By 1857 the Bengal Army was ripe for mutiny. Its infantry regiments, in particular, contained a significant proportion of malcontents who were seeking an end to British rule. They were, by definition, ambitious men drawn from a complete cross-section of army ranks. Their aim was to replace their British employers with a native government that would, at the very least, provide greater career opportunities and increased pay.
A similar network of conspirators had, according to Sir Charles Napier, coordinated the Punjab mutinies of 1849/50. He explained:
In all mutinies, some men more daring than others are allowed to take the lead while the more wary prepare to profit when the time suits; a few men in a few corps, a few corps in an army begin; if successful they are joined by their more calculating, and by their more timid comrades… To what extent [the conspiracy] was secretly carried is unknown; but the four sepoys condemned [at Wazirabad] went from company to company administering unlawful oaths to insist on higher pay from a Government of a different religion, and a different race! Many regiments were of the same mind, and it may be assumed that each had, at least, four agitators similarly employed.
Similar cabals were present in most Bengal native regiments in 1857. During his twelve years as adjutant of the 17th Native Infantry, Major Frederick Burroughs had established a ‘thorough system of espionage’ that enabled him to know exactly what was going on in the regiment. But when he tried to resurrect the system on returning to the 17th as commanding officer in early 1857, he found ‘no one willing or possessing sufficient courage’ to give him any information. This, and other circumstances, caused him to conclude that ‘the plot for revolt was not recent, although probably known to a select few only in each Regiment’.
It was not just disgruntled sepoys who were plotting to topple the British. Indian civilians were also involved, particularly members of princely families who had lost out during Dalhousie’s time as Governor-General: men like Nana Govind Dhondu Pant, better known as Nana Sahib,* the adopted son of Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa of the Maratha Confederacy. Exiled from Poona after his defeat in the Third Maratha War, Baji Rao had arrived at Bithur on the Ganges in February 1819, accompanied by thousands of bedraggled retainers. He provided for them out of his Company pension and the residue of a vast fortune that had once topped 50 million rupees. He also used the money to build a sprawling palace known as Saturday House on the banks of the Ganges, filled with carpets, tapestries, European chandeliers and ‘twenty-five chiming clocks’. But despite his eleven wives and countless dancing girls, Baji Rao managed to produce only two sons and both died in infancy. So in 1827, to ensure a smooth passage to the afterlife, he adopted two infant brothers with impeccable Maratha pedigrees: Nana Sahib, two, and his brother, Bala Rao, one. Their father, Mahadev Rao, a learned Deccani Brahman who had travelled the 700 miles from his home in the Western Ghats to join the former Peshwa’s court at Bithur, had the same caste name as his royal master; their mother was a sister of one of Baji Rao’s wives.
Baji Rao died, at the age of seventy-six, in 1851. According to the terms of his will, the Nana was left ‘the throne of the Peshwa’, his ‘Dominions, Wealth… family possessions, Treasure’ and all his ‘real and personal property’. Yet Baji Rao had long since lost his kingdom, and the British had made it clear that his huge annual pension would not be extended to his heir – adopted or not. After his death the British commissioner at Bithur informed the Nana that he would also forfeit Baji Rao’s seal, his honorific title of maharaja and even his annual allocation of blank cartridges. That left just his Bithur estate and a huge personal fortune, including an annual income of 80,000 rupees from public securities.
The Nana made repeated efforts to recover Baji Rao’s titles and pension. He petitioned the Governor-General, the Court of Directors and the Board of Control – all to no avail. He even enlisted a British barrister, John Lang, to plead his case. Lang had made his reputation by successfully suing the East India Company on behalf of Joti Prasad, an Agra banker who had lent the British almost half a million pounds to fight wars in Afghanistan and Gwalior. Not content with reneging on its debt, the Company had charged Prasad with criminal behaviour. Lang secured both his acquittal and the return of his money – an unlikely feat that was acknowledged when a large Indian crowd carried the tubby lawyer shoulder high from the Agra courthouse. He was still basking in the success of this case when he was invited to Bithur to discuss the Nana’s suit.
Lang’s recollection of their meeting gives a fascinating glimpse of the Nana’s eccentric court. On arriving at Saturday House, Lang was conducted to a suite of guest rooms where he was offered ‘every kind of European drink’ and even a beef dinner. But mindful of the Nana’s brahmanical sensibilities, he opted for rice and vegetables and ate alone at the former mess table of a British cavalry regiment. The soup was served from a trifle dish, the pudding in a soup-plate and the claret in a ‘richly cut champagne glass’. A bedroom towel served as a napkin. After the meal, Lang was taken through a maze of dark passages to the royal apartment, where he found the Nana reclining on a Turkish carpet, surrounded by a sword, a hookah and a nosegay. Lang recalled a portly, sallow, expressionless thirty-year-old of medium height with an aquiline nose and large eyes. As a youth he had affected a small upturned moustache, but now his face and head were clean-shaven but for a small area covered by his skullcap. One Cawnpore surgeon, who treated the Nana for an infected toe, described him as ‘an excessively uninteresting person’ who might have passed for a bazaar trader had it not been for his tight kimkhob (gold-embroidered) blouse, necklace of large pearls and small, jewel-encrusted Maratha turban.
The Nana began by complimenting Lang on winning the Prasad case (‘The whole world is ringing with the praise of your illustrious name’). He then offered the barrister a puff of his hookah before getting down to business. A munshi was summoned to read aloud the detailed petition that had been sent to Lord Dalhousie. Lang, fighting off sleep, expressed astonishment that ‘so much injustice can possibly exist’. Eventually he was escorted back to his room and massaged to sleep by four burly attendants. The following morning, during a carriage trip to Cawnpore, the Nana repeated his gripe with the government and Lang promised to take it up with Dalhousie in person; if that did not succeed, he would, on returning to England, seek an audience with Queen Victoria herself. Lang, of course, knew that the Nana’s case was hopeless and had no intention of approaching the Queen. He later described the Nana as ‘not a man of ability, nor a fool’, a man not dissimilar to most Indian princes. ‘During my rambles in India,’ he wrote, ‘I have been the guest of some scores of rajahs, great and small, and I never knew one who had not a grievance.’
At Saturday House, Lang also came across Tatya Tope, or ‘Bennie’ as he was called then, the son of Baji Rao’s dispenser of charities. Lang wrote: ‘He was not a servant exactly – at all events not a menial servant – but one of those numerous “hangers-on” of Nana Sahib who repaid by flattery the favours they received in the shape of board, lodging and presents.’ Lang added:
He was a man of about the middle height – say five feet eight – rather slightly made, but very erect. He was far from good-looking. The forehead was low, the nose rather broad at the nostrils, and his teeth irregular and discoloured. His eyes were expressive and full of cunning, like those of most Asiatics; but he did not strike me as a man of eminent ability. There were a few men amongst Nana Sahib’s flatterers who were really clever men, but they were not Mahrattas; and my impression is that Bennie was not a Mahratta, but a member of some obscure family in the Upper Provinces of India, under British rule. Like the rest of the tribe of flatterers who surrounded Nana Sahib, Bennie was obsequious and cringing to every European who visited Bithoor. This demeanour, of course, was not the offspring of respect, but prompted rather by the impression that it might tend to some advantage.
The most noteworthy non-Maratha member of the Nana’s court was a handsome and intelligent young Muslim of Pathan descent named Azimullah Khan. He and his mother had arrived in Cawnpore as starving refugees during the famine of 1837 and were fortunate enough to be employed as household servants by Revd Carshore, founder of the Cawnpore mission of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), and later by Revd Perkins, Carshore’s successor. Perkins encouraged the quick-witted Azimullah to attend the Free School, where he became fluent in both English and French. But Azimullah would not submit to his mentor’s crude attempts to convert him to Christianity, and it was during this period, wrote one historian, that his ‘gratitude toward his British benefactors degenerated into what would later manifest itself as a genocidal loathing’. The same writer has suggested that the ‘pretty’ young Muslim may have been the victim of an unwelcome sexual advance from a ‘tortured’ Englishman. If so, it did not prevent him from working for Europeans – first as a khidmatgar, then as a munshi – until he was sacked by Brigadier Ashburnham in 1850 ‘under an accusation of bribery and corruption’. Fortunately he was well acquainted with the former Peshwa’s adopted sons, having taught them English at the SPG’s academy at Bithur in the 1840s, and after Baji Rao’s death he became one of the Nana’s most trusted advisers.
As such he was sent to London with another Muslim, Mahomed Ali Khan, to plead the Nana’s case. The mission failed, but Azimullah made a lasting impression on English society with his Western clothes, impeccable manners and formidable intellect. At East India House, the Company’s neoclassical headquarters in Leadenhall Street, he met the great Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill, then the Company’s liaison officer with the Indian princely states, and through him Lady Duff Gordon, the 33-year-old wife of the Prime Minister’s cousin. A beautiful eccentric who smoked cheroots and whose dress was memorably described as ‘half-way between [that of] a German student and an English waterman’, Duff Gordon was also a brilliant linguist and translator whose salon was patronized by the great writers and thinkers of her day. It was there that Azimullah was introduced to, among others, Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray, Carlyle and Macaulay. His interest in Duff Gordon, however, was not purely intellectual and many suspected them of being lovers. He certainly cut a swathe through a number of other ladies’ bedrooms, including that of a ‘Miss A’ of Brighton who addressed him as ‘Mon cher Goody’ and promised never to reveal the secrets of their passionate liaison. He later tried – in his role as royal studmaster – to lure Lady Duff Gordon, Miss A and others to Bithur to meet Nana Sahib. But without success – or regret. Privately he had little respect for Western women: unless they were restrained as they were in the East, he commented, it was inevitable that ‘like moths in the candlelight, they will fly and get burned’.
During his stay in England, Azimullah spent tens of thousands of the Nana’s pounds hiring lawyers, bribing clerks and entertaining officials. But the Court of Directors would not budge in their determination to withhold all of Baji Rao’s pension and titles from his adopted son. Azimullah and Mahomed Ali finally accepted defeat and set off for India in the summer of 1855. En route they learnt of a British setback in the Crimea and decided to see for themselves. At Constantinople, Azimullah came across William Howard Russell of The Times, who was on the first assignment of a long and illustrious career as a war correspondent. Russell remembered the Muslim envoy as a ‘handsome, slim young man, of dark-olive complexion, dressed in an Oriental costume’, who told him that he was anxious to see Sebastopol and ‘those great Roostums, the Russians, who have beaten French and English together’. But it was Azimullah’s boasting of his success in London society, and the tone of his remarks, that caused Russell to ‘regard him with suspicion, mingled, I confess, with dislike’.
They met again a few weeks later in the Crimea where, according to Russell, Azimullah discovered a British Army in a depressed state and formed ‘a very unfavourable opinion of its morale and physique in comparison with that of the French’. In India, the bazaars of the great military stations were soon buzzing with the news that Britain had suffered a catastrophic reverse in the Crimea. ‘[The] news was always fabricated to show that the Sirkar was usually defeated, and that the Russians had destroyed all the English soldiers and sunk all their warships,’ recalled Sitaram Pandy. ‘This idea was fostered by interested parties with the result that when the Mutiny broke out, most Indians believed that the Sirkar had no other troops than those which were already in India.’ The sepoys’ belief in British invincibility had already been shaken by the ignominious retreat from Kabul in 1842. The reverses of the Sikh and Crimean Wars were seen as further proof that British military power was in irreversible decline.
Mahomed Ali later claimed that, having returned to Constantinople, Azimullah was approached by ‘certain real or pretended Russian agents’ who promised substantial material support if Azimullah could stir up a rebellion in India. ‘It was then,’ he recalled, ‘that I and Azimullah formed the resolution of attempting to overthrow the Company’s Government.’ Once back in India, Azimullah appears to have convinced his royal master that the British would never provide redress for his grievances; a successful uprising, on the other hand, would give him the opportunity to re-establish the Peshwa’s rule. In pursuit of this aim, wrote Russell, the Nana and Azimullah spent much time in Lucknow and subsequently the ‘worthy couple, on the pretence of a pilgrimage to the hills – a Hindoo and a Mussulman joined in a holy excursion – visited the Military stations all along the main trunk road, and went as far as [Ambala]’.
Corroboration of the Nana’s scheming is provided by an Indian emissary called Sitaram Bawa. In a statement given to the Judicial Commissioner of Mysore in January 1858, Sitaram claimed that the Nana was sounding out a host of Indian princes – including the rulers and former rulers of Gwalior, Assam, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jammu, Baroda, Hyderabad, Kolapur, Satara and Indore – as early as the autumn of 1855. At first nobody replied to his letters; but after the annexation of Oudh the ‘answers began to pour in’ from both Hindus and Muslims. Among the Nana’s first adherents, said Sitaram, was Raja Man Singh, the Oudh taluqdar who had lost all but three of his villages in the revenue settlement of 1856. Other dispossessed taluqdars then joined the conspiracy, as did the leading citizens of Lucknow and Golab Singh, the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. An agreement was also made with the King of Delhi. The financial assistance provided by many of these influential plotters was used to seduce serving sepoys and disbanded members of the King of Oudh’s army alike. ‘The military classes were enticed by a promise of restoring the old times of licence,’ commented Sitaram Bawa, ‘and they all prefer that to a regular form of Government.’
Kaye, for one, was convinced by this and other evidence. ‘There is nothing in my mind more clearly substantiated,’ he wrote, ‘than the complicity of the Nana Sahib in wide-spread intrigues before the outbreak of the mutiny. The concurrent testimony of witnesses examined in parts of the country widely distant from each other takes this story altogether out of the regions of the conjectural.’ Kaye particularly referred to machinations between the Nana and the family of the late Raja of Satara, whose south Maratha state had ‘lapsed’ to the Bombay Presidency in 1848. He also links the Nana’s plot to the attempt by adherents of the King of Oudh to tamper with the troops in the Presidency Division in early 1857.
Russell’s claim that Nana Sahib and Azimullah both visited military stations as far as Ambala is not quite accurate. Kaye believed that the Nana, who rarely ventured beyond the limits of Bithur, made three journeys in the early months of 1857: to Kalpi, Delhi and finally to Lucknow. Other evidence proves that Azimullah travelled further. On 30 December 1856 Nana Sahib wrote from Bithur to Azimullah, who was en route to Delhi. He began by requesting the addresses of Lady Gordon and a Mrs Massy, so that he could write to them through the medium of Mrs Todd, the wife of his English tutor. He then asked Azimullah how long he proposed ‘remaining at Delhi and on what day it is your intention to start hence on your further progress towards the north’? The answer was soon, because in January 1857 Lieutenant Edward Martineau bumped into Azimullah at the dâk-bungalow in Ambala, shortly after taking up his appointment as instructor of the musketry depot. Martineau had first made Azimullah’s acquaintance the previous October on the overland journey from Suez to Aden, and had been struck by the bitterness with which he spoke of Lord Dalhousie’s recent annexation of Nagpur. On meeting him again at Ambala, Martineau gained the impression that he was on a ‘tour of inspection to feel the temper of the Mahratta, Rajpoot, & Seik Chiefs on his route from Bombay to enable him to report progress to his master’. A ‘skilful agent’ such as Azimullah, wrote Martineau, ‘was doubtless feeling his way, & was able from his reports to work on the mind of the Nana, already incensed by the stoppage of the stipend accorded to the Peishwa, & to induce him shortly after his return to visit Lucknow, there doubtless to confer with Alli Nuckee Khan [the former Prime Minister of Oudh] & other servants of the Ex King’.
But for the conspiracy to break out into open rebellion, the disgruntled elements of the Bengal Army needed an issue controversial enough to win over their fellow sepoys and so tip their general feelings of discontent – over British arrogance, over pay, over poor career prospects – into a readiness to take up arms. It arrived in the form of a new rifle cartridge.