The Indian Mutiny of 1857
The Indian Mutiny of 1857
Sir Colin Campbell afterwards Lord Clyde.
THE
INDIAN MUTINY
OF 1857.
BY
COLONEL G. B. MALLESON, C.S.I.
With Portraits and Plans
EIGHTH EDITION
LONDON
SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED
38 Great Russell Street
1901.
PREFACE.
In writing this short History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 I have aimed at the compilation of a work which, complete in itself, should narrate the causes as well as the consequences of a movement unforeseen, undreamt of, sudden and swift in its action, and which taxed to the utmost the energies of the British people. Preceding writers on the same subject, whilst dealing very amply with the consequences, have, with one exception, but dimly shadowed forth the causes. The very actors in the Mutiny failed to detect them. Sir John Lawrence himself, writing with the fullest knowledge of events in which he played a very conspicuous part, mistook the instrument for the chief cause. He stopped at the greased cartridge. But the greased cartridge was never issued to the great body of the troops, it indeed to any. There must have been a latent motive power to make of an unissued cartridge a grievance so terrible as to rouse into revolt men whose fathers and whose fathers' fathers had contributed to the making of the British Empire in India. The greased cartridge, too, did not concern those landowners and cultivators of Oudh and the North-western Provinces, who rose almost to a man. What that latent motive power was I have described fully, and I believe truly, in this volume.
My belief in this respect is founded on personal knowledge and personal observation. Locally chief of the Commissariat Department at Kánhpur when, in January 1856, Sir James Outram crossed the Ganges to depose the King of Oudh, I had witnessed the indignation which the very rumour of his purpose caused among the sipáhís of my own guard. I reported their excited state to my superiors, and was laughed at for my pains. But, impressed with the accuracy of my forecast, viz., that the annexation of Oudh would rouse indignation and anger in the sipáhí army, I continued then, and after my transfer, two months later, to an appointment in the Military Audit Department in Calcutta, to keep a careful record of the several occurrences, all apparently of minor import, which supervened when the effects of the annexation of Oudh had been thoroughly realised by the sipáhís. My observations led to the conclusion that they were thoroughly angered, and, a little later, that their minds were being mysteriously worked upon. I kept copious notes of the matters I observed, and I discussed them with my brother officers, without, however, finding that my views were shared by any one of them. It would seem, however, that the officer who held the responsible post of Town Major, Major Orfeur Cavenagh, had, from his own observation, arrived at conclusions not dissimilar. He has narrated in his admirable work[1] the observations forced upon him by the changed demeanour of the natives of the North-western Provinces in 1856. But he, too, stood, amongst high-placed Europeans, almost alone in his convictions. The fact is that, up to the very outbreak of the Mutiny at Mírath, no one, from highest to lowest, believed in the possibility of a general combination. Those, and they could be counted on the fingers of one hand, who endeavoured to hint at an opposite conclusion were ridiculed as alarmists. So ingrained was the belief in the loyalty of the sipáhís, and so profound was the ignorance as to the manner in which their minds were affected, that neither the outbreak of Mírath nor the seizure of Dehlí entirely removed it. The tone of the governing classes was displayed when the Home Secretary prated about 'a passing and groundless panic,' and when the acting Commander-in-Chief, an old officer of sipáhís, babbled, in June 1857, of reorganisation. But the fact, nevertheless, remained. Circumstances had proved to me that extraneous causes were at work to promote an ill-feeling, a hatred not personal but national, in the minds of men who for a century had been our truest and most loyal servants. When the Mutiny had been quelled I renewed my researches regarding the origin of this feeling, and, thanks to the confidences of my native friends in various parts of the country, I arrived at a very definite conclusion. That conclusion I placed on record, in 1880, when I published the then concluding volume of a History of the Mutiny, begun by Sir John Kaye, but left unfinished by that distinguished writer. After the publication of that volume I again visited India, and renewed my inquiries among those of my native friends best qualified to arrive at a sound opinion as to the real origin of the Mutiny. The lapse of time had removed any restraints which might have fettered their freedom of speech, and they no longer hesitated to declare that, whilst the action of the Government of India, in Oudh and elsewhere, had undermined the loyalty of the sipáhís, and prepared their minds for the conspirators, the conspirators themselves had used all the means in their power to foment the excitement. Those conspirators, they declared, were the Maulaví of Faizábád, the mouthpiece and agent of the discontented in Oudh; Náná Sáhib; one or two great personages in Lakhnao; the Rání of Jhánsí; and Kunwar Singh. The action of the land system introduced into the North-west Provinces by Mr Thomason, had predisposed the population of those provinces to revolt. There remained only to the conspirators to find a grievance which should so touch the strong religious susceptibilities of the sipáhís as to incite them to overt action. Such a grievance they found in the greased cartridge. By the circulation of chapátís they then intimated to the rural population that the time for action was approaching. This version of the immediate causes of the Mutiny is known to be true by some at least who will read these pages; it is known to be true by all who have taken the trouble to dive below the surface. I have accordingly given it a prominent place in this volume.
The task of compressing within about four hundred pages the story of a Mutiny which abounded in scenes of action, so many, so varied, so distinct from each other; of a Mutiny in which every station occupied by English men and English women was either a camp or a battle-ground; in the outset of which our countrymen, in the several sub-divisions of India, were in the position of detached parties of a garrison, unable to communicate with headquarters or with one another, suddenly surprised and set upon by men whom they had implicitly trusted; has been one the difficulty of which I never realised until I had taken it in hand. When a writer has at his command unlimited space, his task is comparatively easy. He can then do justice to all the actors in the drama. But I have found it most difficult to mention the names of all who have deserved in a volume every page of which must be devoted to the relation of events. And although my publishers, with a generosity I cannot sufficiently acknowledge, permitted me to increase, by an additional fourth, the number of pages allotted to the series of which this volume is the second issue, I am conscious that I have not sufficiently dwelt upon the splendid individual achievements of many of those who contributed to the final victory. The fact is that there are so many of them. There never has been an event in History to which the principle of the Order of the Day, published by Napoleon on the morrow of Austerlitz, applies more thoroughly than to the Mutiny of 1857. '"It will be enough for one of you to say," said the Emperor, in his famous bulletin, "I was at the Battle of Austerlitz," for all your fellow-citizens to exclaim, "There is a brave man!"' Substitute the words 'Indian Mutiny' for the 'Battle of Austerlitz' and the phrase applies to that band of heroes whose constancy, whose courage, and whose devotion saved India in 1857.
One word as to the spelling I have adopted. It is similar to the spelling which appears in the cabinet edition of Kaye's and Malleson's History, to the spelling adopted by Captain Eastwick in Murray's admirable guide-books for India, and it is the correct spelling. Some critics have ignorantly remarked that the natives of India employ no definite spelling for their proper names. But this remark betrays the prejudice of the traveller who disdains to learn. The natives use not only a well-defined spelling for their proper names, but every name has a distinct meaning. The barbaric method adopted by our forefathers a century and a half since, when they were ignorant of the native languages, and wrote simply according to the sound which reached ears unaccustomed to the precise methods of an Oriental people, totally alters and disfigures that meaning. Take, for example, the word 'Kánhpur,' written, in accordance with barbaric custom, 'Cawnpore.' Now, 'Kánhpur' has a definite meaning. 'Kánh,' or 'husband,' is one of the favourite names of 'Krishná.' 'Pur' means 'a city.' The combination of the two words signifies 'Krishná's city.' But what is the meaning of 'Cawnpore'? It does not even correspond to the pronunciation as the name of the place is pronounced by the natives. It serves to remind us of a period of ignorance and indifference to native methods over which it is surely kind to draw the veil. The same reasoning applies to every proper name in India. It is true I have spelt 'Calcutta,' 'Bombay,' and the 'Ganges' according to the conventional method; but the two places and the river have a long European record, and their names thus spelt are so ingrafted in the connection between India and Europe that it would be pedantry to alter them. But Kanhpur and the places to the north-west and north of it were but little known before the Mutiny, and it seems becoming that the events which brought them into European prominence should introduce them under the names which properly belong to them, and which no European prejudice can permanently alter.
It remains for me now only to acknowledge gratefully the courteous manner in which Messrs W. H. Allen & Co. granted me permission to use, in a reduced form, the plans they had prepared for their larger history of the Indian Mutiny.
- 27 West Cromwell Road,
- October 10, 1890.
CONTENTS.
Chapter page I. 1 II. 21 III. 34 IV. 43 V. 51 VI. 64 VII. 87 VIII. 99 IX. 112 X. 128 XI. 151 XII. 159 XIII. 178 XIV. 203
Chapter page XV. 213 XVI. 231 XVII. 246 XVIII. 254 XIX. 278 XX. 313 XXI. 323 XXII. 340 XXIII. 345 XXIV. 355 XXV. 370 XXVI. 381 XXVII. 398 XXVIII. 403 412
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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- ↑ Reminiscences of an Indian Official. By Sir Orfeur Cavenagh. On the subject of the services rendered by this officer, in 1857, I have entered fully in the sixth volume of my larger history.