God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  But before Tayler’s letter could be delivered Major Eyre had won a quite stunning victory, routing Kumar Singh’s forces with a desperate bayonet charge and so relieving the defenders at Arrah.

  Meanwhile, in Gaya the local magistrate Alonzo Money was behaving in a most irrational manner. He had earlier reported to Tayler that Gaya was in a ‘ferment’ and that the local Nujeeb police could no longer be trusted. Within hours of receiving Tayler’s order to withdraw he set out for Patna with all the other Europeans on the station – but without the money in the sub-divisional treasury, amounting to £80,000. After travelling only a few miles he was persuaded by someone in his party to return to Gaya to collect the treasure, leaving the rest of the party to carry on to Patna. At midnight on 2 August William Tayler received a letter from Mr Justice Trotter, now leading the Gaya party on the road, ‘representing the dilemma in which Mr Money’s “vacillation” had left him and the other officers, and asking whether I adhered to my former order’. Tayler replied that Trotter should stick to his instructions and proceed to Patna.

  Having returned to Gaya, Money was joined, providentially, by a party of reinforcements from HM 64th Foot. With their help he emptied the Gaya treasury and then left the town with his new escort, to proceed at a great pace – not to Patna, as ordered, but down the Grand Trunk Road to Calcutta. Here he was duly received as a hero: the man who, disobeying orders to cut and run, had gone back to Gaya to save the treasury. ‘Mr Alonzo Money,’ wrote Colonel G. B. Malleson, the first authoritative chronicler of the Indian Mutiny, ‘first disobeying then half obeying the directions of his commissioner, was, by his vacillating and impulsive action, converting a plain act of duty into a sensational drama, of which he, for a few brief moments, was the star-spangled hero.’

  Alonzo Money’s unexpected appearance in Calcutta and his self-serving account of his actions coincided with the arrival of a batch of letters from Patna addressed to Frederick Halliday, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. They included the first account of Eyre’s sensational relief of Arrah – but also copies of Tayler’s order to Alonzo Money directing him to withdraw to Patna, and his letter advising that Vincent Eyre should wait for reinforcements before moving on Arrah. There was, additionally, a letter from Major-General Lloyd stating that he himself had ordered Eyre to advance – although, curiously, the actual letter containing that order appeared to have miscarried.

  This was all the ammunition Halliday needed. On 5 August he informed the Governor-General that ‘it appears from a letter just received from Mr Tayler, that, whilst apparently under the influence of a panic, he has ordered the officials at all the stations in his division to abandon their posts and fall back in Dinapore . . . Under these circumstances I have determined at once to remove Mr Tayler from his appointment of Commissioner of Patna.’

  On the basis of Halliday’s report, which cited Tayler’s withdrawal order but omitted the sentence (set in italics on page 151) instructing his two assistant commissioners to bring the treasure with them unless to do so would endanger their personal safety, Lord Canning confirmed William Tayler’s removal on three grounds: ‘showing a great want of calmness and firmness’; ‘issuing an order quite beyond his competency’; and ‘interfering with the military authorities’.

  William Tayler received the news of his dismissal from one of his most persistent critics, Mr Justice Farquharson, now appointed acting commissioner pending the arrival of Tayler’s replacement. It coincided with news of a second great victory secured by Major Eyre in his pursuit of Kumar Singh’s army – a victory that to all intents put the Patna Division and most of Bihar out of danger. ‘My friends were congratulating me that the crisis had passed, that success had at length crowned my exertions,’ wrote Tayler. ‘In the midst of these congratulations, and, at the moment when I thought that, without presumption, I might look, if not for reward, at least for acknowledgement, I was dismissed from the Commissionership; by a singular coincidence, the appointment was made over for a time to the officer who had suggested the abandonment of Patna.’ To further salt Tayler’s wounds, his replacement as Commissioner of Patna turned out to be Edward Samuells, the placeman to whom Halliday had a decade earlier awarded a post allocated to Tayler.

  With the revolt still raging in Delhi, Lucknow and elsewhere, there was little Tayler’s many friends and supporters could do other than grit their teeth and continue to carry out their duties. Mr Samuells duly arrived, bringing with him his own deputy to replace William Tayler’s right-hand man, Dewan Mowla Baksh, dismissed on the grounds that he and a Muslim banker who had also rendered great assistance in the house-arrest of the Wahhabi leaders had both been motivated by jealousy. Among the first acts of this new administration was to order the release of the three detained Wahhabis. This was accompanied by the profuse apologies of the Government of India and a proclamation that they were ‘innocent and inoffensive men’, against whom there was ‘no cause for suspicion’, but who had, on the contrary, shown ‘exceptional and unprecedented loyalty’. This was done at the express instruction of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Frederick James Halliday.

  To his dismay, Edward Lockwood was among the officials then ordered to attend a ‘conciliatory, let bygones be bygones pic-nic’ on the river organised by the new Commissioner to honour the Wahhabis. As he made his way down to the steamer he met the now disgraced assistant magistrate Mowla Baksh: ‘I asked him if he also had received an invitation to the pic-nic, but he, in melancholy tones, which made me laugh heartily, said, “Alas! Dear sir, a new king has arisen here who knows not Joseph.”’

  The river picnic itself was a subdued affair. ‘If those little rascals had possessed any sense of the ridiculous’, declared Lockwood of the Wahhabi leaders,

  how they would have roared with laughter at all this humbug. But when I found them assembled on the steamer which was to take us on our pleasure trip down the Ganges, they looked as good as grace in their priestly petticoats, as though a joke was neither here nor there to them. Directly I arrived, however, they one and all gave me a sly look through the corners of their eyes, and although they said nothing, I knew very well they meant to say, ‘Aha! My fine fellow, you and your Governor [Tayler] have had your combs pretty closely cut, we guess!’

  The pusillanimity of the Government of Bengal in failing to order the disarming of the sepoys in Dinapore and in turning its back on Commissioner Tayler’s actions has to be set against the shared determination of the Governor-General of India and the Lieutenant-General of Bengal not to further alienate the Indian public, which for the most part had watched the Mutiny unfold from the sidelines, waiting to see which way the struggle went before coming forward to profess loyalty to the winning side. In this they succeeded admirably, and the Government of Bengal in particular was quick to congratulate itself in an official report on its conduct, written by none other than Frederick James Halliday.

  Once released, the leaders of the chota godown in Patna behaved with circumspection, doing nothing that might attract the attention of the authorities, and so apparently justifying the trust placed in them by Halliday. The replacement Commissioner, Mr Samuells, was able to report to him that Maulvi Ahmadullah, the Wahhabis’ acknowledged leader, bore no grudges, and that he and his fellow-Puritans in Patna were in every respect model citizens.

  Banished to a subordinate post in Bengal, Tayler fought furiously for his reinstatement and the recognition he regarded as his due. Finding the doors of Government closed to him, he went into print, setting out his case with chapter and verse but also claiming that his dismissal was due to the ‘covert machinations’ of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, inspired by an ‘intense political, perhaps personal dislike’ of him. This was a mistake, for the Governor-General, Lord Canning, had only just declared Halliday to have been ‘the right hand of the Government’ during the dark days of the Mutiny – which was indeed the case in almost a literal sense, as Halliday had moved out of his own residence, Belvedere Lodge, and into Lord Canning
’s Government House for the duration. Canning’s response was to suspend Tayler and threaten a judicial enquiry to examine the charge that Tayler had condemned men to death on insufficient evidence. Such an enquiry would only have drawn attention to the high-handed measures adopted by many other local magistrates and judges besides Tayler, but it was enough to force Tayler to back down. He resigned the service and set up his own legal firm in Patna, while continuing his fight to clear his name. He found many champions among the Anglo-Indian community, but Sir Frederick Halliday, KCB – as he became in 1859 – was too powerful to be moved. Despite the support of The Times and many influential public figures both in India and in Britain William Tayler remained, in the words of the historian Colonel G. B. Malleson, ‘in the cold shade of official neglect’.

  It has always been argued that the Indian Wahhabis played only a peripheral role in the Sepoy Mutiny and the several local uprisings that followed; that the Hindustanis in the Fanatic Camp on Mahabun Mountain alone took up arms against the British. But there is convincing evidence, long suppressed and never discovered by the British authorities in India, that a small group of Wahhabis associated with the ‘Delhi-ites’ also took up arms and made a determined bid to replicate the jihad of Syed Ahmad. Not only did they survive, but they went on to set the Wahhabi movement in Hindustan on an entirely new course.

  This group of Wahhabis came from the faction led by Sayyid Nazir Husain, leader of the ‘Delhi-ites’ after the death of Shah Waliullah’s grandson Shah Muhammad Ishaq in 1846. As noted earlier, the Sayyid was a noted teacher of the Hadith and had many students, but first among them was his disciple Hajji IMDADULLAH, who had been among those who acompanied Shah Muhammad Ishaq on his long exile in Arabia in the 1830s. Hajji Imdadullah was a declared devotee of the martyred Syed Ahmad, and had written of how he had once beheld him in a vision standing beside the Prophet and holding his hand: ‘I, out of respect, stood afar. And Hazrat Sayyid Sahib [Syed Ahmad] took my hand and put it in his.’

  For all his denials, Sayyid Nazir Husain was widely believed to have been one of the Delhi mullahs pressured into putting their seals to the jihad fatwa in mid-July. At that time both sides, British and mutineers, were handicapped by indecisive leadership, but in the weeks that followed it was those camped out on Delhi Ridge who came together, while the much larger force gathered inside Delhi’s walls fell into increasing disarray as its leaders squabbled among themselves. Although the sepoy mutineers and their allies fought with courage, their attacks against the British positions were poorly co-ordinated, and as each was repulsed so the revolutionary fervour that had inspired the sepoys in the first weeks gave way to fatalism. The atmosphere inside the city became increasingly doom-laden as citizens and insurgents alike watched the small British force encamped below their walls grow in both numbers and confidence. No one was in charge, least of all Emperor Bahadur Shah or his sons – and the belief that Delhi was a domain of Faith wherein great things might happen soon evaporated.

  It was probably at this low point in early August that Sayyid Nazir Husain’s disciple Imdadullah and three of his students – MUHAMMAD QASIM Nanautawi, RASHID AHMAD Gangohi and RAHMATULLAH Kairanawi – decided to make their own jihad. For reasons that are unclear but were most probably linked to their doubts about Delhi’s religious status as a seat of jihad, these four left the city and with a number of supporters made their way along the river Jumna to the district of Thana Bhawan, about fifty miles due north of Delhi. Here they raised their own green banner and proclaimed holy war. The town of Thana Bhawan and the surrounding area fell to them without a fight, the British civil authorities having abandoned their posts long before.

  Hajji Imdadullah and his jihadis now set about transforming the district into a theocracy modelled on that first tried in Peshawar by Syed Ahmad thirty years earlier. Imdadullah acted as the group’s imam, but it was twenty-four-year-old Muhammad Qasim who emerged as the real leader of the group. He appointed himself its military commander, with twenty-eight-year-old Rashid Ahmad serving as his lieutenant and judge, and the slightly older Rahmatullah acting as the link-man between their group and the rebels in Delhi.

  This second Wahhabi dar ul-Islam was as short-lived as the first. On 12 September the walls of Delhi were breached and stormed, and the city was taken after a week of vicious house-to-house fighting. The British general directing the assault had ordered that no quarter was to be given, and this order was implemented to the hilt. As the rebel Mainundin Hassan Khan afterwards recorded: ‘The green as well as the dry trees were consumed; the guiltless shared the same fate as the guilty. As innocent Christians fell victims on the 11th of May, so the same evil fate befell the Mahommedans on the 20th September, 1857. The gallows slew those who had escaped the sword.’

  Even before Delhi was fully secured, the surrounding country was being purged of rebels. As part of this process a squadron of Afghans and Sikhs of the 1st Punjab Cavalry led by Mr Edwards, Collector and Magistrate of Muzaffurnugur, set out for Thana Bhawan in mid-September. It met with unexpectedly fierce resistance, and was forced to retreat with the loss of one trooper and a camel-load of ammunition. It regrouped and again advanced on the town, only to have its baggage train attacked from the rear. Whether it was Muhammad Qasim or some other, whoever led the rebels showed courage and initiative. Unable to take Thana Bhawan, Mr Edwards moved on to the town of Shamlee, where he left a number of subordinates in charge with a detachment of eleven troopers before moving south to assault a fortress held by a separate group of rebels. He returned to Shamlee to find the officials and soldiers massacred by the insurgents from Thana Bhawan. A last stand had been attempted in the local mosque, whose inner walls Edwards found ‘crimsoned with blood’.

  Edwards and his demoralised cavalrymen rode back to Thana Bhawan, which was now occupied by more than a thousand insurgents. A further assault was attempted and driven back with heavy losses, leading Edwards to conclude that his safest course was to return to Muzaffurnugur. But his force now found itself pursued by the insurgents, leading fourteen Muslim troopers to desert. ‘I attribute their defection’, afterwards wrote Edwards’ deputy, Mr Ward, ‘partly to the loss of the detachment murdered at Shamlee, and partly to the hoisting of the green flag at Thana Bhawan.’ Their situation soon became so desperate that Mr Edwards finally ordered his men about and called them to follow him in a cavalry charge. As so often in those desperate times, decisive action saved the day: the charge put the insurgents to flight, leaving a hundred dead. ‘Amongst the slain’, recorded Mr Ward, ‘were several men of importance, who had acted as the leaders of the insurgents.’

  However, it seems that the true leaders of the revolt at Thana Bhawan were not among the dead: they were on the run. Imdadullah and Rahmatullah both fled to the coast, from where they eventually made their way to Mecca. The two younger men went into hiding. Two years later Rashid Ahmad was arrested as a suspected rebel, but was released after six months’ detention for lack of evidence. In due course he and the man who may well have commanded the rebels at Thana Bhawan, Muhammad Qasim, went back to Delhi to resume their religious studies under their old teacher Maulana Sayyid Nazir Husain.

  7

  The Ambeyla Disaster

  In our ancient capitals once so well-known, so rich, so great and so flourishing nothing is now to be seen or heard save a few bones strewn among the ruins or the human-like cry of the jackal.

  Syad Ahmad Khan of Aligarh, in an address to the Muhammadan Literary Society of Calcutta, 1862

  By the end of September 1857 Delhi was a ghost town, entirely cleansed of Muslims, who were now increasingly viewed by the British as the real enemy. ‘There has been nothing but shooting these villains for the last three days,’ wrote a young British officer in a letter home from the Delhi camp, ‘some 3 or 400 were shot yesterday. All the women and children are of course allowed to leave the city and the old men. I have seen many young Mussulmen, who no doubt had a hand in murdering our poor women and children, let pass th
rough the gates, but most of them are put to death.’ Areas of the city believed to have given aid and succour to the rebels were flattened, including several mosques. Even the city’s great Jumma Masjid was threatened with demolition. For a time it served as a barracks for Sikh troops, and two years passed before it was finally released to a body of Muslim trustees.

  Up on the Punjab frontier the British authorities were equally ruthless. Apart from those rebels killed in the field, quite a number were found guilty of mutiny or sedition and executed: 20 hanged, 44 blown away from guns and 459 shot by musketry. Then in October 1857, just as order appeared to have been restored, a night attack was made on the camp of one of Herbert Edwardes’ assistant commissioners. The raiders were identified as Hindustani Fanatics. Against all the odds, they had regrouped under Inayat Ali and had once more joined forces with a local ally, Mir Alam Khan of Punjtar. Edwardes decided that they must now be finished off once and for all.