by A. N. Wilson
Nor should one forget the chief reason for the successful suppression of the uprisings: namely that the Indian majority fought alongside the British in the various battles and siege-reliefs and – it must be supposed – that the majority of Indian citizens, for whatever reason, did not wish to take part in a violent war either against the Europeans or against their local Indian landlords. In Narratives of Events at Cawnpore,fn2 14 the Indian author Nanak Chand witnesses the murders, the burnings and the sheer chaos brought about by the uprising. On one terrifying, broiling hot day he found himself cowering in a garden hut for all the hours of daylight without food or water while the mob, who had refreshed themselves by plundering a British wine-cellar, rampaged around the plantations of Madarpoor. These were not aggrieved sepoy officers but peasants on the razzle, completely out of control. At midnight under the cover of dark, Nanak Chand crept to the banks of the Ganges, tiptoeing over untold numbers of corpses. ‘These drunken boatmen were armed; some with clubs, others with weapons, and they were running about the woods like wild men. I cannot describe the terror that seized me at that moment. How I sighed for the British rule.’
It is only fair to record this Indian impression of things before recognizing that ‘British rule’ was not restored without very great cost to the Indian population. The ruthlessness of British reprisals, the preparedness to ‘punish’ Indians of any age or sex, regardless of whether they had any part in the rebellion, is a perpetual moral stain on ‘the Raj’, and it is no wonder that in most popular British histories these atrocities are suppressed altogether or glossed over with such a distasteful anodyne phrase as ‘dark deeds were done on both sides’.15 It is not to defend the murders of European women and children that one points out that such remarks suggest an equivalence where none can properly exist. Even if 1857 was not quite an independence war, it was much, much more than a ‘mutiny’ – a word which not merely, inaccurately, suggests that violence was restricted to the military, but also begs every moral question by assuming the legitimacy of British ‘rule’. The sepoy, for reasons of economic necessity, had accepted his 7 or 9 rupees a month from the East India Company for four generations. Did that give a British historian sitting in London, who had never set foot in India, or a Whiggish president of the Board of Control – also in London – or a local ‘collector’ the right to tell the Indian how much rent he should pay, what he should eat, how he should treat his wife or his neighbours? ‘The people of this country do not require our aid to furnish them with a rule for their conduct or a standard for their property,’ Warren Hastings had wisely remarked in 1773 when Lord North’s Regulating Act set up a Supreme Court in Calcutta.16 The Victorians rode roughshod. There can be no moral equivalence between a people, by whatever means of atrocity, trying to fight for their freedom to live as they choose, without the interference of an invading power, and that power itself using the utmost brutality to enforce not merely a physical but a political dominance over the people.
The terrible story has three phases. It started in the summer of 1857, when the Europeans suffered massacres at Meerut, Delhi and Kanpur – and when the last-named town and Lucknow underwent sieges which, for the heroism and suffering displayed, fast became legendary. Next came the relief of Lucknow and the demonstration that the British were regaining control of the situation. Third came the war of reprisal of 1858–9 in which the brilliant guerrilla leader Ramchandra Pandenanga, known as Tatya Tope, fought a series of heroic rearguard actions and gave the hardened campaigners Sir Colin Campbell and Sir Hugh Rose a ‘run for their money’. By then, though, there was no doubt about the inevitable outcome of the war. Nearly all the British accounts dwell, for reasons which do not need to be explained, on the first two of those phases, and turn a blind eye to the third.17
When the rebels reached Delhi on the night of 10/11 May 1857, probably no one was more surprised than the eighty-two-year-old king, whose days were largely devoted to composing poetry, illuminating manuscripts and listening to the cooing of his pet doves and nightingales. The city was garrisoned, but largely with sepoy troops – there were no European regiments there – and the cry to massacre the infidels was obeyed in a way that most Indians appear to have deplored. The European women who were lucky enough to escape the cantonments – Mrs Wood, the doctor’s wife in the 38th Native Infantry, and her friend Mrs Peile – recorded many acts of kindness from natives who assisted their getaway.18 Many were not so lucky. James Morley, a merchant from the Kashmir bazaar, was typical in finding his whole family massacred. He escaped disguised as a woman, but that would not have saved him in many quarters where the shootings of women and children were indiscriminate. In the aftermath of the violence, careful inquiries were unable to reveal a single instance of rape or torture being a prelude to the death of European women in any of the atrocities of that summer. One official noted that this information was of some comfort to those who had lost wives, sisters and daughters, but there were many in Britain who simply refused to believe it.19 So shocking were the Delhi murders of British women that, paradoxically, the British wanted to make them even more shocking, with the automatic assumption that the ‘angels of Albion’ had been ravished as well as shot. The Reverend John Rotton, British chaplain during the Meerut and Delhi atrocities, reveals the double standards which had crept into British attitudes to the Indian. This clergyman witnessed some terrible things, and buried many of his massacred fellow countrymen, so one does not in any sense wish to patronize him. To say that his partisan attitude is understandable is not, however, to find it especially elevating. He had rushed out his Chaplain’s Narrative of the Siege of Delhi within a year of the event itself, one of the hundreds of books published in the next thirty years demonstrating comparable habits of mind, steeped in a certainty of racial superiority to the Indians. This is something new since the era of Clive, or even of Wellesley, and it was to shape the pattern of ‘British India’ for the next century.20
The men who perpetrated the murders at Meerut were, in the Reverend John Rotton’s view, ‘savages’. He titillated his readers by saying ‘it is better to throw a veil over the sins which have so indelibly disgraced human nature’, but was able to write approvingly of the loyal Gorkha (sic): ‘The facility with which the Gorkhas wielded the Kukree – a native knife, and a most effective weapon of war in experienced hands – elicited the wonder of every beholder. Once plunged into the abdomen of an enemy, in a second he was ripped up, just as clean and cleverly as a butcher divides an ox or sheep.’21
Rotton had no doubt, from the first, that much more was involved in the conflict than a political struggle between conservative-minded, impoverished Indian officers and a thoughtless utilitarian system of reform. The bloodbaths which were unleashed by the original points of contention possessed, for this devout churchman, an unmistakable mystic significance. He likened the Mutiny to the moment in the Book of Kings when:
Ahab and Jehoshaphat went up to Ramoth Gilead, at the instigation of the lying prophets of Baal who said, ‘Go up, for the Lord shall deliver it into the hand of the king.’… The Christian warrior, taking a retrospective glance, can feelingly say, ‘Verily the enemy thrust sore at us that we might fall, but the Lord helped us.’ Not only the disciples of Christ, but everyone realized the fact that the divine favour preventedfn3 and followed us.22
As for the infidel mutineers:
they little thought that the struggle was a battle of principles – a conflict between truth and error; and that because they had elected in favour of darkness and eschewed the light, therefore they could not possibly succeed. Moreover they had imbrued their hands in the innocent blood of helpless women and children, and of honest and confiding men, who spurned to harbour the thought of suspicion, despite the differences of race and religion. That very blood was appealing to heaven for vengeance. The appeal was unquestionably heard, and its justice fully admitted.
This reading of the events of the summer of 1857 must have been tempered, in the chaplain’s mind, by
the knowledge that God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. Vengeance was slow in coming. Besieged in Delhi, the few remaining Europeans had to wait through the hottest months of the year, until August, before Brigadier-General John Nicholson, a tormented homosexual soldier in his mid-thirties who had been in India since 1839, appeared on the ridge above Delhi to relieve the siege. A huge figure, with a long black beard and a deep voice, Nicholson was destined to die in the fighting. Further proof of the mysteriousness of Providence was evinced by the cholera outbreak in the 8th and 61st regiments, which killed hundreds, including General Sir Harry Barnard, in command of the force, and severely weakened his successor General Reed, the provisional commander-in-chief.
Meanwhile, as cholera swept through the camp in Delhi, they heard the news of the disasters at Kanpur. These were perhaps the most shocking losses suffered by the Europeans during the whole summer. The killings were disgusting; the treachery of the local princeling, Nana Sahib, was demonstrable; no one can deny or minimize these facts. From the first, however, Kanpur acquired a mythic significance. The aged poet of Delhi, Bahadur Shah II, or the obese king of Oudh could hardly be represented, even to a furious British newspaper-reading public, as demon-kings. In the local princeling at Kanpur, Nana Sahib, was found an ideal candidate.
Dhondu Pant (Nana Sahib’s actual name) was archetypically one of the Indian bigwigs who stood to lose by the modernizing reforms of Lord Dalhousie. Under Dalhousie the East India Company had dethroned the last Peshwa of Bithur, Baji Rao II, and given him a pension worth £80,000 per annum – 8 lakhs of rupees. The Company took his revenues from rents. When he died, however, his adopted son Dhondu Pant/Nana Sahib was not considered by Dalhousie to be entitled to such lavish treatment.23 No one visiting Nana Sahib in his palatial residence five miles from Kanpur, no one who saw his luxurious carpets, crystal chandeliers, soft Cashmere shawls, his menageries and aviaries, would have believed him to be on the breadline, but the Company had deprived him of vast revenues, which he believed to be his in 1851. In 1857 he would demonstrate the truth of the proverb that revenge was a dish best served cold.24
A glance at the map shows the strategic importance of Kanpur. This town – at the time, numbering 60,000 – on the banks of the sacred Ganges was an important post on the Great Road, the trunk road connecting Delhi and Benares. It is fascinating, from the point of view of military history, that Tatya Tope, the ‘Napoleon’ of the uprising, Nana Sahib’s general, never grasped the importance of this road. Had he but managed to block it at one, preferably at two points, he might have inflicted real damage on the British – perhaps, who knows, broken their nerve.
Kanpur was, however, ripe for his picking in summer 1857.25 The British reorganization of the sepoy regiments had weakened morale. When the 2nd Cavalry mutinied at Kanpur on 2 June, the native regiments were in disarray. All the native officers of the 56th at Kanpur, for example – all – were on furlough, and seconded to mercenary soldiering in districts miles from home, at the time of the rising.26
Tatya Tope had the guerrilla leader’s knack of seizing a chance, but lacked the weapons or manpower to hold on to Kanpur indefinitely. Useful as it might be to occupy this point of the trunk road for a few weeks (or, if he was lucky, months), he knew that he would not be able to hold out against a fully armed British contingent of trained men when they came marching westwards up the Great Road. Once they had mutinied, the men tended to throw away their uniforms, and the rag, tag and bobtail included unskilled peasants wishing to loot and pillage who ‘looked less like a rival Indian army, more like a chaotic collection of civilian insurgents’.27
It is in these circumstances that we must envisage the unfortunate Europeans’ plight in Kanpur. It would appear that after the outbreak of Mutiny, Nana Sahib offered protection and hospitality to the European women and children, and safe-conduct to those who wished to escape by boat down the Ganges. Conditions within the cantonment quickly became intolerable. Dysentery and heatstroke were rife, and morale was weakened by an apparently accidental fire which destroyed all the medical supplies in the Europeans’ possession. The double atrocities with which the name of Kanpur is always associated in British minds concerned the treatment of the British women and children. First – help for Lucknow not appearing – General Wheeler, the British commander, oversaw the European refugees being put on the forty or so boats provided by Nana Sahib. As soon as they were all afloat, their Indian escorts leapt ashore, many of them able to set the thatched roofs of the boats alight before jumping into the water. As the convoy drifted downstream, they were met by an organized firing party of insurgents, who bombarded the boats with musket fire, burning arrows and heavier artillery. They were afloat for two days in these circumstances, the semi-clad survivors being dragged from the river at Satichaura Ghat. Then on 10 July, the women and children were taken to a house known as the Bibighar. It was a large bungalow with a courtyard, formerly the residence of a British officer and his Indian mistress. To the survivors of the boats were added those officers’ wives who had escaped the cantonment and been rounded up by Tatya Tope.
He knew that Brigadier-General Henry Havelock was on his way to relieve Kanpur – which he did, successfully, on 16 July. The British troops who went into the courtyard, and peered into the dried-up well at the Bibighar, were too late to save the women. The newly appointed magistrate, J.W. Sherer, wrote to a senior civil servant, Sir Cecil Beadon:
May God in his mercy, my dear Beadon, preserve me from ever witnessing again such a sight as I have seen this day. The house they were kept in was close to the hotel – opposite the theatre – it was a native house – with a court in the middle, and an open room with pillars opposite the principal entrance. The whole of the court and this room was literally soaked with blood and strewn with bonnets and those large hats now worn by ladies – and there were long tresses of hair glued with clotted blood to the ground – all the bodies were thrown into a dry well and on looking down – a map of naked arms, legs and gashed trunks was visible. My nerves are so deadened with horror that I write this quite calmly. It is better you should know the worst – I am going this very moment to fill the well up and crown its mouth with a mount. Let us mention the subject no more – silence and prayer alone seem fitting.28
It remains uncertain whether Nana Sahib had any prior knowledge that the massacres would take place.29 They were committed in his name, but he always denied having any part in the murders. This did not stop the British press demonizing him as the very type of oriental duplicity and callousness.30 Sherer, the magistrate just quoted, recalled that Nana was an ‘excessively uninteresting person’; rather overweight, boring. Nevertheless, The Spectator suggested that Nana should be ‘caged and exhibited as Macduff intended to do with Macbeth. He should be caged as a matter of study and after exhibition in India should be brought to England and carefully guarded to live out the term of his natural, or unnatural life, a monster without sympathy.’31 For some years after the Massacres,32 a well-known ‘portrait’ of Nana Sahib circulated, comparable to the Wild West ‘WANTED’ posters of criminals. The same picture was also used to hunt for Rajah Kunwar Singh. It was in fact a picture of a blameless banker from Meerut who had given his portrait to a London barrister named John Lang, who successfully prosecuted a case on his behalf. Lang lent it to the Illustrated London News, where it became a serviceable icon ‘against which the public could direct their hatred’.
The revenges exacted by the British for the massacres at Delhi and Kanpur were far from being purely emblematic in India itself. From the very first, the British decided to meet cruelty with redoubled cruelty, terror with terror, blood with blood. At Delhi, Nicholson had urged, ‘Let us propose a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi. The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening.’
Sir Henry Cotton was summoned from his tent by a Sikh orderly. ‘I think, sir, you would like to see what we ha
ve done to the prisoners.’33 Muslims had been stripped, tied to the ground and ‘branded over every part of their bodies with red-hot coppers’. With his own hand, Cotton put an end to their agony by blowing out their brains, but no action was taken against the torturers. Russell, the Times journalist who had covered the Crimean War, saw Sikhs and Englishmen calmly looking on while a bayoneted prisoner was slowly roasted over a fire.34 Sewing Muslims into pigskins, or smearing them with pork fat before execution, was another torture favoured by the British. When ‘Clemency Canning’ – the sobriquet was intended to insult the governor-general – implored army officers not to countenance the burning of villages, his words were met with contempt. Long before the Kanpur massacres, whole villages had been sacked by the British. Rape and pillage were encouraged by the British officers before old women and children were burnt alive in their villages. Officers boasted that they had ‘spared no one’, or that ‘peppering away at niggers’ was a pastime which they ‘enjoyed amazingly’.35 The troops who ‘relieved’ Delhi were drunk, killed hundreds quite indiscriminately, and sent thousands of homeless refugees into the surrounding countryside.
Many Indians had the experience of being lashed, standing, to the mouth of a cannon and blown apart by grapeshot. ‘One gun,’ recalled a clergyman’s wife who had come out to watch the executions, ‘was overcharged and the poor wretch was literally blown to atoms, the lookers-on being covered with blood, and fragments of flesh: the head of one poor wretch fell on a bystander and hurt him.’36