Individually and collectively Indians were not bent upon the creation of a unified nation state. Instead, what came out of the Mutiny was a fragmentation which would have gathered momentum if more men like Devi Singh had been free to emerge. And yet, in the eyes of Lieutenant Majendie, who fought against him around Lucknow, the Indian civilian in arms was ‘simply taking advantage of a great revolt to strike for a country which had been taken from him’.64 It was an exceptional view for the time, but one which few Indians would have understood, although they might not have shared a young Englishman’s concept of national identity and the power of the sovereign state. Shah Mal, an insurgent leader in the region north of Delhi in June 1857, insisted that he was defending the Chowrasee Des, eighty or so villages bound together by traditions of independence and clan kinship, against ‘pale-faced invaders’. But his attachment was to a location and its peculiar customs, not a nation, and not all the Jats and Gujars to whom he appealed were prepared to follow him. Some sided with the government.65
Where national consciousness was evident among the rebels, it was defined in terms of a loathing for the British which, at times, seemed so intense that it appeared that they were waging a racial war of extermination.66 This animus was often expressed by the wholesale destruction of all things British, including railway engines which were shattered by cannonfire at the orders of rioters in Allahabad.67 Intelligent Indians would have shared the British horror at this manic Luddism, and understood that many recent innovations had been beneficial. But their value was diminished for many educated Indians by ‘the distant and contemptible manner in which they are treated by the generality of English gentlemen’ which ‘wounds their hearts and compels them to forget the blessings of British rule’.68
British racial aloofness drove Muhammad Ali Khan into the arms of the mutineers, according to a confession he made to his gaoler, Sergeant William Forbes-Mitchell, on the eve of his execution. A native of Ruhelkhand, Muhammad Ali Khan had been trained as an engineer in the colleges at Bareilly and Roorkee and became a jemadar engineer in the Company’s service. But he found himself subordinate to a British NCO who, ‘like most ignorant men in authority . . . exhibited all the faults of the Europeans which irritate and disgust us, arrogance, insolence and selfishness’. Muhammad Ali Khan was later employed by the King of Awadh and then the Nepalese ruler Jung Bahadur, with whom he travelled to Britain in 1853. It was sad and ironic that in his last hours he discovered that some Europeans were capable of kindness and decency; the Scottish sergeant forbade his men to smear Muhammad Ali Khan with pig fat, or have him and his fellow prisoners flogged by sweepers, and he provided all with a good meal at his own expense.69
The barriers and prejudices created by religion, caste, clan and tribes were still too strong to allow the cultivation of national sentiment or cohesion, even had the rebels attempted to do so. They naturally tried to find allies within the Madras and Bombay armies. In July and September 1857 two agents were turned in to the authorities by Madras soldiers whom they had tried to subvert.70 Both the Madras and Bombay armies had a wider range of castes and races than the Bengal, including many who were not so jealous of their status. Nonetheless, there were 11,700 British soldiers in the Madras presidency during 1858 as an insurance against any unrest. They were moved at even the slightest hint of trouble; in November a detachment of the 60th Rifles and an artillery battery were rushed to Mysore after noisy gatherings there of the local ‘disorderly rabble’ and ‘strangers and foreigners’ from the countryside.71
The arrival of the white soldiers was also an earnest of British backing for the Maharaja of Mysore, who had been loyal throughout the troubles. Like his counterparts in Gwalior, Indore and Nepal, who had visited England and knew its potential strength, the princes were unwilling to commit themselves to a rebellion. In some cases this may have been sitting on the fence, something which made political sense when the balance of power was as unclear as it was during the summer and early autumn of 1857. Once the war began to swing Britain’s way, it was prudent to show active support. It took some time for the reverberations of events in the north to reach much of southern India. The Bombay presidency suffered an upsurge in internecine disturbances during the back end of the year and 1858, but these were firmly suppressed without difficulty. The authorities there were reassured by additional British troops, including the 89th Regiment at Ahmadabad, which was thought to have had a calming effect in a district which had been notably restless.72
V
Wherever British authority disappeared, however briefly, there were peasant insurrections. They presented no serious long-term threat largely because they were localised and, even in the most turbulent areas, the leadership found it an uphill struggle to impose solidarity or sustain momentum in the face of counter-insurgency forces which were better armed and disciplined. The sudden eruption of what horrified local officials saw as rural anarchy and its persistence throughout the Mutiny was, however, an uncomfortable reminder of how superficial their influence had been.
At times, conflict in the countryside overlapped with the larger-scale struggle between the sepoys and the British. Among the defenders of Lucknow were peasant bowmen whose arrow showers reminded Sergeant Forbes-Mitchell of Chevy Chase.73 Shah Mal, the leader of Jat and Gujar insurgents in the Baraut district to the north of Meerut during May, June and July 1857, declared himself a subject of Bahadur Shah and promised him assistance. His uprising seems to have been spontaneous and began with a sequence of thefts from passing merchants, a tax official and bazaar traders, which may have been why escapees from Meerut gaol hurried to join Shah Mal’s band.74 In the same area there were zamindars who were making themselves rajas, and, like Shah Mal, hoped to make their elevation legal through the sanction of the new emperor. Unlike Shah Mal, Wallidad Khan of Bulandshahr was a man of respected family whose inheritance had been pruned by the British authorities which made him a natural, although at times hesitant rebel figurehead. He too sought legitimacy and perhaps future rewards by an alliance with Bahadur Shah, who gave him a jagir and official powers.75
The collapse of British power around Allahabad in early June 1857 was the signal for Udwant Singh, backed by close kinsmen and about a thousand of his clan, to bid for independence from his overlord, the Raja of Benares. Udwant Singh proclaimed himself Raja of Bhadolu and began collecting taxes, but was snared and delivered to the British for execution by the Benares raja’s agents. What was turning into a rebellion against the raja continued under the leadership of Jhuni Singh until the middle of 1858, when his adherents were defeated by the forces of local zamindars, no doubt keen to show their zeal for a Raj which was fast regaining control everywhere.76
In the absence of British constraint, the petty jealousies and rivalries of different tribes, castes and races had free rein. For the greater part, alignment was decided on purely local grounds; most notably whether a village or a caste had suffered losses through an oppressive tax assessment or new land-owning arrangements introduced by the British. It went without saying that wherever taxes had been high or imposed unevenly there were disorders. Past injustices were remembered and old vendettas re-opened, processes which meant that those who had benefited from the Raj tended to support it, for its enemies were now theirs. Those whom their British masters believed mixed husbandry with banditry for a living were in the forefront of any disturbances. Around Meerut, the Gujars and Rangars lived up to a reputation contained in a local proverb:
The dog and the cat are two, the Rangar and Gujar are two. If it were not for these four, one could sleep at night with an open door.77
Both castes were accused of robberies and, of course, outrages against banias, but they were equally happy to place their energies at the disposal of the government. Three hundred Rangars formed an ad hoc detachment raised by the district magistrate, which kept order in Kurnaul during the unquiet days of May and June 1857.78 Several hundred miles to the south in Agra, E. J. Churcher was able to collect a scratch force
of Gujars with which to restore order in Etah. He had 5,000 rupees from the Agra treasury in his pocket and this brought him Bahadur Singh and 140 Gujars, all ‘of fine physique, and regular dare-devils’. He guessed some had been dacoits, but this did not matter in an emergency, and they were, as he soon discovered, more than satisifed with their generous wages. As his small expedition progressed through the countryside, Churcher encountered a party of Sikhs, all suspected rebels, whom he promptly enlisted with a promise of ten rupees each for a few hours’ work storming a fort.79
Co-operation was also secured through fear. Engagements between rural insurgents and British forces were invariably one-sided; Gujar matchlocks were no match for Enfield rifles, and during a fight between Kol archers and matchlockmen in the Cuttack district, native losses were thirty dead against one British soldier wounded.80 Villages near Meerut which had been up in arms or had harboured rebels, whether local men or fugitive sepoys, were burnt as a matter of course. Richard Dunlop, who served with a volunteer force during these operations, recorded that in some instances men of military age were dragged from their villages and shot.81 Those who assisted the government were compensated, sometimes much later. In 1859, Indians who had unsuccessfully tried to fend off an attack by Meos on the treasury at Noh, not far from Mathura, were given portions of land confiscated from their former adversaries.82
Around Lucknow at the end of October 1857, wretched villagers found themselves squeezed between two predatory armies, competing for their allegiance. ‘The population is so timid and stands in such awe of the possible return of the Mutineers,’ reported William Muir, ‘that even a momentary disadvantage gained by them would probably unsettle our hold on the people again.’83 British victories along the road to Jhansi in February 1858 swung local villagers behind the Raj and made them willing to reveal the route and battle positions of a body of mutineers pursuing British cavalrymen.84 Obsequiousness and accommodation were obviously the only policy for the weak, but they did not guarantee safety. Two months later in this campaign, Edward Grey noted in his diary how villagers fled whenever British soldiers approached. On 18 May, he explained why: ‘Four men hanged this morning selected from a dozen poor devils taken at Mugrah and tried yesterday. They were probably as innocent of mutiny as most other villagers.’85 It was small wonder that there were pockets of peasant resistance which held out in remote districts well into the following year, even when it was clear to their countrymen that the Raj had been fully restored.
3
Like Elephants on Heat:
Anglo- Indian Reactions
to the Mutiny
I
Garbled news of the mutiny at Meerut and the seizure of Delhi reached Britain on 27 June 1857. Even in fragmentary form, these tidings disturbed the public, which waited uneasily for the official telegrams due to reach London on 12 July. Speculation flourished and the mood was pessimistic. The Saturday Review suspected that the causes of the disturbances were deep-rooted and the massacres of Europeans indicated that India might be on the verge of a bloody racial conflict like that between the slaves and their masters in Haiti sixty years before.1 In the correspondence columns of The Times, a retired Indian officer warned that, ‘without India, Great Britain would subside into a third-rate state’, a fact which, he thought, was not widely understood. Two days later, on 8 July, the same newspaper hinted at the source of the trouble by reporting a speech recently delivered to Addiscombe cadets by another India veteran, Major-General Tucker. The old soldier had exhorted his listeners to treat their sepoys with kindness and respect and praised those of his generation who had known and loved their men. By implication, today’s officers were less in touch with and sympathetic towards the Indian soldier.
Government telegrams from India, carried by sea and transmitted in haste from the Italian port of Cagliari, were released by the Board of Control on 13 July. The India mail, comprising over 20,000 letters, arrived in London on the night of the 11th, and was delivered the next day. By 14 July, the worst fears of the public were confirmed as national and provincial papers were filled with reports of a revolt by at least 30,000 sepoys, the slaughter of Europeans and the loss of Delhi. Recipients of private letters from India passed them to newspapers for immediate publication. There was now no doubt as to the scale of the insurrection or its implications for Britain and India, where the Raj appeared to be on the brink of collapse. ‘The civilisation of fifty-three years has been destroyed in three hours’ concluded a Bombay resident, whose verdict on the calamities in Delhi was published by The Times on 14 July. As the crisis unfolded and deepened, news from India, mostly baleful, dominated the British press.
Few who read the startling reports of mutinous sepoys, mass murders and episodes of heroism which filled the newspapers during the summer of 1857 knew much about India or its people. Where it existed, public knowledge was either superficial or distorted. This was the opinion of William Thackeray, who had been born in India in 1811 and whose family bonds with the country had remained strong. In 1841 he had outlined the three commonplace images of India then current in Britain. The romantically inclined continued to regard it as ‘the region of fable and marvel, the gorgeous East’, a fairy-tale land where sultans sat on ivory thrones, ‘fanned by peacocks’ wings’ in ‘palaces paved with jasper and onyx’. Prosaic minds imagined India as full of ‘feeble and unwarlike people’, who were backward and in thrall to cunning priestcraft. For the middle and upper classes, India was still ‘a country where younger brothers are sent to make their fortune’.2
There were, Thackeray added, a handful of learned men who possessed a deep understanding of Indian languages, literature, cosmology and philosophy, subjects which were notably unpopular with British publishers and readers. Scholarship in these areas was largely directed towards uncovering links between ancient Indian tongues and Greek, Latin and Hebrew. It was assumed that there had been exchanges between the highly sophisticated culture of India and its counterparts on the shores of the Mediterranean and that, for this reason alone, Indians might be considered as an ‘Eastern Division of the Indo-European race’. It went without saying, even among the most sympathetic Indophiles, that whilst the European branch of this race had flourished, the Indian had withered. Celtic philologists detected similarities between Welsh and Sanskrit. The remote possibility of distant ties, even kinship between the ancient Celts and the Indians, persuaded Welsh scholars to invite Dwarkanath Tagore, a celebrated Bengali businessman and philanthropist, to be their guest of honour at the 1842 Eisteddfod.3
Tagore had been effusively welcomed throughout Britain. He had chatted to Queen Victoria and been made a freeman of London and Edinburgh. Although he wore Indian costume and smoked a hookah, Tagore was recognised by his hosts as living proof of how British enlightenment could transform India for the better. Educated at a British school in Calcutta, he was successively a tax official, cotton merchant, newspaper proprietor and entrepreneur with interests in coal, sugar and commercial docks. Men of his stamp could be found running businesses in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, where they devoted their spare time and money to works of improvement. Tagore too had a well-developed sense of his public obligations, for he had diverted some of his profits to charity, founding a medical college. He was also, in a distinctly middle-class, British manner, a man of humane and liberal persuasions, having been among those who had advised Bentinck to proceed with the abolition of sati. Tagore, a high-principled anglophile (he chose to retire to Surrey, where he died in 1846) demonstrated that the Indian mind could be recast in a British mould.
Thackeray was sceptical about Indians ever cultivating ‘the sterling virtues of our middle classes’, which, he thought, were a peculiar product of Protestantism and liberalism, both of which were lacking in India. He did, however, praise the villagers of India who were ‘a gentle, social and amiable race; in contrast to the British urban masses, who were slaves to drunkenness and gross debauchery’.4 The hackneyed stereotype of the quietist In
dian was trotted out in Chamber’s Information for the People, published weekly during 1842 at one and a half pence (less than lp) and designed for working-class readers in search of self-improvement. Indians were ‘a simple race, and little inclined to war and unconcerned as to who ruled them. Presently a “more or less barbarous people”, they had once manifested the symptoms of civilisation, and even a knowledge of some science.’ The British Raj was a blend of altruism and selfishness: ‘The only advantages which we receive from our occupation of these immense countries are control over trade, which can be developed by cultivation of order and peace.’ This commerce was worth nearly £4 million a year and, thanks to land taxes, India needed no subsidies, unlike other colonies.5 These facts, augmented by sheaves of statistics drawn from Company reports, formed the British working man’s picture of India. There were also the propaganda tracts of the missionary societies which, predictably, painted a bleak picture of a people beguiled by priests and sunk in depravity.
Ignorance about India was matched by popular unconcern as to what happened there, argued Thackeray. This indifference was briefly interrupted by the two Sikh wars, which suddenly thrust India into the public consciousness. The simultaneous development of the fast overland route, cheap postage and the spread of national newspapers, particularly the weekly Illustrated London News, made it possible for these wars to be reported with a fullness, immediacy and intimacy not found in the official despatches of commanding officers. Using on-the-spot sketches and letters sent home by officers, the Illustrated London News provided a vivid coverage of the 1845–46 campaign, with engravings of commanders, Sikh soldiers and dramatic battle scenes. There was no censorship of press reports and correspondence, either in India or Britain, so soldiers writing home were free to castigate their superiors and include unflattering material in letters which their families passed on to newspapers. Describing Chillianwala, one officer observed that: ‘The loss of our guns was owing to the cowardice of ––––– [a cavalry regiment], who, you will hardly believe this, ran away from a party of [Sikh] cavalry.’ Home-letters were often the vehicle for political statements. One officer, after condemning Gough and the cheese-paring economies of the directors, urged his family to get his letter published: ‘I would like the good folks at home to be enlightened in regard to matters out here, and show them how India is governed.’6
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