by Simon Schama
This division of zones, although clear, still put the centre of British life – the Residency – very much inside, rather than outside, the city itelf. Historically this was precisely because the Residents had always claimed an unusual degree of comfort, living amidst the native community. Under the current Resident, Sir William Sleeman, in the early 1850s, the familiar, rather easy-going cooperation by which the British expected to get no trouble from Awadh (and recruit a lot of sepoys) seemed to be working well enough still to make any drastic alteration unnecessary. With Whig governments taking flak from liberals like Richard Cobden for promoting expensive, ‘cruel’ and needless imperialist adventures, and with wars under way in southern Africa, China, Burma and the Crimea, the last thing that Britain needed was to provoke another in India.
But of course Dalhousie – who bequeathed the forthcoming disaster to his successor, Charles Canning – hardly saw the danger coming. As far as he was concerned, a pseudo-independent Awadh, barely governed at all (in his view) by a joke nawab, Wajid Ali Shah (whose proudest boast was his success at breeding a pigeon with one white and one black wing, and who was notorious for spending his days trying on jewellery, writing poetry and reposing with his courtesan of the week), was not just a luxury but a danger. Had not the foreign secretary to the Governors Council, H.M. Elliot, the posthumous author of The History of India, As Told by Its Own Historians (1867), pointed to the ‘evil’ of tolerating such iniquitous maladministration? ‘We behold’, Elliot had written, ‘kings, even of our own creation, sunk in sloth and debauchery.’ Time, then, to unmake them. ‘The British Government’, Dalhousie wrote, ‘would be guilty in the sight of God and Man, if it were any longer to aid in sustaining by its countenance an administration fraught with evil to millions.’ Besides, Dalhousie relished the contribution its revenues would make to cutting the £8 million deficit that his military adventurism in the Punjab had incurred. When he heard that the nawab and his ministers were being ‘bumptious’ he confessed in private that he hoped this was indeed the case, since ‘To swallow him before I go would give me satisfaction.’ In February 1856, despite a journey to Calcutta by Wajid Ali Shah and his chief ministers to plead personally with the Governor-General, Awadh was duly annexed. Dalhousie wrote, scarcely concealing his pleasure, that as a result of the annexation ‘Our gracious Queen has five million more subjects and one point three million pounds more revenue than she had yesterday.’
What might have seemed almost a bureaucratic decision in Bengal set up immediate shock waves in both the towns and countryside of Awadh. Overnight an entire population that had served the court and nobility of the kingdom was, in ways barely discernible to the sahibs, not just demoted but shamed. Spilling back into the countryside, they found another crucial class of influential Awadhis – the taluqdars, sometimes also known as rajahs, who were hereditary owners of land-tax jurisdictions, which, as elsewhere in northern India, carried with them a bundle of manorial rights and obligations – summarily dispossessed of many of their villages, lands and titles. The official British idea – already implemented in Sind and the Punjab – was that something as important as the land tax (which paid, of course, for the huge army) should be directly administered and not left to village notables, invariably (and inaccurately) described as ‘intermediaries’, to cream off profits and perks while bleeding the peasants dry. These ‘intermediaries’ were classified, in the bureaucratic mind of British officials, as somehow alien to the villages; whereas in fact their title, status and authority went back many generations into the Mughal past, when Rajput warriors had been assigned districts and villages for their support. In some cases the ‘rajahs’ were themselves not much more than village farmers and, through clan and caste connections, lived very close to the peasant communities.
The British assumption was that since, in many cases, the amount of revenue they were taking would be less than under the old taluqdar system, they would receive the devoted gratitude of the farmers. But the Awadh countryside turned out to be a poor experimental study for the utilitarian measurement of pain and relief. The taluqdars and rajahs had always been far more than tax collectors: they were manorial, godfatherly patrons, surrounded by personal militia whom it was still an honour to join. Established in their kutcha mud or pakka gravel-and-cement trench forts deep in the jungle, with rifles and light field guns, they were very definitely the power in the land. And that power was not, as the superficial British inquiries had it, a one-way exploitation. In return for the taxes they received in money and kind from the peasants, the taluqdars oversaw the life of their villages; helped the destitute in times of dearth; smoothed out marriage arrangements and disputes; and patronized local mosques and temples. Sometimes they helped with the harvest themselves. Their summary dispossession was not, then, the removal of an obvious anachronism; it was a culture shock that rippled down all the way to local markets, mosques and villages. It made the intruding company bahadur (governor) seem crass, brutal and demonstrably alien. When the smoke cleared from the 1857 rebellion, many British professed their amazement that, instead of remaining loyal or at least neutral, the peasantry in tens of thousands followed their rajahs and taluqdars into resistance. But for both sets of Awadhis, Muslim and Hindu, it was the most natural thing in the world.
Many of those taluqdars and peasant families, of course, had brothers and sons who were sepoys; and who with the disappearance of Awadh had now lost the status they had enjoyed as ‘seconded’ men, not to mention their double batta. Well before the cartridge-grease debacle, there had been many acts of tactlessness that had put a strain on the loyalty of the army rank and file. High-caste soldiers, for whom travel by sea was a taboo, had been threatened by the loss of their caste when ordered to ship to the Burma front to serve in one of Dalhousie’s endless wars. Informed of their objections, but also of the men’s willingness to march to Burma, the Governor’s response was, ‘Oh they are fond of walking, are they? They shall walk to Dacca, then, and die there like dogs.’ (And so they did.) Humiliating corporal punishments, especially flogging, stood in stark contrast to the care taken in earlier decades not to inflict acts of public shame on men for whom loss of respect was the most mortifying of all disgraces. In the charged atmosphere that Dalhousie had chosen to ignore – but that the more alert incoming Governor-General, Viscount Canning, thought heralded trouble – rumours flew that the attah, rations of flour, ground in the company’s new mill near Kanpur (Cawnpore), contained pulverized human bones from corpses collected on the banks of the Ganges and was yet another fiendish plot to defile the purity of both Muslims and Hindus. Not all these shocks were fantasies. In Jhansi, the elimination of the independent state was followed by the mass slaughtering of cattle, a direct cause of uprisings near the fortress city of Gwalior.
The issuing of the new Lee-Enfield rifles with greased cartridges that needed the ends to be smartly bitten off before being inserted into the breech was not, of course, a deliberate provocation. It was precisely the casually unintentional nature of the offence that was so typical of the modus operandi of the Dalhousie era. No one in fact seemed to know whether the offending grease was pork fat, beef tallow or a mixture of the two, thereby outraging both Muslims and Hindus. As soon as the blunder was acknowledged, it was corrected by having cartridges lubricated with vegetable oil. But the damage had already been done. (At Meerut on 9 May the cartridges were not in fact greased with animal fat, but since there was no way for the sepoys to be certain they were not prepared to risk defilement; it was a moment that defined the collapse of trust between officers and men.) To their cost, the British tended to discount the kind of information the telegraph was not equipped to pick up: rumours and prophecies. One of them, circulating in the bazaar at Lucknow and Delhi predicted that the Company’s rule would last no more than precisely the century from the date of the battle of Plassey – 23 June 1757. Cryptic messages to native regiments in the cantonments were relayed through torn chapattis and lotus flowers.
With
in weeks of the outbreaks at Meerut and Delhi, British military power seemed to have collapsed in the Ganges valley. The news that the reign of the English was over carried the spark from the Bengal army to the towns and villages of the northwest provinces, Awadh and northern Rajasthan. At Lucknow the sepoys mutinied on 30 May. At Gonda military station, 80 miles north of the city, Katherine Bartrum, a Bath silversmith’s daughter of 23 who was living the bungalow life along with her husband Robert, assistant surgeon in the army, and their 15-month-old son Bobby, began to notice an ominous change in the attitude of their servants. Quite soon the punkah wallahs, gardeners, stewards, cooks, chokidar watchmen and ayahs started to disappear, and with them went the world Kate Bartrum had thought would last for the rest of her Indian life: ‘I think we have all become fearfully nervous,’ she wrote anxiously to her father. ‘Every unusual sound makes one start; for who can trust these natives now, when they seem to be thirsting for European blood?… For many nights we had scarcely dared to close our eyes. I kept a sword under my pillow, and dear R. had his pistol loaded ready to start up at the slightest sound, though small would have been our chance of escape had we been attacked …’
As the situation suddenly deteriorated, and news arrived of the mutiny at Lucknow and the carnage at Meerut and Delhi, as well as the unlikelihood of immediate British troop reinforcements, Robert knew that Kate’s best chance of survival was getting her and the baby to the relative safety of the defensible Residency compound. At Secrora, 65 miles from Lucknow, they were told there would be a small military detachment to take them and other women and children who were stranded in the country, to the Residency. But they had to get there first. Robert, Katherine and the baby set off together with a Mrs Clark and her husband and small child, all on the backs of elephants, but when they got to Secrora the military escort, worried about time, had already left. The men were needed at their regiments, so, after terrible agonizing, the two women, with a small group of loyal sepoys, made their own way, in temperatures of well over 100°F, through what had suddenly become the hostile country of the rajah of Gonda (as it turned out, one of the most militant rebels) to the domes and minarets of the ‘Golden City’.
They reached the safety of the Residency on 9 June, but even so it was clear that there would no easy salvation. By the end of the month, 8,000–10,000 sepoys, including 700–800 cavalry, had ringed the Residency defences. Two-pounder rebel batteries were soon in full action, along with 12 other field-gun emplacements, which kept up a steady barrage on the compound. Shallow trenches had been dug immediately behind the guns, in which the gunners could lie and still operate the cannon while being virtually invisible to defending counter-fire. Inside the walls were just 1700 male defenders – 800 British troops, 700 loyal sepoys, with the remainder drawn from the civilian and merchant colony including 50 schoolboy cadets from La Martinière. The chief commissioner of Awadh, the veteran military commander Brigadier-General Sir Henry Lawrence, was already seriously ill and quarrelling with the financial commissioner, Martin Gubbins, about whether to keep or send away (without arms) the sepoys inside the Residency. Gubbins, the pessimist, was for getting rid of them.
The Indian Mutiny, 1857–8.
On 30 June an attempted counter-attack under Sir Henry’s command was ambushed disastrously at Chinhat by rebel troops led by, among others, the fighting Maulvi, Ahmadullah Shah, who, although wounded in the foot, pursued the retreating British. When the badly beaten force returned under heavy fire to the Residency, it was obvious that the ensuing siege was to be grim and lengthy, for it was at least two weeks before relief could be expected. In the event, it took 87 days to arrive. Ahmadullah’s shelling of the old Machi Bhawan fort to the west of the Residency had forced its evacuation: 118 British troops had been killed; 54 wounded had been brought back to the Residency and lay on litters, given laudanum or alcohol to dull their senses while shattered limbs were amputated. Bandages ran out and had to be improvised from torn clothing. Sir Henry himself died of a shell wound received while inside his quarters.
By 2 July the rebels were in control of the old city. Ahmadullah Shah, the holy prophet, had set up his own headquarters at the bungalow of a munshi (Brahmin teacher), was hugely popular with the poor and was challenging the authority of the Begum of Awadh, Hazrat Mahal, who wanted to make her young son the new nawab, accountable only to Bahadur Shah in Delhi. The city itself was close to anarchy. A nervous member of the old upper-class Lucknow elite described how the streets were run by armed gangs:
They went round to the doors of the wealthy and gave threats and exacted money … they took halwa and puri and sweets from the shops; they reviled all sorts of people. They took gunpowder and other explosives from the firework makers and paid them inadequately. There was a pile of hay in the garden of the school Kothi to which they set fire and thus produced bonfires which lit the city. They brought Mir Baqar Ali who lived at Pakka Pul and cut him into pieces at the gate of the Bara Imambara with the sword. No-one can say why they committed that sacrilege … they moved about with naked swords in their hands.
From the Residency look-outs, golden Lucknow seemed to be mantled in smoke, din and terror. Conditions inside were rapidly deteriorating. Along with a crowd of the women, Katherine and Bobby were living in the old women’s quarter, the Begum Kothi. The summer heat was almost unendurable, and its punctuation by torrential rain made things even worse. The stench from the overflowing latrines triggered vomiting. With hay and water at a premium, bullocks and cavalry horses staggered around the compound mad with thirst before dropping dead. So many rotting carcasses piled up that men had to be detailed to wrench the remnants from the carrion crows and kites and bury them – not least because they were a breeding ground for millions of huge flies. As soon as any food, even the ‘black greasy dal’ (lentils) that so turned Katherine Bartrum’s stomach, was set out it was instantly covered by a seething, buzzing mass. In the earlier stages of the siege, Deprat, a French merchant, had given away his supplies of canned, truffled sausages. The lucky ones at Gubbins’s house got Sauternes and even champagne as well as tinned salmon, carrots and rice pudding. But that all disappeared. Soon the champagne was reserved for those about to undergo amputations, a whole bottle drunk in a few gulps by the unfortunate patient. Desperate for a smoke, men pawned or traded pieces of clothing or their gold watches for a cigar, and the auctions of clothing and possessions that had belonged to the dead were the scene of hot bidding. Pet dogs were shot to save food.
After a month of this, the mask of Victorian dignity cracked open. The death rate from wounds, cholera, dysenteric diseases and smallpox rose to 10 a day. Drunkenness, usually from bottled beer, was common. There were duels and suicides, and a lot of screaming. No one cared any more what they looked like. Boils and carbuncles appeared on many faces. To the shock of some of the more demure, wives and mothers abandoned their corsets; let their hair down; and went around in whatever was loose enough and cool enough to stop them becoming unhinged by the heat and terror. Paradoxically, enduring months of these conditions inured the inmates to the incoming shells and bullets. A direct hit, after all, was in the hands of God. A slow death from one of the infectious diseases seemed worse. L. E. Rees, a British merchant from Calcutta who had taken part in the defence of the compound, was probably not just bragging when he claimed that ‘Balls graze our very hair, and we continue the conversation without a remark; bullets race over our very hair and we never speak of them. Narrow escapes are so very common that even women and children cease to notice them.’ Much more frightening was the possibility that tunnels had been mined under the Residency and that in the dead of night they might find the compound alive with sepoys coming up from below. Mrs Clark, Katherine’s travelling companion, had given birth on the day of a sepoy attempt to break into the Residency, and now she and the baby were dying. When she asked Katherine, whose son Bobby was himself sick with cholera, to prepare her things as she was going on a long journey, they were dutifully laid out before s
he died, the baby following shortly afterwards and her elder child two weeks later.
It was late September before two relatively small relieving forces, one led by the new chief commissioner of Awadh, Sir James Outram, the other by Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, managed to join up and cut and shoot their way through to Lucknow. Havelock was coming via Kanpur, where there had been a terrible massacre of the entire British community. Nana Sahib, the Peshwa (ruler) of the Mahratta and the political and strategic leader of the uprising, along with his field commander Tantia (Daddy) Topi had given a promise of safe conduct to evacuate downriver the besieged British inside Kanpur, only to have them, mostly women and children, shot up and sliced to pieces once they were aboard the boats. Some 200 survivors were taken back to Kanpur, imprisoned and then in their turn killed, the bodies thrown into a well. After Havelock retook Kanpur, the officer left in charge of the town, the ferocious Colonel James Neill, ordered that any sepoys taken prisoner be executed – some of them blown from cannon – and had the well filled in and dedicated as a shrine to the first ‘martyrs’ of Albion. But the onward advance to Lucknow of Havelock’s troops right through the heart of sepoy-held territory cost them many casualties. One of them, as she learned, was Katherine Bartrum’s husband, the surgeon Robert, who had been shot through the head on the threshold of the Residency’s defences while going to help one of the wounded.
