‘You are one of Col Skinner’s children,’ he said, taking off his turban, and laying it at her feet. This mark of respect, coming at such a time, astonished her, especially as she saw that the man seemed to be of some importance by the manner of the others towards him, and the deferential way in which they treated him.
‘Who are you?’ she enquired.
‘I have eaten the Colonel Sahib’s salt for many years, and I will give my life for any of his children,’ the old man replied. ‘Will you trust yourselves to me?’89
In due course, the old man took the reins of the carriage and escorted them onwards. At eleven o’clock, they saw another ragged party on the road ahead of them: it was Brigadier Graves and Charles Le Bas, along with several other soldiers, all heavily armed. At 4 p.m., they reached the safety of Panipat.90
The morning of 12 May saw Delhi almost completely emptied of the British, who had dominated it since the British defeated the Marathas in 1803.
As Theo woke in ill-fitting Hindustani clothes, hidden in a back room in the house of a stranger; as the Tytlers in Karnal and the Wagentriebers in Panipat wolfed down their breakfasts; as James Morley, swaying on his bullock cart, pondered life without his wife and family; as Edward Vibart and his party hid in a bunch of tall grass in the fields towards Meerut, avoiding the sepoy search parties out looking for British refugees; as Ghalib peered disapprovingly through his lattices at the sepoys swaggering through his muhalla of Ballimaran; as Maulvi Muhammad Baqar began writing up for the Dihli Urdu Akbhar all the strange sights and portents that he had seen the day before; as the young Muhammad Husain Azad composed his poem on the Uprising; as Zahir Dehlavi and Hakim Ahsanullah Khan began trying to remove the sepoys from the most crucial ceremonial parts of the Palace; as all this was happening, Zafar too was anxiously trying to envisage his future.
The night before he had sheltered the forty-odd British prisoners brought in by Muin ud-Din, some of them in one of the few parts of the Palace he could still call his own: his private oratory, the tasbih khana. At Zinat Mahal’s suggestion, he had also sent off by camel messenger a secret letter to the British Governor at Agra, telling him all that happened and asking for help. Zafar could see that the sepoys were violent and unstable; they also had no idea of manners or courtly etiquette: not the least of his objections to them was their refusal to pay him any of the proper courtesies: ‘The Tilangas stood [in the Palace] with their shoes on,’ wrote one news-writer, ‘and His Majesty expressed his great displeasure about that.’91
Yet for all his hesitation and fear and anxieties, for all the chaos of a looted city and harassed courtiers, Zafar could see that the arrival of the mutineers might yet not be entirely a curse, but might in fact represent the hand of God and an opportunity he had never even dreamt of, to re-establish his great Mughal dynasty. Around midnight he sanctioned the firing of a twenty-one-gun salute to mark the beginning of this new phase in his reign. Zafar’s ambivalent but increasingly engaged attitude to the revolution was noted by Mohan Lal Kashmiri, a well-connected alumnus of the Delhi College who had allied himself closely with the British cause, as a result of which he had to flee Delhi soon after the Uprising:
I never heard from any native in Delhi or elsewhere that the King Bahadur Shah was in communication with the mutineers before the mutiny broke out. But after the miscreants had made themselves masters of the Palace and the city … they contrived to bring out His Majesty in a royal procession to restore confidence to the citizens. The King saw now for the first time himself surrounded with dashing and disciplined troops, ready to espouse his cause. He saw that the population who came out as spectators of his procession looked upon him not with gloomy faces. He found that the favourable turn of his affairs had been approved by a large portion of the residents. He listened to the news of [British] disasters. He perceived that regiment upon regiment had waited upon him. He received the false reports that all our European troops were engaged in Persia, and that the unsettled state of the European Politics would hardly permit reinforcements [to be sent] to India. He was informed that the mutiny had [also] taken place in Bombay and in Deccan. All these things made Bahadur Shah believe that he had been born to restore the realm of the Great Timur in the last days of his life.92
Zafar’s increasing openness to the Uprising, though never entirely wholehearted and always ambivalent, nevertheless changed the whole nature of the rebellion. There had been many mutinies before in British India, most dramatically at Vellore in 1806; there had been even more armed acts of Indian resistance to British expansion. But never before had such a powerful combination of forces come together to challenge British supremacy.
By combining the Company’s own Indian armies with the still potent mystique of the Mughals, Zafar’s hesitant acceptance of the nominal leadership of the revolt in due course turned it from a simple army mutiny – albeit one supported by an incoherent eruption of murder and looting by Delhi’s civilians – into the single most serious armed challenge any Western empire would face, anywhere in the world, in the entire course of the nineteenth century.
Yet for Zafar the more immediate question was whether, for all this, he had merely exchanged one set of masters for another.
6
THIS DAY OF RUIN AND RIOT
At four o’clock on the day of the outbreak, Charles Todd’s two assistant telegraph operators, Brendish and Pilkington, closed up their office and set off to flee to safety, first to the Flagstaff Tower, and then on to Meerut.
Before they did so, however, they tapped out two SOS messages in Morse code, and sent them to the Commander-in-Chief and the cantonments on the Punjab and the Frontier. Original transcriptions of both still survive in the Punjab Archives in Lahore. The first, sent some time around midday, was the fuller of the two: ‘Cantonment in a state of siege,’ it read.
Mutineers from Meerut 3rd Light Cavalry number not known said to be one hundred and fifty men cut off communication with Meerut. Taken possession of the Bridge of Boats. 54th NI sent against them but would not act. Several officers killed and wounded. City in a state of considerable excitement. Troops sent down but nothing certain yet.
The second was sent just before the two operators ran off: ‘We must leave office,’ they tapped. ‘All the bungalows are being burned down by the sepoys of Meerut. They came in this morning. We are off. Mr C Todd is dead we think. He went out this morning and has not returned.”1
It was a dramatic vindication of the new technology of the telegraph – something that Ghalib considered one of the miracles of the age. The messages reached Ambala, and within hours had been forwarded to Lahore, Peshawar and Simla.
Relaxing in the cool of the Himalayan summer capital, the Commander-in-Chief, General George Anson, received the message at breakfast on Tuesday morning after an express rider had carried the telegram up the winding mountain track overnight. Anson, who had not seen active service since Waterloo more than forty years earlier, did not seem to realise the seriousness of what was happening, just as he had earlier dismissed the significance of the greased cartridges.2 The following evening one of his advisers, Colonel Keith Young, recorded in his diary that ‘he appears rather to pooh-pooh the [whole] thing. We shall see’. Two days later, with the Commander-in-Chief still stuck immobile in Simla, even Anson’s most loyal friends were beginning to be anxious at his response. ‘The Chief is blamed,’ wrote Young’s wife in a letter.
He has not been trained as a soldier and seems unable to grasp the importance of the situation. When he first received the bad news on Tuesday morning he should have started off at once. Colonel Becher, Quartermaster-General, did his utmost to persuade him not to lose any time: but he said, no; he would wait for the dak [post]. What is the use of the electric telegraph if the news it brings is not at once to be attended to?3
When Anson finally got as far as Ambala, four days later, on the 15th, it was discovered that logistical problems meant that his force could proceed no farther: as part of some cost-cutting
exercise, the army’s baggage camels had recently been sold. Now the contractors could not be found to move the three European regiments that had gathered in Ambala – already known as the Delhi Field Force – even one step on towards their destination.
There were other problems too. None of the regiments initially had any ammunition beyond the twenty rounds they kept in their pouches, since the promised supplies had failed to materialise from Simla. Moreover, the baggage of at least one regiment had been lost between the hills and Ambala, leaving the soldiers with nothing but two white jackets and a pair of trousers each.4 Worse still, Anson had refused to heed the warnings of his staff immediately to disarm the clearly disaffected sepoy regiments stationed in Ambala, with the result that they shortly afterwards broke out into mutiny too, and took off to Delhi down the Grand Trunk Road with all their arms intact. ‘Oh my dear mother,’ wrote the young second lieutenant Fred Roberts.
You would not believe that Englishmen could be guilty of such imbecility as has almost invariably been displayed during this crisis … Perfectly ridiculous, an army going to pieces in this way … You would scarcely believe how paralysed everything is. We have a most dilatory undecided Commander-in-Chief.5
But it was not just the fault of Anson. Similar logistical problems had been behind the failure of the European regiments in Meerut to follow the mutineers to Delhi: on 12 May, two days after the Meerut outbreak, General Archdale Wilson, one of the two station commanders, wrote to his wife to admit that ‘we have no power to move having no cattle only 15 elephants, and a few bullocks’.6 Wilson’s colleague General Hewitt was less effective still. As Wilson himself wrote, ‘[Hewitt] is a dreadful old fool and thinks of nothing but preserving his own old carcass from harm.’7
For ten days the troops in Ambala found themselves marooned, immobile in the terrible heat at the foot of the hills; meanwhile, cholera slowly took hold, the beginning of a plague that would eventually be responsible for nearly as many deaths as the bullets of the insurgents. ‘The stench was awful,’ remembered Richard Barter, a young lieutenant from the 75th Gordon Highlanders.
The dead bodies of three or four of the men who had just been carried off by the dreadful scourge were lying near rolled up in their rezais [quilts]. The heat was terrific, not a breath of air stirred the leaves, and there we sat among the dead and the dying, whose groans resounded through the still air under the trees.8
It was not until the night of 24 May – a full thirteen days after the outbreak – that Anson and his Field Force finally set off towards the Mughal capital from Ambala – only for the Commander-in-Chief himself to die of cholera on the night of the 27th, soon after arriving in Karnal. By that time, partially because of the lack of any effective response by the British, mutinies had broken out amongst sepoy regiments stationed at Nowshera in the North West Frontier; Ambala, Philour and Ferozepur in the Punjab; Nasirabad in Rajputana; and in the North West Provinces at Hansi, Hissar, Moradabad, Agra, Aligarh, Etawah, Mainpuri and as far south-east as Etah to the east of Agra.9
Seen on the map, the outbreaks seemed to ripple outwards in concentric circles from Delhi. The Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, and his revived Mughal Empire were now acting as a focus for all the disparate hopes and aspirations of the many disaffected individuals, groups and causes, both Muslim and Hindu, across northern India, and it was to Delhi that almost all the mutinous troops headed once they had risen against their British masters. To the surprise of the British, not all the mutinous troops rose violently; instead
without molesting or even insulting their English officers they … quietly but firmly announced that they had released themselves from the service of the East India Company, and were about to become enrolled as subjects of the King of Delhi. Then, in several instances even saluting their officers and showing them every mark of respect, they turned their faces to the great focus of the rebellion, to swell the number of those who were about to fight against us in the Mohammedan capital of Hindustan.10
For this reason, the future of both Mughal and British rule now hinged very largely on what happened at Delhi: ‘The fate of all India depends on our success,’ wrote Fred Roberts to his mother soon afterwards as the Delhi Field Force began rumbling slowly south along the Grand Trunk Road. ‘Were a failure to be the result, God only knows what would take place.’11
Luckily for the British, not all their commanders had proved as slow and ineffective as Anson, Wilson and Hewitt.
In Lahore, the headquarters of the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab, the energetic Sir John Lawrence, four disaffected Indian regiments were quickly disarmed on the morning of 13 May, as twelve loaded and primed cannon manned by British artillerymen faced them across the parade ground. The night before, a regimental ball had gone ahead as planned, so as not to make the sepoys suspicious: ‘The evening passed off very pleasantly,’ noted one officer in his journal, ‘a perfect sham of smiles over tears. Half the ladies were not present, and those that were there could barely disguise their anxiety.’12
Meanwhile, farther to the north-west in Peshawar, two of the most militantly Evangelical officials in India, Herbert Edwardes and John Nicholson, met to discuss strategy as soon as the telegrams from Delhi arrived there on the night of 11 May. Their solution was to form a strong Moveable Column of mainly irregular troops able to overawe and terrorise the Punjab into submission. ‘It should take the field at once,’ wrote Edwardes to John Lawrence on 12 May. ‘This disaffection will never be talked down. It must be put down – and the sooner blood be let, the less of it will suffice.”13 Lawrence agreed; within four days the Moveable Column had been formed in Jhelum, ready to move rapidly in any direction and crush rebellion against the Company wherever it broke out.14
Nicholson had some other, more bloodthirsty ideas too, which he did not convey to his superior, but communicated a little later to Edwardes when further details of the Delhi massacres had emerged. He proposed that they jointly put forward ‘a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the [British] women and children of Delhi … The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening … I will not, if I can help it, see fiends of that stamp let off with a simple hanging’. When Edwardes refused to be drawn on Nicholson’s idea, Nicholson said he would propose the idea alone if Edwardes would not help him:
As regards torturing the murderers of women and children, if it be right otherwise I do not think we should refrain from it simply because it is a native custom … we are told in the Bible that stripes shall be meted out according to faults, and, if hanging is sufficient punishment for such wretches, it is too severe for ordinary mutineers. If I had them in my power today, I would inflict the most excruciating tortures I could think of on them with a perfectly easy conscience.15
John Lawrence was by no means averse in principle to strong measures. A former deputy of Sir Thomas Metcalfe in Delhi, he had risen rapidly in the ranks of the Company’s civil service thanks to his reputation for hard work and efficiency. He forbade his officers from going up to the hills for the hot weather, and made known his disapproval of ‘“a cakey man” by which he meant someone who, besides presumably liking cakes, “pretended to much elegance and refinement” ‘.16 When he heard that one of his junior officials had brought a piano to his Punjab bungalow, Lawrence spat, ‘I’ll smash his piano for him’ and had him ‘moved five times from one end of the Punjab to the other in the course of five years’.17 As one of Lawrence’s long-suffering officials remarked on hearing this story:
I had brought from Calcutta a handsome dinner-service, and I was strongly advised not to let the fact be known lest I, too, should be kicked about from one place to another till it was all smashed … He [Lawrence] was a rough, coarse man … [whose] ideal of a district officer was a hard active man in boots and breeches, who almost lived in the saddle, worked all day and nearly all night, ate and drank when and where he could, had no family ties, no wife or children to hamper him, and whose whole establishment cons
isted of a camp bed, an odd table and chair or so, and a small box of clothes such as could be slung on a camel.18
John Nicholson fitted this description perfectly. Even so, the two had a tense relationship, for Nicholson was not a man given to taking orders – and less still criticism – from anyone. One young officer described him as
a commanding presence, some six feet, two inches in height, with a long black beard, dark grey eyes with black pupils which under excitement would dilate like a tiger’s, [and] a colourless face over which no smile ever passed … A stern sense of duty had made Nicholson expunge the word ‘mercy’ from his vocabulary … [and] he had the reputation as the best swordsman in India.19
A taciturn and self-contained Ulster Protestant, it was said that while he was District Commissioner in Rawalpindi, Nicholson had personally decapitated a local robber chieftain, then kept the man’s head on his desk as a memento.20 He was, moreover, a man of few words; one typical note in the archives is a letter to Lawrence which reads, in full: ‘Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I have just shot a man who came to kill me. Your Obedient Servant, John Nicholson.’ For reasons that remain unclear, Nicholson inspired an entire religious sect, the Nikal Seyn* who apparently regarded him as an incarnation of Vishnu. Nicholson tolerated his devotees as long as they kept quiet; but if ‘they prostrated themselves or began chanting they were taken away and whipped’. The punishment never varied: ‘three dozen lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails’.21
Despite – or maybe partly because of – this inexplicable adoration, Nicholson loathed India with a passion (‘I dislike India and its inhabitants more every day’) and regarded only the Afghans as worse (‘the most vicious and blood thirsty race in existence’).22 These views he had already formed before he was captured and imprisoned during the disaster of the 1842 Afghan War. By the time he was released, only to discover his younger brother’s dead body, with his genitalia cut off and stuffed in his mouth, his feelings about Afghans – and indeed Indians and Muslims of any nationality – were confirmed: he felt, he said, merely ‘an intense feeling of hatred’.23 Only his wish to spread the Christian Empire of the British in this heathen wilderness kept him in the East. Indeed his survival amidst the carnage of the Afghan War left him with a near-messianic sense of destiny: if the God of Hosts had saved him when so many other Christians Soldiers had been killed, it must be for some higher purpose of Providence.
The Last Mughal Page 23