In January 1857 the first of a series of disturbances occurred among the sepoys at the military depot of Barrackpore outside Calcutta, fed by rumours that new cartridges being introduced to the infantry were greased with cow and pork fat. Despite assurances from Halliday and from Lord Dalhousie’s successor as Governor-General, Lord Canning, that the Government would continue to treat ‘the religious feelings of all its servants, of every creed, with respect’, these rumours spread up-country.
A year earlier the sepoy Hedayut Ali had transferred from the regiment in which he and several of his brothers were serving, the 8th Bengal Native Infantry, based in Dinapore, to join a new Sikh Bengal Police Battalion being raised in Lahore by a battle-hardened frontiersman named Captain Thomas Rattray. In January 1857 Rattray’s Sikhs began the long march south to Calcutta to take up their new responsibilities in Bengal. Riding at their head beside Rattray-Saheb as his second in command was Hedayut Ali, now promoted to subedar, the most senior Indian officer in the battalion. In the months that followed these two strong-minded men became a formidable double act. ‘A rare specimen of an Oriental soldier’ was how one of their admirers chose to describe Subedar Hedayut Ali. ‘His physique was splendid, and the sight of him, with his drawn sword, running at the head of the Sikhs by the side of Colonel Rattray, was one the enemy never cared to stay very long to contemplate.’
On the road to Calcutta the Sikh column met units from the Bengal Army going in the opposite direction, and Hedayut Ali learned from them that the troops in Barrackpore were on the verge of mutiny: ‘They spoke to our men of the new cartridges, as having been made up with the fat of cows and pigs, and that in consequence of these cartridges, the Sepoys of Barrackpore were ready to make a disturbance, and that the chief people of Calcutta and Barrackpore were promising to aid them with money.’ Hedayut Ali had no doubts as to where his own loyalties lay: ‘I have my home always with my Regiment, and know none for my patron except Government. It was for this reason that when the country began to rise against Government, I informed my Commanding Officer with all the circumstances connected with this insurrection.’ He went directly to Rattray, recounted everything he had heard – and was told that he must be mistaken. In mid-February the Sikh battalion halted at Ranigunge, 120 miles short of Calcutta, where the subedar learned from sepoys of the infantry regiment stationed there that plans were now well advanced for the mutiny at Barrackpore, and they themselves were standing by to join in. This time Rattray believed Hedayut Ali, and immediately spoke to the commanding officer concerned. The colonel responded just as Rattray had earlier, but the latter was now sufficiently troubed to send forward a written report to the military authorities in Calcutta.
At this juncture Rattray’s Sikhs received fresh orders: to report to Arrah, the headquarters of the Shahabad district west of Patna. Rattray and Hedayut Ali duly turned their men about and marched back the way they had come, reaching the little country station of Arrah in late February 1857. Here all the bazaar talk was of the indignities heaped on their local raja, the elderly landowner Kumar Singh, who was said to be so angry with Government that he was plotting an uprising. This, too, was duly passed on to Captain Rattray, who informed Shahabad’s twenty-five-year-old Collector and magistrate, Herewald Crauford Wake. The observant Mr Wake was well aware of the danger Kumar Singh now presented, and in passing on Rattray’s information to William Tayler in Patna added that ‘should these districts be ever the scene of a serious outbreak, he [Kumar Singh] may well take it into his head that it is time to strike a blow for his own interests, and his feudal influence is such as to render him exceedingly dangerous in such an event’.
A month later, on 29 March, a sepoy ran amok on the parade-ground at Barrackpore, and in doing so pre-empted a general mutiny planned for June. After two hangings and the disbanding of one regiment the incident was considered closed. Governor-General Lord Canning professed himself ‘rather pleased with the way in which it has been dealt with’ and his Home Secretary wrote to reassure Tayler and other local officials that it had been no more than a ‘passing and groundless panic’.
Letters and other papers seized during the suppression of what the British termed the Sepoy or Indian Mutiny of 1857 show that there was no overarching conspiracy to free India from a foreign yoke. The uprising was sepoy-led and rose out of a combination of grievances among the troops. But first among these grievances were religious fears, fuelled in part by the insensitivity of the British Government in India but also stoked and fanned by the activities of religious zealots travelling from one military base to another. Among the latter, the Wahhabis can be counted in a class of their own, due to the size of their network and the extent of their propagandising. However, they were far from alone in wishing to see an end to British rule in Hindustan. In Lucknow, former capital of the annexed Kingdom of Oude, there was widespread support for the restoration of the deposed Nawab – support that extended to large numbers of sepoys and sowars in the Bengal Army, many of whom were originally from Oude. In and around Delhi, too, there were just as many who wished to see the old emperor restored to his former glory, and an end to the humiliations heaped on him by the British. But in Delhi the links with the army were fewer, and the feebleness and irresolution of Emperor Bahadur Shah – eighty-two years old, part-Rajput by blood, a Sufi by faith and an opium addict – prevented the plotting from developing much beyond the stage of wishful thinking. Nevertheless, in Patna, Lucknow, Delhi and elsewhere groups of idealists sought the overthrow of the Company Raj and exchanged cautiously-worded correspondence.
Had these various conspirators acted together, the outcome of the 1857 Mutiny would have been very different. That they failed to do so was in some measure due to the Wahhabis, who alone had a well-thought-out plan to overthrow the British and the links to co-ordinate its execution. But theirs was a plan that called for an exclusively Sunni Muslim jihad, and for the strike against the British to come not from a city in Hindustan but from Sittana, and in alliance with the Afghan border tribes. The surviving evidence suggests that the Wahhabi council in Patna, under the leadership of Muhammad Hussain as the movement’s senior imam, with Ahmadullah, eldest son of Elahi Bux, acting as his counsellor, held themselves aloof when approached by other non-Wahhabi conspirators from Lucknow.
On Sunday 10 May 1857 the long-awaited cataclysm finally burst at Meerut, with mobs of soldiers and civilians rampaging through the military cantonment, firing the bungalows and killing every European they encountered. According to the survivors, the shouts most commonly heard were ‘Deen! Deen!’ (‘The Way! The Way!’) and ‘Allah-i-Allah! Mare Feringhee!’ (‘Kill the British’). No one among the British officers took charge and the mutineers were allowed to set out for Delhi unhindered, leaving fifty dead in their wake. Despite the presence in Meerut of a large British force, the military commander failed to order a pursuit and initially refused even to allow a messenger to ride to Delhi with a warning. The result was that next morning the mutineers’ cavalry rode into the city unopposed, again murdered every European they encountered, and forced Emperor Bahadur Shah to receive them with the demand that ‘unless you, the King, join us, we are all dead men’. Although the emperor’s sons were given nominal command of the rebel units it was the mutinous regiments’ own Indian officers – the subedars, risaldars and jemadars – who gave the orders, including the fatal instruction to murder their European and Christian prisoners.
Garbled telegrams sent up and down the line before the wires were cut meant that the news of the fall of Delhi to the mutineers was received in all the larger stations of Hindustan within thirty-six hours of the uprising. Remarkably, the mutiny itself spread almost as quickly, again pointing, if not to co-ordination among the plotters, at least to well-established lines of communication.
As soon as news of the outbreak had been confirmed, emergency councils were held in divisional headquarters all over upper Hindustan and the Punjab. In Patna this meeting took place at the home of the commander of
the locally recruited police battalion, the Nujeebs. Here the first signs of a serious split among the Europeans in Patna appeared when the sessions judge, Mr Farquharson, proposed that they all should move at once to the safety of the military cantonment of Dinapore, taking the station treasury with them. This was intemperately dismissed by Commissioner Tayler on the grounds that it would induce a ‘fatal panic’. He then made a vigorous address to all the Europeans present, telling them to stand firm, advice that was ‘applauded to the echo’. Mr Farquharson’s response was to abandon his bungalow and move himself and his family into the opium godown in the city, where he was joined by the Government’s Opium Agent, Mr Garrett, who happened to be the brother-in-law of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Frederick Halliday. For the next two weeks these two and Mr Garrett’s assistant, Dr Lyell, were, in Tayler’s words, ‘incessant in their representations of the danger anticipated’. Their alarm communicated itself to others, leading the workmen employed on building the new railway to down tools and join them in their refuge. Garrett then refused Tayler permission to store in his godown money brought in from the district treasuries of the two nearest district headquarters, Arrah and Chuprah, on the grounds that this would increase the danger to those who were sheltering there. He afterwards informed his brother-in-law Frederick Halliday that he had offered to hold the treasure, but that Mr Tayler had refused his help.
During this confused early phase of the Mutiny the Commissioner did what he thought necessary to maintain order in the division, while at the same time gathering as much intelligence as possible – a process greatly aided by the support of Patna’s deputy magistrate, Dewan MOWLA BAKSH. From Mowla Baksh and a number of petitions sent in anonymously Tayler learned that ‘conferences were held at night, both in mosques, and private houses, though with such secrecy and cunning that proof or capture was impossible. Particular individuals were named again and again by different parties, who concealed their names, but uttered emphatic warnings.’ It seemed quite clear to him that ‘mischief of some sort was brewing’ and that it came from three separate quarters: ‘Firstly, from the Wahabees of the city and the neighbourhood. Secondly, from the Lucknow immigrants and partisans . . .Thirdly, from the thieves and scoundrels of the city.’ Of the three, Tayler judged the Wahhabis to present the most serious threat, concentrated in the persons of their leaders – ‘several well-known Moulvees of this sect, little shrivelled skin-dried men, of contemptible appearance, and plain manners, but holding undisputed sway over a crowd of tailors, butchers, and low-born followers of every description’. Without hard information Tayler felt unable to act, but he quietly set about turning the house and grounds of his official residence into a fortified defensive position.
Late on 7 June Tayler received the news he had been dreading, contained in a letter handed in by one of the Nujeeb policemen. It had come from the nearby military cantonment of Dinapore and it spoke of the sepoys and the Nujeebs as being of ek-dil or ‘one heart’. It gave notice that the three Bengal Native Infantry regiments stationed at Dinapore planned to rise against their officers that very night, and instructed that when this happened the Nujeeb police battalion should seize the Patna treasury.
Tayler at once implemented the emergency plans he had prepared, sending warning messages to each of his six district headquarters and summoning Captain Rattray to bring his Sikhs in from Arrah. Further summonses went out to every European in Patna telling them to come at once to his residence with as much food and bedding as they and their servants could carry. ‘In less than an hour,’ Tayler recorded a year later, ‘almost every man, woman and child were hurrying helter skelter to our house, followed by a phalanx of beds, clothes, pillows, mattresses and other domestic impedimenta.’
Tayler was a good story-teller and his account of what followed, afterwards published as Our Crisis; Or Three Months at Patna during the Insurrection of 1857, is as lively as the best of the many personal narratives of the Mutiny. ‘It was a lovely night,’ he wrote of this first day of their crisis, ‘and by the time that all were assembled, the moon had risen, and the grounds and garden were lit almost as day.’ Every room in his house was filled with occupants:
In one, a bevy of children of every size, age and disposition, the sleepy, the cross, the silent and the squalling, were stretched in every conceivable attitude on the floor; in another a group of nervous ladies scarcely knowing what to apprehend; strange Ayahs [maidservants] were stealing to and fro with noiseless step, and bearing unintelligible bundles; agitated gentlemen, cool gentlemen, and fussy gentlemen, gentlemen with guns and swords, and gentlemen without guns and swords, were holding consultation in groups; outside the house, a body of the Nujeebs, or local Police Battalion were assembled under the command of Major Nation, while a small party of Holmes’s Troopers were ready mounted near the door; the rattling of carriages, the screaming of children, men’s hoarse voices, servants shouting – all formed on one side of the house a Babel of confusion.
Just before dawn the tramp of marching feet was heard and the alarm was sounded, but it turned out to be Rattray’s Sikhs. Their march had taken them past the military lines at Dinapore, where they had been taunted by the sepoys, ‘accused of being renegades to their faith, and asked whether they intended to fight for the “kafir”, or for their “deen”’. However, the Sikh battalion’s unexpected appearance had also unnerved the conspirators among the sepoys, to the extent that they failed to carry out their planned uprising. The Sikhs took up positions outside the Commissioner’s compound and began to patrol through the city. The immediate crisis appeared to be over.
The one action that Tayler had failed to take was to inform the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Frederick Halliday, of his plans. However, first thing on the morning of 8 June he wrote a report of the steps he had taken. Since the telegraph line to Calcutta was operating only intermittently, he sent this despatch by rider. He then himself rode over to Dinapore accompanied by Rattray and his subedar, Hedayut Ali, to call on Major-General George Lloyd, the commander of the Dinapore cantonment. Lloyd had spent all his adult life in a sepoy regiment. In the words of the first historian of the Indian Mutiny, he ‘had witnessed the fidelity of the native soldier under trying and difficult circumstances, and, fortified by the opinion of the several commandants of regiments, he still clung to his belief in their loyalty’. Despite the evidence of the seized correspondence, Lloyd had just reported to Halliday that his regiments were quiet and would remain so ‘unless some great temptation or excitement should assail them’. He now informed Tayler and Rattray that their fears were groundless, and that the three Bengal Native Infantry regiments under his command were beyond suspicion. One of these three corps was Hedayut Ali’s old regiment, the 8th BNI, in which no fewer than four of his younger brothers were still serving. When he called in on them to renew old acquaintances he found the atmosphere highly charged, and was warned that if he stayed overnight in Dinapore he would pay for it with his life.
The Sikhs guarding the civil lines in Patna now came under intense pressure to desert. ‘The Mahomedans who came to our regiment’, recorded Hedayut Ali, ‘used to say “Thanks be to God that our king has been reinstated on the throne of Delhi.” When I heard them speak so, I immediately informed my Major and Mr W. Tayler, the Commissioner . . . I then ordered some of the sepoys that if any Hindoo or Mahomedan spoke to them such seditious words they should apprehend him instantly. The townsfolk, learning this, ceased their visits to the Regiment.’ The subedar now set up his own network of informers and learned from them that a number of outsiders had arrived in Patna ‘with the intention of making a row and that they were engaged in hiring men at 2 annas per diem and in polishing and mending their arms. On the 13th June I informed my Commanding Officer of this.’
Hedayut Ali’s intelligence only reinforced what Commissioner Tayler had learned from his own intelligence network. However, this dependence on spies and informers did not go down well with some of Tayler’s civil service colleagues. On
e of the most critical was the Patna magistrate, J. M. Lewis, who wrote to Tayler on 21 July complaining of his methods: ‘I had come to distrust spies and underhand information, not only from being myself approached by one of your goindas [informers], armed with a per-wannah [warrant] from you . . . but also from what I learned afterwards of this spy . . . Much mischief resulted from such powers being placed in the hands of unscrupulous persons.’ The commissioner’s response to these and other concerns was to brush them aside. The situation demanded firm action, and he was not to be deflected from taking such steps as he deemed necessary for the maintenance of law and order in his division. This arrogance cost him dearly.
On 19 June Tayler received the Lieutenant-Governor’s response to his report sent to Calcutta eleven days earlier. To his astonishment, instead of congratulations he received a rebuke. ‘My letter was written on the 8th,’ he afterwards explained:
To my utter bewilderment I received his [Halliday’s] reply, dated the 13th, saying that he ‘could not satisfy himself that Patna was in any danger’, and that ‘the mutiny of the sepoys was inconceivable’. I leave my readers to conjecture what my sensations were on the receipt of this letter. I did not, however, waver for a moment. Mr Halliday was 400 miles distant, telegraphic communication had become uncertain, every Christian life was at stake, and moments were too precious to be wasted in remonstrance or argument.
God's Terrorists Page 14