However, the third prisoner sentenced to death was far from happy. He was Muhammad Shafi, a wealthy butcher in Delhi with contracts to supply meat to all the military cantonments along the Grand Trunk Road. Originally incriminated by Muhammad Jafar’s letter, Shafi was shown to be the movement’s main banker, using his agencies to move the Wahhabis’ money from one place to another while making a considerable profit in the process. Deeply involved though he was in the conspiracy, Shafi was not a committed Wahhabi. Several months after sentencing he turned approver in a bid to save his own life.
Captain Parsons and others in Amballa had in the meantime continued their efforts to assemble a sustainable case against Maulvi Ahmadullah. Armed with the fresh evidence from Shafi and from a second approver, a Patna shoe-merchant named Elahi Baksh, they were finally able to bring him to justice. The revelation by Elahi Baksh in his testimony in court that three persons named in various letters as Ahmed Ali, Mohomed Ali and Ahmad Khan were all aliases used by Ahmadullah appears to have been a turning point. The identification proved beyond doubt that Ahmadullah was ‘General Manager of the temporalities of the Kafilah [the name given to the Wahhabi’s secret supply route]’ and had abetted the waging of war against the Government of India ‘by traitorously furnishing supplies of men and money to fanatics at Sittana engaged in warring against the Queen’.
On 1 January 1865 a new up-country newspaper named The Pioneer* came into production and over the next three months charted not only the course of the trial of Ahmadullah Ali in Patna but also the public reaction to it, as the following extracts show:
2 January: The trial of Ahmud-oola, the chief Wahabee Moulvee of Patna, commences, we believe, today. The indefatigable Captain Parsons is now in Bankipore, assisting the Magistrate of Patna, Mr Ravenshaw.
11 January: Not deterred by the examples lately made in the case of the Patna and Umballa conspirators, some amiable gentlemen of the Wahabee persuasion have been getting up a minor conspiracy of their own in Purnea . . . A Moulvee has been collecting money from the faithful in anticipation of the ‘Jehad’, which will be inaugurated by the Twelth Imam, who is about to make his appearance in a flood of light and glory!
13 January: Mahomed Shuffee [Muhammad Shafi] has turned Queen’s Evidence, and the Delhi Mail says that his voluntary disclosures and the trial of Ahmad-oola at Patna, could lead to the hunting-up of the whole gang of traitors.
16 January: The Patna shoe-maker Iahee Buksh [Elahi Baksh] has been admitted as Queen’s Evidence. His disclosures have been of a very important character, and bear strongly against the Moulvee.
1 March: The Judge of Patna has sentenced Moulvee Ahmed-oolla to be hanged. The case against him was complete. A miserable attempt at defence broke down at once; the only witness examined, we are told, simply perjured himself. The verdict of the assessors was unanimous. Thus ends the last act of the Wahabee drama . . . Ahmed-oolla, we suppose, will lose no time in telegraphing to Sir Frederick (James) Halliday.
In the event, the Government decided at the appeal stage that to hang the three Wahhabi leaders would elevate them to martyrs. Their death sentences were commuted to transportation for life, and with seven of the other co-defendants from the two trials they were shipped in chains to the Government of India’s penal colony on the Andaman Islands. The banker Muhammad Shafi and the shoe-merchant Elahi Baksh were spared transportation because of the evidence they had provided. To Muhammad Jafar’s great vexation the former was released after one year in jail, although his properties, said to be worth five million rupees, were never returned to him. The goods and properties of all those found guilty were confiscated, and the great serai in Sadiqpore Road which had for so long served as the Wahhabis’ chota godown was demolished and the site converted to a public garden.
The proving in the law-courts that the chota godown in Patna was the centre of treasonable activity against the Government of India, and had been so for many years, was a very public vindication of Bill Tayler’s conduct in detaining Ahmadullah Ali and the other leading Wahhabis back in 1857. There was now a great clamour, led by The Pioneer and other British newspapers in India, for Tayler’s name to be cleared. Tayler himself was quick to reissue the defence of his actions that he had published in the wake of his dismissal, and again began to bombard the government authorities in India with intemperate letters accompanied by testimonials from the great and good. Finally in 1868 it seemed as if Tayler’s name would at last be cleared when the Duke of Argyll, newly appointed Secretary of State for India, was prevailed upon to reopen his case. At this same time, however, William Tayler’s nemesis, Sir Frederick James Halliday, former Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, was appointed to the Council of India, which advised the Secretary for State for India. The Duke duly took the Council’s advice – and opted to support the status quo.
Membership of the Council of India was for life, and Sir Frederick Halliday lived until 1901. William Tayler died in 1892 without ever clearing his name. ‘To the hour of his death,’ wrote Edward Lockwood, who had been Tayler’s assistant in Patna in 1857, ‘he thought and talked of nothing but the alleged injustice done to him, carrying on at the same time a hopeless war with those who had kept him from honour, by refusing to acknowledge him as the Saviour of Patna during the Indian Mutiny.’ Lockwood compared Tayler to British India’s first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, a small man but a great one, also brought low by his enemies: ‘He was no bigger than Warren Hastings, and both like Virgil’s bees Ingentes animos augusto in pectore versant [With mighty souls in little bodies present] . . . They both would have saved themselves, and everybody else, a great deal of trouble had they used honey in the place of gall for ink.’
The Victoria and Albert Museum has in its South Asian collection 667 jewels and curios amassed by William Tayler during his years in India and bought from him in 1874. Among them is a seal ring in the form of an octagonal engraved carnelian set in silver. It carries the Quranic motto ‘Verily He is the certain Truth’ and is dated 1278 AH, corresponding to 1861–2. How it came into Tayler’s possession is not known, but in the museum’s inventory it is noted that the ring had formerly belonged to ‘Ahmad-ullah, the Wahhabi rebel of Patna’.
The successful outcome of the Amballa and Patna trials greatly encouraged those in Government who regarded the Wahhabis as a major political threat. In their wake a somewhat shady Special Police Department, armed with extra-judicial powers of arrest, was set up under the leadership of J. H. Reily, the Deputy Inspector-General of Police in Bihar. Little is known about this special police unit but it is clear that a number of Wahhabi cells in eastern Bengal were turned over by its men, which led to further underground groups being uncovered. It soon became apparent that well-organised Wahhabi networks existed in many rural areas of Bihar and Bengal. By repeating the same successful tactics of inducing or forcing some of the accused to turn state’s evidence, enough witnesses were found to bring the rest to court, resulting in a further series of high-profile trials in 1870 and 1871.
One of the many trails uncovered by Reily led his team to the Punjab. In October 1868 he visited Hoti Mardan, as close to tribal territory as he could safely go, and from there he sent an emissary to the Hindustani camp. Since the Ambeyla war five years earlier the Hindustanis under Abdullah Ali, son of Wilayat Ali, had been denied access to their traditional sanctuaries on the Mahabun Mountain and had been driven from one refuge to another on the Hazara side of the Indus. It was at one of these temporary camps that they were found by Reily’s emissary, who reported back that the Hindustanis now numbered 362 fighting men, divided into eight units. They had seventy women and children with them and were living in very straitened circumstances. Reily then wrote to his superiors recommending pardons for all the Hindustanis – except for Abdullah Ali, their leader, and his deputy Faiyyaz Ali, a brother of Ahmadullah and Yahya Ali, both now in prison. Shortly afterwards Reily seems to have been visited in the Hazara hills by Abdullah Ali himself or by an emissary from the Hindustan
i camp – a mysterious meeting that may have been part of an unauthorised bid to bring about a peace deal with the Hindustani Fanatics. It evidently failed, and was subsequently hushed up, but at that meeting Abdullah Ali (or his emissary) made a statement of sorts, witnessed by the Assistant Commissioner of Rawalpindi, giving a great deal of information about the Wahhabi organisation, naming names of active members and supporters. Armed with this statement, Reily proceeded to Delhi, where an informant claimed to have seen a letter bearing the seal of Prince FIROZE SHAH, a nephew of the recently deposed last emperor, Bahadur Shah.
Prince Firoze Shah was the only member of the Mughal royal family to have participated actively in the 1857 uprising. With the collapse of the rebellion he had fled from Hindustan into Pathan tribal territory and, according to Reily’s informant, subsequently used the Wahhabi supply chain to write to supporters in Delhi calling for jihadis to join him in the mountains. More arrests were made and statements were taken which pointed to the involvement of the leading maulana (learned teacher) of the school of Shah Waliullah: Maulana Sayyid Nazir Husain of Delhi, famous for his expositions of Hadith.
A mass of correspondence was subsequently seized from Sayyid Nazir Husain’s home, including letters from Wahhabis convicted in the Amballa and Patna trials and from Abdullah Ali, the Wahhabi amir leading the Hindustanis on the frontier. These letters appeared to bear out a claim made by Abdullah Ali himself in his recent statement to Reily: that the respected maulana was the leader of the Wahhabis in Delhi and had been since before the Sepoy Mutiny.
Reily presented his case to the Punjab Government, under whose jurisdiction Delhi still came at this time, and Sayyid Nazir Husain was arrested. After six months’ detention he was released without any charges being brought against him. Why the authorities decided not to proceed against the maulana remains a mystery; it may be that they were concerned about the circumstances in which Abdullah Ali’s statement had been obtained, or it could be that Sayyid Nazir Husain’s standing in Delhi was such that the authorities felt it best not to take the case against him any further. The maulana lived on to the venerable age of ninety-seven and always denied any links with the Wahhabis, just as he denied having played any active or supportive role in the Delhi uprising in 1857. One of his biographers states that of the hundreds of students who sat at his feet up to the time of his death in 1902, many were from Afghanistan and others came from as far afield as Kashgar, the Hijaz and Nejd.
Sir John Lawrence’s successor, Lord Mayo, began his Viceroyalty by expressing his determination to ‘put down Wahabeeism in India as he had put down Fenianism in Ireland’. A Special Commission was set up to examine the extent of the threat posed by the sect, one outcome of which was the first detailed report on the Indian Wahhabi movement and its origins, compiled by T. W. Ravenshaw, the City Magistrate at Patna. His report demonstrated the extraordinary extent of the movement’s organisation, and its history of armed jihad. Then the whole Wahhabi issue came dramatically back to the boil with the murder of two of the highest officials in the land.
The first was the stabbing to death in Calcutta on 20 September 1871 of the acting Chief Justice, Justice John Norman, as he was on his way into court to preside over a Wahhabi trial. His assailant, a Pathan named Abdullah, went to the gallows without giving any coherent account of his motives. A visitor to India named James Routledge attended his trial and observed that the prosecutor soon abandoned ‘any hope of discovering the motive of the crime’. But he further noted that ‘a very uneasy feeling prevailed throughout India at this time . . . People saw in the murder the beginning of a system of warfare in which one man of a body of thugs of a new order would draw a lot which would condemn him to give his life, if need be, to destroy that of some distinguished Englishman. Looking at the circumstances of the case, with many notes before me, I have no doubt that the cause of the murder was the Wahabee trials.’
Routledge’s fears appeared to be confirmed when less than five months after Justin Norman’s assassination a second and even more sensational murder took place.
In September 1872 Lord Mayo began a tour of the Andaman Islands. Prison reform was one of the Viceroy’s special interests, and he wanted to see for himself the conditions under which transportees served out their sentences on the several islands that made up the Andaman group. It is clear from Muhammad Jafar’s account of his life in exile that he and his fellow Wahhabis were well treated by the British officials in charge of the penal colony. Because of his skills Muhammad Jafar worked as a chief clerk for the Chief Commissioner, and although he and the other leading Wahhabis were housed on different islands they were able to meet from time to time to pray and take food together. In Muhammad Jafar’s eyes, what happened to Lord Mayo was a clear example of divine justice.
On 8 February the Viceroy, having inspected various utilities on the main islands, went ashore on the small island of Mount Harriet to view the sunset from its summit. Afterwards he descended in the gathering darkness to board his steam launch, preceded by two torch-bearers and surrounded by a small crowd of dignitaries, officials and armed guards. As Lord Mayo began to walk up the pier leading to his boat a man ran right through the party, jumped on him from behind and stabbed him twice. The assailant was immediately seized, but Lord Mayo fell over the side of the pier into the water. He got to his feet and was helped back on to the pier, and then into his carriage. But within minutes he was dead. His attacker was the Afridi Shere Ali, former orderly to Reynell Taylor and other commissioners of Peshawar, sentenced to transportation for a blood-feud killing in 1867.
Shere Ali was interrogated at length, but said nothing to link him with the Wahhabi convicts on the islands or their movement. Among those who gave evidence was George Allen, proprietor of The Pioneer, who had been standing close to Lord Mayo when he was struck. He reported that, when asked why he had attacked the Viceroy, Shere Ali had answered simply that ‘God had ordered him to kill the enemy of his country, that he had no associate in his crime, but that God was the shereek [accomplice].’ Allen described the Afridi as ‘of middle height, brownish complexion, brown beard, and not at all a bad face, as far as one can judge – at least he does not convey the idea of a criminal’, adding that ‘the way in which he glories in the act with his harsh triumphant laugh is revolting to a degree. Hanging is a thousand times too good for him.’
After his sentencing Shere Ali was again interrogated by experienced police officers from the mainland. They too were unable to extract any hard information from him beyond the fact that ‘he had heard of Abdullah having killed Justice Norman – that was a great deed, but that his was much greater than anything ever done before, as he had killed the greatest sahib in India . . . He hoped his name would be glorified in his country for the deed.’ In his understandably triumphant rendering of the affair Muhammad Jafar has little to add, except to record that at his execution Shere Ali briefly spoke to those gathered to watch: ‘He loudly addressed the prisoners: “Brothers! I have killed your enemy and you are a witness that I am a Muslim.” And he then started Kalma [verses from the Quran] and died while doing that.’
By Muhammad Jafar’s account Shere Ali acted simply as an instrument of divine vengeance, but had Jafar been privy to any Wahhabi conspiracy to kill Lord Mayo he would certainly not have said so, for fear of incriminating himself. While the British community in India was united in believing that the Wahhabis were behind the assassination, not a shred of evidence was found to support this belief. Yet two possibly unconnected events remain unexplained: a grandson of the late Wahhabi leader Wilayat Ali was found to have visited the Andaman Islands just before Lord Mayo’s arrival, and on the night before the murder a person or persons unknown had given a great feast for Shere Ali.
The Wahhabi leaders and brothers Ahmadullah and Yahya Ali both died in exile as convicts on the Andaman Islands. Muhammad Jafar and the remaining Wahhabi convicts were eventually released in 1883 as part of an amnesty announced by the Viceroy, Lord Ripon. Muhammad Jaf
ar returned to his home in Thanesar in December 1883, with a wife he had married during his exile and several children, to be met by his first wife and a twenty-year-old son he had not seen since he was a few months old. Through the good offices of the British magistrate of Amballa he was found a job and resettled in the local community.
By his own admission, Muhammad Jafar returned home a changed man. He had studied English while in the penal colony and it had opened up a new world: ‘The English language’, he had discovered, ‘is a treasure of knowledge and arts. A person not knowing English cannot be well aware of world affairs. Without learning English one cannot become active and business-like.’ As well as discovering modern society through his reading, Muhammad Jafar had also mixed with other communities and had learned religious tolerance, even coming to admire some of the British officers he met. Yet, in the end, he was forced to conclude that all this new learning had endangered his soul: ‘Under the influence of Western knowledge I stopped offering prayers in the early hours of morning . . . I was not inclined to read Quran or listen to Hadith. I was involved with English language and English books all the time . . . I still remember how in those days Satan used to teach me not to believe in God and I sometimes used to do that. Sometimes when I used to read the arguments given by atheists I felt like believing them.’
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