by Jan Morris
The king’s heart was scarcely in the revolution, and he consoled himself by writing melancholy verses in his garden, but around him the forms of an administration were erected, and he was obliged to act the emperor. Proclamations were issued in his name, regiments urged to mutiny under his royal aegis—‘large rewards and high rank will be conferred by the King of Kings, the Centre of Prosperity, the King of Delhi’. A ruling council was constituted, six elected soldiers to look after military matters, four civilians as public administrators. A Commander-in-Chief was appointed, and all the princes were made generals. The king processed through the city streets on his elephant, and in his name food was requisitioned for the troops, and city bankers were persuaded to pay them.
But it was all a sham. The king did not trust the sepoys, and they soon lost their respect for him. They camped all over his beloved gardens, treated him as they pleased and ignored his diffident requests. Thousands more mutineers poured into Delhi over the weeks, sometimes marching over the bridge of boats with bands playing and flags flying, but the city remained in disorder. Shops were looted, homes were stripped, drunken Indian officers roistered through the streets. Business was at a standstill. The neighbouring countryside was ravaged by bandits and robbers. In the heart of the chaos, within his red-walled fortress, Bahadur sat helpless and despondent. His treasury was empty, and around him his self-appointed ministers and generals ineffectively bickered. They had ruined, he said, a kingdom that had lasted for five centuries. Sometimes he threatened to abdicate, or to kill himself, or to retire to Mecca for ever. But they kept him there upon his shadow-throne, and almost the only solace he found was in his ever gloomier verse—
Clothed in my burial sheet I shall spend
My remaining days in the seclusion of some garden.1
This was the nearest the Indian mutineers had to a command centre, an organization, or even an objective. For the rest the rebellion, which spread murderously from station to station throughout northern India, burnt sporadically and haphazardly. Most of the princes and maharajahs stayed cautiously aloof, and there were no senior Indian officers to direct operations. The only common purpose was to get rid of the British Raj, and there were no concerted plans for a replacement. By the middle of June, 1857, the British had lost their authority in most of the central provinces, a slab of country extending from the borders of Rajasthan in the west to Bihar in the east. Everywhere else, though, they remained in command, and they demonstrated soon enough that it was only a matter of time before the rebellion was put down.
But from within the mutinous region terrible reports emerged. Whole communities had vanished. It was like a cauldron in the middle of India, and to the British in the other provinces, and even more to the British at home, life in the war zone seemed to have collapsed into incomprehensible nightmare. Two places only, besides Delhi, impressed their condition upon the horrified world—Lucknow the capital of Oudh, Cawnpore on the Ganges: and the names of these two Indian cities, hitherto so obscure, were now to become engraved for ever in the imperial memory.
7
Bahadur and his family apart, the only eminent Indian prince openly to throw in his lot with the mutineers was the titular heir to another ancient dynasty, subdued by the British long before, but still proud of race and origin. If the King of Delhi offered a cause of loyalty chiefly to the Muslims of India, Nana Sahib of Cawnpore, the adopted son of the last of the Mahratta rulers, was the closest the Hindus had to an emperor. To his people he was the Peshwa, successor to all the Mahratta glories, but to the British he was only the Maharajah of Bithur, a small town on the Ganges some ten miles above Cawnpore; for he was living in exile, and was denied all dignities like royal salutes, seals, or ceremonial gifts. The British kept a jealous watch upon him, as the possible fulcrum of a Mahratta revival, and he could not travel without their permission, or even appear in public without an Englishman at his side.
They liked him, though. He was not a very striking man, fattish, middle-ageing, sallow. But he was hospitable and generous, was fond of animals, and frequently entertained the officers of the Cawnpore garrison in his somewhat eccentric palace, half opulence, half gimcrack, beside the river at Bithur. It was true that he was known to cherish a grudge against the East India Company, who refused to pay him a royal pension, and it was noticeable that he would never accept the garrison’s hospitality in return for his own. But the British did not resent these symptoms of wounded pride. They rather enjoyed his company, relished rumours of his unorthodox sex life, and trusted him far enough to let him visit all the military stations upon the Grand Trunk Road, and to mingle freely with the officers of the garrisons.
Cawnpore, a town of some 150,000 people, was one of the most important of those stations. Here the Grand Trunk Road was crossed by the road from Jhansi to Lucknow, and here too was one of the principal crossings of the Ganges. There was a sizeable British community in the town, and a garrison of four sepoy regiments with a European artillery battery. The news of the Meerut rising reached Cawnpore on May 14, 1857, but for a week nothing much happened. Only a vague premonition ran through the cantonment—‘something indefinite and alarming overshadowed the minds of all’. Nobody seriously thought the last of the Mahrattas would ally himself with the last of the Moghuls, and anyway the garrison was commanded by the highly respected Sir Hugh Wheeler, whose wife was Indian, and who had been fighting battles in India on and off for half a century. Still, Indians and Europeans eyed each other guardedly, the gunners kept their guns well-greased, and Wheeler’s agents in the town kept a steady stream of intelligence flowing into headquarters.
The general decided that while he would do nothing so rash as to disarm his sepoys, he would at least prepare a refuge for the British community in case the worst occurred. He chose two hospital barracks on the edge of the cantonment. He did not think mutineers would actually dare to attack the place, when the crunch came, so he did not fortify it very strongly, merely throwing two low earthworks around the buildings; and he felt sure that help would soon come from elsewhere anyway, so he did not overstock it with provisions (happily accepting, though, the regimental messes’ cheerful contributions of wine and beer).
Presently Nana Sahib, who was allowed to maintain a small bodyguard of cavalrymen and elephants at Bithur, approached his friends in the garrison and asked if he could help. Would the English ladies, for example, care to take refuge with him at Bithur? Or could he and his men help to keep things quiet in Cawnpore? The general preferred the second offer to the first. One of his problems was the defence of his treasury, which lay awkwardly, like the commissariat at Kabul, well outside the cantonment lines. Perhaps, he suggested, His Highness would care to reinforce the sepoy guard there with some of his own men? Nana Sahib agreed at once, moved into Cawnpore with 500 men and a couple of ceremonial guns, and settled in a bungalow between the treasury and the magazine. General Wheeler was delighted—he was proud of his Indian sympathies. ‘It is my good fortune in the present crisis,’ he reported to the Governor-General, ‘that I am well known to the whole Native Army as one who, although strict, has ever been just and considerate to them…. Pardon, my Lord, this apparent egotism. I state the fact solely as accounting for my success in preserving tranquillity at a place like Cawnpore.’
Poor Wheeler! His success was illusory, and brief. On June 3, his informers told him that a rising was imminent, and all the women, children and non-combatants made for the new entrenchments. Almost at once, as if in response, the sepoys rioted, firing their pistols at nothing in particular, setting fire to buildings, and then, ignoring the Europeans crouched within their flimsy fortifications, rushing off helter-skelter towards the Treasury. They had no trouble with the Nana’s soldiers, and loading the treasure into carts, and grabbing the munitions from the magazine in passing, and releasing all the convicts from the town gaol, and setting fire to all the documents in the public record office, off they set in motley triumph up the Grand Trunk Road to Delhi.
No
w the Nana showed his colours. Nobody knows whether he had been in league with the sepoy leaders from the start, whether they impressed him into the cause, or he incited them. It used to be suggested that he was the spider behind the whole web of the Indian Mutiny, and that his visits to military stations were intelligence missions. Whatever the truth, less than 20 miles along the Delhi road the mutinous sepoys halted and returned to Cawnpore, where they apparently placed themselves under the Nana’s command: and next day Wheeler received a letter from the Nana himself warning the British quixotically that he was about to attack their entrenchment. The European officers hurried into the refuge; guns were primed and sandbags strengthened; at noon on June 6, 1857, the first round fell into the hospital barracks, and the siege of Cawnpore began.
This pathetic action was to enter the mythology of the Empire. In the mid-Victorian era womanhood was elevated to a mystic plane of immunity, and the vision of European women and their children violated or murdered by mutinous ruffians touched atavistic chords of fury. In contemporary pictures the siege of Cawnpore, which was to have a lurid ending, was painted in appallingly lurid colours. Every sepoy is black, wild-eyed and blood-stained; every English mother is young, timid, spotless, terrified, and clutches to her breast a baby still immaculately pantalooned. It was above all the killing of women and children that horrified the public, when news of the Mutiny reached England: and of all the fearful tales of the rising, the story of Cawnpore was the most often and perhaps the most enjoyably retold.
Wheeler’s entrenchment was in open ground about half a mile from the Ganges—a treeless place without a flicker of green, where black birds of prey circled always overhead, and the dry dust got into everything. Here the British were besieged for eighteen days. There were about a thousand of them, including 300 women and children. The two buildings were small single-story blocks with verandahs, and the arrangements (wrote Kaye, historian of the Mutiny as he was of the Afghan War) ‘violated all the decencies and proprieties of life, and shocked the modesty of … womanly nature’. Indeed all the feminist elements necessary to such a Victorian drama were present at Cawnpore. Several babies were born during the siege. There was a wedding. Children played among the guns, mothers pathetically kept up their journals. Stockings and lingerie were commandeered to provide wadding for damaged guns (‘the gentlewomen of Cawnpore’, as Kaye says, ‘gave up perhaps the most cherished components of their feminine attire to improve the ordnance …’).
But though it read like a parody in contemporary accounts, it was all too real. There was plenty of ammunition, but the commissariat supply was eccentric, and in the first days of the siege one saw private soldiers drinking champagne with their tinned herrings, or rum with their puddings. Later everyone got a single meal a day, of split peas and flour, sometimes supplemented by horsemeat (‘though some ladies could not reconcile themselves’, we are told, ‘to this unaccustomed fare’). The sepoys never stormed the position, but they kept up a constant fire of musketry and artillery, night and day, so that the British never got any rest, were always at their guns, and were forced to make constant sorties to keep the enemy at a distance. Every day there were more casualties, and as the tension increased, the food ran short, the bombardment relentlessly continued and the sun blazed mercilessly on, several people went mad. Every drop of water had to be fetched from a well outside the entrenchment, and man after man was shot getting it. Another well was used for the disposal of corpses: the dead were laid in rows upon the verandahs, and when night fell they were dragged away from the steps, feet first.
The temperature rose sometimes to 138 degrees Fahrenheit, the guns were too hot to touch, and several men died of sunstroke. On June 12 the thatched roof of one of the barracks caught fire, and the building was burnt to ashes, through which the men of the 42nd Regiment raked with their bayonets, hoping to find their campaign medals: all the medical supplies were lost in the blaze, and the survivors were forced to draw in their defences, and huddle in the single building left. Poor Wheeler was now distraught. ‘We want aid, aid, aid!’ he wrote in a message smuggled across the river to the British garrison at Lucknow. ‘Surely we are not to die like rats in a cage? When his own son Godfrey was killed—‘Here a round shot came and killed young Wheeler’, recorded a graffito, ‘his brains and hair are scattered on the wall’—the old general was broken, and lay on his mattress all day long in tears.
By now the place was full of half-starved children, sick and wounded women, men blinded, insane, or helplessly apathetic. ‘June 17th’, recorded one young Englishwoman’s diary, ‘Aunt Lilly died. June 18th. Uncle Willy died. June 22nd … George died. July 9th. Alice died. July 12th. Mamma died’.1 Yet on June 23 the most determined rebel assault was beaten off, and after thirteen days of siege there was reached a kind of stale-mate. The sepoys were too timid to take the place by storm, but too impatient to starve it into submission. On June 25 a solitary Eurasian woman, barefoot, with a baby in her arms, appeared on the flat ground before the entrenchments, holding a flag of truce. They carried her half-fainting over the rampart, and she presented an envelope ceremoniously addressed to ‘The Subjects of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria’.
The Nana was offering terms. ‘All those who are in no way connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie’, his unsigned message ran, ‘and are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive a safe passage to Allahabad’—100 miles away, and the first downstream city still held by the British. After a day of discussion with his officers, Wheeler accepted the offer, insisting only that his soldiers keep their side-arms, with 60 rounds of ammunition apiece. There were parleys on the flat ground before the entrenchment; the guns were handed over; and at dawn on June 27 the evacuation began.
Sixteen painted elephants, eight palanquins and a train of bullock-carts, with sullen mahouts and insolent drivers, took the sick and wounded out of the camp, down a shallow wooded gulley towards the river. Behind them straggled the walking survivors, rifles on their shoulders, scraps of baggage in their hands, ragged, dirty and silent. Most of the sepoys who swarmed around them treated them with contempt or contumely: others asked kindly after old friends or former officers. Crowds of sightseers followed too, but a few hundred yards before the river, where the track crossed a stream by a wooden bridge, they were all stopped. Only the British and their guards were allowed to proceed, the macabre procession of elephants, carts, palanquins and exhausted soldiers proceeding heavily in the heat towards the waterfront.
On a bluff beside the river there stood a small white temple, attended by a tumble of thatched huts, through whose purlieus dogs and geese wandered, and monkeys bounded. Below it was the ghat at which the Hindu faithful performed their ablutions in the holy river. Only a narrow gap in the bluff, sprinkled with trees, gave access to the water’s edge. As they stumbled down to the waterfront, the British could not see far either up or down the river, but lying off-shore in front of them they discovered some forty high-sterned river boats, thatched like floating haystacks, with their crews waiting impassively on deck. There was no jetty at the ghat. The fit men were made to wade into the stream, carrying their wives, children and wounded—a forlorn emaciated company, many of them bandaged or splinted, some carried out on stretchers, some clutching raggety bundles of possessions. Bewildered and terrified, watched by the silent boatmen and the sepoys leaning on their muskets on the shore, they scrambled dripping and bedraggled aboard the boats, nine or ten souls to each craft. The last people to embark, Major Vibart and his family, were seen aboard with every courtesy by sepoys who had been in Vibart’s regiment, and who insisted on carrying his bags.
On a platform before the little temple sat the Nana’s representative, a functionary of the court at Bithur, keenly watching events below, and cheerfully crowded around the bridge over the gulley behind, peering through the gap like spectators at a sporting contest, hundreds of sightseers waited to see the last humiliation of the Raj. As soon as Vibart was aboard something ominous happened: i
nstead of pushing off, all the boatmen jumped overboard and hastily waded ashore. Pandemonium followed. The British opened fire on the boatmen, and simultaneously the troopers who had so politely escorted the Vibarts aboard opened fire upon the boats. In a moment there poured into the stationary flotilla, from guns hidden on both banks of the river, a heavy fire of grape-shot and musketballs. The British were overwhelmed. Soon the thatch of the boats was aflame, and the river was littered with corpses, and threshed with desperate survivors. Women crouched in the water up to their necks, babies floated helplessly downstream, men tried desperately to shove the boats into midstream and get away. Indian cavalrymen splashed about the shallows, slashing at survivors with their sabres, and the few people who managed to get ashore were either bayonetted then and there, or seized and whisked away beyond the gulley. Only one boat escaped, rudderless and oarless, and after nightmare adventures on stream and on land—chased through the night by maddened sepoys—besieged in a burning temple—without food, weapons, maps—at last two English officers and two Irish privates, all stark naked, swam ashore in friendly territory to tell the story of Cawnpore.1
Nobody else lived. Every man was killed. Every surviving woman and child was taken to a house called the Bibighar, the House of Women, a mud flat-roofed building beside the Ganges canal which a British officer had built for his Indian mistress long before. On the afternoon of July 15 several men, some of them butchers by trade, entered the Bibighar with sabres and long knives, and murdered them all. The limbs, heads and trunks of the dismembered dead were carried to a nearby well, and almost filled its 50-foot shaft.2
8
The other sacramental episode of the Indian Mutiny was the siege of Lucknow. This city, annexed by the Raj only in the previous year, was naturally full of dissidents—deposed princes, soldiers of the disbanded royal army, dispossessed stipendiaries, and a vast number of citizens who, far from welcoming the new enlightenment, missed the delinquent old days of cheap opium and corruptible officials. The British, who had a low opinion of Oudh traditional life, ensconced themselves in a grand towered Residency and used as an ammunition store the Kadam Rasul, a building particularly sacred to the Muslims of Oudh because it contained a stone impression of the Prophet’s footprint.