by Jon Wilson
Calcutta is quite safe
Despite the often limited coherence of rebel forces, the British response to any threat of insurgency was usually to retreat to their few fortified citadels. Europeans abandoned their collectorates and business houses for the nearest fort, seeking protection behind thick walls and guns commanded by soldiers with white skins. The summer of 1857 saw British officials and their entourages packing up their instruments of government and abandoning the courts and revenue offices scattered around the small European settlements of India’s dispersed district capitals, often long before rebels arrived. The British retreat from Bijnor on 7 June was one of the earliest flights. Had the Collector stayed, Mahmud Khan might have remained on the British side. At Tirhoot, at the other, eastern, end of the zone under insurgent control, indigo planters fled their estates in early July, moving to the East India Company’s station at Muzaffarnagar. Eighty men, thirty women and forty children crammed themselves into two houses. All but two of the British civil stations in Bihar had been abandoned by the beginning of August even though the province saw very little fighting. Gorakhpur, near the border with Nepal, was abandoned on 13 August, despite the only sign of insurrection being a small ‘poorly armed rabble’. The speed of British retreat turned ambivalent leaders into rebels and hastened the spread of the revolt.31
Panic was rife even in places far from the main centres of revolt. Indian soldiers refused to use the new cartridges at two garrisons near Calcutta, Barrackpore and Berhampore, but they were quickly disarmed. Pro-British Indian observers were sure there were sufficient European soldiers to protect the city’s European inhabitants. But Calcutta’s British residents imagined conspiracies were being hatched at every corner to overthrow their power. The exiled Emperor of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, living by then in an unarmed palace in Calcutta’s southern suburb of Metiya Burg, was the favourite demon figure of British fantasy. Once rebellion broke out in Lucknow, Europeans imagined him to be conspiring with disbanded soldiers to murder them in their beds. ‘Calcutta is quite safe – although the magnates of Chowringhee don’t think so,’ the Indian liberal journalist Girish Chunder Ghose wrote. On 9 June Ghose noted that the ‘ladies and gentlemen’ in the British suburb of Ballygunge were so scared they had ‘started from their beds at midnight’ in a state of panic. In fact, the noise came from ‘the festive glee and pyrotechnic wonders’ of a wedding party. Five days later Calcutta was affected by more serious panic. Europeans fled to Fort William or took refuge on steamships in response to a rumour that the garrison had revolted again. Late into the night the house belonging to the major in charge of Calcutta’s defence was ‘besieged by all sorts of people wishing to obtain shelter in the Fort’.32
The limits of the insurrection were defined by the distribution of European soldiers. Indian troops mutinied throughout India and beyond, not only in north India but also at Peshawar and Ambala in Punjab, Barrackpore near Calcutta and Chittagong in far southeastern Bengal, at Madras, Karachi and Bombay, even in the Indian garrison at Singapore. Where the British presence was protected by large detachments of European troops, these garrison mutinies did not spark a broader revolt. Calcutta was defended by two European battalions, with perhaps 2,500 soldiers in total, more than 10 per cent of the total of 22,698 European soldiers in the Company’s north Indian army. There was a strong garrison at Dinapur, on the outskirts of Patna, to protect the western frontier of Bengal. At the far north-west of India, in Punjab, soldiers were concentrated to keep the population of a newly conquered and supposedly warlike province in check. Punjab was occupied by eleven battalions of British troops, dispersed between eight garrisons. Because Punjab was seen as the most dangerous place in India it was defended with enough troops to defend British power. By contrast, the Mughal empire’s old Hindustani heartland had scant European troops, with only one infantry regiment apiece at Lucknow, Meerut and Agra. Even if the British had responded more quickly to rebellion, these scattered detachments of about 4,000 soldiers would have been no match for the perhaps 100,000 sepoys who took up arms against their employers on north India’s plain.
By the end of July 1857 many British officers started to believe that they could only survive by abandoning the stretch of territory between Bihar and Punjab where the rebellion was most intense. The priority was for the Company to keep its capacity to collect revenue from the fields of eastern India’s profitable rivers and deltas. ‘For the moment,’ the newly appointed Governor-General Charles, Earl Canning wrote on 8 August, ‘everything must give way to the necessity of arresting rebellion or general disorder below Benares. If this is not done our slender remains of revenue will be in jeopardy.’ This strategy left embattled enclaves of Britons stranded at Lucknow and Delhi. British opinion in London demanded that Europeans besieged in the midst of the insurgency be rescued. Between defence and rescue, British policy vacillated. Small forces were sent to capture Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow, but most troops were forced to sit and wait for the arrival of reinforcements.33
The greatest early British triumph happened at Delhi, but this was an equivocal victory. A small British force pushed its way from Ambala in Punjab to Delhi soon after the Mughal capital was captured by rebels. It was joined by a second detachment on 14 August, led by the brutal Ulsterman John Nicholson, a man who liked to keep the head of a chief he had executed on his desk. In the years soon after the revolt, the British imagined their assault was the victory of Nicholson’s ‘gallant few’ fighting against hordes of zealous ‘fanatics’. In Self-Help, his 1859 post-mutiny celebration of British national character, the journalist Samuel Smiles spoke of 3,700 British-led ‘bayonets’ defeating an army of 75,000 crazed Muslim insurgents.
In reality, the victory was much less impressive. The Company possessed 6,800 troops, mostly Indian or Nepali, and there were not many more Mughal soldiers in Delhi. A few Muslim jihadis had arrived throughout July, but they came in small numbers, the last and largest contingent of only 600 coming from Amir Khan’s old state of Tonk on 21 July. For the most part Delhi’s rebel army had begun to dissipate in the month before the attack, as soldiers went unpaid and supply routes had been blocked by British forces. By the end of July, there were only 10,000 badly equipped, hungry Mughal soldiers left in the old capital. When the British started to shell Delhi six weeks later, many troops and most of Delhi’s administrators fled, including the last Mughal chief of police, Gangadhar Nehru, grandfather of independent India’s first Prime Minister. By the time the British army marched to the city walls, they probably had a small numerical advantage over the forces they challenged. As usual, the idea of a tiny number of morally superior Britons holding massive Indian forces at bay was a myth. The battle for Delhi was a fight between two starving, demoralized and badly disciplined armies.
The British started to march from their ridge-top position in the middle of the night of 13 September, but their movement was disordered and far slower than planned. To begin with the emperor’s troops retained control of Delhi’s key sites, the Jama Masjid, Chandni Chowk and the main police station. John Nicholson was fatally wounded. The British lost more than 1,100 men and 60 officers in the first few hours of fighting. Exhausted and disheartened, large numbers of British soldiers broke into liquor shops, absenting themselves from the fight by getting drunk on looted alcohol.
Samuel Smiles described the storming of Delhi as ‘the most illustrious event’ to occur during the mutiny. He wrote that every member of the ‘English race’ had been a hero and quoted Captain William Hodson, ‘one of the bravest’, saying that no other nation would have stood its ground so doggedly. The passage Smiles quoted was written in Hodson’s diary before the fighting had even started, when Hodson imagined a great, noble victory was possible. The reality of war transformed his opinion. After the battle Hodson wrote that it was the first time he saw ‘English soldiers refuse repeatedly to follow their officers’. ‘[T]he troops are utterly demoralized by hard work and hard drink.’ Thirty-eight per cent of the British infant
ry were killed or wounded, with more than half the officers also lost in the fighting. After the first day, the Mughal army could easily have driven the British out of Delhi if an order had been given to counter-attack, but the emperor’s forces were themselves fractured. They did not have a single leader, did not share a strong enough sense of common purpose and, unlike the British, had homes in India to return to. After days of street fighting the rebel soldiers retreated in waves, some to fight on elsewhere, others to their families. Only a small contingent surrounding the man who had no home but this defeated city, the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was left to surrender to the British army. Delhi was under British control by 21 September.34
The conquest of Delhi created an island of British power at the western end of the rebel-controlled zone. It also ended the rebels’ claim to be the heirs of Mughal power. But it did not end the revolt. Awadh remained a rebel stronghold. A force led by Sir Henry Havelock eventually reached Lucknow, but was besieged itself until liberated by an army led by Sir Colin Campbell which arrived on 15 September 1857. Campbell’s army relieved the Europeans stranded at the residency but was then forced to retreat, leaving the rebels in charge of Awadh’s capital city until March the following year. The human cost of these limited gains was extraordinary. A third of the original Lucknow garrison had died, in addition to 256 soldiers within the relieving force losing their lives.
The reconquest of India only began once 40,000 soldiers arrived from Europe to give the British numerical superiority. As it marched up from Calcutta, the British army gained the support of groups of Indians who had fallen out of favour with rebel forces in each place. In Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Bijnor, for example, the predominantly Hindu landholders whom Mahmud Khan had tried to tax quickly rallied to the British standard. Landlords in Awadh worried about the radicalism of the rebel army and thought the British were more likely to protect their property and supported the Company to.
Despite gathering some degree of elite Indian support, the British reconquest was marked by massive, indiscriminate violence. This violence was not a fine-tuned effort by the British to rebuild power. It had the character of a forward panic, caused by the sudden release of fear and the quick appearance of passive targets on which to take out pent-up feelings of anger.35
The desire for vengeance was shared by high officials and junior soldiers, from India to Britain. Exaggerated reports had been transmitted to London about terrible violations and atrocities committed by Indian insurgents, as false tales were circulated about European women ‘turned naked into the streets’ and ‘abandoned to the beastly lusts of the blood-stained rabble’, as one early book put it. There was, missionary Alexander Duff wrote, ‘some species of hallucination respecting the real condition of affairs here’. The passion these stories excited was extreme. ‘I wish I were commander-in-chief in India,’ Charles Dickens wrote, ‘I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.’ Thomas Macaulay was unusually reflective about his state of mind. He noted the British nation’s ‘one terrible cry for revenge’ but was, he felt, ‘half ashamed only half ashamed, for the craving for vengeance which I feel’. ‘I could be very cruel just now if I had power,’ Macaulay wrote. He wondered whether ‘the severity which springs from a great sensitivity to human suffering’ was better than ‘lenity which springs from indifference’. As Macaulay debated the intellectual case for and against brutality as a response to rebellion, British officers and soldiers in India were acting out countless varieties of genuine cruelty.36
Delhi was one of the most brutal sites of revenge. In the days that followed its capture, 200 suspected rebels were hanged from gallows in the centre of the city without trial. The Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar had been promised that his life would be saved if he gave himself up. He was captured, found guilty of treason and then exiled to Burma for the rest of his life. His two sons were summarily shot to prevent them being the subjects of a new wave of rebellion. The entire population of Delhi was evicted, and British officials debated demolishing the whole city. In fact, only the structures inside Delhi’s Mughal Red Fort were knocked down. But the city was ransacked and plunder given official sanction by the appointment of British prize agents whose job was to collect wealth and divide it in exact proportions among the conquering army. A few notables, able to provide clear evidence of continued loyalty to the British through the short-lived Mughal regime, were given protection tickets and left alone. Without that evidence, dispossession was severe.
The merchant Umed Singh claimed he had suffered during the uprising for the crime of being able to read English and remaining a ‘partisan’ of the East India Company. After the reconquest, his house was demolished and land dug up to recover buried gold and jewels to the value of 60,000 rupees. This was a personal catastrophe. ‘The labour of a whole life, the accumulation of many long years of all of us, is thus knocked on the head,’ he said. Already an old man, he was left with nothing to live on in retirement. An Indian observer from nearby Mhow thought the violence of the British reconquest was worse than Nadir Shah’s sacking of Delhi 118 years before. ‘No one ever thought that the capture of Delhie by Englishmen would be attended with more cruelty to the general population, than that by a Nadir,’ wrote Sannat Nana. Trade bounced back, but the dislocation of 1857 permanently killed off Delhi’s cultural life. As their sources of patronage were annihilated, musicians and musical connoisseurs, poets and calligraphers went elsewhere seeking work and Delhi’s 300-year history as the cultural capital of Mughal India came to a quick end. After 1857 Delhi was a very different city.37
British violence was driven by the ‘anguish’ of humiliation, as John Kaye put it, motivated by a visceral desire to undo ‘the degradation of fearing those whom we had taught to fear us’. Kaye thought British brutality dissipated as passions subsided, but violence seems often to have become routine, something to which initially anxious soldiers became desensitized. The 47-year old Scottish Brigadier General James Neill was author of some of the earliest, most brutal violence at Allahabad and Kanpur. Early in the war he hanged six supporters of Maulvi Ahmadullah on thin evidence, nervously writing about carrying out ‘a duty I never contemplated having to perform’. ‘I have’, he went on, ‘done all for the good of my country, to re-establish its prestige and power.’ But on his march upcountry Neill killed indiscriminately, gunning down bystanders on the banks of the Ganges from his steamship and burning entire villages. Like other British soldiers, Neill justified cruelty with cruelty, believing that barbarity could only be stopped by reciprocal acts. As time passed Neill would deliberately offend Indian religious sensibilities. At the site of the Bibighur massacre he forced the men accused of rebellion to clean the blood of Europeans with their tongues before hanging them.38
Amid these cruel, cathartic acts of reconquest, the need to rebuild British authority created a countervailing set of arguments. Governor-General Charles Canning worried that British vengeance would incite further opposition and create news cycle of violence. Canning famously offered clemency to rebels who switched sides in July 1857. ‘There is a rapid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad . . . which it is impossible to contemplate without a feeling of shame for one’s own countrymen,’ he wrote to Queen Victoria. Canning’s approach was dominated by an effort to rein in British passions in the interests of British power. ‘I will not’, he insisted in December, ‘govern in anger.’
These sentiments were vigorously lampooned in the British press. The satirical magazine Punch, for example, published cartoons which stoked up ‘the British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger’. It celebrated the noble deeds of previous conquerors like Robert Clive and urged its readers to ‘Cry Havelock! And let slip the dogs of war’. In response to similar pressure from Europeans in India, Canning himself equivocated, issuing a proclamation in March 1858 which insisted that the property of north Indian landholders would be confiscated. But politicians, if not the rabid sections of the press, came increasingl
y to see that conciliation was the only way to end the war.
Dominated more by battles between different groups of politicians than public opinion, the British Parliament seems to have been largely immune from the cry for revenge. When the uprising took place, a Whig ministry led by Lord Palmerston was desperately trying to cling to power. In Parliament Palmerston minimized the scale of the crisis. When details of the rebellion began to arrive in July and August 1857, Palmerston’s government denied it was anything other than a minor military mutiny, which a detachment of additional troops would quickly suppress. The government sent reinforcements by slow steamship rather than using quicker vessels equipped with new screw propellers. Amid growing public clamour for retaliation, Whig ministers left London for their country estates in one of the hottest summers in living memory. Palmerston’s government was splitting into rival factions. The only way to keep it together was to minimize the scope for argument.
The Conservative MP Benjamin Disraeli was one of the few politicians to challenge the ministry’s inaction, and it was his approach which shaped the new order created to rule India after 1858. Once rebel strongholds there had been defeated the biggest question was how to encourage India’s elites to submit to British power and what to do with the East India Company. Disraeli’s argument was that the revolt had been sparked by the dispossession of India’s great landed magnates. The British state, he said, needed to stand forth as the protector of the subcontinent’s ruling classes, guaranteeing their security in return for their submission not merely to the East India Company, but to the British Crown. To begin with, this was simply clever rhetoric to humiliate the Palmerston administration. But Disraeli quickly found himself in power, appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative administration led by Lord Derby once the Whig government had collapsed. As a minister Disraeli worked closely with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to create a new political order in India based on the conservative principles he had used to attack Palmerston.
