God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  The British prepare to invade Afghanistan for the third time: a fanciful engraving from the Illustrated London News in November 1878 as British and Indian troops gathered to launch three armies into Afghanistan. Pathan and Afghan hostility was largely due to fears of British occupation and the threat to their religion (Illustrated London News)

  Pathans in ambush: an early lithograph from the 1840s by Lieutenant James Rattray, from his Costumes of the Various Tribes of Afghaunistan (British Library)

  Elephant-drawn artillery and commissariat column pass a mosque in Peshawar city: an engraving from 1878 (Illustrated London News)

  ‘Abdallah Ebn-Souhoud, Chief of the Wahabys, beheaded at Constantinople in 1819’: an engraving of the captured Wahhabi Emir Abdullah ibn Saud, from Sir Harford Jones Brydges’ Account of the Transactions of His Majesty’s Mission to the Court of Persia (British Library)

  Four armed Bedouin on horseback c. 1900 (George Eastman House)

  Maulvies or learned teachers of religion in the courtyard of an old-style madrassah, northern India, late nineteenth century (Charles Allen)

  A street in Patna city showing Fakir Dowlah’s mosque: a pen and ink sketch drawn in 1824 by Sir Charles D’Oyly of the Bengal Civil Service (Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library)

  ‘The Warning or the “inoffensive Wahabee gentlemen”’: William Tayler’s caption to his cartoon, which shows Sir Frederick Halliday (‘the Bengal Giant’) racquet in hand, restraining William Tayler (‘the Behar Chicken’) from attacking the three Wahhabi mullahs he had interned, Maulvi Ahmadullah in the centre (Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library)

  Another of William Tayler’s cartoons, drawn by him in 1857 after his dismissal, captioned ‘Lootf Ali’s release’ and ‘Martyred Victim of the Commissioner’s Cruelty’. The gold-braided Lieutenant-Governor Sir Frederick Halliday watches as Tayler’s three leading critics in Patna (from left to right, Messrs Elliott, Farquharson and Samuells) come to the aid of one of the suspected rebels detained by Tayler (Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library)

  ‘The Umbeylah Pass and Chumlah Valley’: the scene of the Ambeyla Campaign disaster of 1863. The Wahhabi stronghold of Malka was sited on the distant mountain peak at the head of the valley. A sketch by Major John Adye, reproduced in his book Sitana: A Mountain Campaign

  ‘Storming the heights of Laloo, 15 December 1863’: the final engagement of the Ambeyla Campaign: a sketch by Major John Adye, reproduced in Lord Roberts, Forty-One Years in India, 1897

  Saiyyeds of the Black Mountains, drawn by Lockwood Kipling of Lahore, father of Rudyard Kipling. The Saiyyeds provided a haven for the Hindustani Fanatics and three expeditions were mounted in the 1880s to expel them from the Black Mountains (Sue Farrington)

  The banners of jihad: a band of ghazis or ‘religious fanatics’ advance towards their enemy waving banners, banging drums and firing their jezails in the air. A watercolour by Lieutenant Dixon, 16th Lancers, 1898 (Sue Farrington)

  The murdered Viceroy, Lord Mayo, 1872. His public declaration that he would destroy the Wahhabis made him a target for assassination (Illustrated London News)

  Shere Ali Khan, assassin of the Viceroy Lord Mayo, photographed in chains prior to his hanging. Although it was never proved, Shere Ali was widely believed to have been put up to it by the Wahhabis in revenge for Lord Mayo’s persecution of their cult (The Andaman Association)

  Since Syed Ahmad’s demise a new political phenomenon had appeared in the mountains of Swat and Buner in the person of the Akhund of Swat, who was none other than Abdul Ghaffur, the saintly hermit who had been expelled from the mountains after his unwise intervention in Syed Ahmad’s vendetta against a local chieftain. In 1834, at the age of forty, Abdul Ghaffur had returned to Swat in triumph as an acknowledged man of God and had been accorded the local title of Akhund or saint. Since then he had become increasingly influential as the religious leader of the mountain Yusufzai, and as a peacemaker. In 1850, in an attempt to bring an end to the inveterate feuding among the tribes, he had anointed Sayyed Akbar Shah as padshah and leader of the law (amir-e-sharia), effectively making him king of the Swatis and Bunerwals.

  Although a Naqshbandi Sufi, the Akhund was resolutely opposed to the violent and exclusive creed of the Hindustani Wahhabis, which makes it hard to understand why he should have chosen the patron of the Hindustani Fanatics to be pad-shah. According to Abdul Ghaffur’s grandson, Miangul Abdul Wadud Badshah Sahib, the Akhund acted in response to a call from the tribes for a leader who would prevent the British from taking them over. To have selected a Pathan would have led to inter-tribal jealousy, whereas Sayyed Akbar Shah was both a Saiyyid and greatly respected for his leadership in the first insurrection against the Sikhs back in 1823 – to say nothing of his subsequent support for Syed Ahmad in his fatal campaign against the same enemy in 1830–1. So Sayyed Akbar Shah had been made king of Swat in the hope that he would command respect from all sides.

  However, the effect of the Akhund’s appointment of a king from the Saiyyed clan had one consequence that he may not have anticipated, for it gave further credence to the Wahhabi claim that here in the mountains of Swat was the dar ul-Islam from which the great jihad should be launched. Yet at the same time the Akhund’s moderating influence over Sayyed Akbar Shah acted as a brake on the Hindustanis’ warlike ambitions – until the death from natural causes of Wilayat Ali at Sittana in the late autumn of 1852. This event coincided with Lord Dalhousie’s writing of his Second Minute on the Wahabees, in which he declared the Hindustani Camp at Sittana to be insignificant and best left alone.

  Wilayat Ali’s death left his brother Inayat Ali free to act as he judged fit. He at once descended on Sittana, assumed the imamship of the Fanatic Camp and ordered the Hindustanis on to the offensive – their first aggressive act being the seizing of the fort at Kotla from the Khan of Amb.

  Despite the alarms raised in Patna a year earlier by the discovery of Inayat Ali’s letters, the Wahhabi network was still untouched. In concert with his colleagues at the chota godown the movement’s new amir-cum-imam now stepped up his plans for the great jihad against the British. As the Bengal magistrate James O’Kinealy later put it: ‘He laboured to organise his followers and fire them with a hatred of the English Kafirs. The crescentaders [Muslim jihadis] even drilled daily, sometimes twice a day, and on parade were taught to recite songs extolling the glories of jihad, and on Fridays after the jumma prayers they listened to sermons descriptive of the joys of paradise, and exhorting them to wait patiently until the time appointed for the subjugation of British India would arrive.’

  News of the Wahhabi build-up in Sittana eventually reached the ears of the British authorities in Peshawar and Lahore, who complained to Lord Dalhousie that the fanatics were ‘trying to seduce poor and ignorant Mohammadens to join them, by false accounts of security and abundance’. The Governor-General’s response was to issue an amnesty. The Hindustani Fanatics at Sittana were given one month to turn themselves in. If they did so, they would be given ten rupees each to cover their expenses and a safe-conduct back to their homes. If, however, they failed to surrender, they could expect no mercy: ‘After this notice any Hindustani or other British subject found in arms, or otherwise attached to the Moulvis, will be treated as a Moofsid [enemy], and the least punishment he will receive will be three years on the road in irons. This circular is issued in mercy to the poor and ignorant, who have been deluded. Woe to those who neglect the warning! Their blood will be upon their own heads.’

  The Wahhabis’ response to Lord Dalhousie’s amnesty was a redoubling of their propaganda campaign. Large numbers of printed prophecies and ballads now began to circulate in Delhi and other towns in Upper Hindustan. One of these was the Ode of Niyamatulla, purportedly written in the twelfth century, which concluded with the following lines:

  Then the Nazarenes will take all Hindustan.

  They will reign for a hundred years.

  There will be a great
oppression in their reign.

  For their destruction there will be a King in the West.

  The King will proclaim a war against the Nazarenes.

  And in the war a great many people will be killed.

  The King of the West will be victorious by the force of the sword in a holy war.

  And the followers of Jesus will be defeated . . .

  In 570 AH [AD 1174-5] this ode is composed.

  In 1270 AH [AD 1853-4] the King of the West will appear.

  This dating clearly demonstrates that Inayat Ali planned to launch his great jihad against the British in India in the cold weather months of 1853–4. That he failed to do so was almost certainly a result of the disruption caused by Colonel Mackeson’s raid in January 1853 and the Hindustanis’ humiliating expulsion from Sittana (as described in the Introduction).

  The consequence of Mackeson’s raid was that the jihad had to be rescheduled and the prophecies revised. Inayat Ali knew now that he had found an enemy. Colonel Mackeson’s assassination nine months later can be seen as Inayat Ali’s revenge, and the Hindustani Fanatics’ first telling blow against the hated Nazarenes.

  British rule in northern India had officially begun in 1765, when the East India Company received a royal order from the Mughal emperor appointing it Diwan or local administrator of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. However, the popular understanding was that the Nasrani Raj dated from the battle of Plassey, fought in Bengal on 23 June 1757. It now began to be put about that British rule in India would last for a hundred years and no more. Because it had begun in June 1757, so it would end in June 1857, the centenary of Plassey.

  In 1855 printed copies of the Wahhabis’ war song Risala Jihad (The Army of Holy War) began circulating in the streets of Delhi along with rumours of a great awakening. Such rumours and prophecies fell on receptive ears. When asked to explain why his fellow Muslims had joined in the Sepoy Mutiny, the soldier Shaik Hedayut Ali had this to say:

  It is said in the Koran that the British administration will once extend as far as Mecca and Medina, after which the Imam Mahdee will be born and wrest the kingdom from them. But some of the Moulvies have declared that the British dominion in India will continue for one century, and then disturbances will arise in the land. The Moosulmen learning this, imagined in their ignorance that the British administration was now to go away, and they therefore joined the Sepoys in the mutiny.

  5

  The Early Summer of 1857

  The tenets originally professed by the Wahabees have been described as a Mahomedan Puritanism joined to a Bedouin Phylarchy, in which the great chief is both the political and religious leader of the nation . . . With the Soonnees the Wahabees are on terms of tolerable agreement, though differing on certain points, but from the Sheahs, they differ radically, and their hatred, like all religious hatred, is bitter and intolerant. But the most striking characteristic of the Wahabee sect, and that which principally concerns this narrative, is the entire subservience which they yield to the Peer, or spiritual guide.

  William Tayler, Our Crisis: Or Three Months at Patna

  during the Insurrection of 1857, 1858

  The ancient city of Patna extends for several miles along the southern bank of the Ganges some four hundred miles upstream from Calcutta and a hundred and fifty miles short of Benares. In the summer of 1857 a railway line linking these three cities was in the process of being laid, but until its completion the only comfortable way to travel up-country was by river. The less comfortable alternatives were to travel by palanquin, carried on the shoulders of relays of porters, or to go by dak, a coach-staging system which involved travellers staying overnight in dak-bungalows.

  Like most large towns in northern India with a British presence, Patna in 1857 was divided into three areas: the old city, which the British knew as the native town, with a population of three hundred thousand predominantly Muslim inhabitants; the civil station laid out on its western outskirts, consisting of government offices and the homes of the city’s small population of European ‘civilians’ in government employ; and, further west again, the military cantonment of Dinapore, with a garrison of three regiments of Bengal Native Infantry together with one British infantry regiment. Patna was the collection centre for Bengal’s most important cash-crop, opium, and the headquarters of a region of local government known as the West Bihar Division, an area comparable in size and shape to Ireland, made up of six sub-divisions or districts. Each of these districts was administered by a British member of the Bengal Civil Service known as a Collector, whose duties included acting as the local magistrate, supported by a deputy who was usually a learned Muslim. The collectors reported to the Commissioner, based in Patna, who was himself supported by a junior assistant and a city magistrate. The division also had its own sessions judge, also based in Patna, to whom all judgments by the district magistrates were referred. In all, the division’s administrative and judicial systems were in the hands of scarcely more than a dozen Europeans. To maintain law and order they could call upon a locally raised police force known as the Nujeebs and, in times of civil disturbance, upon the troops stationed at Dinapore.

  This was the region that became the charge of William Tayler when he was appointed Commissioner of Patna in April 1855. Bill Tayler was then aged forty-seven and, in the words of a later champion, ‘in the prime of life . . . a gentleman and a scholar, possessing great natural abilities which he had lost no opportunity of cultivating, an elegant mind, and a large fund of common sense’. Before his commissionership Tayler had spent over a quarter of a century in Bengal in the service of the East India Company. As he worked his way up the civil service ladder in a variety of administrative posts he had shown himself to be a good all-rounder. But he was not the most tactful of men, and in the course of his career he had made a powerful enemy of a fellow member of the Bengal Civil Service, his senior by two years. This was Frederick James Halliday, whose talent for secretariat work had taken him up the promotional ladder with remarkable speed. By the age of thirty Halliday had secured his first secretary-ship, and within a decade had become the éminence grise of the Government of Bengal, so much so that it was said of him that he ‘exercised all the powers, though not bearing the responsibilities, of Governor’. Not for nothing had he acquired the nicknames the Big Fiddle and the Bengal Giant. As Secretary to the Home Department, it was Frederick Halliday who guided Lord Dalhousie’s hand and pen during the first six of his eight years as Governor-General. Then in May 1854 Bengal ceased to be a presidency under the direct control of the Governor-General of India and became a province under a lieutenant-governor. Halliday became its first Lieutenant-Governor.

  The contrast between Tayler and Halliday could hardly have been greater: the one a small man of slight physique, with wide-ranging interests extending from poetry and sketching to field sports and antiquarian collecting; the other a big man in every sense, described by Buckland in his Dictionary of Indian Biography as ‘of lofty stature and splendid physique . . . the embodiment of great power, an impression which was strengthened by whatever he said or wrote’. Halliday was single-minded and ambitious, causing even his great admirer Lord Dalhousie to remark in private that ‘he has so managed that I believe he has not in Bengal a single influential friend but myself’. He was also a bully, and never hesitated to use his forceful personality to get what he wanted. Tayler and Halliday had first come into conflict when the latter blocked Tayler’s appointment to a post already allocated to him and gave it to his own choice, a Mr Edward Samuells. Later there had been a second brush when Halliday had dismissed Tayler’s allegations that the police in his district were conniving with local robbers to conceal their crimes. A third and more serious difference between the two men occurred in April 1855, soon after Bill Tayler’s appointment as Commissioner of Patna, when he wrote to warn the Government of Bengal that reforms being pushed through by Halliday were contributing to local unrest: ‘I brought to the notice of Government . . . that there was a deep and gr
owing dissatisfaction and excitement throughout Behar, particularly among the Mahomedans, arising from the suspicions with which several measures of the Bengal Government, and especially those connected with education, were contemplated.’

  Among all sections of the populace there were deep-rooted fears that Government was interfering in their caste-practices and religion, but at the back of Tayler’s mind was the Wahhabi conspiracy uncovered in Patna by his predecessors in 1852, which had resulted in the two dismissive Minutes from Lord Dalhousie. At the time of the writing of the second of these, Frederick Halliday was on home leave. However, as Secretary to the Home Department he had undoubtedly played a guiding role in the drafting of the first. Now, three years on, all those Wahhabis named as conspirators in the original reports dismissed by Dalhousie were still in residence behind the high walls of their caravanserai at Sadiqpore, and as active as ever.

  One year later the Government of India added further fuel to the general discontent when Lord Dalhousie, as his last act before leaving India in 1856, sent in troops to annexe the Kingdom of Oude on the grounds of ‘barbarous government’. Oude was the last surviving Muslim kingdom in northern Hindustan, and its swallowing-up by the East India Company angered Muslims and Hindus alike. The annexation also brought many demobilised sepoys from Oude to Patna in search of new employment, exacerbating the tension in a city that was already, in Tayler’s view, ‘a very sink of disaffection and intrigue’.

  To add further to Tayler’s worries, he had on his doorstep a powerful Rajput aristocrat by the name of Kumar Singh of Jagdishpur. The elderly Raja Kumar Singh owned extensive estates in Shahabad district west of Patna but had become so debt-ridden that the Bengal Government’s board of revenue had stepped in to manage his affairs on behalf of his creditors. Early in 1857 Halliday ordered the board of revenue to stop bailing out Kumar Singh, effectively ruining him. Up to this point Kumar Singh had been a good friend to Bill Tayler and, for all his troubles, had always professed his loyalty to the British Raj. Although required to carry out the order against Kumar Singh, Tayler wrote to Halliday to protest, and to warn him that this move would alienate Kumar Singh and his many fellow Rajputs in the region. Halliday’s response was to initiate proceedings to have the troublesome commissioner transferred down-country to Burdwan.