Nana Sahib’s involvement in the Cawnpore outbreak is significant for a number of reasons. In the first place, his pre-mutiny machinations indicate the existence of a plot for a rebellion by both civilians and sepoys that pre-dated the cartridge question by almost a year. Sitaram Bawa’s claim that the conspiracy got off the ground only after the annexation of Oudh is entirely consistent with the fact that two of the regiments then stationed at Lucknow – the 19th and 34th Native Infantry – were at the forefront of the disaffection in 1857. In this context, the cartridge controversy was a heaven-sent opportunity for the conspirators to unite Hindu and Muslim sepoys against their European masters. It may be no coincidence that the rumour about bone dust being added to flour originated at Cawnpore. Then there is Sitaram Bawa’s point that the ‘military classes’ were enticed by the promise that the old days of licence would be restored. This is important because it identifies plunder as a motive for mutiny. By 1856, with most of India under the heel of the British, the opportunity for Indian soldiers to supplement their relatively meagre pay with plunder had all but vanished. Only the replacement of the British with Indian rulers would bring back this cycle of war and rapine. Lastly the mutineers’ offer of a kingdom or death to Nana Sahib confirms that they were the real power behind the rebel movement (just as they were at Delhi and elsewhere). Yet only a handful of mutineers tried to set themselves up as rulers in their own right: possibly because they realized that only legitimate princes had a chance of gaining enough grass-roots support to defeat the British; and possibly because their chief aim had always been to attach themselves to a viable employer.
Of the six ruling princes named by Sitaram Bawa as party to the Nana’s conspiracy – the Nizam of Hyderabad, Maharaja Holkar of Indore, Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior and the Maharajas of Jaipur, Jodhpur and Jammu – not one openly rebelled during the Indian mutiny. But that was probably because they had the most to lose. The British certainly suspected more than one of them of disloyalty and came to the conclusion that they were waiting to see how events unfolded before they committed themselves. These suspicions were partly founded upon the inability or unwillingness of these princes to prevent their own troops from mutinying. Most of the European-officered Gwalior Contingent mutinied in the first two weeks of June 1857, as did a cavalry regiment of the Hyderabad Contingent. Two of Holkar’s Indian-controlled regiments rose and attacked the British Residency at Indore on 1 July, and the whole of the Jodhpur Legion turned against its officers in late August. Referring to the first three of these mutinies in a letter of 23 July, the Governor of Madras wrote: ‘Holkar’s and Scindiah’s conduct appears questionable, at all events they appear to have been shaken for a short time but subsequently to have recovered themselves & remained staunch… The Nizam [of Hyderabad] appears true at present but from all I can learn he is a wretched weak creature who will certainly go wrong if his present Minister, Salar Gang, should not be got rid of.’
The mutinies at Gwalior and Scindia’s reaction are particularly revealing. In late May Scindia told the British political agent, Major Macpherson, that the worst affected of his contingent (most of whom were purbias from Bengal) had been holding ‘nightly meetings for administering pledges’ and had been ‘boasting of the destruction of the English power and of all Christians’ since the arrival of news from Meerut. Furthermore ‘emissaries and letters from Delhi, Calcutta, and other centres of the revolt’ had been circulating in Gwalior. Six of these emissaries had been arrested and discharged as deserters from Bengal regiments, said Macpherson, but nothing more serious could be proved against them. Scindia’s own inquiries as to the cause of the revolt had revealed a ‘general hostility to our rule’ with the ‘cartridge question being declared to be merely its pretext’. Macpherson added:
Scindia and the Dewan[chief minister]… said most confidently that, as no reigning prince of influence had joined the revolt, and as its leaders at Delhi were plainly unequal to their great enterprise, but especially as Benares, Gya [Gaya], and the other centres of Hindu opinion, to which all had looked, had abstained from sanctioning any religious pretext alleged for it, when Delhi should be crushed, the belief in our ascendancy would at once return, and the revolt be arrested.
This may explain why Scindia never sided with his mutinous troops, despite severe pressure for him to do so after Macpherson and the other European survivors left Gwalior for Agra on 17 June. ‘I may observe,’ wrote Macpherson, ‘that had Scindia, in this the dark hour of the storm, supported by the Dewan alone with the two chiefs of his troops, yielded to the pressure of the opinions and temptations which impelled him to strike against us, the character of the revolt had been entirely changed… But he believed in our final triumph, and that it was his true policy to strain his power to contribute to it.’ For four months the troops ‘menaced, beseeched, dictated, wheedled, and insulted Scindia by turns’. He, in turn, used every stratagem available to keep them at Gwalior until the British had concentrated enough forces to retake Delhi. Then, said Macpherson, he ‘despatched them to rout by our arms’.
According to Ahsanullah Khan, the mutinous troops at Delhi persuaded the King to send shukkas (messages) to a number of princes – including the Maharajas of Gwalior, Jodhpur, Jaipur and Jammu – ‘calling upon them to come over with their troops and munitions of war’. But none of the above four replied because they had ‘no inclination to side with the King’. However, Scindia might have been hedging his bets. In a letter attributed to him of 18 November 1857, he congratulated the rebel Nawab of Banda for having reclaimed his former domain. ‘You have beaten and driven out the English,’ he wrote. ‘This is good news to me. Tell me of whoever comes to fight with you and I will give you assistance with my army… I hear that the Rewa Raja has allowed the English to stay with him. At this I am much displeased… I have published your name from this to Delhi.’ Such behaviour was certainly in line with Maratha diplomatic tradition: during the Second Maratha War the Peshwa, Baji Rao, was an official ally of the Company but kept in regular contact with its enemies, the Maharajas of Gwalior and Nagpur.
Former rulers – such as the Nawabs of Farrukhabad and Banda, the Raja of Assam, and the families of the late Rajas of Kolhapur, Satara and Jhansi – had less to lose and were more willing to risk rebellion. The young Raja of Assam, for example, was arrested and sent out of his province in September 1857 after being implicated in a plot to incite the 1st Assam Light Infantry to mutiny. The extent to which the Rani was complicit in the outbreak at Jhansi, on the other hand, is much disputed. As for the other former rulers, it is surely no coincidence that by far the most serious mutiny in the Bombay Army was perpetrated by sepoys of the 27th Native Infantry at Kolhapur. The Nawab of Farrukhabad, on the other hand, appears to have taken no part in any pre-mutiny plotting and agreed to set himself up as subordinate ruler to the King of Delhi only when mutineers threatened to kill him if he did not.
Other influential rebels included large landholders who had had their estates broken up by revenue settlements of the Company. The most notable was Raja Kunwar Singh of Jagdispur in Bihar, the recruiting heartland of the Bengal Native Infantry. S. B. Chaudhuri is not entirely convinced that Kunwar Singh incited the three regiments at Dinapore – the 7th, 8th and 40th Native Infantry – to mutiny on 25 July 1857. Yet the circumstantial evidence is compelling: the three regiments made straight for Jagdispur and put themselves under the raja’s command; they were joined, three weeks later, by the mutinous 5th Irregular Cavalry from Bhagalpur. Another disgruntled landholder was the Raja of Mainpuri, who had forfeited one hundred and forty-nine of his two hundred villages as a result of the British land settlement. He was indirectly implicated in the rising of the 10th Native Infantry at Fatehgarh on 18 June by the interception, two weeks earlier, of a letter from his uncle, exhorting the sepoys of the 10th to mutiny. The raja himself later petitioned the King of Delhi for troops, but the mutinous officers insisted that none could be sent until the British had been driven from the Ridge.