by Jon Wilson
After two weeks of sustained bombardment, Nana Sahib offered safe passage to the British at Kanpur on 25 June, but the British men were massacred as they boarded boats onto the Ganges two days later, probably because the sepoys had become increasingly frightened about being attacked themselves. On 15 July, 200 British women and children were shot and butchered as a British army led by General Henry Havelock approached in an effort to recapture Kanpur. It was this ‘Cawnpore massacre’ that defined the horror of 1857 for generations of Britons afterwards. ‘Remember Cawnpore!’ became the cry during the war of reconquest. The massacres occurred at the lowest point of British power. With the exception of a few besieged residencies and cantonments, the East India Company’s authority had been extinguished from a vast swathe of territory between Patna in the east and Patiala in the west. Beyond that territory, British survival relied on embattled garrisons surrounded by people happy to submit to a rebel regime.
These massacres show that 1857 was far more than a political conflict for the insurgents. It was a struggle for survival. As historian Faisal Devji argues, the rebels were concerned above all to protect the distinctions that constituted Indian social life. At the core of Indians’ sense of self in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was their membership of groups which distinguished them from their neighbours. These groups were defined in different ways, by caste, occupation, gender and geography. For many of the rebels, though, religion provided a common denominator, a way to articulate the sense an individual had of belonging to a particular way of life they would fight to protect. Religious belonging depended on shared practices rather than beliefs. Friendship across community divisions depended on respect for different customs. Culinary habits were particularly important. North Indian society held together because everyone respected that Brahmins refused to eat food that was not cooked by other Brahmins, Hindus refused beef and Muslims rejected pork. Forcing everyone to eat the same foodstuffs would annihilate the distinctions that each individual’s status and honour relied on, and in doing so erode the very fabric of Indian social life.
The one element that cut through all rebel statements was the fear that the Company was making everyone eat the same food together, and so corrode the most fundamental character of Indian life. Joint messing, in prison or the army, was a particular target of criticism in rebel proclamations. The rebels rose up seeking autonomy from a domineering power which they thought wanted to turn them into an undifferentiated, statusless mass. This was certainly a war fought for independence, but it was fought in fervent opposition to the idea that Indians shared a common culture or nationality. Against the supposed British attempt to flatten difference and create unity, rebel proclamations emphasized Indian plurality, in the name of ‘the Hindus and Musalmans of Hindustan’.22
British officers thought the concern about animal fat was ridiculous. But Indian fears reflected an accurate understanding of British desires, if not the practical realities of Company rule. Take religion, for example. Among Britons in India, evangelical Christianity was on the rise in the 1840s and 1850s. Most British officers probably did think India’s Muslims and Hindus were infidels who would suffer eternal damnation if they did not convert. Proselytizing pamphlets had been circulated with greater frequency, even in cantonments. European religion and the British government seemed to occupy the same space, as the 1830s and 1840s saw new churches built in cantonments, often bringing the centres of British worship and British power within a few yards of each other. The British did talk about subjugating the whole of India to a single, unitary form of power, even if they saw the East India Company as a decidedly secular kind of authority. The Company wanted to introduce a single set of laws and create a system of communications, steamships, telegraph, roads and railways which would make their government more secure by annihilating distance and difference.
The British did not try to convert Indians to one religion. Most officials were extremely anxious about any hint of official support for evangelism. A story circulated that the Governor-General, Dalhousie contributed money to missionary organizations in India. Lord Ellenborough, President of the Board of Control, described the news as ‘one of the most dangerous things which could have happened to the security of our government in India’, a rumour that could be the cause of ‘the most bloody revolution which has at any time occurred in India’. In the minds of most Britons, the conquest of territory or imposition of new laws was a separate matter from the conversion of Indians to Christianity. But with no place for conversation with Europeans, lower middle-class Indians did not know that.23
Sayyid Ahmad Khan knew there was no government plan to Christianize India, but his account of the revolt was a damning indictment of a regime whose way of working allowed such misunderstandings to grow. The British, he said, had no regard for the ‘characteristics’ or ‘daily habits’ of the people they ruled. ‘Our Government never knew what troubles each succeeding sun might bring with it to its subjects, or what sorrow might fall upon them with the night.’ The consequence was that ‘Hindustanees fell into the habit of thinking that all laws were passed with a view to degrade and ruin them, and to deprive them and their fellows of their religion.’ The ‘real cause’ of the revolt was the absence of conversation between the Company and its subjects. In particular, Sayyid Ahmed blamed the fact that the ‘people do not have a voice in Government’s councils’.
Sayyid Ahmed was not talking about the flow of abstract information through official inquiries and surveys, nor did he think a free press made any difference. For him, politics was personal. Good government relied on face-to-face conversation between people who were not afraid of each other. It depended on the existence of ‘common friendship . . . which springs from the heart’ between ruler and ruled. Sayyid Ahmed repeated the complaint that men and women familiar with Mughal idioms of government had made against the Company for a long time. The British did not cultivate the friendship of Indians. They kept themselves apart. They refused to live among the people they ruled. They spoke with contempt and ill temper to their subjects. Even the most senior Indian officials were abused. It was ‘well-known to Government [that] even natives of the highest rank never come into the presence of officials, but with an inward fear and trembling’. The disastrous result of this was that Indians connected law, religion and conquest with a single image of British force intent on subjugating every distinction of Indian society under British power. As one Muslim in Sayyid Ahmed’s town of Bijnor asked, ‘what ease have we, they are always inventing new laws to trouble us, and to overturn our religion’. If British rule continued, ‘there would be no difference between Mahomedans and Hindoos, and whatever they said, we should have to do’.24
Badshahi Sarkar
The rebels sought relief in the restoration of a Mughal empire. Despite British efforts to diminish the prestige of the descendants of Timur, Mughal allegiances remained strong through most of the subcontinent. Up to 1857, soldiers fighting for the British had been commanded by a Company that, nominally in its own eyes, was a vassal of the emperor. The sovereignty of the empire was proclaimed in the qasbah towns of north India as the mantra khalq khuda ka / mulk badshahi ka / hukm kampani bahadur ka (creation belongs to God, the country is the emperor’s and administration the Company’s) was shouted to beating drums. As Meerut’s cavalrymen put it in their first message to the emperor, ‘the English have been ruling on your behalf’.
Once the insurrection spread, petty lords and great kings rose up alike claiming they were vassals of Bahadur Shah, sending anxious letters to Delhi asking to be confirmed in their possessions, often using the moment to dispossess local rivals. This was as true for Hindu Rajputs and Marathas as much as former Mughal officials, even for kings who had thrown off Mughal authority before 1857. The rulers of Awadh had declared their independence from Mughal power in an elaborate ceremony held in 1819, where the Nawab was converted into a Padshah, or emperor: the British merely called him King. But when the Lucknow garrison revo
lted and returned power to the old court, the mutineers demanded the new Awadh regime declare its allegiance to the Mughal emperor once again. The new rebel Nawab, Wajid Ali Shah’s young son Qadir Birjis, declared he ruled merely as a provincial governor of the Mughal empire. With the submission of both the Nawab of Awadh and the man claiming to be Peshwa to the emperor’s authority, the rebellion tried to recreate the exact constitutional form of the Mughal empire as it existed in the early eighteenth century.25
This return of Mughal authority was supposed to replace the aloof British regime with an empire based on friendship and conversation. In many places, those conversations took new forms. Old Mughal officers like the kotwal and kazi returned alongside new, more plebeian councils and courts, where troops particularly had a voice. The insurrection began with fierce debates between soldiers in garrisons, and the restored Mughal regime was not going to suppress the conversation its existence relied on. In Delhi, the rebels created a court of administration, ‘a sort of military junta’, where six elected soldiers met with four representatives of the palace to talk and decide about the life of the city. To begin with, the court’s president was Bakht Khan, an officer (like the man Henry Lawrence had spoken to in May 1857) from the artillery corps who had served in the Company’s army for forty years. In practice the court was constantly harassed by Delhi’s princes, and found it impossible to speak with a single common voice. In Lucknow, the mutineers decided to elect a new king, but two factions, which divided the infantry and cavalry regiments from one another, backed different claimants. Eventually, Birjis Qadir, the twelve-year-old son of Wajid Ali Shah, was chosen. But Lucknow’s military council retained effective control. The democratic sentiments of the mutineers meant a clear line of command only came into being when the approach of General Henry Havelock’s army created a mood of urgency.26
Throughout the months in which the Badshahi Sarkar (the emperor’s government), ruled, the Mughal regime existed as an ideal more than a political reality. In Delhi itself the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar tried to put the Mughal idea of ensuring a balance between different communities and interests into practice. He attempted to protect Europeans from massacre, ensured Muslims did not kill cows and insisted that both soldiers and nobles were represented on the government’s council. The emperor asserted that the Mughal regime was not fighting an Islamic war. When a group of Sufi Maulvis tried to fly the green standard of holy war on Delhi’s largest mosque, the Jama Masjid, Bahadur had it taken down, saying that ‘such a jehad was quite impossible and an act of extreme folly, for the majority of the Purbea [ex-Company] soldiers were Hindus’. But these efforts to balance and incorporate depended on the moral aura of Zafar’s physical presence, not the emperor’s construction of an effective form of conciliatory practice. The emperor could not insist on any kind of order or hierarchy beyond the city walls of Delhi. Outside the capital the Badshahi government was a system of independent franchises. Leaders who fought in the name of the emperor were driven by different motivations, and put very different styles of political rule into practice. The history of the rebellion showed the enduring power of the ideal of Mughal sovereignty. But it also demonstrated that a century of war and Company government had destroyed the practical authority of Mughal institutions. With their demise, the memory of how the different communities and interests of India could coexist without serious social fracture had been annihilated. Eighteen fifty-seven brought together groups of armed men to fight against the same enemy with radically different political visions.27
One vision, articulated by a significant minority of rebels, saw the war as an attempt to eradicate the rule of infidels and create a polity able to sustain a regenerated version of Islam. In the early nineteenth century this kind of politics was nurtured on the fringes of British power, in kingdoms beyond the borders of the East India Company’s regime such as Afghanistan or in princely states under British ‘protection’ such as Tonk, Hyderabad or even Hindu-ruled Gwalior. Here, political radicals linked up with sufi saints to offer an ethical alternative to British power.
The most famous sufi radical of 1857 was Maulavi Ahmadullah. A tall, muscular man with ‘beetle brows’ and an aquiline nose, Ahmadullah was the son of a south Indian nobleman who was educated in Hyderabad and spent some time in London as a young man. After studying the arts of war Ahmadullah became a disciple of a sufi master near Amir Khan’s old centre of power at Tonk, in Rajasthan. In the 1830s and 1840s Ahmadullah lived in the princely state of Gwalior, a centre of anti-British organization. He was present when British security concerns forced Gwalior to disband its army, a moment of humiliation which may have strengthened his desire to challenge British power. From the early 1850s, Ahmadullah began to travel throughout northern India to preach holy war to evict the British from India. At Agra he lived in a palace but wore the clothes of a faqir, a Muslim holy man, meditating and holding his breath to demonstrate his physical prowess at prayer meetings. Ahmadullah used music to attract support, holding parties in the evening where members of the town’s Muslim middle classes would gather to hear qawwali, or sufi devotional songs, to build support for jihad. ‘He is a dervish only in name, actually he is a prince and is preparing the masses to wage a war against the government,’ one British officer asserted.28
Ahmadullah’s move from nobleman to sufi warlord marked a more fundamental transition, particularly in his relationship to authority. The power of Sufi leaders was based on popular support rather than government patronage. They acquired money and recruited followers from the people who listened to them rather than relying on official backing. Consequently, they were less vulnerable to the corrosion of India’s Muslim political hierarchy than other religious leaders. During the uprising, Ahmadullah thought his purpose was to lead a popular uprising that would renew Islam, not restore a political order he thought was decaying. His style was prophetic rather than authoritarian, based on a passionate denunciation of British crimes, a reputation for invincibility and a wariness, verging on paranoia, about aristocratic plots which might derail the uprising.
The relatives of the last Nawab of Awadh saw the rebellion in a different light, using it as a way to restore the authority of the region’s time-honoured rulers. The conflict between the two groups in Awadh was a battle between demagoguery and aristocratic authority, a clash between a movement that renounced worldly goods in the name of moral renewal and a form of statecraft wanting to re-establish a traditional political order based on wealth and patronage. After a particularly impressive victory against the British, the prince offered his spiritual allegiance to Ahmadullah, agreeing that the whole army should be placed in the Maulvi’s hands. But Ahmadullah demanded the prince’s officers only join his army if they renounced their wealth. The two sides went their separate ways again. It was not the last time a leader who had freed himself from worldly possessions would claim to lead India’s masses against British power.
Relying on nothing more than his ability to persuade men to follow him, Ahmadullah survived far longer than other rebel rulers. Once both Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi and Birjis Qadir in Lucknow were defeated, Ahmadullah retreated in March 1858 to the rebel heartland of Rohilkhand, 200 miles north-west of Lucknow. He was captured in July 1858 after a local raja betrayed him. The raja had Ahmadullah blown up by a cannon, then cut his head from the remains of his body to hand to the British Collector in exchange for a reward of 50,000 rupees. The head was put on a stick and displayed outside the newly restored British government’s office.29
Pragmatic radicals
Maulvi Ahmadullah’s prophetic visions were very different from the reasons which drove Nawab Mahmud Khan to take part in the uprising, although the story had a similar end for both. Mahmud Khan was leader of the insurgency at Najibabad, a small town 120 miles or four days’ ride north-east of Delhi in the district of Bijnor where Sayyid Ahmad Khan was stationed. Like Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Mahmud Khan was a descendant of Afghans who had come to north India with the Persian conqueror Nader Sha
h and then settled in the area where the north Indian plain meets the foothills of the Himalayas. If Ahmadullah was an enthusiastic opponent of British power, Mahmud Khan was a reluctant rebel.
When mutinous soldiers first sought his support, Mahmud Khan sent them away, telling them they could ‘make trouble’ near the district capital of Bijnor as long as they left him alone. The first weeks of June saw the East India Company’s authority in the district challenged by gangs of rebels throughout the countryside. When he decided to leave Bijnor, the British Collector chose to hand the government’s buildings and property, including 109,430 rupees in cash and 38,000 in stamped paper, to Mahmud for safekeeping. Mahmud arrived to meet the British collector ‘wringing his hands and making a very sad face’ at the growing power of the insurgents, according to Sayyid Ahmad. By the end of the month he had plumped for the rebels’ side and used it to strengthen his power. He moved money from the Company’s treasury to his own fort twenty miles away, and replaced British-appointed officers with his own staff. By the middle of July, the Mughal emperor formally invested Mahmud Khan with the title of Nawab, and the town criers of Bijnor had begun to cry Khalq khoda ka, mulk badshah ka, hukm Nawab Mahmud Khan ka: the people belong to God, the country to the king and administration to Mahmud Khan.30
Mahmud Khan’s regime tried emphatically to return to Mughal patterns of rule. Sayyid Ahmad Khan reported that he had developed an ‘obsession with displaying at least some of signs of royal rule, and wiping out the chief symbols of the Government’s authority’, altering the weights and measures ordered by the Company’s government, for example. But the formal trappings of Mughal administration did not give Mahmud unbridled power. His regime alienated local landlords, and these men began to challenge him. Mahmud’s troops started to raid and ransack the forts of ‘troublemakers’. As it escalated, violence polarized along religious lines, as Mahmud’s largely Muslim officers fought largely Hindu rural elites. Fear and a desire for revenge grew, as retaliatory violence intensified. ‘This hatred’, Sayyid Ahmad Khan noted, ‘became so bitter that no one could put any credence in what Muslims said about Hindus, and vice versa.’ What began as a political battle turned into a religious war with Hindus massacring Muslim confectioners and cloth-printers in the town of Haldaur, and Muslims ransacking and killing anyone they could find in Hindu temples. Mahmud Khan ended up fighting beneath a Muslim flag. Sayyid Ahmad Khan believed this was mere opportunistic pragmatism. The Nawab’s men, he said, chose to leave Muslims unharmed as a ‘matter of political expediency, for the wretches were only interested in keeping the Muslims on their side’.
