Eighteen fifty-seven

Surendra Nath Sen

Sen, Surendra Nath;

Eighteen fifty-seven

Publications Division, 1957, 466 pages

topics: |  india | history | 1857 | british-raj

Is there a single truth behind events in the mutiny?

a large number of histories have written of the events of 1857, mostly by britishers who have taken the evidence rather lightly and their moral indignation very heavily. in any event, most reconstructions and most of the evidence is based on the the extensive (British) records.

on the other hands, indian historiography has also had its biases. however, in the last few decads, there have been some balanced histories written. of these, surendranath sen's work stands out, in the objectivity and directness of presentation. it provides a more readable alternative to the colonial vituperation to be found in many British texts, some of them even now popular in India. Certainly the recent accounts provide a greater balance compared to the fanatical writings of Savarkar, or even the better documented position of RC Majumdar.

one of the problems faced by any historian writing about the uprising 1857 is what name to call it by. sen has shown his wisdom by avoiding completely politically loaded terms such as "mutiny", or "war of independence". he merely calls his book "eighteen fifty-seven".

Unfortunately this book, printed by the government of India, remains out of print...

British historiography

The British mainstream narrative tends to view the rebellion as a mutiny by the sepoys of the East India Company, caused by a rumour about animal fat in a cartridge, and possibly other grievances and other ill-understood rumours. the colonial anger at the violation of their privileged status - the established norm - results in moral rage. this arises from a violation of expectations, and may be compared to the visceral anger one feels when after a big flood, the shopkeeper charges ten times the normal price for a cup of tea; he has a limited supply (since roads are blocked) and many more customers than he can possibly serve. this is a price at which seller and buyer agree to exchange a good. yet one feels moral indignation.

thus, most british histories view the Indian violence as unpardonable, and take a severe view of Indian excesses. At the same time, we must remember that a few thousand Englishmen died in 1857, whereas the death toll for Indians, computed based on population records and emptied villages and letters retur to the Dead Letter Office may be about ten million in the Awadh (Lucknow/Kanpur) region alone.

the argument made by rudrangshu mukherjee in Spectre of violence) is that the "established norm" itself was disbalanced - it conferred a "monopoly on violence" to the English tribe, disenfranchising the natives. The violation of this monopoly in 1857 was the source of this moral anger, but the starting point itself was not balanced.

One of the saner voices in the British writing about the mutiny is the historian John Kaye, whose record provides the first source for any opinion to be formed about the mutiny. Kaye observed in his official history, written two decades after the events in the 1880s:

 An Englishman is almost suffocated with indignation when he reads
 that Mrs. Chambers or Miss Jennings was hacked to death by a
 dusky ruffian; but in Native histories... it may be recorded
 against our people, that mothers and wives and children, with
 less familiar names, fell miserable victims to the first swoop of
 English vengeance.  It may be, too, that the plea of
 provocation, which invests the most sanguinary acts of the white
 man in this deadly struggle is not wholly to be rejected when
 urged in extenuation of the worst deeds of those who have never
 known Christian teaching.

The time for these native histories have come, and i believe that while
some of their arguments may be debatable, on the whole they have achieved
a greater balance in this narrative, for example by shifting the focus
of the debate from the generals and their wives to the peasants and
their aspirations.

Modern Indian historiography

Starting with the work of S.B. Chaudhuri in the 1930s, a number of texts by
Indian historians have taken a broader view, suggesting that participation
may have involved more than a group of disgruntled sepoys, with support
from a wide section of the population, including a number of local kings
and zamindars.  In particular, the role of the north Indian villager
(peasant class), from whom the sepoy was drawn, has been widely analyzed
in the subaltern histories, and has emerged as a mainstream view over
the last three decades.  See e.g. Eric Stokes and C.A. Bayly,
The peasant armed: the Indian revolt of 1857 (1986) - largely a response to
the thesis of S.B. Chaudhuri and subsequent subaltern authors.  While not
quite a war of independence, it was clearly much more than a military
mutiny.

In 1956, on the eve of the centenary of the rebellion, Maulana Abdul Kalam
Azad, himself a respected scholar, and then the Minister for Education in
India's second Lok Sabha, commissioned historian S.N. Sen to write a
history of 1857, removing the prejudices of British historiography.  The
resulting text is well-balanced, and gives a very broad analysis of the
causes behind the event.

Subsequent texts, such as Ranajit Guha's British Imagination and Rudrangshu
Mukherjee's Awadh in Revolt, build on this view with additional material
emphasizing the broad discontent with the Company rule, and the many strands
of causes that led to that great upheaval.

Events at Kanpur

However, the gulf with the british position is hard to close.  This is
particularly true about the events at Kanpur, which were particularly 
poignant for the British at the time, and are being brought up in more
than a hundred mutiny novels - including one from 2010.  

Yet  a number of authors have pointed out that the only reliable 
first-person narrative of the events - from Lt. Mowbray Thomson, clearly
states that it was the tense Britishers who suddenly started firing when
the boatmen suddenly jumped into the water.   Sen below, and also others
(e.g. see Spectre of violence) have argued that 
in a tense situation where the two sides were firing at each other till
yesterday, such a sudden firing would definitely bring a hostile
response.  And given that the shores were laden with sepoys, and that the
British were sitting targets with their boats stuck in the mud, it is not
very hard to see how the entire British contingent would get wiped out. 

Yet, the mainstream history contintues to maintain that the events were a
conspiracy  by Nana.  Indeed, it is evident that had Nana intended
treachery, why would he have spent so much money and labour purchasing
the boats and fixing them up overnight - the murder could have been done
just as efficaciously on land.  Also, Mowbray clearly states that the
sepoys who met him and helped him bring his belongings to the river were
far from hostile, and certainly they had no inkling of a conspiracy. 

It is a situation where a dubious fact of history, just because it has
been repeated so often, continues its hold on the imagination. 

The following is an excerpt of how Sen views the events at Kanpur.

Excerpt: The Kanpur "massacre"

[background: after twenty days of fighting, the small british
contingent in "wheeler's entrenchment" at kanpur (near the present-day
memorial church) are offered terms of surrender, 

 each man being permitted to leave with his arms and sixty rounds
 of ammunition. Conveyance should be provided for the wounded, the
 women and the children, and boats should be kept ready at the
 ghat with food supply.

on 26th June evening, a british team inspects the sati chaura ghat and
finds about forty country boats "moored and apparently ready for
departure, some of them roofed, and others undergoing that process."  a
team of workers work through the night on this flotilla of boats, while
others arrange land transport to the river. ]

27 June 1857. Morning

On the morning of the 27th sixteen elephants and seventy to eighty palanquins
came to convey the fugitives to the boats. But all of them could not be
accommodated, and Captain Moore, who was supervising the operations, had to
come for a second time. "The women and children were put on the elephants,
and into bullock carts; the able-bodied walked down indiscriminately, after
the advance had gone." 

[many britishers have misgivings about the pact, there is a lot of suspicion.
some sepoys came to the entrenchment, "inquiring after their old
officers whom they had missed," says Mowbray Thomson, "and they appeared much
distressed at hearing of their death." 

 I inquired of another sepoy of the 53d, 'Are we to go to
 Allahabad withbut molestation?' He affirmed that such was his
 firm belief; and I do not suppose that the contemplated massacre
 had been divulged beyond the councils of its brutal projectors.
       p.145

The rear was brought up by Major Vibart, who was the last officer in the
intrenchment. Some of the rebels who had served in this officer's regiment
insisted on carrying out the property which belonged to him. They loaded a
bullock cart with boxes, and escorted the Major's wife and family down to
the boats, with the most profuse demonstrations of respect."  

By 9 o'clock the last boat had received her complement. If anything had
happened on the way Mowbray Thomson and Delafosse were unaware of it.

First shots fired from the boats

[The monsoons are yet to come.  The water is shallow, and it's hard to
launch the boats.  tension is mounting. ]

The river was low, the boats had no gangway, and the passengers, men, women
and children, had to wade through the water. What followed, let Mowbray
Thomson relate. No one was likely to know the whole truth, for no one could
possibly have witnessed everything. There was a huge crowd on the river
banks that morning, and thousands of spectators had gathered to see their
former rulers leave. But there were no more reliable witnesses than Mowbray
Thomson and Delafosse, two of the four survivors, who escaped the massacre
and lived to record their unhappy experience. They were both of them
trained observers, but while Delafosse's account is very brief, Mowbray
Thomson's narrative is more detailed. Neither of them had complete
confidence in Nana and his  counsellors.  p.146

Thomson writes:
 As soon as Major Vibart had stepped into his boat, 'Off' was the
 word; but at a signal from the shore, the native boatmen, who
 numbered eight and a coxswain to each boat, all jumped over and waded
 to the shore. We fired into them immediately, but the majority of
 them escaped, and are now plying their old trade in the neighbourhood
 of Cawnpore. Before they quitted us, these men had contrived to
 secrete burning charcoal in the thatch of most of the
 boats. 

 Simultaneously with the departure of the boatmen, the identical
 troopers who had escorted Major Vibart to the ghaut opened upon
 us with their carbines. As well as the confusion, caused by the
 burning of the boats, would allow, we returned the fire of these
 horsemen, who were about fifteen or sixteen in number, but they
 retired immediately after the volley they had given us.

[Note that firing by the sepoys is mentioned only after the British
start firing at the boatmen.]

Only one boat escapes

Then followed pandemonium. Most of the boats could not be moved, though the
passengers jumped into the water and tried to push them afloat. Fire was
opened from ambushed guns and the thatched roofs of the boats were in
flames. Women and children crouched behind the boats and "stood up to their
chins in the river" to avoid the thickly falling bullets. Vibart's boat,
however, drifted into deep waters with its thatched covering
unburnt. Mowbray Thomson swam to this boat and was pulled in. A second boat
also got away from the ghat but a round shot below the water mark sent it
down. The survivors were rescued and taken in Vibart's boat. With the help
of spars and pieces of wood the passengers tried their utmost to move the
boat out of the danger zone, but grape and round shot fell all
around. About mid-day the fugitives got out of range of the big guns but
they were followed by musket fire the rest of the day. At night burning
arrows were shot and a fire boat was sent down stream with a view to
setting fire to the boat.

They had a brief respite in the morning, but they learnt from some villagers,
who were bathing in the river, that Babu Ram-baksh, a powerful zamindar, was
waiting at Nazafgarh ready to intercept them. At about 2 o'clock they reached
the dreaded place, and, as 111 luck would have it, the boat ran aground and
offered a fixed target for the musketeers on the banks. A gun was later
brought, but a lucky shower put it out of action. At sunset a boat-load of
armed men came from Kanpur but their boat also got stuck on a sand bank. The
fugitives anticipated their attack and completely routed them. The boat ran
aground for a second time; though a strong hurricane released it soon
afterwards.

By this time their number was reduced to seven. Two of them were shot while
swimming and a third got to a sand-bank where he was knocked on the
head. The pursuers at last gave up the chase. After three hours of swimming
the survivors decided to take some rest. They sat by the shore, with water
up to the neck, when they were hailed by friendly voices from the bank. At
first they could not believe in their good luck, but when they were
convinced that they were safe at last, they found that they had lost all
their energy so long sustained by fear of life and had to be helped out of
the shallow water. Thomson was clad in a shirt only, Delafosse had a sheet
about his loins, Sullivan and Murphy had no clothing of any kind. Their
host was Digvijaya Singh of Murar Mau, a zamindar of Oudh, whose residence
they reached in the evening of the 29th June.

Delafosse's brief account differs in some detail from that of Mowbray
Thomson.
 We got down to the river and into the boats, without being molested
 in the least; but no sooner were we in the boats and had laid down
 our muskets, and taken off our coats, in order to work easier at the
 boats than the cavalry gave the order to fire two guns that had been
 hidden; they were run out and opened fire on us immediately, whilst
 sepoys came from all directions, and kept up a heavy fire. The men
 jumped out of the boats, and instead of trying to get the boats loose
 from their moorings rushed to the first boat they saw loose; only
 three boats got safe over to the opposite side of the river, but were
 met there by two field pieces guarded by numbers of cavalry and
 infantry. Before the boats had gone a mile down the stream half of
 our small party were either killed or wounded, and two of our boats
 had been swamped.

  
the only extant sketch of nana sahib, as reproduced by Sen (p.178).  a
statue from the nana rao park in bithoor, clearly based on this image.

Sen's analysis

Thomson and Delafosse had obviously boarded two different boats. Their
accounts make it clear that if any outrage had been committed on the way,
they were unaware of it. Mowbray Thomson positively states that the sepoys
were quite courteous before the embarkation was completed, and as he says,
nothing happened until Major Vibart, the last man to leave the camp, had
boarded his boat.

It can be assumed that the story of Colonel Ewart being killed in the rear
of the column and General Wheeler being beheaded as he was getting out of
his palanquin does not rest on any substantial evidence. Ewart would have
been missed at the ghat and Wheeler did not ride a palanquin, but walked
with his wife and daughter all the way to the river. 

It is not clear who fired the first shot, men from Mowbray Thomson's
boat or the horsemen on the banks. For, he is definite that when the
boatmen deserted they were immediately fired on, and simultaneously the
horsemen, who had accompanied Major Vibart, fired a volley. [p. 147-149)

[Note also that by Delafosse's account, the boatmen did not leave the boat
all at once...]

Other arguments against a conspiracy theory

The boats were collected and fitted on very short notice. They did not belong
to the boatmen, but to banias of Maheshwari and Agarwal section. The
proprietors were duly compensated for their loss.  On the evening of the 26th
when the Committee of Inspection went to see them, many of the boats still
lacked their bamboo platforms and roofs of straw. But thousands of labourers
worked all night to remove these deficiencies.

If Nana meditated treachery from the first, one wonders why so much money
and labour were wasted on the boats, for once out of the entrenchment, the
English would be as helpless in the midst of a hostile crowd on land, as
they were on the river. They had their arms, and it could not be expected
that they would let their women and children be slaughtered without a
desperate fight.

[read together with other pieces of evidence, such as the impression
that thompson clearly conveys that the sepoys themselves did not seem
to be aware of any conspiracy, we may infer that the episode at sati
chaura ghat was an unintended offshoot, possibly of some nervous
british officers starting to fire first. ]

---

amitabha mukerjee (mukerjee [at-symbol] gmail) 2013 Aug 30