by M. M. Kaye
Mornings at the Retreat began with a clamour of birdsong; doves and pigeons, hoopoes and parrots, crows, mynahs, blue-jays and sat-bhai, saluting the day in joyful chorus. At around seven o’clock a bearer would appear with chota-hazri — literally ‘small breakfast’ — without which no Indian day would be complete. This consisted of tea and toast and whatever fruits were in season: papaya when available, bananas (of which there were always at least half a dozen varieties to choose from), oranges, lychees and mangoes. After that, bathed in a tin tub and having dressed, one went out into the cool, glittering morning to walk through the gardens and along the lakeside, sniffing the flowers and watching the birds and squirrels.
Sometimes we would be taken out shopping in the bazaars, but always we were back again at the bungalow by eleven o’clock for ‘brunch’, the main meal of the day. This was a curious mixture of breakfast and lunch that was served on the verandah, and consisted of porridge for those who fancied it, and Grape-nuts or Shredded Wheat for those who didn’t; fruit juice and coffee, bacon and eggs, and at least one Indian dish, such as curry and rice, jhal-frazi or chicken pilau, plus some pudding or other to end with. The earlier part of the afternoon was generally occupied by a siesta, and after tea on the lawn we would go out, as in Lucknow, to see the sights of the city.
And here, once again, we were back in the Mutiny; for Cawnpore was the scene of one of the great tragedies of that terrible period, a crime that shocked India almost as deeply as it shocked the British. For almost sixty years later, when I was a child in Delhi, listening pop-eyed and riveted to tales of the ‘Black Year’, I was told by a Muslim resident of that walled city a tale that had been current there for many years. How the head maulvi of the Jumma Masjid had nailed a manifesto on to the main door of that great mosque, denouncing the massacre of the captive Angrezi women and their children in the Bibi-ghur, and calling upon the Faithful to lay down their arms and return to their homes, since God could no longer be on their side because of the ‘Sin of Cawnpore’. I used that tale when I wrote Shadow of the Moon.
* For a wonderful description of this part of Calcutta, read The Lady and the Unicorn by Rumer Godden.
* This history was completed by a Colonel Mallenson, who married the only sister of the ‘ten fighting Batteys’, three of whom served in the Corps of Guides and appear as real-life characters in The Far Pavilions. The work was published as Kaye and Mallenson’s Indian Mutiny.
* Author of Plain Tales from the Raj, The Princes, etc.
* A school run by an appointed Board; predecessor of today’s state schools.
Chapter 3
The story of Cawnpore would have differed very little from half a dozen other Mutiny stories, had it not been for the fact that the victims of the final horror of that terrible summer were all women and young children. Over 200 of them — all that were left of the ‘more than 1,000’ Europeans who had survived a horrendous twenty-one-day siege, followed by an even more horrific massacre in the shallows of the Ganges.
When I see and hear some of the anti-British tump that is being dished out today by son-et-lumière shows at Delhi’s Red Fort, or in pamphlets sold in her bazaars, written by agitators still whipping that long dead horse, the Raj, and inciting racial hatred by retelling the tale of ‘Hodson’s brutal and unnecessary shooting of the unarmed sons of the King of Delhi’,* I am reminded that no mention is ever made of another hapless fifty or so non-combatants, of whom all but six were women and children whose menfolk had been killed on that fateful June day when Delhi rose against ‘John Company’s’ rule; and who, after being held captive for nearly three weeks in the fetid darkness of a stifling dungeon below the palace in that same Red Fort, were eventually dragged up into the glaring sunlight, to be butchered in an open courtyard by men armed with swords, bayonets and sabres, for the entertainment of a gaping, jostling crowd of onlookers …
The bodies were left there all day to provide the citizens of Delhi with a free raree show. And in the evening they were piled on carts by men of the lowest caste, untouchables who are the disposers of rubbish and filth, and taken to the river-bank to be flung one by one into the placid Jumna. ‘Food for the crocodiles and the mud-turtles, the jackals and the scavenger birds: and a sign and a warning to a hundred villages as the bodies drifted with the slow stream, to be stranded on sandbars and burning-ghats and fish-traps, or caught in the eddies that washed the walls of fortified towns.’*
That story is not popular with the pamphleteers. Nor (though we still hear a lot about Amritsar and General Dyer) do we hear much about the fate of the Cawnpore garrison, whose numbers were roughly estimated as ‘well above a thousand souls’ (a figure that included their families, but not the scores of panic-stricken civilians who had flocked in from outlying stations to take refuge in General Wheeler’s pitifully inadequate entrenchments). Incredibly, the garrison stood siege there for twenty-one days, under continual fire and appalling daily losses, until eventually, driven by lack of food and almost no water, they were forced to accept the terms of surrender offered by the ‘Nana Sahib’ — Dundu Pant, Rajah of Bithor — now being written up as a heroic freedom fighter. The terms had included a solemn promise to send the remnants of the garrison in budgerows (large eight-oared river-boats with thatched roofs) down-river to Allahabad, and the ragged, starving survivors gave up their weapons, ammunition and treasure and, carrying their wounded on mattresses, managed to drag themselves down to the mile-distant river and on to the waiting boats. But it had been a trap.
No sooner were they all aboard than a signal was blown by a bugler and immediately the boatmen set fire to the thatched roofs and, jumping into the river, waded ashore, allowing Dundu Pant’s soldiery to open fire from either bank on the helpless passengers. The wounded and too weak burned to death, and of those who were not drowned or shot in the river but managed to struggle ashore, the men were immediately killed and the women and children herded into carts and taken away to be imprisoned in the Bibi-ghur (women’s house),† where they were later joined by other wretched captives, of whom it is said that ‘only four or five’ were men.
As for the 200 or so women and children who had survived the horrors of the siege and the massacre of the boats, they had just fifteen more days to live. For when, barely more than a fortnight later, Dundu Pant heard the guns of the relief force firing within earshot of Cawnpore, he turned like a mad dog on the helpless prisoners and ordered his sepoys to open fire on them. When, to their eternal credit and the fury of the Nana Sahib, they refused, he ordered butchers to be brought in from the town’s abattoirs; men who, armed with sharpened swords and the knives and cleavers of their trade, set about butchering the close-packed mass of dazed and starving women and children.
It had taken all day to kill them; and according to the onlookers, when the butchers’ weapons became blunted they were handed out through the windows to be re-sharpened or replaced by fresh ones. With the morning the avid crowds were back again in force, this time to watch the mangled bodies dragged out and thrown into a nearby well. Not all of them were dead, and one small boy who had lain all night, frozen with terror under the bodies of the dead, ran screaming round the well until one of the onlookers caught him by the legs and, swinging him against the rim, so that his head cracked on the stone, tossed him in. That savage mass-murder successfully accomplished, Dundu Pant marshalled 5,000 of his fighting men and marched out to meet the Company’s army …
They were only narrowly defeated. But when their leader realized that the battle was lost, he took to his heels and fled into the Terai,* leaving his followers to face the music. His parting act before he fled was to order his guards to kill a Mrs Carter and her new-born infant. Which was done, despite the frantic protests of his wives and women, who had taken in and given refuge to the pregnant mother, whose baby had recently been born in the women’s quarters of his palace. Not a man to look back upon with pride as a national hero, I would have thought.
By now the thunder of Havelock’
s guns could be heard firing on the outskirts of the city. So when the last corpse was flung into the well, onlookers and perpetrators alike took to their heels without making the slightest effort to cap the well or to clear away the gruesome evidence of the butchery that had taken place in the Bibi-ghur.
The stench of that charnel-house, and the sight of those appalling wounds and silent gaping mouths and sightless eyes that stared up from the well at the men who had arrived too late, provoked an explosion of rage and hatred among Havelock’s men, and marked an ugly turning-point in the campaign. For from that day forward men of the British regiments, who had felt no particular animosity to the mutineers and had always got on well with the sepoys, turned into vicious killers intent on revenge. They went into battle shouting as their war-cry: ‘Remember Cawnpore! Remember Cawnpore!’ And they remembered Cawnpore and killed without mercy and hanged without mercy, condemning a man as often as not for the colour of his skin as from any proof of guilt.
The atrocities committed in revenge for those who were so brutally slaughtered at Cawnpore were as unforgivable as the deeds which prompted it. And, as ever, it was the innocent who suffered most. Countless Indians, many of them blameless, died violent deaths at the hands of infuriated soldiers who, blinded by the red fog of rage, forgot that they were, technically at least, Christians whose Bible states categorically that “‘Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, “I will repay."’ They preferred to take the matter into their own hands — and did so. The results have been collected in detail in a book entitled The Other Side of the Medal, which does not make pretty reading.
A little over sixty years later, in a last echo of those terrible days, the terrified, bloodstained little ghosts of those who died in the Bibi-ghur at Cawnpore crept out from the blackness of the well into which their bodies had been thrown, to haunt a man by the name of Dyer, who, though born seven years after their deaths, had been brought up by people to whom the Mutiny and its horror-stories were part of current history and their day-to-day lives.
He had joined the army and done well there, and shortly after the end of the First World War (by which time he had reached the rank of General) he was called upon to cope with a savage explosion of violence, anarchy and rioting that had broken out in the Punjab, whipped up by agitators demanding immediate independence. The burning and looting inevitably led to bloodshed, and in Amritsar, a centre of the violence, the mob killed five Europeans, three of them, Scott, Stewart and Thompson, bank managers whom they beat up with lathis* before dragging them up to the flat rooftops of their respective banks and throwing them down on to the pavements below, where the mob doused them with kerosene oil and set them alight. Mr Robinson, a railway guard, was also beaten to death by the lathis of another ‘unarmed’ mob, while Sergeant Rowlands, an electrician peacefully on his way to work at the Municipal Power House and unaware of any trouble, was attacked and had his hands hacked off before being battered to death.
There was very nearly a sixth victim, a Miss Sherwood, whom the mob beat and left for dead. Poor Marcella Sherwood, a woman doctor who for fifteen years had worked selflessly for the Zenana Mission Society and the women of Amritsar, heard of the rioting and, though warned of the danger, sped off on her bicycle to make sure that all her pupils got safely back to their homes. She was well known and liked by the citizens. But by now the mob had embarked on an orgy of blood and violence, and seeing her appear a group of youths began yelling, ‘She’s English! Kill her! She’s English!’ A man in the crowd shouted back that she was a good woman, a healer and a teacher; but the crowds were drunk on destruction and one of the youths pulled her off her bicycle by her hair and pushed her to the ground. She managed to scramble up and run, only to be brought down again; and at that the frenzied mob closed in like hounds at a kill, snarling, ripping and kicking the defenceless woman until they reduced her to a bloodstained pulp. Shouting exultantly that she was dead, they left her lying in the gutter and rushed away in search of further entertainment; yelling, of all things, ‘Victory to Gandhi!’
For it was Gandhi’s tragedy (and India’s even more so) that this Mahatma who preached peace and non-violence understood the mind of the British so much better than the mind of his own people, and never seems to have realized that any gathering of the latter must, when whipped up by inflammatory speeches by an agitator, inevitably lead to violence. It is only too possible that this revered and world-famous apostle may, after all, have been personally responsible for more deaths than Stalin. Though not, as it happened, for Marcella’s, who by some miracle survived — her battered and unrecognizable body having been retrieved and cared for, at the risk of their lives, by a bazaar shopkeeper and his wife. But this savage attack on a harmless woman, and the brutal murders of the five non-combatant Europeans for no better reason than their nationality, served to convince many more people than Dyer that what they were seeing was a rerun of the opening days of the Mutiny.
Murderers like Dundu Pant are extolled as heroic freedom fighters, while men like Dyer are execrated in films,* books and newspaper articles, though Dyer acted as he did for one reason only: he firmly believed that he was preventing another Mutiny and a second Cawnpore. For the repercussions of that brutal Massacre of the Innocents, like a stone flung into a stagnant pool, had sent ripples out across India, driving men to acts of savagery that they chose to term ‘reprisals’. And sixty-two years later the last of those ripples was to lap against the walls of the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, when a man who had seen the smashed and mangled, near-dead body of Marcella Sherwood,† and feared a repetition of that appalling slaughter, ordered his troops† to fire on an ‘unarmed’ (if you don’t count lathis and clubs as arms) mob of thousands, who had already tasted blood and were being urged by a series of well-known rabble-rousers to march on the Cantonments and kill all the ‘Angrezi monkeys’.
There is a postscript to all this.
Many years later, long after India had achieved her independence and become two separate countries, while on a visit to Indian friends in Calcutta I had an interesting conversation with one of that city’s lively and cynical young writers. We had been commenting on his country’s rewriting of British–Indian history, with special reference to such matters as the bricking-up, post Independence, of a narrow alleyway leading out of the Jallianwala Bagh, with a view to impressing on foreign tourists the extreme brutality of the British (it makes that terrible episode look even nastier if there was no other way out of it — and nowadays there isn’t).
Then there was also the recent removal by the Calcutta City Council of a monument to all those who died from suffocation in a single night in the notorious Black Hole of Calcutta — a gruesome incident that occurred over a century before the massacre of Cawnpore — and the fact that, in addition to abolishing the monument (no loss; it was not a thing of beauty), the Council had pronounced the entire incident to have been a malicious invention; a lying piece of British propaganda without a grain of truth in it, fabricated for the sole purpose of discrediting that heroic freedom fighter, and the local Nawab, one Suraj-ud-daula (in those days the larger part of India was ruled by Muslim potentates).
I said that this seemed a pretty silly thing to do, considering the amount of evidence that existed, including letters from the only two survivors, and that I was surprised — if this type of Orwellian ‘1984’ Newspeak was becoming so popular in India — that while they were about it they hadn’t decided to repudiate the Cawnpore massacre as well. At which my chatty acquaintance laughed and said: ‘Don’t worry. We will! Just give us time. It’s early days yet, and Cawnpore isn’t nearly as easy to dismiss as the Black Hole was, because the evidence is still all there.’
When I asked what evidence, he said: ‘The bodies, of course. They’re still down there, and if we began to say that the whole affair was only a propaganda horror-story cooked up by your lot, someone has only got to take the top off that well and there they all are. Bones last for thousands of years and it’s easy to find o
ut how the owners died and what sex they were. And to date them. Besides, there must be a lot of other things down there. Hooks and eyes. Buttons. Whalebone from stays. Hairpins — any number of things besides a couple of hundred skeletons. But the bodies from the Black Hole were thrown into the Hoogly, which is a tidal river. See?’
I said I saw. And I did.
‘I daresay that one of these days,’ mused Young India, ‘when the ground has been cleared and people have forgotten where that well was, or what happened here, some business corporation will build a whopping great housing estate on the site, all concrete beehive flats. And if anyone remembers the Bibi-ghur affair, we shall say that it was just a story that was put about to discredit us — another “lying bit of Angrezi propaganda”.’
He laughed again, and I said it was quite a thought. But that nothing would induce me to live in one of those flats. Would he?
‘The gods forbid!’ agreed my cynical acquaintance with unexpected fervour; and shuddered as he said it.
The little temple on the river-bank, from where Tantia Topi, the general in command of the Nana Sahib’s forces, watched the massacre at the boats, was still there when Charlie Allen took us to see the sites in the autumn of 1927. But as soon as the Mutiny was over, the Bibi-ghur was destroyed and a garden planted on and around the place where it had stood. The well was properly capped and sealed and a sorrowing angel in white marble was placed on top of it, and the whole enclosed in a circular screen of ornately pierced and carved red sandstone. I gather that after Independence all this was swept away and the angel removed to the nearest Christian church. Which is no loss, since she was a singularly stodgy-looking Victorian angel in the worst tradition of British funerary sculpture.