‘People may say that it was a cruel execution, but it was a necessity, and everyone felt that the sternest discipline was required to repress every and any attempt to rise on the part of so large a body of mutinous troops who had been coerced by a comparatively small number of Europeans, while any vacillation or weakness shown by our chiefs would have precipitated a rising.’32
* * *
While the use of gallows hill and gibbeting had long been abandoned in Britain, hangings and bodies left for public display were becoming a very common sight in northern India in 1857. In August, Gordon spent three days in the cantonment at Sialkot, during which time he witnessed five ‘rebelliously inclined’ locals being executed.33 ‘The sight of the gallows,’ Gordon claimed, ‘with a very moderate use of it, proved a most effective means of restoring order.’34 There was however, nothing moderate about the British use of the gallows to exact retributive justice, as even the semi-official historian, John W. Kaye, admitted:
‘Already our military officers were hunting down criminals of all kinds, and hanging them up with as little compunction as though they had been pariah-dogs, or jackals, or vermin of a baser kind. […] Volunteer hanging parties went out into the districts, and amateur executioners were not wanting to the occasion. One gentleman boasted of the numbers he had finished off quite “in an artistic manner,” with mango-trees for gibbets and elephants for drops, the victims of this wild justice being strung up, as though for pastime, in “the form of a figure of eight.”’35
Who exactly the so-called ‘criminals’ were, was of course a moot point. Officers like Nicholson were attributed with the singular ability to distinguish between run-away sepoys and hapless villagers, to separate the guilty from the innocent. In reality, however, this was little more than a convenient myth and colonial retribution was largely indiscriminate. British officials acted as if the mutinies in the Bengal Army regiments, and the outbreak at various stations, had been personal attacks on themselves.36 Accordingly, it was in many instances virtually impossible to draw a clear line between the military suppression of mutiny, legal punishment, or revenge and mindless slaughter. For the British, the horrors and moral threat of the uprising was embodied in the image of white women ravaged by Indian men. Indian rebels were accordingly dealt with as if they were each and every one a murderous rapist, and as if they all had the fresh blood of European children on their hands. The fate of the sepoys of the 26th BNI, who, as mentioned above, killed their officers at Mean Meer, is a case in point. The regiment, which had already been disarmed, consisted of about 600 men who fled from the Lahore area, and headed north-east, possibly towards Kashmir.37 Pursued by local police and villagers, they were soon cornered at the Ravi River, where about 150 of them were either shot or driven into the water and drowned. Trapped on an island, much as the Sialkot rebels had been at Trimmu Ghat, the remaining 282 fugitives eventually surrendered to Deputy Commissioner Frederic Cooper, who had arrived from Amritsar, in charge of the local Sikh levies. Cooper had the prisoners marched back to a small town called Ajnala, where the hapless sepoys were locked up inside some old buildings for the night. At daybreak next morning, 1 August 1857, the prisoners were taken out in batches of ten to a nearby abandoned well that Cooper had discovered:
‘Instantly a party of 10 Seikhs moved up within one yard, fired at their hearts, and in one moment they were launched into eternity. Bodies with the slightest signs of life in them were despatched by sowars and flung into the pit (Pandeys, Tewarrys, Brahmins and Mussulman) by the sweepers of the village.’38
Those who refused to walk to their executions, were dragged by ropes tied to their feet and shot on the ground.39 This went on for several hours, and by 10am, after some of the Sikh levies who served as executioners had collapsed, 237 of the prisoners had been killed. When the last remaining prisoners refused to leave their temporary prison it was discovered that they had in fact died. As Cooper laconically noted: ‘Forty-five were dragged out of their place of confinement, from combined hunger, fright, exhaustion, and their anticipated sentence. Their bodies were consigned to the sweepers to be cast into the pit…’40 In the course of just forty-eight hours, Cooper later gloated, ‘there fell by the law nearly 500 men.’41 The well where the bodies had been disposed of was covered up and Cooper intended for it to serve as a deterrent against other outbreaks; he even had the audacity to claim that the local spectators to the slaughter at Ajnala ‘marvelled at the clemency and the justice of the British.’42 In reference to the well at Cawnpore, where the slaughtered European women and children had been dumped by Nana Sahib’s henchmen, Cooper proudly proclaimed that ‘There is a well at Cawnpore, but there is also one at Ajnala!’43
Cooper’s infamous line emphasised the deliberate mirroring of violence that took place during the uprising. Indian violence was not only seen to legitimise British retribution, it also shaped the forms and functions of colonial retributive violence.44 When Cooper subsequently described the events at Ajnala in his memoirs, he did so with an unmistakable sense of achievement:
‘The above account, written by the principal actor in the scene himself, might read strangely at home: a single Anglo-Saxon, supported by a section of Asiatics, undertaking so tremendous a responsibility, and coldly presiding over so memorable an execution, without the excitement of battle, or a sense of individual injury, to imbue the proceedings with the faintest hue of vindictiveness. The Governors of Punjab are of the true English stamp and mould, and knew that England expected every man to do his duty, and that duty done, thanks them warmly for doing it. The crime was mutiny, and had there even been no murders to darken the memory of these men, the law was exact. The punishment was death.’45
Conscious of the fact that his actions left him vulnerable to accusations that he had acted out of fear or revenge, Cooper presented an explicitly racialised portrayal, if not a caricature, of the embattled colonial officer carrying out his horrible duty in a dispassionate manner and without ever losing his head.46 This was part of the narrative built around figures such as Nicholson, as a sort of Victorian myth of righteous vengeance, which allowed the British to glory in their own ability to inflict violence without emotion or hesitation. This was the proverbial ‘stiff upper lip’ at its most colonial and most brutal.47
Cooper furthermore invoked an absolute notion of ‘the law’, almost like Kipling later did in the Jungle Book, to justify what was in effect indiscriminate slaughter.48 The British in India of course had a long history of enshrining exceptions and emergencies within the law; the legislation used to suppress the ‘Thugs’ during the 1830s, for instance, had been little more than the legalisation of the ad hoc measures already deployed outside the formal jurisdiction of the East India Company territories.49 Martial law had been passed in several of the key regions of northern India in May 1857, and a spate of subsequent emergency acts had granted civilian officials almost unlimited powers to punish and execute rebels, on the spot and without legal process.50 However, considering the de facto collapse of British authority in large parts of northern India in 1857, and the brutality and bitterness with which the conflict was being fought, this attempt at keeping reprisals within the bounds of law was in practice meaningless. Through their indiscriminate violence, British officials and civilians had already invoked the right to deploy such force, and the legislation did little more than provide a semblance of legality to unfettered retribution.51 Although his superiors in the Punjab Administration supported Cooper’s actions, he was pointedly ordered to refrain from any further executions: ‘You have had slaughter enough.’52
By the end of the summer of 1857, various measures by the British authorities sought to reign in some of the most excessive violence, including the resolution to distinguish between degrees of culpability among mutineers, which earned the governor general the nickname of ‘Clemency Canning’. Indiscriminate and summary punishment, however, was never simply replaced by due process and the rule of law. The trial of Bahadur Shah, for instance, took
place within a strictly legal framework, even though the British were, technically speaking vassals of the Mughal Emperor.53 Yet at the very same time that the Emperor was apprehended, his two eldest sons had simply been gunned down by their captor, Major Hodson, after they had surrendered. ‘I am not cruel,’ Hodson noted, ‘but I confess I did rejoice at the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches.’54 Formal executions and frenzied lynching often took place side by side and were in many instances quite indistinguishable—as Cooper’s actions at Ajnala revealed.
The scale of the violence, and the ubiquity of death, was unlike anything any British had previously experienced and it left an indelible mark in contemporary accounts. One of these was Lieutenant V.D. Majendie’s published narrative from, 1859, Up Against the Pandies, which included a remarkable passage touching on this very subject:
‘It is rather startling when enjoying a quiet country ride to come suddenly upon a body writhing in its last agonies, or hanging lifeless before you—it somewhat abruptly breaks off your train of peaceful thought, and pleasant reveries of home—and I must plead guilty to something very like a revulsion of feeling, when, sauntering along one evening, and coming upon a moderately large green, which my truant fancy immediately metamorphosed into a village green in England, I became suddenly aware that there was swinging before me, not the signboard of the “Green Dragon” or “Marquis of Granby,” but the pinioned lifeless corpse of a Sepoy, which a native policeman, tulwar in hand, was guarding. The man had not been dead long, and his face, over which there was no cap or covering, was as quiet as though he had been asleep; but the silence, and the absence of any mortal beings but my companion, the policeman, and myself—the dreary, listless way in which the body kept on swinging, and swaying, and turning to and fro—the arms—what deeds of wrong and murder may not those arms have done—now pinioned as if in mockery of the helplessness of death, made the scene a sombre one enough—sombre, and that was all; for no feeling of sorrow, pity, or remorse for the fiends who, falling into our hands after a bloody and treacherous career, meet the death which is so justly their due, can ever be roused, I should think, in an Englishman’s breast. This very man now swinging before us may have dabbled those pinioned hands in women’s blood, or the golden tresses of a child may have been wound round those fingers, while the other hand grasped the knife which was to sacrifice it: those eyes may have looked into the trusting blue eyes of a poor little baby, and seen it smile on him and on the sharp steel, in its innocence, and yet that smile may have failed to rouse his pity. Faugh! let us be off, such sort of reflections are not pleasant, but they are apt, my friends, to occur to one on such occasions.’55
In this small vignette, the author, almost unknowingly, reveals just how troubling it was for the British to justify their own violence. Any uncomfortable hints of empathy were shrugged off and briskly banished by the feverish invocation of the monstrous crimes ascribed to the hanged. The British could not allow themselves to recognise, even for a moment, any trace of humanity in the people they were killing by the hundreds and thousands every single day. Instead, they doubled down on the effort to pursue those rebels who had so far escaped colonial justice.
9
A PURSUING DESTINY
In his short story, ‘The Lost Legion’, first published in 1892, Rudyard Kipling described the tragic fate of a regiment of mutinous sepoys in 1857:
‘When the Indian Mutiny broke out, and a little time before the siege of Delhi, a regiment of Native Irregular Horse was stationed at Peshawur on the frontier of India. That regiment caught what John Lawrence called at the time “the prevalent mania” and would have thrown in its lot with the mutineers, had it been allowed to do so. The chance never came, for, as the regiment swept off down south, it was headed off by a remnant of an English corps into the hills of Afghanistan, and there the tribesmen, newly conquered by the English, turned against it as wolves turn against buck. It was hunted for the sake of its arms and accoutrements from hill to hill, from ravine to ravine, up and down the dried beds of rivers and round the shoulders of bluffs, till it disappeared as water sinks in the sand—this officerless, rebel regiment.’1
The main inspiration for this story was John Nicholson’s pursuit of the 55th BNI, which fled from Multan into the Swat region where they were annihilated by local tribesmen. If the ‘Mutiny’ was synonymous with the massacres of innocent Europeans, in the British imagination, its aftermath was encapsulated in the image of rebels mercilessly pursued into the mountains.2 Hunting down these fugitives was not simply a matter of suppressing an uprising and reasserting colonial authority. Meek calls for restraint, or the insistence of proper trials, were met with angry denouncements by those men on the spot who believed people back home had no true appreciation of the villainy of the rebels, as one missionary described it:
‘I never saw or heard of men to whom, more appropriately or deservingly than to the Sepoys and their chief, could be applied the terrible character given by the Holy Spirit, when he so fully describes those whose profanity, crimes, and riot, exhibit them “as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed.” 2 Peter ii, 12. They were men who neither knew nor showed mercy, any more than would be exhibited by the tigers of their own jungles.’3
Literally dehumanised, Indian rebels could be hunted and killed like wild beasts with complete impunity—and the blessing of the Bible. The rallying cry of ‘Remember Cawnpore!’, or stories such as those of the murder of Jane Hunter and her baby, imposed a moral obligation to bring the ‘villains’ to justice at any cost. As long as rebels ‘lurked in the hills’, the ignominy suffered by the British had not been righted, and the wound of the ‘Mutiny’ could not be healed. The ‘Sepoy hunt’ that ensued after Trimmu Ghat, was accordingly imbued with a strong sense of moral purpose.4
Once the situation at Sialkot had been brought under control, McMahon was despatched with some of the mounted police and Sikh levies to intercept any stragglers or mutineers who might double back after Nicholson had cut them off. The presence of troops south of Sialkot would furthermore send a signal to the local population who might have come to doubt the strength of British rule after more than a thousand rebels had passed through the area.5 On his way to the Ravi River, McMahon, however, received the news of the final rout of the sepoys on 16 June, and he thus changed course and skirted along the Jammu border in the hope of intercepting any fugitives from Trimmu Ghat.6 It soon turned out that a large group had sought refuge at Jasrota within the Jammu territory, and McMahon left his force behind and proceeded on his own with only a few sowars to accompany him.7 Kashmir and Jammu were so-called princely states within India, which retained a degree of independence from British rule and which were technically outside of British jurisdiction. The Diwan, or local official, came out to meet McMahon and after some negotiation promised to hand over the rebels. The weakening of British authority, and the general chaos of the uprising, provided local rulers with some degree of leverage in their dealings with the colonial state and rebel fugitives thus became pawns in local negotiations. This had also been the case decades earlier when East India Company officials were hunting down gangs of ‘Thugs’, or highway robbers, who resided, or had taken refuge, outside British jurisdiction. If Indian rulers played their cards well, they could receive recognition for their support, thus improving their own status and power—but, on the other hand, they could also risk antagonising the British, and ultimately lose everything if they were seen to side with the rebels. At Jasrota, seventy-eight rebels were initially handed over to McMahon who had them all immediately shot, and smaller parties subsequently handed over shared the same fate.8 Those who turned out to be camp-followers were sent to Sialkot under escort. A portion of the loot from Sialkot was also recovered, along with other valuables. In total, the Diwan handed over 1,989 rupees he had confiscated from the fugitives, 2,079 rupees were discovered on the persons of the mutineers when they were searched, and an additional 1,246 rupees were found to be in poss
ession of the camp-followers. Jewellery worth 570 rupees was also recovered, along with 105 horses and 15 camels.9 Considering that a sepoy made 84 rupees a year, while an NCO like Alum Bheg made 168, these were substantial sums of money, and they had all come from the treasury or private houses that had been plundered at Sialkot.
The breakdown of the fugitives handed over to McMahon at Jasrota is worth noting:
9th Light Cavalry 35th Native Infantry 46th Native Infantry
1 Subadar 1 Subadar 4 Subadars
2 Havildars 3 Sepoys 2 Jemadars
1 Darogah – 7 Havildars
9 Troopers – 9 Naiks
– – 2 Drummers
– – 100 Sepoys
13 4 12410
Although the sowars of the 9th had been on horseback and thus had a much greater chance of getting away, it appears their numbers had been completely annihilated during the first day of fighting at Trimmu Ghat; the four remaining men from the 35th must have deserted after their regiment was disarmed at Phillaur a month earlier. The ranks of the men of the 46th BNI, consisting of captains, lieutenants, sergeants, corporals, drummers and privates, respectively, indicate that an entire company had fled from the Ravi River as a unit. ‘The arrival of my party on the border was opportune’, McMahon later noted, ‘as the mutineers at Jusrota were daily melting away and escaping to the hills, but after the interview with the Dewan this was stopped.’11 It would seem that Alum Bheg along with other sepoys of the 46th BNI, were among those very fugitives who were ‘melting away,’ which would make it the second time in just a few days that he escaped capture in the nick of time.
Later on, smaller groups of Sialkot mutineers and camp-followers were apprehended in Chamba, near Dalhousie, and in the Kangra District, near Dharamsala.12 Those sepoys who survived disarmament and the massacres and executions that took place all over Punjab during the second half of 1857 fled across the border, into the vast and mostly unmapped wilderness that made up the foothills of the Himalayas. This inaccessible and mountainous region became a rallying point and a safe haven for rebels—albeit a temporary one. The British kept pressuring local rulers to hand over fugitives, but these requests were largely ignored. As one colonial official described it:
The Skull of Alum Bheg Page 21
