On 8 July 1859 a ‘State of Peace’ was officially declared throughout India. A day later, as a symbolic gesture, ex-King Wajid Ali of Oudh and his advisers were released from Fort William. Canning had wanted to mark the declaration of peace with a day of thanksgiving and prayer; but he agreed to postpone it until all operations in Oudh had ceased. It eventually took place on 28 July, with the Viceroy proclaiming: ‘War is at an end. Rebellion is put down. The Noise of Arms is no longer heard where the enemies of the State have persisted in their last struggle. The Presence of large Forces in the Field has ceased to be necessary. Order is re-established; and peaceful pursuits everywhere have been resumed.’
Canning’s reward for ‘saving’ India was a GCB and an earldom. Neither honour gave him much pleasure: the former because Sir John Lawrence, his subordinate, had received his a full eighteen months earlier; the latter because he had always looked upon viscounts as ‘a more select caste’ than earls. He had, in any case, no heir to leave the title to.
Lawrence had also received a promotion at the beginning of the year when his post was upgraded from Chief Commissioner to Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab. Soon after he returned home to England to take up a seat on the new Council of India. Before he left, however, he sent Canning a list of Indian princes who deserved recognition for their support during the mutiny. Chief among them were the three great Sikh rulers of the Cis-Sutlej States – the Maharaja of Patiala and the Rajas of Jhind and Nabha – who had safeguarded the lines of communication to the Punjab and made the reconquest of Delhi possible. Patiala, the most influential of the three, was given land with a rental value of 2 lakhs a year, a mansion in Delhi that had belonged to a rebel and the dubious honour of calling himself ‘Choicest son of the British Government’. Jhind, the only prince to lead his troops in person to Delhi, was allotted land worth a lakh of rupees, a house in Delhi, an increase in his royal salute from nine to eleven guns and the even more dubious title of ‘Most cherished son of the true Faith’. Nabha received similar rewards. As a further concession, all three were given the right to resolve disputed successions or failures of line among themselves.
The great princes were also rewarded. Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior got land worth 3 lakhs a year and the authority to increase his personal army from 3,000 to 5,000. Maharaja Holkar of Indore, whose conduct was not so clear cut, gained no territory but, his two sons having died, was granted the right of adoption with undisputed succession. The Nizam of Hyderabad received back a parcel of land that Dalhousie had confiscated from his father; he was also given the vacant state of Shorapur and his debts, estimated at half a million pounds, were cancelled. Nepal was thanked for its military assistance by the return of territory that had been annexed in 1815. In addition, Jung Bahadur was awarded the GCB. And all Indian princes benefited from the reinstatement of the right of adoption.
Canning continued as Viceroy of India until March 1862, presiding over a series of government measures designed to make the British Raj more inclusive. In 1861, for example, he enlarged the legislative council to make room for Indian non-official members. He also encouraged education: Calcutta, Bombay and Madras universities were founded during the mutiny and grants were given to private colleges. This was a deliberate attempt to create a ‘westernized’ Indian middle class that would cooperate rather than confront. In one respect it succeeded: by the mid 1880s there were 8,000 Indians with degrees and a further half a million had graduated from secondary schools. Yet it was this English-speaking elite – Gandhi et al. – that would ultimately spearhead the campaign for independence.
Canning’s other post-mutiny initiatives included the introduction of a penal code, the acceleration of railway building and a Bengal Rent Act to protect tenants against eviction or gratuitous rent increases. But the most important reform of his viceregal administration was that of the army.* Prompted by the recommendations of the Peel Commission† – set up in London in July 1858 to advise on the reorganization of the Indian Army – Canning’s government introduced a number of changes to prevent a large-scale mutiny from ever happening again. They succeeded. From 1858 to independence in 1947, the Indian Army had just twenty minor mutinies, half of them during the First and Second World Wars. The smallest involved twenty men, the largest a single regiment. Only one – the mutiny of four companies of the 5th Light Infantry at Singapore in 1915 – resulted in sepoy violence against their officers. Most of the mutinies – including the seven that occurred between 1886 and 1914 – were little more than peaceful collective protests over professional issues such as pay, allowances, promotions and conditions of service.
That the mutinies did not develop into anything more significant can be put down to the post-1857 military reforms: the increased ratio of European to Indian troops (which remained at around 1:2 until 1914), the concentration of artillery in European hands and the brigading of one European regiment with every two Indian corps so that no major station was left without a European presence. Just as significant were the improvements made to the service conditions of all three presidency armies, and the Bengal Army in particular: the creation of a Staff Corps and the selection of European officers for more lucrative regimental duties that came to be regarded as an honour rather than a chore; the increase in the power of commanding officers to punish and reward, including the replacement of seniority with merit as the dominant principle of promotion; the switch to irregular regiments with fewer Europeans, which gave Indian officers more responsibility and greater job satisfaction; the increase in pay for Indian infantry officers and all native cavalrymen; the switch from tight and uncomfortable European-style uniforms to those more suited to the Indian climate; and, crucially, the Bengal Army’s shift in recruitment from the high-caste Hindus of Oudh and the North-Western Provinces to the Sikhs and Muslims of the Punjab, the Gurkhas of Nepal and the lower castes of Hindustan.
No one was more central to the creation of the new ‘irregular’ system than Brigadier-General John Jacob, who had been urging similar reforms since the 1840s. If Jacob had been listened to earlier, the Indian mutiny might not have occurred. He died in December 1858; but he would have been gratified to hear the judgement passed on the ‘irregular’ system by Lord Napier, the Commander-in-Chief of India, in 1875: ‘No impartial observer, who knows what the old army was, and what the present one is, can hesitate for a moment to pronounce the regiments of the present day greatly superior to those of the old army; better drill [sic] and disciplined, more obedient, less fettered by assumptions of religious restraint, more moveable, more ready for every service.’ A greater contrast with the indiscip-lined, caste-ridden, disaffected Bengal Army of 1857 is hard to imagine.
In November 1861, just four months before her husband was due to return home, Lady Canning died of jungle fever. A heartbroken Earl Canning handed over the viceroyalty to Lord Elgin in March 1862 and arrived back in London a month later. But the burden of six years as head of the Indian government had taken its toll and he died on 17 June at the age of fifty. ‘I was assured by a great doctor on his return that he was perfectly sound,’ wrote Lord Granville. ‘He died, and nearly all his organs were found to be destroyed by the heavy strain, possibly by that of the last additional year, which a sense of duty made him go through.’
Within a year Lord Elgin had followed Canning to the grave. He was succeeded by Sir John Lawrence, who had been created a baronet and given a life pension of £2,000. As in the Punjab, Lawrence sought to centralize authority by keeping financial control in the Viceroy’s hands and blocking the creation of executive councils for his lieutenant-governors. He was also successful in resisting the Indianization of the higher civil service. It had been open to Indians since 1853, when public competition was introduced, but only one Indian actually entered the service before 1871. Lawrence’s rule was typically paternalistic: he tried to lighten the fiscal burden on the peasantry by limiting government expenditure, lowering the salt tax and taxing the middle classes; he also set in motion an ambitious programme of railway and canal building, and did much to promote public health, prison reform and primary education. He had become increasingly convinced that British rule in India was part of God’s purpose. ‘We have not been elected or placed in power by the people,’ he wrote, ‘but we are here through our moral superiority, by the force of circumstances and by the will of Providence.’ Lawrence’s views were representative of the shift in the British perception of Empire from trading opportunity to civilizing mission (or ‘white man’s burden’). He was made Baron Lawrence of the Punjab on his return to England in 1869 and died ten years later.
Lawrence’s senior advisers in the Punjab in 1857 also did well. Robert Montgomery was made GCB and Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab. Herbert Edwardes was also knighted, but had to turn down Lawrence’s offer of the Punjab because of ill health. He died of pleurisy in 1868. Of the Punjab soldiers who survived the mutiny, Neville Chamberlain was the most successful. After a six-year spell as Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army in the 1870s, he joined the Viceroy’s Supreme Council and eventually retired to England in 1881. He lived long enough to criticize the conduct of the Boer War and finally died, as Field-Marshal Sir Neville Chamberlain, in 1902 at the age of eighty-two.
As well as the Barony of Clyde, Sir Colin Campbell received the thanks of Parliament and a pension of £2,000 a year. He did not enjoy it for long. Having left India in June 1860, he died at Chatham in Kent three years later. He was succeeded as Commander-in-Chief of India by the most successful British general of the mutiny: Sir Hugh Rose (later Baron Stathnairn). Rose himself was replaced, in 1866, by Campbell’s chief of staff, Sir William Mansfield (later Baron Sandhurst). But all these illustrious careers were eclipsed by that of young Fred Roberts, who rose to become Field-Marshal Earl Roberts, VC, the sole Company officer to command both the Indian and British Armies. The only other junior officer to achieve a similar prominence was Captain Garnet Wolseley of the 90th Foot, who served under Campbell at Lucknow in 1858. Wolseley became one of the great reforming generals of the British Army and was Roberts’s predecessor as Commander-in-Chief.
Few of the senior Bengal officers had been able to cope with the emergency of May 1857. Fred Roberts put this down to their age and inefficiency and blamed the Bengal Army’s seniority system of promotion. He added:
Nearly every military officer who held a command or high position on the staff in Bengal when the Mutiny broke out, disappeared from the scene within the first few weeks, and was never heard of officially again. Some were killed, some died of disease, but the great majority failed completely to fulfil the duties of the positions they held, and were consequently considered unfit for further employment. Two Generals of divisions were removed from their commands, seven Brigadiers were found wanting in the hour of need,* and out of the seventy-three regiments of Regular Cavalry and Infantry which mutinied, only four Commanding Officers were given other commands, younger officers being selected to raise and command the new regiments.
Even Major-General John Hearsey, the one divisional commander who responded energetically to the outbreak of mutiny, was not re-employed. He was knighted, however, and died of bronchitis at Boulogne in 1865.
What of the lesser lights? ‘Butcher’ Vibart, the sole survivor of his family, retired as a colonel and later published an account of the mutiny. He died in 1923 at the age of eighty-six. Lieutenant Hugh Gough of the 3rd Light Cavalry won a Victoria Cross for two outstanding acts of bravery at the Alambagh in November 1857 and Jelalabad three months later. He retired as General Sir Hugh Gough, VC, and also published his memoirs.† Ensign Everard Phillipps, who had joined the 60th Rifles after the mutiny of his regiment at Meerut, was killed at Delhi on 18 September 1857. Fifty years later, his gallantry at Delhi was rewarded when his family was presented with his posthumous VC.*
Elizabeth Sneyd and her daughter Louisa were eventually reunited with Louisa’s husband, Dr Robert Hutchinson, who had survived the outbreak at Fatehpur. But Louisa’s baby son died in Calcutta at the age of two and a half months. Stanley Delhiforce Tytler, another child born during the mutiny, lived through the hazards of the Ridge and accompanied his parents to England in 1860. Before leaving, Robert Tytler had bought the King of Delhi’s crown – a sort of cap set with diamonds, emeralds, rubies and pearls – and two of his gilt throne chairs at an auction of the Delhi prizes. He was offered £1,000 for the crown by a Bond Steet jeweller but was persuaded to sell it to Queen Victoria by Sir Charles Wood, then Secretary of State for India. The most the Queen was prepared to pay, however, was £500. Tytler accepted it because Wood assured him that he would be given a plum appointment on his return to India. Wood added that the Queen was interested in buying the throne chairs and so Tytler sent them to Buckingham Palace. But he was never paid for them. When he made inquiries, Wood told him that Her Majesty was under the impression that the chairs were included in the original price. Afraid of losing his appointment, he let the matter drop. ‘But he was very loyal,’ wrote Harriet, ‘which made it very difficult for him to understand how Her Majesty could lend herself, for the sake of filthy lucre, to deprive one of her subjects, a poor military man who, she should have known, had lost his all in the mutiny.’ The crown and chairs are still in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. To add insult to injury, Tytler never got his plum appointment. Instead, in 1862, he was given the superintendency of the Andaman Islands’ penal colony, a post that Harriet thought was ‘worth having as a major, but not as a colonel’. He accepted it anyway, ‘hoping that by doing so it might lead to something better’. It did not. Robert fell ill in 1870 and died a year later. Harriet outlived him by thirty-six years.
But the most poignant and tragic denouement of the mutiny involved a loyal Indian soldier: Jemadar Sitaram Pandy of the 63rd Bengal Native Infantry. In June 1857 Sitaram was on leave at his village in the Rai Bareilly district of Oudh when a band of mutineers appeared. ‘I explained to them the folly of going against the English Government,’ he recalled, ‘but these men were so intoxicated with the plunder they had taken, and by their hope of reward from the Emperor of Delhi, that they turned on me and were about to shoot me on the spot for having dared to speak out in favour of the English Government. They called me a traitor, and ended by taking me prisoner.’ But as the mutineers neared Cawnpore they were attacked by a troop of volunteer cavalry under Captain Lousada Barrow – part of Havelock's relief column – and Sitaram was released. As he was not a horseman, but could read and write Persian, Barrow made him the troop interpreter.
I went about with this rissalah for about six weeks [he remembered], during which time it destroyed several bands of mutineers and one day had a hand-to-hand fight with a party of regular cavalry. They fired off their pistols and made off as hard as they could although they were three times the size of our party. Nineteen sowars were killed and twenty-one of the best of the Government’s horses were taken. We lost five men killed and seven wounded. After this our Troop returned to Cawnpore, which had been re-taken twice by the English.
At Cawnpore Sitaram was transferred to the 12th Punjab Infantry as a supernumerary jemadar. Thereafter he fought in several actions, culminating in the pursuit of the rebels to the Nepal border. But it was during the capture of Lucknow, in March 1858, that Sitaram faced his greatest test of loyalty. A number of mutineers had been captured in one of the enclosed buildings near Lucknow and Sitaram was told to execute them. To his horror he discovered that one of them was his long-lost son, Ananti Ram, whom he had not seen for twenty-five years. He wrote later:
The prisoners were to be shot at four o’clock in the afternoon and I must be my son’s executioner! Such is fate! I went to see the Major sahib and requested that I might be relieved of this duty as a very great favour. He was very angry and said he would bring me before a court-martial for trying to shirk my duty… I burst into floods of tears. I told him that I would shoot every one of the prisoners with my own hands if he ordered me but I confessed that one of them was my own son… He ordered my unfortunate son to be brought before him and questioned him very strictly.
I shall never forget this terrible scene. Not for one moment did I consider requesting that his life should be spared – that he did not deserve. Eventually the Major came to believe in the truth of my statement and ordered me to be relieved from this duty. I went to my tent bowed down with grief which was made worse by the gibes and taunts of the Sikhs who declared I was a renegade. In a short time I heard a volley. My son had received the reward for mutiny!… Through the kindness of the Major I was allowed to perform the funeral rites over my misguided son. He was the only one of the prisoners over whom it was performed, for the remainder were all thrown to the jackals and the vultures.
Two years later Sitaram was promoted to the rank of subedar. But at sixty-five he was too old to perform his duties. ‘I was expected to be as active as ever,’ he wrote, ‘and no allowance was made for my forty-eight years’ service. No one bothered to remember that I had carried a musket for thirty years and had been present in as many battles as most of the officers had lived years. I was shouted at by the Adjutant as if I was a bullock, and he a mere boy, young enough to be my grandson. I was abused by the Commanding Officer, and called a fool, a donkey, and an old woman!’ It was a relief when, later that year, he was pensioned off by an invaliding committee. ‘The Company Bahadur and its officers were much kinder to the people of India than the present Government,’ he reminisced. ‘If it were not for the old servants of the Company, it would be even worse than it is.’
Among those ‘old servants’ was J. T. Norgate, Sitaram’s former commandant, who persuaded Sitaram to write his memoirs. Sitaram completed the manuscript in 1861, shortly after his retirement, and sent a copy to Norgate. He translated it into English and it was finally published in 1873. It remains the only printed account of the mutiny period by an Indian soldier.
Sitaram had seen much, but his regrets were few. He signed off:
Thanks be to God the Creator! I lack nothing thanks to the bounty of the Sirkar, and I have a son left to perform my funeral ceremonies. If your Lordship, when you return to your own country, will always remember that the old Subedar Sita Ram was a true and faithful servant of the English Government, it will be enough for me.