The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Colonel James Neill was one of the many British officers who fought in India at this time with a religious sense of duty. (He was to rise to the rank of brigadier-general.) Like Nicholson in Delhi, Neill at Kanpur felt that hanging was too gentle a fate for the murderers. In fact, no sepoy would take part in the massacres in the Bibighar and the disgusting slaughter had been the work of five local butchers. This did not stop Neill embarking on a system of wholesale torture and butchery himself when he and his men retook possession of the station. Prisoners were made to lick the blood from the floor of the Bibighar while a European soldier lashed their backs with a whip. Every means was taken to offend the religious sensibilities of prisoners, whether they had any proven part in the uprising or not. Brahmins, therefore, would be made to lick parts of the floor previously moistened with water by ‘untouchables’. ‘We broke his caste,’ wrote one Major Bingham. ‘We stuffed pork, beef and everything which would possibly break his caste down his throat, tied him as tight as we could by the arms and told the guard to be gentle with him … The guard treated him gently. I only wonder he lived to be hung, which I had the pleasure of witnessing.’

  Neill killed as many Indians in Allahabad alone as were killed on his own side in the entire two years of fighting. Yet the British continued to feed their self-esteem by representing themselves as the underdogs, heavily outnumbered, never more so than during the legendary siege of Lucknow.

  This great feudal court-city, the capital of the nawabs of Oudh, was much the most prosperous precolonial city in India.37 An Englishwoman who married a Lucknow nobleman (Mrs Meer Hasan Ali) was reminded by the city of the visionary castles of the Arabian Nights. Russell, the war correspondent, saw

  A vision of palaces, mirrors, domes azure and golden, cupolas, colonnades, long façades of fair perspective in pillar and column, terraced roofs – all rising up amid a calm still ocean of the brightest verdure. Look for miles and miles away and still the ocean spreads, and the towers of the fairy-city gleam in its midst.

  Russell also observed the appalling squalor and poverty of the slums for which the British, like the nawabs before them, had done nothing.38

  Dalhousie’s reforms were especially resented in Lucknow, not least because of Lucknow’s religious significance in the Muslim consciousness, site of many holy mosques, and because of the blatant greed with which the governor-general regarded the ancient Muslim kingdom. Dalhousie spoke of Oudh as the luscious ‘cherry that will drop into our mouth one day’. The British army annexed Oudh in 1856 and the king lived under a benign house arrest. Dalhousie’s much more agreeable successor, ‘Clemency’ Canning, saw the nawab as a joke figure. The nawab wrote a poem for Canning which translated as ‘Thy body is as jessamine. Erect as the Cypress thou art. Minister of the Queen of the World, Protector and Benefactor of all the world, Great thou art.’ Sending this effusion home for the amusement of his family and friends, Canning wrote to Harriet, Lady Hodgson:

  Pray read the King of Oude’s [sic] Ode. It is an old affair – written before he was released; but I had forgotten to send it to you before.

  He is very fat; and when he composes, he has all the cushions of his divan laid out in the middle of the floor, and lies down upon them, stomach downwards, dictating his verses, with his arms and legs spread out as far as he can stretch them. Exactly like a turtle.39

  This was written in 1859, in the peaceful period after the hostilities were over. When the uprising had engulfed the city in the summer, two years before, it was something much more than a mutiny of the sepoy regiments. On the first Sunday of the outbreak, in April 1857, thousands of Muslims marched through the streets under the banners of their faith, while less thoughtful rioters ransacked and burnt houses, looted the shops, and indicated their contempt for the Europeans by staging mock decapitations of life-size dolls dressed in British army uniform.40

  The British retreated into the Residency of Sir Henry Lawrence, chief commissioner of Oudh, and the financial commissioner, Martin Gubbins, fortified his own substantial house, using seventy-five native servants to build bastions and dig ditches. The siege itself lasted 143 days, and the courage and endurance of the British men, women and children who held out in the entrenchment inspired a mass of literature. Cholera and dysentery carried off as many as did enemy bullets. Food supplies were limited, and morale was undermined by bickerings and resentments. Gubbins and Lawrence were perpetually at odds. The civilian volunteers resented very deeply the lack of gratitude displayed to them by the military. Twenty volunteers, civilians not in the government employ, stood guard at various key positions around the entrenchment.

  One half of the soldiers were thus on duty every day, and the other half off duty at the Residency; not so with the volunteers, for every day and night of the whole five months [his italics], did they stand sentry and do their duty, yet so unjust were the military authorities, that, while the soldiers got sugar and tea (as long as it lasted) the volunteers got none, while the soldiers drew rum and porter rations daily, until Havelock’s force came in, the volunteers were refused it – while the soldiers received meat daily the volunteers were only allowed it every second day, and while the soldiers got otta, the volunteers were served out with wheat and told to grind it into flour themselves! This will give you an idea of the treatment to which gentlemen of respectability, who never flinched from the post of danger, were subjected during this trying time. The brigadier was always coarse in his speech and harsh in his manners, and fairly led by his staff, his aide-de-camp conceited and impertinent – the adjutant-general the reverse of conciliatory, the Commissariat officer … was snappish and insolent in the extreme.41

  When at last, after several botched attempts, General Havelock relieved the siege, the conquering heroes themselves – Havelock himself and Neill – were exchanging such notes as this – ‘I wrote to you confidentially on the state of affairs. You send me back a letter of censure of my measures, reproof and advice for the future. I do not and will not receive any of them from an officer under my command be his experience what it may.’42

  Havelock contracted dysentery at Lucknow, from which he died43 – ‘Harry,’ he said to his son, ‘see how a Christian can die.’ Henry Lawrence died of wounds during the siege – every one of the soldiers who carried him to his grave kissed him on the forehead. This was not a war when the senior officers escaped. General Barnard died of cholera. At the funeral of General John Nicholson, aged thirty-six, the men of the Multani Horse threw themselves on the ground and wept. ‘Probably not one of these men had ever shed a tear before; but for them Nicholson was everything.’44 It was not only the suffering, and deaths, of women and children which excited passionate British emotion during this tragic period. The Mutiny, as they called it, had caught them all by surprise. The possibility that Indians could, for whatever motives, expose their vulnerability summoned forth in the collective psyche violent and passionate emotions.

  The fluttering, torn Union Jack was never removed from the flagpole of the Residency at Lucknow through all the hellish nine months. It was not a moment for national self-questioning about what right they had to be in India in the first place. The uprisings and wars of 1857–8 were seen as the assault of barbarism against Christian civilization. The army officers who suppressed the rebellion were seen as magnificent heroes in the mould of those chronicled by Livy in the schoolbooks. ‘Never since the days of old Rome, when “the bridge was kept by the gallant three” have there been heroes more worthy of a nation’s honour than that little band of fighting men who held the Temple on the banks of the Ganges and cut their way through a pitiless multitude who were thirsting for their blood’45 is a typical sentence from The Great White Hand or The Tiger of Cawnpore by J.E. Muddock – one of over fifty exciting novels which British men or women wrote about the uprising. ‘The “Great White Hand” was triumphant; it had crushed “the House of Timour” into the dust; it had broken and destroyed the power of England’s enemies, and had vindicated the outraged honour
of the British nation.’46

  That was how most of the British, however sophisticated, saw the suppression of the ‘Mutiny’. The Illustrated London News, in a leader-article on 26 September 1857, said:

  The general feeling of India is not only that the mutiny will and shall be suppressed, but that the result of the struggle – bloody and horrible as it may be – will be the re-establishment of British power on a firmer basis than ever. At home the same feeling is prevalent. We have some croakers – as we always must have; but the tone of the public mind is proud, self-reliant, and hopeful; and men the most peaceful – who, prior to these exciting events, had no more notion that they possessed the martial spirit than the good bourgeois in Molière’s comedy had that he spoke in prose – burn with an irrepressible desire to punish the murderers of women and children, and to wreak avenging justice upon the traitors and the cowards who have done us this wrong. If anything were needed to show that we were at heart a nation of soldiers this mutiny has effected it.47

  This was, undoubtedly, the public mood. It is a terrifying example of how short a collective memory can be, how distorted its moral sense. In something like fifty years, the British had radically changed the rules and terms by which the East India Company had operated in India. From being a trading monopoly which worked, where successful, to the mutual advantage of greedy English merchants and greedy, or timorous, Indian princes, it became an administration, claiming the right to the revenues and rents of those princes, and the rents of the peasant-farmers. It had taken upon itself the role of educator, civil servant and improver, making no secret not merely of its disapproval of Indian religions, but, more, of its right to disapprove. The sharp reactions these events in India had produced were seen by the English public at large (apart from the inevitable croakers) as ‘treason’ – though how you can ‘betray’ an interloping authority which you do not regard as legitimate, these English imperialists did not trouble to ask themselves. By the next year, when the Act of Parliament abolished the EIC, it was ‘provided that the splendid empire raised by the East India Company during the last and present century should be transferred to Queen Victoria’.48 The nation of shopkeepers had become the nation of imperialists. The late Victorian historian of Punch, M.H. Spielmann, saw as the ‘masterpieces of Sir John Tenniel his Cawnpore cartoons depicting “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger.” … Once this fine drawing is seen, of the royal beast springing on its snarling foe, whose victims lie mangled under its paw, it can never be forgotten.’ Spielmann tells us that Tenniel’s cartoon served as ‘a banner when they raised the cry of vengeance, it alarmed the authorities, who feared that they would thereby be forced on a road which both policy and the gentler dictates of civilisation forbade’.

  It is with relief that one turns to the exchanges between the governor-general and his monarch.

  One of the greatest difficulties which lie ahead, and Lord Canning grieves to say so to Your Majesty, will be the violent rancour of a very large proportion of the English Community against every native Indian of every class. There is rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad, even amongst many who ought to set a better example, which it is impossible to contemplate without something like a feeling of shame of one’s fellow-countrymen.49

  The vehemence of the Queen’s response does her great credit. She entirely shared Canning’s ‘feelings of sorrow and indignation at the unchristian spirit shown – alas! also to a great extent here – by the public towards Indians in general and towards Sepoys without discrimination! [her italics]’. She emphasized that the Indians should know ‘that there is no hatred to a brown skin’.

  These words were totally sincere, and borne out in her unfeigned delight in the company of Indians, an aspect of the Queen’s character which would lead to minor troubles later in the reign. Apart from being shaming, the British vindictiveness towards all Indians in general, in the aftermath of what they called the Mutiny, blinded them to the most extraordinary aspect of the period 1857–9 in Indian history: namely that sepoy regiments on the whole remained loyal to the East India Company. Even those which did not conspicuously refused to take part in the worst atrocities upon Europeans.

  Historians from Indian and British backgrounds both tend to write as if the defeat of the ‘Mutiny’ were an inevitability. Certainly, by the end of 1857 the British had largely gained control of the situation: Lucknow and Delhi had been relieved. Tatya Tope, however, and other Indian resistance-fighters, kept up fairly vigorous guerrilla warfare for the whole of the next year. The king of Delhi, who was put on trial in March 1859 for having aided and abetted the ‘mutineers’, was exiled for life to Rangoon. Addressed by his followers as ‘Ruler of the Universe’,50 he was an enfeebled old man, toothless, weak, and powerless as he had always been. Sir Colin Campbell, the veteran Crimean hero, pursued Tatya Tope in some exciting campaigns and the defeat of the Mutiny at Jhansi by Sir Hugh Rose really signalled the end of the war.51 Tatya Tope was hanged at dawn on 18 April 1859.

  Undoubtedly a factor in the Indian defeat was the tendency for rebel groups to disintegrate. At the outbreak, the 17th Native Infantry had marched out of Azamgarh for Faizabad ‘with all the pomp of war: elephants, carriages, buggies and horses accompanied Bhundu Singh Rajah their leader’. They fought in the action there – the 200 troops having swollen to 500 non-uniformed rabble. After August 1857 there were no organized sepoy resistance-fighters in the entire Doab district. By contrast the British, who had their share of setbacks, always regrouped, closed ranks. Much has been made of the importance of the telegraph and the railway, which the British had at their disposal and the rebels did not.

  Such would be the common-sense or occidental version of events. Perhaps it would be truer to say that India, and the Indians, did not yet have an alternative vision of themselves to put up against the European bullies in their midst. The notion of ‘enlightened’ politics was itself a Western import which, having taken root, would require nurture before achieving the desired result of British withdrawal. Viewed in this light, it is hard to see who was the victor of 1857–9. The British ground the Indians down, but what followed – ninety years of ‘The Raj’ – was in fact an odd sort of coalition. The British could not ‘govern’ India without Indian consent. The subsequent occasions of violence, such as the notorious massacre at Amritsar of 1919, were in fact signs of British weakness, a losing of grip, rather than the reverse. The Raj worked only for so long as the Indians themselves, fearful of the divisions within their own ranks, between castes, religions and cultures, got along as best they could with their European visitors.

  Sir Fitzjames Stephen, the political philosopher of the new order in India, took a bleak view of British rule: ‘It is essentially an absolute government, founded not on consent, but on conquest. It does not represent the native principles of life or of government, and it can never do so, until it represents heathenism and barbarism …’ Yet as everyone, English and Indian, knew, India chose in 1857 to conquer itself, and finally to let its rebels cave in. The 36,000 European troops could easily have been defeated had not the majority of 257,000 sepoys chosen to remain on their side.

  The knowledge that the Indians had the power, if they chose, to re-enact another Kanpur, another Lucknow, perhaps underwrote the insufferable psychology of bullying conquest which characterized the British military mindset after their supposed victories. Johnny Stanley (1837–78), younger brother of the 3rd Lord Stanley of Alderley, is alas a typical specimen. Having served in the Crimea aged sixteen, and nearly died of fever, he came out to India as Lord Canning’s ADC. He wrote home amusedly in December 1868, clearly frustrated to be out of England during the hunting season: ‘Yesterday Baring and I had a tremendous race after a ragged black dog, it made for its village, & we crashed through everything scattering cows & niggers & their bamboo fences as if they were nothing.’52

  While Lord Canning was exchanging kindly letters about the need to establish good relations between Europeans and Indi
ans, his young aide wrote, four days before Christmas:

  The way to keep a Sikh regiment in order is this: of course you will not agree with me, but it is this, an officer commanding one of the irregular regiments of cavalry rides through the Bazaar in plain clothes, he meets one of his troopers whom he orders to salute, the sowar is insolent, the officer rides up to him, takes him by the long hair & throws him off his horse. That is the only way. The man is immediately cowed, if you attempt to parley they get worse. The men have all positive orders to salute any white face, not a private.53

  The immediate political consequence of the uprising was the abolition of the East India Company, and the placing of India under the direct control of the government in Westminster. Lord Canning became not governor general, but viceroy. This had been planned for years before the sepoy uprisings – Sir Charles Wood’s Government of India Bill of 1853 had set in train the process of abolishing the EIC and attempting a programme of modernization, railways, education, land reform54 – all the blessings of civilization bestowed by whiggish busybodydom on a culture that had not asked for any of them. Inevitably there were Indians who received all or part of these things with the enthusiasm which was deemed appropriate in Whitehall. It is impossible not to smile at the high-mindedness of the British bafflement when their gifts were not appreciated.55 ‘Firing cannon balls at railway engines symbolized a wilful and irrational rejection of technical progress.’ One can imagine Carlyle, Ruskin, William Morris, William Holman Hunt, George MacDonald and Cardinal Newman, while not exactly approving of the violence done against ‘technical progress’, at least seeing the point of it.

  Some British men and women, in spite of the bitter legacies of 1857, would always respond sympathetically to the Indian ethos; many married Indians, and it was by no means only in the ‘nabob’ era that Britons ‘went native’ in India. Many who did not, like Kipling or Curzon, had a deep love for Indian history, culture and tradition. Yet the cynical judgement of Colonel Chardin Johnson of the 9th Lancers probably felt like truth when he wrote it: