Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (27 page)

As the century passed, and the flow of the steamships thickened, and the great railways crossed the continents one by one, so the charisma of technique faded rather, and the British saw their command of steam, iron, steel and electricity less as an instrument of redemption than an engine of command. (So did their subject peoples: the Ashanti of West Africa thought the Empire’s telegraph wires to be an infallible war fetish, and strung their own cords from tree to tree in emulation.) In the 1850s, however, science was still an abstraction of holy beauty, and the Crystal Palace, though of course it was a tacit declaration of British material strength, stood too in the public mind for the universal benevolence of British aims. Whatever made Britain richer or stronger, like the acquisition of Sind, say, or a monopoly of the Canadian fur trade, made the world a happier and Godlier place:
1
every new steamship, every additional Government Steam Train transported to some newly-amazed corner of the world, or some hitherto unjustly neglected society, demonstrated the benefits of the British example.

So Tennyson wrote in his
Ode
Sung
at
the
Opening
of
the
Interna
tional
Exhibition
, and as this sense of divine potential was the inspiration of the exhibition itself, so it was at that moment the temper of Victoria’s scientifically-developing Empire. The profits of the great show were used to buy eighty-seven acres of land in South Kensington, and upon this estate there arose a complex of scientific and artistic institutions—the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Geological Museum, colleges of science, mining engineering, music, art. And when in later years they erected a memorial to Prince Albert, whose solemn enthusiasm so permeated the Great Exhibition of 1851, they portrayed him holding upon his knee, beneath his high sculptured canopy overlooking Kensington Gore, not as it happened a copy of the Holy Scriptures, but its virtual synonym, an Exhibition Catalogue.
1

H
IGH above the Jumna River at Delhi, towering over the bazaars and alleys of the walled city, there stood the fortress-palace of the Moghul Emperors. Clad in decorations of gold, silver and precious stones, this had once been the most magnificent palace of the East, the envy of rulers from Persia to China, a mile and a half around, walled in red sandstone, sited with all the expert advice of astrologers, magicians and strategists. This was Qila-i-Mubarak, the Fortunate Citadel, Qila-Mualla, the Exalted Fort, approached through the high vaulted arcade of the Chata Chauk, where the royal bands played five times daily in the Royal Drum House, and the ambassadors of the nations prostrated themselves in the Diwan-i-Am before the Shadow of God.

Here the royal ladies looked through their grilled windows to see the Stream of Paradise rippling through its marble chute, here Aurungzeb worshipped in the copper-domed mosque of the Moti Masjid, here in the Golden Tower above the river the Emperor on ceremonial occasions greeted his people far below, and here in the Diwan-i-Khas was the very crucible of the Moghul Empire, white marble ceilinged in silver, with water running through its central conduit, and on its dais the Peacock Throne itself, inlaid with thousands of sapphires, rubies, emeralds and pearls, guarded by jewelled peacocks and a parrot carved from a single emerald. The Red Fort was one of the great masterpieces of mediaeval Muslim art.
If
there
be
a
Paradise
on
earth
, said the famous inscription above its Diwan-i-Khas,
it
is
here,
it
is
here,
it
is
here.

In 1857 there still lived in this marvellous place the last of the Moghul
monarchs, Bahadur Shah Zafar. By now the palace was only a parody of its own splendours. With the crumbled mass of its red sandstone, with its audience chambers stripped of their glories and the overgrown lawns of its Life Bestowing Gardens, it was like a relic from some dimly remembered, half-legendary golden age. Yet Bahadur, a powerless pensioner of the British, was still the titular King of Delhi. The British preferred it so. When they found it legally or tactically convenient, they could refer to him as the embodiment of traditional power, or claim to be acting as his constitutional successors. Their representatives visited him with formal respect, entering his presence barefoot or with socks over their boots, and until the 1850s presenting a ceremonial bag of gold, the
nazar
, in tribute to the Ruler of the Universe. Bahadur, who was very old, accordingly lived in a phantom consequence. He was an eastern monarch of the old kind, frail but dignified. His face was fine-drawn and long-nosed; he was bearded to the waist like a king in a Persian miniature; he wandered about his palace leaning on a long staff.

He was a poet, a scholar, a valetudinarian, and believed himself to possess magic powers.
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He distributed charms and shadowy privileges. By his authority a royal bulletin was issued each day, reporting events inside the sorry court as might be chronicled the affairs of a Jehangir—or a Victoria. He was surrounded still by swarms of servants, and attended by many wives and unnumbered children, and at the Lahore Gate his personal bodyguard, 200 strong, was quartered under its British commander. To many millions of people, especially Muslims, he was still the true ruler of India: and it was as a ruler that he bore himself still, conscious of his heritage and deeply resentful of the changing world outside. ‘A melancholy red-stone notion of life’, Emily Eden had called it.

Bahadur lived altogether at the mercy of the British. They paid him a subsidy of
£
200,000 a year, but they had effectually removed the centre of Indian life from his court to their own capital at Calcutta. They did not even bother to keep European troops in Delhi, so unimportant a backwater had it become, and it was administered as a provincial city like any other. Sometimes they thought Bahadur
should be removed too, to somewhere less historically suggestive, but for the time being they let him stay. They had, after all, made it clear that upon his death the imperial title must lapse, so that in a sense he was already no more than a ghost or a memory, an emperor in the mind.

Early on the morning of May 11, 1857, this monarch
soi-disant
was sitting in his private apartments overlooking the river when he heard the noise of a crowd shouting and jostling in the dusty space below, where petitioners habitually appeared to offer their pleas, and jugglers or dancing bears sometimes performed for the royal entertainment. It was Ramadan, the Muslim month of fast, when tempers were always testy, and the combination of heat, hunger, exhaustion and religious zeal was traditionally the begetter of riots.

The old king sent for the commander of his guard, Captain Douglas, who stepped out to a balcony to stop the disturbance. There below him, between the palace and the broad sluggish sweep of the Jumna, were hundreds of Indian soldiers, some on horseback, some on foot, in the grey jackets and shakoes of the Company service, dusty from a long journey, their horses lathered, waving their swords and calling for Bahadur. Douglas shouted to them to move away, for they were disturbing the king, and after a time they went : but an hour or two later the noise began again, fiercer and louder this time, and shots rang out beyond the palace walls. There were angry shouts, a fire crackled somewhere, women screamed, hoofs clattered, and suddenly there burst into the royal precincts a rabble of cavalrymen, firing
feux-de-joie
and shouting exultantly. Behind them a noisy mob of sepoys and ruffians from the bazaar, scarlet and white and dirty grey, poured into the palace. Some ran upstairs to Douglas’s quarters, and finding him there with two other Englishmen and two Englishwomen, murdered them all. The others swarmed through the palace, brandishing their swords, singing, or simply lying down exhausted on their palliasses in the Hall of Audience.

The terrified old king retreated farther and farther into the recesses
of his private quarters, but presently the leaders of the mob found him. Far from harming him, they prostrated themselves at his feet. They were rebelling, they said, not against the Moghul monarchy, but against the rule of the English, and they asked him as Light of the World to assume the revolutionary command. Bahadur did not know what to do. He was surrounded by advisers—Hasan Ansari his spiritual guide, Hakim Ahsanullah his physician, Ghulam Abbas his lawyer, his sons Moghul, Khair Sultan, Abu Bakr. He was not a man for quick decisions. He was old, he said, and infirm. He was no more than a pensioner. While he prevaricated, a messenger was posted to the British Lieutenant-Governor at Agra, forty miles away, in the hope that the Raj might resolve the issue by sending a rescue force: but as the hours passed and nobody came, as the mutineers dossed down in the palace, and their leaders pressed for an answer—as the sounds of looting and burning came from the city, with random musket-fire, and explosions, and hysterical laughter—as the princes whispered in one ear, and Ghulam Abbas in another,
and the soldiers stumbled in one by one bareheaded to receive the royal blessing—as no word came from the British of comfort or punishment, and there stirred in the king’s poor old mind, elated perhaps by all that martial loyalty, some inherited pride of the Moghuls—some time that evening, after dark, Bahadur Shah capitulated, and assumed the supreme and symbolic leadership of the Indian Mutiny. At midnight his soldiers greeted him with a 21-gun salute.

But it was not a national revolution at all. The Indian Mutiny, or the Sepoy War as the Victorians often called it, was one of the decisive events of British imperial history, which set a seal upon the manner and purpose of the Empire: yet it was limited in scale and confused in meaning. It had been smouldering for years, as British intentions in India became more radical, more earnest and more ideological. We have seen how, under the influence of the evangelical movement, the British conceived the ambition of re-moulding India to an image of their own design; now we see, in the fragile indecisive person of the King of Delhi, the inevitable reaction. All the conquests and conflicts of two centuries had led at last to this: in 1857 it was finally to be decided which were the stronger, the muddled loyalties and traditions of India, or the new dynamic of Victoria’s Britain.

The British had made many enemies in India by their developing dogmatism—what Sir James Outram, one of the more sympathetic of their administrators, called ‘the crusading, improving spirit of the past twenty-five years’. There were enemies of course among the princes, so many of whom had been humiliated, and who had been especially incensed by Dalhousie’s doctrine of lapse. There were enemies among the Brahmins, whose supremacy of caste depended upon a series of shibboleths and assumptions now being systematically discredited. Religious leaders resented the advent of Christian missionaries, and the arrogant assertion by men like Nicholson and the Lawrences that Christianity contained the only truth. Ordinary people of all sorts rankled under the growing exclusivity of the British, fostered partly by better communications
and the arrival of that archetypal snob, the memsahib. Colder and colder the rulers were withdrawing into their cantonments and clubs, to clamp themselves within a round of amateur theatricals, pig-sticking, gossip and professional ambition which shut them off from Indian life outside, and made them more and more contemptuous of it: by 1852, when the young Frederick Roberts reached India, one of the sights of Allahabad was the last of the hookah-smoking Englishmen, once familiar figures of Anglo-Indian life—he had a servant called his
bookab-bardar
just to look after the pipe.

That the British were powerful everyone knew. Their
iqbal
was formidable. But there were signs that they were not infallible. Kabul in 1842 had not been forgotten, and rumours were now reaching India of British reverses in the Crimean War, which had broken out in 1854.
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The British were ludicrously thin on the Indian ground-in 1857 there were 34,000 European soldiers to 257,000 Indians—and they depended for their security, as any percipient native could see, upon the Indians themselves, represented by the sepoys of the Company armies. Out of this ground-swell of disillusion, signs and portents bubbled. Prophecies were recalled, legends resuscitated, secret messages circulated, and there were whispers of conspiracy.

Among the sepoys there were already special reasons for disaffection. In earlier times a sense of brotherly trust had characterized the regiments, and a family spirit bound British officers and Indian soldiers alike. Now many of the officers had wives and children in India, and they found it easier to live the sort of life they might lead at home in England, to the exclusion of their men. Though many officers would still swear blindly by their soldiers, and stand by them in any emergency, many of the sepoys felt a less absolute loyalty to their commanders. The rapport had faltered, and the British knew far less than they thought about the feelings of their Indian troops.
In particular they were out of touch with movements within the Bengal Army.

Most of the Company sepoys were Hindus, for the three armies were all based in predominantly Hindu areas. The men of the Madras and Bombay armies were drawn from all classes and many regions, but the Bengal army was more homogeneous. Not only were its sepoys mostly of high caste, but they nearly all came from three particular regions, notably the recently-annexed kingdom of Oudh. Men like the Lawrences early saw the dangers inherent to this sytem. The Bengal sepoys were clannish, caste-ridden and susceptible. John Lawrence thought they should be supplemented by Sikhs and Muslims. General J. B. Hearsey, commanding the Presidency Division of Bengal, believed the army should set about recruiting Christians from the Middle East, Malaya, China, or even South America—‘but they must be Christians, and then TRUST can be reposed in them’.

Yet in the officers’ messes of the Bengal army there was little unease. Most officers refused to believe reports of subversion, and retained the affectionate trust in their men that was a British mililtary tradition.

The new Enfield rifle, with which the Company armies were about to be re-equipped, used greased cartridges which must be bitten open to release their powder. Half the grease was animal tallow, and it was thickly smeared on the cartridges. Early in 1857 the rumour ran through the Bengal sepoy regiments that the grease was made partly from pigs, abominable to Muslims, and partly from cows, sacred to Hindus. This was a device, it was whispered, by which the British meant to defile the sepoy, or break his caste. Deprived of his own religion, he would be more or less forcibly converted to Christianity and used as cannon-fodder wherever the British needed him.

These rumours had reached the Government at Calcutta as early as January, 1857. Mutinies were not unknown in the Indian armies, and action was prompt The factory-greased cartridges, it was
ordered, were to be used only by European troops, and the sepoys were to grease their own with beeswax and vegetable oil. But it was too late. By now the sepoys had convinced themselves that the cartridge-grease was only one of a series of perfidies. At the end of March a young soldier of the 34th Native Infantry, Mangal Pande, stationed at Barrackpore under General Hearsey’s command, ran amok and shot at his European sergeant-major on the parade-ground. The Adjutant at once mounted his horse and galloped to the scene, but Pande shot the horse beneath him, and as the Englishman disentangled himself from the harness, fell upon him with a sword and severely wounded him. There then arrived on the parade ground, as in some tragic pageant, General Hearsey himself mounted on his charger and accompanied not only by his two sons, but by the entire garrison guard—all advancing, sternfaced and indomitable, upon the confused young sepoy. The general rode directly towards him, a son on either flank, and Pande stood with his musket loaded ready to fire. ‘There was a shot,’ reported the young Frederick Roberts, who was there, ‘the whistle of a bullet, and a man fell to the ground—but not the General! It was the fanatic sepoy himself, who at the last moment had discharged the contents of the musket into his own breast.’