a shoestring budget. Andrew Gordon had originally chosen Sialkot because of its reputedly mild climate, yet the summer heat still proved unbearable to a native of Allegheny, North Carolina:
‘As when the chilling blast of December from the frigid north sweeps down upon the United States, driving pulverised snow through every keyhole and crevice, imperilling the life of every one who ventures out, so the hot wind of an Indian May or June, surcharged with double-refined dust, penetrates our dwellings, withers and scorches those who expose themselves, and sets all our foreign blood simmering.’72
In the morning of 14 May, after the arrival of the messenger, and the nights’ turmoil in the cantonment, things were still quiet south of the city. By 9am, however, Gordon and his little congregation, which included his wife Rebecca, his sister and two other American missionaries and their families, were interrupted by a trooper in uniform, riding a fleet horse, who rushed up to the bungalow with an urgent message from the Deputy Commissioner:
‘My Dear Mr. Gordon:—Please suspend your preaching for a season—especially do not allow your native preachers to go about. Have you heard that Delhi has been taken by the mutineers, and the European population massacred? This reached me last night by express. The Dak [post] is cut off, and the electric telegraph broken. Please do not mention this to any native.
Yours sincerely, H. Monckton’73
The American missionaries did not dare to leave their compound and stayed inside all day—none of the adults had any appetite as they sat down for lunch and only the children ate, blissfully unaware of the fears that wracked their parents. A few hours later, Gordon received another letter brought by special messenger, this time from an acquaintance in Lahore and with more details of what had occurred in the south. The news confirmed their worst fears:
‘I am sorry to tell you that the bridge of boats at Delhi was captured by 150 mutineers from the 3rd Light Cavalry at Meerut. The 54th native infantry was ordered out against them, but refused to obey, and joined the mutineers; and their officers, I hear, are killed. Col. Ripley commanding the 54th, is mentioned as killed. The whole of the native population of Delhi have risen; and I fancy by this time every Christian in Delhi is murdered. The Commissioner, Mr. Fraser, Captain Douglass commanding the palace guards, Mr. Beresford of the Delhi bank, and others were murdered when the telegraph message was sent, and they expected to share the same fate. The magazine had fallen into the hands of the mutineers. The native troops at Lahore have all been disarmed. This is sad news.’74
At Delhi, the two assistants at the telegraph office had been frantically messaging their colleagues in Ambala, as the situation grew increasingly worse. Their final message sent during the afternoon of the 11th, before they had to flee for their lives, had been rather terse: ‘Several officers killed and wounded. City is in a state of considerable excitement. Troops sent down, but nothing known yet. Information will be forwarded.’75 That message hardly conveyed the true extent of the disaster that had befallen the British at Delhi, but since then, more details had emerged and the news that reached Gordon and the others at Sialkot on 14 May sent them into a state of panic. Gordon’s little son, Silas, was sick with fever at the time and Dr Graham had explicitly forbidden that he be exposed to the sun, which meant that fleeing was out of the question. Where exactly they would have fled to, was an altogether different question. Their situation seemed desperate as Gordon later recalled:
‘Between us and the nearest sea-board town, with fourteen hundred miles of staging as the fastest mode of travelling, a thousand deaths intervened. Successful disguise was exceedingly difficult. We could easily change our costume and complexion, if that were all; but to walk and talk, eat and drink without betraying ourselves, would perhaps be impossible; nor could we conceal ourselves in a dark hole and lie dormant, as some animals do in order to escape observation. Yet we all instinctively set about bundling up a few necessary articles ready to be snatched and carried with us whithersoever a sudden emergency might impel us.’76
Prompted by Monckton’s warning not to mention the news to any Indians, Gordon and the missionaries began looking at their servants and the locals outside the compound with a new-found suspicion bordering on paranoia, ‘for it was impossible to know who could be trusted.’77 In India, even poor Europeans lived surrounded by ‘native’ servants who attended to the most intimate aspects of daily life: Indian ayahs looked after the white children, a local watchman guarded the entry to the house, a local cook prepared the food. The notion that local servants, or slaves, should turn on their masters was one of the oldest fears in colonial societies—and it was a fear that materialised along racial lines, as each and every Indian suddenly became a potential threat. The acute sense of vulnerability and uncertainty was given full expression in Gordon’s description of the missionaries’ fears as they huddled together within their bungalow on that long, hot afternoon:
‘“Do they know what we know?” we whispered anxiously one to another. Our very appearance must reveal to them that something appalling is apprehended. Surely they cannot fail to see anxious forebodings written in our very faces. Hark! Have our Sepoys risen? Is that the sound of arms, or only fireworks of some wedding party? Who are these native troopers galloping at such unusual speed?–Oh! These dark visaged Moslems and pagans of solemn mien—how sullenly they seem to move about! How deceitful and treacherous we know them to be! If they have heard it, why should they feign absolute ignorance? Their silence is ominous! They would sell our heads for a penny apiece; and every one of them looks as if he might be an assassin waiting his opportunity.’78
Finally, after eight hours of tense waiting, Gordon, another American missionary and one of the Indian converts ventured outside to gather news and perhaps get a sense of what they should do next. In the marginally cooler afternoon, they made their way through the city, up to the house of District Commissioner Monckton in the civil lines. At Monckton’s house, they found the Commissioner seated at dinner along with two guests, Captain C.A. McMahon, the assistant commissioner, and Reverend W. Boyle, the chaplain of the station. Much like the American missionaries, the trio had little appetite, and were,
‘not eating, but endeavouring to go through the form, for the purpose of keeping up appearances before the Indian servants. Muhammadan waiters in snow-white costume, girded about the waist with redundant girdles, were standing behind their masters, as solemn as elders79, ever and anon gliding out and in as noiselessly, on their bare feet, as if they had been so many black-faced ghosts; and all direct allusion, in their hearing, to impending danger was studiously avoided.’80
Despite the absurdity of the situation, Monckton managed to convey to the Gordon and the others that he was as much in the dark as they were and had no advise or reassuran
ce to offer. Monckton was not even sure whether the Indian policemen under his command, who were quartered near the house, were to be relied upon and ‘instead of being any longer a source of confidence and strength, had become a source of weakness and danger.’81 As the missionaries were leaving, still fearful and none the wiser, Reverend Boyle, visibly excited and constantly looking over his shoulders lest someone should listen, walked them to the door and implored Brother Scott, the Indian convert: ‘Now, Scott, is the time for you. You are a native, and you know the natives. If you can obtain information for the Government you will be well rewarded.’82 Boyle’s wild-eyed plea to Scott belied the notion that the British truly knew the land, and during times of crisis, it was ‘native’ informants who came to be relied on. The fact that Scott was a Christian, meant that he was exempted from the suspicion that attached itself to all other Indians at the time.
Gordon and the two others then drove over to Colonel Dawes, commanding the European artillery, and who was also in charge of the school of musketry. Although the old officers was rather more composed than the civilian authorities had been, ‘Still he felt it necessary to converse in a quiet tone, occasionally dropping a sentence in the middle, or finishing it enigmatically when he saw natives approaching, because, as he remarked, many of them know enough English to catch a word here and a word there, and make out the subject of our conversation.’83 Dawes advised the missionaries to move into a nearby bungalow, whose owner had gone to the hills, rather than to risk remaining at the isolated compound south of the city where help would be difficult to get should the need arise. The result was that Gordon, his family and the four other missionary families, altogether some thirty-two people, moved up to the empty house right at the edge of the cantonment. The missionaries were now as far from the city as they could be, but in dangerous proximity to the sepoys’ lines. ‘As soon as our mission band had taken refuge in this place of comparative safety,’ Gordon noted, ‘a rumour spread throughout the Cantonment that the Sepoys purposed to mutiny that very night, and murder all the English. In case they should mutiny, we were instructed to escape if possible to the barracks [of the British troops] one hundred and fifty yards north of the house.’84 Once installed, the missionaries organised themselves into two groups: one was to keep watch from the flat roof of the house, while the other group was engaged in praying throughout the night. Gordon himself felt safer sitting on the ground outside the house in the dark, hoping that in the event of a disturbance, he might be mistaken for an Indian: ‘Our white faces, European dress and houses are our great danger.’85 In any event, nothing happened and all the Europeans—including Andrew Gordon, Dr Graham, his daughter Sarah, and Thomas and Jane Hunter with their small son—could breathe a sigh of relief as darkness descended over Sialkot on 14 May 1857. This was the day that news of the outbreak of what became known as the Indian Uprising reached this far corner of the British Empire.
* * *
The elaborate charade kept up by the missionaries and the entire British establishment at Sialkot that day—keeping calm and carrying on—had been an exercise in futility that was entirely wasted on the local troops. Alum Bheg and the sepoys, as well as most of the local population at Sialkot, already knew about the outbreak at Meerut and the fall of Delhi and they had known almost as soon as the British did. It only took an hour and a half from when the messenger reached Monckton in the Civil Lines and to the time the sepoys of the 35th responded to the news and turned out in panic. In light of the night’s disturbance, the cause of which was never explicitly referred to, the British officers of the 46th probed the loyalty of the sepoys during the morning parade on 14 May; the sepoys all declared that they were ‘in no way dissatisfied, but would give their lives for the British flag.’86 Whatever loyalty Alum Bheg and the rest of his regiment outwardly expressed that morning, they were deeply unsettled by the news of the outbreak and they too were putting on a brave front. A contemporary Indian account described how the news was received amongst the sepoys:
‘When the news of the outbreak became known, the irritation of the sepoys increased. The whole army felt that their confidence in Government was at an end, that Government was only waiting for an opportunity to punish them all, and hence it was that their confidence in what their officers did and said was scattered to the winds. They used to say, “Government says this and that just at present, but when all is quiet again it will not do what it says it will do.”’87
The outbreak signalled a catastrophic breakdown in the relationship between the British and their closest allies, and it affected every single sepoy across northern India. But it was a crisis that had been a long time coming and in faraway Delhi, the local police officer, Mainodin Hassan Khan, noted that ‘When the rebellion had begun, the full force and significance of all that had preceded it became apparent, and men understood what it meant.’88 If the news of the mutinies at Meerut and Delhi burst upon the inhabitants at Sialkot ‘like a desolating cyclone’, as Andrew Gordon put it, the clouds had been gathering for some time.89
2
A RELIGIOUS QUESTION FROM WHICH AROSE OUR DREAD
In January 1857, schools of musketry were established at the major depots of the Bengal Army cantonments of Dum Dum, Ambala and Sialkot, in order to train sepoys in the use of the Enfield Pattern 1853 Rifled Musket.1 This new firearm would replace the old smoothbore Brown Bess, which apart from the replacement of a flintlock with a percussion cap, had changed little since the days of the Napoleonic Wars. From each regiment stationed across northern India, a British officer, an Indian officer, and five NCOs and privates, would undergo instruction at the depot within their division.2 At Sialkot, the grandiose-sounding Punjab School of Musketry was to train a total of 1300 men from no less than twenty-two regiments within the divisions of Peshawar and Lahore. In the words of one local newspaper, the training would enable the detachments ‘to carry with them, on their return to the regiments, the germs of a thorough knowledge in the art of killing their enemies with precision.’3 Indian NCOs of the 46th BNI, including havildars like Alum Bheg, served as drill instructors at the school in Sialkot and thus acquired an intimate knowledge of the drill and procedures involved in the use and maintenance of the Enfield rifle.4
The ammunition for the Brown Bess musket, which Alum Bheg and other sepoys in the Company’s service had been using for decades, consisted of a paper cartridge containing a pre-measured amount of powder and one round ball. When loading the musket, the paper cartridge had to be torn open at one end with the teeth and the powder poured into the barrel. The torn paper cartridge with the round ball would then be rammed down the barrel. The hammer was cocked, a percussion cap was placed on the nipple of the lock, and when the trigger was pulled the hammer would strike the cap which then ignited the gunpowder and fired the musket. The paper cartridge was required to prevent the ball and powder from simply rolling out of the barrel and also made the process of loading more efficient.
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, technological developments had made the smoothbore all but obsolete and most European armies were introducing rifles.5 The percussion lock and muzzle-loading system remained unchanged, but the barrel of the Enfield was rifled with three grooves which would spin the bullet around an axis, dramatically increasing its range and accuracy. The shape of the bullet itself was also changed, and the Enfield fired a conical Minié-type 0.577 calibre bullet instead of the round ball of the 0.75 calibre Brown Bess. Whereas the old musket had an effective range of no more than 150–200 yards, the lighter and more accurate Minié bullet was considered more accurate at longer distance. There was, however, one more difference between the arms: to ease the process of ramming down the bullet and to make a tight fit once it was loaded, one end of the paper cartridge for the Enfield was coated in animal grease or some other kind of lubricant. When loading the Enfield, sepoys would now have to hold the greased end of the paper cartridge, where the bullet was, while tearing the other end open with the teeth. After the powder ha
d been poured down the barrel, the cartridge would then be rammed down, greased end first.6 And so Alum Bheg, and countless other sepoys, hundreds of miles apart, were all going through the very same motions as part of the drill to learn to handle their new firearm. ‘The school of musketry at Sealkote’, a newspaper report stated, ‘is working along in great style; both officers and men, royal and native, evincing the greatest alacrity and desire to obtain all information they can possibly gain upon the subject which has drawn them together.’7
The fact that sepoys from so many different regiments were gathered in Sialkot for instruction, enabled a lively communication between the soldiers of the Bengal Army, spread out across northern India. Gossip and stories were exchanged—on the parade ground, in the depot and barracks, in the bazaar or the men’s huts, and letters sent and received between cantonments as far apart as Calcutta and Peshawar. Soon rumours began to circulate of a disturbing incident that had happened at Dum Dum, involving a khalasi, or low-caste labourer, and a high-caste sepoy. An Indian account of the story, described in a letter sent from Amritsar to Peshawar, and probably very similar to the version that would have reached Alum Bheg, read as follows:
Near Calcutta, five coss [about 14 miles] distant from it, there is a place called Achanuk [Barrackpore]. There is a Government cantonment at that place. At that place a Hindostanee8 was drawing water out of a well. A ‘Chumar’9 came in and asked the Hindostanee to give him water to drink. The Hindostanee told him that he had better go to some other place to drink water.
The Skull of Alum Bheg Page 6