Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  Here the royal ladies looked through their grilled windows to see the Stream of Paradise rippling through its marble chute, here Aurungzeb worshipped in the copper-domed mosque of the Moti Masjid, here in the Golden Tower above the river the Emperor on ceremonial occasions greeted his people far below, and here in the Diwan-i-Khas was the very crucible of the Moghul Empire, white marble ceilinged in silver, with water running through its central conduit, and on its dais the Peacock Throne itself, inlaid with thousands of sapphires, rubies, emeralds and pearls, guarded by jewelled peacocks and a parrot carved from a single emerald. The Red Fort was one of the great masterpieces of mediaeval Muslim art. If there be a Paradise on earth, said the famous inscription above its Diwan-i-Khas, it is here, it is here, it is here.

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  In 1857 there still lived in this marvellous place the last of the Moghul monarchs, Bahadur Shah Zafar. By now the palace was only a parody of its own splendours. With the crumbled mass of its red sandstone, with its audience chambers stripped of their glories and the overgrown lawns of its Life Bestowing Gardens, it was like a relic from some dimly remembered, half-legendary golden age. Yet Bahadur, a powerless pensioner of the British, was still the titular King of Delhi. The British preferred it so. When they found it legally or tactically convenient, they could refer to him as the embodiment of traditional power, or claim to be acting as his constitutional successors. Their representatives visited him with formal respect, entering his presence barefoot or with socks over their boots, and until the 1850s presenting a ceremonial bag of gold, the nazar, in tribute to the Ruler of the Universe. Bahadur, who was very old, accordingly lived in a phantom consequence. He was an eastern monarch of the old kind, frail but dignified. His face was fine-drawn and long-nosed; he was bearded to the waist like a king in a Persian miniature; he wandered about his palace leaning on a long staff.

  He was a poet, a scholar, a valetudinarian, and believed himself to possess magic powers.1 He distributed charms and shadowy privileges. By his authority a royal bulletin was issued each day, reporting events inside the sorry court as might be chronicled the affairs of a Jehangir—or a Victoria. He was surrounded still by swarms of servants, and attended by many wives and unnumbered children, and at the Lahore Gate his personal bodyguard, 200 strong, was quartered under its British commander. To many millions of people, especially Muslims, he was still the true ruler of India: and it was as a ruler that he bore himself still, conscious of his heritage and deeply resentful of the changing world outside. ‘A melancholy red-stone notion of life’, Emily Eden had called it.

  Bahadur lived altogether at the mercy of the British. They paid him a subsidy of £200,000 a year, but they had effectually removed the centre of Indian life from his court to their own capital at Calcutta. They did not even bother to keep European troops in Delhi, so unimportant a backwater had it become, and it was administered as a provincial city like any other. Sometimes they thought Bahadur should be removed too, to somewhere less historically suggestive, but for the time being they let him stay. They had, after all, made it clear that upon his death the imperial title must lapse, so that in a sense he was already no more than a ghost or a memory, an emperor in the mind.

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  Early on the morning of May 11, 1857, this monarch soi-disant was sitting in his private apartments overlooking the river when he heard the noise of a crowd shouting and jostling in the dusty space below, where petitioners habitually appeared to offer their pleas, and jugglers or dancing bears sometimes performed for the royal entertainment. It was Ramadan, the Muslim month of fast, when tempers were always testy, and the combination of heat, hunger, exhaustion and religious zeal was traditionally the begetter of riots.

  The old king sent for the commander of his guard, Captain Douglas, who stepped out to a balcony to stop the disturbance. There below him, between the palace and the broad sluggish sweep of the Jumna, were hundreds of Indian soldiers, some on horseback, some on foot, in the grey jackets and shakoes of the Company service, dusty from a long journey, their horses lathered, waving their swords and calling for Bahadur. Douglas shouted to them to move away, for they were disturbing the king, and after a time they went : but an hour or two later the noise began again, fiercer and louder this time, and shots rang out beyond the palace walls. There were angry shouts, a fire crackled somewhere, women screamed, hoofs clattered, and suddenly there burst into the royal precincts a rabble of cavalrymen, firing feux-de-joie and shouting exultantly. Behind them a noisy mob of sepoys and ruffians from the bazaar, scarlet and white and dirty grey, poured into the palace. Some ran upstairs to Douglas’s quarters, and finding him there with two other Englishmen and two Englishwomen, murdered them all. The others swarmed through the palace, brandishing their swords, singing, or simply lying down exhausted on their palliasses in the Hall of Audience.

  The terrified old king retreated farther and farther into the recesses of his private quarters, but presently the leaders of the mob found him. Far from harming him, they prostrated themselves at his feet. They were rebelling, they said, not against the Moghul monarchy, but against the rule of the English, and they asked him as Light of the World to assume the revolutionary command. Bahadur did not know what to do. He was surrounded by advisers—Hasan Ansari his spiritual guide, Hakim Ahsanullah his physician, Ghulam Abbas his lawyer, his sons Moghul, Khair Sultan, Abu Bakr. He was not a man for quick decisions. He was old, he said, and infirm. He was no more than a pensioner. While he prevaricated, a messenger was posted to the British Lieutenant-Governor at Agra, forty miles away, in the hope that the Raj might resolve the issue by sending a rescue force: but as the hours passed and nobody came, as the mutineers dossed down in the palace, and their leaders pressed for an answer—as the sounds of looting and burning came from the city, with random musket-fire, and explosions, and hysterical laughter—as the princes whispered in one ear, and Ghulam Abbas in another, and the soldiers stumbled in one by one bareheaded to receive the royal blessing—as no word came from the British of comfort or punishment, and there stirred in the king’s poor old mind, elated perhaps by all that martial loyalty, some inherited pride of the Moghuls—some time that evening, after dark, Bahadur Shah capitulated, and assumed the supreme and symbolic leadership of the Indian Mutiny. At midnight his soldiers greeted him with a 21-gun salute.

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  But it was not a national revolution at all. The Indian Mutiny, or the Sepoy War as the Victorians often called it, was one of the decisive events of British imperial history, which set a seal upon the manner and purpose of the Empire: yet it was limited in scale and confused in meaning. It had been smouldering for years, as British intentions in India became more radical, more earnest and more ideological. We have seen how, under the influence of the evangelical movement, the British conceived the ambition of re-moulding India to an image of their own design; now we see, in the fragile indecisive person of the King of Delhi, the inevitable reaction. All the conquests and conflicts of two centuries had led at last to this: in 1857 it was finally to be decided which were the stronger, the muddled loyalties and traditions of India, or the new dynamic of Victoria’s Britain.

  The British had made many enemies in India by their developing dogmatism—what Sir James Outram, one of the more sympathetic of their administrators, called ‘the crusading, improving spirit of the past twenty-five years’. There were enemies of course among the princes, so many of whom had been humiliated, and who had been especially incensed by Dalhousie’s doctrine of lapse. There were enemies among the Brahmins, whose supremacy of caste depended upon a series of shibboleths and assumptions now being systematically discredited. Religious leaders resented the advent of Christian missionaries, and the arrogant assertion by men like Nicholson and the Lawrences that Christianity contained the only truth. Ordinary people of all sorts rankled under the growing exclusivity of the British, fostered partly by better communications and the arrival of that archetypal snob, the memsahib. Colder and colder the rulers were withdrawing into t
heir cantonments and clubs, to clamp themselves within a round of amateur theatricals, pig-sticking, gossip and professional ambition which shut them off from Indian life outside, and made them more and more contemptuous of it: by 1852, when the young Frederick Roberts reached India, one of the sights of Allahabad was the last of the hookah-smoking Englishmen, once familiar figures of Anglo-Indian life—he had a servant called his bookab-bardar just to look after the pipe.

  That the British were powerful everyone knew. Their iqbal was formidable. But there were signs that they were not infallible. Kabul in 1842 had not been forgotten, and rumours were now reaching India of British reverses in the Crimean War, which had broken out in 1854.1 The British were ludicrously thin on the Indian ground-in 1857 there were 34,000 European soldiers to 257,000 Indians—and they depended for their security, as any percipient native could see, upon the Indians themselves, represented by the sepoys of the Company armies. Out of this ground-swell of disillusion, signs and portents bubbled. Prophecies were recalled, legends resuscitated, secret messages circulated, and there were whispers of conspiracy.

  Among the sepoys there were already special reasons for disaffection. In earlier times a sense of brotherly trust had characterized the regiments, and a family spirit bound British officers and Indian soldiers alike. Now many of the officers had wives and children in India, and they found it easier to live the sort of life they might lead at home in England, to the exclusion of their men. Though many officers would still swear blindly by their soldiers, and stand by them in any emergency, many of the sepoys felt a less absolute loyalty to their commanders. The rapport had faltered, and the British knew far less than they thought about the feelings of their Indian troops. In particular they were out of touch with movements within the Bengal Army.

  Most of the Company sepoys were Hindus, for the three armies were all based in predominantly Hindu areas. The men of the Madras and Bombay armies were drawn from all classes and many regions, but the Bengal army was more homogeneous. Not only were its sepoys mostly of high caste, but they nearly all came from three particular regions, notably the recently-annexed kingdom of Oudh. Men like the Lawrences early saw the dangers inherent to this sytem. The Bengal sepoys were clannish, caste-ridden and susceptible. John Lawrence thought they should be supplemented by Sikhs and Muslims. General J. B. Hearsey, commanding the Presidency Division of Bengal, believed the army should set about recruiting Christians from the Middle East, Malaya, China, or even South America—‘but they must be Christians, and then TRUST can be reposed in them’.

  Yet in the officers’ messes of the Bengal army there was little unease. Most officers refused to believe reports of subversion, and retained the affectionate trust in their men that was a British mililtary tradition.

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  The new Enfield rifle, with which the Company armies were about to be re-equipped, used greased cartridges which must be bitten open to release their powder. Half the grease was animal tallow, and it was thickly smeared on the cartridges. Early in 1857 the rumour ran through the Bengal sepoy regiments that the grease was made partly from pigs, abominable to Muslims, and partly from cows, sacred to Hindus. This was a device, it was whispered, by which the British meant to defile the sepoy, or break his caste. Deprived of his own religion, he would be more or less forcibly converted to Christianity and used as cannon-fodder wherever the British needed him.

  These rumours had reached the Government at Calcutta as early as January, 1857. Mutinies were not unknown in the Indian armies, and action was prompt The factory-greased cartridges, it was ordered, were to be used only by European troops, and the sepoys were to grease their own with beeswax and vegetable oil. But it was too late. By now the sepoys had convinced themselves that the cartridge-grease was only one of a series of perfidies. At the end of March a young soldier of the 34th Native Infantry, Mangal Pande, stationed at Barrackpore under General Hearsey’s command, ran amok and shot at his European sergeant-major on the parade-ground. The Adjutant at once mounted his horse and galloped to the scene, but Pande shot the horse beneath him, and as the Englishman disentangled himself from the harness, fell upon him with a sword and severely wounded him. There then arrived on the parade ground, as in some tragic pageant, General Hearsey himself mounted on his charger and accompanied not only by his two sons, but by the entire garrison guard—all advancing, sternfaced and indomitable, upon the confused young sepoy. The general rode directly towards him, a son on either flank, and Pande stood with his musket loaded ready to fire. ‘There was a shot,’ reported the young Frederick Roberts, who was there, ‘the whistle of a bullet, and a man fell to the ground—but not the General! It was the fanatic sepoy himself, who at the last moment had discharged the contents of the musket into his own breast.’

  Poor Pande did not die at once, surviving to be hanged in public, but his name went into the English language: ‘Pandy’ became the British Army’s nickname first for a mutineer of 1857, and later for the Indian soldier in general. His regiment was disbanded, its fate being publicly proclaimed at every military station in India, but the effect was not what the British intended. The 34th achieved a kind of martyrdom among the sepoys, and within a few weeks there occurred the next act of what seems in hindsight an inexorable tragedy. At Meerut, north of Delhi, eighty-five troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry refused to obey orders. They were court-martialled, sentenced to ten years’ hard labour each, and publicly degraded at a parade of the whole Meerut garrison. This was done with ritual solemnity. The garrison was drawn up in ranks around the parade ground. Commanding the scene was a regiment of European soldiers, ready for any trouble, and a battery of artillery with loaded guns. The mutineers were paraded under a guard of riflemen. Their sentences were read aloud, their uniforms were stripped from them, and on to the parade ground advanced the smiths and armourers, with hammers, shackles and chains. In a terrible silence the garrison, at attention, watched while the chains were riveted on. Sometimes a prisoner cried aloud for mercy. Sometimes there was a mutter in the sepoy ranks. It took more than an hour, and when at last the parade was dismissed, the prisoners marched off to their cells and the regiments returned to their quarters, a heavy sense of sorrow hung over the camp. Veteran sepoys wept in shock and despair, and at least one of the English subalterns, the future General Sir Hugh Gough, ‘was weak enough almost to share their sorrow’.1

  It was Sunday next day, May 10, 1857 and all seemed quiet in Meerut. Rumours reached the British officers of restlessness in the town bazaars, and there appeared to be a shortage of domestic servants in the cantonment that day, but morning and afternoon passed peacefully, and in the evening the European soldiers polished their boots, brasses and badges as usual for church parade. Then without warning, soon after five o’clock, Meerut exploded. Suddenly through the cantonment armed sepoys were furiously running, shooting, looting, dancing, leaping about in frenzy, setting fire to huts and bungalows, galloping crazily through the lines, breaking into the magazines, deliriously releasing the men of the 3rd Cavalry from their shackles and chains. A mob from the bazaars followed them, augmented by convicts freed from the city prisons, and policemen off-duty. Many of the sepoys tried to protect the officers and their families, but the crowd swept through the cantonment like a whirlwind, murdering Europeans and Indians alike, and leaving the whole camp ablaze, with clouds of black smoke hanging on the evening sky. The ground was littered with corpses, some horribly hacked about, with smashed furniture, with weapons and charred clothing and piles of ash.

  In a frenzy of passion and fear the mutinous cavalrymen galloped out of Meerut into the night, in scattered groups. Some still wore their high feathered shakoes and their cross-belted scarlet jackets: some had got out of their uniforms and thrown away their weapons. After them hastened hundreds of infantrymen, in field grey. All assumed, as their passions cooled, that the British dragoons stationed at Meerut would soon be after them, but when they left the blaze of the cantonment behind, and hurried away down the Delhi road, they
unexpectedly left the noise and the excitement behind them too, and were presently passing through silent sleeping villages. Nobody followed them. It was a bright moonlit night, and most of the horsemen rode to Delhi almost without stopping.

  By eight o’clock next morning the first of them crossed the Bridge of Boats across the Jumna, within sight of the Red Fort: and pausing to kill a passing Englishman, out on his morning exercise, and setting fire to the toll-house at the lower end of the bridge, almost before the King of Delhi had finished his breakfast they had arrived at the dusty space below the walls of the palace, and were calling for Bahadur Shah.

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  The Mutiny was a muddle. It had no coherent strategy and no enunciated purpose, and what symbolic leadership it had came from Delhi. There most of the Europeans were quickly slaughtered. Whole families died. All the compositors of a newspaper were killed as a matter of principle, and nine British officers in the arsenal blew it and themselves up when ordered to surrender ‘in the King’s name’. The few survivors fled the city, some to be murdered in the countryside, some to reach safety in Agra or Meerut; and so Delhi became once more, at least in pretension, the capital of a Moghul Empire.