India: A History. Revised and Updated (80 page)

The doctrine of ‘the right of lapse’ held that the paramount power might assume the sovereignty of a state whose ruler was either manifestly incompetent or who died without a direct heir. Since the latter ignored the long-established right of an Indian sovereign to adopt an heir of his own choosing, and since the former was obviously a matter of opinion, the doctrine had hitherto been invoked rarely and with great caution. Now it abruptly became an obligation; the government, in Dalhousie’s words, was ‘bound to take that which is justly and rightly its due’. In fact he annexed seven states in as many years. They included Satara in the Maratha heartland, where Shivaji’s direct descendants had long reigned; the Bhonsles’ Nagpur, where insult was added to injury with a callous dispersal sale of the maharaja’s effects; and Jhansi, another albeit minor Maratha raj whose youthful rani exhibited something of the character of Ahalyabhai Holkar but to whom widowhood now merely brought the added pain of deposition and dispossession.

Other rulers were greatly alarmed. The Mughal emperor had already been demoted to ‘King of Delhi’ and his image had been removed from the coinage. Now it was being suggested by Dalhousie that his successor be recognised as no more than a prince and that the Delhi Red Fort in which he held court be handed over to the British. Similarly Nana Sahib, the heir adopted by the Peshwa Baji Rao II while in exile near Kanpur, found himself not only stateless but pensionless and title-less. Like other disappointed princes and pensioners, he appealed to London but received no satisfaction. Several senior British political officers, including the Residents at Satara and Nagpur, also raised strong objections and insisted that the deposed dynasties enjoyed the affection of their subjects. But Dalhousie, never a man to welcome advice from subordinates, was unimpressed. In 1856, on the eve of his departure from India, he delivered his masterstroke by annexing Awadh – or Oudh as the British insistently spelled it.

Nearly the largest, probably the richest, and certainly the most senior and the most loyal of all the native states, Awadh’s extinction seemed to call into question that good faith on which the British so prided themselves. Since the days of Clive, its rulers had been the Company’s allies, graciously accepting a succession of territorial and financial demands and providing much of the manpower for the Company’s Bengal army. It was true that latterly the nawabs – or ‘kings’ as the British now preferred, in a further blow to the Mughals’ pride – had set something of a record in irresponsible government. Lucknow (Laknau), Awadh’s adopted capital as of the turn of the century, had come to combine the monumental magnificence of Shah Jahan’s Delhi with the scented allure of Scheherazade’s Baghdad. In a final outburst of what used to be called ‘Indo-Saracenic’ architecture, the nawabs endowed their city with palaces, gateways, halls and mosques of riotous profile. The Great Imambara, fifty metres long and fifteen high, may be the largest vaulted hall in the world and is certainly ‘one of the most impressive buildings in India’.
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But if it dates from 1780, it is old by Lucknow standards; most of the city’s monuments are nineteenth-century and owe their distressed aspect simply to the intensity of the bombardment which Awadh was about to undergo, plus the chronic neglect which followed.

No less sensational was Lucknow’s lavish lifestyle. As connoisseurs of the exquisite and the exotic, the nawabs supported the most celebrated Urdu poets, Persian calligraphers and Shi’ite divines. In the royal employ Hindu minstrels, dancers and impersonators mingled with English barbers, Scottish bagpipers and European clockmakers. Closer still to the royal person moved a swarm of eunuchs, courtesans, concubines and catamites. In short, to the best of their limited abilities the last nawabs fulfilled to the bejewelled hilt their role as the dissipated Oriental despots of European imagining.

But as the Company’s own directors had admitted in 1828, it was the British government which was largely responsible; for ‘such a state of disorganisation can nowhere attain permanence except where the short-sightedness and rapacity of such a barbarous government is armed with the military strength of a civilised one.’
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British troops not only guaranteed Awadh’s security; they also helped enforce the state’s revenue demands. Its nawabs therefore had little to do but spend the proceeds. Nor was their extravagance always objectionable. Loans extracted from the Awadh government had part-financed several of the Company’s wars, and in the case of the Gurkha War of 1814–16 had paid for the entire affair.

Under the terms of an 1801 treaty the nawabs were also bound to rule in the interests of their subjects and to accept British advice when tendered. In fact they did neither. Dalhousie’s decision to annex followed repeated warnings and was prompted by genuine outrage over ‘this disgrace to our empire’. Whether his decision was also ‘just, practicable and right’ as he contended is another matter. Legally it was doubtful, and the doubts were compounded first by the nawab’s refusal to sign the instrument of accession and secondly by Dalhousie’s decision to use limited force. There was also the question of Awadh’s very desirable revenue. Had this played no part in British calculations, and had the spendthrift habits of the nawabs been the main reason for annexation, some of this revenue might reasonably have been earmarked for investment in Awadh. In fact it simply disappeared into the Company’s coffers.

To the people of Awadh the whole affair was inexplicable, indeed indefensible.

Few could really understand why their weak, harmless prince, who had done the British no injury, but like his ancestors, had ever been faithful to them, should be thrust aside. He was not a cruel tyrant and his self-indulgence and careless neglect of his subjects’ welfare were not, in their eyes, such heinous offences as they were to the British.
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In place of ‘careless neglect’ and paternal exploitation the British signalled their arrival by introducing a radical hands-on reformation of the revenue collection. Based on experience gained in the neighbouring North-West Provinces of British India and informed by the principle of dealing direct with the cultivator, it instantly alienated Awadh’s influential aristocracy of rich hereditary revenue farmers, or
taluqdars
, while seemingly alarming the cultivating classes whom it was supposed to benefit.

Annexation also had the effect, as in the Panjab, of demobilising part of the Awadh army and, worse still, of undermining the privileges enjoyed by the forty thousand men of the Company’s Bengal army who had been recruited in Awadh. With their homeland reduced to the status of a British province, these men lost rights of appeal and redress, previously exercised through British influence with the nawab’s government, which had guaranteed to their families and kinsmen a certain security and immunity. Now they differed from all the other brahman and rajput sepoys recruited in the neighbouring British districts of Bihar, Varanasi and Allahabad only in the depth of their suspicions. They shared grievances over such matters as serving outside India; they shared fears about the intent of alien rulers who seemed increasingly indifferent to their religious beliefs; and they added something very like a national grievance resulting from the faithless treatment meted out to their hereditary ruler in Lucknow. Any of these might have provoked mutinous protests; some already had. Together they became grounds for rebellion.

1857 AND ALL THAT

‘The events of 1857 … have provoked more impassioned literature than any other single event in Indian history.’
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They generated much contemporary documentation and they have since often been taken to mark a watershed in both British rule and the Indian response to it. But the interpretation
of these events remains controversial, and so does their title. Known to the British as ‘the Sepoy’, ‘Bengal’ or ‘Indian Mutiny’, to Indians as ‘the National Uprising’ or ‘the First War of Independence’, and to the less partisan of both nations simply as ‘the Great Rebellion’, what happened in 1857 defies simplistic analysis.

For example, equating the rebellion with a traditional, even ‘feudal’, form of reaction whose failure would usher in the new age of nationalism and politically organised protest is no longer completely acceptable. Many different groups with as many different grievances became aligned with either side in the Great Rebellion. The rights and wrongs of British rule were not always a decisive factor and the frontier between the two sides sliced through both agrarian and urban communities, both settled and nomadic peoples, both high caste and low, landlord and tenant, Muslim and Hindu. Paradoxically there was thus something of a national character in the composition of those who opposed the rebellion as well as in that of those who supported it.

Of the insurgents’ various grievances, many were long-standing and had provoked earlier protests and mutinies. Some of these grievances had been, and continued to be, articulated in nationalist terms. But they lacked a pan-Indian dimension, and this mirrored the lack of overall cohesion in the British government of India itself, with each presidency (Calcutta/Bengal, Madras, Bombay) still having its own army and its own administration. Thus, although the Rebellion commanded support amongst most communities in much of northern India, and although recognisably nationalist rhetoric contributed to it, large parts of the future nation, together with the most important centres of British rule, were quite unaffected. Moreover, if ‘historians of the future will begin to define the content of nationalism much more widely and to date its origins much earlier’,
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no less surely will traditional forms of resistance based on hereditary leaders and local grievances be discerned long after 1857. The great ‘watershed’ of British–Indian relations, in other words, proves to be a broad plateau where the run of the rivulets is often contradictory.

But at least there is agreement that the Great Rebellion began as a rising within the Company’s Bengal army. It was not the first. On the eve of Baksar, nearly a century earlier, the Company’s Indian sepoys had refused orders and been horribly executed by Hector Munro. In 1806 at Vellore in Tamil Nadu new regulations about uniforms and the wearing of a cap-badge of leather (always repugnant to Hindus) had prompted a violent mutiny in the Madras army. And, as noted, during the Burmese, Sind and Panjab wars sepoys had staged several mutinies when denied compensation for the loss of caste involved in serving ‘overseas’.

In 1857, soon after Dalhousie had fanned this still simmering discontent about ‘overseas’ service, the Bengal sepoys became aware of another development which would compromise their beliefs. A new rifle was being issued for which the cartridges, which had to be rammed down the barrel, were being greased with a tallow probably containing both pigs’ fat and cows’ fat. Moreover, the cartridges had first to be bitten open with the teeth. To cow-reverencing Hindus as to pig-paranoid Muslims the new ammunition could not have been more disgusting had it been smeared with excrement; nor, had it been dipped in hemlock, could it have been more deadly to their religious prospects.

Although the offending cartridges were quickly withdrawn, all existing cartridges immediately became suspect. So did other official issues like those of flour and cooking oil. Detected in such an underhand attempt, the British were deemed capable of adulterating anything whereby they might compromise the sepoy’s religion and so advance his conversion to Christianity. In Bengal itself a serious mutiny over the cartridges was easily suppressed in February 1857, but as the rumours and the rancour spread upcountry they multiplied and were magnified.

The evidence for any organised incitement is unconvincing. Shared distrust was sufficient to concert action, British arrogance sufficient to incite it. At Meerut (Mirat), an important garrison town about sixty kilometres from Delhi, a particularly insensitive British command court-martialled eighty-five troopers for refusing suspect cartridges and then publicly humiliated them in front of the entire garrison. Next day their comrades-in-arms at Meerut rose as one to free them. They also broke into the armoury and began massacring the local European community. It was early May, a hot month in a parched province. Tinder-dry, the wattle huts of the garrison and the thatched roofs of the officers’ lines ignited at the kiss of a torch.

As a metaphor, spark and tinder would feature widely in contemporary British accounts. Meerut lit the ‘conflagration’ which then ‘spread like wildfire’ across the parched Gangetic plain and deep into the forest scrub of central India. There was no knowing where or when the ‘flames of rebellion’ would break out next; even when extinguished, they often ‘flared up’ again. By perceiving the mutiny as a natural disaster the British tried to come to terms with it. How else to explain an indiscriminate ferocity, their own as well as the enemy’s, whereby innocents and onlookers, women and children, were routinely killed to no obvious purpose?