There is sympathy for the ryots, expressed in a round-about way in a passage during which one character relates the story of a hard-dealing collector:
. . . often did the poor ryot sigh for the day back again when he was taxed by the Mussulman, he at any rate spent his exactions among them, and planted trees, sunk wells, and allowed they were better than beasts.
Contradicting this, Villars later observes of Muslim-ruled Oudh (Awadh) that the peasantry were ‘victimised by those devils in human forms, native civil officials’. In the end, the author comes down very strongly in favour of British rule which, for all its faults, is just and incorruptible. ‘From the sahib . . . justice is obtainable, but from our own people just the reverse. From the native magistrate to the jail daroga, all take bribes.’23
This justification of the Raj prepares readers for Villars’s dinner-party confrontation with Mr Jones, the local Liberal MP and a ‘vulgar brute’. He stands for John Bright, the Birmingham MP and self-appointed voice of the non-conformist conscience, and his opinions echo those expressed by Bright during the Commons India debate in July 1858. Like Bright, Jones is solely concerned with how much Lancashire cotton the Indians will purchase and he dismisses its government as overbearing and belligerent. Villars defends the Raj as humane and honest, but fails to change a low commercial mind which sees the world only in terms of profits and losses. The row gives Villars the chance to take a side-swipe at recent press criticisms of the Indian government, its officials and generals. ‘So long as we govern India,’ he insists, ‘it is improper for England to let the ruled know that their rulers are infamous.’
III
The intensity of public agitation rendered it impossible for editors and politicians not to seek scapegoats. When it was not demanding Indian blood, the public was casting about for someone to blame for a calamity which had taken everyone in India and Britain unawares. There was a close analysis of the actions of individuals, in which the Meerut commanders, Carmichael Smyth and Hewitt, came off badly, and rightly so. Thinly disguised, they appeared in a mocking verse in Punch:
The idiots stood gazing while cities were blazing,
And all they could do was gibber and gape.24
It was less than a year since the end of the Crimean war and memories were fresh of the chapter of blunders which had marked its opening stages. It was still open-season for ageing, slow-witted generals and Company bureaucrats bound in red tape. The Times had some wicked fun at the expense of General Lloyd, the ‘gouty old general’ who mismanaged the disarmament of sepoys at Dinajpur. Lloyd indignantly riposted that gout had not impaired his judgement and that a bandaged foot was no impediment to active command.25
There was much political mileage in the Mutiny for the Tory opposition. This was the era of the Whig–Liberal ascendancy which stretched from 1846, when the Tories had split over the Corn Laws, until 1874, when they won their first general election for over thirty years. Stuck in the wilderness, the Tories were grateful for any opportunity to discountenance the government, and the Mutiny offered one. The former Governor-General, Lord Ellenborough, opened the assault on the government on 13 July, accusing ministers of an ostrich-like complacency over the news from India. The following day, Disraeli pressed the Prime Minister, Palmerston, for details of the revolt and hinted that the Cabinet was deliberately withholding embarrassing information.26
A full-scale attack on the government’s policy was launched by Disraeli in a three-hour speech delivered on 27 July. It was a characteristically sharp-edged performance, which began with a challenge to government to declare publicly whether the Mutiny was a soldiers’ rebellion or a national insurrection. Disraeli plumped for the latter and claimed that the sepoys were the ‘exponents of general discontent’. Its sources were obvious: the abandonment of sound, practical policies and the misapplication of the principles of Whiggery to the government of India:
In olden days, and for a considerable time – indeed, until, I would say the last ten years – the principle of our government of India, if I may venture to describe it in a sentence, was to respect Nationality.27
This had gone by the board. Reforms had been thrust upon the Indians, irrespective of whether they needed or wanted them. The authority of the princes had been devalued and their lands and privileges had been snatched from them by Dalhousie’s policies of lapse and annexation. Having trampled on the rights of property, the reformers tampered with religion and had offended the sensibilities of Hindus with laws which overturned their customs of inheritance. The Company had forfeited its right to rule India and its place should be taken by the Queen, who would publicly pledge that her government would safeguard property, uphold established traditions, protect native faiths and honour treaties. It went unsaid that the Tory approach to India, with its respect for ancient and well-loved hierarchies and usages, would not have brought the Company to its present position. Disraeli’s charges were lamely rebutted by Robert Vernon Smith, a mediocre hack who held the presidency of the Board of Control, who insisted that there was no widespread disaffection in India. The lobby fodder then did as they were bid and the government emerged with a majority of 124.
The damage had been done, although Disraeli was accused of scoring political points from a catastrophe whose exact compass was not yet fully known. Nonetheless, his indictment had been convincing and the Company’s reputation had been indelibly tarnished. On 15 August, Punch published a cartoon which showed ‘John Company’ being fired from a cannon, mutineer-style, with fragments labelled ‘Avarice’, ‘Misgovernment’, ‘Nepotism’, ‘Blundering’, and ‘Supineness’. Press criticism gathered momentum as reports of the setbacks during the summer and autumn began to reach Britain. The Company became the scapegoat for the Mutiny and would soon undergo a metamorphosis into a sacrificial calf. Its ‘extravagantly centralising policy’ and reforms which had pleased the high-minded in Britain and looked good on paper had been a recipe for disaster, according to the conservative Saturday Review. Furthermore, great harm had been done by the religious zeal of officers’ wives, especially ‘a Scottish Free-Kirk woman’, presumably the Mrs Mackenzie whose memoirs had appeared three years before.28
The churches defended themselves by a series of offensives designed to show that there had been too few Christian influences in India rather than too many. This theme was woven into many of the sermons preached on 7 October, with robust claims that the Company’s misfortunes owed everything to its even-handedness in religious matters. Canon J. G. Miller detected God’s will behind the conquest of India and regretted that the government had not attempted to convert the sepoys. Praising the humanity of British government, Canon Stowell hoped that when the Mutiny had been crushed, mass conversion would follow:
This is the revenge I covet – that every idol should be caste to the moles and the bats, every pagoda changed into a house of prayer, every Mahommedan mosque into a temple of the living God.29
An anonymous hymnist had the same vision, and portrayed those who had been killed in the war as proto-martyrs:
O may their blood, by Satan shed,
Our Holy watchword be,
In turning, by Thy Spirit led,
A pagan race to Thee!30
The religious establishment held its ground, as might be expected in an age which believed that Christianity and civilisation were inseparable, and when few would dare suggest that there were admirable elements of spirituality within Islam and Hinduism. The Company was unable either to stifle or resist the growing criticism of its record. At the end of 1857, Palmerston had decided to end the Company’s government and replace it by the Crown. His Indian legislation died with his ministry on 18 February 1858, after a Commons defeat on an anti-terrorist measure which the John Bullish majority regarded as appeasement of the French.
A minority Tory ministry succeeded, headed by the Earl of Derby, with Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was quick to restore old principles to the Indian administration: Canning was sharply and pu
blicly rebuked for his seizure of taluqdar estates in Awadh, which both infringed the rights of property and made bad political sense, for in future the Raj would need the friendship of the land-owning classes. Henceforward, the British government ‘desired to see British authority in India rest upon a willing obedience of a contented people. There cannot be contentment where there is general confiscation.’
Public opinion was now behind measures to terminate Company rule and re-order the government of India. This was accomplished by the India Act, which was passed during the spring and early summer, guided through the Commons by Disraeli. Henceforward, there were two sources of executive power: the Secretary of State for India, who answered to Parliament, and the Viceroy, who oversaw everyday administration and law-making in Calcutta. Here, he presided over a sort of cabinet, comprising the heads of the Indian departments of states such as finance, and co-opted councillors, including Indian princes. Under the Viceroy was the familiar, layered pyramid of Indian government, with its hierarchy of presidency and provincial governors, collectors, commissioners, deputy commissioners, assistant commissioners, judges, magistrates, assistant magistrates, police superintendents and inspectors and the legion of Indian clerks and tax gatherers. All were now servants of the Crown and, in theory, their every action was subject to Parliamentary scrutiny, although Indian business was usually conducted before an all-but-empty chamber.
The new order would continue the work in the spirit of the old, but with a greater sensitivity to the feelings of its subjects. On 1 November 1858 the temper and aims of the new state was made known to Indians through the Queen’s proclamation, which was read aloud, in various languages, in all the main cities and towns. Queen Victoria promised that her government would treat all its subjects equally, uphold the rights of the princes and respect all the religions of India. Rebels who surrendered before 1 January 1859 would be automatically pardoned unless they had been involved in massacres. A line was being drawn between the past and future. The Raj may have been severely jolted by the mutiny, but its servants’ ideals were as strong as ever. Programmes of reform in education and recruitment (by competitive examination) begun in 1854 and 1856 went ahead. In a statement which could have been made at any time during the past fifty years and would be repeated, in various forms, for the next fifty, the Edinburgh Review reminded its readers that it was ‘the glorious destiny of England to govern, to civilise, to educate and to improve the innumerable tribes and races whom Providence had placed beneath her sceptre’.31
The Mutiny had been a dire warning as to what might occur when that sceptre disappeared. As the Whig Lord Brougham had told an audience of working men in the Leeds Mechanics Institute in November 1857, if India was ever lost, Britain would ‘abandon millions to the most cruel of fates – the anarchy, the rapine, and the bloodshed of their contending chiefs and tyrants’.32 He had in mind an aspect of the Mutiny which was less well known in Britain: the outbreaks of rural insurgency that had followed the disappearance of British authority. The mass of first-hand accounts, histories and commentaries which poured from the presses during 1858 and 1859 said little about the disorders in the countryside. Where they were mentioned, they were ascribed to the recidivism of the Indian equivalent of the British criminal underclass, a mob which, in India, would break loose ‘when the hangman’s whip no longer menaces them’.33 Military men were the chief historians of the Mutiny and they stuck to the thesis that it had been a war between the Company and its former soldiers. This convinced large sections of the public who, like the editor of the National Review, insisted that the Indian peasantry had been unwavering in their loyalty because they understood that the Raj protected them.34
This had not been the case, but few realised it. ‘This is no mutiny now we are contending with, but a desperate rebellion,’ Richard Cust wrote in his diary as he traversed southern Awadh in March 1858.35 A few months later, an indigo planter from Aligarh told a Commons select committee that Indians ‘look on our hold of the country as ephemeral’. Another witness, a former magistrate from eastern Bengal, remarked sadly that ‘the Europeans were most popular in those parts where they were least known’.36 Coupled with the evidence of the upheavals that followed the collapse of the Raj’s civil authority, these comments indicated that the government was not universally loved and that its temporary departure had been welcomed by sections of a peasantry whom it had expressly claimed to safeguard.
This message had penetrated the sub-conscious of the official mind. What might be called the subsidiary, civil uprisings served as a warning which was well understood by India’s rulers for the next ninety years. Even in tranquil times, the Raj could not be strong everywhere. There was a constant fear that failure to act swiftly and vigorously whenever trouble threatened was to invite more, perhaps on a scale which might prove unmanageable. This nervousness lay behind the Punjabi government’s reactions to the disturbances in the province during the spring of 1919, when force was applied with the utmost ferocity. Throughout the emergency and afterwards, everyone in authority cited the Mutiny as an example of what might follow inertia or half measures. Neither was apparent in the Punjab where, under the orders of its governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, rioters were strafed and bombed by aircraft and fired on by soldiers – most infamously at Amritsar, where 379 were killed and several hundreds wounded.
In justification of these measures, the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, later wrote:
At any moment the trouble might have spread to the United Provinces and the remaining provinces; at any moment the Army might have gone, and once they had gone we should have had a state of things which would have been infinitely more serious than the Mutiny of 1857. You must remember that it was the initial indecision in the Mutiny which led to its widespread nature. [My italics.]37
As to the nature of the unrest, Chelmsford believed that, again as in 1857, it would prove impossible to uncover the ‘real truth’.38 Be that as it may, the Mutiny had left behind a legacy of paranoia which, in the passage of time, lost nothing of its power to make the flesh creep. In 1918, young British subalterns, fresh to India, were given a solemn lecture on the Mutiny by a senior officer which ended with a warning that history might repeat itself if they were not vigilant. One in the audience wondered whether the speaker had heard the same talk many years before, perhaps from an eyewitness.39
Conspiracy theories offered a comforting explanation as to why the British, like the Americans at Pearl Harbor, had been taken by surprise and briefly humiliated. The credulous, including Disraeli, wondered whether the Russians had had a hand in preparing the ground for the rebellion, but speculation along these lines collapsed for lack of evidence. Another blind alley was the theory that the Mutiny had been the product of a vast Muslim plot. This was superficially attractive; after all, the mutineers had restored the Mughal emperor and had been egged on by various maulavis who had preached anti-British and anti-Christian jihads. Reluctant and ambiguous confessions made after the event by a handful of Indians convinced the Mutiny historian Colonel G. B. Malleson that there had been a secret, countrywide masterplan for simultaneous uprising across India. It went awry, so he was told, when the Meerut mutineers jumped the gun.40
This was implausible on the grounds that, like everyone else in India, the Muslims were divided by the Mutiny. A wahabi, member of a strict Islamic sect, forewarned the authorities of imminent unrest in Patna in July 1857.41 Defiantly anti-British Muslim communities in the foothills of the North-West Frontier refused to make common cause with mutineers from the 55th NI, whom they expelled from their villages.42 Muslim cavalrymen in the Madras army were reported as solidly behind the government in August 1857, and that their ‘good treatment secures the loyalty of a large number of Mahomedan families’ who were glad for their sons to secure well-paid and honourable employment.43 The Mutiny had not been the product of Muslim intrigue, but this has not prevented historians in modern Pakistan from attempting to portray it as a Muslim national uprising.44
&nb
sp; It was inevitable that twentieth-century Indian nationalists looked back to the Mutiny for inspiration, a process which involved transforming widespread rejection of the Raj into a positive affirmation of a national will. In 1908, a Bengali nationalist called on his fellows to celebrate 10 May, the anniversary of the Meerut disturbances, as a reminder of the first campaign of the war of Independence. Oh! Martyrs, a pamphlet then current, invoked the ghost of Bahadur Shah and promised him that ‘your Diamond Jubilee [1917] shall not pass without seeing your wishes fulfilled and the Raj overthrown’.45 In 1942 the first women’s regiment of the Indian National Army was named after the Rani of Jhansi, no doubt in the hope that its members would be enthused with her Amazonian spirit.
There was a British as well as Indian mythology of the Mutiny. Even before it had ended it had become fixed in the national psyche as an epic struggle between good and evil, with the good, often surrounded and outnumbered, sustained by courage and Christian faith. The Union Jack which had fluttered over the Lucknow residency was both a token of national willpower and a beacon of civilisation. It was transformed into a token of British determination to rule India, and its successors flew over the residency until 15 August l947, when, after a row with local nationalists, it was finally hauled down. Havelock, Nicholson, Sir Henry and Sir John Lawrence and Campbell, ennobled in 1858 as Lord Clyde, took their places in the pantheon of imperial superheroes. Their perfect blend of Christian manliness, love of country and willingness to persevere against the odds made them ideal models for future generations of empire-builders.
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