Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
dawn the next day. Although the attack went in late, the attackers poured in, some through the breaches and others through the Kashmir Gate, blown in by a party of engineers. There was fierce fighting, in the course of which Nicholson was mortally wounded, and Delhi was secured by 20 September. William Hodson persuaded Bahadur Shah to surrender, having guaranteed him his life, but he personally shot two of the King’s sons and one grandson, apparently to forestall a rescue attempt.104
The fall of Delhi marked a turning point in the campaign. Before it, the British might well have lost, but after the fall their damaged iqbal was somewhat restored, and rulers who might have sided with the rebels were now persuaded to remain loyal. But it was still vital to relieve Lucknow, and Major General Sir James Outram, now chief commissioner of Oudh, and just back from commanding the Persian expedition, arrived at Cawnpore to take over the relief force, although he generously allowed Havelock to retain military command for the moment. The relieving force got into the Residency compound on 25 September, and although it could not fight its way out again, the place was in less danger than it had been before. It took the newly arrived Lieutenant General Sir Colin Campbell, with the regiments diverted from China, to break the garrison out on 16 November. (One of Campbell’s staff produced the second great Latin joke of British India. ‘Nunc fortunatus sum,’ he quipped, amidst gusts of cheroot smoke: ‘I am in luck now.’) Havelock, old and promoted so very slowly, confirmed in death that iconic status which had come to him too late. Sick and worn out, he died before he could be evacuated.
With Campbell busy at Lucknow, the rebels struck at Cawnpore, and Campbell swung back to deal with them, administering, on 6 December, a defeat which ranked alongside the capture of Delhi as evidence that the tide had turned. He then took Fategarh, scene of another massacre and, after consultation with Canning, who had now moved up to Allahabad, he reorganised his force and then set about dousing the rebellion in Oudh. Lucknow was finally taken, though Campbell, probably because of reluctance to cut off ‘desperate soldiery whose only wish was to escape’, did not use his cavalry to intercept fleeing rebels, and so the revolt there smouldered on for another year.
The suppression of the Mutiny in central India was caught up with the fate of Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, one of the most striking figures in the whole conflict. Jhansi had been annexed by the British when Lakshmi Bai’s husband died without a natural heir. When the little British garrison surrendered in June she was believed to have been involved in the massacre of the prisoners.105 She certainly sought to come to terms with the British during the autumn, even as Major General Sir Hugh Rose’s Central India Field Force was moving into the area. But when it became clear that she would indeed be tried if captured, she at last sided with her staunchly anti-British troops, and energetically threw Jhansi into a state of defence. Sir Hugh Rose was forced to mount a formal siege, and the rani’s garrison steadfastly answered him shot for shot. Rose was about to order an assault when he discovered that Tantia Tope, a prominent Oudh rebel, was close at hand with a huge army – 22,000 men to Rose’s 3,000. Rose decided to take just under half his force out to the River Betwa to meet Tantia, and on 1 April he won a remarkable victory. Rose assaulted Jhansi the next day, taking the place after a bitter struggle, but the rani escaped and joined another rebel force, with whom she was killed fighting on 17 June 1859. Tantia Tope’s little army staggered on into Nagpur, and he was eventually captured and hanged. The Nana Sahib, arch-fiend in the eyes of the British, was never caught, but almost certainly died of fever in Nepal.
ONE OF THE RESULTS of the Mutiny was the replacement, in August 1858, of the Company’s rule by that of the Crown. The Secretary of State for India would have an advisory council of fifteen members, the majority of whom should have lived in India for at least ten years, eight nominated by the Crown and the rest by the Company’s outgoing Court of Directors. The governor-general became the viceroy and retained his supreme council. On 1 November of that year, Queen Victoria’s proclamation, embodying the new arrangements, was read out across India. It confirmed all existing grants and treaties, renounced further territorial ambition and promised religious toleration. Rebels who surrendered before 1 January 1859 would be pardoned unless they had been involved in massacres. The Company’s military forces were embodied in those of the Crown, giving rise to the almost bloodless ‘White Mutiny’ of 1859–61.
The legacy of the Mutiny was poisonous. Although Penderel Moon, a distinguished Indian administrator of a later generation, thought that relations between British and Indians were less damaged than others had suggested, even he acknowledged that: ‘The Mutiny did, however, tend to accentuate the social cleavage between the two races and to intensify the overbearing, contemptuous attitude of some of the British towards the Indians.’ The British sense of isolation and superiority was enhanced, and even if officials behaved courteously towards Indians of rank, they expected to be treated with deference. Some of them were ‘offensively arrogant’, and ‘non-officials of the rougher type’ behaved even worse.106 Philip Woodruff, another former official, emphasised that the Mutiny affected only part of India: the south was largely untouched. He thought that: ‘The civilian seems to have recovered more quickly than the soldier, both more quickly than the trader or planter.’ Even Alfred Lyall, who had been white-hot with fury at the massacre in the Bibighar at Cawnpore, wrote in November 1858 that: ‘In spite of all that has happened I take an immense interest in the natives of India and like constantly to be among them.’107
Nevertheless, the Mutiny had a ‘living and enduring presence’ as long as the British remained in India. When the last British soldiers left Lucknow in 1947, General Sir Francis Tuker even considered demolishing the flagstaff above the Residency (where the Union Jack had flown day and night since the siege) so that the Indian flag could not flutter over the holy ground.108
By ending the ‘doctrine of lapse’ and guaranteeing native rulers the right of succession, the British government actually made it more difficult to interfere in cases of manifest injustice. And a widespread recognition that this had been both an agrarian insurrection and a clash between Indian rulers, whose adherence reflected local loyalties and hostilities, as well as a military mutiny, persuaded many British politicians and administrators that the prevention of anarchy in India depended on the continuation of British rule. The fact that British victory had teetered in the balance was not forgotten: one deduction was that the proportion of British to Indian soldiers had been too small. There had been 45,000 Europeans to 232,000 Indians in 1857 – a ratio that was much the same as in 1835, and in the vital area from Delhi to Barrackpore just 5,000 British soldiers to 50,000 sepoys. In March 1859 a royal commission recommended that there should be at least 80,000 British soldiers to 190,000 Indian. In fact the recommended figures were never attained, with the maximum reached being 62,000 to 135,000, with an overall increase of some 30,000 in the 1880s due to the Russian threat to the North-West Frontier. In post-Mutiny India, British units were stitched into Indian brigades to ensure their ‘reliability’, a procedure which continued through both world wars.
Well aware that the new rifle had played such a significant role in the Mutiny, the government ensured that British units received new technology before Indian soldiers did, and that modern artillery was largely British-manned. The British soldiers who fought in the Second Afghan War of 1878–81 carried the new Martini-Henry rifle, while their Indian comrades were still armed with the Snider – essentially the old Enfield with an extemporised breech-loading mechanism. The Indian troopers of Hodson’s Horse, were carrying the old muzzle-loading Victoria carbine when they set off to join the Peshawar Valley Field Force at the start of the Second Afghan War, and received their ‘new’ Sniders on the march: ‘not a very suitable moment, one would have thought, for such a change’, mused the regimental historian. The regiment did not get Martini-Henry carbines until 1880, nine years after the weapon’s introduction into the British army.109