Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (26 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Bentinck had made up his mind on the issue of sati even before his appointment in 1827. ‘To the Christian and to the Englishman,’ he wrote, ‘who by tolerating sanctions, and by sanctioning incurs before God the responsibility of this inhuman and impious sacrifice’, there could be no excuse for its continued toleration:
The whole and sole justification is state necessity – that is, the security of the British empire, and even that justification, would be, if at all, still very incomplete, if upon the continuance of the British rule did not entirely depend the future happiness and improvement of the numerous population of this eastern world ... I do not believe that among all the most anxious advocates of that measure any one of them could feel more deeply than I do, the dreadful responsibility hanging over my happiness in this world and the next, if as the governor-general of India I was to consent to the continuance of this practice for one moment longer, not than our security, but than the real happiness and permanent welfare of the Indian population rendered indispensable.
 
Only a few old India hands spoke out against the ban. Writing from Sitapur to Bentinck’s military secretary, Lt.-Col. William Playfaire offered a dark warning:
Any order of government prohibiting the practise would create a most alarming sensation throughout the native army, they would consider it an interference with their customs and religion amounting to an abandonment of those principles which have hitherto guided government in its conduct towards them. Such a feeling once excited, there is no possibility of predicting what might happen. It might break out in some parts of the army in open rebellion ...
 
Such fears were premature, and for the moment could be ignored amid the thousands of congratulatory letters Bentinck received from evangelical Britons and enlightened Indians alike. In any case, other army officers Bentinck consulted supported the prohibition.
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But Playfaire’s concerns were far from groundless, and they were shared by Horace H. Wilson, one of the most eminent Oriental scholars of the age. A reaction against the imposition of British culture on India was indeed brewing. And Playfaire was all too right about where the trouble would arise.
The rock on which British rule was founded was the Indian Army. Although by 1848 the East India Company was in a position to add territory to the Empire by simply taking over when a ruler died without an heir (the so-called ‘doctrine of lapse’) it was ultimately the threat of armed force that enabled it to do so. When it had to fight – in Burma in the 1820s, in Sind in 1843, in the Punjab in the 1840s – the Indian Army was rarely beaten. Its only significant nineteenth-century reverses were in Afghanistan, where in 1839 all but one man of an occupying army of 17,000 had been wiped out. Yet eight out of ten of those who served in the Indian Army were sepoys, drawn from the country’s traditional warrior castes. British troops – who were in fact very often Irish – were a small minority, albeit often militarily crucial.
Unlike their white comrades-in-arms, the sepoys were not drawn from the dregs of society, taking the Queen’s shilling as a last resort. Whether they were Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs, the sepoys regarded their calling as warriors as inseparable from their religious faith. On the eve of battle, Hindu soldiers would make sacrifices or offerings before the idol of Kali, the goddess of destruction, to win her blessing. But Kali was a dangerous, unpredictable deity. According to Hindu legend, when she first came to earth to cleanse it of wrongdoers she ran amok, killing everyone in her path. If the sepoys felt their religion was under threat, they might well follow her example. They had done so once before, at Vellore in the summer of 1806, when new dress regulations abolishing their right to wear caste marks and beards and introducing a new style of turban had precipitated a mutiny. As would be the case in 1857, an apparently trivial point – the fact that the cockade on the new turban appeared to be made of cow or pig hide – masked a much wider dissatisfaction with pay, conditions and politics.
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But at root the Vellore mutiny was about religion: its principal victims were in fact native Christians. Sir George Barlow had no hesitation in laying the blame on ‘preaching Methodists and wild visionaries’ who had been ‘disturbing the religious ceremonies of the Natives’.
In that sense, 1857 was a repetition of Vellore, but on a much grander, more terrible scale. As every schoolboy knows, it began with rumours that the new cartridges about to be issued were lubricated with animal fat. As the ends of these had to be bitten off before use, both Hindus and Muslims ran the risk of defilement – the former if the grease was from cows, the latter if it came from pigs. Thus it was that a shot began a conflict before it had even been loaded, much less fired. To many sepoys, it seemed to prove that the British did indeed have a plan to Christianize India – which, as we have seen, many of them did. The fact that the cartridges had nothing whatever to do with that plan was beside the point.
The Indian Mutiny was therefore much more than its name implies. It was a full-blown war. And its causes were more profound than lard-coated cartridges. ‘The First War of Independence’ is what the Indian schoolbooks and monuments call it. Yet Indians fought on both sides and independence was not the issue. It had, as at Vellore, a political dimension, but the mutineers’ aims were not national in the modern sense. It also had its humdrum causes: the frustration of Indian soldiers at their lack of promotion prospects, for example.
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Of far greater significance, however, was their essentially conservative reaction against a succession of British interferences with Indian culture, which seemed to – and in many ways actually did – add up to a plot to Christianize India. ‘I can detect the near approach of the storm’, wrote one perceptive and anxious British officer on the eve of the catastrophe. ‘I can hear the moaning of the hurricane, but I can’t say how, when or where it will break forth ... I don’t think they know themselves what they will do, or that they have any plan of action except of resistance to invasion of their religion, and their faith’.
First and foremost, as the scant Indian testimony which has survived makes clear, this was indeed ‘a war in the cause of religion’ (the phrase recurs time and again). In Meerut the mutineers cried: ‘Brothers, Hindoos and Mussalmans, haste and join us, we are going to a religious war’:
The kafirs had determined to take away the caste of all Mahomedans and Hindoos ... and these infidels should not be allowed to remain in India, or there would be no difference between Mahomedans and Hindoos, and whatever they said, we should have to do.
 
In Delhi the mutineers complained: ‘The English tried to make Christians of us’. Whether they called their rulers the Europeans, the Feeringhee, the kafirs, the infidels or the Christians, this was their central grievance.
The first mutineers were men of the 19th Bengal Infantry, stationed at Berhampur, who refused to accept the issue of new cartridges on 26 February. They and the 34th Infantry at Barrackpur – where the first shot of the Mutiny was actually fired – were promptly disbanded. But at Meerut (Mirath) near Delhi the spark was not so easily snuffed out. When eighty-five men in the Bengal Light Cavalry were jailed for refusing the new cartridges, their comrades resolved to free them. Private Joseph Bowater described what happened next, on the fateful evening of Sunday 9 May:
There was a sudden rising ... a rush to the horses, a swift saddling, a gallop to the gaol ... a breaking open of the gates, and a setting free, not only of the mutineers who had been court-martialled, but also of more than a thousand cut-throats and scoundrels of every sort. Simultaneously, the native infantry fell upon and massacred their British officers, and butchered the women and children in a way that you cannot describe. Gaolbirds, bazaar riff-raff, and Sepoys – all the disaffected natives in Meerut – blood-mad, set about their work with diabolical cruelty, and, to crown their task, they fired every building they came across.
 
The revolt spread with astonishing rapidity across the north-west: to Delhi, Benares, Allahabad and Cawnpore. Once they had resolved to defy their white officers, the mutineers seemed to run amok, killing every European they could find, often aided and abetted by local urban mobs.
On 1 June 1857 Mrs Emma Ewart, the wife of a British officer, was huddled inside the besieged Cawnpore barracks with the rest of the white community. She described her fears in a letter to a friend in Bombay: ‘Such nights of anxiety, I would have never believed possible. Another fortnight we expect will decide our fate and whatever it may be, I trust we shall be able to bear it’. Six weeks later, with help only a day away, she and more than 200 British women and children were dead, either killed during the siege or hacked to death in the Bibighar or House of the Ladies – after they had been promised safe passage when the garrison surrendered. Among the dead were Mrs Ewart’s friends, Miss Isabella White and Mrs George Lindsay, along with the latter’s three daughters, Caroline, Fanny and Alice. They and the other women of Cawnpore would provide the British account of the Mutiny with its tragic heroines.
Its heroes were the men of Lucknow. There the British garrison, dug in at the British Residency, held out defiantly and it was the siege of Lucknow that became the Mutiny’s most celebrated episode. The Resident himself was one of the first to die and is buried close to where he fell, under the classically understated epitaph:
Here Lies Henry Lawrence, Who Tried To Do His Duty.
 
But it was the ruined, bullet-riddled Residency itself that became the Mutiny’s most poignant memorial. The Union Jack that flew here during the siege was not subsequently lowered until Independence in 1947, echoing Tennyson’s tremulous poem on the subject: ‘And ever aloft on the palace roof the old banner of England blew’. The siege was certainly one of those rare events genuinely worthy of Tennysonian high diction. Even the senior boys at the nearby La Martinière School joined in the defence, earning the school a unique military decoration (a distinction the entirely Indian pupils today have not forgotten). Under relentless sniper fire and menaced by mines from below, those inside the Residency held out unassisted for nearly three months, and remained under siege even after a relief force broke through in late September and evacuated the women and children. In fact, it was not until 21 March 1858, nine months after the siege had begun, that Lucknow was recaptured by British forces. By that time nearly two-thirds of the British community who had been trapped in the Residency were dead.
Yet two things need to be remembered about Lucknow. First, it was the capital of a province, Oudh, which the British had annexed only a year before; in that sense, the besiegers were simply trying to liberate their own country. Indeed, the annexation may be regarded as one of the political causes of the Mutiny, since a very large number of sepoys – as many as 75,000 within the Bengal army – hailed from Oudh and were plainly alienated by the deposition of their Nawab and the dissolution of his army.
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In the words of Mainodin Hassan Khan, one of the few mutineers who lived to write an account of the experience: ‘It [was] pressed upon the Sepoys that they must rebel to reseat the ancient kings on their thrones, and drive the trespassers away. The welfare of the soldier caste required this; the honour of their chiefs was at stake’. Secondly, about half of the 7,000 people who sought refuge in the Residency were loyal Indian soldiers and camp followers. Despite what was later written, the Mutiny was not a simple struggle between black and white.

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