Mangal Pandey’s attempt at self-slaughter was no more successful than his attempt at murder. The shot that Mangal Pandey inflicted upon himself passed through his chest, shattering bone and grazing the subclavian artery, even as the muzzle-burst set his garments afire. His captors, from whom he had just broken, stepped further back to watch him burn. Then someone—a fellow sepoy—stepped in with a thick blanket and wrapped it round Mangal Pandey, extinguishing the flames. By sunset Lieutenant Baugh’s horse had been put down; the officers were in recuperation at Titagarh Hospital, in a high room with a view of the Hooghly; and Mangal Pandey, in wrist- and leg-irons bound, did lie on a dirt-floored cell in military prison. The guards who watched over that prison were, typically, sepoy. But not tonight.
It did not go unremarked that when Mangal Pandey was driven to rampage, but one of his fellow sepoys—the aforementioned Shaikh Paltu—thought to intervene on Empire’s behalf. Perhaps the soldiers of the Bengal Native Infantry were cheered by the insurrection, however futile, of one of their own.
When on 8th April Mangal Pandey was hanged for his crimes the man who wove the noose, the man who fitted it round Mangal Pandey’s head, the man who dropped the bottom from beneath Mangal Pandey’s feet, and with that gesture dropped the bottom from Mangal Pandey’s life— They were all of them English, all of them white. These hangings were typically done in public, as deterrent to future malefactors; but this one was done in closed courtyard, with no onlookers at all, or at least no witnesses of dusky hue. They wanted to make of Mangal Pandey an example, but they did not want him to become an exemplar.
In that endeavor, despite the precaution of a private hanging, they were not successful. Seemingly within moments the mad insurrection of Mangal Pandey became known throughout the subcontinent. Those events, among those seeking inspiration, did inspire. And thus did the morning of Mangal Pandey’s hanging precipitate a rebellion the scale of which had not heretofore been seen, neither in the Princely States nor indeed anywhere else within the expanse of British Empire.
The news was carried by voice, by wire, by press, and thus in short order did reach our prince, Prince Dakkar, the prince of Bundelkhand. On his mother’s side the descent was from the Garhwas, on his father’s, from the Chandel Rajputs; one might say and with real justification that both reign and command were in the blood.
Prince Dakkar that spring possessed but twenty-seven years, an age where we find remnants of the boldness of youth, yet this was tempered by the wisdom of a well-traveled life. And so upon hearing the news our prince—who had studied the classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, but also the arts military at Sandhurst—pulled together his best soldiers and his wisest advisors, that he might ready himself and his men.
The prince a large and detailed map of Hindoostan did lay out upon his palace table. Troop movements and strengths were upon that map indicated with blocks of colored wood. With each new dispatch concerning their number and disposition the blocks were shifted round. Dakkar paced round the map considering the terrain from every angle, and considering, too, his terrain interior, where even now the colored blocks were shifting.
The causes of any given national rebellion, revolt, mutiny are multivalent; there likely are as many interpretations as there are interpreters. Thus of the Sepoy Rebellion (as we herein will call it), there is much to say by way of explication. But what of the mutiny internal? What of the rebellions and revolts that occur inside the soul, and chart not the course of nations but the destiny of a man? What is the congeries of thought and feeling, within the mind and heart of a prince, as he ponders his future?
Let us acknowledge, then, that we will never know what “caused” Prince Dakkar to take up arms, leave his home, and pursue the Company’s army to Cawnpore, any more than we will ever know what “caused” the Sepoy Rebellion. Nor can we fully know the moment when Dakkar did say goodbye to Madhya—his wife and his princess, his love and his treasure, his anchor and his polestar—knowing that it was likely, nay, far more than likely, that the two would not in this lifetime meet again.
Another wife might have gone at him with a dagger, so that if his death were certain, it would at least be here, rather than on some distant plain; intimate, rather than random; and with certainty, rather than with the agony of waiting for the news that must one day arrive. Another might have accepted her fate, as wives for millennia have accepted theirs, when their men go off to war. And our Madhya? If we do not know her thoughts, or his, we do know what transpired when other eyes were present: she stood still, and thin, on the palace balcony, in a sari of purest orange. Her eyes met those of her husband—now on horseback—and did not look away. Nor did his. He was as fully in love as in the first instant he had ever set sight upon her: the years in between vanished like dust in the air and he was once again a schoolboy, seeking the most impossibly lovely young woman. Madhya. He had known her all his life, before he had ever met her, and he would carry her with him, until the moment of his death. Perhaps beyond. Madhya. Dust, and the cry of horses, as his men waited for the call to set forth. How can a man forsake family for country, love for slaughter? It is not a question unique to the story of Prince Dakkar; and it is not a question to which we know, or have ever known, an answer.
With his men behind him, his country before him, a long talwar draped from his belt—a talwar that had never heretofore seen blood—Dakkar looked at Madhya for the longest moment in the world. She looked back without trembling, and if there had been tears before, there were none now. She lifted her arm in salute, ending the moment, allowing her prince to pull on his stallion’s reins, to turn his mount to the right and, at the head of a column of his loyal and prepared men, ride into the east, shielding, when they could, their eyes from the morning sun.
Dakkar did not turn back. He thought of his men, whom he was now leading into battle. He thought of Madhya, of course, and of his children. Rani. Hanuman. And he thought of something else, too, a story from childhood: the tale of the Mussulman of Gwalior, his name lost to time across the intervening years, who’d woken one morning with an image—a dream, a wish, a premonition?—of a boat that sailed beneath the waves. The Mussulman of Gwalior had sketched his dream on vellum in blackest ink. The vellum, it was long gone, and the story, if you were to examine it, was scarcely a story at all. A man has a dream, wakes up, tries to capture in daylight what he’d seen with his eyes closed. Why would such a tale persist? Why would an amah tell it to the young boy, and why would that young boy ask to hear it, again and again?
* * *
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PRINCE DAKKAR AND his men—a band of perhaps eighty, including among their number his most treasured mentor Mr. V. K. Singh, a practitioner in his youth of what the English call Dacoity but who had through self-education become learned, and who was the young prince’s tutor in math, chess, and much else; the Brahman Mohan and his inseparable companion Feringheea; the outlaw Sikh Daku Jagga; and the French tutor Thomy-Thiérry—did then leave Orchha Palace. They made their way from Bundelkhand to Cawnpore where, it was said, rebels of the Bengal Native Infantry sepoys had taken hold of the city entire.
The grasp of the sepoys upon Cawnpore was wide but shallow, and although they had the goodwill of the citizenry, they were from a military standpoint spread thin. It was far easier to take the city than to defend it. Dakkar reasoned thus: if he could bring his men to Cawnpore—engage, and weaken, the British Cawnpore regiment—he could gain time for the sepoys to consolidate their grip.
Dakkar and his men slept by day, traveled by night. Past Parichha, where the road parallels the river, then on to Chiragaon, Moth, Orai. It was here that they began to hear more of the rebellion that the mad strike of Mangal Pandey, the fire-arrow assault upon the telegraph office at Barrackpore, and the mutinous BNI soldiers of Meerut had unleashed upon the land. “Devil’s wind,” the British called it. And the British would not countenance what to them was disobedience, breach of command, betrayal. To make an example, the officers of the Honoura
ble Company took sepoy mutineers, lashed them one by one to cannon, such that they were bent backward over the muzzles. They then fired, cannon after cannon, so that each sepoy was in turn scattered to the wind in a coarse amalgam of dust and body parts—the cannon balls then recovered, to be used again.
They rode past Kalpi, forded the Yamuna at Daulatpore, followed the railway bed through Chaunrah, where they met, engaged in battle, and defeated a British section out on reconnaissance. It was the first time Prince Dakkar had taken life or seen life taken. He did not reflect much upon it. It was, to him, like the Yamuna: a river now forded.
The contingent from Orchha then resumed their march, through Jalpura and Bhoganipore, past Pukhrayan and Hansemau. Just outside Hansemau they came upon a company of British infantrymen. Dakkar, recalling the tactical lessons he learned at Sandhurst, divided his men into columns, surprising the British from all points of the compass under cover of darkness. The battle was bloody and extended over the course of three days. Dakkar’s troop emerged victorious though at the cost of perhaps thirty of their own number. Among them was the dear and incomparable Daku Jagga. Sent, with one bullet, from this life to the next.
The day after the fighting at Hansemau had ended they came upon an elderly man, his right eye clouded over, dressed in the simple cloths of a mendicant. He told them of something he had seen. It was an elephant, but no ordinary elephant was this. An elephant made of iron, held together by rivets; and plumes of steam did hiss and stutter from its trunk. An armored pachyderm? asked one of Dakkar’s men. No, replied the mendicant. This was a machine, and made the noise of a machine, and had the smell of a machine.
On the elephant’s back was a tall octagonal hauda, whose glistening gold-leaf surface contrasted with the elephant’s dull metal. The hauda was topped with a shikhara, or tower, dome shaped, and stupi, or finials, in the colors of a UK flag. (Not only was this elephant mechanical: it was British.)
This clattering and steamy beast was making its way through central India. When the mendicant had seen it the “elephant” was headed north, toward the Himalayas; but it was just as likely, he said, to turn south, and become an instrument of war. “Your bullets cannot pierce its hide,” he said, “because it is not made of skin. Your bullets cannot still its heart, because its heart is made of iron. When you hear it approach—and hear it you will, because the steam and engine make a fine havoc—I suggest you move from its path, disappear from its sight. The men in the hauda have guns and it is far easier for them to shoot down upon you than for you to shoot up at them.”
Some of Dakkar’s men believed the mendicant, word for word; others were more skeptic. (How can one believe visual descriptions rendered by a blind man?) But in a land where rebels were by Englishmen tied backward to cannon—then dispatched, one by one, to the wheel of samsara—the notion of credibility was already stretched to limit. Dakkar and his men had been on a march, weary of limb, scarred by battle, exhausted from constant vigilance. And so it was hard to know what was fact and what not; what was reportage, and what was fiction; what was reverie, what was dream; what danced and trembled before rather than behind one’s eyes.
Dakkar and his men reached the outskirts of Cawnpore just past nightfall. Once in the city proper the British garrison with its crenellated walls was not difficult to locate. Dakkar dispatched three of his most silent and cunning men to surveille and reconnoiter. They returned with news that the garrison was perhaps as deep as it was wide—no mere encampment but a city within a city, housing the British soldiers, their families too, civilians of various trades and positions: in short, all those who comprised the Anglo-European community in Cawnpore. Though the wall was well-fortified there was, in addition to the main gate a small portal on the far side, presumably for the ingress of victuals and supplies. If it were not heavily guarded on the interior it should be possible to breach the supply portal and disarm the sentries before they might raise alarm.
Dakkar was, in his raid, aided by the clear and moonless night. They were able to reach the garrison wall in full force without attracting notice, and, by means of stealthy crabwise locomotion—too near to the wall to be observed by any atop it—they massed on the far side of the garrison by the supply portal on either side of its reinforced doors. Had they scaling ladders, Dakkar would have sent the eldest and most respected of Thugs, their jemadar Mohan, to top the wall, descend by rope, then open the portal from the inside—a maneuver Dakkar had been taught, had practiced, had mastered, at Sandhurst. But they’d not brought such ladders, nor was there anything on site from which they might fashion them.
Dakkar then sent his men to build a ram, and that they did, a makeshift ram of uprooted shesam, substantial in length and breadth, and with enough weight to lend good momentum to their task. While all others bent low against attack—for once they commenced to ram, there would be no more pretense of secrecy—the ramming crew gathered in position and then, at the quiet count of three, commenced. They slammed once, and twice, shearing the hinges; and on the third attempt broke through.
They had assumed that they would be attacked, met with a fusillade of bullets, and were prepared to respond in kind. But there was no fusillade. There was not a single shot. Still, they made their way into the garrisoned city with caution. It appeared to be unguarded. But Dakkar and his men knew that the high point of danger was the moment you assumed yourself to be safe.
Dakkar sent scouts left and right, past the barracks to the west and the civilian housing to the east, and another set of scouts down what was, in effect, the main thoroughfare. None drew any fire. Each returned, each reported much the same news: the garrison city seemed to be deserted. No smoke from cook-fires, no sound of movement. The city, they told him, was a labyrinth with nothing at its center.
What could not escape their notice: the odor, the awful pungent odor of rot that hit them the moment they were through the walls, and never left, and which seemed only to intensify as they advanced upon the city center. Secure—or reasonably secure—that they had not entered a trap, they advanced toward that center. At the head of the column was Dakkar, a warrior Diogenes: sword in one hand, lantern in the other.
The silence was in its own way more frightening than the noise of armed defense, and the lack of human habitation in its own way more terrifying than would have been a brigade of armed troops. Had the British already departed for Lucknow? And if they had: where were the wives, the children, the merchants, the bootmakers, the pandits?
As Dakkar swung his lantern the light caught, now and then, a darker spatter upon the walls. Dakkar wet a finger and rubbed it along the stain. Not new blood but not, in any case, all that old. Something had happened here. In the shifting lantern light under moonless skies shapes appeared, danced, vanished. Ghost armies leapt out at them then disappeared into the shadows. The quiet had put their nerves on edge, and the smell of rot more so, that with every step they fully expected to meet their death. By silent massed British fusiliers, or by whatever demon had devoured all that was living in Cawnpore garrison and left it dry.
Now Dakkar’s lantern shed its light on a wall more darkened—not just streaks but blots, a fresco of bloody handprints: the indexical traces of men, women, in the throes of their death. Some of the handprints quite small, and low-to-ground. It was hard to come up with explication, other than that these were children, or had been. The walls also bore indentations, scars, sabre-cuts. From high down to low. As if the victims had crouched to avoid the blows.
On the ground were objects yet more disturbing: a row of children’s shoes; a man’s index finger; a foot, severed at the ankle. There was a yard-long lock of thick black hair. Dakkar did not want to look at the proximal end, for it seemed to have been ripped from a head, taking scalp and skin along with it.
He moved forward with his men in darkness, the dirt path increasingly muddy, the stench ratcheting up with each new step. A courtyard now, where the walls were dense with drying blood. If they were alive, how had they escaped?
If they were dead, where were the bodies? Dakkar’s men tied bandannas over mouth and nose. The way to find the victims was but to follow the stench.
Some fifty feet east of this courtyard was the well that served the garrison. It was perhaps five-foot wide and deep enough to reach groundwater. The shaft of the well, glimpsed in Dakkar’s flickering lantern, was brick-inlaid. But what they saw within was not water: no other way to describe it other than “remains”—severed and inert fractions of what once had been human. What once had lived, walked, worked, slept, dreamed, loved.
Dakkar’s lantern guttered, casting intermittent shadows. He lost certainty as to what he had seen, what had been imagined. But in the lantern’s lambent light they came to discern that they were gazing at sundered limbs, at heads cut off from bodies, the eyes sightless and gazing up. Dakkar looked away and then looked back. The well was perhaps some fifty feet deep. The bodies filled the well.
Dakkar did what he could to keep thoughts focused on the present moment: were there British troops hidden, lying in wait? But the mind, however trained in dispassion, cannot gaze straight down to that abyss without wanting to flee.
He now knew what had happened: the regiment had never left Cawnpore. Instead an overwhelming force of sepoy had breached the gates or, more likely, the walls. Had been shot at by the British, had been slashed at, had been slain. For three days the British held them off, and for those three days the mutineers were hung, were eviscerated, were draped over the mouths of cannon by the British militia. But for each sepoy slaughtered, ten o’ertopped the wall. The magma of a thousand sleights, over a hundred years, oozed up, then burst. Imagine, if you can, a battalion of Mangal Pandeys, gone wild simultaneous. An army of the mad cannot be defeated. And so victorious they were, over the regiment, yes, then over every English being within their sight. Man, yes, but also woman, and also child. Pursued, slain, hacked up. Dakkar could hear their screams over the moonless silence. They echoed still, if not within the walls of the garrison, then within the walls of his head.
The Great Eastern Page 5