Mutiny & Insurgency in India, 1857–58

The British Army in a Bloody Civil War

T. A. Heathcote

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781781594629
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A vivid account of the bloody rebellion against colonial rule that raged through Northern India in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1857, a mutiny against the British East India Company broke out in the Bengal Army that would soon spread to Delhi and beyond. The cycle of bloody reprisals would continue for a little over two years, leaving countless bodies in its wake. The events of 1857 to 1859 were tragic and momentous. The challenge to British colonial rule was on an unprecedented scale. This book places these grim events into their historical, political, and economic contexts, and the authors' use of sources including personal accounts brings events of over a century and a half ago vividly to life.

Chapter 1

THE DRESS REHEARSAL. VELLORE, 1806

Enter RUMOUR, painted full of tongues.
‘Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?’

Henry IV Pt II, Induction

In 1805 the East India Company’s Madras Army could look forward to resuming normal peacetime soldiering. The long wars against Mysore had ended in 1799 with the defeat and death of Tipu Sultan. His territories had been divided between the British and their allies. His surviving sons, granted handsome pensions and accompanied by a large retinue, had been exiled to a palace within the great fortress of Vellore, some 75 miles inland of Fort St George, Madras (the modern Chennai). During 1803 and 1804 the armies of the great Maratha princes Sindhia of Gwalior, Holkar of Indore and the Raja of Berar were defeated and, at the insistence of their British allies, the armies of the Peshwa (head of the Maratha Confederacy) and the Nizam of Hyderabad were significantly reduced. As Tipu had been, and the Nizam was, a Muslim prince, and as the Marathas were Hindus, both of India’s major religions were equally affected by the triumph of a notionally Christian power. With their other victories elsewhere in India, the Feringhi (Faring or Franks, though the word had come to mean any kind of European) seemed to be taking over the country.

As was the case with the Company’s other two armies (those of Bengal and Bombay respectively), that of Madras was made up of a small number of units from the British Army serving in India for a limited period, an even smaller number of European units raised by the Company for permanent service there, and a much larger number of Indian units under British officers with Indian officers as their assistants. The official term for an Indian regular soldier was ‘sepoy’, from the Persian sipah. Spahis, the Arab cavalry troops of French North Africa, took their name from the same word. In India a mounted trooper was a ‘sowar’ (from the Persian sawar, a rider). A gunner was a ‘golandaz’ or ball-thrower, from gul, a ball (an Urdu word that, through the medium of the barrack room, later entered vulgar English usage). An ordinary soldier was a ‘jawan’, which, like the Latin juvens, means ‘youth’ or any man of military age, and corresponds to ‘our boys’ in modern journalese.

In all armies, the return to peace is usually followed by the adoption of new uniforms, partly to take account of practical lessons learned during the recent campaigns, partly to restore standards of smartness relaxed under the pressures of service in the field, and partly to follow the latest dictates of military fashion. In 1805 Lieutenant General Sir John Cradock, a 43-year-old veteran of the British Army’s campaigns against the French in the West Indies and Egypt, and the Irish Rising of 1798, became C-in-C, Madras, and approved a new pattern of headdress, adorned with leather cockades, for his sepoys.

At much the same time leather stocks, such as were worn by the Europeans and which were thought to increase smartness by making the wearer keep his head up, were introduced for the necks of the sepoys’ coatees. New regulations were issued forbidding sepoys to wear caste marks on their face when in uniform, and ordering them to shave their beards and trim their moustaches to a standard pattern. A special commission composed of military officers and senior civil servants subsequently declared ‘nothing would appear to be more trivial to the public interest than the length of hair on the upper lip of a sepoy, yet to the individual himself, the shape and fashion of the whisker is a badge of his caste, and an article of his religion.’

Castes (Jati) - groups whose members normally follow the same occupations, eat only with each other and marry only within their group - form a distinctive feature of Indian culture and were vital to an individual’s place in the world. A man expelled from his caste was cut off from his family and ostracized by his peers, at least until he could find a priest willing to perform lengthy and expensive purification ceremonies. The caste system was so important in Indian society that it entered even those groups that had originally rejected it. Hindu reformers forbade caste among their followers, but in time these followings became castes themselves and even subdivided into new castes. Sikhs, despite the egalitarian teachings of their founding gurus, never broke free of caste prejudices. Indian Muslims, notwithstanding their belief in the equality before God of all believers, formed caste groups, and so did many Indian Christians converted by Portuguese missionaries during the sixteenth century. The Portuguese called such groups ‘families’ (casta) and it was from this that the English word ‘caste’ is derived.

Hindus were additionally divided into the four great classes (varna) of Brahman, Ksatriya, Vaisya, and Sudra, equating to priests and law-givers, rulers and warriors, merchants and businessmen, and peasants or workers. The first three were ‘Twice-born’, invested with the sacred thread of initiation to Hindu society on reaching manhood. As not all men were in a position to restrict themselves to the occupations prescribed for their class, they were allowed by the sacred Hindu texts to take up other professions that had a similar status. Among these was that of a regular soldier in the ranks (which in India, unlike in England, was a respectable occupation). Brahmans and Ksatryas alike clung to their class and thought its display by appropriate marks a matter of importance. In the same way, Muslims felt the need to distinguish themselves by outward appearance from the idolatrous Hindus and thereby to remind others that all India had once been under Muslim rule. Caste and religion in India, where for centuries most of the population had lived under rulers of alien origin, were the focus of loyalties that elsewhere men tended to give to their country or city. In the words of the modern European Declaration of Human Rights, the sepoys claimed the right to ‘manifest their religion or belief’.

Both Hindus and Muslim soldiers wore beards, as much for outward evidence of their virility as from fashion. Strict Muslims, then as later, considered that to shave the chin was contrary to the fundamental tenets of their faith. Men of neither religion wished to appear like the clean-shaven Christian soldiers, people who ate the flesh of cows (sacred to Hindus) and pigs (unclean to Muslims) indiscriminately, drank alcohol (forbidden to Muslims and avoided by respectable Hindus) intemperately, and failed to perform the frequent ablutions that both Islam and Hinduism prescribed. For Australians to say ‘Here comes a Pom, hide your wallet under the soap’ may be regarded as a jest. For the sepoys, cleanliness was not merely next to godliness but essential to it. That the new headdress would make them look more like British soldiers was emphatically not a recommendation in their eyes. Even worse, it made them look like the regimental drummers, who were recruited from the Eurasian Christian community.

This objection was strengthened by rumours that the leather cockade of the new headdress was made of cowhide or pigskin, the touch of which would bring ritual pollution to Hindus or Muslims respectively. Although sophisticated townsmen in India, as in many societies, might have been lax in their religious observances, the ordinary sepoy came from respectable peasant communities. Indeed, since English is one of the few languages in which to call a man a peasant is to insult him, the social status of such men is better indicated by referring to them as ‘yeomen’. The anxieties of the Madras sepoys in 1806 were not so different from those of British Protestants scarcely a century earlier, who had deposed a king to preserve their religion.

Thus it was that at Vellore, early in May 1806, Lieutenant Colonel Darley, commanding the 2nd Battalion, 4th Madras Native Infantry, learned that most of his elite grenadier company had refused to accept the new headdress. This was reported to the C-in-C, Madras, who consulted his staff and was assured that there was no good reason for the objection. He therefore decided to treat the matter as one of insubordination and ordered the leaders of the protest (ten Muslims and eleven Hindus) to be punished. Despite delaying tactics on the part of their officers, who obviously had some sympathy with the men and foresaw trouble if their complaints were ignored, all the NCOs of the grenadier company, except two who had accepted the new headdress, were to be reduced to the ranks, and the Indian officers of the battalion were to begin wearing it at once, on pain of dismissal.

Courts martial in the Company’s armies followed the same principles as those in the British Army, with a group of officers (Indian officers, when sepoys were the accused) in place of a jury, who also decided the sentence. A British officer acted as judge advocate, ensuring that the trial was conducted in accordance with the law and in this respect corresponding to a judge in ordinary criminal courts. British officers acted as prosecutors and the accused were allowed to defend themselves or ask another British officer to speak for them. The weakness of the system was that Indian officers were commonly believed to bring in the verdict that they thought the judge advocate expected of them. Such beliefs, indeed, are not unknown in military justice elsewhere. This court martial found all the accused guilty and sentenced one Muslim and one Hindu to flogging and dismissal. The remaining nineteen were sentenced to 500 lashes each, but punishment was remitted when they admitted their error and gave assurances of future good conduct.

Cradock made a tour of inspection, in the course of which he received an official letter from Lieutenant Colonel James Brunton, Military Auditor General, Madras, reporting that the new headdress caused great discontent, and strongly recommending its withdrawal. This matched what Cradock had discovered for himself, and on 29 June he sent Brunton’s letter to the Governor of Madras, saying that the objections were ‘almost universal, and that it was commonly believed that the next attempt would be to force the sepoys to become Christians’. If the question concerned British soldiers, he said, he would know what to do, but because it required knowledge of Indian soldiers, he sought advice from the Madras government.

The government there was headed by the 31-year-old Lord William Cavendish-Bentinck, second son of the former Prime Minister, the 3rd Duke of Portland. Lord William had seen active service on the staff of the Duke of York in Flanders, with the Russians in northern Italy and with the Austrians at Marengo. In 1803, through his father’s influence, but against the wishes of the Company’s Court of Directors, he had been appointed Governor of Madras. Brunton’s warning was disregarded on the grounds that he had long been in bad health, that his nerves were gone, and that he suffered from ‘great despondency’. Nevertheless, the Madras government produced a draft General Order, with the intention of reassuring the sepoys, but Cradock decided that, as opposition seemed to be fading, he would let sleeping dogs lie.

At Vellore, however, the dogs were not sleeping at all. The 2nd Battalion, 4th Madras Native Infantry, had been replaced by the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Madras NI, from Walajapet (Wallajabad), a dozen miles away, but the new arrivals were equally determined to defend their religion. Clandestine meetings were held in the lines of the 23rd and its companion sepoy unit, the 1st Battalion, 1st Madras NI. Most of the Indian officers attended, together with courtiers from Tipu Sultan’s family in the nearby palace, and all swore to resist the new regulations. Determined not to share the fate of the 4th’s grenadiers, they decided that they would seize their weapons, which were stored in Vellore fort with the sepoys themselves being quartered outside. To do so, however, they would have to deal with a wing of the 69th Foot, totalling eleven officers and 372 men, whose barracks were inside the fort.

On 17 June, Sepoy Mustafa Beg of the 1st Madras NI reported to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Forbes, that there was a plan to rise and attack the British. Forbes asked his Indian officers to investigate. They, unsurprisingly, reported that Mustafa Beg was insane and persuaded the Colonel to throw him in the cells as a troublemaker. About the same time, a European woman, Mrs Burke, went to see the station commander, Colonel Fancourt about her late husband’s prize money and, while there, told him of what was rumoured in the bazaar. According to her later evidence, ‘on his asking her if she was a married woman, and her replying that she was a widow, he said he took her to be a bad woman and bade her go away.’ Whatever the merits of Fancourt’s suspicions about Mrs Burke’s profession, he had made a disastrously wrong assessment of the intelligence that she provided.

On the night of 9 July the men of the 23rd Madras NI were given permission to sleep inside the fort in order to be ready for an early parade the next morning. The orderly officer, Captain Miller of the 23rd, decided not to bother with his evening rounds and delegated this duty to the orderly subadar (Indian captain). This officer delegated it to the orderly jemadar (Indian lieutenant), Jemadar Shaikh Kasim, who was one of the leaders of the plot. At moonrise, about 2.30 a.m., sepoys of the 23rd suddenly turned on the British soldiers with whom they were sharing guard duties, and began firing into the 69th’s lines. Five of the 69th’s officers assembled at the adjutant’s quarters, disarmed the four sepoy sentries posted there, and began an exchange of fire with their attackers. At first light Sergeant Brady of the 69th went out to discover what was happening and returned an hour later to give a good clear report that all the British sentries and several European officers, including Colonel Fancourt, had been killed, the 69th’s barracks were under fire from musketry and artillery, and Mysorean colours had been hoisted over the flagstaff bastion.

At about 7.00 a.m., it being by this time fully light, the adjutant, Lieutenant Thomas Mitchell, made a dash for the barracks. The remaining officers moved into the house of the battalion medical officer, Surgeon Jones, before making their way under fire to the barracks. There they found Mitchell and their men trying to take cover from the two 6-pdrs in sepoy hands, whose shot repeatedly passed down the length of the barrack rooms. With many men already killed or wounded and ammunition running low (they had begun with only six rounds per man in their pouches), Captain Archibald Maclachlan, the senior officer present, decided to lead the two hundred or so still standing in a sally through the barrack windows, to dislodge the sepoys from the nearby ramparts.

This was done, though Maclachlan was badly wounded in the process, and command passed to Captain C.J. Barrow. They then fought their way along the walls and captured the gateway, despite heavy fire from the nearby palace. Leaving a party there, the rest went on to the main magazine, almost opposite the barracks from which they had started, but found just a few barrels of blank cartridges and a quantity of loose gunpowder. The British sentry was later discovered dead at his post, with one round left in his pouch and the bodies of nine sepoys around him. The 69th’s only ammunition by this time consisted of what had been taken from the pouches of the dead of either side. This was augmented by a large number of rupees, found loose in the paymaster’s office and now fired with the blank cartridges.

Using their bayonets, the British retreated to the gateway and its neighbouring bastions, but suffered more casualties from musketry fire. Barrow himself fell wounded and the only two officers left in action were Surgeon Jones and Assistant Surgeon Dean. Under their command, the wounded were placed in a cavalier (a raised work within a bastion) with such of the women and children as had escaped from the Regiment’s married quarters. The fighting men, by now reduced to about sixty, manned the walls. Out of ammunition, they watched helplessly while fifteen of their sick comrades were dragged from the hospital and killed. Outside, Major Coates of the 69th, unable to join his men in the fort, sent an urgent message to Lieutenant Colonel Rollo Gillespie, 19th Light Dragoons, the forty-year-old commandant of the cavalry post 16 miles away at Arcot.

Gillespie, an Ulsterman of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, had a reputation for boldness and daring that more than compensated for his small stature. At the age of twenty he had caused a scandal by eloping with the nineteen-year-old sister of a Dublin squire in whose house he had been a guest. A year later, challenged to a duel by a noted marksman, he levelled the odds by stipulating that the participants would hold a corner of the same handkerchief in one hand and a pistol in the other. His opponent was killed and Gillespie was indicted for murder. Acquitted by an Anglo-Irish jury, he left the court with no other stain on his character.

On the evening of 9 July he had been engaged to dine at Vellore with Fancourt (an old friend with whom he had served in the West Indies), but a sudden duty had kept him at Arcot. Coates’s message reached him at about 7.00 a.m. just after he had begun to ride to Vellore with his apologies. He immediately returned to barracks, turned out the duty troop of the 19th and a troop of the 5th Madras Light Cavalry, and led them at full speed to the rescue. Lieutenant Colonel Kennedy of the 19th was ordered to follow as fast as possible with the rest of the Regiment, their close support ‘galloper guns’ and every other man, British or Indian, who could ride, leaving only a small garrison behind.

At about 8.30 the watchers on Vellore’s ramparts saw horsemen approaching, with a single figure far in advance of it. Sergeant Brady, still in action, recognized him and knew his reputation. ‘If Colonel Gillespie be alive,’ he shouted, ‘that is he, and God Almighty has sent him from the West Indies to save our lives in the East.’ Reaching the fort, Gillespie found the drawbridge down, two outer gates open, and the two inner ones closed. The scene, he later wrote, ‘was heart-rending, the white people over the gateway shrieking for assistance, which it was impracticable to afford them from the height of the walls and the strength of the gate which was shut’. A party of the 69th buckled their belts together and climbed down to open the third gate from the inside. Led by Gillespie, they forced open a wicket door and tried to open the fourth gate, but were driven back by intense musketry fire.

Gillespie then found a rope hanging down from the gateway and climbed up to join the men there and put new heart into them. ‘I found a pair of colours [not belonging to the 69th], which I seized, gave a loud shriek and at their head, under a tremendous fire, took possession of a cavalier of three guns.’ Despite having nothing to fire from them, he ordered the guns to be traversed round towards the palace, where a mass of mutineers had assembled. He then decided to make a bayonet attack on the grand arsenal, but was forestalled by the arrival at about 10.00 a.m. of the main force from Arcot. ‘It was,’ he wrote, in a masterpiece of understatement, ‘a fortunate circumstance that I was not reduced to this expedient, which however necessary for the purpose of obtaining ammunition, would undoubtedly have been attended with considerable loss.’

On Gillespie’s shouted orders, the horse gunners used their standard tactic of galloping up to the gateway and opening fire from close range. The gates of South Asian fortresses were always remarkably unprotected by European standards, and the first salvo blew the innermost gate wide open. Gillespie led a charge down from the ramparts to clear a space for the cavalry to deploy. Trapped inside the fort, about 350 mutineers were killed, with no quarter given. One group held out inside a barrack block, but was wiped out in a dismounted assault by British troopers of the 19th and Indian sowars of the Governor of Madras’s Bodyguard. The rest escaped through a sally port, but the light dragoons and the 7th Madras Light Cavalry cut many down in the surrounding roads and fields. Within fifteen minutes Vellore was once more under British control but the discovery of the mutilated bodies of the sick from the hospital roused the dragoons to fury. Some were seen hunting for mutineers in the magazine, oblivious to the fact that at any time a spark from their spurs or steel scabbards could have ignited the loose powder, the most dangerous kind of explosive then in existence. A large number of mutineers found hiding in the palace were lined up and killed by repeated salvos of canister from the guns.

Vellore, however, was not the only station where discontent was openly expressed. Sepoys at Hyderabad shared the belief that there was a government plan to abolish all caste distinction and convert them to Christianity. Moreover, an oracle had stated that there was a well full of treasure in the European barracks whose guardian spirit required human heads as an offering and that the European troops on that account were about to murder their Indian comrades. With only one British unit, the 33rd Foot, in the garrison, the local authorities decided to cancel the new dress regulations in order to preserve discipline.

At Vellore on 12 July Gillespie heard rumours of widespread disturbances elsewhere in Madras and received warnings from several local sources that a general rising was planned for the same evening. He issued a proclamation denying the rumours and warned that, if these continued to be spread, he would turn his guns on the sepoy lines outside the fort and unleash the much-feared 19th Light Dragoons. Pending the arrival of three companies of the 59th Foot, who were expected the following day, he doubled the guard on the Mysorean princes and reported that he would ‘not permit a single black soldier to remain within the walls this night’.

The light dragoons had lost one man killed and three wounded. Gillespie escaped with a badly bruised arm, having been accidentally ridden down during the final melee. The 69th, however, had lost heavily. Out of 11 officers and 372 men, 2 subalterns and 115 men were killed or died of wounds, and another 3 officers and 76 men were badly wounded. Among the victors, Gillespie was the hero of the hour and was awarded Rs 24,500. Sergeant Brady was awarded Rs 2,800 and offered a commission, but instead accepted the warrant of a Conductor in the Ordnance Department. Sergeant Angus McManus and Private Philip Bottom of the 69th, who h...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Chapter 1 - THE DRESS REHEARSAL. VELLORE, 1806
• Chapter 2 - THE THEATRE OF OPERATIONS, MAY 1857 - THE STAGE, THE SETTING AND THE PLAYERS
• Chapter 3 - THE AFFAIR OF THE GREASY CARTRIDGES
• Chapter 4 - THE CHALLENGE. MEERUT AND DELHI, MAY 1857
• Chapter 5 - THE RESPONSE. THE PUNJAB AND THE NORTH-WEST PROVINCES, MAY-JUNE 1857
• Chapter 6 - THE ETHNIC CLEANSING
• Chapter 7 - THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF TIMUR. JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1857
• Chapter 8 - THE RESCUERS OF LUCKNOW. JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1857
• Chapter 9 - THE DELIVERERS OF LUCKNOW. SEPTEMBER 1857 TO MARCH 1858
• Chapter 10 - THE PERIPHERY. COUNTER-INSURGENCY OPERATIONS, JANUARY 1858 TO DECEMBER 1859
• Chapter 11 - THE IMPACT ON THE BRITISH ARMY
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX