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The Indian Mutiny
THE INDIAN MUTINY
John Harris
The photographs and illustrations in this book are reproduced by kind permission
of the following. The portrait on page 1 7 by the gracious permission of H M the Queen.
Those on pages 13, 23, 24, 29, 34, 35, 36, 38, 43, 53, 66, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 121, 122,
124, 137, 138, 164, 168, 169, 176, 188 and 189. National Army Museum; pages 45,
50, 82, 103, 115, 152, 158, 190, I 93 and 196, Victoria and Albert Museum; pages 8, 14,
46-7, 56, 57, 59, 78, 116, 149 and 163, India Office Library and Records; pages 10, 61,
111, 126 and 150, National Portrait Gallery; pages 32, 42, 49, 71, 72, 76, 84, 90, 104,
105, 107, 109, 112, 130, 132, 143, 144, 147, 157, 172-3, 174, 194 and 201, Radio Times
Hulton Picture Library; pages 367, 40 and 154-5, Mansell Collection; pages 54, 127,
1 29 and 204, The Parker Gallery; pages 1 82-3 and 1 78-9, Trustees of the Tate Gallery;
page 96, Trustees of the British Museum; pages 139, 140 and 187, Queen’s Own
Highlanders (Seaforth and Camerons); page 184, Queen’s Dragoon Guards; page 75,
Queen’s Lancashire Regiment; page 70, Sherwood Foresters Museum; page 69,
Somerset Light Infantry Museum; page 19, Congregational Council for World Mission;
page 1 81, Sheffield City Art Galleries; page 1 8, Mr Michael Appleby: the pictures on
pages 166 and 167 are from Recollections of a Winter Campaign in India 1857-1858 by
Capt. Oliver Jones, RN; on page 31, from Curry and Rice by G.F. Atkinson; and on page
101 from Campaign in India also by G.F. Atkinson. Illustration Research Service supplied
the pictures. The maps were drawn by Brian and Constance Dear.
®
Wordsworth is a registered trade mark of
Wordsworth Editions Limited
Introduction vii
1 Men on Stilts 8
2 Outbreak at Meerut 24
3 Murder at Delhi 40
7 England Expects 96
Index 206
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NORTHERN
INDIA 1857
Introduction
'he great Indian Mutiny of 1857 is remembered for events that have
T become legendary; the massacre at Cawnpore; the Kashmir Gate
at Delhi; the relief of Lucknow. In this book John Harris has vividly brought
to life the pity and terror of the Mutiny, the sense of shock to both sides at
the challenge to established order. Britishers in India and England were
horrified by the murders of women and children, and yet British reprisals
were no less horrific; captured rebel sepoys were blown from guns.
\ Despite its horrors the Mutiny was followed by one of the most splendid
chapters in British Imperial History - the long years of the Raj. Yet looking
back, we can see that in the year of 1857 - when a coloured people rose
against its British rulers for the first time - were the first stirrings of the
movement that was to lead to independence in I 947, and
eventually to the dissolution of the Empire itself.
Ludovic Kennedy
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'n May 1857, Queen Victoria’s England seemed
at peace. The Crimean War, recently over, had
shown up the defects of a moribund army system
.but attempts were now being made to put things
right, and it was believed that Britain’s good name held
everywhere and that prosperity was on the increase.
British dominions overseas seemed secure in Africa, Canada, New
Zealand, Australia, and a host of other places.
Not least important among them was India, where Robert Clive
and the young men of the East India Company had wrenched a
continent from the hands of its native princes and presented it to
Britain as a vast and priceless jewel which was to enrich her for
generations.
It was one hundred years since Clive had taken India from the
French and, though most of the British were unaware of it, an old
prophecy stated that in this centenary year of the Battle of Plassey
their hold would crumble. The East India Company had long
ceased to be merely the trading organisation that had been given
power in India in the days of Elizabeth I, and its strength had
grown so that, though its right to trade had been surrendered, it
had become, in fact, the British Government’s representative on the
sub-continent. Through its agents and tax-collectors and the
Governor-General, Lord Canning, it held control from the
Himalayas to the southernmost tip. As the power of the Moghul
emperors had declined, the Indian princes, both Hindu and
Moslem, had become merely its puppets.
It had taken the Indians a long time to realise that they were no
longer masters in their own country. Because the Company had
originally acted in the name of the princes, the fact that power had
been captured by a foreign race had not at first been apparent. But
slowly, as the Company’s agents behaved with considerably less
dignity and honesty than the agents of the Crown would have done,
Opposite
the Indians began to wake up and the realisation became wide¬
Even the most junior
spread. Perhaps the Company’s decision in 1835 to strike coins officer or official in
from which the last Moghul emperor’s name was omitted, was one India had a host of
servants.
of the first things that made people aware of what had happened
and even as early as 1837 shrewd administrators were beginning to
notice a change. Although outwardly everything was calm, and
though the peasant, the industrialist, the trader and the oppressed
felt the British had brought undreamt-of blessings, the situation had
in fact become ‘charged with dynamite’.
It was an age of reform and the British wished to reform India -
even as they conquered it - both politically and morally. While 9
Clive had used Indian forms of government to disguise the true
sources of power, Lord Canning’s predecessor, Lord Dalhousie — at
thirty-five the youngest-ever Governor-General — had thought
differently. He believed that India under the British was happier
than India under its native rulers - many of whom were descended,
anyway, from comparatively recent soldiers-of-fortune — and, ex¬
ploiting an old Indian law, he had therefore removed many of the
feudal states and kept only a few of the larger ones, under the control
of the Central Government.
In itself, it was not a bad idea, because it would have led eventu¬
ally to better government, but Dalhousie’s methods had been ruth¬
less. At first he had annexed states where there was no direct heir,
because the constant discord had brought misery. But for the same
reason he had also refused to accept that a childless ruler had the
right to adopt an heir, and many minor states such as Satara,
Jhansi and Nagpur were annexed, as well as the property of those
landlords who could produce no proper title to their estates. His
final and most dangerous seizure was that of the Muslim kingdom of
Oudh, where his excuse was its gross mismanagement. The annexa¬
tion had stirred the resentment of Muslims all over India. Though
the king was given a pension and allowed to live in luxury, those
who depended on him for a living or a comfortable old age — even
the peasants whose lands were part of his domains - were not con¬
sidered at all. In addition, Coverly Jackson, the man placed in
charge, was a tactless, unsympathetic man surrounded by incom¬
petent subordinates.
The British had done a lot of good, but they had also unwittingly
done a lot of harm. Suttee (widow-burning), infanticide and
thuggism, practices which were abhorrent even to enlightened In¬
dians, had been suppressed, but the Indian masses regarded the
suppression as interference in their way of life. And the Company
was always too greedy. While its expenditure for the good of
India remained small, its taxes fell heavily, not only on the wealthy,
but also on the poor. Tolls had to be paid to cross rivers, and
salt — so essential in the tropics — was a government monopoly.
Liquor and opium were also beyond the reach of the poor, and even
those native princes and landowners who had still not been touched,
waking up at last to the fact that Dalhousie had already annexed
over 250,000 square miles of India, began to grow afraid. It would
be their turn next, they decided, as they saw the British apparently
seeking to change the very structure of Indian social and political
life. Unfortunately, there was no means by which either side could
put its point of view because there was no body on which the
representatives of the Company could meet representatives of the
Indians; as a result, the British were never in a position to sense the
outrage their subjects felt against them.
Nevertheless, on io May 1857, all seemed well. Though the hot
weather was near, it was mild still and, with the sun reaching its
zenith, for those who could leave the most important thing in their
minds was the coming journey to the hills where they could pass
the hot season. For the rest, the sweltering heat of the plains meant
spending as much time as possible in shuttered houses with only the
slow wafting of the punkah to move the air. The shimmering after¬
noon had emptied of white men and only a few natives were visible,
dozing in the shade like bundles of old rags. India seemed ancient
and quiet and at peace.
Beneath the dark surface, however, mutterings were taking place. Lord Canning,
Governor-General of
Canning was not unaware of them. ‘. . . In the sky of India,’ he had India, on whom the fury
said at the farewell dinner given to him in London before he had of the Mutiny fell.
left, ‘. ... a small cloud may rise, at first no bigger than a man’s hand
but which . . . may at last threaten to overwhelm us with ruin.’ His
words had surprised his audience but, in fact, they seemed later to
be prophetically inspired because messages were already being
passed and cabalistic symbols scrawled on walls, and the British
were only hours away from an era of sweat, tears, torment and
savage atrocity. To some it was to mean massacre and mutilation,
when women saw their husbands and children butchered before
their eyes. To some, caught in besieged towns, it was to mean long
periods of agonised waiting until relief came. To some it was to
mean no more than the unbelievable shock and outrage of seeing
men they had trusted turn on them. But to all of them, important
and unimportant, civilian and soldier, male and female, it was to be
a period of dread when the knowledge that violent death was
probably not very far away was large in their minds. Often they
were to struggle across burning plains or through steaming jungles,
either in escape or in an effort to exact vengeance, and to many of
them it was to mean the end of life, from exhaustion, heatstroke or
one of the many diseases that plagued Asia.
ber of British troops was never very large but the army, with its
three main centres in the Bombay, Madras and Calcutta Presi¬
dencies, was able to recruit without trouble from the native
Indians. Company regiments were raised under British officers
with Indian officers serving under them - though the most senior
Indian was always subordinate to the lowest-ranking Englishman.
Most European troops were British regiments hired out to the
Company for a tour of overseas duty, and with the British in the
ratio of one to 4,000, the ratio of troops had been fixed by a former
Governor-General as one British soldier to three native soldiers and
had never been less than one to four. With the Crimean War
draining off men, however, and trouble in Burma, China and
Persia, the ratio had been allowed to become almost one to eight —
40,160 European troops as against 311,000 native troops, among
whom were 5,362 British officers.
Originally, these native soldiers had been low-caste Afghan or
Turkish mercenaries, but in an attempt to make the army more
national, the sons of landowners and peasants had been deliberately
recruited. In the army of Bengal, with its cantonments stretching
along the Ganges and the Jumna from Calcutta to Peshawar, three-
fifths of the men serving in the 63 infantry regiments came from
Oudh, ‘the nursery of soldiers’. As servants of the British in their
home state, they had held a privileged position and were supported
by the British against the corrupt native government, but with the
annexation in 1856 these privileges had disappeared. From being
important when they went home, the Oudh soldiers - already
14 humiliated by the seizure of their homeland - had now begun to
find they were being treated there as nothing, or even with con¬
tempt as slaves of the British. Many of them were Brahmins, high¬
born Hindus, while the cavalry, who lived apart, were Muslims.
Well-paid by their own standards, they were popular with the
British. Dressed in the same scarlet jackets and white cross-belts so
that Indian opponents should not know where the line was Euro¬
pean and where native, they looked the part with their curled
beards and whiskers. They were enthusiastic, intelligent and able,
and seemed tp be loyal, though there had been previous instances of
trouble among them. At Vellore in Southern India in 1806, for
instance, the native soldiers, or sepoys, had revolted because they
had been ordered to wear a new style of headdress which included a
leather cockade believed to be miade of cowhide or pigskin. With
the cow sacred to the Hindu and the pig unclean to the Muslim, the
cockade offended the religion of both and when they were also
ordered to trim their beards and give up wearing their caste marks,
they began to believe an attempt was being made to force them into
becoming Christians and they rose during the night to murder
their officers in their beds.
In 1824, a regiment ordered to go to Burma had refused because
of a dispute over cooking pots and because they believed they were
to be transported by sea, in defiance of their caste feelings. In both
cases other influences had worked on the excitable, superstitious
soldiers. In the first case Vellore was the home of the children of
Tipu Sahib, the Sultan of Mysore, Wellington’s old opponent, who
were cherishing visions of a restoration of their dynasty and, in the
second, reports of defeat in Burma led them to expect the end of the
Company’s authority. Both of these mutinies had been brutally
suppressed and the ringleaders hanged, their bodies swinging in
chains as an example to others, while hundreds had been con¬
demned to years of hard labour on the roads. There had been more
trouble after the wars of 1839 to 1849 when the accountants of the
Company, to save money, had unwisely decided that allowances
for service outside the soldier’s native states must cease. It had
caused hardship, and regiments - by this time linked by post
refused to move. When they won their point it began to dawn on
them that there was power in unified action.
In 1852, when the 38th Native Infantry refused to cross the sea
to Burma, where the British were again involved in a war of
annexation, enlightened opinion demanded that this mutiny should
be resolved simply by & change of station; but in 1856 the General
Service Enlistment Act was brought in to give the authorities
absolute power to take the soldiers out of India. To cross the Kala 15
Pani, the black waters, was pollution to an orthodox Hindu and
reduced him in caste, and no Indian soldier"could eat salt pork
or ship’s biscuit. The whole of Northern India was uneasy and it was
obvious to the sepoys that, although the Indian troops took all
the rough and ordinary duties of the service, more than half the
money spent on the army went on the small proportion of British.
Even in the British regiments all was far from well. Purchase, the
system by which officers obtained their commissions, all too often
resulted in a wholesale changeover of officers when a regiment went
abroad. Those with money remained in England, going on half-pay
or buying into a different regiment, while their places were taken
by men who would otherwise never have got commissions. The
senior captain of the 61st (Queen’s) Foot, who had been unable
to get a commission in England, was five feet two inches tall,
with an enormous head, short, hunch-backed body, long arms, and
thin, shrivelled legs. Marching, he was unable to keep step with his
men and on horseback looked ‘more like a monkey than a human
being’.
Yet, well aware that so long as they had a little money they could
still get promotion, they did not have to worry about their com¬
manders’ disapproval and officers formed their own ideas about
how much work they should do. Even the most conscientious did
little more than an hour’s duty a day in the hot weather. It was
believed that exposure to the sun might be fatal, so the European
officers rarely made an appearance except in the morning or
evening. During the rest of the daylight hours they remained in
their darkened shabby bungalows, bored, underpaid, frustrated,
and often drinking far too much.
Sir William Mansfield, later Lord Sandhurst, Commander-in-
Chief, India, noticed that they were often not as zealous or as smart
as a commanding officer had a right to expect and that their fibre
and behaviour had often been sapped by heat, liquor, idleness and
supercession. Aften ten years on the sub-continent, he claimed, they
Opposite were often physically or morally weaker, ‘less amenable to disci¬
Queen Victoria,
painted at the
pline . . . more slothful, and . . . incapable of prolonged effort.’
time of the With the officers of the Company’s army, the situation was prob¬
Indian Mutiny.
ably even worse. In the past, impoverished men, seeking a fortune,
had gone eagerly to the East to face an exile of perhaps thirty years
and as often as not had died without returning home or even ex¬
pecting to. They had therefore made their lives with their regi¬
ments, identifying themselves entirely with their men, speaking
their language and taking Indian ‘wives’. But now they had grown
16 indifferent and lacking in zeal and the generals were old and unfit,
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