I recently did a deep dive into the burrows of my hard drive. I’m not sure whether I will write another novel at the moment, but whether I do or not there are several part completed ones that will not actually be completed because I ran out of steam…
One such was a set of preliminary drafts for a story set during the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857. This piece is part of a chapter setting out the background to what happened. It hasn’t been vigorously checked, but I think the facts are all correct. It’s obviously incomplete, but I think it does stand alone.
And should I post a few more of these remnants occasionally?
9th May 1857, and a dreadful heat sits on the Northern Indian plain like breathless death. The air is full of dust and the land is parched, cracked and waterless, eight months or so since the last rains came, yet the suffocating debilitation of the temperature, well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit for most of the day and a goodly portion of the night, is made more unbearable still by the effects of the high humidity. One felt that one could almost wring water out of the surrounding air, yet the only moisture visible was the sweat covering anyone foolish enough to attempt to move around in this climate.
In Meerut, less than forty miles northeast of Delhi, eighty-five sepoys have just been sentenced by Court Martial to ten years imprisonment. Muslim and Hindu, they are imprisoned for refusing to bite cartridges that have been smeared both with cow fat that was sacred to some and pig fat which defiled them all. In a move of breath-taking stupidity, the British have decided that this concoction is a suitable one for their native troops to have smeared onto cartridges that work by having the top bitten off, before pouring and ramming the contents down the barrel of the new Lee Enfield rifle. To be fair, after the mistake was realised, moves were made to ensure that the grease was made from different ingredients, but the damage by then was done. The belief was widespread that the grease was still composed of these taboo ingredients and, worse still, that it was a deliberate attempt by the British to contaminate and weaken their religions. The crassly insensitive handling of the issue did nothing to improve matters.
Nor is this an entirely new development. For maybe a quarter of a century things have been going rapidly downhill. There have been a number of ‘minor’ mutinies in the past, but these seem to be on the increase. For High Caste Hindus, ‘crossing the black water’ is prohibited, so attempts to force serving soldiers to sail abroad have been invariably interpreted as caste breaking and resulted both in mutinies and draconian punishments. Both this and the foolishness with the new cartridges have acquired added importance, though, due to the increased activity of Christian missionaries in India. It is possible that the British never fully realised quite how important religion was to the Indians. There never had been an Indian nation. India’s history was one of various states, Hindu and Moslem, shifting empires, conquests and absorptions. The idea of Indian nationhood had not yet arisen. Nor did there exist a universal shared culture. As well as the beliefs and traditions surrounding the different religions – Sikh, Parsi and tribal as well as the predominant two – the massive size of India had meant that most regions knew little about the others, even of their existence.
What mattered most to the average Indian, other than the struggle to survive, was his religion. It was what defined his life. And by 1857 it must have appeared to many that the British were determined to defile and break these religions, and then to impose their own. This was hardly helped by the general change in attitude exhibited by the British towards their subjects.
Much had altered over this time. In the late 1700’s, many of the British who came out to India acquired a huge respect, and frequently love, for the country and its people. Scholars such as James Princep and William Jones immersed themselves in the study of the languages and history of India, carrying out research and making huge discoveries. They treated the educated Indians in their circle as equals, treated others with respect and frequently married Indian wives. More than a few also converted to Islam. All this gradually changed in the 1800’s, however. A major factor in this was a steady increase in the number of women who came out to India from Britain. Debutants became aware of the existence of a pool of marriageable young men who were supposedly earning large sums of money and living in style with servants at their beck and call. They only lacked wives to make their lives complete. What could be more natural than to go to their assistance? Thus the ‘Fishing Fleet’ came into existence.
The impact that this had upon the British way of life in India was dramatic. As more of the British men married within their own, the growing community rapidly came to look down with disgust and contempt on those that cohabited with Indian women. And it was a short step from that to frowning upon those who changed their religion, wore native clothes, or even fraternised with the ‘natives’. Attitudes, too, were changing back in Britain. An increase of Christian evangelical zeal coincided with more information finding its way back from India about the country the British were ransacking, most shockingly that the majority were heathens who worshipped idols.
Within the army itself, the Indian troops noticed a change in their officer’s attitudes. Previously, British officers would happily mix with their men, socially as well as on duty and spoke their languages well. They were now more reluctant to learn these languages, found it irksome to talk for long to their men and no longer went hunting or to social events with them. This, the troops tended to put down to the influence of the church – the ‘Padre Sahibs’.
The British have always referred to the uprising that exploded in 1857 as The Indian Mutiny. The Indians prefer to give it the title of the First War of Independence, yet there had already been a number of mutinies throughout the time that the British had been in India, even within the Bengal army. In 1765, on the eve of the Battle of Baksar, Company sepoys had rebelled and been executed. Then in 1806 an attempt was made to force sepoys in Tamil Nadu to wear a leather badge, anathema to Hindus, which had resulted in rebellion. And throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there had regularly been mutinies when the British had forced sepoys to serve ‘abroad’, often prohibited by their caste, which was frequently viewed as a deliberate attempt to weaken said castes. And viewed as a prelude to attempting to convert them to Christianity.
There were, of course, many other factors contributing to this outbreak of violence. Over the previous twenty five years or so, the British had steadily been displaying a greater intolerance towards all facets of Indian society than they had done before. The respect that they had previously shown towards India’s long and rich history had all but disappeared, to be replaced by an attitude that they were governing ‘ignorant savages’ who were ripe for conversion to Christianity. And indeed, the company encouraged further Evangelical and Unitarian missionary activity; frequently this consisted simply of setting up schools and medical facilities for the poorer Indians, but this did nothing to allay Indian suspicions. In another insensitive gesture, English also replaced Persian as the official language of both government and education.
So, simmering just beneath the surface of all walks of Indian society was this fear, this suspicion, that the English were determined to break the native religions and to force Christianity upon India. And it only needed a spark like the Meerut incident to ignite a conflagration that would rapidly sweep across Northern India.
Move forward twenty-four hours and dreadful deeds have been done in the Indian heat. In the morning, the remainder of the Indian regiment at Meerut rose up to free their comrades, broke into the armoury, and then began to systematically slaughter the European community.
Even then, it was possible that the revolt might have petered out, if the sepoys had not decided to ride through the night to Delhi, to seek out the aged Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, who ‘ruled’ as no more than a puppet of the English, and to declare themselves as his army of liberation. As they rode, they gathered supporters from the disaffected population and, around dawn, poured into Delhi.
It was the middle of Ramadan, so most of Delhi had been awake for some while, since for all Muslims it is forbidden to eat or drink during the daylight hours of Ramadan, and so across the city meals had been prepared, cooked and eaten before sunrise. At this time of year, too, because of the intense heat, much of the other activity of the city happened around dawn and dusk, whence it was a little cooler. And so, the streets were busy with worshippers making their way to and from mosques and temples, traders and shoppers busy at markets, beggars and hawkers, businessmen and palanquin bearers, soldiers and magistrates, all out and about in the labyrinth of streets and alleys that criss-crossed Delhi between the city gates.
Rumours of rebellion had been abroad for some months before, and so much of the native population of Delhi was in a state of keen anticipation. The rebels immediately found that they had sympathisers who rose in revolt as soon as they entered the city, especially many of the native soldiers stationed there. The British soldiers were mainly barracked outside the city walls and although a few Europeans quickly realised the severity of the situation, in the main events unfolded faster than could be dealt with and the city was largely overrun before the army could effectively intervene.
By nightfall the majority of the European population of Delhi – men, women and children – had either fled the city or been hacked to pieces. The only ones spared during the initial massacre were those few that had converted to Islam.
The next four months saw much bitter fighting across the north, as the rebels tried desperately to widen the rebellion and hold onto areas they had taken, while the British, with any hope of reinforcements many long weeks away, attempted, equally desperately, to break sieges and retake towns and garrisons that had fallen to the rebels. On both sides, tremendous cruelties and massacres were carried out, few more infamous than that at Cawnpore…
Mick Canning 