REBELLION: LAST OF THE TAMERLANIANS AND THE FIRST OF THE NEHRUS
Bahadur possessed little power outside his residence, the Red Fort in Shahjahanabad, Delhi. Like all educated Mughals, he was a calligrapher and poet in Persian and Urdu, but he ruled only ‘from Delhi to Palam’ (a Delhi suburb), his court funded by an EIC pension. Britain, which had just taken control of the Punjab in the west and Burma in the east, now dominated India, the first time the subcontinent had ever been ruled by one power. The British aspired to the Mughal realm and, as with the Mughals, theirs was a makeshift structure, run by London, some parts nominally governed by the EIC, much still ruled by Indian princes. Clumsy British arrogance had infuriated both Hindus and Muslims. The early cultural mixing had been replaced by a British racist superiority that closed top positions to Indians and an evangelical mission that raised fears of forced conversion. Princes and landowners resented British annexations. Proto-nationalists resented foreign rule. In early 1857, in the Bengali army, new cartridges, greased with cow or pig fat, alarmed both Hindus and Muslims, who, resenting the punishments of oafish British officers, mutinied in Meerut and now rushed to Delhi.
Zafar felt the expectation of millions as rajas and sepoys turned to him as the traditional authority in India. In Delhi, sepoys joined the Meerut rebels and an underground network of jihadis; the British fled the city or hid in the palace as a popular revolt exploded across Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh as well as Rajasthan and Bihar.
As a mixture of rajas, warlords, peasants, sepoys and preachers – Muslim and Hindu – attacked British soldiers, murdering women and children, the British responded with equal ferocity, aided by the three new technologies that gave them the ultimate advantage: the telegraph allowed them to deploy reinforcements, at home railways rushed troops to ports and steamships conveyed them to India. British security was fragile: there were 45,000 British troops, some EIC, some royal, and 311,000 sepoys. A single unifying Indian leader might have seized the entire country. Yet the mutiny was very regional, with mass support only in western Uttar Pradesh, while the vast majority of the population, most Indian merchants, the port elites and most princely states in the north and centre remained loyal, as did two of the three EIC armies. Without the aid of Indian soldiers, the British could never have crushed the rebellion.
‘I didn’t call for you, you’ve acted wickedly,’ Zafar told the rebel sepoys, but they rushed around him, shouting, ‘Unless you join us, king, we’re all dead men.’
‘I have neither troops,’ replied Zafar, ‘nor magazine nor treasury.’
‘Just give us your blessing.’
Zafar blessed them, resumed the durbars for the first time since Nader’s conquest and appointed his energetic son Mirza Mughal as commander-in-chief. Mirza Mughal urgently built defensive positions. The sepoys, along with his own servants, hunted down Europeans. Mirza Mughal colluded in the massacre of fifty-two Britons in the Red Fort. Within the city, the emperor’s
In Awadh, south-east of Delhi, Begum Hazrat Mahal, widow of the last king, seized power in the capital Lucknow and enthroned her adopted son, Nana Sahib. Four hundred Britons were slaughtered. Further south, Lakshmi Bai, the beautiful thirty-year-old widow of the last raja of Maratha Jhansi and accomplished fencer and horsewoman whose principality had been annexed by the British, sympathized with the rebels but tried to protect British civilians. Facing invasions from rival Indian princes and British intervention, she joined the rebellion, supervising the casting of cannon and emerging as a glamorous but harsh military leader, fascinating the British with her ‘high character’ and ‘remarkably fine figure’.
Palmerston, prime minister at last, was relieved that the Madras and Bombay armies were loyal, as were the rulers of Kashmir and Hyderabad, along with the Sikhs and Pathans of the Punjab. Appointing Charles Canning, son of the prime minister, as governor-general, he ordered the rebellion to be crushed. Extreme violence on both sides unleashed mutual savagery.
FLAY, IMPALE, BURN: THE BRITISH RECONQUER INDIA
In Awadh in summer 1857, British civilians and troops were besieged in Lucknow. In Kanpur, Nana rescued 200 women and children from a massacre. As British forces advanced from Allahabad, sepoys refused to kill them, whereupon five butchers from the bazaar slaughtered the 200 Britons with cleavers, while babies were brained against nearby trees. The bodies were then thrown down a well. Britons were sometimes fired out of cannon. Altogether, in the rebellion, 6,000 were killed.*
