One of the few exceptions to what had become a Victorian obsession with the hunt for Indian rebels, was the correspondent William Howard Russell, who was able to empathise with the plight of the fugitives. An editorial in The Times highlighted the sober tone struck by their correspondent in his most recent communication, where he described:
‘the miserable fate of the Sealkote mutineers, wandering from province to province in the Himalayas, endeavouring to force their way into Thibet, and driven back into the hands of their masters. His anticipation of their fate, and his views on the disarmed regiments, are strangely corroborated by the miserable fate of the disarmed regiments at Mooltan, which, as if obeying an evil destiny, have broken loose, divided, and found everywhere the same utter destruction, so that not one survives.’43
Russell was here referring to the tragic end of the 55th BNI at Multan, which later served as the inspiration for Kipling’s story. But the fate of the 55th was at the same time also the story of numerous other sepoy regiments, which like the 26th that was massacred by Cooper at Ajnala, or indeed the Sialkot brigade intercepted by Nicholson at Trimmu Ghat, were all massacred. After Mr. Knox captured the last group refugees in the middle of the Himalayas, the men who had risen up at Sialkot almost a year before, had for all intents and purposes, been exterminated. By that point, however, Alum Bheg’s fate had already been sealed. Captured at Madhopur, he was taken back to Sialkot so ‘that a more formal and public example might be made,’ and here he was promptly identified as belonging to the 46th BNI.44 According to a British eyewitness, ‘one of the prisoners showed a mark of a wound in the leg, which, according to his own statement, he received at “Trimmoo Ghat Putton,” whilst engaged against Nicholson’s movable column, just twelve months ago.’45 Another prisoner, also a havildar of the 46th, was unexpectedly released when he was serendipitously recognised by one of the officers as having escorted his wife back to her house to retrieve her valuables during the outbreak.46 For Alum Bheg, though, there was no reprieve—by virtue of being an officer, even if only an NCO, he was considered a ringleader in the mutiny and as guilty of the murders of the Hunters and others as if he had himself struck the fatal blows.
10
SHARP AND SHORT AS THE CANNONS ROAR
Along with a sepoy and two young musicians from his regiment, who had also been amongst the prisoners taken at Madhopur, Alum Bheg was sentenced to death after a brief court martial on 8 July 1858.1 The musicians were only thirteen and sixteen years old, and in a much-reported act of mercy, the younger one was pardoned (the older one was not).2 Following military custom, Alum Bheg and the two others were sentenced to be executed by being blown from a cannon two days later. The fear of British artillery was deeply ingrained in the minds of Indian troops and had led to mutiny on several occasions over the past decades. Furthermore, there seems to have been a blurring between British firing on sepoys with artillery, as happened at Barrackpore in 1824, and the use of the cannon in formal executions, as occurred on such a massive scale in 1857. Whatever the exact circumstances, the fact remained that the imagery of British artillery provoked a sense of dread among Indian sepoys.
To most of the British public, the spectacle of the execution of mutinous sepoys was by then a quite familiar one. If people had not personally witnessed Indians being blown from guns, they had certainly heard about such executions through personal letters, newspaper reports, or the numerous illustrations that were disseminated throughout the Empire. One particularly graphic account was published in The Times on 3 December 1857, under the prosaic title ‘An Indian Execution’.3 The anonymous correspondent described how five sepoys were blown from the muzzle of cannons for conspiring to mutiny: ‘There was a roar […] a bank of white smoke, and a jet and shower of black fragments, sharp and clear, which leaped and bounded in the air; this and a fearful sound from the spectators, as if the reality so far exceeded all previous fancy that it was intolerable; then a dead stillness.’ As the smoke cleared, the author proceeded to inspect the scene of the execution:
‘I walked straight to the scattered and smoking floors before the guns. I came first to an arm, torn off above the elbow, the fist clinched, the bone projecting several inches, bare. Then the ground was sown with red grisly fragments, then a blackhaired head and the other arm still held together… [C]lose by lay the lower half of the body of the next, torn quite in two, and long coils of entrails twined on the ground. Then a long cloth in which one had been dressed rolled open like a floorcloth and on fire. One man lay in a complete and shattered heap, all but the arms; the legs were straddled wide apart, and the smashed body on the middle of them; the spine exposed; the head lay close by, too. The last body was that of a native officer, who was the arch fiend of the mutiny; he was a short man, with a cruel face. His head had been cut clean off, but the muscles of the neck had contracted round the throat like a frill. His face was half upturned and calm, the eyes shut. I saw no expression of pain on any of them. What had been his body lay on its face, the legs as usual not shattered, but all the flesh torn like cloth from a sharp angle in the hollow on the back, off and off, till it merged in one mangled heap. […] The troops immediately marched off, and I rode home at speed, and when I dismounted the dogs came and licked my feet.’4
At a time when most modern states had long replaced the spectacle of the scaffold with penal institutions, the British in India still had recourse to exemplary punishment through singularly brutal rites of public executions.5 The practice of execution by cannon was used by both the Marathas and the Mughals, and also appears to have been used as late as the early twentieth century in Iran and in Afghanistan.6 The physical destruction of the body had a distinct religious function within the cultural context of the Indian sub-continent, since it effectively prevented the customary funereal rites of Muslims and Hindus alike. There was accordingly a deliberate cultural specificity to the punishment, which extended beyond death. Europeans first encountered this technique during the mid-1700s, and one of the earliest recorded instances of its colonial use was when the French-Irish Count Lally executed an Indian spy near Madras in South India in 1758.7 Five years later, Major Hector Munro, who was soon to give the East India Company its first major victory in India at the Battle of Buxar, allegedly restored order amongst his Indian soldiers by blowing twenty-four mutinous sepoys from guns.8 An attempt by the rival Maratha power to ‘corrupt’ sepoys at Bombay in 1780, similarly led to one of the ringleaders being executed by cannon by the British authorities, who emphasised the deterrent aims of the spectacle:
‘We judged it highly necessary for the public safety in a case of such fatal tendency, to inflict the most exemplary punishment on the delinquent, and to make the example as striking as possible to deter others from the like attempts.’9
The use of the cannon was thus regarded as the ultimate tool of exemplary deterrence and it was in this capacity that it was deployed on such an overwhelming scale during the uprising in 1857.
The British in India conventionally favoured hangings when executing criminals or rebels. Controlling the symbolism of public executions, however, proved increasingly difficult within a colonial context, and the hanging of hundreds of ‘Thugs’ during the 1830s had fully exposed the porous nature of colonial rituals of power.10 The ‘Thugs’ signally failed to conform to the expected pattern of behaviour of condemned facing execution: One British observer noted that the night before execution ‘was passed by these men in displays of coarse and disgusting levity […] they evinced neither penitence nor remorse’, and on the way to the site of execution the following morning, the convicts continued singing their ‘unhallowed carols.’11 On the scaffold they did not confess to their crimes nor display a spirit of contrition as behoved repentant criminals facing justice. Instead the prisoners boldly climbed the scaffold and, rather than letting the low-caste executioners pollute them with their touch, tightened the noose around their own neck and then simply stepped off the platform—effectively taking command of the ri
tual that was intended to reflect their submission to the legal process of the colonial state.12 British officials had to infer (rather wistfully) the deterrent efficacy of such executions:
‘…I may venture to say that four out of five […] executed this season at Saugor have thrown themselves from the drop before it could be struck from under them with a degree of audacious impudence that has removed all doubt of their guilt from the minds of the spectators, and left in their bosoms a feeling of indignation unmixed with any degree of sympathy for their sufferings.’13
The truth is that the Indian spectators probably felt nothing of the kind. Similar to widows becoming sati by joining their husband’s body on the funeral pyre, criminals about to be executed were commonly believed to be in possession of semi-divine powers. ‘They have a superstition’ wrote one British officer, ‘that a man about to be executed imparts a sanctity to all he touches; and in a manner similar to this, he always throws flowers among the crowd, who eagerly scramble for them.’14 Prior to their execution, some ‘Thugs’ asked for money to be distributed for charity, and others wore garlands of flowers, a well-known sign of honour and respect, and were seen to be laughing and chatting with members of the crowd. The British might seek to convince themselves that these executions went according to plan. Their very own accounts, however, insisting on the public approval of colonial authority, could not hide their unease about a public ritual the symbolism of which was increasingly slipping out of their control.
* * *
In the absence of a shared cultural framework, or a popular claim to power, the British could never be certain that the ritual of public executions was intelligible to their Indian subjects. If convicted murderers could project an image of unbowed piety on the scaffold, the British were even less likely to achieve the intended effect in the execution of high-caste sepoys. During moments of crisis, such uncertainty in the very performance of power and authority was little short of disastrous. As a ‘traditional’ Indian practice, however, the use of the cannon supposedly overcame the perceived need to ‘translate’ the spectacle of execution. A contemporary British newspaper report elaborated on the cultural specificity of the spectacle enacted during the first mass-execution of sepoys at Peshawar in June 1857:
‘You must know that this is nearly the only form in which death has any terrors for a native. If he is hung, or shot by musketry, he knows that his friends or relatives will be allowed to claim his body, and will give him the funeral rites required by his religion; if a Hindoo, that his body will be burned with all due ceremonies; and if a Mussulman, that his remains will be decently interred, as directed in the Koran. But if sentenced to death in this form, he knows that his body will be blown into a thousand pieces, and that it will be altogether impossible for his relatives, however devoted to him, to be sure of picking up all the fragments of his own particular body; and the thought that perhaps a limb of some one of a different religion to himself might possibly be burned or buried with the remainder of his own body, is agony to him.’15
British retributions during 1857 infamously targeted the very issues that had precipitated the mutiny of the sepoys of the Bengal Army—their religious and ritual purity. Colonial knowledge was accordingly turned against colonial subjects in a form of spiritual warfare that transcended mere physical punishment. In the aftermath of the Cawnpore Massacres, for instance, the British General James Neill earned notoriety for forcing captured rebels to clean up the blood at the site of the massacre of European women and children before being hanged. According to Neill ‘To touch blood is most abhorrent to the high caste natives; they think by doing so they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so. My object is to inflict a fearful punishment for a revolting, cowardly, barbarous deed, and to strike terror into these rebels.’16 As had been the case in the executions of ‘Thugs’ decades earlier, low-caste executioners were deliberately used to ensure that the punishment was made as culturally offensive as possible. Even transportation to the newly established penal colony of the Andaman Islands, was intended as a particularly effective form of punishment for Indians:
‘Our word transportation conveys no idea of the horror with which this punishment is regarded by the natives. They submit to death with the resignation of fatalists, but transportation for life to a West Indian island would be regarded by them as an intolerable evil. The spectacle of successive gangs of chained convicts, in which the Brahmin and the Rajpoot would be linked to the Goojur and the Sweeper, going down the country on their way to hopeless banishment in the unknown regions of the West […] would make an impression upon the native mind which would never be effaced.’17
It is in fact possible to talk about an ‘Orientalisation’ of colonial violence during 1857 as British retribution deliberately exploited Indians’ fears of ritual pollution. Russell very clearly recognised this and was among the very few who denounced the colonial violence he witnessed in India:
‘All these kinds of vindictive, unchristian, Indian torture, such as sewing Mahomedans in pig-skins, smearing them with pork-fat before execution, and burning their bodies, and forcing Hindus to defile themselves, are disgraceful, and ultimately recoil on ourselves. They are spiritual and mental tortures to which we have no right to resort, and which we dare not perpetrate in the face of Europe.’18
Where such retribution would indeed have been unthinkable in conflicts against white people, the perceived need to reassert racial hierarchies during a time of crisis made such violence both permissible and seemingly indispensable.
The British ultimately assumed that violence was the only language Indians understood and the mass-executions by cannon enacted this particular logic in a highly systematic manner. The rebels were treated as an undifferentiated mass and the revenge of the British was defined by its indiscriminate and collective character.19 The purely instrumental nature of the spectacle of violence as deterrent rather than punitive was made very clear by Sir John Lawrence prior to the execution of mutineers in Peshawar in June 1857:
‘In respect to the mutineers of the 55th, they were taken fighting against us, and so far deserve little mercy. But, on full reflection, I would not put them all to death. I do not think that we should be justified in the eyes of the Almighty in doing so. A hundred and twenty men are a large number to put to death. Our object is to make an example to terrify others. I think this object would be effectually gained by destroying from a quarter to a third of them.’20
Similarly, when Cooper was told not to execute any more of his prisoners at Ajnala, Montgomery ordered him to send the rest to Lahore, adding that ‘We want a few for the troops here.’21 Irrespective of their alleged crimes, prisoners were accordingly reserved for execution where it was thought to have the biggest impact. The execution of mutineers was reduced to a spectacle of power—the identity and even guilt of the individual prisoners was less significant than the message their death conveyed and the performance of state power they were made to participate in.
Not everyone believed these spectacles reflected well on British rule in India and Russell was scathing in his newspaper reports for The Times, exposing the combination of fear and vengefulness that characterised the attitudes of many of his compatriots:
‘…I have no sympathy with those who gloat over their death, and who in the press and elsewhere, fly into ecstasies of delight at the records of each act of necessary justice, and glory in the exhibition of a spirit as sanguinary and inhuman as that which prompted murderers, assassins, and mutilators to the commission of the crimes for which they have met their doom. The utterers of those sentiments have been so terribly frightened that they never can forgive those or the race of those who inflicted such terrible shocks to their nervous system. They see no safety, no absolute means of prevention to the recurrence of such alarms but in the annihilation of every Sepoy who mutinied, or who was likely to have done so if he could.’22
Such critical voices, however, had little impact on either official policies or public opin
ion, mainly due to the fact that the mass-executions were commonly believed to be the most effective, if not only, means of maintaining British control.23 Descriptions of the reaction of Indian spectators invariably made reference to their changing skin-colour as a sure sign that the message had hit home: ‘…their faces grew ghastly pale as they gazed breathlessly at the awful spectacle.’24
In addition to their deterrent effect, these executions were perceived as uniquely effective in re-establishing colonial rule by bolstering the prestige of the British. In the semi-official history of the ‘Mutiny’, John W. Kaye described the impact of the executions at Peshawar:
‘To our newly-raised levies and to the curious on-lookers from the country, the whole spectacle was a marvel and a mystery. It was a wonderful display of moral force, and it made a deep and abiding impression […] Perhaps some of the most sagacious and astute of the spectators of that morning’s work said to each other, or to themselves, as they turned their faces homeward, that the English had conquered because they were not afraid. […] Among the rude people of the border the audacity thus displayed by the English in the face of pressing danger excited boundless admiration. They had no longer any misgivings with respect to the superiority of a race that could do such great things, calmly and coolly, and with all the formality of an inspection-parade. The confidence in our power, which the disbandment of the Native regiments had done so much to revive, now struck deep root in the soil. Free offers of allegiance continued to come in from all tribes.’25
The Skull of Alum Bheg Page 23
