The fall of princes had repercussions throughout their states. When Awadh had been taken over in February 1856, the royal household was severely reduced, the 200,000-strong royal army was dispersed and those who maintained it, including 12,000 armourers, were thrown out of work.4 The numbers of unemployed rose further when the new government ordered the taluqdars to dismiss their armed retainers. Jobless and discontented men drifted towards the big cities, and they may have been among the crowds whose foul-mouthed incivilities distressed Mrs Amy Haines whenever she went abroad in Lucknow.5
Rural grudges were long-standing and directed in equal parts against the government which extracted taxes and the moneylenders who supplied the peasantry with the wherewithal to pay. In some districts in north-western India there was a largely artificial sense of foreboding caused by the appearance of strangers in villages. The visitor would seek out the chowkidar, present him with four small chapattis, instruct him to bake four more and have them delivered to neighbouring villages. Officials were perplexed and the best explanation they could offer was that the rigmarole had been contrived to ward off some unspecified but imminent catastrophe.6 In Baroda, a pariah dog was guided from village to village with a basket of food which was shared among local dogs and then replenished. Bewildered magistrates dug into local mythology and discovered that the Maratha god of the sword was a dog, which suggested the dissemination of restlessness and violence. As for the food, eating it might be some form of sacrament, rather like the ritual taking of sugar which bound the thugs together.7
Indians interpreted these phenomena differently. They saw the distribution of food as a token that in the near future the Company would end all distinctions of caste and religion and that everyone would share a common diet.8 Sepoys of the 2nd Bengal NI told their colonel that now: ‘Rajas, Thakurs [Rajput landlords], Zamindars, Maharajas and Ryots all eat together and English bread has been sent to them.’ This prediction was a variation on an old but persistent theme: the Company’s secret plans to impose Christianity on India. ‘The Lord Sahib [the Governor-General, Lord Canning] has given orders to all commanding officers which he has received from the Company to destroy the religion of the country,’ the sepoys continued. The signs were unmistakable; why, they asked, had a law been passed to allow Hindu widows to remarry? Now the Company was contaminating the salt, ghi and sugar of its sepoys with the bones of pigs and cows and, as every soldier knew, the cartridge for the new Enfield rifle had been lubricated with the mixture of pig and cow fat. A government which had just demonstrated its absolute supremacy by dethroning the most powerful prince in India, the Nawab of Awadh, would stop at nothing to gets its way.
Evidence for this official conspiracy was everywhere. The 34th Bengal NI listened uneasily to sermons from Colonel G. S. Wheler, whom, they imagined, regularly went to Calcutta to consult with Lord Canning on the regiment’s conversion. In fact, the Governor-General considered Wheler’s preaching made him unfit for command.9 Routine movements of European soldiers were regarded in the same sinister light. Reports that British artillery and infantry units were being posted to Barrackpur in March were immediately seen as evidence that some measure of coercion was about to be applied to the sepoys. In the middle of the month, latrine rumours of the 2nd Bengal NI predicted the imminent arrival of 5,000 white soldiers who would compel the sepoys to use the cartridges for the new rifle which was then coming into service.10
Sepoys groused more than anyone else in 1857, mostly in that secret world of the regimental lines, cantonment bazaars, grog shops, and street corners where few Europeans went and none were welcomed. One night towards the end of April, a private of the 9th Lancers stumbled across three sepoys gathered in a garden at Ambala and was manhandled by them, spat at and thrown out.11 Such was the mood of the times that he reported the incident to an officer who thought the information worth passing on to his superior. No one knew exactly what the sepoys were saying or imagined that their complaints might be translated into a massive insurrection. Even when the mutinies were under way, there was a degree of lassitude when it came to uncovering precisely what the sepoys were planning. Major-General Hearsey, the local commander in Calcutta, in many respects a vigilant officer, found spying on his men distasteful. On 20 May, he admitted that it would be impossible to get ‘secret information’ from his soldiers, adding, ‘It would not be proper for me to do it.’12 Where the intelligence-gathering machinery was in place, it was quickly activated. On 12 May, Captain Richard Lawrence of the Thagi and Dakaiti Department based at Lahore sent a Brahmin agent into the sepoy lines to discover their mood. When he returned, he told Lawrence, ‘Sahib, they are full of fissad [sedition].’13
During the first five months of 1857 sedition meant tales about cartridges and their potential to defile the Muslim and break the Hindu’s caste. No number of perfectly true official statements that the cartridges were untainted could persuade the sepoys otherwise. Nor were they mollified by suggestions that the cartridge paper could be torn rather than bitten. Moreover, there was the legendary remark of an untouchable labourer at the Dum Dum arsenal who, on being refused water by a Brahmin sepoy, told him that soon there would be no barriers of caste, for the army was grinding pig and cow bones into the sepoys’ flour. The Company was suspected of a similar trick in Gujarat, where it was using its salt monopoly to destroy the caste system. Cow’s blood was being surreptitiously added to the salt, which was why it had a curious reddish tinge.14 The discolouration actually came from the red ochre dye on the sacks, but this explanation convinced no one.
As rumours and complaints proliferated, it was clear that the Raj was suffering a gigantic loss of credibility among its most valuable collaborators, the Bengali sepoys. On every occasion, they believed the worst of their officers and the Company. Not only did they share their countrymen’s apprehension at the quickening tempo of change and reform, they felt individually endangered, for their social and religious status appeared to be under a systematic assault. Gurkhas and Sikhs were making their way into an army which had hitherto been the exclusive preserve of Rajputs, Brahmins and well-born Muslims. The pursuit of efficiency was sweeping away old privileges such as the right of Hindus to refuse foreign service on the grounds that they would be polluted if they crossed the sea. And then there were the recent laws against Hindu inheritance and marriage customs, preaching officers who favoured Christian sepoys, and the meddling arrogance of the missionaries whose schools taught young Indians to scoff at their parents’ creeds.
These anxieties might have been allayed had the Company’s officers been more patient and understanding. Many, especially younger men, were out of touch with their sepoys, preferring the society of the officers’ mess and leaving regimental chores to Indian junior officers and NCOs. Martin Gubbins, the financial commissioner for Awadh, was struck by the aloofness of Company officers. ‘How can you expect devotion on the field,’ he once asked some subalterns, ‘when you are a stranger to your men in cantonment?’15 This detachment might not have mattered too much if native officers and NCOs had faithfully carried out their customary duty of being the eyes and ears of their British superiors. In many, perhaps the majority of instances, they were swept along by the same misgivings as their men with whom they made common cause. ‘The Native Officers, Subadars, Jemadars are all good men in the whole brigade except two whose faces are like pigs: the Subadar Major of the 70th Regiment who is Christian and Thakur Mizra of the 43rd Light Infantry,’ the 2nd NI told their commanding officer.16 Interestingly both men were Christians, for the latter is later described as a man who ‘has lost his religion’ and the respect of his men, since Brahmin sepoys refused to salute him. Faced with this sort of statement and those of informers, British officers retreated behind a barrier of prejudices: the ruckus was no more than another, exasperating example of Indian naiveté and gullibility, and would soon pass.
Treating the unrest with impatience and disdain made matters worse. Dismissing the the 19th and 34th regiments’ apprehen
sions about the cartridges as absurd deepened disquiet. Violence erupted on 29 March with the one-man mutiny of Mangal Pande of the 34th. He may have expected assistance for he was discovered on the Barrackpur parade ground, armed with a loaded musket, calling on his fellow soldiers to join him. ‘Come out, you banchuts [sister-fuckers] . . . Why aren’t we getting ready? It’s for our religion! From biting these cartridges we shall become infidels. Get ready! Turn out all of you! You have incited me to do this and now you banchuts, you will not follow me!’ A British NCO and subaltern hurried to the scene and were wounded by Pande. A bloody tussle followed which involved his colonel and General Hearsey. Much to their consternation, the British officers were hindered by all but one of the nearby sepoys, who was afterwards promoted. After a desperate resistance – he had been taking bhang, as he later admitted – Pande tried to shoot himself. Just over a week later, and still recovering from a wound in the neck, he was tried by a court martial of Brahmin and Muslim NCOs and sentenced to be shot. It was thought prudent to have a detachment of British regulars present during the execution.
The day after Pande’s defiance, the 19th Bengal NI was disbanded, and since it was all too clear that the 34th was wobbling, it too was disarmed in the presence of a strong British force, including artillery. These punishments were designed to deter and humiliate: the sepoys were disgraced, deprived of their livelihood and pensions and sent back to communities where they would no longer enjoy any special standing. The same procedure was followed at Lucknow at the beginning of May after Sir Henry Lawrence had detected evidence of sedition among sowars of the 7th Awadh irregulars. They were cowed by the 32nd Regiment and a battery of loaded cannon and disarmed. As they surrendered in their muskets, the sepoys gave no hint of their emotions; a few were heard to mutter, ‘Jai Company Bahadur Ki [Long Live the Illustrious Company].’17 Whether this was loyalty or irony, no one knew.
The pattern had been set; once a regiment showed signs of sullenness or intractability, the authorities would move pre-emptively and break it up in the hope that its fate might concentrate the minds of others inclined to disobedience. The psychological effect was not always as predicted. Fear of disarmament and perhaps being shot down by British musketry and grape shot panicked sepoys who were already the hosts to terrifying phantoms. Rather than submit and hand over their muskets, they would make the first move.
At Meerut, Colonel Edward Carmichael Smyth of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry was prepared to face trouble head-on in a characteristically bullish manner. Stiff and short-tempered, he was disliked by his sowars who, in the same circumstances and handled by another officer, might well have done as they were told. The temper of his men was sulky and he was determined to put them to the test. On 24 April Carmichael Smyth ordered a special parade for the regiment’s eighty-five skirmishers, lectured them about the new ammunition, and ordered them to load their carbines with the suspect cartridges, tearing the paper with their fingers. They refused, even though they had fired the carbines previously, and were immediately arrested. ‘The real case is that they hate Smyth,’ one of his subalterns commented.18 The mutineers were tried by a native court martial, found guilty and each sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. But first they had to undergo a ritual humiliation designed to intimidate their colleagues and the sepoys of the 11th and 20th Bengal NI. On 9 May the convicted men were marched to a parade ground where they were stripped of their uniforms and shackled, a process which took several hours. Among the onlookers were the 60th Rifles with loaded guns, the 6th Dragoon Guards with drawn sabres and a battery of artillery – Major-General William (‘Bloody Bill’) Hewitt, the divisional commander, was taking no risks. It was a sombre spectacle with old soldiers weeping at their shame and pleading for mercy. One cried out: ‘I was a good sepoy, and would have gone anywhere for the service, but I could not forsake my religion.’
Nor would his brothers-in-arms. On the evening of 10 May, a Sunday, the cavalrymen broke into the gaol and rescued their comrades. Horsemen then galloped through the town, calling civilians to join them. The mob, swelled by sepoys from the two infantry regiments, attacked off-duty British soldiers in the bazaar and rampaged through the cantonments, burning bungalows and murdering every European man, woman and child they encountered. It was a frenzied, almost suicidal gesture, for everyone involved knew that Meerut had the largest British garrison in the region and they would surely take fearsome revenge. There was, bizarrely, a purpose behind this and later massacres. Killing men and women of a race which had hitherto represented authority and demanded obedience destroyed the mystique of British supremacy. It was almost an act of sacrilege; even the thugs had shrunk from attacking Europeans. Furthermore, the rebels were forging a sort of unity, for murdering Europeans made them men apart, cut off for ever from any chance of reconciliation and mercy. There was only one way forward: to fight and find friends. It was a desperate and irreversible course which many sepoys refused to take, then or later. At Meerut a handful of sowars and sepoys stayed loyal and did what they could to rescue Europeans.
There was a guiding political hand behind the wanton fury of the Meerut uprising, although it was never definitely identified. It had used violence to give the mutineers cohesion and a common cause, and somehow persuaded them that their only future course lay in an alliance with the old Muslim ruling dynasty, the Mughals. To stay in Meerut would mean annihilation by the 1,700 European troops who, thanks to the nerveless incompetents in command, had not yet been ordered into action. At some time during the night, a body of cavalry sowars set off for Delhi, thirty-six miles to the south-west, and were followed by the remnants of the infantry who had been persuaded not to scurry off to their homes with their loot. The first horsemen galloped across the bridge of boats over the Jumma two or so hours after daybreak on 11 May. They then rode into the great open-air audience hall of the Red Fort, swords drawn, and demanded that Bahadur Shah, King of Delhi, appoint one of his sons their general. One of them, the seventeen-year-old Mirza Jiwan Bakht, thought the Russians had come!19 An 82-year-old poet, somewhat gaga and addicted to opium, Bahadur Shah was an unlikely leader for what was about to become a revolution. But he had one invaluable asset: he was the heir of the Mughals, and as such was a figure of legitimate authority whom the insurgents needed as a focus for what they were beginning to perceive as a popular movement that would defend their faiths and expel the British. As they later pointed out, Bahadur Shah was the legal ruler of India and the British were in fact traitors and rebels.
The coup took the British in Delhi completely by surprise. The events of the next few hours followed the same awful pattern as those in Meerut. Europeans were killed at random and attempts by their officers to rally the city’s garrison, the 38th, the 54th and the 74th Bengal NI, ended with mutiny and murder. A handful of gallant officers rose above the chaos and forestalled the seizure of the Delhi magazine by blowing it up. As their assailants rushed the building their warcry was the same as that uttered by sepoys when they had fought for the British: ‘Deen’ (the Faith). Antipathy towards Christianity united Hindus and Muslims, as the leaders hoped it would, and mobs desecrated churches and cemeteries and murdered Indian and Eurasian converts. There were many hair-breadth escapes, but fifty British, Indian Christian and Eurasian prisoners, mostly women and children, were taken and confined within a dungeon in the Red Fort. On 16 May, and at the instigation of the original mutineers, they were brought into a courtyard and slaughtered in the presence of Bahadur Shah and his family. They were now accomplices in the uprising and had no choice but to act the parts assigned to them by the Meerut mutineers. Not long afterwards the new emperor composed a couplet on the events which had so suddenly elevated him to his throne:
Na Iran, ne kiya, ne Shah Russe ne, –
Angrez ko tabah kiya Kartoosh ne.
The English who conquered Persia and defeated the Czar of Russia had been overthrown in India by a simple cartridge.20
II
The situation in north-western
India was extremely dangerous, but it did not yet represent a calamity. There were perhaps five or six thousand mutinous professional troops in Delhi, together with the poor-quality ceremonial troops of the emperor. There were also potential friends in the region to the north of the city where there had been a wave of peasant insurrections under leaders who were willing to assist what they saw as the new Raj.21 But to make real headway, the rebels needed more trained soldiers. Scattered across the Punjab, the Ganges plain and Bengal were a further 130,000 sepoys of the Bengal army who, in various degrees, shared the anxieties of their colleagues at Meerut and Delhi.
News of the uprisings there travelled by word of mouth at a speed which amazed the British. In some cases it was accelerated by agents; two were arrested at Allahabad on 24 May after they had been discovered attempting to suborn sepoys on the eve of a Muslim festival.22 The job of agitators was made easy by prevailing fears of the immediate disbandment of regiments and possibly chastisement.23 After their officers had attempted to stifle unrest at Firozpur on 12 May, the 45th and 61st Bengal NI rebelled and hurried south to Delhi, and eight days later several companies of the 9th Bengal NI rose at Aligarh. Here the catalyst was the execution of a sepoy for inciting a mutiny, and news of his fate led to outlying detachments of the 9th rebelling in the next few days. In response to proclamations in the new emperor’s name they too fled to Delhi, where they had the safety of numbers and protection against retribution.
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