The Skull of Alum Bheg
Page 24
Deliberately leaving out the gory details, Kaye turned the executions into a celebratory demonstration of the virtues of the stalwart British character that underpinned colonial rule and sustained the so-called ‘civilising mission’.26 As previously noted, accounts of British retribution served to emphasise the violence inflicted on European men and women, rather than the violence of the executions themselves. The violence of Indian rebels was at times even blamed for having brutalised the British, as witness to an execution described in a letter to a relative back in England: ‘I am afraid we are all very bloodthirsty, as almost everyone had a smile of gratified revenge on his lips. We are all thinking of Cawnpore. […] Those massacres have quite changed me. I believe I could walk over a recently fought battle field quite unmoved.’27 The crucial point here is that the ‘massacres’ referred to were those perpetrated by the Indian rebels and not the executions witnessed by the author. British accounts of the executions of sepoys and rebels were thus made morally palatable by consistently reminding the public about those atrocities committed by Indian rebels; this was all part of the retributive logic of colonial violence that relied on indigenous practice and was inspired by the alleged aggression ascribed to Indians.28 The prisoners tied to the mouths of guns were implicitly depicted as the perpetrators of horrible crimes which not only justified unrestrained retribution but also negated the brutality of colonial punishment.29 Execution by cannon could thus be presented as both justified and civilised—or as Lord Roberts put it: ‘Awe inspiring, certainly, but probably the most humane, as being a sure and instantaneous mode of execution.’30
Witnessing an execution became an established part of experiencing the ‘Mutiny’ and the numerous accounts reproduced in newspapers or anyone of the numerous memoirs published in the aftermath of the uprising, often dwelled on the violence, in great and gory detail. Describing the sensory aspects of the spectacle—the sound of the gun, the smell of burnt flesh, the sight of the bouncing head and remains of the corpse strewn on the ground in a bloody mess—satisfied a morbid fascination with death and the voyeuristic impulse of an audience for whom public executions were no longer a common sight.31 Visual representations of executions by cannon, disseminated through the press across the empire, furthermore provided an image of a carefully orchestrated military spectacle, indicative of the order that British rule imposed on Indian society.32 Apart from the brute language of power and terror, colonial violence and its representation during 1857 thus conveyed a reassuring message to both an Anglo-Indian as well as a British audience.33 This secondary function of colonial violence is clearly reflected in an eyewitness account of an execution in Bombay published in Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words in early 1858:
‘Those who witnessed the impressive scene will never forget it. The Europeans were scarcely one to a thousand—in fact, they could hardly be seen amongst the myriads of Asiatics; but all appeared as cool and confident as if they had been at a review in Hyde Park. And yet there was scarcely a man present who had not been sleeping with a loaded revolver in his bedchamber for months…’34
The public execution was in fact described as a perfect reflection of the colonial situation itself: the British were isolated and outnumbered, yet ultimately triumphant thanks to their resolve and strength of character. In this sense, the executions served to sustain the ‘bluff’ that was colonialism, and shore up the self-confidence of the British in the crucible of rebellion.
The mass-executions were, nevertheless, messy affairs—both literally and symbolically—and it was only by sanitising the accounts of sepoys being blown from guns that they could be represented as orderly and unequivocally efficacious spectacles. Kaye’s assessment of the executions of 10 June at Peshawar, for instance, was belied by the account of Lord Roberts who witnessed the affair:
‘It was a terrible sight, and one likely to haunt the beholder for many a long day; but that was what was intended. I carefully watched the sepoys’ faces to see how it affected them. They were evidently startled at the swift retribution which had overtaken their guilty comrades, but looked more crest-fallen than shocked or horrified, and we soon learnt that their determination to mutiny, and make the best of their way to Delhi, was in nowise changed by the scene they had witnessed.’35
This was not a controlled ritual and the ‘stinking shower’ of human remains was virtually impossible to instrumentalise. The sepoy regiments forced to watch the executions were deliberately positioned as near to the guns as possible, and various accounts describe how the prisoners had ‘their intestines blown into the faces of their former comrades who stood watching the scene.’36 Yet British spectators too were covered in ‘minute blackened particles’ of burned flesh while the gunners serving the cannon routinely demanded extra pay to have their white uniforms cleaned afterwards.37 The artillerymen had no prior experience of this kind of work, and as one of them wryly remarked: ‘this had not formed part of our curriculum at Woolwich’. Quite often the executions went terribly wrong, turning the carefully choreographed ceremony into the sort of grim farce described by one medical officer:
‘One wretched fellow slipped from the rope by which he was tied to the guns just before the explosion, and his arm was nearly set on fire. Whilst hanging in his agony under the gun, a sergeant applied a pistol to his head, and three times the cap snapped, the man each time wincing from the expected shot. At last a rifle was fired into the bottom of his head, and the blood poured out of the nose and mouth like water from a briskly handled pump. This was the most horrible sight of all. I have seen death in all its forms, but never anything to equal this man’s end.’38
While the British believed the public executions were effective in forcing Indians into submission and actually shored up their loyalty, these bloody spectacles could just as easily drive Indian troops, and the wider population, away from their colonial rulers. Some accounts clearly suggest that sepoys only deserted when the British lost trust in them, or when indiscriminate reprisals left wavering troops no other option but mutiny. The supposed efficacy of executions by cannon, however, was far too important for the British authorities to formally acknowledge their ambiguous symbolism and messy reality, let alone condemn the practice. In the House of Commons, Lord Stanley expressed this sentiment in no uncertain terms: ‘Only by great exertions—by the employment of force, by making striking examples, and inspiring terror, could Sir J. Lawrence save the Punjab; and if the Punjab had been lost the whole of India would for the time have been lost with it.’39 British rule in India, in other words, was sustained by the application of exemplary violence and this became one of the founding narratives of the colonial state in India post-1857.
The executions of 1857 were not spectacles of entertainment for the masses, nor were they lessons in citizenship—not least because Indians did not enjoy the status of citizens within the colonial state.40 Ruling through coercion rather than consent, the British could only ever hope to assert their power, rather than eliciting the approval of the crowd. And where the European ruler might fear that the crowd identified with the convict on the scaffold, the British in India could simply assume this to be the case; the mass-executions were never intended solely, or even primarily, for the attendant sepoys, but by extension for the entire Indian population. Accordingly, these spectacles became occasions for the British to reinforce racialised hierarchies in front of both sepoy regiments and locals who were forcefully gathered to witness the spectacle. The colonial execution was thus aimed (sometimes quite literally) at the Indian spectators, both in uniform and without, but operated within a structure of power from which they were specifically excluded. These spectacles furthermore marked the ultimate point of escalation in the application of brute force—beyond the cannon, there was no tool left in the armoury of the colonial state.
* * *
By July 1858, when Alum Bheg was sentenced to be ‘cannonaded’, the crisis of the ‘Mutiny’ was essentially over. The last fugitives of the 46th brought back as
prisoners later that summer, were either branded with a ‘D’ for deserter, following military practice, or deported to the newly established penal settlement on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.41 As an Indian officer, however, Alum Bheg was selected to be executed at Sialkot ‘to make an impression’—although it was entirely unclear on whom that impression was to be made. There were no longer any sepoy regiments left to be forced to watch their comrades blown apart, nor any crowds of sullen villagers made to witness the spectacle at the point of the bayonet.42 Accordingly, Alum Bheg was one of the very last rebels to be blown from a gun during the long aftermath of the ‘Mutiny’—a gory leftover from an earlier and more anxious time.
9 July 1858 was the anniversary of the outbreak at Sialkot and Reverend Boyle held a special memorial service in the church.43 Before sunrise the following morning, Alum Bheg was to be executed. An eyewitness account was published in the newspapers in India and later also back in Britain:
‘On Saturday last, the 10th instant, all the troops in this station assembled on the plain in front of the sepoy lines, lately occupied by the 35th Bengal Native (Light) Infantry. Her Majesty’s 52nd Light Infantry were on the right, next to them stood the regiment of Punjaub Infantry; the next in the line were the Battery of Artillery, which arrived here on the 5th instant. On the left were drawn up the 7th Dragoon Guards. The regiment deployed into line, the 7th Dragoon Guards wheeling up to the right, and H.M. 52d Light Infantry brought their right shoulders forward, thus forming three sides of a hollow square. The brigadier and his staff arrived on the ground at 4.30 A.M., and took up a prominent position in the interval of the square; four prisoners—sepoys belonging to the late 46th Bengal Native Infantry, who mutinied 12 months ago—were also marched into the interior of the square under an escort of H.M. 52d. […] After the proceedings of the court martial had been read in the vernacular language, three guns were moved out to the front, clearing the right flank of the 52d and the left of the 7th Dragoon Guards.’44
Contemporary accounts of executions referred to the comrades of the condemned witnessing the spectacle, but Alum Bheg saw no friendly faces in the crowd of spectators as he was marched to the guns at sunrise on 10 July 1858. His entire regiment had been wiped out and the ‘Hindustani’ camp-followers were all gone or deported. By a bizarre coincidence, however, Gordon, along with the Indian convert Scott, happened to be present at Alum Bheg’s execution, as the Reverend later described:
‘It is believed that none of the Sialkot mutineers ever reached Delhi. I was occasionally invited by English officers to speak to little squads of them who were captured in the mountains and condemned to be banished, shot, or blown from the cannons’ mouths; but whilst they besought me earnestly to save them from corporeal punishment, yet it was sad to see that they cared not a single word about the salvation of their souls. On one of these occasions particularly, accompanied by Mr. Scott, I was very solemnly and deeply impressed. Two regiments of English soldiers were drawn up front to front, separated by a little space. Between them stood three pieces of artillery loaded with blank cartridges. The three mutineers who were condemned to be executed were then brought out of prison under guard, and conducted down to the open space between the two regiments. Brother Scott walked along with them, and the group stood beside the loaded guns. A solemn and awe-inspiring stillness reigned among the uniformed spectators, whilst Mr. Scott spoke of the only Saviour of sinners to those who were about to enter the eternal world, assuring them that they would be safe if only they would put their trust in Him. But their rejection of the glad tidings was decided—nay, even bitter.’45
It never occurred to Gordon that if fears of conversion had originally triggered the outbreak, the words of missionaries were probably the last thing the condemned mutineers wanted to hear during their final moments. Indeed, the presence of missionaries at the execution might have actually confirmed every single suspicion Alum Bheg and the others harboured concerning the essentially Christian nature of British rule.
British accounts often focused on the demeanour of the prisoner about to be put to death, who, much like criminals in Europe, were expected to perform their part in the ritual of the execution. Ideally, a repentant prisoner stoically accepted his judgement and perhaps even addressed the crowd of spectators with a few edifying words of warning. The prisoner was thus expected to verbalise the deterrent logic of his own execution. Facing imminent death, few convicts, however, acted simply according to this script. During the suppression of the uprising in India, some rebels were indeed contrite, but others went to their death defiant and shouting obscenities, while others again were sullenly quiet and seemingly consigned to their fate. According to Cooper, who had ample opportunity to observe sepoys being put to death, ‘every phase of deportment was manifested by the doomed men when inevitable death forced itself upon them—astonishment, shame, frantic rage, despair, the most stoic calmness, but no sign of contrition…’46 The eyewitness accounts make no mention of how the three prisoners acted on 10 July 1858, and we can only imagine what Alum Bheg was feelings on this fateful morning. Alum Bheg was essentially executed as a proxy for Hurmat Khan. Having been swept up by events over which he had no control, he was about to be executed for murders he did not commit. Through the early morning haze he may have been able to make out the dusty-blue outline of the Himalayas, where he had been in hiding not so long ago. His home in Awadh, however, was thousands of miles away and he was never to see it again.
After Mr Scott withdrew, Alum Bheg’s fetters were knocked off, and his arms and legs were tied to the wheels of the gun, with the mouth of the heavy barrel pressing against his chest.47 The gun had been loaded with a half-charge of gunpowder and nothing else; with the body strapped to the cannon and the trunk in direct contact with the barrel, the burst of the blank charge alone would be more than sufficient to blow him to pieces. The hoarse yell of the command to ‘fire’ was given, echoing across the plain and across the lines of troops, and the fuses were lit. Seconds later the guns went off with a roar and Alum Bheg was ‘instantaneously shivered to atoms.’48 ‘The body appears to swell and burst—like a shell,’ a colonial photographer noted of another similar execution, and ‘the pieces of flesh and bone are scattered all round and the head goes bounding in front.’49 As the proceedings were completed, the troops marched back to their respective quarters.
One of the British soldiers who was present at the execution was a Corporal in the 52nd Regiment, who had been stationed with the 46th at Sialkot, and later fought them at Trimmu Ghat. In a letter to his father he described his thoughts of the spectacle he had witnessed:
‘On the 10th of this month we [have] blown three from the guns at this station; it is a shocking sight to see, but what is that to the brutal murders which they have committed. I should like to have seen three hundred. Some of our young men who had lately come out from England did not like to see it, but they have not seen how they have brutally cut up our people. The three belonged to the 46th Regt. N.I. which we left in Sealkote…’50
The British troops present evidently had mixed reactions to the bloody spectacle but the atrocities indiscriminately ascribed to the rebels were yet again invoked to legitimise British retribution—and also as a coping mechanism to steady those forced to witness the sight of fellow human beings being blown apart. The execution nevertheless prompted the Corporal to reflect on his own mortality:
‘Dear Father, I often think it is a great mercy that I am still spared, seeing that so many poor fellows have been taken off to that journey where they will never return. I may say I have seen hundreds taken from my side since I have been out in this country; and strange to say, all the ablest and strongest men are called away first, and many I dare say, not fit to meet their God.’51
Having witnessed the execution, Gordon simply observed that ‘all that remained of the three wretched criminals was three limp, blackened sack-like inanimate objects, lying on the ground some considerable distance in front of the guns
.’52 What he did not mention, perhaps because he did not wait around after the brutal spectacle was over, was the fact that the heads of those executed remained quite intact even after the execution. The heads were thrown up in the air by the blast, but were otherwise the only identifiable body part left. Before the British troops marched off, one of them, Captain A. R. Costello of the 7th Dragoon Guards, picked up Alum Bheg’s severed head and carried it away. It was at this point not yet a skull that could be handled with ease, but a recognisable human head, complete with facial features, hair, skin, flesh, muscle, tongue, teeth, brain matter, and, most likely, blood oozing from the torn neck. As the barren plain outside Sialkot was emptied of troops, all that remained of Alum Bheg’s mangled corpse was removed by low-caste cleaners and disposed of as so much offal. Only his head was missing.
11
BUT FROM THE SKULLS OF THE SLAIN
Captain Costello left India just three months after he had witnessed Alum Bheg’s execution and taken the head—just long enough for the head to have been skeletonised by insects and the intense heat of the summer.1 The note found with Alum Bheg’s skull is written on paper bearing the watermark of the Kildare Street Club in Dublin, which suggests that Costello brought the skull all the way back to Ireland when he returned from India in 1859. The note, however, also refers to Costello in the third person and describes him as being ‘late’ captain of the 7th Dragoon Guards.’ It would thus appear that he got rid of the skull not too long after his return—perhaps when he got married in 1862, or when his new manor was built a few years later. While we will never know exactly what moved Costello to pick up the bloodied head of Alum Bheg, and go through the visceral process of defleshing the skull in order to bring this grisly trophy back home, it is nevertheless possible to make some educated inferences.2