by Paul Scott
I invited Merrick to have breakfast with me but he declined and said he must be getting back to work. Before he went I told him that if circumstances warranted it one or all of the six prisoners could be moved into the greater security of the Berkshires’ guard room, providing that the police supplied their own guards and the Berkshires were absolved of direct responsibility for them. Merrick obviously feared an attack on his own jail by a ‘do or die’ crowd bent on releasing the men arrested for the rape. He had no doubt that by this morning the whole town knew of the incident. In India it was almost impossible to keep anything secret. Rumours began with the whispered gossip of native servants and spread quickly to the rest of the population. But a crowd attracted by the idea of rescuing their ‘heroes’ would have to show a lot of determination to try to penetrate the Berkshires’ lines because this would mean a direct attack on a military installation – and on the whole this was something Indian mobs usually avoided. Much as I sometimes found it irksome not to take immediate control of this explosive situation – which an attack on the military would have entitled me to do without signed permission of the civil authority – the last thing I wanted was to become involved at this level, which is why I qualified my permission to move the prisoners into military lines with the phrase ‘if circumstances warranted it’. But I certainly endorsed Merrick’s opinion that the six prisoners must be held under maximum security. Their forcible release to go free and boast of their attack on an Englishwoman was at all costs to be avoided.
After breakfast I rang the Deputy Commissioner and told him that I had spoken to Merrick, and that Merrick had told me about the attack on Miss Manners. I again offered to cooperate with military patrols as a precautionary propaganda measure, but he said the district was quiet and that he was trying hard to maintain an atmosphere of normality. Most District Headquarters availed themselves of the services of what I suppose we must call spies or informers. White’s informers reported to him that the population was more puzzled than angry, uncertain what their arrested Congress leaders really expected of them. To provoke them now was, he was sure, the very last thing a sensible man should do. Fortunately, for the present anyway, Muslim and Hindu communities were living together on terms of amity and although in a sense this could be counted a bad sign – since it suggested an alliance against the English – in another sense it was a good thing, because there was little or no danger of a communal situation developing that would snowball into something worse.
As usual, when I spoke to the Deputy Commissioner I was impressed by his calm and balanced thinking. I asked what he felt about the attack on Miss Manners and whether he didn’t see it as a prelude to attacks on Europeans in general. He said it might well have been an isolated incident, such as that at Tanpur, the work of hooligans, men who had probably come in to Mayapore from one of the outlying villages expecting to find it in the grip of civil disturbance, only to be disappointed and therefore capable of taking it out on the first defenceless person they happened to see. I said the impression I got from Merrick was that the culprits were not villagers but young anarchists who lived in Mayapore. To this he did not immediately reply, so I asked him whether he thought the men arrested were not the real culprits. He said he had to keep an open mind on the subject and that a lot depended on the girl’s own evidence once she was fit enough to give it. He thought Merrick might have made a mistake, but could not criticise him for his prompt action, at least not in the light of what Merrick himself had told him of the circumstances attending the arrests.
Having spoken to the Deputy Commissioner I then called my own staff together, told them of the situation as seen (a) by Merrick and (b) by Mr White, and finally (c) as seen by myself, that is to say one that was potentially grave but at present under the control of those whose duty it was to control it. In other words, for us, I said, it was ‘business as usual’, and I ordered my staff car for ten o’clock so that I could pay an unexpected visit to the Pankots out at Banyaganj. Taking me on one side when the others had gone, Ewart Mackay told me that he and his wife had already heard about the attack on Miss Manners and his wife’s private view was that it was something the poor girl had been heading for, although naturally Christine and he were shocked and grieved. The point was, though, that Christine Mackay felt I should know that she did not see the attack on Miss Manners as evidence that European women generally were in danger. She had asked if the man Kumar had been involved and Ewart said she would be more than glad to hear that he had actually been arrested.
In other words, from this private source, I had confirmation of the reasonableness of young Merrick’s personal suspicions but also of the Deputy Commissioner’s broader impersonal attitude. I therefore set off for Banyaganj fairly confident that there was at least a breathing space for us to concentrate on more important things. In Banyaganj itself work was proceeding on the construction of the airfield. My heart went out to those poor and simple labourers, men and women, who needed every anna they could earn and did not lightly drop their tools and their baskets of stones at anyone’s beck and call. I could not help thinking that if every one of the women working so hard in the heat and humidity of that August morning, with her ragged saree torn and mud-spattered, had taken the Mahatma at his word, and gone home to spin cotton she would have been hard put to it to feed her children – children for whose welfare, and hers, a committee of our own women had been set up and was actually represented that morning by young Mavis Poulson and the wife of the Station Staff Officer, who were doing their best to attend single-handed to the screaming wants of Hindu and Muslim babies of both sexes and to pregnant mothers who had collapsed under the weight of the baskets. Fortunately there were some stout-looking lads from the RAF in the vicinity so I felt that Mrs Poulson and Mrs Brown wouldn’t come to much harm, and continued my journey to the headquarters of the Pankots. I spent a pleasant day there, watching their battle drill.
This was indeed the calm before the storm! I returned to Mayapore at about 5 pm and gave Mrs Poulson and Mrs Brown a lift, to save them the discomfort of the journey back to the cantonment in the RAF bus. Mrs Poulson also seemed to share Christine Mackay’s view of the fate that had overtaken Miss Manners. Mrs Poulson said that the whole business must be extremely distasteful to Lady Chatterjee who probably felt a special degree of responsibility for what had happened, not only because Miss Manners was her house guest but because she herself was an Indian. I asked Mrs Poulson what she knew of the man Kumar and she said at once, hearing from me that he had been arrested, ‘Well, you’ve got the right man. A trouble-maker if ever I saw one.’ She thought that if poor Miss Manners had not been such an ‘innocent’ about India this distressing business would never have arisen, and she added how extraordinary and yet how logical it was that the two Europeans who had so far suffered injury in the present troubles were both women, and both women of radical, pro-Indian views. Mrs Brown, I noticed, was less positive on the subject, but I put this down to shyness. Her husband, as readers may remember, had risen from the ranks. I made a special point of trying to bring her into the conversation. I had a great respect for her husband’s capabilities as Station Staff Officer. I am sure, however, that she felt much the same way as did Mrs Poulson, that is to say that they both thought the girl had been unwise but of course were dismayed by her fate and determined to stand by her. I was touched by this as yet further proof of our solidarity. Armed thus, one can face any crisis.
I dropped Mrs Brown in the cantonment bazaar where she had some shopping to do and took Mrs Poulson back to her bungalow. Declining her kind offer to come in and have a drink I left her to her task of supervising the putting to bed of her little daughter whose name, I think, was Anne, and ordered the driver to return to brigade headquarters. The rain had let up again and the late afternoon sun had come out. The maidan looked peaceful and I was reminded of those far-off days when I was a young man without a care in the world. That evening after dinner I wrote some personal letters and retired early to work o
n a field-training scheme that my staff had drafted for my consideration. Reading it through, and finding little to criticise, I felt a glow of confidence. If only the scheme had been more than a scheme! The Japanese would not have been resting so peacefully in their beds that night!
This was, however, to be the last comfortable night’s sleep I was to enjoy myself for many days.
*
In the personal diary which I kept at this time the space allotted to the following day – August 11th – is blank, but there is a brief note on August 12th headed 2 a.m. which reads, ‘A moment’s respite after a day of widespread riots throughout the district. I received at 20.00 hours (Aug 11) a request for aid from the deputy commissioner. Cold comfort for our forces in Assam and Burma to know that those whose role is to supply and eventually reinforce them are being hindered in this way.’
Looking back to that day in August which marked the beginning of disturbances throughout most of the country, and remembering – as hour by hour reports of commotions, riots, arson and sabotage began to come in – the sense that grew of what we had feared and tried to stop finally facing us I cannot but be puzzled by the opinion still held in some quarters that the uprising was indeed a spontaneous expression of the country’s anger at the imprisonment of their leaders. In my opinion, final proof to the contrary, if any is needed, lies in the words spoken by the Mahatma to his followers at the time of his arrest, ‘Do or die.’ Nothing, I feel, could be plainer than that. I did not hear of those words until the 11th, on which day the crowds that collected and attacked police stations, telegraph offices, and sabotaged stretches of railway line, were crying them as their motto.
Again the immediate seat of disturbances was in Tanpur and Dibrapur, and the police in those areas were sorely pressed. During the afternoon of the 11th the police in Mayapore, directed by mounted officers, were fully occupied in dispersing and redispersing the crowds that attempted to collect. Several constables were injured. A score of men were arrested and taken to jail. In a village just south of Mayapore an Indian sub-divisional officer of the uncovenanted civil service was attacked and held prisoner in the police post and was not rescued until the following day when our own patrols scoured the area. The Congress flag was run up in the village, and also over the court house in Dibrapur – a town that was cut off for several days. The post-office in Dibrapur, which had been attacked on the 9th of August (the day of the attack on the mission school teacher) was this time destroyed by fire. Until our troops retrieved the situation on the 17th August Dibrapur – 70-odd miles away from Mayapore – was in the hands of the mob. In fact one of the mob’s leaders declared himself Deputy Commissioner and district headquarters to have been transferred from Mayapore to Dibrapur! The sub-divisional officer who was legally and constitutionally in charge of that sub-division (again an Indian) was at first imprisoned but then released and installed in the court house as ‘District and Sessions Judge’. He later claimed that he was forced to co-operate with the self-appointed Deputy Commissioner and that he had hidden most of the money from the local treasury to save it from falling into the rioters’ hands. Restoration of the money and his previous good record probably saved him from paying the penalty of his apparent defection to the side of the rioters. There were, unfortunately, several cases spread throughout the country where magistrates and even senior Indian district officers complied with the orders of the mob leaders, and considerable sums of Government’s money was stolen. In some areas the new self-appointed officials ‘fined’ townsmen and villagers and put the money into their own pockets along with revenues they had collected ‘on behalf of free India’. There was not, I think, any instance of an English civil servant being coerced in this way, and there was, thank God, virtually no loss of European life. The one instance I remember was the murder of two Air Force officers (not in our own district) by a mob who – imagining them to be the pilots of an aircraft that had recently taken part in a punitive raid on a mutinous village nearby – immediately set on them in this foul way and tore them to pieces.
But to go back to the 11th, and to Mayapore itself: the District Superintendent of Police showed, throughout that day, considerable tactical ability. It was impossible for Merrick to have men everywhere they were needed, but there were three main danger areas – the area of the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road which led from the south of the town directly to the Bibighar bridge, the ‘square’ opposite the Tirupati temple leading to the Mandir Gate bridge and the road leading west to the jail (the jail on the black town side of the river, not the cells at Police Headquarters in the civil lines where the six men suspected of the rape were being held). It was anticipated that there would be two main objectives of attack – the jail and the civil lines.
The day had begun normally enough until the police in the city reported that ‘hartal’ was being observed. At 8 a.m. however (an hour that more or less coincided with the renewed uprising in Dibrapur) a crowd was found to be collecting on the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road. This was dispersed by 9.30 a.m. but at once there was evidence that the dispersal had only led to the collection of another crowd in the vicinity of Jail road. Fortunately, Merrick had anticipated the moves that might be made in the event of any organised defiance of the agents of law and order and had already ordered his forces to deploy. There were several skirmishes. The post office on Jail road was threatened but secured. Meanwhile reports had begun to come in of ‘isolated’ acts of violence and sabotage in the district’s outlying areas. At 1200 hours the sub-inspector of police in charge of the kotwali near the Tirupati temple received an ‘ultimatum’ to join the forces of ‘free India’ and co-operate in the ‘release of the six martyrs of the Bibighar Gardens’. This ultimatum was delivered to him in the form of a printed pamphlet! The attempt to identify the rebellion in Mayapore with the Bibighar Gardens affair as though it were simply a crusade to release men whom the population thought wrongfully imprisoned was, I thought, not only a cunning move but proof of the existence of underground leaders of considerable intelligence. With this Merrick agreed. At first sight of the pamphlet he had at once raided the offices of an English language newspaper called The Mayapore Hindu and found a press there that suggested that not only newspapers were printed on those premises but that they were also equipped to print in the vernacular. The type from which the pamphlet had been set up in English and Hindi had already been ‘distributed’ but Merrick felt justified in arresting every member of the staff actually on the premises and in destroying the press from which pamphlets of the kind distributed could have been run off.
This operation had been completed by 1300 hours, only 60 minutes after the delivery of the pamphlet to the kotwali in the temple square, which said a lot for Merrick’s capacity for prompt action, as well as for his intelligence or ‘spy’ system. He told me that afternoon when I visited District Headquarters where the Deputy Commissioner and his staff were gathered in force, that one of the men on The Mayapore Hindu whom he had arrested was a close friend of the man Kumar, the principal suspect in the Manners case. He felt that it was very likely now that by interrogating this fellow (the note in my diary gives his name as Vidyasagar) Kumar’s duplicity would be proved.
I confess that I felt sickened to realise the extent to which some of these so-called educated young Indians would go to defy and attack the people who had given them the opportunity to make something of themselves. I was also concerned about the capacity they had for violence in the sacred name of satyagraha. I said as much to Merrick who then reminded me that, in his job, he had to deal almost every day with fellows of this kind. If he sometimes ‘bent the rules’ and paid them back in their own coin, he believed that the end justified the means. He said he was almost ‘off his head’ at the thought that a decent girl like Daphne Manners, with every advantage civilised life had to offer, should have been taken in by a fellow like Kumar who had had the benefit of an English public school education. I was astonished to have this information about Kumar’s back
ground and felt that my own sense of values had been pretty well knocked for six.
Merrick described Gandhi on this occasion (when we drank a hasty cup of tea together) as a ‘crazy old man’ who had completely lost touch with the people he thought he still led, and so was the dupe of his own ‘dreams and crazy illusions’, and had no idea how much he was laughed at by the kind of young men, he, Merrick, had to keep in order.
That afternoon at district headquarters I found the Deputy Commissioner calm and decisive in his reactions to the reports that were coming in. I told him that I was prepared to order the provost in charge of the military police to assist in the transfer of the six prisoners to the Berkshires’ lines. This took White by surprise because apparently Merrick had not discussed such a possibility with him. He said he had no intention of aggravating racial feeling by placing six men suspected of raping an English woman under the noses of English soldiers. I grew rather heated at what I thought to be an unwarranted criticism of my men’s capacity for self-restraint. He then assured me he had not meant any such thing, but simply that the job of guarding such prisoners could only be extremely distasteful and therefore bad for the morale of the Berkshires who, if called out in aid, would need to exercise a high degree of level temper and self-discipline. It was bad enough, he said, that the news of the attack on Miss Manners had become current. He did not wish to have the Berkshires ‘reminded hourly by the suspects’ presence in their midst of an affair that can only excite strong basic emotions’.
On this subject we did not see eye to eye, and broke off conversation somewhat tartly. At eight o’clock that evening I received the expected request for aid, at once ordered what we had come to call the riot squad to report to district headquarters and the rest of the Berkshires to stand by, and drove to White’s bungalow to which he had now returned and where I found him in conference with Judge Menen and members of his staff. Judge Menen looked as imperturbable as ever. I could not help wondering whether under that grave, judicial exterior lurked a heart that beat in unison with his countrymen’s hopes for ‘freedom’.
