He was right, for while the sepoys would declare that they were in arms to protect their faiths, they never forgot that they were paid professional soldiers. Everywhere they mutinied, one of their first objectives was the district treasury. At Mathura some of the spoils were handed out to rioting townsfolk, but the Bareilly mutineers carried their silver rupees, the equivalent of six months’ wages, with them to Delhi. Once there, they spurned suggestions that it ought to be added to the general kitty.36 Those directing Bahadur Shah’s propaganda recognised that the Bengal sepoys remained at heart hireling soldiers when they issued proclamations which offered twelve rupees a month to infantrymen and thirty to cavalry, more than the Company paid. Generosity was not matched by resources so that, by the final fortnight of the siege, many sepoys inside Delhi were unpaid. There were cash-flow problems for Nana Sahib, despite the usual expedient of forced loans and outright theft. Some of his soldiers turned to private enterprise money-raising in the traditional manner, forcing rich men to excavate their cellars for concealed cash.37
The Company had more money to throw around. Sir Henry Lawrence offered a bribe of 200,000 rupees to one nobleman and a jagir of 100,000 rupees a year to another if they remained constant. Four sepoys received 500 rupees each and promotion after they refused to join the Azamgarh mutineers, and the same sum was distributed among the Multan Irregular Horse after they had helped expel rebels from the city. Old Mughal precedents were resurrected and lands and a 200-rupee jagir were given to two loyal NCOs from the 4th NI. Those who helped fugitives were duly rewarded for their kindness and courage: a zamindar from Pulri received 200 rupees and a land grant, and a blacksmith from Badli got 200 rupees.38 In July 1857 the government proclaimed a fifty-rupee reward to anyone who captured an armed mutineer and thirty for an unarmed one.
The price of rebellion was high. A proclamation of 5 September 1857 warned the taluqdars of Awadh that their estates would be reduced to ‘deserts’ and their families obliterated if they succoured the rebels. This was too severe even for Neill, who suggested that it might be wiser to entice men of property into the government’s camp by pledges of future favours, a policy which was later adopted. Nonetheless, in many areas rebels’ lands were seized and their heirs evicted. Once back in the saddle, the government could afford some relaxation of its penalties. In 1859 the wives and children of executed mutineers from the Hisar district were allowed to enter their inheritances, although the widow of one ‘Abdullah’, shot in Delhi at the orders of Mr Clifford, was refused permission to acquire her husband’s land. Despite her protests to the contrary, ‘a man having been shot for rebellion by order of a competent authority . . . was a rebel’, and that was that.39
In the war of inducements, victory was bound to go to the side with the larger purse or better credit. Here, the mutineers were at a severe disadvantage, for they never secured the breathing space in which to reactivate effectively the tax-collecting machinery in those regions they controlled. Initial windfalls from looting were quickly used up in Delhi, where Bahadur Shah’s officials were forced to borrow with menaces. Between fifty and sixty less-than-compliant bankers and banias were locked up and 40,000 rupees extracted from Punjabi merchants at the end of August. In the meantime, the emperor had been able to seize cash abandoned by the collector of Gurgaon and had received offers of taxes from zamindars in the Doab district, but endeavours to proceed with regular collections elsewhere were resisted.40 Peasants who had been celebrating the end of one Raj could hardly have been expected to welcome tax collectors from its replacement. Abdul Rahman Khan, the rebel Nawab of Jhajjar, offered to pay his dues to Bahadur Shah, but it was considered prudent to send a force of cavalry with cannon to collect them. During their progress through eastern Rajasthan, the sowars wrested 2,200 rupees from various zamindars and banias they encountered, presumably for the Delhi government. The nawab delivered 60,000 rupees at the end of August, when it was desperately needed; it might have been more, but he had recently been fleeced of 160,000 by Hodson and his ‘Plungers’.41
The mutinies and rural uprisings meant a temporary loss of income for the Raj. Tax revenues slumped in the Agra region and, at the end of August, its treasury contained 735,000 rupees, just enough to keep ahead of day-to-day expenses, including paying the wages of native levies. The moment Delhi was recaptured, collections restarted, as they did in the Meerut district in mid-October.42 It was noticed in areas where there had been peasant insurrections that the ryots were abnormally accommodating when it came to paying up, no doubt well aware of how officials would react to even the slightest hint of reluctance or disrespect.43 The Punjab had reserves to cover expenses until September, but its government took the precaution of seeking loans at between 4 and 5 per cent from the friendly rajas of Patiala and Nabha.44 Appeals for money from the commercial community in Peshawar had a frosty reception at the end of July, understandably since the money men had no way of knowing how events would turn out at Delhi and Lucknow.45
There was no hestitation among local tribesmen when appeals were made for troops to help suppress the rebellion or replace garrisons sent south. ‘Friends were as thick as summer flies’ Herbert Edwardes reported from the frontier districts, and the call to arms in the Peshawar valley was warmly welcomed by ‘all the idlers and adventurers’ for whom a war in the rich plains of Hindustan was a dream come true.46 What amounted to an official invitation to sack Delhi, for this must have been how the call to arms was interpreted, brought in thousands of volunteers from all over the Punjab. Those who could not join the armies heading for Delhi, attacked and killed fugitives from disbanded Bengali regiments and were officially commended.
Among the Punjabis who attached themselves to the British were many former Khalsa soldiers who had not quite forgotten their old loyalties. The warcry ‘Jai Khalsa Ji’ (victory to the Khalsa) was heard when Sikhs charged during the fighting around Cawnpore at the end of 1857.47 Lieutenant-Colonel Chardin Johnson of the 9th Lancers thought Sikh loyalty was superficial and temporary:
The Sikhs don’t love us one bit, but hate sepoys like poison . . . Moreover, they are the lastly conquered of the Indian races and have not forgotten what British Pluck can do. They like the cause now, for the sepoys have mutilated and tortured their men . . . and their blood is up on our side at the present – but, this business over, they may play us the same trick as the sepoy ruffians, anyday. There is no sympathy between us – we despise niggers, they hate us.48
He was mistaken; when the war was over Sikhs, as it were, stepped into the shoes of the Bengali sepoys and became the mainstay of the new Indian army. They also got on well with British troops. There was a warm and intimate camaraderie between them and the Highlanders, another warrior race, during the Lucknow campaign. Its echoes may be heard today as Indian and Pakistani regiments parade with bagpipes playing.
Experts in comparative martial virtues rated Sikhs the equal to British troops in combat and more resilient during hot-weather campaigning. They were also a match for anyone when it came to plundering; after the capture of Delhi, Sikhs had to be dissuaded from returning home with their bundles of loot.49 Their conduct was part of that deeply-rooted convention of Indian warfare by which fighting men, native and British, considered themselves professionals for whom war was a legitimate source of personal enrichment.
The ruthless pursuit of private gain was a constant feature of the Mutiny. The cities, towns and villages and the camps of beaten armies were prizes to be taken and stripped bare by soldiers who went to war in the hope that they would emerge from it better off. Everyone, on both sides, was convinced they were entitled to rewards and, in the case of official British prize money, pursued their claims relentlessly and sometimes dishonestly. Men who had remained at Meerut during the siege of Delhi thought that they deserved a share of the spoils and put in false applications.50 Even small-scale operations paid a dividend; the personal belongings of the dispossessed rebel Ali Bahadur, Nawab of Banda, were assessed by the prize agents at ov
er a million rupees and included old Roman, Venetian and Portuguese coins and four elephants which fetched 700 rupees each at the prize auction.51 Seen from the perspective of the prize auction or through those letters and diaries which contain detailed accounts of the plunderers’ exploits, the Mutiny appears as a huge free-for-all in which risk-takers prospered. Private advantage was, therefore, uppermost in many Indian minds when they made the choice of which side to support, or whether or not to become entangled in the conflict.
IV
Nonetheless, large bodies of sepoys rebelled without weighing the odds, swept along by a knot of ringleaders and, at the time, with little idea as to what the consequences of their actions might be. Many of the original Meerut mutineers, having parcelled up their plunder, threw away their muskets and ammunition pouches and headed for their homes in Awadh. Some reached their villages where they were later discovered by Havelock’s forces, but the majority were persuaded to stick together and set off for Delhi.
At this level, it is hard to look into the sepoy’s mind and discern his motives. What amounted to an anatomy of an individual mutiny was undertaken by officers attached to Rose’s army after the Bhopal contingent had been captured at the close of 1857. It was realised that many of the mutineers had been passive or secretly loyal and might be re-admitted to the Company’s service. All the sepoys were interrogated and then placed in three categories: active mutineer, weathercocks who swayed either way, and loyal. Of the 657 infantrymen, 166 were found to have been the instigators of the revolt, 96 to have been sympathetic, 223 wavering and 37 steadfast. Among the 220 cavalry sowars there were 130 loyal men (who re-joined the army), 47 hostile trimmers and 23 mutineers.52 So, in one regiment, it only required the participation of less than half the strength to effect a successful mutiny and in another, just over a tenth. This attempt at a scientific analysis bore out the judgement of a loyal native officer who observed that each mutiny was the work of one knave and nine fools. The rogue encouraged the others and, once they had crossed the boundary which separated obedience from rebellion, told them there was no going back.53
There was no unanimity of purpose among the Bengal army either before or after the first mutinies. Collectively, it was the victim of the equivalent of the Grande Peur which infected the French countryside during the summer of 1789, during which men and women fell victim to spasms of irrational and often paranoiac dread. At the heart of India’s great fear was the conviction that in the future, probably sooner rather than later as all the signs indicated, the Company would mount an assault on Hinduism and Islam as a preparation for mass conversion. Every examination of the events of 1857 comes back to this fact: that the rank and file of the Bengal army imagined that they were about to be made Christians. At Delhi in May, they implored their countrymen to join them in a war for India’s faiths, even if this meant fighting under a Muslim emperor. Sir Henry Lawrence realised the importance of the binding power of religion when he undertook an exercise in black propaganda by spreading rumours that Muslim mutineers had desecrated Hindu temples.54
In the atmosphere generated by the all-pervasive dread, soldiers feared the worst and prepared for it. At the end of May, and a fortnight before they rose, sepoys at Bareilly were said to be disheartened by ‘a great depression of spirits caused by the fear of some heavy punishment they imagined the government was about to inflict upon them’.55 The frightening paraphernalia of disarmament with lines of British troops and batteries of loaded cannon must have added immeasurably to the sepoys’ apprehension. Foreboding was the father of panic, and this was the common reaction when disbandment was threatened or individual soldiers had been found guilty of acts of defiance. ‘You hanged five sepoys lately,’ a sowar of the 12th Irregular Cavalry shouted at his commanding officer before he shot him. The murderer, a Muslim, announced that he had acted under the orders of God.56
All Muslim mutineers imagined that they were fulfilling a holy duty. The Mutiny was a jihad, a holy war for their faith and the restoration of an Islamic, Mughal Raj in India. Jihadic recruiting officers, usually holy men, and jihadic propaganda were found throughout northern India and beyond once the Mutiny was under way. A number of Muslim missionaries from Delhi, including a maulavi (religious teacher) from Bareilly, were apprehended preaching holy war and calling for ghazis in the foothills of the North-West Frontier in July 1857.57 Muhammad Husain, another maulavi, was one of the figures behind a rebellion which miscarried at Belgaum, one of the very few instances of an attempted mutiny by Bombay sepoys. Local intelligence had been vigilant and intercepted correspondence between mutineers and Bombay troops. One anonymous Bombay soldier had written ominously:
We are your children, do with us as it may seem best to you. We are all of one mind, on your intimation, we shall come running. You are the servant of Raymath [the God Man].
Shape and direction for this unrest was provided by the maulavi and subadar Thakur Singh, who hoped to use the jihadic mutiny to make himself ‘chief ruler in these parts’ in the manner of a Mughal warlord of the previous century. The conspirators and their plot were exposed by a Christian sepoy on 14 July, and the two ringleaders were tried and executed by being blown from cannon.58
Further north, two charismatic maulavis, Liaquat Ali and Ahmad Ullah Shah, assumed spiritual and military leadership of rebels during the campaigns around Lucknow. Ahmad Ullah Shah was a well-educated and travelled teacher who had fallen foul of the authorities by preaching an anti-British jihad in Rajasthan and Awadh during 1856, and was one of those released from prison by the Faizabad mutineers. He gained command through sheer force of personality and alleged supernatural powers, which included an immunity from bullets. He was a populist, adored by the men he led into battle and, like other Muslim holy-men-turned-political-leaders, he was uncompromising, falling out with the factious aristocratic clique which had taken control of the rebellion in southern Awadh. His war was one for the annihilation of the British in India, and he once boasted that he would beat his drum in London. He was killed in the fighting near Lucknow in February 1858.59
Equally unwavering in his faith and hostility to Christianity was Dr Wazir Khan of Agra hospital, lecturer in Pharmacology at the local medical college. Educated at the Murshidabad English school, Calcutta Medical College and in Britain, he was appointed Governor of Agra by Bahadur Shah after the British had withdrawn into the fort. Very much a Westernised Indian in terms of learning, he was one of many Muslims who had been offended by the encroachments on Islamic law by the British; the spread of Christian missions; and what were considered underhand means of gaining converts through orphanages and preaching to the illiterate.60 For Dr Khan, active support of the régime in Delhi was a contribution towards the regeneration of Islam within India and the expulsion of an alien faith promoted by its rulers. Only through the eviction of the British would Islam be secure.
Did this then make him or any of the mutineers nationalists in a modern sense? Probably not, although Indian historians have endeavoured to present the 1857 Mutiny as a proto-war of national independence, despite its confinement to the northern regions of the country. Even though the Awadh mutineers once referred to themselves as ‘the Army of India’, there is nothing in what they said or did to suggest that they could have comprehended, let alone wanted, an equivalent to the Indian state that emerged during the twentieth century. Rather, wherever they were free to create systems of government, the tendency was towards restoration and particularism. This was attractive, in so far as the process of reinstatement favoured those like Nana Sahib and Lakshmi Bai, who had been losers under the Raj. Lower down the scale, efforts by Begum Hazral Mahal to revive the former Awadh court in Lucknow resulted in some brief reversals of fortune. Mismur Ali, who had spent between twelve and thirteen years as a munshi in the old king’s service, hurried back to Lucknow on hearing a summons for all his servants to resume their posts. So too did Abdul Duleep, who arrived to find his house had been looted by mutineers. One ex-Mughal servant declared h
imself delighted to wear again his forefathers’ ‘ring of slavery’ and to have the emperor’s ‘saddle cloth on his shoulders’.61
The old ways returned in the district around Mathura almost the moment British authority dissolved. ‘No one regretted the loss of our rule,’ remembered Mark Thornhill, the local magistrate, ‘and with the exception of the Banias who suffered by it, all classes enjoyed the confusion.’62 Zamindars were glad to do as they pleased: some declared themselves independent, some pledged allegiance to Bahadur Shah and several went raiding. In some places, domestic slavery and sati made a comeback.
There was also a widespread release of pent-up social tension in which peasants attacked the estates of new proprietors, as often as not hard-grinding financiers for whom villages were investments. Leadership came from below in the form of Devi Singh, a peasant who seems to have distinguished himself during the days of paying off old scores. By an ancient Jat custom he was elected raja of fourteen villages and established his state in Tappa Raya, a market town, where he held court and set up formal revenue and legal departments. Wearing yellow robes, as was the custom for Hindu royalty, he sat in judgement over the local banias who, after some rough usage, were compelled to surrender their mortgage deeds and bonds. Raja Devi Singh also kept his electorate happy by letting the peasants strip bare the banias’ shops and houses. His reign ended abruptly on 15 June, when Thornhill appeared at Tappa Raya with a small force and a howitzer. Two shells were fired; one exploded over the town, the other inside, and the inhabitants scattered into the countryside. Devi Singh was taken and faced the mockery of his former subjects’ ironic salaams before his execution.63 In some respects he was an Indian Jack Cade, but he obviously possessed some qualities of leadership and might, had things turned out differently, have founded a dynasty in the fashion of those men-on-the-make who had flourished during the disorders which had accompanied the decline of the Mughals. But by no stretch of the imagination was he a nationalist in any modern sense.
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