India

by John Keay

  But at least there is agreement that the Great Rebellion began as a rising within the Company’s Bengal army. It was not the first. On the eve of Baksar, nearly a century earlier, the Company’s Indian sepoys had refused orders and been horribly executed by Hector Munro. In 1806 at Vellore in Tamil Nadu new regulations about uniforms and the wearing of a cap-badge of leather (always repugnant to Hindus) had prompted a violent mutiny in the Madras army. And, as noted, during the Burmese, Sind and Panjab wars sepoys had staged several mutinies when denied compensation for the loss of caste involved in serving ‘overseas’.

  In 1857, soon after Dalhousie had fanned this still simmering discontent about ‘overseas’ service, the Bengal sepoys became aware of another development which would compromise their beliefs. A new rifle was being issued for which the cartridges, which had to be rammed down the barrel, were being greased with a tallow probably containing both pigs’ fat and cows’ fat. Moreover, the cartridges had first to be bitten open with the teeth. To cow-reverencing Hindus as to pig-paranoid Muslims the new ammunition could not have been more disgusting had it been smeared with excrement; nor, had it been dipped in hemlock, could it have been more deadly to their religious prospects.

  Although the offending cartridges were quickly withdrawn, all existing cartridges immediately became suspect. So did other official issues like those of flour and cooking oil. Detected in such an underhand attempt, the British were deemed capable of adulterating anything whereby they might compromise the sepoy’s religion and so advance his conversion to Christianity. In Bengal itself a serious mutiny over the cartridges was easily suppressed in February 1857, but as the rumours and the rancour spread upcountry they multiplied and were magnified.

  The evidence for any organised incitement is unconvincing. Shared distrust was sufficient to concert action, British arrogance sufficient to incite it. At Meerut (Mirat), an important garrison town about sixty kilometres from Delhi, a particularly insensitive British command courtmartialled eighty-five troopers for refusing suspect cartridges and then publicly humiliated them in front of the entire garrison. Next day their comrades-in-arms at Meerut rose as one to free them. They also broke into the armoury and began massacring the local European community. It was early May, a hot month in a parched province. Tinder-dry, the wattle huts of the garrison and the thatched roofs of the officers’ lines ignited at the kiss of a torch.

  As a metaphor, spark and tinder would feature widely in contemporary British accounts. Meerut lit the ‘conflagration’ which then ‘spread like wildfire’ across the parched Gangetic plain and deep into the forest scrub of central India. There was no knowing where or when the ‘flames of rebellion’ would break out next; even when extinguished, they often ‘flared up’ again. By perceiving the mutiny as a natural disaster the British tried to come to terms with it. How else to explain an indiscriminate ferocity, their own as well as the enemy’s, whereby innocents and onlookers, women and children, were routinely killed to no obvious purpose?

  To the mutineers, however, the conflagration was not without purpose. From Meerut, the first insurgents headed immediately for Delhi, there to seek out the higher authority of the Mughal emperor. Bahadur Shah Zafar (or Bahadur Shah II) was eighty-two and had reigned from Shah Jahan’s Red Fort for the past twenty years, a king with neither subjects nor troops. The sudden accession of both scarcely improved his position. With his local British sponsors outwitted, outnumbered and quickly evicted from the city, and with their sepoys joining the men from Meerut, he had little choice but to endorse the insurgents’ cause. But if the insurgents did the Mughal no favours, the Mughal’s co-option transformed the insurgency. Within hours of its outbreak, a regimental mutiny had acquired the character of a political revolt whose legitimacy arguably transcended that of the regime it challenged. ‘For there is not the slightest doubt that the rebels wanted to get rid of the alien government and restore the old order of which the King of Delhi was the rightful representative.’25

  If the example of Meerut prompted a host of other military mutinies, the sanction of the Mughal invited a swarm of civilian adherents. To all who sought redress for past grievances or reassurance over future fears the rebellion now provided a lawful focus. It was the British and their local allies, principally Sikhs, Gurkhas and others from beyond the margins of arya-varta (the Aryan homeland), who were regarded as the subversives. The Sikhs in particular, long hostile to Mughal rule and lately worsted by the now mutinous Bengal army, rallied to the British cause. Meanwhile in the Panjab and elsewhere hasty British disarmament and disbandment of suspect Bengal units contributed to the sense of a faith that had been broken and an authority transferred. The enemy was no longer the British government but the entire British presence plus all those who, unless they proved otherwise, had supported it or benefited by it. The old order was being restored, the clock set back; Bahadur Shah was appointing a governing council; Awadh had erupted; Kanpur had fallen; Agra, Allahabad, Varanasi and Gwalior seethed with dissent. Instead of a dry-season conflagration, to the insurgents their uprising partook of the green renewal heralded by the god-given monsoon which in late June duly blessed their struggle.

  By then a force comprised of British, Sikh and Gurkha units had returned to the Ridge just north of Delhi. Although neither the British on the Ridge nor the insurgents in the city were actually besieged, for two months both sides engaged in the sallies, bombardments and reinforcements typical of a siege situation. Within the city, attempts to set up an administration floundered on the unruliness of the sepoys and the incompetence of the Mughal court. Many of the insurgents had dispersed elsewhere when in September the city finally fell to a British assault. The British, nevertheless, suffered heavy casualties which left them thirsting for revenge. Another indiscriminate massacre, another orgy of looting was added to Delhi’s record of woe. Two of Bahadur Shah’s sons and a grandson were shot while in custody, supposedly to thwart an escape. The emperor himself traded trial and ignominy for a few more months of an already wretched existence. Exiled to Rangoon, the last Mughal died ‘a plaything of fortune, in a foreign land, far from the country of his ancestors, unhonoured and unsung, but maybe not altogether unwept’.26

  Delhi, like the Mughal, had served its purpose. To the insurgents its loss was less disastrous than it had been to the British. Poorly armed compared to the British forces, lacking a command structure and hampered by weak communications, the rebels were ill-equipped to hold prestigious strongpoints or defend strategic frontiers. Their capabilities and their composition, now heavily diluted by irregular local militias, unruly bands of aggrieved cultivators and the firebrands of various religious and agrarian movements, were better suited to wide-ranging tactics of mobility, concentration and dispersal.

  By September 1857 it was clear that south of the Narmada river the rebellion enjoyed little support; the Madras and Bombay armies remained loyal to the British. To the north-west Sind was indifferent, Kashmir’s new maharaja supported the British, and the Panjab provided a steady stream of Sikh and Pathan recruits. In the east, Bengal itself and most of Bihar were neutralised by the prompt arrival of British troops redirected from imperial duties in China and the Persian Gulf. The rebellion thus became largely confined to the vast mid-Gangetic region which now comprises the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh together with adjacent areas of Rajasthan and Bihar.

  In the midst of this region Awadh – the recruiting ground whence a third of the mutinous Bengal army had traditionally been drawn, the erstwhile kingdom whose free-spending nawab had so recently been dispossessed, and the now-British province whose revenue system had just been so disastrously reorganised – became the main arena of revolt. Indeed in Awadh the rebellion transcended both its origin as an army mutiny and its transformation into a political revolt. It became, indeed, a genuinely populist uprising rooted in rural support. Amongst the Awadh insurgents armed retainers and rural militias outnumbered the Bengal mutineers. Lucknow now eclipsed Delhi as the military
focus of the rising; and the Nana Sahib, the adopted heir of the last peshwa, emerged to replace the Mughal as its figurehead.

  Amongst the British community in Kanpur the portly Nana Sahib had once been a popular figure. Although the loss of the peshwa’s pension gave him a grudge against the British government, his support for the insurgents seems, like that of the Mughal, to have been given with some reluctance, and his authority over the mutineers remains doubtful. He nevertheless assumed the defunct peshwa-ship and took the surrender, after a three-week siege, of the four hundred British in Kanpur. For their massacre as they boarded boats to take them downriver to Allahabad, he was technically guilty as the guarantor of their safe-conduct. But at the time passions were running high. Reports of draconian British reprisals at Varanasi were followed by news of an avenue of gibbets along the road thence to Allahabad. Retribution was advancing up the Ganga; on the riverbank at Kanpur mercy must have seemed out of place. The first shots were probably mischievous. The Nana Sahib, far from ordering the massacre, organised the rescue of some British women who were abducted during the ensuing chaos.

  They, along with other surviving women and children, perhaps two hundred in all, were then lodged under the Nana Sahib’s protection. With the avenging British forces now fast approaching from Allahabad, the intention seems to have been to use these captives as hostages. But if that was indeed the plan, it was never put into operation. Instead, as the insurgent commanders debated escape, orders were issued for the captives’ extermination. The task, so objectionable to trained soldiers, was eventually undertaken by five bazaar recruits. Two were actually butchers by trade. Their slaughterhouse methods, clumsy rather than sadistic, constituted an atrocity which would haunt the British till the end of their Indian days. For sheer barbarity this ‘massacre of the innocents’ was rivalled only by the disgusting deaths devised for dozens of equally innocent Indians by way of British reprisal.

  The Nana Sahib claimed to have been as ignorant of the second massacre as he was of the first. Along with his ablest commander, a fellow Maratha known as Tatya Topi (Tantia Topi), he escaped from Kanpur, was later reported at Lucknow, and would continue with the insurgents until he disappeared in Nepal. But, noted mainly for a louche lifestyle, he owed his celebrity less to his exploits and more to the British need for scapegoats plus Indian nationalism’s later need for heroes. Like the emperor Bahadur Shah, his importance was largely symbolic.

  Meanwhile the recapture of Kanpur had given the British a forward base from which to attempt the relief of their fellow-countrymen in Lucknow. Awadh’s spectacularly endowed capital had fallen to the insurgents at the end of June (1857), at which time about 750 European combatants, as many British Indian sepoys, and about 1400 servants, women and children had taken refuge in a fortified area around the British Residency on the outskirts of the city. Here they made a defiant stand which developed into a remarkable siege. With the first relief effort in late September serving merely to reinforce the defence, the siege lasted nearly five months. It captured the imagination of India’s entire British community, for whom Lucknow became a microcosm of the ‘mutiny’, and its saga of brave deeds, shattered hopes and ultimate redemption an enduring reminder.

  The little band in the Residency did more than make history. In a sense they made scripture, for their refuge became one of the holy places of British Imperialism and their struggle, reiterated in verse and prose, re-enacted on the stage and refought in spirit, summarised the Imperial ethos and furnished the Imperial dogma with all the apparatus of miracles and martyrs.27

  The massacre at Kanpur, or rather ‘Cawnpore’ as it was known to the British, was too shocking for polite English mention; it was banished to the sweat-soaked realm of nightmares and high fevers. But Lucknow was a soaring triumph of the spirit, eminently worth mythologising, and defiantly commemorated by the Union Jack which would fly, night and day, above the ravaged Residency for the remaining ninety years of British rule.

  To the insurgents too, Lucknow was important. The siege of the Residency provided a sustained focus for the revolt in Awadh. The longer it lasted, the more committed became both Hindu and Muslim participants and the more persuaded became the great rural taluqdars. Lucknow flourished again as a source of power and authority. A supposed son of the last nawab was enthroned, and a skeleton administration set up in his name. It lasted until March 1858 when the city finally fell to the largest British army, as opposed to Sepoy army, ever mustered in India. Suppressing the insurgency in the rest of Awadh took another year, plus a complete reversal of the 1856 land settlement. But with the fall of Lucknow and the ruthless sacking of this ‘Babylon of India’ the Great Rebellion lost all momentum.

  The final scenes of defiance occurred to the south of the Jamuna in the wilder territory, mostly under princely rule, between the Chambal and Betwa rivers. This was Bundelkhand and amongst its states was that of Jhansi, a small Maratha principality south of Scindhia’s Gwalior which had been annexed under Dalhousie’s ‘doctrine of lapse’. Lakshmi Bai, the last raja’s widow, made a strong impression on those British who took over her state. She was ‘of high character [and] much respected by everyone’; she was also comparatively young and possessed of ‘many charms’ and ‘a remarkably fine figure’. Although, like the Mughal and the Nana Sahib, she had a strong grievance against the British, she too seems to have played no part in the mutiny of the Bengal troops stationed in Jhansi. There, in a carbon copy of events in Kanpur, the small British community had sought refuge in the local fort but soon accepted proposals for its evacuation. They then straggled out under what they thought was a safe-conduct and were promptly massacred. Again Lakshmi Bai may have been innocent. She blamed the mutinous troops and insisted that she too had been their victim, having been forced to part with funds and her few guns. The mutineers then marched off to Agra and Delhi leaving her implicated and defenceless.

  No British troops were available to deal with this comparatively minor affair, but the rani soon found herself challenged both by a rival claimant to her husband’s defunct title and by the neighbouring rajput rajas of Datia and Orchha. When the latter invaded Jhansi, supposedly on behalf of the British, she began raising troops and herself led them in repulsing the assault. This was in September and October 1857. It is notable that the rani’s considerable military reputation was first acquired fighting not the British but local rivals and that, though her forces were drawn largely from elements who had aligned themselves with the Rebellion, in her correspondence she continued to protest her fidelity to the British. In effect old dynastic scores were being settled and new opportunities exploited under cover of the Rebellion.

  The situation changed in early 1858 with the northward advance of a section of the British Bombay army. Having received no encouragement from her various letters to the British, the rani and her advisers rightly assumed that her reassertion of Jhansi’s sovereignty was threatened and her own safety in danger. Now, if not earlier, she definitely became reconciled to rebellion and established contact with Tatya Topi, the Nana Sahib’s protégé who had established himself at Kalpi on the Jamuna. When the British laid siege to Jhansi in March, Tatya came to her aid but was repulsed. After a ferocious resistance led by Lakshmi Bai herself, Jhansi fell; but of its fearless commander, ‘the Jezebel of India’ as a fanciful British writer called her,28 there was no sign. In one of those hair’s-breadth escapes so dear to Maratha folklore, she slipped out in disguise with a trusty band of followers and rode hard for Kalpi.

  Thereabouts the combined insurgents were again worsted, but on 1 June 1858 they responded with the boldest move of the whole Rebellion. Just when the British thought they had finally dislodged them from Bundelkhand, Lakshmi Bai and Tatya Topi seized Gwalior. As Scindia’s capital and still the greatest natural stronghold in India, Gwalior was well-chosen for a final stand. Scindia himself, while remaining loyal to the British, had been pretending sympathy for the insurgents as a way of detaining the large body of mutinous troops bas
ed in Gwalior. An appeal in the name of the peshwa, Scindia’s one-time superior in the Maratha hierarchy, failed to sway him; but it did serve to disabuse his troops. With their collaboration, Tatya Topi and the rani entered the city, paid their forces from its accumulated riches, and duly ensconced themselves on central India’s ‘Heights of Abraham’.

  This tableau, so dear to nationalist lore, lasted barely three weeks. It ended when Lakshmi Bai died the death of the heroine she undoubtedly was. While riding round the ramparts, she was hit by a spray of bullets as the British launched their first assault. She was cremated nearby, ‘the only man among the rebels’ according to one of her British adversaries. Three days later the citadel fell and with it the last attempt at concerted action by the insurgents. Tatya and his followers would roam through Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh for another year of improbable and much-embellished escapades before he was betrayed, captured and executed. Meanwhile the Nana Sahib and the rump of the Awadh insurgents were penned ever closer to the Nepalese border. By 1860 even these ‘embers’ had been doused or dispersed. Their cause was anyway hopeless, not least because many of the grievances on which it rested had by then been addressed.

  Measured in terms of concessions the Great Rebellion was far from being a disaster for the insurgents. Obviously the British made sure that military vulnerability would never again be the undoing of the Raj. By 1863 the Indian component in the Bengal, Bombay and Madras armies had been reduced by about 40 per cent and the British component increased by nearly 50 per cent. This gave an Indian – British ratio of less than 3:1, which was henceforth considered the bare minimum; in 1857 it had been more like 9:1. No Indian troops were now given artillery training; recruitment was increasingly switched from Awadh and Bihar to the Panjab and marginal hill regions whose supposedly ‘martial peoples’ were deemed more reliable and less paranoid about caste-loss; at the same time deployment was so organised as to avoid a concentration anywhere of units with the same composition. Rapid expansion of the railway system and of the telegraph further precluded the danger of mutiny. The 250 kilometres of track laid by 1856 had become 6400 by 1870 and sixteen thousand by 1880. Moreover in 1869 the opening of the Suez Canal slashed journey times between Europe and India, while the 1870 completion of an overland telegraph link brought closer co-ordination of imperial policies and more supervision from London.