This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  By now, this precarious balance between trading and governing was about to collapse. It would be recovered, but the immediate consequences were murderous. Through these three presidencies, the East India Company now ruled more than 60 per cent of India. The other territory was in the hands of the princes, but they relied heavily on direction from their British Company advisers. Even the armies of the princes were commanded by Company men.

  If Dalhousie is to be loaded with any of the blame for what happened in 1857, then the irony is that he wasn’t there when the discontent boiled over into rebellion. He should not be damned. The Marquess of Dalhousie is sometimes seen as, historically, the best of the British Governor-Generals in India. He was appointed in 1847 at the age of thirty-five. His record shows that it was he who planned the remarkable network of railways in the sub-continent. His engineers built 2,000 miles of road, irrigated farmland and strung 4,000 miles of telegraph cable across India. He opened up the Indian Civil Service to any British subject, whatever their class or colour, and, as we have seen, apart from undoubtedly improving the way the States were administered, he took for Britain: Berar, Jhansi, Nagpur, Oudh, Pegu, the Punjab and Satara. All this took him just nine years. It also took away his health, which was the reason Dalhousie left India in 1856 having made his final acquisition, Oudh, and perhaps squeezing the trigger of mutiny.

  Dalhousie was replaced by a man the same age who had been with him at Christ Church College, Oxford, Viscount Charles Canning (1812–62, third son of the British statesman, George Canning). Canning was to become the first Viceroy of India. When the mutiny began on 10 May 1857 at Meerut, it would become a year when the Governor-General was thought to be weak and so earned the title ‘Clemency Canning’. This was an injustice. Canning was a judicious and intelligent man whose quiet courage probably was essential in bringing the rebellion to a close. He arrived in Calcutta late in February 1856 to be welcomed by the departing Dalhousie. One of Canning’s first tasks was to resolve the problem of Oudh. Outram was ill and had returned to Britain two months after Canning’s arrival. Canning was not at all well himself and relied very much on local advice, which is why the short-tempered Coverly Jackson, a revenue officer, replaced Outram. Jackson spent more time quarrelling than administrating. More importantly, Canning had arrived at the very time of the official annexation of Oudh and during the declining health of its King, Wajid Ali. So Britain had a new Governor-General, coping with a disgruntled King, equally dissatisfied local populations and an administrator of this crucial region who was simply not the man, certainly not the diplomat, necessary to even begin a smooth transition from regal to British rule. Canning now made one of the best decisions of his short time in India. He sacked Jackson and replaced him with the enormously knowledgeable Sir Henry Lawrence (1806–57). Lawrence was to die in the mutiny the following year. His younger brother, John Lawrence, would be equally famous in India and become Governor-General.

  The mutiny was about far more than Dalhousie’s policies. It was a rebellion against the British, the way in which they ruled and the arrogance among administrators, or at least many of them. Dalhousie and his policy of the taking up of lapsed titles was simply an example. So, as with all events which cause a sensation and live under scrutiny in future years, there was never one reason for the mutiny although the trigger for it was easily identifiable. The popular view is that the rebellion came when soldiers in the Bengal army, both Hindu and Muslim, refused to bite on the greased cartridges with which they were issued. The cow fat on those cartridges insulted the Hindu soldiers. The pig fat, the Muslims. If that was the trigger, it most certainly was not the cause of the mutiny; that came from a far more complex set of grievances. Nor was it simply an isolated incident. In the Bengal army there were more than 80,000 men within seventy-four infantry regiments. Fifty-four of those seventy-four regiments either mutinied or did so in part. At the time of the defiance only three infantry regiments were considered loyal to the British.

  Thus, the infantry of the Bengal army became the focal point of the mutiny. The Madras army of fifty-two native regiments refused orders to serve in Bengal in the summer of 1857, but never mutinied. The Bombay army consisted of twenty-nine infantry regiments of Indian soldiers. There was open dissent, but not full-scale mutiny in three of those regiments. Now why should the mutiny have come largely in Bengal? Part of the answer is in its tradition of recruiting.

  Bengal was the home of the full Indian battalions. They had been formed by Clive exactly 100 years earlier. Almost exclusively, the British recruited what we would have called agricultural workers, the judgement being that the equivalent to yeoman stock made good soldiers. There was some sense to this. They were used to living off the land, they had an easier disposition and, again a British term, were likely to see reason in reasonable instruction and order. This meant that the recruiting sergeants had to travel widely. There were not enough agricultural soldiers in the main Bengal recruiting areas – Dinapore and Burhanpur.54 More recruits were pressed from north India. The non-Bengalis were high caste soldiers, many of them Brahmans and Rajputs. The British view was that the higher the caste (and coincidentally, the higher the stature), then the greater expected loyalty. Messing with the caste system forecast all sorts of difficulties. Curiously, it was not until this period – the nineteenth century – and the need to maintain status, that the caste system became a quasi-political difficulty in Indian society. So until this confrontation between British rule and the East India Company native soldiers, the clear ordinances of the caste system were not meticulously followed even when the castes subdivided to distinguish the soldiery.

  The introduction of a higher caste system in the Bengal army, not by Indians but by the British, was the seed from which insurrection grew. In short, British senses of order and ambitions for the loyalty of soldiers actually emphasized differences that hitherto had been more or less ignored by the Indians themselves. The high caste Hindus by the 1850s probably controlled more than 50 per cent of recruiting into the Bengal native infantry regiments. There were natural anxieties and annoyances among some of those regiments which, even today, are typical in barrack rooms. For example, modern soldiers are very aware of the advantages of overseas allowances. In the mid-nineteenth century some of the Bengal battalions were angry when their ‘overseas allowances’ were withdrawn. In 1856, Canning instructed that all East India Company soldiers would be liable for general service and therefore obliged to serve outside the areas of Company control, that is, non-British India and even overseas. This instruction appeared in the General Service Enlistment Order. It seems likely that the greatest concern came from the old serving sepoys who thought that their traditional role was being set aside. Again, just as it is common in modern armies for rumours and assumptions to spread, so did the assertions of the old guard in the regiments in the 1850s. The most common assumption was that the British were getting rid of the distinguished Bengal army. It would be, according to the barrack-room lawyers, nothing more than a general force with no distinction of caste and available for whatever task the British thought fit to give it. After all, Indian forces had gone in 1855 to the Crimea.

  We have seen, above, the parallels with modern attitudes in the services. However, there is one big difference: the sepoys were mainly volunteers who saw all sorts of reasons, including position and money, for joining up. More important, unlike a modern British or Indian regiment, the Company army was made up of sepoys led by British officers. There may have been understanding, but there was no inherent sympathy of the religious sensitivities of the sepoys. There is, perhaps to us, yet another source of aggravation to be remembered. The English East India Company formed its army and dressed it as a series of British regiments. Instead of the tribal dress and style of the traditional sepoy, he was dressed up as a model soldier in the European style. Moreover, he was armed with the heavyweight weaponry of the European. All this may seem of little consequence. It assumes importance when added to the series of aggr
avations and disappointments which were brought together daily under the considerably harsh discipline of a typically agricultural-born soldier being force fed on European military discipline.

  Moreover, there were no great social benefits when off duty. The sepoy was expected to maintain loyalties, enthusiasms, alertness and smartness in very basic huts built of mud and thatch, and which they usually had to build for themselves. The Madras and Bombay armies were better off than the Bengalis. Here was another reason, but again not an exclusive one, for the sense of rebellion to fester. Perhaps all this could have been ignored if the overseas allowances had continued and even improved upon and, more importantly, the basic rates of pay were attractive. There was a further factor. The unfairness of the promotion system in the Bengal army presented problems for its officers. If, for example, they had poor senior soldiers, there was not much they could do to replace them. Moreover, the most effective means of military reward, promotion, could well be out of the hands of a commanding officer. Meanwhile, lower down the scale, junior soldiers felt they were not being rewarded for their capabilities. There were Indian officers. Many of these, Company men, remember, were equally dissatisfied with the nineteenth-century glass ceiling that prevented their rise, even when long-served, to anything more than junior and strictly subordinate roles. It might not be a coincidence that the mutinous regiments looked to these older and dissatisfied Indian officers for example and leadership. The differences and anomalies in the ways in which sepoys were treated were not accepted by all British administrators. There were certain examples drawn to Canning’s attention that the poor conditions borne by the sepoys could cause active dissent.

  This whole picture of unfulfilled ambitions amongst sepoys, the lack of understanding of what had been created within the army of castes and the inability to either think through the consequences or persuade others to do so, was exacerbated by an often not very high quality of British officer class. Ironically, the British infantry officers often had one of the same frustrations as the sepoys inasmuch that length of service decided promotion, rather than capabilities. We might add to this the restrictions of any commanding officer to impose his will on the regiment. In particular, because of centralized controls within the Company and administration, even commanding officers quite often had little authority over the regiment’s discipline. A local commander might well know his sepoys and the best way to keep them on side and improve their efficiencies. Some higher command gave him little room for initiative and therefore great opportunity to witness dissent. By the middle 1850s the lack of discipline among the Bengal infantry was regarded with contempt by the other armies. It was as if the fundamental task of a commanding officer was to hold his regiment together, not to exercise it as an efficient fighting machine. By that time many of the sepoys were not at all interested in the regiment’s function.

  Consequently many, although certainly not all, British officers, incapable of exercising absolute control, grew even further distant from their sepoys. They, in turn, increasingly gave the impression that they would only choose to obey orders that suited them. The result was a lack of trust and respect on both sides. There were exceptions, but the above shows that the mutiny in May 1857 that began in the Bengal army had long-standing and complex origins and was certainly not about the grease on a cartridge case.

  We might also remember that earlier, in 1849, there had been mutiny in the ranks of the regiments in the Punjab. On that occasion a small group of sepoys had roused their colleagues to demand more pay. This handful of men had genuine grievances. So had the sepoys in 1857. However, in the more well-known Indian Mutiny the conspirators were greater in number. The grievances were older and, on reflection, there was some conclusion that the wider agenda was to bring down the East India Company. Therefore, we must assume that the dissatisfaction and ambitions against the British went beyond the army. The Indian Mutiny may have been directly about conditions of service. Indirectly, and more seriously, it reflected an anti-British sentiment among some who could, for example, spread a rumour that the British would make everyone become Christians – and be believed. This last point should not be underestimated when making a list of grievances that brought mutiny.

  The high-handed British attitude affected a broad cross-section of Indians. The biggest effect, of course, fell on those with most to lose, the princes and officials. Honours, pensions and bureaucratic titles had been forfeited as a result of British policies. Central inefficiencies within legislation of the East India Company had restricted careers and advancements in spite of 250 years of working and trading in India. Equally, we should not make comparisons with so-called business efficiencies of the twenty-first century. There were, in the 1850s, no ideas of personnel management. While they were spared the ridiculous jargon and business-speak of modern times, the running of commercial houses had not gone much beyond the fifteenth-century practices of employer-employee relations. The Company, and therefore the British, still failed to either appreciate or care for the sensitivities of caste and religion. The restructuring and recruitment within the Bengal army proved this. The pensioning off of old princes without understanding the consequences for those who expected to inherit, perhaps a generation on, reflected either British ignorance or arrogance. We should argue therefore that the Indian Mutiny was the figurehead of a movement of greater dissatisfaction among Indians.

  All this dissatisfaction and its history does not explain the incident that brought about the mutiny. In 1853, as a prelude to issuing the Indian soldiers with a new rifle, the cartridges arrived in India. This was not some pre-positioning exercise. It was a climate test. The system was very simple and was the same as with an earlier muzzle loaded weapon. The cartridge came in two parts. One contained the shot. The second part was the gunpowder that exploded and sent the shot out of the muzzle. All this was normally in a strengthened paper tube, the cartridge. The basic system is ages old and in a slightly different form is still used in shotguns. In the 1850s the army was changing over to a new weapon. The cartridge was partly greased to make it easier to ram down the barrel. A dry cartridge, a paper one, could be universally used. The army needed to know how a greased cartridge would react to the temperature and humidities in India. The authorities in London were not impressed by any suggestion that the origins of the tallow grease, that is, pork or beef dripping, might offend Indian religious sensitivities. During the two years of the tests there were no complaints from the sepoys. In 1856 the new Enfield rifles arrived in India. The cartridges, apart from the initial order, were to be made by the Department of Ordnance of the Bengal army. The greasing came in three parts, the most sensitive being tallow.

  Instead of thinking through the consequence of making the tallow as they did, the authorities were distracted. They were now faced with a continuing rumour which began at the beginning of 1857 that there was a move to convert India to Christianity. The extension of this rumour was that a Christian sepoy would not mind biting into a greased cartridge in order to release the powder into the barrel. Towards the end of January came the first signs that the Indian soldiers, including officers, had asked that the greased composition should be changed. Here was no difficulty. The answer was simple: sepoys should be issued with clean cartridges and they should be allowed to grease them with whatever they wished. Moreover, any tallow would be that from goats or sheep. All should have been satisfied. However, the rumour persisted that the tallow was from pigs and cows. In ordnance records there is no written evidence that this was so. It is possible to draw modern parallels. How often government departments, especially agriculture, have been either vague or evasive until the crisis has proved original accusations founded. There was, in early 1857, an almost offhand agreement from the Department of Ordnance that the tallow may indeed have been prepared from substances which native soldiers might find offensive.

  From a distance of 160 years it would seem that the offer to allow sepoys to grease their own cartridges should have resolved the matter
. However, the grease question was long out of the hands of the authorities. Might the paper, asked the sepoys, also contain some grease content? It must have been clear by February at the very latest that the cartridge and grease controversy was a vehicle to raise the wider grievance. The conspirators were not going to let the opportunity slip. There were visible signs of unrest. The homes and buildings of Europeans had been attacked by arsonists. The Raniganj telegraph office was burned to the ground. There was evidence of bribery among Indian officials to disrupt and exacerbate an undercurrent of unrest. The belief that the British were going to usurp the religious responsibilities of Indians and corrupt the caste system could not be countered. The unrest and movement of dissent was helped by the lack of discipline within many of the sepoy regiments. The senses of which regiments were loyal and which were not was hard to assess.

  By middle to late March this was becoming clearer. Open defiance was rife throughout the 19th Native Infantry and on 31 March the regiment was disbanded. However, it was by then too late to prevent the rebellion that would begin in May. Tensions increased with growing disobedience. The partial reason for disobedience was that the sepoys believed they could get away with it because of the lack of discipline.

  The Sepoy Rebellion was a cruel and wretched conflict that began in May of 1857 and was not finally put down until two years later. It is not the place of this book to go into the mutiny in great detail. Some 45,000 white British soldiers, half of them in Punjab, waited in May for the inevitable uprising. Given the distance between England and India, there was no hope for immediate reinforcement. A sense of helplessness was the order of the British soldiery spread across India. The mutiny began when the rebels took over Meerut and within three weeks the rebellion covered the Ganges valley. The successful sepoys then headed for Delhi. On 11 May 1857, they were joined by the Delhi garrison and one of their first tasks was to slaughter any Christian who came to hand. Two days later a new Mogul emperor, Bahadur Shah, was proclaimed. On 20 May, the 9th Native Infantry, close to Agra, joined the rebellion. At the same time, the British managed to disarm the Peshawar garrison, fearing it too would mutiny. On 30 May came the uprising at the Lucknow garrison and its commander, Brigadier General Isaac Handscomb, was killed. During the first two weeks of June the mutineers carried out a series of massacres as far apart as the early centre of unrest, Oudh, central India, Rajputana, the Punjab (which by and large remained loyal) and the north-west.