Salute the Heroes of the 1857 Indian War of Liberation – Part 2
Suppression
of the First Indian War of Independence
The 1857 revolt was suppressed eventually. Delhi fell to English forces on 20 September 1857. Lucknow, the second centre of the
revolt, was captured by the English on 21 March 1858. The cruelty that
accompanied, and followed, the suppression of the first Indian war of Independence was truly barbaric and unspeakable. The British press and statesmen alike
spread scare stories about the atrocities committed by the insurgents, but
these more often served as a smokescreen to cover up the infamies committed by England over a long period of time, especially during, and in the aftermath of, the revolt.
Capture
of Delhi
On the capture of Delhi, the British forces
subjected the town to wholesale bombardment, followed by its general plunder,
with the inhabitants having had but one night to escape through three gates
(the Ajmeri, the Turcoman and the Delhi gates) which were still under the
control of the rebels. During this precipitate flight, mothers were separated
from their children, husbands from their wives. Upon entering the city, the
British subjected the unfortunate remaining citizens to a merciless slaughter,
with every Indian that could be found being killed by the soldiers – not
excepting women and children in many cases. Hangings, shootings, blowing up
people from the mouths of cannons, massacres, torching of whole areas, were the
order of the day.
Those who fled Delhi, numbering tens of
thousands of men, women and children, were to be seen wandering homeless and
penniless, all over the country, while the British soldiers, moving from house
to house and street to street, systematically stole everything of value and
destroyed items they could not take away.
“A Military Governor had been appointed;
but he could do little to restrain the passions of those who surrounded him.
Natives were brought forward in batches to be tried by a Military Commission or
by Special Commissioners, each one of whom had been invested by the Supreme
Government with full powers of life and death. These judges were in no mood to
show mercy. Almost all who were tried were condemned; and almost all who were
condemned were sentenced to death. A four-square gallows was erected in a
conspicuous place in the city; and five or six culprits were hanged every day.
English officers used to sit by, puffing at their cigars, and look on at the
convulsive struggles of the victims” (T Rice Holmes, A History of the
Indian Mutiny and of the disturbances which accompanied it among the civil
population, p.397-8).
William Russell, who reached India in January
1858 on a year’s assignment as a war correspondent for The Times, found
himself “…in the ruined streets of a deserted city, in which every house
bore the marks of cannon or musket shot… I could scarcely believe that I was
in a city which was described by an old traveller as being of the bigness of
London, Paris and Amsterdam together and of … greater population and riches”
(My Diary in India in the year 1858-59, Vol 2, p.53).
Plunder
The Prize Agents declared that by conquest the
entire city had become army property and hence a lawful ‘prize’. This doctrine
of dubious validity held sway for three whole months, during which Delhi was plundered with impunity – even the Sabbath brought no respite to the plunderers
and the plundered. Colonel Burn, the Military Governor of Delhi, estimated on
24 October 1857 the loss of property from plunder and wanton destruction by
British soldiers to be of the order of two crores of rupees (20 million
rupees), adding that no more than 15 lakhs (1.5 million) had been, or would be,
realised by the Prize Agents. Not surprisingly, then, English soldiers’ wives
were to be seen coming to Church, dressed in the most exquisite finery, which
could never have been purchased out of their husbands’ salary. “I fancy
every officer present at the siege [of Delhi] might be able to retire at
once”, reported Sir William Muir, an Assistant Surgeon (Records of the
Intelligence Department, Government of North-Western Provinces of India during
the Mutiny of 1857, ed. Coldstream, Vol 1, p.239). Some British officers
simply used their servants for plunder and transport of anything of value.
Even rare and valuable manuscripts on
theology, medicine and literature, which any government professing a ‘civilising
mission’ would have been keen to preserve, came under the hammer by order of
the Prize Agents.
Cruelties
allegedly committed by sepoys
The British authorities attempted to create
the myth that their barbarity stemmed from, and was justified by, the passion
for revenge following the massacre of a number of Europeans in the Palace on 16
May 1857. In fact, the practice of barbaric cruelty was a matter of
premeditated policy, which had been in force long before the revolt of 1857, as
well as during and in its aftermath.
“At the end of his
Diary in 1859, William Russell explicitly stated: ‘I am deeply impressed by the
difficulty of ruling India, as it is now governed by force, exercised by a few
who are obliged to employ natives as the instrument of coercion. That force is
the base of our rule I have no doubt; for I see nothing else but force employed
in our relations with the governed’” (WH Russell, The Diary, My India
Mutiny Diary, edited by Michael Edwardes, p.34)
“I protest against meeting atrocities by
atrocities … instead of bowing before the name of Jesus, we were preparing to
revive the worship of Moloch”, Benjamin Disraeli, Speech at Newport
Pagnell, September 1857.
Marx was the first to confront, and refute,
the hysteria created in Britain over the cruelties allegedly committed by the
insurgents. While not denying the “outrages” attributed to the rebels,
he put them in perspective by showing that they were merely a response to England’s own conduct in India. “However infamous the conduct of those sepoys,” he wrote in the New York Daily Tribune of 16 September
1857, “it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own
conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern
Empire, but even during the last 10 years of a long settled rule. To
characterise that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic
institution of its financial policy”. He added: “There is something in
human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that
its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself”
(Marx and Engels, page 94).
There was little reason for England to display superciliousness in this regard in view of her own fiendish record.
Alluding to England’s first Opium War against China (1839-42), Marx goes on: “to
find parallels to the sepoy atrocities, we need not, as London papers pretend,
fall back on the Middle Ages, nor even wander beyond the history of
contemporary England. All we want is to study the first Chinese War, an event,
so to say, of yesterday. The English soldiery then committed abominations for
the mere fun of it; their passions being neither sanctified by religious
fanaticism nor exacerbated by hatred against an overbearing and conquering
race, nor provoked by the stern resistance of a heroic enemy. The violations
of women, the spittings of children, the roastings of whole villages, were then
mere wanton sports, not recorded by mandarins, but by British officers
themselves” (ibid. p.95).
Marx cites several examples to show that even
in the war then being fought “… it would be an unmitigated mistake to
suppose that all the cruelty is on the side of the sepoys, and all the milk of
human kindness flows on the side of the Engllish” (ibid.),
Marx tells his readers
never to forget that, whereas “… the cruelties of the English are related
as acts of martial vigour, told simply rapidly, without dwelling on disgusting
details, the outrages of the natives, shocking as they are, are still
deliberately exaggerated. For instance, these circumstantial account first
appearing in ‘The Times’, and then going the round of the London press, of
atrocities perpetrated at Delhi and Meerut, from whom did it proceed? From a
cowardly person residing at Bangalore, Mysore, more than 1000 miles, as the
crow flies, distant from the scene of action. Actual accounts of Delhi evince
the imagination of an English parson to be capable of breeding greater horrors
than even the wild fancy of a Hindu mutineer”, adding, “… the horrid
mutilations committed by the sepoys, of course more revolting to European
feeling than the throwing of red-hot shell on Canton dwellings by a Secretary
of the Manchester Peace Society, or the roasting of Arabs pent up in a cave by
a French Marshal…” (ibid. p.97).
Exposing the “frantic
roars of the ‘bloody old times’ in rousing vengeful hatred for what they really
were”, Marx concludes his article thus: “as Delhi has not, like the
walls of Jericho, fallen before mere puffs of wind, John Bull is to be steeped
in cries for revenge up to his very ears, to make him forget that his
government is responsible for the mischief hatched and the colossal dimensions
it had been allowed to assume” (ibid. p.98).
Capture of Lucknow
In the attack on Lucknow, the British bayonet,
wrote Engels, “… has done more execution in any one of these onslaughts on
the panic stricken natives than in all the wars of the English in Europe and
America put together” (Details of the attack on Lucknow, Marx and Engels,
page 149).
The capture on 21
March 1858 of Lucknow (the capital of the erstwhile kingdom of Oudh) made way immediately for indiscriminating plunder. “A merry scene it must have been”,
said Engels, “for a true, liberty-loving John Bull to see his British
soldiers helping themselves to the jewels, costly arms, clothes, and all the
toggery of His Majesty of Oudh” (ibid, page 150). Continuing,
Engels paints the following devastating picture of the barbarity, lawlessness
and thievery which characterised the British Army then, and still does, as any
Irish, Iraqi, or Afghan will vouch for – all accompanied by the Goebbelsian
propaganda about the allegedly humane conduct of this murderously mercenary
machine:
“This is indeed a pretty state of things in
a civilised army in the 19th century; and if any other troops in the world had
committed 1/10 of these excesses, how would the indignant British press brand
of them with infamy! But these are the deeds of the British Army, and
therefore we are told that such things are but normal consequences of war.
British officers and gentlemen are perfectly welcome to appropriate to
themselves any silver spoons, and jewelled bracelets, and other little
memorials they might find about the scene of their glory; and if Campbell is
compelled to disarm his own army in the midst of war, in order to stop
wholesale robbery and violence, there must have been military reasons for the
step; but surely nobody will begrudge these poor fellows a week’s holiday and a
little frolic after so many fatigues and privations”.
“The fact is”, adds Engels, “ there
is no army in Europe or America with so much brutality as the British.
Plundering, violence, massacre – things that everywhere else strictly and
completely banished – are a time-honoured privilege, a vested right of the
British soldier. The infamies committed for days together, after the storming
of Badajoz and San Sebastian, in the Peninsular War, without a parallel in the
annals of any other nation since the beginning of the French Revolution; and
the mediaeval usage, proscribed everywhere else, of giving up to plunder a town
taken by assault, is still the rule with the British. At Delhi imperious
military considerations enforced an exception [and this is saying something
in view of what happened in Delhi as outlined above]; but the army, though
bought off by extra pay, grumbled, and now at Lucknow they have made up for
what they missed at Delhi [and they did not miss much even there]. For
12 days and nights there was no British Army at Lucknow – nothing but a lawless,
drunken, brutal rabble, dissolved into bands of robbers, far more lawless,
violent and greedy than the sepoys who had just been driven out of the place.
The sack of Lucknow in 1858 will remain an everlasting disgrace to the British
military service” (ibid. pp.151-152).
Fiendish racism
What kind of fiendish racism permeated British
official circles at the time can be gauged from the following words of General
Nicholson, the “hero of the mutiny”. “Let us propose”, he wrote
to his friend, Edwards, “a Bill for flaying alive, impalement, or burning of
the murderers of women and children at Delhi. The idea of simply hanging the
perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening. I wish I was in that part of the
world, that if necessary, I might take the law into my own hands” (quoted
by Majumdar, page 112).
For this racist and brute representative of a
racist and brute civilisation, simply hanging his enemies was not good enough;
the hangings had to be preceded by flaying and followed by impalement for the
fun of the representatives of this lurid civilisation. He is wrong on two
counts though. First, it was the British who were mainly guilty of the crimes
he attributes to the insurgents. Second, the British officials hardly ever
felt their freedom of action limited by law; they acted in total disregard of
their own laws as well as the rules of conduct among civilised peoples – they
were the law and those at the receiving end, the Indian people, were fully
aware of it; in India, British officialdom was precisely in that part of the
world, their Indian Empire, where it was free to take the law into its own
hands – and actually frequently did so.
In the face of overwhelming evidence of the
barbaric infamies committed by the British forces, some apologists of British colonialism
came up with the thesis that there were atrocities on both sides which it was
best to forget. Not only is the colossal scale of the atrocities on the
British side in no way comparable to some such isolated acts on the side of the
insurgents, the very idea of putting on the same plane the violence of the
oppressors and the oppressed is absurdly perverse.
Conduct of the insurgents
The revolt of 1857 reached its peak in Oudh. Even in the heat of the battle, the conduct of the insurgents was truly admirable.
Forrest was obliged to pay this tribute to the self-restraint, discipline and
regard for humanitarian considerations of the population of Oudh: “the
troops mutinied and the people threw off their allegiance, but there was no
revenge and no cruelty. The brave and turbulent population, with a few
exceptions, treated the fugitives of the ruling race with marked kindness and
the high courtesy of the barons of Oudh was conspicuous in their dealings with
their fallen masters” (A History of the Indian Mutiny, volume 1,
page 217).
The episode concerning the alleged
dishonouring and mutilation of British women by the forces of Nana Saheb in Kanpur is well-known. The British media and spokesmen gave it extensive publicity and
roused anti-Indian hysteria to a pitch. Even the official British historians,
Kaye and Malleson, found these stories to be “fictions of an excited
imagination”.
“The refinements of cruelty – the
unutterable shame – with which, in some chronicles of the day, the serious
massacre was attended, were but fictions of an excited imagination, too readily
believed without enquiry and circulated without thought. None was mutilated,
none was dishonoured… This is stated in the most unqualified manner, by the
official functionaries who made the most diligent enquiries into all the
circumstances of the massacres in June and July” (History of the Indian
Mutiny, Vol II, p.281).
In regard to Delhi too, there were stories of
British women being forced to walk the streets naked, that some had had their
breasts cut – not even small girls spared. White Christian parsons were the
loudest in spreading these stories. But Sir William Muir, chief of the
intelligence department put the record straight, saying that “… however
much of cruelty and bloodshed there was, the tales which gained currency of
dishonour to the ladies were, so far as my observations and enquiries went,
devoid of any satisfactory proof” (quoted by Savarkar, page 125).
It is noteworthy that whenever the insurgents
soldiers were guilty of acts of inhumanity towards women and children, the
leadership of the rebellion condemned such acts in the most stern terms. That
this was done at the height of a national war against such a hated enemy as
British colonialism redounds to the nobility of the insurgent side. Allamah
Fazle Haq of Khayrabad in his War Journal says that among the rebel sepoys
there “… were those who did evil things and went beyond the limits and
committed excesses and cruelties. The children and women were also killed. They
earned degradation and disgrace by murdering women and distribute and dishonour
by killing children” (Fazle Haq, The Story of the War of Independence).
British brutalities
If the stories spread
by the British side about the reign of terror allegedly perpetrated by the
insurgents were largely fictions and products of an excited imagination, the
savage brutality on the British side was on such a scale that it even worried
Lord Canning. The proceedings of the Governor General in Council, dated 24
December 1857, contain this minute:
“… the
indiscriminate hanging, not only of persons of all shades of guilt, but of
those whose guilt was at the least very doubtful, and the general burning and
plunder of villagers, whereby the innocent as well as the guilty, without
regard to age or sex, were indiscriminately punished, and in some cases,
sacrificed, had deeply exasperated large communities not otherwise hostile to
the government; that the cessation of agriculture and consequent famine were
impending;… and lastly, that the proceedings of the officers of the
Government had given colour to the rumour … that the government meditated a
general bloody persecution of Mohammedans and Hindus” (quoted by Edward
Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal, pages 73-74).
Even the formalities of the court-martial
trial were honoured in their breach and reduced to farce. T R Holmes, in his History
of the Sepoy War, gives us this glimpse of such proceedings: “Officers
as they went to sit on the court-martial swore that they would hang their
prisoners, guilty or innocent and, if any dared to lift up his voice against
such indiscriminate vengeance, he was instantly silenced by the clamours of his
angry comrades. Persons condemned to death after a hasty trial were mocked at
and tortured by ignorant privates before the execution, while educated officers
looked on and approved” (p.124).
None other than Lord Elphinstone, writing to
Sir John Lawrence about the sack of Delhi, expressed himself thus:
“After the siege was over, the outrages
committed by our army are simply heartrending. A wholesale vengeance is being
taken without distinction of friend or foe. As regards the looting, we have
indeed surpassed Nadirshah” (Aitchison, Life of Lawrence, Vol II,
p.252).
The number of persons executed in Delhi was, according to reliable sources, 27,000.
A British officer, who had been in active
service, in his History of the Siege, painted this horrifically graphic
picture of the actions of the British officers en route from Ambala to Delhi:
“Hundreds of Indians were condemned to be
hanged before a court-martial in a short time, and they were most brutally and
inhumanly tortured, while scaffolds were being erected for them. The hair on
their heads were pulled by bunches, their bodies were pierced by bayonets and
then they were made to do that to avoid which they would think nothing of death
or torture – cows’ flesh was forced by spears and bayonets into the mouth of
the poor and harmless Hindu villagers” (quoted in Savarkar, page 134).
What happened at Delhi after the siege was
over, was repeated after the capture of Lucknow, with the sepoy and the
civilian alike butchered by the victorious British, one of whom gives us this
description of what happened:
“… at that time of the capture of Lucknow
a season of indiscriminate massacre – such distinction was not made and the
unfortunate who fell into the hands of our troops was made short work of –
sepoy or Oudh villager it mattered not, no questions were asked; his skin was
black, and did not that suffice? A piece of rope and the branch of a tree or a
rifle bullet through his brain, soon terminated the poor devil’s existence”
(quoted in 1857 In our History, P C Joshi, p.44).
During their campaigns in the countryside, the
British forces behaved like a hunting party on a turkey shoot. The actions of
the British Army during General Neill’s march through the countryside, between
Benares (Varanasi), Allahabad and Kanpur, get the following description from
Kaye and Malleson:
“Volunteer hanging parties went out into
the districts and amateur executioners were not wanting to the occasion. One
gentleman boasted of the numbers he had finished off quite ‘in an artistic
manner’, with mango trees for gibbets and elephants as drops, the victims of
this wild justice being strung up, as though for past-time, in the form of a
figure of 8” (Vol II p.177).
Such was the extent of the atrocities
committed by the British forces in India, that it alarmed some liberal elements
in high places in Britain, who feared that these actions threatened “liberties
at home”. Writing in Greater Britain, Sir Charles Dilke had this to
say:
“Those who doubt that Indian military
service makes soldiers careless of men’s lives, reckless as to the rights of
property, and disgraceful of human dignity, can hardly remember the letters
which reached them in 1857, in which an officer in high command during the
march upon Kanpur reports, ‘a good bag today, polished off rebels’, it being
borne in mind that the ‘rebels’ thus hanged or blown from the guns had not
taken any arms, but villagers apprehended ‘on suspicion’. During this march,
atrocities were committed in the burning of villages and massacre of innocent
inhabitants at which Mohamed Toglak himself would have stood ashamed, and it
would be to contradict all history to assert that a succession of such deeds
would not prove fatal to our liberties at home.” (quoted in Major B D Basu,
Rise of the Christian Power in India, 1931, p.959).
Relevance of remembering
1857
Reading the above account, there are those who
will say that it is pointless to harp on the atrocities committed by British
forces in India 150 years ago; that stirring up the memory of those momentous
events only stands in the way of reconciliation between the two countries and
their peoples; and, therefore, we should let bygones be bygones. Such an
attitude, besides constituting suppression of historical truth, implies our
inability to learn from history. He who would know the future must know the
past, so runs a Chinese saying. The whole meaning of recounting the events of
1857 is not to put the entire British people in the dock, for it is not they
who committed these horrible crimes against the Indian masses. It was British
capitalism and colonialism that was guilty of these crimes. One has only to
know what British imperialism, along with its senior partner, US imperialism,
is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, to realise that it has not changed for the
better in the slightest since 1857; that it is today, in its decadent, moribund
and parasitic stage, even more dangerous and cruel than at an earlier period in
history; that it is today engaged in committing a genocide of far greater
proportions than that of 1857, that it is the common enemy of the British
proletariat at home and the oppressed peoples abroad; that only its overthrow
and the establishment of socialism can bring true peace, prosperity and
happiness to the British proletariat and the oppressed people alike.
[To
be concluded in next issue with the reasons for the failure of the uprising and
the legacy of this first war of the Indian people for independence.]