Hindustan ki kasam

Inspirational, romantic but ultimately doomed to fail, 1857, writes Chandan Mitra, was the last gasp of old India.

India is as confused about 1857 today as it was when it happened. What was 1857? India’s only armed national uprising? A mere Sepoy Mutiny? The failed First War of Indian Independence as Savarkar asserted? A disjointed, haphazard attempt by dispossessed rulers and local chieftains to reclaim lost authority?

A jihadi conspiracy to overthrow infidel rule and re-establish the power and glory of the Mohammedan faith in India – still a candidate country for conversion to Dar-ul-Islam? Conversely, a rare, post-Shivaji Hindu foray into armed insurrection to protect the honour of the Brahmin and the cow? Or a violent peasant protest against the perceived feringhee move to destroy millennia-old cultural legacies and replace feudal benevolence with impersonal, alien codified laws?

Was it a cleverly planned, proto-modern, anti-imperialist movement that could have led to India’s emergence as a powerful Asian nation rubbing shoulders with Europe, America and the Ottoman Empire? Or a retrograde throwback into a fissiparous, casteist, exploitative ancien regime that would have pushed India again into the divisive cauldron that followed Aurangzeb’s death in 1707?

Whatever it was, in retrospect the Great Uprising was incredibly romantic in its resplendent canvas. Visualise those dried lotus petals carried from village to village across the Indo-Gangetic heartland by rustic runners, lathi in hand, dark cloth covering them head to toe, chestnut-brown eyes shining in the dim glow of lanterns. Their job was to reach remains of lotus flowers to the dominant Hindu family of the nearest village, enjoining them to cry freedom. A Muslim counterpart would similarly run, chapati in hand, a symbolic declaration of revolt that virtually made it mandatory for the recipient to join the holy war to overthrow the feringhee.

Visualise the shadowy Maulvi of Faizabad, draped in a black al-khallah, who would walk in and out of the dusty cantonment, once upon a time military headquarters of Avadh’s erstwhile capital, Bangla (those who have seen Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan will get the reference). His job as a disciple of Shah Waliullah, harbinger of the Waha’bi sect, was to inspire Muslim recruits of the Company’s marauding army to revolt in defence of Islam.

Imagine the ferocious pride of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, who risked her all to protect the principality from within and without. Recall Nana Saheb, the intellectual hero, strategist and ideologue, sending emissaries to distant lands almost seeking international recognition for a government-in-the-making, a virtual forerunner of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind Huqumat, proclaimed in Singapore 86 years later.

Visualise the Declaration of Independence by Babu Kunwar Singh, the rebel Rajput of Ballia-Maharajganj, the firmans of Muslim fief-holders of Avadh, the effervescent joy at the panic and trepidation of the once all-powerful “gora“, (eloquently captured in Shyam Benegal’s Junoon), the magnificent sense of triumph of tradition over alien modernity. The Indian mosaic, its caste and community cohesion, the fusion of Nakki Khan and Mangal Pandey who fired 1857′s first salvo, was never painted in such rainbow colours before or after the Great Uprising.

Six years earlier a young man in southern China had similarly raised the banner of revolt against extortionist foreigners and the supine Manchu Emperor, proclaiming the parallel Tai’ping Tien’kuo (Kingdom of Heavenly Peace). But he compromised by seeking legitimacy from the very foreigners by anointing himself “younger brother” of Jesus Christ in an attempt at ingratiating himself to those whom the Manchus called “foreign devils” and “barbarians”.

Howsoever inchoate and disorderly, the Great Uprising of 1857 brooked no compromise with “dharam-imaan” – religion and morality. The Tai’ping Movement petered out in three years; the I-Ching or Boxer Uprising of 1900 was an abysmal failure in nine months. Neither finds recollection in collective Chinese memory.

But 1857 lives, even if hesitantly, its romance undiminished. It gave India its first, hesitant feel of nationhood. That is why Marxist fellow-traveller Rudrangshu Mukherjee is so hopelessly wrong when he attributes Mangal Pandey’s individual revolt to everything (including addiction to bhang and unrequited love) except nationalist fervour.

If that were true, disbanded soldiers of the Bengal Regiment would not have carried back tales of his valour to their villages in Avadh, nor would hair-raising stories of Pandey’s bravado on March 29 have been transmitted by India’s equivalent of the bush telegraph to Meerut, triggering the violent eruption of May 10.

That however brings us no closer to defining the Great Uprising. Indeed, we will probably remain as confused another 150 years later. Such was the terror the British unleashed in the aftermath of their victory that few contemporary scribes or historians ventured to record either the character or legacy of 1857. And, lest we forget by virtue of the time-ordained Hindu disregard for history, British terror could indeed be terrifying. For instance, the “liberator” of Delhi, John Nicholson, whose tomb was recently restored, walked into a dinner shortly after his re-conquest of the city, almost an hour late, and proffered this by way of a nonchalant apology: “Sorry to be delayed, gentlemen; I was busy hanging your cooks.”

To cite a significantly later example just to establish continuity, we know from the memoirs of Hugh Lane, ICS, the first British official to set foot in UP’s easternmost district of Ballia, peacefully “liberated” for seven days by otherwise law-abiding, middle class Congress leaders in response to the Quit India call of 1942: “None dared to don the Gandhi cap in this rebellious district till 1944 when Feroze Gandhi arrived wearing one and admonished his partymen for being so timid.”

India’s colonial masters learnt many lessons from 1857, the most important being not to permit perpetuation of the Uprising’s memory. Astonishingly, little survives even in folklore, nor the eloquent writings of the period’s most prolific poet, Mirza Ghalib. It is easier deciphering the heroics of the forgotten Baba Ramchandra of Faizabad (Jawaharlal Nehru in Discovery of India attributes his first interaction with peasants to the semi-religious, itinerant preacher’s skill in mass mobilisation) than reconstructing the totality of the Great Uprising. Yet India celebrates the pathos of its last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar, exiled to Rangoon, with eloquent nostalgia:

Itna hai badnaseeb Zafar

Dafn ke liye

Do gaz zameen na milee

Ku-e-yaar mein

Lagta nahin hai jee mera

Ujdey dayar mein

But nobody dared write a comprehensive history of what happened during the steamy summer of 1857, replete with tales of valour and cowardice, revenge and retribution. Surprisingly, there are many heart-rending tales of despair written about the defeat of the indolent, incompetent Siraj-ud-Daulah at Plassey, exactly 100 years before the Great Uprising; or the tragedy of the languid Nawab of Avadh, Wajid Ali Shah, whose mal-administered kingdom was annexed by Lord Dalhousie in 1846.

Maybe the absence of a composite historiography of 1857 can be attributed to Muslim historians’ discomfort with recording Islam’s final defeat in its erstwhile domain. At least that is the hypothesis of William Dalrymple, writer of the superb narrative on the unfolding of the Uprising in Delhi, woven around the derelict court of the last titular head of the Mughal Empire.

Since most of the Indian source material is in archaic Farsi script, it stands to reason that India’s Muslim historians would have been best placed to reconstruct the story. Maybe the Marxist orientation of Aligarh historians had a further bearing on 1857 being skipped from contemporary historical discourse.

Does that mean 1857 left no lasting legacy? Sadly, it must be admitted that beyond disjointed, disparate legends of individual valour and tragedy, not much of 1857 resides in India’s collective memory. One reason was the confinement of the Uprising to roughly today’s Hindi heartland. Although its first spark was lit by Sepoy Mangal Pandey at Barrackpore, a Calcutta suburb, the spark became a prairie fire only with the mutiny at Meerut and the rapid fall of Delhi.

It spread through most of what is now Uttar Pradesh, affected parts of adjoining Bihar and Central India but left the rest of the subcontinent virtually untouched. In fact, Bengal has little or no memory of 1857, nor do other eastern parts of India. The west and south were almost totally untouched.

The rising new metropolitan centres around Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were not only insulated from the disturbances in the Gangetic Plains, but also petrified at the thought of East India Company rule being challenged. These were the upcoming locations of trade and commerce. The coastal presidencies, non-existent prior to colonial incursions, had developed vested interests in the perpetuation of British supremacy. The comprador bourgeoisie never had it so good.

The new middle class were also products of English education that began with Lord Macaulay’s famous Minute of 1835, resulting in the establishment of the Hare School and Presidency College in Calcutta, Elphinstone College in Bombay and the Madras Christian College. Alumni of these institutions shared little historically or culturally with the native elite of Upper Hindostan, loathed the indolent princes of kingdoms like Avadh and considered the Uprising an anachronism.

Significantly, the new elite in the coastal presidencies was almost entirely Hindu. Contrary to the attempt by so-called secular historians to paint the Uprising as a landmark of communal amity, there were undercurrents of tension. In their own quiet way, Hindus were beginning to assert their identity and looked upon British rule as deliverance from Islamic “tyranny”. The concluding message of Bankim Chandra’s Ananda Math, which extols the British for getting rid of Muslim rule, is a categorical assertion of Hindu resurgence.

While it is true that the Great Uprising, wherever it happened, was marked by an alliance between orthodox Hindus and their Muslim counterparts, the rebellion itself was limited not just geographically but also historically. History was on the side of the British because modern India was still in an embryonic stage in 1857. Modern India’s time would come only around the turn of the 19th century. Tragic as it seems from the perspective of romantic nationalism, the defeat of 1857 was written into its genes.

Wahhabi phobia in Bombay.

For the British, the uprising was not just a military challenge. In some places, it was also a law and order problem. In this extract from Urbs Prima in Indis: An Epoch in the History of Bombay, 1840-1865, Teresa Albuquerque details how a proactive police superintendent saved the young metropolis The mutiny that broke out in Meerut on May 10, 1857, had its repercussions on various parts of the country. Bombay too was not unaffected; but the local disturbance was greatly mitigated by the prudent and timely action of the prescient guardians of her peace.

Lord John Elphinstone, nephew of a previous governor of Bombay – the renowned Mountstuart Elphinstone – had been governor of Bombay since 1842 … When the news of the outbreak reached him at Bombay on May 14, 1857, the governor determined to regard the interests of his own charge as subordinate to the interests of the empire.

True, this incident could spark off a conflagration to which his Bombay army would be most vulnerable, it being composed partly of recruits from Oudh and mainly from the Maratha states. But he was confident that, adhering firmly to the Napoleonic strategy of concentrating maximum forces at key positions, he could prevent the situation from going out of hand. Accordingly, he despatched all the European troops he could muster to places most exposed, and he ordered Bartle Frere, then commissioner of Sind, to transfer the First Bombay Fusiliers from Karachi to the Punjab. He himself carefully expedited the passage by sea of the 64th and 78th Regiments, en route from Persia to Bombay, and sent them on to Calcutta instead …

Police spies in the army

It was, however, far from the governor to neglect his own province. Diligently, he directed the measures for the security of the city of Bombay and entrusted their execution to his trusted officers. To Brigadier General JM Shortt, an experienced and intelligent officer, he handed the entire command of the troops in the garrison which comprised a European force of 400, and three Indian regiments – the 10th and the 11th Naval Infantry, and a Marine Battalion.

Besides the army, there was a Police Corps of 50 Europeans and a number of Indians under the senior magistrate of police, William Crawford. But Bombay was singularly fortunate in having in Charles Forjett, the superintendent of police, a man of supreme intelligence …

At first, to the people of Bombay, the Mutiny seemed far too remote. The local newspapers did inform them of the gruesome massacres in the north but there was no reason for a scare … In time, however, at news of the massacres mostly perpetrated by Muslim sepoys in other provinces, the city became infected by what came to be known as a “Wahhabi phobia”.

The governor therefore felt it prudent to take precautionary measures and instructed Forjett to meet him after conferring with the brigadier. The latter told Forjett that the governor and he were greatly concerned about maintaining peace in the city and urged him to stress the point on the leading Muslims of Bombay. The festival of Buckree Id was to take place at the end of July, and excitement at such festivals sometimes did provoke unpleasant incidents.

Forjett assured the brigadier that he would be most alert and should any man create mischief, he would be shot or cut down. He did not fear the Muslim community, among whom he had friends, including the Kazi, on whom he could rely. But he hesitated to appeal to them lest that be mistaken for weakness – a circumstance which could bring about the opposite of what was intended! The only real menace he could anticipate were the sepoys against whom he had guarded by placing a spy in their midst.

Shortt indignantly retorted that he had absolute faith in his men and in the ability of his officers to detect or curb any such tendencies. Forjett then met the governor and explained the grounds on which he considered the army chief’s suggestion impolitic. The governor acquiesced and also agreed to his proposal to incorporate into the police a body of 50 mounted Europeans to strengthen his meagre force in the event of an uprising of the 150,000 Muslims of the city.

When events in the north began to take a serious turn, the citizens of Bombay came forward with formal gestures of loyalty and goodwill. Headed by David Sassoon, the Jewish inhabitants addressed the governor on June 15, and expressing their dismay at the atrocities committed by the Bengal Army, they pledged their support to the government in the preservation of peace should the need arise. On June 20 a petition expressing similar sentiments was presented to the governor by nearly 400 of the most respectable European and Indian inhabitants of Bombay, representing various religious denominations.

On June 23, the Bombay Association addressed the Governor proffering the efforts of all classes of the community towards maintaining tranquility, should the presence of troops be required elsewhere. The local press offered suggestions for the creation of a volunteer force of civilian Europeans, and even of a Parsi militia …

Conspicuous by its absence, however, was any like overture from the Muslim community, which formed a major segment of the population of Bombay. Uneasiness on this account was gradually mounting, and it intensified with news of the arrest at Poona of the Muslim Moulvi of the Cantonment Bazaar Mosque and the unearthing of a plot relating to mass murder of Europeans. A rumour circulated that “something unpleasant may be expected to take place on the day of the Mohamedan festival of Buckree Id” …

Buckree Id passed off without any incidents but the “Wahhabi Phobia” persisted. Moharam was to take place in the last week of July. This too was a festival during which excitement sometimes climaxed to a frenzy that could be contagious. On the arrival of Her Majesty’s 33rd Regiment from Mauritius, newspapers attempted to induce a sense of security: “The Moharam may come when it likes now. We are fully prepared for everything.”

Talking turkey

Forjett sensed the pulse of the people and, meaning to prevent any recurrence of the recent panic, he judged it was now expedient to obtain an assurance from the Muslim community. Revered as a ma-bap or protector, Forjett sahib had by then become a household word, celebrated for his spectacular feats of detection. In response to his invitation, a gathering of about 500 influential members of the community assembled on the afternoon of August 8 at the residence of Mohamed Ali Rogay, the Nakoda …

Forjett addressed a gathering, speaking in the vernacular. After welcoming his audience and congratulating them for wisely remaining on the side of tranquility, he boasted of the power and might of the British government and of how it had withstood vain efforts to subdue it. Referring to the present conflict, he boldly affirmed that the British as usual had emerged the victors and, now, only persons fit to be inmates of the Colaba Asylum would attempt to threaten the peace, for “every guilty man will be strung up before his own door”.

Coming to the specific purpose of the invitation he trusted the leaders would use their influence to ensure that like the last Moharam, this festival too, though in a different climate, would terminate peacefully. Thus they would benefit themselves by safeguarding life and property and gain the good graces of the government. He reminded them of the benefits bestowed by the British government, particularly religious tolerance, and quoted their Koran as approving of a sense of gratitude to any such government …

Obviously, the meeting had the desired effect. A detailed account appeared in the local newspaper the next day. On August 17, the Muslim community presented to the governor its rather belated assurance of loyalty and its devotion to peace. As anticipated by Forjett, the Kazi availed himself of every opportunity of influencing his co-religionists to be careful in their conduct.

Another eminent leader, Sheikh Ahmed Kubbay, brought Forjett an agent who was providing ships with Indian sailors and was thus instrumental in sending away from Bombay during the Moharam 573 Seedies and Candaharee sailors who might have otherwise created problems. The day after the meeting, Lord Elphinstone commended Forjett for not mincing his words to the Muslims earlier.

The city prays

In response to the Lord Bishop’s declaration that August 14 be the Day of Humiliation “in view of the dreadful judgment with which God is visiting the land”, people flocked the houses of worship – Christians to St Andrews Kirk or the Chapel at Ambroli; Parsis to their Fire Temples; the Shenvies offered Hari Kirtans; the American clergy prayed at the Fort; and on August 20 the Prabhus held a prayer meeting. Bombay was in dread of what might happen, not aware of how the governor was engaged.

On August 17 … the bulk of the European troops stationed at Colaba would protect the Fort with its government offices, the mint and the banks, and thus also ensure the safety of the dockyard and harbour. A small military guard supported by the police would defend the hospitals and the barracks at Colaba. Small units of the army would be posted round the native town to prevent entry into the main European residential areas of Malabar Hill, Breach Candy, Byculla and Mazagon …

The Indian Navy was to lend a party of seamen to the Peninsula and Oriental Company office at Mazagon, the Powder Works at Sewree and Rowlee Hills at Parel. Brigadier Shortt was to be in command of the military as well as the police. During the Moharam a train would stand in readiness at Bori Bunder to expedite the movement of troops. British civilians volunteering their services were to meet at pre-arranged spots.

The governor even took the precaution of ordering the postal authorities to check letters written in the vernacular and to forward those containing suspicious matter to the scrutiny of the Oriental Translator to Government …

Anticipatory arrests

On August 27, the arrival in Bombay of another detachment of the 33rd Regiment from Mauritius was most welcome, especially as tension had mounted due to the coming Moharam. Forjett was extra vigilant. To use his own words: “Every scoundrel in the town was closely watched and kept in a state of terror. When on my rounds at night in disguise I found anybody speaking of the success of the rebels in anything like a tone of exultation, I seized him on the spot. A whistle brought up three or four policemen who too followed in disguise and the person or persons were at once bound and walked off to the prison” …

Forjett was distressed to find that, even after the festival, the “Wahhabi phobia” persisted. With his disguises he unnerved the people. He knew that the Indians had feared that martial law might be introduced into Bombay and referred to it as Nuwa Kaeeda (new law). To avert any further mischief, he installed a gibbet in the yard of the police station and, rounding up some of the shady characters, indicated what might be their fate should they show subversive tendencies.

Lord Elphinstone cooperated by permitting the deportation of men taken into custody to the Thana Jail by night. This heightened the air of mystery and suspense.

The conspiracy that failed

One of Forjett’s detectives, a Wahhabi named Soobedar Mohamed Booden, discovered soon after the Moharam that a house of one Ganga Prasad in Sonapore had become the rendezvous of the sepoys. Suspecting that the purpose was seditious, attempts were made to gain entry. But neither Booden, married to the daughter of a pensioned soobedar of the Marine Battalion, nor two other detectives were successful because they did not belong to the army. Here was irrefutable evidence that Forjett’s premonition of the Mutiny being exclusively confined to the sepoys was not incorrect.

“Bold as a lion and wise as a serpent”, Forjett … drastically ventured forcibly to abduct Ganga Prasad himself at night, take him to the police station and from him, by threats and bribes, he managed to extract the bare facts of the plot. In the triple role of a priest, a devotee and a physician, Prasad had lured the Indian sepoys to meet at his place. Forjett insisted on being an eyewitness at the meetings and, having ensured by threats that Prasad would not betray him, he and his assistant, Eddington, and an Indian policeman, all in disguise, concealed themselves, in a small room at the rear.

Through holes bored in the plastered wickerwork wall which separated them from the 30-foot long and 15-foot wide ante-room, they watched the sepoys enter one by one. From their conversation, Forjett was convinced that trouble was really brewing there. But in order to convince the authorities who were so biased in favour of the sepoys, he took with him on his second visit a witness, Major Barrow, officer-commanding, the Marine Battalion.

Very surreptitiously, going separately on foot in disguise, the two visited the spot. When Major Barrow recognised a private and a jemadar of the 10th Regiment, and a drill havaldar of the Marine Battalion and heard their seditious conversation disclosing also the guilt of a soobedar of the 17th Regiment, he was horrified and exclaimed: “My God, my own men. Is it possible?” …

It was later revealed that an outbreak had been planned by the sepoys on the last night of the Moharam, but it had been forestalled due to the counter measures then maintained by the authorities … Despite the revelations, the brigadier took no decisive action. Only two days later, after Forjett got more information disclosing plans for an uprising on the 15th [October 15], the night of Diwali, did Shortt caution his officers commanding the 10th and 11th Regiments.

Meanwhile, Forjett accompanied by Major Barrow, made three more visits to the rendezvous till Ganga Prasad advised him against making more. He discovered that the mutineers, expecting vigilance to be relaxed by the Diwali, anticipated looting the wealth of the Indian inhabitants which was customarily concentrated in one room during the festival for the purpose of worship. Ganga Prasad later revealed that the sepoys’ intention had been to bolt with the loot after killing those who opposed them, and at Poona to unite with the Indian Regiment there and proclaim the sovereignty of the Nana as Peshwa of the Deccan.

Details of the revolting incident that followed are available to us: On October 13, Drill Havaldar Syed Hussein of the Marine Battalion and Private Mungal Gudrea of the 10th Regiment were court-martialled and sentenced to death by being blown from the muzzle of a cannon.

Murder in Daryaganj

It began with the killing of Dr Chaman Lal outside his clinic. Sidharth Mishra recounts four months that turned Delhi society upside down.

Contrary to popular perception, no battle was fought for the takeover of Delhi by the mutinying sepoys who arrived from Meerut. There was, though, great resistance to the East India Company reinforcements who arrived to seize power back from the Mughal “emperor” Bahadur Shah Zafar. Bards and courtiers presented embellished accounts of brave Mughal princes leading the mutineers.

Ensconced within the high walls of the Red Fort, urban life in 1857′s Delhi was an illustration of lechery, debauchery and mal-governance. The British resident, Charles Metcalfe, encouraged these trends, especially in the inner apartments of the royals. The rangeen culture also caught on with British officers and business agents, who made Daryaganj their little European quarter. There were many white residents of Daryaganj who had never actually been to England. Some of them did not have enough to pay for the passage.

For the subalterns of Douglas’ Guard, which secured the royal quarters, whoring with the young wives and daughters of gentlemen grown old was common. No surprise that Captain Douglas and the then commissioner of Delhi, Simon Fraser, were massacred by the mutineers who arrived unannounced on May 11.

Metcalfe encouraged white ladies well-versed in Persian and in court culture to interact with Bahadur Shah Zafar’s harem. The tottering old king’s middle-aged wife, Zeenat Mahal, presided over the harem and, to an extent, the Mughal court. The Persian-speaking white ladies participated in the intrigues of the harem and court.

Metcalfe maintained a dialogue with Zeenat through messengers and kept her assured that her 16-year-old son, Jawan Bakht, would be declared successor to the king of Delhi, as the British knew Bahadur Shah. Bakht’s most notable attribute was his ability to crack bawdy jokes in the company of the harem’s eunuch guards. Other than the emperor, Bakht was the only other male with access to Zeenat Mahal’s apartments.

There are references to Fraser having ignored a dispatch carried by a rider from Meerut the night before the sepoys arrived. Having received it during an evening drinking session, Fraser kept the dispatch in his pocket and forgot about it. When the Mutiny riders crossed the boat bridge, they found the fort guard hardly prepared for battle. In fact, the opening in the walled city was found through Daryaganj, the epicentre of hip and happening Delhi.

The sepoys arriving from across the river did not have to walk northwards to enter through Kashmere Gate or southwards to Delhi Gate. The opening Daryaganj provided proved costly. The gate had been opened early to allow the residents to go to the Yamuna for bathing. There was no warning whatsoever of the Mutiny sepoys having arrived on the eastern bank of the river, and resting there for the night.

So ill-prepared was the fort guard that Douglas was found ordering cannons to the “right” position near Calcutta Gate when he was confronted by the sepoys. He ran towards Lahore Gate to secure his family quarters as the sepoys walked through Daryaganj, burning down European mansions and bungalows.

There is the account by an Indian police officer, Moinuddin, the inspector of the Paharganj police station. He escorted the joint commissioner of Delhi, Theosiphus Metcalfe, out of the walled city. Metcalfe had arrived at the police station in a shirt and underwear, riding a horse. He left wearing Indian dress, hoodwinking the crowds baying for his blood.

One Dr Chaman Lal was the first to be killed by the sepoys. He was murdered outside his clinic. The doctor, it is said, was the first Indian in Delhi to embrace Christianity and paid the price. It’s another matter that, post-May 12, the Muslim elite of the walled city went berserk converting whites.

An American staffer of the English daily Gazette was the lone white employee to survive the massacre. He was spared because he embraced Islam. There are several such instances of the maulvis having a field day reading the Kalma to white children and women, who were promptly taken into the walled city’s harems.

The Red Fort never quite fell to the mutineers. What did fall were the homes of defenceless white traders, the sort who raised guns only to kill partridges. After the recapture, the first thing the British did was to create a garrison inside the Red Fort. This garrison remained with the Indian Army till 2003-04, when it was transferred to the Archeological Survey of India.

In 1857, the nearest garrison was at Rajpura, north of Kashmere Gate. With a large number of senior officers vacationing for the summer, the relatively junior officers found the task of fending off the mutineers near insurmountable. The walled city was cleansed of white skin by May 14.

Before the British “gave up” the walled city, they took two major steps late on the morning of May 11. The officers of Her Majesty’s Post and Telegraph Service, manning the telegram office at what is today’s General Post Office (GPO), sent out a telegram to officers in Ambala, informing them of the fall of Delhi.

Second they secured the magazine outside the GPO, which was the dump yard for a huge quantity of arms and ammunitions. They manned it till four in the afternoon expecting help. When none came and the building was seized by the sepoys and crowds, they blew it up.

These two incidents ensured the British troops regrouped and were back on the northern ridge, overlooking the walled city, by June 8. Thereafter it was a long ordeal. It took the British forces, with Gorkha and Sikh reinforcements, nearly three months to overcome the resistance and re-enter the walled city through Kashmere Gate. On June 12, 17, 20 and 23, the mutineers, now under the Mughal insignia, came out of the walled city and launched attacks on the British troops regrouping in the Bara Hindu Rao area.

June 23, 1857, was the centenary of Clive’s victory in Plassey. Soothsayers had predicted that on completion of 100 years, British rule would end. Short on strategy but motivated by the prophecy, the shahi troops launched their last big assault on the ridge on June 23. It was a daylong battle. The British had been nearly forced into retreat when additional troops arrived under Nicholson.

The inability of the Mutiny forces, led by Mughal princes whom the emperor had appointed troop commanders, to evict the British sent the city into general depression. Markets shut and support for the sepoys started to wane. Sepoys resorted to looting Paharganj and Chandni Chowk.

In July arrived the legendary Bakht Khan from Rohilkhand. He had led an uprising in Bareilly and was appointed supreme commander of the Mughal forces in Delhi. The direct fallout of the emperor’s decision was rivalry and jealousy within the ranks. The princes encouraged sepoys to ransack the markets and disobey Bakht Khan. The British waited for the monsoon rains to recede. The sepoys lost the opportunity to attack when the British were weakened by malaria.

The British maintained a regular supply line for their troops from Punjab. They also opened dialogue with traders of Delhi for supplies. The traders were being forced into selling on credit or facing loot from the sepoys. On the other hand, they had the option of cash payment from British agents. It led to a direct loss of goodwill for the Mughal administration.

Bakht Khan made one last attempt to cut-off the British supply lines from Punjab. His plan was leaked and the British engaged him on the way, at Najafgarh. The Battle of Najafgarh eclipsed Bakht Khan’s aura of invincibility.

After Najafgarh, the sepoys were on the defensive. It was now the turn of the walled city to come under heavy artillery fire. The defences started to crumble, and the British entered the city on September 14 with Nicholson at the head of the Gorkha, Sikh and Punjabi Muslim troops.

That night they consolidated themselves around Skinner’s Estate. The troops found an abandoned liquor godown and helped themselves. The officers had to order the blowing up of the godown to get the troops back on their feet.

By September 20, Bahadur Shah had withdrawn from the Red Fort and taken shelter at Humayun’s mausoleum. The recapture of Delhi was complete. The British did not want to lose the chance to stamp their authority. They did it with never-before cruelty.

No Dravida, only Banga

Why didn’t the Madras Army join the Bengal Army? The clue, writes P Ananthakrishnan, lies in caste I read Veer Savarkar’s book on 1857 – in Tamil translation – when I was about 10. It was titled Erimalai (“Volcano”) and its Tamil rendition was indeed fiery. One thing that struck me was the fact that I could hardly find a Tamil name in the book. The men had strange, unfamiliar names. The lone heroine’s name, Lakshmi, was somewhat Tamil sounding, but the suffix “Bai” betrayed its alien origin.

I was moved by their bravery, but theirs was decidedly not Tamil bravery. Our heroes were Kattabomman and the Marudu brothers. Garish films on the lives of these brave men were then running to full houses and they died fighting the British more than 50 years before 1857 erupted.

Even today, the only person familiar to Tamils from the saga of that momentous year is the redoubtable Rani of Jhansi, and her name is never collectively remembered with the other tragic characters of the tumult. The title given to the struggle – “First War of Independence” – is viewed in south India with unease and even dismay. For instance, The Hindu recently carried a rather grumpy article listing the revolts that took place in southern India much before 1857 – starting from the Tellicherry Mutiny of 1780.

It is not that the south was entirely silent. There were a few ruffles that, fortunately for the British, didn’t turn out to be the heralds of the forthcoming storms. An article in People’s Democracy claims as many as 1,044 sepoys of the Madras Army were court-martialled for being sympathetic to the struggle and gives several instances when minor eruptions took place in various towns of Tamil Nadu.

A book published in 1859 – The History of the Indian Revolt and Expeditions to Persia, China and Japan, written by George Todd – narrates this incident: “The 8th Cavalry was ordered to march from Bangalore to Madras and then embark for Calcutta. On arriving at a place about 25 miles from Madras on August 17 [1857], the men put forward a claim for the rates of pay, batta and pension which existed before 1837 … Such a claim put forward at such a moment was perplexing to the officers. They … obtained the consent of the government to make conciliatory offers to the men. After a further march of 13 miles … the troopers again stopped and declared that they would not … ‘war against their countrymen’. This being an act of insubordination, two guns and some artillerymen were promptly brought forward; the 8th Cavalry was unhorsed and disarmed … The affair caused great excitement in Madras.”

A letter written in 1858 from Nagpur, talking of the Madras sepoys stationed at Kampti, says: “The sympathies of the Madras sepoys were entirely with the insurrectionary movement, and if they had got a tempting opportunity they would have joined it. They only want a beginning to be made, and a rallying point of some sort … We must never … suppose that the Madras men are of a different clay from those of Bengal.”

One of the reasons why not even a single of the many fuses of the rebellion was lit in the south is given in the above letter. There was no rallying point. They felt no loyalty towards the tottering emperor in Delhi. But there is another, weightier reason.

The Quarterly Review of 1858 (volume 103) says this in a tone that typifies the unsurpassed arrogance – and ignorance – of the Victorians: “That the sepoys of the Madras Army have not revolted is simply because the Tamul [sic] races to which they belong have no literature, no traditions, or none worthy of the name, no pride of ancestry, no country in fact and no caste.”

This monstrous statement is so exactly untrue that what is true is the opposite of it. The principal reason why the Madras Army and the Tamils in it didn’t revolt was caste.

While Muslims in the cavalry of the Madras Army outnumbered Hindus (or Dalits) 7:1, the infantry had considerably more Hindus. For any revolt to succeed, the infantry’s support was needed. What was the caste composition of the Madras Army’s infantry?

This is what an 1845 book – Travels in India, by Leopold von Orlich – says: “The Hindoo sepoy of the Madras Army is still more alien to the great body of the Hindoo people than the sepoys of Bengal; he is generally of a low caste, born and brought up in the field.”

The operative words are “born and brought up in the field”. This statement brings to the fore the horrendous realities of rural Tamil Nadu in the 19th century. These are explained succinctly by another author, Henry Mead, in his book The Sepoy Revolt: Its Causes and Consequences (1857): “In the Southern Presidency the families of the men always accompany them, a custom which, however inconvenient in general … affords an almost certain guarantee for the fidelity of men. Their sons, when they grow up, hang about the lines and officer’s quarters, pick up a modicum of English … and by the time they arrive at manhood, or the age at which they are permitted to be taken on the strength of the corps, they have been thoroughly identified with it.”

The book does not speak of the women of the families. But it is clear that only men who had absolutely nothing to hold on to at the place where their ancestors once lived would even contemplate allowing their women and children to follow them wherever they went. They must have been abysmally poor, without land, without hope. The Madras Army provided succour to them. They had no reason to revolt.

– The writer is the Chennai-based CEO of a scientific research company and author of two books

The Mutiny manifesto

When the war of 1857 broke out, Karl Marx was the London-based correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune. He analysed the causes and consequences of the turbulence in India, offering a detached and, as would be expected, opinionated assessment, hovering between the commonsensical and the spectacularly wrong August 4, 1857: The war will spreadOn the 8th of June, just a month had passed since Delhi fell into the hands of the revolted Sepoys and the proclamation by them of a Mogul emperor. Any notion, however, of the mutineers being able to keep the ancient capital of India against the British forces would be preposterous. Delhi is fortified only by a wall and a simple ditch, while the heights surrounding and commanding it are already in the possession of the English, who, even without battering the walls, might enforce its surrender in a very short period by the easy process of cutting off its supply of water. Moreover, a motley crew of mutineering soldiers who have murdered their own officers, torn asunder the ties of discipline, and not succeeded in discovering a man upon whom to bestow the supreme command, are certainly the body least likely to organise a serious and protracted resistance.

To make confusion more confused, the chequered Delhi ranks are daily swelling from the fresh arrivals of new contingents of mutineers from all parts of the Bengal Presidency, who, as if on a pre-concerted plan, are throwing themselves into the doomed city. The two sallies which, on the 30th and 31st of May, the mutineers risked without the walls, and in both of which they were repulsed with heavy losses seem to have proceeded from despair rather than from any feeling of self-reliance or strength …

The news of the fall of Delhi may be daily expected; but what next? If the uncontested possession by the rebels during a month of the traditionary centre of the Indian Empire acted perhaps as the most powerful ferment in completely breaking up the Bengal army, in spreading mutiny and desertion from Calcutta to the Punjaub in the north, and to Rajpootana in the west, and in shaking the British authority from one end of India to the other, no greater mistake could be committed than to suppose that the fall of Delhi, though it may throw consternation among the ranks of the Sepoys, should suffice either to quench the rebellion, to stop its progress, or to restore the British rule.

Of the whole native Bengal army, mustering about 80,000 men – composed of about 28,000 Rajpoots, 23,000 Brahmins, 13,000 Mahometans, 5,000 Hindoos of inferior castes, and the rest Europeans – 30,000 have disappeared in consequence of mutiny, desertion, or dismission from the ranks. As to the rest of that army, several of the regiments have openly declared that they will remain faithful and support the British authority, excepting in the matter in which the native troops are now engaged: they will not aid the authorities against the mutineers of the native regiments, and will, on the contrary, assist their “bhaies” (brothers) …

In the Punjaub, open rebellion has only been prevented by disbanding the native troops. In Oude, the English can only be said to keep Lucknow, the Residency, while everywhere else the native regiments have revolted, escaped with their ammunition, burned all the bungalows to the ground, and joined with the inhabitants who have taken up arms. Now, the real position of the English army is best demonstrated by the fact that it was thought necessary, in the Punjaub as well as the Rajpootana, to establish flying corps. This means that the English cannot depend either on their Sepoy troops or on the natives to keep the communication open between their scattered forces …

The actual insufficiency of the British forces is further proved by the fact that for removing treasures from disaffected stations they were constrained to have them conveyed by Sepoys themselves, who, without any exception, broke out in rebellion on the march, and absconded with the treasures confided to them.

August 29, 1857: Revolt or revolution?

By dint of weakness, vacillation, and direct blunders, the British generals have contrived to raise Delhi to the dignity of the political and military centre of the Indian revolt. A retreat of the English army, after a prolonged siege, or a mere staying on the defensive, will be regarded as a positive defeat, and give the signal to a general outbreak. It would moreover expose the British troops to a fearful mortality, from which till now they have been protected by the great excitement inherent to a siege full of sorties, encounters, and a hope of soon wreaking a bloody vengeance on their enemies.

As to the talk about the apathy of the Hindoos, or even their sympathy with British rule, it is all nonsense. The princes, like true Asiatics, are watching their opportunity. The people in the whole Presidency of Bengal, where not kept in check by a handful of Europeans, are enjoying a blessed anarchy; but there is nobody there against whom they could rise. It is a curious quid pro quo to expect an Indian revolt to assume the features of a European revolution.

September 16, 1857: ‘A religion of cruelty’

The outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable – such as one is prepared to meet – only in wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of religion; in one word, such as respectable England used to applaud when perpetrated by the Vendeans on the “Blues”, by the Spanish guerrillas on the infidel Frenchmen, by Servians on their German and Hungarian neighbours, by Croats on Viennese rebels, by Cavaignac’s Garde Mobile or Bonaparte’s Decembrists on the sons and daughters of proletarian France.

However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last 10 years of a long-settled rule … There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.

The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the Ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the Sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them. To find parallels to the Sepoy atrocities, we need not, as some London papers pretend, fall back on the middle ages, not, even wander beyond the history of contemporary England. All we want is to study the first Chinese war, an event, so to say, of yesterday.

The English soldiery then committed abominations for the mere fun of it; their passions being neither sanctified by religious fanaticism nor exacerbated by hatred against an overbearing and conquering race, nor provoked by the stern resistance of a heroic enemy. The violations of women, the spittings of children, the roastings of whole villages, were then mere wanton sports, not recorded by Mandarins, but by British officers themselves.

Even at the present catastrophe it would be an unmitigated mistake to suppose that all the cruelty is on the side of the Sepoys, and all the milk of human kindness flows on the side of the English. The letters of the British officers are redolent of malignity. An officer writing from Peshawur gives a description of the disarming of the 10th Irregular Cavalry for not charging the 55th Native Infantry when ordered to do so. He exults in the fact that they were not only disarmed, but stripped of their coats and boots, were marched down to the river side, and there embarked in boats and sent down the Indus, where the writer is delighted to expect every mother’s son will have a chance of being drowned in the rapids.

Another writer informs us that, some inhabitants of Peshawur having caused a night alarm by exploding little mines of gunpowder in honour of a wedding (a national custom), the persons concerned were tied up next morning, and “received such a flogging as they will not easily forget”.

News arrived from Pindee that three native chiefs were plotting. Sir John Lawrence replied by a message ordering a spy to attend the meeting. On the spy’s report, Sir John sent a second message, “Hang them.” The chiefs were hanged. An officer in the civil service, from Allahabad, writes: “We have power of life and death in our hands, and we assure you we spare not.” Another, from the same place: “Not a day passes but we string up front 10 to 15 of them (non-combatants).”

One exulting officer writes: “Holmes is hanging them by the score, like a ‘brick’.” Another, in allusion to the summary hanging of a large body of the natives: “Then our fun commenced.” A third: “We hold court-martials on horseback, and every nigger we meet with we either string up or shoot.” From Benares we are informed that 30 zemindars were hanged for the mere suspicion of sympathising with their own countrymen, and whole villages were burned down on the same plea …

While the cruelties of the English are related as acts of martial vigour, told simply, rapidly, without dwelling on disgusting details, the outrages of the natives, shocking as they are, are still deliberately exaggerated. For instance, the circumstantial account first appearing in the Times, and then going the round of the London press, of the atrocities perpetrated at Delhi and Meerut, from whom did it proceed? From a cowardly parson residing at Bangalore, Mysore, more than a thousand miles, as the bird flies, distant from the scene of action. Actual accounts of Delhi evince the imagination of an English parson to be capable of breeding greater horrors than even the wild fancy of a Hindoo mutineer …

The infamous mutilations committed by the Sepoys remind one of the practices of the Christian Byzantine Empire, or the prescriptions of Emperor Charles V’s criminal law, or the English punishments for high treason, as still recorded by Judge Blackstone.

With Hindoos, whom their religion has made virtuosi in the art of self-torturing, these tortures inflicted on the enemies of their race and creed appear quite natural, and must appear still more so to the English, who, only some years since, still used to draw revenues from the Juggernaut festivals, protecting and assisting the bloody rites of a religion of cruelty.

May 28, 1858: Victor’s justice

About 18 months ago, at Canton, the British Government propounded the novel doctrine in the law of nations that a State may commit hostilities on a large scale against a Province of another State, without either declaring war or establishing a state of war against that other State. Now the same British Government, in the person of the Governor-General of India, Lord Canning, has made another forward move in its task of upsetting the existing law of nations. It has proclaimed that: “The proprietary right in the soil of the Province of Oude is confiscated to the British Government, which will dispose of that right in such manner as it may seem fitting.”

When, after the fall of Warsaw in 1831, the Russian Emperor confiscated “the proprietary right in the soil” hitherto held by numerous Polish nobles, there was one unanimous outburst of indignation in the British press and Parliament. When, after the battle of Novara, the Austrian Government did not confiscate but merely sequestered the estates of such Lombard noblemen as had taken an active part in the war of independence, that unanimous outburst of British indignation was repeated …

All this honest indignation has now been practically illustrated. England, by one stroke of the pen, has confiscated not only the estates of a few noblemen, or of a royal family, but the whole length and breadth of a kingdom nearly as large as Ireland, “the inheritance of a whole people”, as Lord Ellenborough himself terms it.

But let us hear what pretexts – grounds we cannot call them – Lord Canning, in the name of the British Government, sets forth for this unheard-of proceeding: First, “The army is in possession of Lucknow.” Second, “The resistance, begun by a mutinous soldiery, has found support from the inhabitants of the city and of the province at large.” Third, “They have been guilty of a great crime, and have subjected themselves to a just retribution.”

In plain English: Because the British army have got hold of Lucknow, the Government has the right to confiscate all the land in Oude which they have not yet got hold of. Because the native soldiers in British pay have mutinied, the natives of Oude, who were subjected to British rule by force, have no right to rise for their national independence. In short, the people of Oude have rebelled against the legitimate authority of the British Government, and the British Government now distinctly declares that rebellion is a sufficient ground for confiscation.

Leaving, therefore, out of the question all the circumlocution of Lord Canning, the whole question turns upon the point that he assumes the British rule in Oude to have been legitimately established.

Now British rule in Oude was established in the following manner: When, in 1856, Lord Dalhousie thought the moment for action had arrived, he concentrated an army at Cawnpore which, the King of Oude was told, was to serve as a corps of observation against Nepaul. This army suddenly invaded the country, took possession of Lucknow, and took the King prisoner. He was urged to cede the country to the British, but in vain. He was then carried off to Calcutta, and the country was annexed to the territories of the East India Company.

This treacherous invasion was based upon Article 6 of the Treaty of 1801 concluded by Lord Wellesley. This treaty was the natural consequence of that concluded in 1798 by Sir John Shore. According to the usual policy followed by the Anglo-Indian Government in their intercourse with native princes, this first Treaty of 1798 was a treaty of offensive and defensive alliance on both sides. It secured to the East India Company a yearly subsidy of Rs 76 lakh; but by Articles 12 and 13 the King was obliged to reduce the taxation of the country.

As a matter of course, these two conditions, in open contradiction to each other, could not be fulfilled by the King at the same time. This result, looked for by the East India Company, gave rise to fresh complications, resulting in the Treaty of 1801, by which a cession of territory had to make up for the alleged infractions of the former treaty; a cession of territory which, by the way, was at the time denounced in Parliament as a downright robbery, and would have brought Lord Wellesley before a Committee of Inquiry, but for the political influence then held by his family.

In consideration of this cession of territory, the East India Company, by Article 3, undertook to defend the King’s remaining territories against all foreign and domestic enemies; and by Article 6 guaranteed the possession of these territories to him and his heirs and successors forever. But this same Article 6 contained also a pitfall … The King engaged that he would establish such a system of administration, to be carried into effect by his own officers, as should be conducive to the prosperity of his subjects, and be calculated to secure the lives and property of the inhabitants.

Now supposing the King of Oude had broken this treaty; had not, by his government, secured the lives and property of the inhabitants (say by blowing them from the cannon’s mouth, and confiscating the whole of their lands), what remedy remained to the East India Company?

The King was, by the treaty, acknowledged as an independent sovereign, a free agent, one of the contracting parties. The East India Company, on declaring the treaty broken and thereby annulled, could have but two modes of action: either by negotiation, backed by pressure, they might have come to a new arrangement, or else they might have declared war against the King. But to invade his territory without declaration of war, to take him prisoner unawares, dethrone him and annex his territory, was an infraction not only of the treaty, but of every principle of the law of nations …

This denying the validity of treaties … this seizing violently upon independent territories in open infraction even of the acknowledged treaties; this final confiscation of every acre of land in the whole country; all these treacherous and brutal modes of proceeding of the British toward the natives of India are now beginning to avenge themselves.

– Though archaic, spelling used by the author has been largely retained

Regime change, nation building

Was Nana Saheb proposing a United States of India? In this engaging extract from The War of Independence: 1857, VD Savarkar describes how the last Peshwa made plans for the coming war, carefully building a coalition of the willing In Brahmavarta [Bithoor, near Kanpur, seat of Nana Saheb], a programme was being prepared as to how to organise properly all the materials for the war so as to bring the War of Independence to a successful conclusion. In the third chapter, we left Rango Bapuji [who led the Chhataprati of Satara's embassy to Britain] and Azimullah Khan [who led Nana Saheb's embassy to Britain] holding secret interviews with each other in some London rooms. Though history cannot record the exact conversation the Brahmin of Satara held with the Khan Sahib of Brahmavarta, still, it is as certain as anything can be that the map of the rising was being prepared by these two in London.

After leaving London, Rango Bapuji went straight to Satara, but it was not possible for Azimullah Khan to go direct to Hindusthan. The extent of the dominions and the diplomacy of those against whom the war was to be waged were not now confined to Hindusthan alone. Hence, it was necessary to attack the British Empire in as many places as possible. It was also essential that it should be ascertained from what quarters in Europe direct help or moral sympathy could be expected.

With this object, Azimullah Khan made a tour in Europe before returning to India. He went to the capital of the Sultan of Turkey, famed throughout the world as the Khalifa of all Moslems. Being informed that, in the Russo-Turkish War then going on, the English had been defeated in the important battle of Sebastopol, he stayed some time in Russia.

Many English historians have a suspicion that Azimullah had gone there to ascertain whether Russia would pursue the war against England in Asia, and, if possible, to enter into an offensive and defensive treaty. When the trumpet of National War had been blown, all people openly declared that the Nana had completed a treaty with the Tsar of Russia and the Russian army was ready to fight against the Feringhis. If we bear this in mind, the above suspicion is strengthened.

When Azimullah was in Russia, he had an interview with the well-known writer [William] Russell, the military correspondent of the London Times. The poor man could not have even dreamt that, immediately after the Turko-Russian War, he would have to send from Hindusthan news of the wonderful activities of his guest. As soon as Azimullah heard the news of the defeat of the English, and that the Russians had beaten back the attack of the united forces of the English and the French on June 18 [1855], he obtained admittance into the English camp. His dress was Hindusthani and rich like that of a prince.

As soon as Russell came out, Azimullah said to him, “I want to see this famous city and those great Rustoms, the Russians, who have beaten the French and the English together.” Undoubtedly, Azimullah was a past master in irony and satire. This curiosity on the part of Azimullah to see these brave Rustoms who defeated both the English and the French Russell undertook to satisfy, by inviting him to his tent. On that day, till the shades of sunset closed round them completely, “He was looking with marked interest at the fire of the Russian guns.” One cannonball of the Russian guns burst right at his feet, but he did not move.

Azimullah, before returning home in the evening, said to Russell, “I have my serious doubts whether you could ever capture this strong fortified position.” That night, Azim slept in Russell’s tent, and he left the next day, early in the morning. On the table was left this note: “Azimullah Khan presents his compliments to Russell, Esq., and begs to thank him most truly for his kind attentions.”

Planning a post-war India

It is difficult to say where Azimullah went after leaving Russia. Yet, from the mention in the Proclamation of Cawnpore later on, it would appear as certain that he was trying to put through some diplomatic scheme in Egypt also. So, Azimullah then completed his European tour and returned to Brahmavarta. As soon as Azim reached Brahmavarta, the whole political atmosphere of the palace was changed …

Nana’s programme was first to fight a united fight, to make India free and, by removing internecine warfare, to establish the rule of the United States of India which would, thus, take its rightful place in the council of the free nations of the earth. He also felt that the meaning of “Hindusthan” was thereafter the united nation of the adherents of Islam as well as Hinduism.

As long as the Mahomedans lived in India in the capacity of the alien rulers, so long to be willing to live with them like brothers was to acknowledge national weakness. Hence, it was up to then necessary for the Hindus to consider the Mahomedans as foreigners. And moreover this rulership of the Mahomedans, Guru Govind in the Panjab, Rana Pratap in Rajputana, Chhatrasal in Bundelkhand, and the Maharattas by even sitting upon the throne at Delhi, had destroyed; and, after a struggle of centuries, Hindu sovereignty had defeated the rulership of the Mahomedans and had come to its own all over India. It was no national shame to join hands with Mahomedans then, but it would, on the contrary, be an act of generosity.

So, now, the original antagonism between the Hindus and the Mahomedans might be consigned to the past. Their present relation was one not of rulers and ruled, foreigner and native, but simply that of brothers with the one difference between them of religion alone. For, they were both children of the soil of Hindusthan. Their names were different, but they were all children of the same Mother; India therefore being the common mother of these two, they were brothers by blood. Nana Sahib, Bahadur Shah of Delhi, Moulvi Ahmad Shah, Khan Bahadur Khan, and other leaders of 1857 felt this relationship to some extent and, so, gathered round the flag of Swadesh leaving aside their enmity, now so unreasonable and stupid.

In short, the broad features of the policy of Nana Sahib and Azimullah were that the Hindus and the Mahomedans should unite and fight shoulder to shoulder for the independence of their country and that, when freedom was gained, the United States of India should be formed under the Indian rulers and princes.

How to achieve this ideal was the one all-absorbing thought of everyone in the palace of Brahmavarta. Two things were necessary for the success of this terrible war that was to be waged to win back freedom. The first thing was to create a passionate desire in Hindusthan for this ideal; the second was to make all the country rise simultaneously … These two things it was necessary to accomplish; and this in such a manner that the Company’s government should not suspect anything while the scheme was yet unripe …

Nana sends out emissaries

A little before 1856, Nana began to send missionaries all over India to initiate people into this political ideal. In addition to sending missionaries to awaken the people, Nana also sent tried and able men to the different princes from Delhi to Mysore, to fill their minds with the glorious ideal of the United States of India and to induce them to join in the Revolution. These letters, which were sent into every Durbar secretly, clearly pointed out how the English were playing the game of reducing India to insignificance by annexing Swadeshi kingdoms under the pretext of “no heir”, how those states which were spared yet would soon be reduced to the same fate as the others and how, under the yoke of slavery, country and religion were both being trampled underfoot; and they concluded by exhorting the princes to work for the Revolution which was to make them free.

Direct evidence is available that messengers and letters from Nana were sent to the states of Kolhapur and Patwardhan, to the Kings in Oudh, the princes in Bundelkhand, and others. The English arrested one of such messengers at the Durbar of Mysore. The evidence given by this man is so important that we give it word for word below:

“Two or three months before Oudh was annexed, Shrimant Nana Sahib had begun sending letters. First, no one would reply, for no one hoped for any success. After Oudh was annexed, however, Nana began a regular battery of letters and, then, the opinions of Nana began to appeal to the Sirkars of Lucknow. Raja Man Singh, the leader of the Purbhayas, was also won ever. Then the Sepoys began to organise amongst themselves and the Sirkars of Lucknow began to help them. No replies to letters were received till Oudh was annexed; but as soon as that was accomplished, hundreds of people came forward boldly and replied confidentially to Nana. Next came the affair of the cartridges and, then, the disaffection was so great that letters were simply showered on Nana.“

This very agent has given a long list of the letters sent by Nana to the various Durbars.

While agents of Nana were moving from one Durbar to another from Delhi to Mysore in order to draw them into the War of Independence, it was in the Dewan-i-Khas of Delhi, more than in any other Durbar, the seeds of Revolution began to take root … At this juncture, the English were engaged in a war with Persia. Seeing that a simultaneous rising in India would be a help, the Shah of Persia began to open diplomatic correspondence with the Emperor of Delhi.

In the Declaration of the Emperor of Delhi, it had been made quite clear that a confidential agent had been sent to Persia from the Delhi Durbar. While this intrigue was going on at the Durbar of the Shah, right in the city of Delhi agitation was started to stir the public feeling to its very depths.

For this work, even public Proclamations were sometimes posted up on the walls of the town. In the beginning of 1857, a Proclamation couched in the following terms appeared boldly: “The army of Persia is going to free India from the hands of the Feringhis. So, young and old, big and small, literate and illiterate, civil and military, all Hindusthanee brothers should leap forth into the field to free themselves from the Kaffirs” …

Missionaries of revolution

After sending letters to the various Durbars from Brahmavarta, Nana exerted himself thoroughly to awaken all the latent power of the people. When Brahmavarta, Delhi, Lucknow, Satara and such other big and prominent princes figured conspicuously in the Revolutionary Organisation, how could this organisation suffer for want of money?

To preach to all those who were a power among the people, thousands of Fakirs, Pundits, and Sanyasis were sent out in an incredibly short time. It is not true to say that all these Fakirs were true Fakirs; for, some of the Fakirs and Sadhus lived with the grandeur of Amirs. Elephants were given to them for travelling. Guards armed to the teeth travelled with them, and every stage on their way was a regular camp. Provided with such paraphernalia, they could influence and impress the people better, and the Sirkar also had fewer reasons to suspect them. Influential and noble Moulvies were appointed to preach the political Jehad, and they were rewarded with thousands of rupees. Through towns and villages, these Moulvies and Pundits, these Fakirs and these Sanyasis began to travel, from one end of the country to the other, preaching secretly the war for political independence …

This work of preparing for revolutionary rising was done so cautiously and secretly that not much inkling of what was going on could reach even such cunning people as the English, until the explosion actually took place. When such a Fakir or a Sanyasi went to a village, a strange agitation and an unrest began in that village, and of this the English were sometimes cognisant. Whisperings went on in bazaars; “sahibs” were refused water by the bhishtis, ayahs left English homes without permission; baberchis purposely stood before the memsahibs half-dressed; and Indian messenger boys walked insolently and slovenly before their “masters” when sent out.

These Fakirs and Pundits used to walk round and about the military cantonments more particularly. From Barrackpore to Meerut, Umballa and Peshawar, they started secret societies and, more than that, practically surrounded every military cantonment. The Hindu and Moslem Sepoys in the army being very devoted to their religious teachers, the Sirkar, though they might suspect them, could hardly proceed against them. For they feared that the Sepoys would find in it another grievance against the government …

That patriot Moulvie Ahmad Shah, whose sacred name has cast a halo round Hindusthan, whose glorious achievements we shall have to describe very soon, began similarly to tour through the country preaching the Revolutionary War. At last, when he began to preach in Lucknow itself, to thousands and tens of thousands in open meetings, that there was no other way of saving the country and the religion than by killing the English, he was arrested for sedition and sentenced to be hanged …

Coalition of the willing

The secret organisation of the Revolution, which was first started in Brahmavarta, was now growing at a tremendous rate. By this time, nuclei had been established in various places in Northern India and regular communication had been established between them. Rango Bapuji was trying hard to create nuclei of this organisation in the Deccan. The palace at Brahmavarta was the focus of the activities at Cawnpore; the same function was performed for Delhi by the Dewan-i-Khas.

The great and saintly Ahmad Shah had woven fine and cleverly the webs of Jehad – the War of Independence – through every corner of Lucknow and Agra. Kumar [Kunwar] Singh, the hero of Jagadishpur, had taken the leadership of his province and, in consultation with Nana, had been busy gathering materials for war. The seeds of the Jehad had taken such root in Patna that the whole city was a regular haunt of the Revolutionary party.

Near Calcutta, the Nabob of Oudh and his Vizier, Ali Nakkhi Khan, had seduced all the Sepoys and were ready for the occasion. The Mahomedan population of Hyderabad began to call secret meetings. The coils of the Revolution began to wind themselves round the Durbar of Kolhapur. The states of Patwardhan, and the father-in-law of Nana, at Sangli, were ready to fight – with their followers – under the banner of the united nation in the coming war.

Why, right in Madras, in the beginning of the year 1857, the following Proclamation began to appear from the walls of the city:

“Countrymen and faithful adherents of your religion, rise, rise ye, one and all, to drive out the Feringhi Kaffirs! They have trampled underfoot the very elements of justice, they have robbed us of Swaraj; determined are they to reduce to dust our country. There is only one remedy, now, to free India from the insufferable tyranny of the Kaffir Feringhis, and that remedy is to wage a bloody war. This is a Jehad for Independence! This is a religious war for justice! Those who fall in such battles will be their country’s shahids.

Opened wide are the doors of Heaven for the shahids. But Hell is burning fierce to engulf those wretches, those cowardly traitors, who turn away from this national duty! Countrymen, of these, which would ye have? Choose now, even now!”

– This book was written on the 50th anniversary of 1857. Though archaic, spelling used by the author has been largely retained

Canning’s cunning

Wartime press censorship, a panicky populace, a cool-headed governor-general: Udayan Namboodiri reports on Calcutta’s busy summer.

How was Calcutta affected by the events of 1857? Historians, whether British or Indian, are unanimous that as the capital city of the East India Company it could not escape impact. But while everyone talks in terms of “uprising in Delhi” or “massacre in Kanpur”, for British Calcutta the only description deemed apt is “panic”.

From the denizens of Government House to the natives who lived beyond the Mahratta Ditch, everybody trembled with fear at the thought of Calcutta falling to the sepoys. For, by 1857, Calcuttans of all hues had developed a stake in Company raj. Whether European or native, Chinese indigene or American itinerant, there was genuine concern that a city that had become an outpost of Europe in Asia, with institutions in banking, law, education – a proper university was established in January that year – was in danger of slipping back to medievalism.

A strange equilibrium had been reached in the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. British administration symbolised stability, growth and a modern outlook. Once earlier in its history, Calcutta had been taken. In 1756, troops from Murshidabad, under Siraj-ud-Daulah, had stormed the city and occupied it briefly. To the British, the Mutiny revived the imagery of the Black Hole myth. For the baboo of Sovabazar, on the other hand, another blast from old India would have meant two things: a return to chaos, and destruction of the achievements of the first phase of the Bengal Renaissance.

As no fighting happened in Calcutta, historians usually give the “people’s history” of the city, during the term of the hostilities, secondary treatment. The city is deemed less important than the grand military strategies and diplomatic games conceived there.

Lord Canning, the governor-general who had arrived two years earlier, and his charming wife Charlotte were quick to discern the tension. The section most stricken by fear was the native Christians. It is possible to glean, from the pages of the Bengal Catholic Herald and the Enquirer, how the ordinary Goan, Bengali and Eurasian community had nightmares of mass execution because the sepoys, whether Hindu or Muslim, made little secret of their antipathy towards the “new” religion.

So the first couple at Government House took it upon themselves to reassure the locals. Lady Canning made it a point to continue with her practice of short rides along the riverfront with a small escort. Seeing her composure, a leading sweetmeat maker of the city named a new product after her – the Lady Kenny, an oval version of the gulab jamun but less syrupy.

The day news of the rising at Meerut reached Calcutta, Canning, who didn’t lose his head through the crisis, ordered the immediate return of troops sent to Persia and asked the governor of Madras to have two European regiments ready for embarkation. He then sent a steamer to Pegu, in Burma, to fetch a regiment. John Lawrence in Punjab was directed to send every available man to Delhi. Finally, Canning wrote to London seeking three additional regiments for service in India.

May 24 was Queen Victoria’s birthday. Lord Canning thought it fit not to cancel the annual ball held to celebrate the event. After all, the diplomatic community of the city, which included an American presence since 1792, had to be persuaded that the British were not taking the uprising too seriously. But the military bandobast made it clear that Calcutta was in a state of high alert.

Rumours flew about “imminent attacks”. The Garden Reach palace of the deposed Nawab of Awadh was considered a hotbed of conspiracy. Acts of “insolence” by native servants, both real and imagined, drove people crazy. Lord Canning was worried that everybody carried guns. He admitted in a letter that he was “ashamed” by the role of Englishmen in deepening the divide with Indians.

The last governor-general of the East India Company, later to become the first viceroy of India, goes down in history as a leader who sought to not just defeat an enemy at war, but win the peace as well. He restricted action to professional soldiers. To offers from the Calcutta Masonic Fraternity, the European Traders’ Association and sundry federations of Armenian and Jewish merchants to raise not only money but also armies, Lord Canning’s reply was a firm no.

In fact, Canning earned the rage of Christian zealots when he made it clear that he shared none of their hatred and condemnation of Hindus and Muslims. He issued a “Proclamation of Pardon” after the uprising was quelled, an act that somewhat absolves him of responsibility for the disproportionate vengeance extracted by the British in Delhi. He also passed a “Gagging Act”, making it mandatory for newspaper publishers to obtain licences and submit material for vetting prior to publication.

Canning rolled out the red carpet for Jayaji Rao Scindia, the pro-British ruler of Gwalior, and hosted a state reception for the potentate when he visited Calcutta in September 1857. This sent out a message to the Indian princes that the Company was willing to accept the Doctrine of Lapse as a mistake. This helped contain the geographical extent of the rebellion.

Calcutta’s hospitals were filled with wounded soldiers. It is important to note the role played by nuns of the Loreto Order. They toiled night and day in the heat and grime, tending to patients. This was the first war anywhere in Asia to see Catholic nuns doing the job of nurses.

The flagship Loreto convent on Calcutta’s Middleton Row – it still stands – was partially turned over to house the widows and orphans of European soldiers who streamed in from upcountry war zones.

A grateful Calcutta resident composed an ode to “Bishop Oliffe’s Female Brigade” (Bishop Oliffe was the secular head of the Catholic Bishopric of Calcutta until 1860). It went like this:

Calcutta needs no volunteers, the papist bishop cries

From rebels he’ll defend the town, by aid of women’s eyes

Our citadels are … Convent walls! each rosary a gun

The leading Chief – an abbess fair, each sentinel a nun!

Loreto’s dames will quite suffice, to batter Delhi down

And save the gem that glitters most, in Queen Victoria’s crown!

Bihar’s last lion

Kunwar Singh was the authentic Bhojpuri folk-hero. Amarnath Tewary visits his village to find nostalgia, rubble and a fraying family tree There are just two triggers in Jagdishpur (Arrah district, Bihar) to evoke memories of the legendary Kunwar (Kuer) Singh. One is the colossal black equestrian statue of the martyred Raja of Jagdishpur, who, apocryphal reports have it, cut off his hand with his sword when a bullet hit it, and dropped it into the Ganga as an “offering”. A few days later, he was dead. That aside, two ageing descendants, six generations removed, live less than 10 miles from the town, in Dalippur village.

In Bihar, the land time forgot, Veer Kunwar Singh is himself the forgotten hero. Few remember him in the place where he was born in 1777, and where he valiantly fought the Company forces for a year, at the age of 80, eventually succumbing on April 26, 1858. He was Bihar’s last lion, annihilating the forces of Captain Dunbar and Captain Le Grand to liberate Azamgarh, participating with Tantya Tope in the Battle of Kanpur.

In a country where heritage is just another word, Kunwar Singh is just another name. His fort and palace in Jagdishpur have been almost entirely demolished. Only two pillars remain, freshly coated with pale yellow lime wash.

Scraps of history are scattered here. Two statues of the warrior for freedom, enclosed, inexplicably, behind iron bars; a waterless fountain; a dry well said to be dug by Kunwar Singh; three street dogs sleeping peacefully; dirt strewn everywhere; two large peepal trees under which villagers pass time in the summer heat: this is Jagdishpur’s tribute to the man who made it famous. Also present are sweeper Lal Babu, and a company of State Auxiliary Police (SAP) jawans.

“The local police station inspector had an office here in a room where some of Kunwar Singh’s personal belongings and weapons were kept,” remembers Lal Babu, “but that was looted or burnt in the fire of 2002.” The memorial’s caretaker, Jay Prakash Narayan Singh, visits only occasionally. He lives in Patna and is also in charge of the Karpoori Thakur Museum there.

In 1972-73, the Bihar Government had taken over the ruins of Kunwar Singh’s palace to make it a museum. Over 115 years, it had become a public lavatory, and a grazing ground for cattle. Villagers broke open the gates and built a connecting road by demolishing boundary walls, says Krishna Sahu, resident of Jagdishpur.

More recently, under pressure from the Veer Kunwar Singh Smarak Samiti, the State government decided to repair the structure and upgrade the museum. RJD chief and former chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav inaugurated the renovated building in July 2003. In April 2005, Union Steel Minister Ram Vilas Paswan unveiled the black statue of the martyred Rajput. It joined a white statue that had been installed in 1983. In the time-span between the two statues, Kunwar Singh’s home continued to resemble a morgue.

Hope was rekindled on April 23, 2007, when Chief Minister Nitish Kumar visited and promised to make the Veer Kunwar Singh Museum a showpiece. Since then, electricity supply has become regular and SAP jawans have been stationed.

“We’ve locked the gates from both sides and closed the public passage,” explains an SAP constable, “and swept the compound clean.” It took great persuasion to get him to allow The Pioneer team to shoot photographs, including establishing press credentials and producing identity cards. The palace is out of bounds for walk-in visitors. In India heritage means either a free-for-all or government bureaucracy. There are no half-measures.

In Dalippur village, pride for Kunwar Singh is a personal affair. Bharat Bhushan Singh is in his sixties and, with younger brother Pradeep Kumar Singh, is happy to show off the genealogical chart of the family. Sahabzada Singh had four sons – Kunwar Singh, Dayal Singh, Rajpatti Singh and Amar Singh. “We belong to the line of Dayal Singh, who looked after the Jagdishpur estate,” says Bharat Bhushan, who retired from Indian Oil Corporation.

In 1857, there were two vast estates in this part of Bihar – Jagdishpur and Dumraon (Buxar district, but like Jagdishpur part of the Bhojpur region). “Jagdishpur estate had 900 villages under its fiefdom whereas Dumraon had 800 or so,” says Bharat Bhushan, “Jagdishpur was a bigger estate, but since the Dumraon family was pro-government, it flourished. Kunwar Singh fought the Britishers, and so we are here!” “There’s nothing left for us to feel proud of … except the legend of Kunwar Singh,” adds farmer Pradeep Kumar Singh, Bharat Bhushan’s cousin.

“A total of 32 individuals can claim descent from Kunwar Singh,” says Pradeep, “they’re of the sixth and seventh generation.” In his time, the stalwart of Bhojpur took on the world’s mightiest business corporation in an epic contest. Today, other companies preoccupy his descendants, as they find employment in Reliance Petroleum, HDFC Bank and as stock brokers.

Maybe Kunwar Singh should have backed the British. His descendants could have ended up as MPs and ministers, in high office; look what happened to the scions of Gwalior, Patiala, Kapurthala, Bhopal …

Mutiny as muse

For a half-century after the Mutiny, Anglo-Indian literature was dominated by images, memories, nightmares and imaginings of ‘revolting natives’. Kanchan Gupta dusts the volumes

“For the Faith! For the Faith! Victory to Mohammed!“

This was possibly the rallying cry of Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali and his ghazis as they gathered support for the tattered masnad of Delhi and a decrepit king presiding over a derelict kingdom, its frontiers demarcated by the walls of the Red Fort. In the absence of any recorded history of that turbulent summer, when Delhi was overrun by sepoys who wore their disloyalty to John Company as a badge of honour, we can only surmise.

But Anglo-Indian writers who flogged the rising to churn out an amazingly large body of novels, short stories, diaries and chronicles through the second half of the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th, were not particularly bothered about accuracy of detail. Fact and fiction would often be mixed to serve a heady cocktail of memorial history. After all, the bulk of their work came at least two decades after the last shot had been fired.

So Flora Annie Steel, one of the most prolific and popular Anglo-Indian writers of the period – she spent 20 years in India, moving from station to station with her husband in the service of crown and Empire – did not allow historical facts to come in the way of her fiction. Her 1896 bestseller On the Face of the Waters, a novel that was billed as revolving around “the Mutiny, romance and inter-racial relations” (salacious tales of miscegenation that generated vivid imagery of native women being “violated” by white men, compared to the memorial history of white women being “violated” by mutinous native men, attracted readers like nothing else) begins with the chapter “Going, Going, Gone”.

The dramatic start to Steel’s imagined sequence of events, which she ensured were not robbed of romance even when unbridled brutality raged, brought her readers face to face with India as it existed – a clamorous and unruly bazaar – before “order” was established. She began her tale with the public auction of the “menagerie of the lately deposed King of Oude”, with the auctioneer crying, “Going, Going, Gone”.

Suddenly, a cockatoo, described through a careful choice of words as a pale white bird with grey scaly feet and a flame coloured crest, screamed, “For the Faith! For the Faith! Victory to Mohammed!” And the auctioneer called for bids, though the bird was not really the property of the “lately deposed King of Oude” but that of the “Moulvie from Fyzabad”, who had turned up in a green turban to reclaim his pet but failed to convince British officials of his case.

The cockatoo was sold to Major Erlton of the British Army, who gifted it to his mistress, Alice Gissing, a woman of “questionable character”. Untouched by Erlton’s gesture, she gave the bird away to his “noble” wife, Kate. Later, the cockatoo was snatched by murderous sepoys after they rode into Delhi, painted a bright green and made the mascot of the rebel force. In Steel’s book, the tragic denouement of the rising coincided with the screeching bird’s death in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s palace, uncared for and unfed by a king barely able to feed his troops.

On the Face of the Waters was, of course, not only about a bird that inspired those who held aloft the banner of early political Islam and declared fidelity to a king without a kingdom. It was about the racial superiority of a British woman, Kate, who, unlike the two native women in the tale – Tara Devi, a “Hindoo” widow, and Zora, the Persian (“Mussalman”) mistress of the hero, Jim Douglas – was able to summon enormous courage to survive the early days of the rebellion disguised as a “Persian” woman.

Lest readers thought all of her book was fiction, Steel informed them by way of a pithy introduction, “An English woman was concealed in Delhi, in the house of an Afghan, and succeeded in escaping to the Ridge just before the siege. I have imagined another, that

is all.”

End of innocence

Other writers of Mutiny fiction would also “imagine” those who either died or survived the rising. In her touching short story, Ann White, Alice Perrin wrote about an old woman she met at the station where her brother was posted – “Before the Mutiny, Jutpore had been a military cantonment; now it was no more than a small civil station” – and who had been in the custody of the local mission all her life.

Ann White lived in a silent, fantasy world that had long ceased to exist. “When in ’57, the native regiment at Jutpore mutinied, murdering officers, women and children, the only Europeans to somehow escape death in the station, as far as was known at the time, were the members of the mission. But when, alas, too late, a British relief party arrived and were scouring the neighbourhood in search of the rebels, a little English girl about 10 years old was found in the jungle, starving, disguised as a native.” Was it the ingenuity of a faithful native ayah that saved the child? We will never know.

That child grew into Anne White but never spoke a word. Till the day she slipped out of the mission to alert a passing regiment about imminent violence in Jutpore, instigated by the pastor’s missionary zeal and his rant against idolatry, and thus prevented a repeat of the massacre she had barely survived. Her noble task done, she breathed her last.

Anne White’s “imagined” life as a survivor of the savagery of 1857 was stunningly similar to the real life story of a five-year-old boy, Francis Double, who was the sole survivor after sepoys ran amok at Orai in Bundelkhand. His parents, grandmother and sister died in the massacre, but he escaped because of his faithful ayah, who hid him in the neighbouring jungle.

Rape as revolt

In a sense, the numerous Mutiny short stories and 50 odd novels that were written between 1857 and 1900 were both a requiem for the British men, women and children who were murdered with savage ferocity – recall the massacres at Meerut, Kanpur and Delhi, the siege of the Residency in Lucknow and the slaughter at Jhansi – as well as a tribute to the civilising force and colonising mission of Empire.

The white man’s gallantry and valour (the women in James Grant’s First Love and Last Love: A Tale of the Indian Mutiny watch their men take on sepoys from a safe, sequestered distance with opera glasses, while waving their bonnets and scented kerchiefs) were painted in sharp relief to the villainy and treachery of the natives.

The rape and dismemberment of defenceless white women became the leitmotif of post-Mutiny fiction. It was largely about knightly deeds (of the coloniser) in the face of beastly acts (of the colonised). That imperial authority triumphed after “almost everything was lost” only reinforced ideas of racial superiority, of Rule Britannia and of the need to civilise savages, first by numbing them through an awesome display of counter-brutality – vultures who fed on the dead after Delhi was retaken became too engorged to spread wing and fly – and then with a dextrous mix of administrative skill and missionary zeal.

Meadows Taylor packed all this and more in Seeta, a novel laced with British racism and “Hindoo” fanaticism. Taylor’s story was essentially about the inter-racial relationship between a Hindu Brahmin widow, Seeta, and the town magistrate, Cyril Brandon, and the dominant racist view of such miscegenation told against the backdrop of 1857.

In Taylor’s imagined history, Seeta’s first husband was killed by the incredibly named Azrael Pande (remember the Pandies?) lusting for his property. Pande later turned instigator, urging sepoys to take on their masters: “I have heard but one cry – a cry that came from the very souls of the people – deliverance from the English.”

And what was the English perspective? Taylor’s voice of sanctified racism is heard through that of Mrs Smith, who, commenting on Seeta’s affair with Brandon, tells her friends, “No, she is as fair as any of us, and very pretty too … but she is a native, and they are all niggers, and – and – I hate them – that’s all … If (white) men will have black ‘companions’, you know, they ought to keep them to themselves, and not stuff them under our noses. I hate the thought of it. I feel quite sick as I look at them … and see that fine young fellow with his arms around her.”

The noble savage

An interesting outcome of the rising, which was crushed with the help of Sikhs and Frontiersmen, was the colonisers’ overwhelming sense of loss of faith in “Hindoos” and “Mussalmans”. The very thought that what Steel in one of her short stories described as “dirty humanity” could have defiled English purity (for decades after 1857, British women were haunted by the memorial history of junglee natives stripping, raping and dismembering them) stuck in their minds.

At the same time, the Frontiersmen went up in the esteem of the colonisers, both men and women, as loyal till death. There was some ambiguity, though, on this issue. Was Emamdin, the head bearer in Ethel Winifred Savi’s The Interloper, a Frontiersman? Her description of him would suggest so. In this story, Emamdin struggles with a rabid dog to save the newly-arrived English bride of Mungalbari’s magistrate. The story has two conclusions. In the fictional version, Emamdin survives; in real life, the head bearer dies.

Not all writers, however, were as generous. Robert A Sterndale weaved Wahabi fervour of the times into his The Afghan’s Knife to bluntly state that Islam was the prime motivator of the rebellion. He also slyly suggested a larger Czarist conspiracy as part of the Great Game.

A common theme was the need to uphold British prestige, even if it meant pandering to base racism. Unlike George Orwell who thought the Empire was a “gigantic confidence trick” or EM Forster who mocked at the colonialist’s sense of superiority and irrepressible urge to suppress the colonised in A Passage to India, writers of Mutiny fiction, curiously most of them women, believed it was their duty to put the colonised in their place.

Saros Cowasjee, who has spent a lifetime studying Raj literature, informs us that “many of them approved of General Reginald Dyer’s massacre of unarmed Indians at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, and a few even contributed to the Dyer Appreciation Fund which raised £26,000 pounds for the dismissed general”.

By the time the British left India, interest in the Mutiny and the fiction it had spawned had begun to wane. Empire was on decline and the sun had begun to set; British self-perception had undergone a radical change. Yet, India remained, in large measure, a substantial part of the departing colonisers’ memorial history.

But the heat and dust, the clamorous bazaar of pre-Mutiny India had yielded space to pomp and grandeur of another imagined variety – that of MM Kaye’s Far Pavilions (and later Shadow of the Moon) and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet that aired on television as The Jewel in the Crown. These and other books of recent vintage are not about cultural isolationism but inter-culturalism.

The birds in these books sing melodious tunes as dashing men sweep away exotic women. Quite unlike Steel’s cockatoo, who gave the game away even before the sowars had begun their journey from Meerut to Delhi.

Action emotion drama thrills

To most Indians, writes Ashok Malik, the Mutiny is not so much history as a happy cocktail of conspiracies, counter-factuals and pet theories.

Since the past is as much about fact as perception, how one sees history is often a product of social conditioning. Take some examples. To the lay citizen in the United States – the quintessential Middle American – the history of his country is an idealistic expansion of human freedom, from independence for white, property-owning males in 1776 to civil rights and equality for the coloured person in the 1960s.

To the educated Englishmen – or Briton, the words were once interchangeable but no longer – till about the middle of the 20th century, the history of his little island was seen as a divine mission, an obligation to carry education, rule of law, fair-play and, that dynamite word, civilisation, to the farthest corners of the world.

To the contemporary Israeli, the collective memory of the Jews is one of historical injustice, fortifying the determination that oppression and dispossession will not be repeated: “Masada shall not fall again”.

True, there is an element of myth to all these examples, but then the history of a nation is, in many ways, the collation of what its citizens want to believe themselves to be.

How then do Indians see their past, their legacy? Unlike the Anglo-American or Israeli models, there is no linear projection. Rather, history is a happy compendium of conspiracies, conspiracy theories and counter-factuals. The central narrative – if there is one in the first place – is easily obscured by the side stories and the sub-plots.

In short, history is some variation or the other of the Mahabharata. It is at once a moral war, a gigantic property dispute typical of so many Indian families, a series of personal and personalised blood feuds, plotting and intrigue – Jayadratha and the killing of Abhimanyu; the death of Ashwatthama the elephant and the cheating of Drona – a maddening mix of sub-stories ranging from Yayati’s tragedy to the Nal-Damayanti romance. The main thread is quickly lost – as it is in our history.

The events of 1857 make up India’s modern Mahabharata, not just as a terrible war but also in terms of the multiplicity of perceptions and interpretations the Mutiny or Revolt or Uprising or War of Independence lends itself to.

As such, every Indian who has heard of 1857 has his own idea of what it was or what it should have been. In their film on Mangal Pandey, Aamir Khan and Ketan Mehta decided to script it as, in part, a proletarian protest against a “Company” obsessed with “market” and “profit”. This was nonsense, of course, but so was Modern India, a class VIII textbook prescribed by NCERT and written by “historians” Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev, which claimed of 1857:

“In Britain itself, the common people, including industrial workers who had emerged as a new social class, had organised themselves and were demanding equal political rights for all citizens and abolition of inequalities in society. Many of their leaders, it would interest you to know, supported the aims of the revolt in India and condemned the atrocities committed by the British troops on the Indian people. It was their view that the British domination of India benefited only the small upper sections of British society against whom the common people of Britain were themselves struggling.“

Intellectuals have their hobby horses; commoners have their imagination. Since the conflict of 1857 – whatever one may insist upon calling it – was eventually lost, no grand, national celebration of a glorious triumph is possible. Indians tend to remember individuals from 1857 – none more than the dashing Tatya Tope and the courageous Rani of Jhansi.

With victory out of reach, they satisfy themselves with trivia – Lakshmibai guiding the horse’s reins with her teeth, brandishing two swords, one in each arm – or conspiracy – Tatya betrayed by an ally – esoterica and a lament of what might have been or almost was. From Porus to Panipat, India’s history is, alas, a saga of lost chances.

The 20th century had its own version of this great Indian mope trick. It was – is – called the Netaji legend, story of the Ghost who Walks, Man who Cannot Die. The Mukherjee Commission, which investigated the alleged air crash that killed Subhas Bose in Taiwan in 1945, went into various theories about the man’s last sighting. One of them, Justice Mukherjee’s findings said, was of a plane crash in an obscure village in Madhya Pradesh. It had two survivors, Netaji and Adolf Hitler.

If a judicial probe could give weightage to such profundity, why ridicule the man in the mohalla? Can be he blamed for seeing, for instance, 1857 as a collection of near misses and untold truths, the mother of all Hindi film screenplays, history as action, emotion, drama, thrills, all rolled into one.

Imagine for a moment that the UPA Government decides to mark the sesquicentennial of the Mutiny by setting up – what else? – a commission of inquiry. What could it set out to find? Candidate number one would be to establish the final destiny of Nana Saheb, heroic last Peshwa to Indians, fiend of Cawnpore to generations of English children, real-life inspiration for Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo (the fugitive submariner out to save the world), and the Netaji of the 19th century – the Mystery of the Mutiny.

Nana is said to have crossed into Nepal with eight elephants carrying his treasures. He is said to have asked the double-crossing Rana of Nepal for safe passage to Tibet or China. He is said to have been killed by a tiger in Nepal in 1859, to have gone to Russia or Mecca, to have lived in the south as the sadhu Jaja Maharaj till 1896 or as an ascetic in a cave in Sihor (Gujarat) till 1903 or in Sitapur (Uttar Pradesh) till 1926.

In 1877, the Bombay financial markets went into a tizzy when a newspaper reported that Nana Saheb was about to invade India at the head of a Russian army. In 1881, two of Nana’s servants returned home to Bithoor saying their master had just died in Nepal.

Andrew Ward’s Our Bones are Scattered captures the best story of all:

“In 1895, when Nana Saheb would have been 70 years old, an addled old man dressed as a sadhu was found in a station in Gujerat, staggering around the bazaar, pestered by children. He was placed in protective custody, where he confided to a young British police office that he was the Nana Saheb and wished to place himself under the protection of the King of Nepal. The police officer eagerly telegraphed district headquarters. ‘Have arrested the Nana Saheb,’ he declared. ‘Wire instructions.’

‘Release at once,’ came the weary reply.”

After such hysteria, who needs history?