Sahib (12 page)

The short but bloody campaign that followed was complicated not only by the stormy relationship between Hardinge and his commander in chief, Sir Hugh Gough, but by the fact that Tej Singh and Lal Singh, the two chief Sikh commanders, appointed by the army council on the outbreak of war, believed that the British would triumph and were anxious to emerge on the winning side. Hardinge’s political agent at Lahore, the energetic Major George Broadfoot, supplied intelligence that was often contradictory, but was secretly and independently in touch with both Tej and Lal Singh. Because of Hardinge’s reluctance to be seen to provoke the Sikhs the British were weak in numbers; and they were not helped by Gough’s conviction that the Sikhs, what Hardinge had called ‘the bravest and most warlike and most disruptive enemy in Asia’, could be viewed as a traditional Indian army, strong in numbers but weak in cohesion.

On 18 December the
Khalsa
pushed hesitantly forward to catch Gough on the march at Mudki. Gough rallied, formed up on difficult ground and attacked the Sikhs, but the battle ended inconclusively, with the Sikhs falling back on their main position at Ferozeshah.
Gough attacked them there on the 21st, and after a terrible day’s fighting, spent a cold night on the field. Things looked so bleak that Hardinge had his state papers burnt, sent Napoleon’s sword (a present from Wellington) for safe-keeping and ordered Prince Waldemar of Prussia, ‘who had accompanied the army as an amateur’, to a place of safety. Gough was reinforced by Harry Smith’s division before dawn on the 22nd, but it took another day’s fighting to make the Sikhs draw off.

Even then they might have won, for fresh Sikh troops appeared when the British were at their last gasp. Gough later said that while he had no doubt about offering battle on the 22nd – ‘my determination is taken rather to leave my bones to bleach honourably at Ferozeshah than they should rot dishonourably at Ferozepore’ – the appearance of this new force briefly dismayed him:

We had not a shot with our guns, and our Cavalry Horses were thoroughly done up. For a moment I felt a regret (and I deeply deplore my want of confidence in Him who never failed me nor forsook me) as each passing shot left me on horseback. But it was only for a moment, and Hugh Gough was himself again.
⁷⁹

Gough’s forces suffered 2,415 casualties, and it was a striking fact that although his native regiments easily outnumbered his British, 1,207 of those hit were Europeans. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lawrence believed that this was in part a legacy of Afghanistan, where ‘by far our worse loss was the confidence of our native soldiery’.
⁸⁰
Sita Ram – using the word
Sirkar,
for ‘state, government, supreme authority’ – would have concurred:

It was well known during the Afghan War the
Sirkar
itself had been afraid. It had ordered the artillery to fire more that year to remind the people of Delhi of its power. But the disasters in Kabul went a long way towards showing that the
Sirkar
was not so invincible as had always been supposed.
⁸¹

Hardinge himself thought that: ‘The British infantry as usual carried the day. I can’t say I admire sepoy fighting.’
⁸²
When his men cheered Hardinge and Gough after the battle, one honest commanding officer said: ‘Sir, these cheers of my men are not worth having; only a
few of the regiment were with me during the night.’
⁸³
And perhaps Indian reluctance was caused by more than the Company’s bruised
iqbal
or their awareness of the fighting quality of the Sikhs. There was a feeling that the Sikhs were the last independent power in India: if the Company beat them, then it would have the whole of the subcontinent.

Gough was reinforced after Ferozeshah, and while he paused to regroup he sent Harry Smith off to deal with a large Sikh detachment. Smith found them at Aliwal, where he won what he called a ‘stand-up, gentlemanlike battle, a mixing of all arms and laying-on, carrying everything before us by weight of attack and combination, all hands at work from one end of the field to the other’.
⁸⁴
The Sikh force included some of Avitabile’s best-trained battalions, who formed equilateral triangles – their equivalent of squares – when charged by HM’s 16th Lancers. Corporal F. B. Cowtan wrote that his troop of lancers

moved on like a flash of lightning, clearing everything before us, guns, cavalry and infantry. As for myself, I went through cavalry and infantry squares repeatedly. At the first charge I dismounted two cavalry men, and on retiring we passed through a square of infantry, and I left three on the ground killed or wounded … My comrade on my left, just as we cheered before charging, had his heart torn from his side by a cannon-ball, but my heart sickens at the recollection of what I witnessed that day. The killed and wounded in my squadron alone was 42.

After the first charge self-preservation was a grand thing, and the love of life made us look sharp, and their great numbers required all our vigilance. Our lances seemed to paralyse them altogether, and you may be sure we did not give them time to recover themselves. There was no quarter given or taken. We did spare a good many at first, but the rascals afterwards took their preservers’ lives, so we received orders to finish everyone with arms.
⁸⁵

When he heard of Smith’s victory, which did so much to restore sepoy confidence, Gough fell on his knees to thank God, and then moved on to attack the Sikh camp at Sobraon. He took it, as we have
seen, on 10 February 1846, and the Sikhs asked for terms. By now the European portion of Gough’s force had been reduced, by battle casualties and sickness, and Hardinge’s terms were relatively generous: the Sikhs lost some territory, including Kashmir, and agreed to reduce the size of their army. This would avoid outright annexation, or running the Punjab as a ‘subsidiary state’ with the Company’s troops helping local landlords extract taxes from their peasants. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lawrence was appointed resident at the court of Dalip Singh (whose mother was regent), and British agents were established in other major towns. There was an air of genuine optimism. Lieutenant Herbert Edwardes, one of the great soldier-administrators of the era, recalled:

What days those were! How Henry Lawrence would send us off to great distances: Edwardes to Bannu, Nicholson to Peshawar, Abbot to Hazara, Lumsden somewhere else, etc, giving us a tract of country as big as most of England, and giving us no more helpful directions than these, ‘Settle the country, make the people happy, and take care there are no rows’.
⁸⁶

But there were rows aplenty. The Company sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh for £3 million, but its Sikh governor refused to give it up until British troops arrived. It was discovered that the regent and her adviser, Lal Singh, were involved in the plot, and both were removed from power and replaced by a Council of Regency. Hardinge, meanwhile, had reduced the native army by 50,000 men to save money, despite furious protests from Gough, and then returned to England, being replaced by the Earl of Dalhousie. No sooner was Dalhousie installed in Calcutta than war once more flared up in the Punjab. Two British officials were sent as resident magistrates to the fortress city of Multan, accompanied by Khan Singh, the city’s new governor. Mulraj, the outgoing governor, a man with a reputation for honesty, received them courteously. But both were attacked and badly wounded by the garrison, and were then butchered the following day, showing, at the last, a courage that was to inflame their countrymen.

It is impossible to be certain of Mulraj’s role: he was probably a decent but weak man overtaken by events. However, over the months that followed Multan became a magnet for disaffected Sikh
zamindars
and dismissed officials, out-of-work soldiers, and adventurers like the Baluchis and Pathans encountered by Major James Abbot, ‘who, at all times, prefer military service to agriculture’. In September an attack on Multan by Major General Whish failed, and there was a general rising across much of the Punjab. Dalhousie’s nerve did not fail him, and his directive to Gough, written on 8 October 1848, deserved quoting as an example of one of the clearest statements of intent that a military commander could receive:

As long as there is a shot or shell in Indian arsenals, or a finger left that can pull a trigger, I will never desist from operations at Mooltan, until the place is taken and the leader and his force ground if possible into powder … I have therefore to request that Your Lordship will put forth all your energies, and have recourse to all the resources which the Government of India has at their command, to accomplish this object promptly, fully and finally.

Gough was permitted to fight the Sikhs elsewhere if he thought it necessary, but he was reminded that Multan and its defenders ‘are the first and prime objects of our attention now’.
⁸⁷

Multan was taken by storm in January 1849, its capture accompanied by a spree of looting and killing which so often disfigured the aftermath of an assault. Captain John Clark Kennedy of HM’s 18th Foot, serving on Major General Whish’s staff, described how bloody retribution was followed by ritual commemoration:

The bodies of the two political officers, [Mr Patrick Alexander Vans] Agnew and [Lieutenant William] Anderson, who had been murdered by Mulraj’s men, were now disinterred from their graves outside the city and carried back into it, not through the gate by which they had entered and through which they had been driven out in ignominy and contempt but over the ruins of massive works which had crumbled into dust under the guns of their fellow countrymen. Their brother officers stood round their graves. An English chaplain performed the last rites. The British flag was flying over the highest bastion and the farewell volleys, echoing through the ruins of the citadel, must have reached the ears of Mulraj himself, a prisoner in our camp.

Mulraj was taken to Lahore, court-martialled, found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hanged but, seen as ‘the victim of circumstances’, was banished for life.
⁸⁸

While operations against Multan were ongoing, Gough fought a scrambling cavalry battle at Ramnagar, and crossed the Chenab. But an attempt to engage the Sikh army on favourable terms miscarried, probably because of poor staff-work. On 13 January 1849 he went head-on at a strong Sikh position in close country at Chillianwalla, where one of his battalions, HM’s 24th, took the battery to its front ‘without a shot being fired by the Regiment or a musquet taken from the shoulder’, which even Gough described as ‘an act of madness’.
⁸⁹
It could not hold the ground that it had captured, and was driven back with the appalling loss of fourteen officers killed and nine severely wounded; 231 men killed and 266 wounded.
⁹⁰
To make matters worse, a cavalry brigade, with two experienced regiments in it, fell victim to an almost inexplicable panic. At the end of a difficult and depressing day Gough had to fall back to Chillianwalla for water, abandoning not only the captured Sikh guns but also four of his own.

Gough’s bulldog approach had already aroused criticism, and the losses of Chillianwalla, over 2,300 in all, provoked a storm of protest in both India and Britain. Dalhousie wrote that Gough’s conduct was beneath the criticism of even a militia officer like himself, and the British government decided to replace Gough with Napier. ‘If you won’t go, I must,’ declared the Duke of Wellington. But Gough had settled matters before Napier arrived. On 21 February he attacked the Sikhs at Gujarat, and this time he did not send his infantry in until his gunners had done their work properly. The Sikhs were decisively beaten for a loss of only 800 British casualties. The pursuit rolled on to Rawalpindi on 14 March and Peshawar on the 21st. Gough left the country accorded his old honours as commander in chief, promoted to a viscountcy and given the thanks of Parliament. Even the satirical magazine
Punch
managed an apology:

Having violently abused Lord Gough for losing the day at Chilianwalla,
Punch
unhesitatingly glorifies him for winning
the fight at Gujerat. When Lord Gough met with a reverse,
Punch
set him down as an incompetent octogenarian; now that he has been fortunate,
Punch
believes him to be a gallant veteran; for
Mr Punch,
like many other people, of course looks merely to results; and rates as his only criterion of merit, success.

Dalhousie formally annexed the Punjab that very month, and Gough proudly told his men: ‘That which Alexander attempted, the British army have accomplished.’
⁹¹

I
T IS IRONIC
that within less than ten years of the triumph at Gujrat, the Company would be fighting for its very life. The causes of the great Mutiny of 1857 are complex, but a significant role was played by the ‘doctrine of lapse’, the policy devised by Dalhousie which said that any princely state or territory dominated by the British and without a natural heir to the throne would automatically be annexed. In 1848 the Raja of Satara, in western India, died without an heir. Dalhousie refused to recognise his recently adopted heir, declaring that his state had ‘lapsed’ to the paramount power. Two experienced political officers, Colonel William Sleeman and Colonel John Low, protested that this policy caused great concern. Low warned Dalhousie that Indians asked him: ‘What crime did the Rajah commit that his country should be seized by the Company?’ When the state of Nagpore was also annexed, he admitted: ‘After a very careful perusal of the Governor-General’s minute on this important subject – it is with feelings of sincere regret that I found it is quite out of my power to come to the same conclusions as his Lordship.’
⁹²

What happened to the large state of Oudh was even more serious. There was no question that the conduct of its ruler, Nasir-ud-din Hyder, the seventh nawab of his line, left a good deal to be desired. Henry Lawrence described him as being:

engaged in every species of debauchery and surrounded by wretches, English, Eurasian and Native, of the lowest description.
Bred in a palace, nurtured by women and eunuchs, he added the natural fruits of a vicious education to those resulting from his protected position.

His Majesty might one hour be seen in a state of drunken nudity, at another he would parade the streets of Lucknow driving one of his own elephants. In his time all decency … was banished from the Court. Such was more than once his conduct that the Resident, Colonel Low, refused to see him or transact business with him.
⁹³

His successor seemed little better, alternating excursions to ‘the uttermost abysses of enfeebling debauchery’ with the ‘delights of dancing, and drumming, and drawing, and manufacturing small rhymes’.
⁹⁴
Dalhousie decided to annex Oudh, but first offered a compromise: the nawab could retain his royal title, have full jurisdiction (apart from the death penalty) in two royal parks, and receive a pension of 12
lakhs
of rupees. There was some doubt as to whether this sum, enormous though it was, was actually ‘adequate to one of his prodigal inclinations’ who had just spent £5,000 on a pair of vultures. The nawab declined to sign a crucial document, and his state was duly annexed.

Another disgruntled nobleman was Nana Govind Dhondu Pant, better known as the Nana Sahib, adopted son of Baji Rao II, the last Maratha Peshwa, now living in well-pensioned opulence at Bithur. When Baji Rao died in 1851 the Nana Sahib was told that he would inherit neither pension nor title: he mounted a legal counter-attack which failed. After the Mutiny it would be easy for Englishmen to detect a conspiracy between the Nana Sahib and other noblemen such as the Oudh
taluqdars
who had lost land as a result of the 1856 revenue settlement, and to make a firm connection between growing civil dissatisfaction and incipient military mutiny.

The annexation of Oudh and insistence on the doctrine of lapse did not simply make some Indian rulers uneasy. It affronted the sepoys of the Bengal army, perhaps three-quarters of whom came from Oudh. They also had other grounds for complaint. Traditionally, most of them were high-caste Hindus, but changes in recruitment policy in 1834 and after the Sikh Wars had widened the recruiting base: new units, containing Sikhs, Hindus, Moslems and

Pathans, were raised to defend the Punjab and the new North-West Frontier. The General Service Enlistment Order of 1856 made all recruits liable for overseas service, which was believed, by high-caste Hindus, to be damaging to their status. All these measures seemed to make good sense from the government’s point of view, but they dismayed the high-caste sepoys who were still a majority in most native regiments when the Mutiny broke out. Tampering with allowances, particularly
batta,
often caused disaffection among British and Indian soldiers alike, and there had been a mutiny in 1849 when foreign service
batta
for the Punjab was cancelled because it was now part of British India; the most mutinous regiment, 66th BNI (Bengal Native Infantry), was disbanded, and the Gurkha Naisiri Battalion was given its place as 66th (Gurkha) Native Infantry.

To specific causes of grievance were added a wider sense of – well, the right word might even be
apartheid.
British officers, as we shall see later, were increasingly discouraged from long-term relationships with Indian women, and the offspring of such unions were denied official employment. European women arrived in India in ever-increasing numbers and this seems to have had an effect on the attitudes of the Company’s officers. One contemporary scathingly attributed the decline in relations between British and Indians directly to the impact of the memsahibs:

Every youth, who is able to maintain a wife, marries. The conjugal pair become a bundle of English prejudices and hate the country, the natives and everything belonging to them. If the man has, by chance, a share of philosophy and reflection, the woman is sure to have none. The ‘odious blacks’ the ‘nasty heathen wretches’ the ‘filthy creatures’ are the shrill echoes of the ‘black brutes’ the ‘black vermin’ of the husband. The children catch up the strain. I have heard one, five years old, call the man who was taking care of him a ‘black brute’. Not that the English generally behave with cruelty, but they make no scruple of expressing their anger and contempt by the most opprobrious epithets that the language affords.
⁹⁵

Christian missionaries, too, appeared in growing quantities, and although they were generally unsuccessful in achieving mass conversions, it was easy for Indians to suspect that the Company hoped to
deprive them of their religion, as we shall see later. ‘Everyone believed that they were secretly employed by the Government,’ wrote Sita Ram. ‘Why else would they take such trouble?’
⁹⁶
There seemed good reason for this suspicion, as the Chairman of the East India Company had declared that: ‘Providence has entrusted the empire of Hindustan to England in order that the banner of Christ should wave from one end of India to the other.’ Finally, once Oudh was administered by British officials there were complaints that many were ‘totally ignorant of the language, manners and customs of the people, and the same was true of all the
sahibs
who came from Bengal and from the college’.
⁹⁷

By early 1857 there was ample evidence of the fact that the Bengal army was close to mutiny, had the authorities only been prepared to take it seriously. The proximate cause of the outbreak was the introduction of a new weapon which replaced muzzle-loading percussion muskets like those carried by HM’s 50th at Sobraon. The new Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle had a barrel which spun the conical bullet to give greater accuracy; to enable the bullet to expand to grip the shallow rifling its base was hollow and was forced into the rifling by the explosion of the charge; and around this hollow base were grease-filled flanges.
⁹⁸
Although a senior officer warned that there would be problems unless it was widely known that ‘the grease employed in these cartridges is not of a nature to offend or interfere with the prejudices of caste’, soon there were rumours that the grease was made either from cows (sacred to Hindus) or from pigs (unclean to Moslems). The authorities responded by declaring that sepoys could grease their own bullets with whatever material they chose to procure from the bazaar. But the damage was done.

In January 1857 there was an abortive mutiny around Calcutta, with the new cartridge, dissatisfaction of pay, and resentment about the annexation of Oudh amongst its causes. At much the same time local officials reported that chapatties (discs of unleavened bread) were being sent from village to village; there were rumours of imminent upheaval, and stories that British rule over India, begun at Plassey a century before, would soon be over. On 29 March, Sepoy Mungal Pandy of the 34th BNI at Barrackpore wounded his adjutant and sergeant major. Although both he and the guard commander,
who had ordered his men not to detain Mungal Pandy, were hanged, things went from bad to worse. The skirmishers of the 3rd Light Cavalry at Meerut refused to handle the new cartridge, and most received long sentences of imprisonment with hard labour. On 9 May the convicted men were shackled on the parade ground, and on Sunday the 10th there was a large-scale rising at the cantonment. The mutineers killed perhaps fifty Europeans and Eurasians and their families, and then made for Delhi.

The best evidence suggests that even if the King of Delhi was not aware of the incipient mutiny, members of his household – described as ‘this inflammable mass of competing interests’ – certainly were.
⁹⁹
When the mutineers reached Delhi they made for the palace, killing Europeans en route. The native infantry regiments in the garrison promptly mutinied, murdering some of their officers. The eight British officers, warrant officers and NCOs in the Delhi arsenal defended the place as long as they could, and then fired the magazine, destroying large quantities of arms and gunpowder: miraculously, five of the men survived. The unlucky Bahadur Shah found himself the titular head of the revolt, but neither he nor anyone else exercised real control over the ‘Devil’s Wind’ that now blew so fiercely across northern India.

At Agra, John Colvin, Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Provinces, heard the news on 14 May and – for he was not a man of action – was persuaded to show a firm front. Lord Canning, the Governor-General, who had first been told of the Mutiny on the 12th, needed no such persuasion. He realised that the Mutiny could only be suppressed by force, and set about assembling the European regiments at his disposal, aided by the fact that troops were on their way back from an expedition to Persia and a force on its way to China could be recalled. He issued a proclamation affirming the government’s commitment to religious tolerance and urging all subjects not to listen to firebrands.

The Commander in Chief, General the Hon. George Anson, was at the government’s hot-weather retreat at Simla when he was told of the Mutiny. He sent orders to secure the great arsenals at Ferozepore, Jullundur and Philur, and by 15 May he had a strong brigade of Europeans at Ambala. But he was reluctant to move on Delhi until
his preparations were complete, and although both Canning and Sir John Lawrence, chief commissioner of the Punjab, urged immediate action, he did not leave Ambala until 23 May. In the meantime there had been outbreaks of mutiny elsewhere, although in Peshawar, where Herbert Edwardes was chief commissioner, potentially mutinous units were swiftly disarmed. A strong ‘moveable column’ was quickly assembled under Brigadier Neville Chamberlain, while Edwardes’s deputy, John Nicholson, hustled about quashing mutinies and inflicting punishment on those he judged guilty: forty were blown from cannon in Peshawar.

On 26 May, Anson died of cholera on his way to Delhi, and was succeeded in command by Major General Sir Henry Barnard, who reached Alipore, eleven miles north of the city, by 5 June, having left the trees along their route heavy with the bodies of villagers who had, allegedly, mistreated fugitives. Another force, under Brigadier Archdale Wilson, left Meerut on 27 May and on 7 June the two columns met at Alipore, bringing the strength of the Delhi Field Force to just over 3,000 men. On 8 June the little army forced a strong position at Badli ke Serai, and camped that night on the ridge overlooking Delhi. But its senior officers reluctantly agreed that they were not strong enough to risk an assault on the city, and so, for the moment, they remained stuck fast, themselves under attack, while rebellion flared up elsewhere.

On hearing of the outbreak at Meerut, Sir Henry Lawrence, chief commissioner of Oudh, quickly prepared the area of his Residency at Lucknow for defence, and it became a place of refuge for survivors as revolt spread across the whole of Oudh. At Cawnpore, not far to the south, Major General Sir Hugh Wheeler threw up an entrenchment around the barracks, and he too prepared to meet an attack. The fate of these two little garrisons set the tone for much of what followed. Lucknow held out (although Lawrence himself was killed early on in the siege) until partial relief by Major General Sir James Outram and Major General Sir Henry Havelock in September, and final relief by Lieutenant General Sir Colin Campbell in November.

At Cawnpore, however, Wheeler held out until it became clear that his flimsy lines, packed with women and children, could no longer sustain the bombardment. The Nana Sahib had thrown in his
lot with the rebels early on, and an emissary of Wheeler’s concluded an agreement with him which would give the garrison safe conduct to the River Ganges, where boats would be ready to take them downstream to safety. On 27 June, Wheeler’s little party hadjust embarked when the sepoys opened fire, and then waded into the river to finish off the surviving men. The remaining women and children were herded into a compound called the Bibighar and, when a relief column under Havelock neared Cawnpore, they were murdered on the Nana’s orders. Even the mutinous sepoys could not steel themselves to the task, and eventually five men, two of them butchers from the bazaar, hacked them to death: their bodies were thrown down a well.
¹⁰⁰

The massacre at Cawnpore inspired shocking retribution. Brigadier James Neill, second in command of the relief column, had already hanged men indiscriminately on the advance, and now he declared:

Whenever a rebel is caught he is immediately tried, and unless he can prove a defence he is hanged at once; but the chief rebels or ringleaders I first make clean up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep, in the shed where the fearful murder and mutilation of women and children took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to high-class natives, they think that by doing so they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so … 

The first I caught was a subadhar, a native officer, a high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order to clean up the very blood he had helped to shed; but I made the Provost-Marshal do his duty, and a few lashes soon made the miscreant accomplish his task. Which done, he was taken out and immediately hanged, and after death buried in a ditch by the roadside.
¹⁰¹