The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  and am taking a leading part as concerns the management of the new Enfield rifles. Our fellows don’t like them as much as the old ones. I think they will, but at present do not see how. It is a disfavourable circumstance because we cannot afford to unload and clean them as often as we would wish. We have so little ammunition … and after firing a few rounds, they get very foul and hard to load.42

  Edward didn’t trouble his wife with the technical details, but the problem with the new Enfield guns was that, unlike their predecessors, the smooth-barrelled Brown Bess muskets, they had grooved (or rifled) barrels. While this made them much more accurate and gave them a longer range, it did mean they were more difficult to load, and in order to get the ball down the barrel, quantities of grease were needed, as well as a great deal of pushing with the ramrod. The drill Edward had to teach his troops involved biting off the top of the cartridge, pouring the powder into the rifle, then stuffing the ball and the rest of the fatty cartridge down after it with the rod.43

  This was all new technology, however, and the Company had decided, unwisely, to have the cartridges manufactured at the Dumdum arsenal in Calcutta, which had no previous experience of manufacturing this type of ammunition. As a result there were inevitably teething problems, in particular with the first few batches of Dumdum-manufactured cartridges, which seemed to have been coated with far too much grease. This had two results. First, as Edward wrote to GG, it meant that the barrels quickly fouled up with the excess fat, and needed frequent cleaning.44 The second problem was that the greasy coating of the cartridge was deeply unpleasant to put in your mouth, and biting became thoroughly repellent to any rifleman.

  It was into this fertile soil that a rumour quickly took root: that the quantities of grease used were not only unpleasant, they were actually defiling, and made from a mixture of cow fat (offensive to the majority of sepoys, who were high-caste and vegetarian Hindus, and who would also be extremely upset at having to touch anything that had caused suffering to the much-revered cow) and pig fat (an unclean animal to both Hindus and Muslims and so offensive to just about all sepoys).

  The rumours do seem to have been based on truth: initially, the unpleasant grease had indeed been made from these defiling ingredients, as Lord Canning later admitted.45 The ingredients of the grease were quickly changed, and in many cases the sepoys were allowed to make up their own lubricant of beeswax and ghee, clarified butter. But the damage was done. It was not just that most of the sepoys totally refused to touch the new rifles. More dangerously still, the idea quickly gained acceptance that the mistake was far from accidental and was part of a wider Company conspiracy to break the sepoys’ caste and ritual purity before embarking on a project of mass conversion.

  The rumours were given some genuine credibility by the crassly tactless activities of the missionaries and their supporters among the Evangelicals of the army and administration. Had the Company chosen to recruit their sepoy armies from the lower castes this would possibly have been less important. But it had long been British policy to enlist Hindus from the ritually sensitive higher castes, and particularly those from Avadh, Bihar and the area around Benares. Encouraged to regard themselves as an elite by the British, the northern Indian peasant farmers who became sepoys had grown to become very particular about the preparation and eating of their food, and notions of caste, which in India had traditionally been relatively fluid, underwent a process of hardening, or what some scholars have called ‘Sanskritisation’, as the sepoys came to understand such issues as being central to their notions of self-respect.*

  To make matters worse, and the situation even more combustible, the army was already on the verge of mutiny over quite separate – and more secular – issues of pay and regulations. One of the first among the senior officers to realise this was Edward Campbell’s old boss, Sir Charles Napier, who had resigned as Commander-in-Chief in 1850, specifically because his growing worries that British India was in ‘great peril’ from the unrest among its own sepoys were comprehensively ignored by Lord Dalhousie. ‘There is no justification for the cry that India is in danger,’ wrote Dalhousie in answer to a written report of Napier’s. ‘Free from all threat of hostilities from without, and secure, through the submission of its new subjects, from insurrection within, the safety of India has never for one moment been imperilled by the partial insubordination in the ranks of its army.’46

  Having been close to Napier, and so aware of the extent of the discontent, Edward Campbell was quick to realise the danger that this new threat posed. There were, after all, already very many good reasons for the extreme unhappiness of the sepoys. Many sons of established sepoy families in Hindustan now found themselves refused jobs in the army as the Company was busy filling its ranks with Gurkhas and Sikhs, whose fighting skills had come to impress the British during the closely fought Gurkha and Sikh wars of the early and mid nineteenth century. And for those who could get positions, there was little chance of promotion: even after years of gallant and faithful service, no Indian could rise above the ranks of subahdar (or officer, of whom there were ten to a regiment) or subahdar-major (senior officer, one per regiment); real authority remained entirely with the British.47

  Moreover, the British officers, who once mixed with their men – and not infrequently cohabited with the men’s sisters – had become increasingly distant, rude and dismissive. Gone were the days of the White Mughals, who used to join their men wrestling or dancing in the lines, and who used to send ahead to the next village on a march to have the best chess player ready and waiting. According to Sitaram Pandey, a sepoy who wrote his memoirs after 1857,

  In those days the sahibs could speak our language much better than they do now, and they mixed more with us. Although officers today have to pass the language examination, and have to read books, they do not understand our language … the Sahibs used to give nautches [dance displays] for the regiment, and they attended all men’s games. They took us with them when they went out hunting. Now they seldom attend nautches as their Padre Sahibs have told them it is wrong. These Padre Sahibs have done, and are still doing, many things to estrange British officers from their sepoys. When I was a sepoy the captain of my company would have some men at his house all day and he talked with them … I have lived to see great changes in the Sahibs’ attitudes towards us. I know that many officers nowadays only speak to their men when obliged to do so, and they show that the business is irksome and try to get rid of the sepoys as quickly as possible. One sahib told us he never knew what to say to us. The sahibs always knew what to say, and how to say it, when I was a young soldier.48

  To add to their unhappiness, the relative value of the sepoys’ pay had seriously declined – valuable perks such as free postage and an extra wartime allowance called bhatta had been slowly whittled away – yet conditions of service were now more demanding than ever: around the same time as the Company annexed Avadh, the home of many of the sepoys, it had also passed the hugely unpopular General Service Enlistment Act, which required that all sepoys should be prepared to serve abroad. Since ‘Crossing the Black Water’ was forbidden to orthodox high-caste Hindus, this only went further to confirm the fears of the sepoys that the Company was actively conspiring to take away their status and their religion.

  In May 1855 a long article was published in the Delhi Gazette purporting to have been written by ‘an old sepoy officer just invalided and settled in my village for the remainder of my days’, but which in fact was almost certainly penned by an English officer. According to the author, none of the best potential recruits in the villages now wished to join up with ‘an army which may turn into a navy at any point’. There were also, so the officer maintained, great worries that the military profession was losing its status and respectability as the Company was now actively recruiting, and promoting, men of low caste. The Company high command now came to regard such men as less troublesome and ritually oversensitive; but for the existing troops they were ‘men we cannot know and whom 1000 o
f the 1120 people in the village despise’, as the officer put it. ‘Great as is the Company’s name and wealth, it is not so strong as the prejudice of caste.’49

  One very strong candidate for the authorship of the Delhi Gazette piece was Captain Robert Tytler.

  Tytler was a veteran of the 38th Native Infantry, and an officer of the old school who was close to his sepoys, concerned for their well-being, and completely fluent in Hindustani. Tytler appears to have been a kind and sensitive man, a widower with two little children who had recently remarried, this time to the brisk and resilient Harriet. Harriet was half his age, and as fluent in Hindustani as her husband. This she had learned as her first language from her ayah during her army childhood, following her father’s regiment across the plains of India. Together the two Tytlers pursued their amateur artistic enthusiasms, and – unexpectedly for an army couple – became pioneering photographers, carefully documenting the monuments of Delhi, most of which had never been photographed before.

  Several years earlier, during the Second Anglo-Burmese War, Tytler’s regiment had been ordered to cross the sea to Rangoon by Dalhousie – ‘a very obstinate Scotchman’, according to Harriet. Tytler had been mortified by the dilemma this presented to his sepoys. In her memoirs Harriet wrote, ‘They were very high caste men from Oudh and to make them go by sea to Burma would have caused a mutiny. What they should have done was to ask for volunteers … My husband said, “I know my men will never go if ordered, but if the Government would only ask them to volunteer, they would go to a man.”’

  Tytler was ignored, and the order to sail was given. The response from the sepoys was that they would go, but not by sea. As a punishment, the entire regiment was ordered by Dalhousie to march, by land, not to Rangoon but to Dacca, one of the most unhealthy postings in India; within five months all but three men in the entire regiment either were dead or had been hospitalised. In Harriet’s view, ‘it was most unChristianlike to wish these poor men, who had only upheld their religious rights, to go where they were to die like dogs’.50

  Understanding and sympathising with his sepoys’ religious feelings, Tytler was therefore extremely anxious when his sepoys began to hear the rumours about the new Enfield rifle and asked him about the truth of them. By the spring of 1857 none had yet been issued to the troops stationed in the Delhi cantonments, but orders duly came that two companies from each of the regiments stationed in Delhi should be sent to Ambala, 100 miles up the Grand Trunk Road, for training with the new guns. ‘Our men marched to that station,’ wrote Harriet, ‘and though before leaving Delhi they evinced some insubordination, still the officers hoped it would pass off as soon as they saw we had no desire to destroy their caste and turn them into Christians.’51 The hope was quickly disappointed.

  Bulletins kept coming in from Ambala to the Brigadier stating the great dissatisfaction the men were showing to the use of the Enfield rifle and its greased cartridge, and my husband often said to me, ‘if our natives were to rebel against us, India is lost.’ He really became very anxious as days went on and symptoms of disaffection were showing themselves everywhere.52

  The signs of disaffection were certainly becoming more and more apparent. On 29 March at Barrackpore in Bengal, one sepoy named Mangal Pandey called upon his fellow sepoys to rise up, and shot and wounded two officers; he was promptly tried and hanged. Soon afterwards in Ambala, so Tytler learned, the earnest requests of the British officers for the new rifles to be withdrawn were ignored by the Commander-in-Chief, General George Anson, a gambling man renowned as ‘the best whist player in Europe’, who had won the 1842 Derby with a horse he had bought for only £120.53 His touch with his sepoys was, however, less sure than his feel for racehorses: ‘I will never give into their beastly prejudices,’ Anson said, when told that the troops were on the verge of mutiny.54 As a result, from that evening until May, the Ambala cantonments were hit by a wave of arson attacks; meanwhile any sepoy who bit the cartridges – including those from the Delhi regiments – was made outcaste by his fellows and taunted as a Christian. ‘Feeling is as bad as can be,’ wrote the commander of the depot, Captain E. M. Martineau,

  and matters have gone so far that I can hardly devise any suitable remedy … I know that at the present moment an unusual agitation is pervading the ranks of the entire native army, but what exactly it will result in I am afraid to say. I can detect the near approach of the storm, I can hear the moaning of the hurricane, but I can’t say how, when or where it will break forth … I don’t think they know themselves what they will do, or that they have any plan of action except resistance of invasion of their religion, and their faith.55

  By the end of April the trouble had spread to Meerut, where the 3rd Light Infantry also refused to fire the cartridge. The ringleaders were arrested, and at the end of the first week of May, Tytler’s subahdar-major and close friend, Mansur Ali, travelled up from Delhi to sit as President of the Court Martial. Before he went he told Robert, ‘“Sir if I find these men guilty, I will give them the severest punishment in my power.’

  He was true to his word. On 9 May, Mansur Ali duly sentenced no fewer than eighty-five sepoys of the regiment to ten years’ penal servitude. That evening placards were seen in the Meerut bazaar calling on all true Musalmans to rise up and slaughter the Christians.56

  The tenth day of May 1857 dawned suffocatingly hot and dusty in Delhi: it was now reaching the peak of the summer heat, and 1857 had proved an even hotter and drier year than usual.

  As was their habit, the Tytlers drove down from the cantonments to the morning service at St James’s, and on the way met one of their brother officers, who had just returned from the rifle training in Ambala. ‘My husband called out, “Well Burrowes what about the men?” His reply was, “Oh they are all right now Tytler, and are on their way back.”’

  Robert, however, remained worried and alert. That evening he heard the ‘tootooing of the dak gharree [post carriage] bugle in the [sepoy] lines, a very unusual thing for native soldiers never travel in a dak gharree. My husband came to the conclusion it must be Mansur Ali, our subahdar-major returning from the court martial. Presently the bearer came back to say Mansur Ali had not returned, but some men from Meerut had come to see their friends in the lines. My husband thought it was a strange thing, but never gave the matter any serious consideration.’57

  Tytler was not the only person in Delhi to notice odd happenings connected with Meerut. On their drive to church, the Tytlers would have passed the city telegraph office, which was situated in the Civil Lines outside Kashmiri Gate. Inside, Charles Todd and his two young assistants, Brendish and Pilkington, were chatting with their friends in the Meerut telegraph office. There was great excitement and unrest in that town, they heard, due to the sentences that had just been given out. At nine o’clock both offices closed for the hottest part of the day.

  When Todd returned at 4 p.m., at the end of his siesta, he found that communication with Meerut had been severed. He suspected that it was something to do with the weak link in the cable, the section that ran under the Yamuna, which, owing to ‘the deterioration in the insulating material with which the cables were constructed, were a source of constant trouble’. Brendish and Pilkington were sent out to check. To their surprise they found that the cable was fine as far as the east bank of the Yamuna, and they had no problem signalling back to Todd from the far bank; the problem clearly lay somewhere towards Meerut. But by this stage it was six o’clock and too late to do anything more that day. So ‘Todd made arrangements to go out himself next morning to endeavour to restore communication’. He then closed the office and went off back to his bungalow to have his dinner.58

  As Todd was closing the office, George and Elizabeth Wagen-trieber were riding past it on their way back from Jennings’ evening service. That night, they had a visitor. More unusually, it was a prominent Delhi nobleman, Zia ud-Din Khan, the Nawab of Loharu, a cousin of Ghalib whose father had been a business partner and great friend of Elizabeth’s fath
er, James Skinner. According to their daughter Julia, George and Elizabeth sat huddled in earnest conversation with the Nawab on the veranda, but

  as I seldom went out to native visitors, I walked in at once and did not come out again. But when he had gone they spoke of some words of warning which he had been given about the troopers at Meerut being put in prison, that ‘it was not wise policy and the Government would be sorry for it.’ They thought it right to inform Sir T Metcalfe [Theo] of the Nawab’s hints and my father sent him a letter that night.59

  Theo, however, was otherwise engaged in packing for his holidays: he was due to leave on his journey to join GG and his son Charlie in Kashmir early the following morning, and he was too exhausted and depressed to act on the letter that night.

  While the Nawab was visiting the Wagentriebers, another letter was given to Simon Fraser as he stepped out of the evening service at St James’s. But it was a Sunday, and Fraser’s mind was no doubt still on his beloved weekly performance with the choir. Whatever the reason, he put the envelope in his pocket and did not remember it until the following morning.60

  The letter, which Fraser finally opened and read over his breakfast, was a warning that the sepoys had finally decided to rise up in Meerut, and that they intended to massacre the entire Christian population of the station on Sunday evening. Fraser was horrified and called for his buggy to take immediate action; but by then, of course, it was too late.

  The Meerut sepoys had not only risen and committed a massacre, they had also ridden south-eastwards throughout the night, and at that very moment were pouring over the Bridge of Boats, and into the walled city, in search of their Emperor.