The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  Three years after the annexation of Punjab, Dalhousie’s government went to war with Burma. Again, conflict grew as a neighbouring state showed signs of hostility to the expansion of British power. When merchants were harassed and the Burmese government did not demonstrate appropriate respect, the British invaded in 1852. Echoing the language of the British participants at Plassey in 1757 or the Maratha wars of the early 1800s, Dalhousie argued that ‘dread is the only real security we can ever have . . . for stable peace with the Burman state.’ The Company wanted to fight until ‘the Burman Court and the Burman people alike have shown that they now dread our power’. War led to the assimilation of the southern half of Burma into Britain’s Indian empire. It also sparked bitter condemnation from liberals in Britain.

  The Manchester industrialist and MP Richard Cobden ridiculed Dalhousie’s belief that war against such a puny power was necessary. Cobden thought British public opinion was driven by the desire to seek revenge against previous humiliation. Britons supported conquest in India ‘so long as [it was] believed to be profitable’. His 1853 pamphlet How Wars Are Got Up in India proved it wasn’t, and ended with a prediction. ‘[D]eeds of violence, fraud and injustice’ would be repaid with a violent penalty. Cobden recognized something later historians have missed, that violence in India was driven by passion as much as reason, by a sense of the need for retribution against past wrongs as much as a desire to advance clearly calculated interests. His aim was to rouse ‘the national conscience’, to avert ‘by timely atonement and reparation, the punishment due for imperial crimes’.12

  There was no such atonement. The final annexation took place in Awadh in 1856, in the last days of Dalhousie’s years as Governor-General. Awadh occupied a rough square of territory 250 miles across centred on Lucknow, the city where Sir Henry Lawrence was to lose his life. Since the late eighteenth century, Awadh’s practical autonomy had been steadily restricted in the interests of the East India Company’s security. An army was imposed and revenue demanded to pay for it. When rulers resisted, as Nawab Wazir Ali did in 1798, territory was occupied by the British. In 1801, the half of Awadh which lay between the Jamuna and Ganges rivers was annexed by the Company. For the next fifty-five years this shrunken province stayed intact, but its government was trapped between increasingly powerful local landholders and British networks of power. Awadh became a major source of soldiers for the East India Company’s army, as 40,000 troops were recruited from the province. And the province bought an increasingly large quantity of British goods. Hemmed in by these imperial networks, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, sovereign from 1847, ended up with little room for political manoeuvre. Instead of exercising governmental power, he retreated into the world of culture and sought to construct an autonomous life in music, poetry and theatre. Seen as an overly sensuous lush by his British critics, Wajid Ali Shah was one of nineteenth-century India’s most important artistic innovators, reviving the khatak style of Indian dance, founding a music school and writing some of the first plays in the Urdu language.13

  All but a few British officers were unsympathetic. William Sleeman, appointed as Resident to Awadh in 1848, described the province as ‘a scene of intrigue, corruption, depravity, neglect of duty and abuse of authority’. Lucknow, he argued, was ‘an overgrown city, surrounding an overgrown court, which has, for the last half century, exhausted all the resources of this fine country’. Sleeman believed Wajid Ali Shah’s court had ‘alienated the feelings of the great body of the people’. Before his appointment to Awadh, Sleeman had been in charge of the government department concerned with catching dacoits and ‘thugs’: the word originally referred to criminals the British believed were members of a religious cult. There, he developed a particularly suspicious frame of mind. He ‘was ever on the look-out to capture a thief’. A British critic described him as an ‘able and zealous officer’, but also ‘the emissary of a foregone conclusion’. Those words were written by Captain Robert Bird, a refined and well-connected officer in the Bengal army whose fluent Persian led to his appointment as Sleeman’s assistant. Sleeman accused Bird of spending too much time buying and selling horses, and being too friendly with the Nawab, and had him transferred to Punjab. Bird felt Sleeman’s investigation was prejudiced. He collected evidence to prove that Sleeman’s portrayal of social breakdown could not be accurate. If British-ruled districts were so much better off than Awadh, why did peasants not move there, he asked? If they had become so badly alienated from their rulers people would have fled Awadh, and there was no evidence they had.14

  Sleeman’s biggest criticism was that the King of Awadh presided over a state of war and anarchy which threatened to spill out into British lands. The level of violence in Awadh was certainly high. In the 1850s an average of 628 people were killed each year, a murder rate comparable to that of present-day South Africa. But most of this violence occurred in the process of tax collection, as Awadh’s government tried to collect land revenue needed to pay money demanded by the Company. As Sleeman’s successor admitted, death had not arisen from ordinary crime or disorder, but from ‘faction fights’ and ‘collisions’ between revenue collectors and landholders. The scale of violence does not show that Wajid Ali Shah’s court had abandoned order for the sake of drunken revelry, quite the reverse in fact. Awadh’s government was trying to assert its own authority over the province’s society by violent means. Because its power had become so closely entangled with the Company it lost the capacity to persuade powerful social groups to submit to its authority without using force.

  The last annexation took place on 30 January 1856. Wajib Ali Shah was asked to sign over his state to the East India Company, he refused, and it was forcefully taken away. But the king did not rebel. Worried about the consequences of resistance, he asked his subjects to stay loyal to the British. Instead, he travelled to Calcutta with the intention of going on to London to plead his case before Queen Victoria. Wajid Ali Shah persuaded Robert Bird to leave the East India Company’s service and become his agent, with a view to sending him to London to lobby Parliament and the British press for the return of his lands. Bird arrived in London, but only a senior queen and one son accompanied him from the Nawab’s family. The British incarcerated Wajid Ali Shah until six months after the rebellion ended. Once they had deposed him, the Company tried to impose their authority on the war-torn countryside more emphatically than even Wajid Ali’s government had done. Awadh’s landholders were dispossessed and a revenue survey started to collect tax directly from peasants. Throughout 1856 and the first half of the next year, British officers suffered constant attacks, and the Company found revenue impossible to collect until, in June 1857, the scale of rebel violence forced them to flee the countryside entirely.15

  The governed not the governing class

  British commentators on the events of 1857–8 sometimes imagined the rebellion was driven by the rage of recently dispossessed kings and aristocrats, whether Maratha princes or Awadhi taluqdars (landlords). It is easy to misunderstand the impact of these evictions and annexations. As the ‘loyalist’ Indian Muslim leader Sayyid Ahmad Khan argued, it was ‘the governed not the governing class’ who rebelled. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s perspective is worth paying attention to. From a Pathan family of Mughal officials, he grew up around the Mughal court and was employed as a government officer from 1838. He lived through the rebellion itself in rebel-held Bijnor. A historian and poet, Sayyid Ahmed’s writings before 1857 barely acknowledged the British. It was possible to live as a member of the northern Indian gentry without paying much attention to British power. The insurrection changed that, making Sayyid Ahmed believe he had no choice but to deal with the British. His pamphlet The Causes of the Indian Revolt, published in Urdu from Agra in 1858, was the first Indian account of the rebellion. Sayyid Ahmed went on to become an advocate of Indian Muslim engagement with western science and a supporter of British rule, for which he received a knighthood, becoming Sir Sayyid. His loyalty, though, was complicated and partial. It was a
strategy for coping with the defeat of Muslim power in India rather than a decision born from active love for British rule. Some of his relatives joined the insurgency, as many of his colleagues in the Company’s service did. But Sayyid Ahmad thought rebellion was the work of a disorderly mob who could not create a stable regime. Perhaps he also recognized that though rebel victory would not dent his chances of continuing in government service, joining the insurgency would end his career if the British won. ‘The mutineers were for the most part men who had nothing to lose,’ he wrote, and Sayyid Ahmed himself had a lot.16

  Sayyid Ahmed argued that the insurrection was not a campaign by feudal magnates to restore their lost principalities. After all, the King of Awadh thought that appealing to Queen Victoria was a better way to restore his control of Awadh than a full-scale revolt. Most large landholders equivocated before joining the insurrection. Some of the greatest rebel leaders, Rani Lakshmibhai of Jhansi, for example, only turned into rebels very later in the revolt, when their loyalty was challenged by the British. The insurrection was led by north India’s dislocated lower middle classes. The proclamations of rebel leaders particularly called upon soldiers, clerics, artisans, petty officers, minor landlords and merchants to join the revolt. These were not the Mughal elite, but men who benefited from the institutions the Mughal regime and its successors sustained. Before 1857 they flourished in the spaces which India’s pre-colonial regimes left open for self-rule. Few had been hostile to the British to begin with. As Sayyid Ahmed argued, the revolt was not an effort ‘to throw off the yoke of foreigners’.

  In the northern Indian provinces where the revolt was eventually fiercest, the British had begun their rule by promising to be impartial, not taxing too much, offering security for trade during troubled times and providing a major source of employment for soldiers and officials. They did not introduce peace and stability and were too arrogant to listen to their subjects well enough, but north India’s middle classes imagined the British might be taught how better to exercise their power. But as the Company’s sway expanded across the whole of the subcontinent, British paranoia grew and power was asserted with ever-greater force. Lord Dalhousie’s annexations and wars of conquest made belief in British benevolence impossible to sustain. As the historian F. W. Buckler argued almost a century ago, the insurgents of 1857 believed the British, not they, had overturned legitimate political order.17

  Soldiers faced the power of the British most directly. That is why they were the first to revolt. According to Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the pride of Indian troops had grown as the Company acquired more and more land. ‘It is we’, an early soldiers’ proclamation declared, ‘who have conquered the whole territory extending from Calcutta to Kabul for the English, because they did not bring any English army with them from England.’ But these soldiers felt humiliated just as their pride grew. As British territory expanded so pay shrank, as troops had less opportunity to earn the allowance for working in foreign territory they had previously been entitled to. Army discipline became more severe. And since January 1857, a rumour had started to circulate that the cartridges used to fill their rifles contained cow and pig fat. In fact, animal grease was quickly withdrawn. Soldiers were allowed to buy their own grease and test the paper in water to ensure it did not contain oil. As Kim Wagner notes, ‘not a single greased cartridge was ever distributed to the sepoys’. But the soldiers saw the British response to their anxieties as irrationally violent, proof perhaps that there was a conspiracy to undermine their way of life. Protests in Bengal in April led to the hanging of isolated rebels, and the disbanding of regiments. On 4 May, fires began to be lit at the cantonment in Ambala in Punjab, and the regiment there was instantly disarmed. When a section of the Meerut garrison refused to use the new cartridges at the end of April, eighty-five of them were court-martialled and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. On 9 May, their comrades were forced to watch as the reluctant soldiers were stripped, shackled and marched off in chains to begin their sentences. Prostitutes in the marketplace taunted those soldiers still under British orders: ‘If you had an atom of manhood in you, go and release them,’ they are reported to have said. In another story, respectable women asked the soldiers for their arms: ‘we shall fight and liberate the brave officers [instead]’, they said. The cowardly troops were asked to ‘keep inside the home and put on bangles’. Humiliation of this kind could not be borne for long.18

  On the morning of 10 May, rumours circulated that the garrison at Meerut would mutiny. Indian servants insisted their European masters stay at home. At dusk a cavalry regiment rode out to free imprisoned comrades. One of the infantry regiments followed. A third regiment was agitated but wavered. Colonel Finnis, their British commander, implored them to put down their arms. A shot, perhaps fired by accident, went off, which injured his horse. Finnis was then blasted at close range by a soldier from one of the regiments that had already mutinied. Frightened they would be hanged for murder, the rest of the garrison believed they had no choice but to join the rebellion. Finnis’s death was followed by the killing of three other British officers, eight women and eight children. Mutineers on horseback rode to Delhi. Others rode into the countryside, spreading violence into the villages around Meerut. Soldiers had talked for weeks beforehand about resisting the cartridges. But the first spark of rebellion was not the product of a long-term plan. It was sparked by soldiers’ fears about the brutal consequences of British power.19

  For eleven days Meerut and Delhi were the only garrisons that mutinied, creating a short-lived belief among the British that the uprising would quickly be quelled. After all, plenty of similar mutinies had been suppressed quickly in the past. The difference now was that thousands of civilians in the surrounding towns and countryside quickly took up arms. At Meerut, the kotwal, or head of the city police, sided with the rebels, and quickly freed a small number of prisoners in the gaol before fleeing himself. The remaining 839 prisoners were liberated later by the crowd, ‘yelling and shouting, and vociferating savage denunciations of vengeance on all Europeans’, as one observer put it. Those Britons who could barricaded themselves into the garrison’s ammunition storehouse, but forty Europeans were killed at Meerut in a night of violence and panic. The mutinying soldiers were mostly Brahmins, but urban celebrations involved large numbers of Muslims, particularly Shia, as groups roamed the streets chanting ‘Ali, Ali, our religion has revived’. This was an uprising of butchers and weavers, cooks and grass cutters, aided by the almost instant defection of the police to the mutineers’ side, with a large number of liberated prisoners joining in, too. The same social groups participated in the revolt once it reached Delhi. Rebel cavalrymen arrived from Meerut early in the morning of 11 May, burning the city’s eastern toll-house and the telegraph office. Within hours, crowds of lower-middle-class Delhi residents had formed a mob. Delhi’s elite had a disdainful attitude to this band of badmashes, or ruffians. ‘No person from a decent family was a part of this crowd of rioters,’ one Mughal courtier wrote. ‘[T]he respectable people were all locked inside their houses.’20

  The mutiny of 1857 quickly turned into a peasants’ revolt as well. As Eric Stokes wrote, ‘rural disturbance at first outpaced military mutiny’. At Meerut most of the police were Gujars, belonging to a community of cattle herders who had a reputation for their warlike behaviour but particularly suffered from the Company’s high taxation. Gujar leaders organized bands of men to attack centres of prosperity and power, creating what British observers described as ‘anarchy’. The British presence at Sikrandabad, forty miles south of Meerut, was attacked on 12 May. By that date, Sayyid Ahmad Khan reported that it was impossible to travel on the roads of Bijnor, forty-five miles north-west of the rebellion’s epicentre, without being attacked.

  Amid this growing insurgency of soldiers, peasants and artisans, the revolt did have one very significant noble backer. Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar had long felt humiliated by the British effort to limit his power and to snuff out the last traces of
Mughal authority. When the mutineers arrived in Delhi, they sought Bahadur Shah Zafar’s support, which was quickly offered. In doing so Zafar did not seek political power as we would normally understand it. A philosopher and poet rather than a political leader, Zafar saw the insurrection as an opportunity to restore a Mughal system of government and exact retribution for the dishonourable way he had been treated by the British. His purpose was not to augment his own capacity to command. Bahadur Shah Zafar shaped the rebel government, making sure sepoy leaders were not displaced by nobles, but he did not direct it. Instead, he provided moral sanction for the new regime, then tried to use his authority to direct it away from excessive violence.21

  With Zafar’s support, the circulation of insurgents between towns in northern India intensified. A second wave of garrison uprisings occurred in late May and early June. On 20 May part of the army rebelled at Agra, the capital of the North Western Provinces, but was quickly disarmed by European soldiers. Soldiers in the cantonments of Lucknow and Muttra rose up on 30 May. The garrison at Bareilly, capital of the Afghan-dominated region of Rohilkhand, revolted the following day. Kanpur (called Cawnpore by the British at the time) mutinied on 5 June, and British soldiers took refuge in an entrenchment at the north of the town. Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last Maratha Peshwa, lived at Bithoor, fifteen miles away. The day after the Kanpur mutiny he declared his support for the uprising and sought the backing of the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar.