Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (27 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Even in Delhi the battle lines were blurred. Here was the historic capital of the Mughal Empire, surely the crucial battleground if the mutineers genuinely dreamt of ousting the British from all of India. And indeed many of the Muslim mutineers did look for leadership to the Bahadur Shah Zafar, last of the Mughals, now merely the King of Delhi – much to his consternation. There still survives a five-point proclamation issued in his name appealing to a broad range of Indian social groups – zamindars (the local landownerscum-tax collectors on whom both Mughal and British rule was based), merchants, public employees, artisans and priests – to unite against British rule. It is perhaps the nearest thing produced during the Mutiny to a manifesto for national independence. True, its fifth paragraph acknowledges that ‘at present a war is raging against the English on account of religion’ and calls on ‘pundits and fakirs ... to present themselves to me, and take their share in the holy war’. But the rest of the manifesto is wholly secular in its tone. The British are accused of imposing excessive tax assessments on the zamindars, excluding Indian merchants from trade, displacing the products of Indian artisans with British imports and monopolizing ‘all the posts of dignity and emolument’ in both the civil and armed services. Yet the memorial to the soldiers killed fighting on the British side, which still stands on a hill overlooking Delhi, shows how little this last appeal was heeded. The inscription shows that a third of the casualties among officers and fully 82 per cent of the casualties among the other ranks were classified as ‘native’. When Delhi fell to ‘British’ forces, those forces were mostly Indian.
The British at home nevertheless insisted on regarding the Mutiny as a revolt of black against white. Nor was it simply the idea that Indians were killing Britons. It was the fact that supposedly loyal sepoys were killing – and, it was rumoured, raping – white women. Eyewitnesses supplied plentiful hints of such atrocities. As Private Bowater put it in his memoir:
Regardless of sex, in spite of their appeals to mercy, deaf to the piteous cries of the little ones, the mutineers had done their monsters’ work. Massacre itself would have been terrible enough; but they had not been satisfied with that, for to murder they had added outrage and nameless mutilation ... I beheld all that was left of the wife of an adjutant, who, before she was shot and cut to pieces, had had her clothes set on fire by men who were no longer human.
 
Lurid atrocity stories proliferated. In Delhi, it was claimed, forty-eight British women had been paraded through the streets, publicly ravished and then put to death. A captain’s wife had been boiled alive in
ghee
(liquefied butter). Such tall tales confirmed in the minds of credulous people at home that the Mutiny was a struggle between good and evil, white and black, Christian and heathen. And if the calamity was to be construed as a manifestation of divine wrath, then that only went to show that the conversion of India had commenced too late for God’s liking.
The year 1857 was the Evangelical movement’s
annus horribilis
. They had offered India Christian civilization, and the offer had been not merely declined but violently spurned. Now the Victorians revealed the other, harsher face of their missionary zeal. In churches all over the country, the theme of the Sunday sermon switched from redemption to revenge. Queen Victoria – whose previous indifference to the Empire was transformed by the Mutiny into a passionate interest – called the nation to a day of repentance and prayer: ‘A Day of Humiliation’, no less. In the Crystal Palace, that monument to Victorian self-confidence, a vast congregation of 25,000 heard the incandescent Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon issue what amounted to a call for holy war:
My friends, what crimes they have committed! ... The Indian government never ought to have tolerated the religion of the Hindoos at all. If my religion consisted of bestiality, infanticide and murder, I should have no right to it unless I was prepared to be hanged. The religion of the Hindoos is no more than a mass of the rankest filth that imagination ever conceived. The Gods they worship are not entitled to the least atom of respect. Their worship necessitates everything that is evil and morality must put it down. The sword must be taken out of its sheath, to cut off our fellow subjects by their thousands.
 
Those words would be taken literally when the sections of the Indian army that remained loyal, the Ghurkas and Sikhs in particular, were deployed. In Cawnpore Brigadier-General Neill forced captured mutineers to lick the blood of their white victims before executing them. At Peshawar forty were strapped to the barrels of cannons and blown apart, the old Mughal punishment for mutiny. In Delhi, where the fighting was especially fierce, British troops gave no quarter. The fall of the city in September was an orgy of slaughter and plunder. Mainodin Hassan Khan described how ‘the English burst like a pent-up river through the city ... No one’s life was safe. All ablebodied men who were seen were taken for rebels and shot’. In a moment of singular imperial ruthlessness, the King of Delhi’s three sons were arrested, stripped and shot dead by William Hodson – the son of a clergyman. He explained his conduct to his brother, also a clergyman:
I appealed to the crowd, saying that these were the butchers who had murdered and brutally used helpless women and children, and that the government had now sent their punishment: seizing a carbine from one of my men I deliberately shot them one after the other ... the bodies were taken into the city, and thrown out on to the Chiboutra [midden] ... I intended to have them hung, but when it came to a question of ‘They’ or ‘Us’, I had no time for deliberation.
 
It was, as Zachary Macaulay’s son observed, a fearful paroxysm to behold – the vengefulness of the Evangelicals: ‘The account of that dreadful military execution at Peshawar ... was read with delight by people who three weeks ago were against all capital punishment’.
The Times
had demanded that ‘every tree and gable-end in the place should have its burden in the shape of a mutineer’s carcass’. And indeed the route of the British retaliation could be followed by the scores of corpses they left hanging from trees along the line of their march. In the words of Lieutenant Kendal Coghill: ‘We burnt every village and hanged all the villagers who had treated our fugitives badly until every tree was covered with scoundrels hanging from every branch’. At the height of the reprisals, one huge banyan tree – which still stands in Cawnpore – was festooned with 150 corpses. The fruits of the Mutiny were bitter indeed.
No one can be sure how many people died in this orgy of vengeance. What we can be sure of is that sanctimony bred a peculiar cruelty. In the wake of the relief of Lucknow, a young boy approached the gate to the city, supporting a tottering old man,
and throwing himself at the feet of an officer, asked for protection. That officer ... drew his revolver, and snapped it at the wretched supplicant’s head ... Again he pulled the trigger – again the cap missed; again he pulled, and once more the weapon refused its task. The fourth time – thrice he had time to relent – the gallant officer succeeded, and the boy’s life blood flowed at his feet.
 
To read this story is to be reminded of the way SS officers behaved towards Jews during the Second World War. Yet there is one difference. The British soldiers who witnessed this murder loudly condemned the officer’s action, at first crying ‘shame’ and giving vent to ‘indignation and outcries’ when the gun went off. It was seldom, if ever, that German soldiers in a similar situation openly criticized a superior.
The project to modernize and Christianize India had gone disastrously wrong; so wrong that it had ended up by barbarizing the British. Those who actually had to run India had been proved right: interfering with native customs had meant nothing but trouble. Yet the Evangelicals refused to accept this. In their eyes, the Mutiny had happened because Christianization had not progressed fast enough. As early as November 1857, one missionary in Benares wrote that he felt ‘as if a blessing were descending on us in answer to the fervent prayers of our brethren in England’:
Instead of giving way to despondency, well does it become us to brace ourselves anew for our Master’s work, in the full assurance that our labour will not be in vain. Satan will again be defeated. He doubtless intended, by this rebellion, to drive the Gospel from India; but he has only prepared the way, as often before in the history of the Church, for its wider diffusion.
 
The leaders of the London Missionary Society echoed this view in their 1858 report:
By the deeds of perfidy and blood which have characterized the Sepoy rebellion, the delusion and false security long indulged by multitudes both in Britain and in India, have been for ever destroyed and idolatry, in alliance with the principles and spirit of Mahomet, has exhibited its true character, a character only to be understood to be dreaded and abhorred ... The labours of the Christian Missionary, which were heretofore treated with derision and contempt are now commended as the best and only preservative of property liberty and life.
 
The Society resolved to send an additional twenty missionaries to India within the next two years, earmarking £5,000 for their ‘passage and outfit’ and a further £6,000 for their maintenance. By 2 August 1858 the special fund set up for this purpose had already attracted donations totalling £12,000.
In short: it was onward, Christian soldiers.
In Livingstone’s Footsteps
 
On 4 December 1857, just as Cawnpore was being reclaimed from the Indian mutineers, David Livingstone gave a rousing lecture in Cambridge University’s Senate House. The man who had set out to Christianize Africa made it clear that he also saw the Indian Mutiny as the result of too little missionary work, not too much:
I consider we made a great mistake when we carried commerce into India, in being ashamed of our Christianity ... Those two pioneers of civilization – Christianity and commerce – should ever be inseparable; and Englishmen should be warned by the fruits of neglecting that principle as exemplified in the management of Indian affairs.
 
Here, however, Livingstone overreached himself. Neither his advice nor the fulminations of the missionary societies were heeded in the reconstruction of British rule in India that followed the Mutiny. On 1 November 1858 Queen Victoria issued a proclamation that explicitly renounced ‘the right and the desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects’. India was henceforth to be ruled not by the East India Company – it was to be wound up – but by the crown, represented by a Viceroy. And the new government of India would never again lend its support to the Evangelical project of Christianization. On the contrary, the aim of British policy in India would henceforth be to govern with, rather than against, the grain of indigenous tradition. The attempt to transform Indian culture might have been ‘well inspired’ and its ‘principles right’; but, as the British official Charles Raikes put it, the Mutiny had exposed ‘the fatal error of attempting to force the policy of Europe on the people of Asia’. From now on ‘political security’ would be paramount: India would be administered as an unchanging and unchangeable society, and the missionary organizations would be tolerated by the government of India only if they accepted that basic premise. By the 1880s most British officials had reverted to the habit of their predecessors of the 1820s in regarding missionaries as, at best, absurd; at worst, subversive.
Africa was another matter, however; and the future of Africa was the crux of Livingstone’s Cambridge lecture. Here, he argued, the British could avoid the mistakes they had made in India precisely because the commercial development of Africa could
coincide
with its religious conversion. His aim was ‘to open a path’ to the highlands of the Batoka Plateau and neighbouring Barotseland so that ‘civilization, commerce and Christianity might find their way there’; from this bridgehead all Africa would be ‘opened ... for commerce and the Gospel’:
By encouraging the native propensity for trade, the advantages that might be derived in a commercial point of view are incalculable; nor should we lose sight of the inestimable blessings it is in our power to bestow upon the unenlightened African by giving him the light of Christianity ... By trading with Africa, also, we should at length be independent of slave labour, and thus discountenance practices so obnoxious to every Englishman.
 
As he concluded in a peroration carefully crafted to stir the youthful ardour of his audience:
The sort of men who are wanted for missionaries are such as I see before me. I beg to direct your attention to Africa; – I know that in a few years I shall be cut off in that country, which is now open, do not let it be shut again! I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity; do you carry out the work which I have begun. I LEAVE IT WITH YOU!
 
In the mood of national crisis engendered by events in India, Livingstone’s call to get things right in Africa met with a euphoric reception. Those persuaded by his vision of a Christian Africa rushed to join a new organization, the Universities Mission to Central Africa. Among them was a young pastor from Oxford called Henry de Wint Burrup. Two days before he set off for Africa, Burrup married. It was to be a tragically short-lived union.

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