Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (28 page)

Poor Pande did not die at once, surviving to be hanged in public, but his name went into the English language: ‘Pandy’ became the British Army’s nickname first for a mutineer of 1857, and later for the Indian soldier in general. His regiment was disbanded, its fate being publicly proclaimed at every military station in India, but the effect was not what the British intended. The 34th achieved a kind of martyrdom among the sepoys, and within a few weeks there occurred the next act of what seems in hindsight an inexorable tragedy. At Meerut, north of Delhi, eighty-five troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry refused to obey orders. They were court-martialled, sentenced to ten years’ hard labour each, and publicly degraded at a parade of the whole Meerut garrison. This was done with ritual solemnity. The garrison was drawn up in ranks around the parade ground. Commanding the scene was a regiment of European soldiers, ready for any trouble, and a battery of artillery with loaded guns. The mutineers were paraded under a guard of riflemen. Their sentences
were read aloud, their uniforms were stripped from them, and on to the parade ground advanced the smiths and armourers, with hammers, shackles and chains. In a terrible silence the garrison, at attention, watched while the chains were riveted on. Sometimes a prisoner cried aloud for mercy. Sometimes there was a mutter in the sepoy ranks. It took more than an hour, and when at last the parade was dismissed, the prisoners marched off to their cells and the regiments returned to their quarters, a heavy sense of sorrow hung over the camp. Veteran sepoys wept in shock and despair, and at least one of the English subalterns, the future General Sir Hugh Gough, ‘was weak enough almost to share their sorrow’.
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It was Sunday next day, May 10, 1857 and all seemed quiet in Meerut. Rumours reached the British officers of restlessness in the town bazaars, and there appeared to be a shortage of domestic servants in the cantonment that day, but morning and afternoon passed peacefully, and in the evening the European soldiers polished their boots, brasses and badges as usual for church parade. Then without warning, soon after five o’clock, Meerut exploded. Suddenly through the cantonment armed sepoys were furiously running, shooting, looting, dancing, leaping about in frenzy, setting fire to huts and bungalows, galloping crazily through the lines, breaking into the magazines, deliriously releasing the men of the 3rd Cavalry from their shackles and chains. A mob from the bazaars followed them, augmented by convicts freed from the city prisons, and policemen off-duty. Many of the sepoys tried to protect the officers and their families, but the crowd swept through the cantonment like a whirlwind, murdering Europeans and Indians alike, and leaving the whole camp ablaze, with clouds of black smoke hanging on the evening sky. The ground was littered with corpses, some horribly hacked about, with smashed furniture, with weapons and charred clothing and piles of ash.

In a frenzy of passion and fear the mutinous cavalrymen galloped
out of Meerut into the night, in scattered groups. Some still wore their high feathered shakoes and their cross-belted scarlet jackets: some had got out of their uniforms and thrown away their weapons. After them hastened hundreds of infantrymen, in field grey. All assumed, as their passions cooled, that the British dragoons stationed at Meerut would soon be after them, but when they left the blaze of the cantonment behind, and hurried away down the Delhi road, they unexpectedly left the noise and the excitement behind them too, and were presently passing through silent sleeping villages. Nobody followed them. It was a bright moonlit night, and most of the horsemen rode to Delhi almost without stopping.

By eight o’clock next morning the first of them crossed the Bridge of Boats across the Jumna, within sight of the Red Fort: and pausing to kill a passing Englishman, out on his morning exercise, and setting fire to the toll-house at the lower end of the bridge, almost before the King of Delhi had finished his breakfast they had arrived at the dusty space below the walls of the palace, and were calling for Bahadur Shah.

The Mutiny was a muddle. It had no coherent strategy and no enunciated purpose, and what symbolic leadership it had came from Delhi. There most of the Europeans were quickly slaughtered. Whole families died. All the compositors of a newspaper were killed as a matter of principle, and nine British officers in the arsenal blew it and themselves up when ordered to surrender ‘in the King’s name’. The few survivors fled the city, some to be murdered in the countryside, some to reach safety in Agra or Meerut; and so Delhi became once more, at least in pretension, the capital of a Moghul Empire.

The king’s heart was scarcely in the revolution, and he consoled himself by writing melancholy verses in his garden, but around him the forms of an administration were erected, and he was obliged to act the emperor. Proclamations were issued in his name, regiments urged to mutiny under his royal aegis—‘large rewards and high rank will be conferred by the King of Kings, the Centre of Prosperity, the King of Delhi’. A ruling council was constituted, six elected soldiers
to look after military matters, four civilians as public administrators. A Commander-in-Chief was appointed, and all the princes were made generals. The king processed through the city streets on his elephant, and in his name food was requisitioned for the troops, and city bankers were persuaded to pay them.

But it was all a sham. The king did not trust the sepoys, and they soon lost their respect for him. They camped all over his beloved gardens, treated him as they pleased and ignored his diffident requests. Thousands more mutineers poured into Delhi over the weeks, sometimes marching over the bridge of boats with bands playing and flags flying, but the city remained in disorder. Shops were looted, homes were stripped, drunken Indian officers roistered through the streets. Business was at a standstill. The neighbouring countryside was ravaged by bandits and robbers. In the heart of the chaos, within his red-walled fortress, Bahadur sat helpless and despondent. His treasury was empty, and around him his self-appointed ministers and generals ineffectively bickered. They had ruined, he said, a kingdom that had lasted for five centuries. Sometimes he threatened to abdicate, or to kill himself, or to retire to Mecca for ever. But they kept him there upon his shadow-throne, and almost the only solace he found was in his ever gloomier verse— 

This was the nearest the Indian mutineers had to a command centre, an organization, or even an objective. For the rest the rebellion, which spread murderously from station to station throughout northern India, burnt sporadically and haphazardly. Most of the princes and maharajahs stayed cautiously aloof, and there were no senior Indian officers to direct operations. The only common purpose was to get rid of the British Raj, and there were no concerted plans for a replacement. By the middle of June, 1857, the British had lost their authority in most of the central provinces, a slab of country
extending from the borders of Rajasthan in the west to Bihar in the east. Everywhere else, though, they remained in command, and they demonstrated soon enough that it was only a matter of time before the rebellion was put down.

But from within the mutinous region terrible reports emerged. Whole communities had vanished. It was like a cauldron in the middle of India, and to the British in the other provinces, and even more to the British at home, life in the war zone seemed to have collapsed into incomprehensible nightmare. Two places only, besides Delhi, impressed their condition upon the horrified world—Lucknow the capital of Oudh, Cawnpore on the Ganges: and the names of these two Indian cities, hitherto so obscure, were now to become engraved for ever in the imperial memory.

Bahadur and his family apart, the only eminent Indian prince openly to throw in his lot with the mutineers was the titular heir to another ancient dynasty, subdued by the British long before, but still proud of race and origin. If the King of Delhi offered a cause of loyalty chiefly to the Muslims of India, Nana Sahib of Cawnpore, the adopted son of the last of the Mahratta rulers, was the closest the Hindus had to an emperor. To his people he was the Peshwa, successor to all the Mahratta glories, but to the British he was only the Maharajah of Bithur, a small town on the Ganges some ten miles above Cawnpore; for he was living in exile, and was denied all dignities like royal salutes, seals, or ceremonial gifts. The British kept a jealous watch upon him, as the possible fulcrum of a Mahratta revival, and he could not travel without their permission, or even appear in public without an Englishman at his side.

They liked him, though. He was not a very striking man, fattish, middle-ageing, sallow. But he was hospitable and generous, was fond of animals, and frequently entertained the officers of the Cawnpore garrison in his somewhat eccentric palace, half opulence, half gimcrack, beside the river at Bithur. It was true that he was known to cherish a grudge against the East India Company, who refused to pay him a royal pension, and it was noticeable that he would never
accept the garrison’s hospitality in return for his own. But the British did not resent these symptoms of wounded pride. They rather enjoyed his company, relished rumours of his unorthodox sex life, and trusted him far enough to let him visit all the military stations upon the Grand Trunk Road, and to mingle freely with the officers of the garrisons.

Cawnpore, a town of some 150,000 people, was one of the most important of those stations. Here the Grand Trunk Road was crossed by the road from Jhansi to Lucknow, and here too was one of the principal crossings of the Ganges. There was a sizeable British community in the town, and a garrison of four sepoy regiments with a European artillery battery. The news of the Meerut rising reached Cawnpore on May 14, 1857, but for a week nothing much happened. Only a vague premonition ran through the cantonment—‘something indefinite and alarming overshadowed the minds of all’. Nobody seriously thought the last of the Mahrattas would ally himself with the last of the Moghuls, and anyway the garrison was commanded by the highly respected Sir Hugh Wheeler, whose wife was Indian, and who had been fighting battles in India on and off for half a century. Still, Indians and Europeans eyed each other guardedly, the gunners kept their guns well-greased, and Wheeler’s agents in the town kept a steady stream of intelligence flowing into headquarters.

The general decided that while he would do nothing so rash as to disarm his sepoys, he would at least prepare a refuge for the British community in case the worst occurred. He chose two hospital barracks on the edge of the cantonment. He did not think mutineers would actually dare to attack the place, when the crunch came, so he did not fortify it very strongly, merely throwing two low earthworks around the buildings; and he felt sure that help would soon come from elsewhere anyway, so he did not overstock it with provisions (happily accepting, though, the regimental messes’ cheerful contributions of wine and beer).

Presently Nana Sahib, who was allowed to maintain a small bodyguard of cavalrymen and elephants at Bithur, approached his friends in the garrison and asked if he could help. Would the English ladies, for example, care to take refuge with him at Bithur? Or could
he and his men help to keep things quiet in Cawnpore? The general preferred the second offer to the first. One of his problems was the defence of his treasury, which lay awkwardly, like the commissariat at Kabul, well outside the cantonment lines. Perhaps, he suggested, His Highness would care to reinforce the sepoy guard there with some of his own men? Nana Sahib agreed at once, moved into Cawnpore with 500 men and a couple of ceremonial guns, and settled in a bungalow between the treasury and the magazine. General Wheeler was delighted—he was proud of his Indian sympathies. ‘It is my good fortune in the present crisis,’ he reported to the Governor-General, ‘that I am well known to the whole Native Army as one who, although strict, has ever been just and considerate to them…. Pardon, my Lord, this apparent egotism. I state the fact solely as accounting for my success in preserving tranquillity at a place like Cawnpore.’

Poor Wheeler! His success was illusory, and brief. On June 3, his informers told him that a rising was imminent, and all the women, children and non-combatants made for the new entrenchments. Almost at once, as if in response, the sepoys rioted, firing their pistols at nothing in particular, setting fire to buildings, and then, ignoring the Europeans crouched within their flimsy fortifications, rushing off helter-skelter towards the Treasury. They had no trouble with the Nana’s soldiers, and loading the treasure into carts, and grabbing the munitions from the magazine in passing, and releasing all the convicts from the town gaol, and setting fire to all the documents in the public record office, off they set in motley triumph up the Grand Trunk Road to Delhi.

Now the Nana showed his colours. Nobody knows whether he had been in league with the sepoy leaders from the start, whether they impressed him into the cause, or he incited them. It used to be suggested that he was the spider behind the whole web of the Indian Mutiny, and that his visits to military stations were intelligence missions. Whatever the truth, less than 20 miles along the Delhi road the mutinous sepoys halted and returned to Cawnpore, where they apparently placed themselves under the Nana’s command: and next day Wheeler received a letter from the Nana himself warning the British quixotically that he was about to attack their
entrenchment. The European officers hurried into the refuge; guns were primed and sandbags strengthened; at noon on June 6, 1857, the first round fell into the hospital barracks, and the siege of Cawnpore began.

This pathetic action was to enter the mythology of the Empire. In the mid-Victorian era womanhood was elevated to a mystic plane of immunity, and the vision of European women and their children violated or murdered by mutinous ruffians touched atavistic chords of fury. In contemporary pictures the siege of Cawnpore, which was to have a lurid ending, was painted in appallingly lurid colours. Every sepoy is black, wild-eyed and blood-stained; every English mother is young, timid, spotless, terrified, and clutches to her breast a baby still immaculately pantalooned. It was above all the killing of women and children that horrified the public, when news of the Mutiny reached England: and of all the fearful tales of the rising, the story of Cawnpore was the most often and perhaps the most enjoyably retold.