Sad prologues to the swelling act of the imperial theme
Juliet Townsend
THE INDIAN MUTINY, 1857 by Saul David Penguin/Viking, £20, pp. 504, ISBN 06770911372 Nearly 40 years ago I was staying with my father in Hyderabad in what had, in the days of the princely state, been the Nizam's guest house. The functionary who was in charge of this establishment was, appropriately enough, known as 'In Charge', and the night before we left he made the familiar request to my father to find his son a university place in England. He assured us that he had 'very, very good qualifications', and half the night we heard the ancient typewriter clacking away as the boy set them out for us. We expected to see lists of exam successes; instead the CV
began, 'My great-great-grandfather remained loyal to the British in 1857. and fought with them at the siege of — and the attack on —'. Appended were fragile letters on yellowing paper by long dead colonels commending Lance Naik Faiz Ullah for his conduct in battles now forgotten but once household names. These were the 'very, very good qualifications' which it was assumed would ensure a university place for the Lance Naik's descendant. It made that hot, dusty conflict seem surprisingly close, and indeed it is one of the incidents of history which springs most vividly to life in our minds. Perhaps this is because so many of those caught up in the ghastly events of the Indian Mutiny kept diaries or wrote personal accounts afterwards. Many of them were civilians, so we are given fascinating intimate touches by people who were snatched, totally without warning, out of their comfortable, pampered lives, and thrust into dangers and hardships almost beyond imagination.
Saul David in his masterly history of the conflict makes full use of these personal accounts, peopling his pages with a fascinating cast of characters and keeping the narrative rattling along at an irresistible pace. Such extreme events bring out the best and worst in human nature. Among the military leaders, we are led from the weak and vacillating — Hewitt at Meerut, Anson at Ambala — to the noble figure of Sir Henry Lawrence of Lucknow. Most striking of all was the almost superhuman John Nicholson, Nickal Seyn to his devoted band of wild frontier horsemen, astride his famous grey charger with his imposing stature, long black beard and total lack of fear. It was an officer cadre of muscular Christians, many of them sons of the parsonage: 'As Christians and soldiers, our duty is to meet the storm with calm and fortitude.' They were not the only ones to brace themselves to meet the storm, as we see in the grim story of the dogged defence of the exposed entrenchment at Cawnpore, where 200 British troops, 70 of them sick, together with 170 women and children and their Indian servants, held out against the 4.000-strong forces of the treacherous Nana Sahib for three weeks, tortured by the grinding heat and shortage of water. The fearful massacre of 73 women and 124 children after the Nana had promised them safe conduct out of Cawnpore was the most notorious atrocity of the whole conflict. and 'Remember Cawnpore!' became the battle-cry of the British troops for the rest of the campaign.
It was not only in Cawnpore that women and children died. There were massacres at Meerut, Jhansi and Delhi, as well as killings on a lesser scale at innumerable smaller outposts, and many women came to a kind of grim acceptance of their probable fate. Harriet Tytler, the only woman to remain on the Delhi Ridge until the recapture of the city, saw the dead bodies being brought in from the first wave of murders. When asked by her four-year-old son whether he was going to be killed, she wrote, 'I gazed at his little white throat and said to myself, "My poor child, that little throat will be cut ere long." Harriet was no shrinking Victorian violet and passed on her resilient genes. She gave birth to a baby on the Ridge, naming him Stanley Delhiforce. He survived the heat and severe dysentery and lived on into the 1940s, the last survivor of the Indian Mutiny.
Saul David's account of the sequence of events and the complicated military manoeuvring is admirably clear. The two areas on which he casts new light are the causes of the mutiny and his convincing analysis of the very real possibility that India could have been lost to the empire. One revelation is how many people foresaw the disaster. Henry Lawrence wrote in 1856:
So long as all is smooth and quiet on the surface few inquiries are made. All may be rotten below — a mine may be ready to be sprung, for all that nine-tenths of the officers would know.
The warnings had fallen on deaf ears for many years. Colonel Sleeman, famous for his suppression of thuggee, wrote in 1848 to Lord Dalhousie, then Governor General, objecting that
the system of annexing and absorbing native States .. . might some day render us too visibly dependent upon our native army, and that accidents might occur to unite them . . . in some desperate act.
It was, indeed, this policy, and especially the annexation of Oudh in 1856, which led to such a sense of grievance, not only among grandees like Nana Sahib and the redoubtable Rani of Jhansi, who lost status and income, but also in the ranks of the Bengal army itself, which was largely recruited in Oudh. Saul David claims that the annexation was 'not the only cause of mutiny, but it was a vital ingredient'. That there were many other ingredients in this explosive brew he makes clear, from the sepoys' poor pay and the stultifying army practice of both British and Indian officers being promoted by seniority rather than on merit, to the falling proportion of British to Indian troops.
It is interesting to read that mutiny was a reaction to excessive leniency rather than oppression in the army. Absentee officers, slack discipline and general inertia encouraged the sepoy agitators to flex their muscles. The close and easy relationship between the native population and the earlier officers of the East India Company, many of whom had Indian mistresses or even wives, is vividly shown in Zoffany's picture, 'Colonel Mordaunt's Cock Match' in the Tate Gallery. Those days of easy social intercourse came to an end in the 1830s with the arrival of the memsahibs, those 'portable little packets of morality' with their pianos and 'dismal prints of the Monarch of the Glen'. The governors became increasingly remote from the governed, with disastrous results.
The mutiny was put down with some brutality, particularly among officers on the ground, who took pleasure in avenging the dead by humiliating their captives before hanging them. The author points out that the gruesome practice of execution by blowing the mutineers from guns, greeted with horror and revulsion nowadays, was a Moghul custom, regarded as an honourable soldier's death and much preferred to hanging.
At a higher level, neither Governor General nor Queen was caught up in the general hysteria. 'Clemency' Canning, at the height of the bloodshed, stated firmly, 'I will not govern in anger', and Queen Victoria agreed: The Queen shares his feelings of sorrow and indignation at the unchristian spirit shown — alas? ... by the public towards Indians in general and towards sepoy-s without discriminanion.
The mutiny led to a complete change in the way India was governed. Reforms in the army and a certain generosity of spirit on both sides made possible nearly 100 years of Indian and British soldiers fighting side by side, from the Western Front to Burma. It is ironic that the deliberate creation of an educated, westernised elite was to lead eventually to Ghandi, the Congress Party and independence, an outcome for which the mutiny of 1857 could be seen as a bloody curtain-raiser.
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