Eliza Sneyd was passing through Cawnpore in late March 1857 when she first noticed a change in the demeanour of Indian troops. Born Eliza Halhed, the daughter of a London underwriter, she had arrived in India in 1819 to stay with her older brother Robert who was serving with a Bengal regiment. There she met Edward Sneyd, a Commissariat officer, and within a year they were married. But Captain Sneyd was tragically drowned off Burma in 1826, and his widow returned to England with her four young children: Anna, Alice, Louisa and Henry.
Henry returned to India in 1840 as a fifteen-year-old Bengal ensign. His mother and sisters joined him in 1853. But Mrs Sneyd’s joy at seeing Anna marry her brother’s best friend, Corney Lysaght, quickly turned to despair when Alice, ‘the most blooming and strongest’ of her girls, died of a ‘feverish attack’. After retiring to the hills to recover, she and her youngest daughter rejoined Henry’s regiment at Shahjahanpur in Rohilkhand in May 1856. There the family moved into a substantial house, ‘very prettily situated in a beautiful large compound filled with fine forest trees from various countries which blossomed in succession’. Louisa’s residence did not last long: in September 1856 she married Dr Robert Hutchinson and moved to Fatehpur in the Doab where her husband was the civil surgeon.
In the spring of 1857 Louisa fell ill and Mrs Sneyd travelled down from Shahjahanpur to nurse her. On stopping to rest at the Old Cawnpore Hotel – the only one suitable for European ladies – she was informed that all the best rooms had been booked by a party of ‘native princes & chiefs’ whose unruly ‘host of retainers & armed men’ were milling around the courtyard. (These ‘native princes’ may well have been Nana Sahib and his adviser Azimullah Khan, who passed through Cawnpore on their way to Lucknow at around this time.) She was given two little veranda rooms that were usually occupied by the head clerk, ‘in a most dirty and comfortless state’. But it was the behaviour of the ‘motley group’ in the courtyard that most alarmed her. She recalled:
I saw a number of sepoys just in front of my apartment, whose conduct struck me as very strange & uncourteous, unlike what I had ever before observed or experienced from any of our native soldiers, who, when not on duty with their regiments & officers, used invariably, on meeting any ladies or gentlemen, to salute them in the sepoy fashion, by just putting their hand to the side of the hat or cap, whereas these men did nothing but point & laugh at me amongst themselves, while talking a great deal together in an undertone, keeping seated on the ground the whole time. My mind misgave me – it appeared very ominous of evil.
It was nearly six in the evening before Mrs Sneyd was given any food, and then ‘only a small quantity of the stale remnants of the natives’ dinner’, which she could not bring herself to eat. Disgusted by her treatment, she ordered her gharry to be brought round so that she could continue her journey to Fatehpur. It took another twenty-four hours of exhausting travel, over rutted roads and in stifling heat, before she finally reached her destination.
Another who was acutely aware of Indian hostility at this time was Amy Horne, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Eurasian woman and a captain in the Royal Navy. Her father had died while she was still a baby, leaving her mother to remarry an agent named John Cook with whom she had five more children. In February 1857 Cook was hired to look after the dwindling Lucknow business interests of John Brandon, the unscrupulous proprietor of the North-Western Dak Company who had used his contacts at the King of Oudh’s court to undercut competitors. The Cooks moved into a small house near the iron bridge over the River Gumti, a thoroughfare so busy, recalled Amy, that ‘night after night, without exception, was one of merrymaking and rejoicing, and little sleep could we obtain’. She added:
They carried vice and depravity to such an extent that the very walls of some houses and even palaces, bore paintings such as no gentleman of refinement could even look at without a feeling of disgust; it was however amusing to see this corrupt set arrayed in all the splendour imaginary [sic], their dress generally of the richest satins, and spangled over with silver and gold, dazzled the eye, and left an impression on the beholder of the wealth of the city; but this was shabby finery, for they are filthy beyond description, the streets are never swept, and flies abound in such numbers that sometimes the shops can only be opened at night.
Amy detested Lucknow, regarding its people as ‘the most indecent, abusive set in the wide universe’. Two months after the Cooks’ arrival, she was out for an evening stroll when a gang of rowdy youths threw a garland of flowers round her neck. For her stepfather it was the final straw. In April 1857, seeing in ‘the insolence of the natives’ the ‘shadow of coming events’, he moved his family to Cawnpore.
By the time of Amy Horne’s flight to Cawnpore, the first substantial outbreak of mutinous violence had already taken place at Barrackpore. In the late afternoon of Sunday, 29 March, Sergeant-Major James Hewson of the 34th Native Infantry was resting in his bungalow when a naik burst in and reported that a sepoy, under the influence of bhang, had ‘armed himself with his loaded musket, and was walking about in front of the quarter-guard’. Hewson told the naik to warn the adjutant. Then he put on his tunic, grabbed his sword and hurried towards the parade-ground.
As Hewson reached the light company’s bell-of-arms, he was confronted by a sepoy in ‘regimental dress’, wearing a dhoti rather than trousers, and armed with a sword and a musket. He recognized him as Mangal Pande of No. 5 Company. Seeing Hewson, the sepoy raised his musket, took deliberate aim and fired. The ball missed and Hewson ran behind the bell-of-arms, shouting for the guard to fall in. On reaching the quarter-guard, he asked the jemadar, Issuree Pandy, why he had not arrested the sepoy. ‘What can I do?’ replied the jemadar. ‘My naik is gone to the adjutant, the havildar is gone to the field officer? Am I to take him myself?’
Hewson ordered him to fall in his guard and tell them to load. He complied, but so loud was the grumbling that he did not repeat the order. Hewson gave up and went outside, where he found the jemadar and colour-havildar from No. 5 Company trying to persuade Mangal Pande to give up his weapons. A minute or so later the drumming of horses’ hoofs heralded the arrival of the adjutant, Lieutenant Henry Baugh.
‘Where is he? Where is he?’ shouted Baugh.
‘To your left!’ Hewson cried. ‘Sir, ride to your right for your life, the sepoy will fire at you!’
The warning came too late: a shot rang out and Baugh’s horse collapsed under him. Having extricated himself, the adjutant drew one of his two pistols from its saddle holster and ran towards Mangal Pande, who was in the act of reloading. This caused Mangal to abandon his musket and retire. At a distance of about 20 yards, Baugh fired his pistol but missed. He then drew his sword and rushed forward. ‘I had proceeded about half way,’ recalled Baugh, ‘when the prisoner drew a tulwar. I looked back to see where my horse was, intending to get my other pistol, but saw that he was gone; so continued my advance and engaged the prisoner.’
He was assisted by Sergeant-Major Hewson, sword in hand, who had ordered the quarter-guard to follow him. Hewson remembered:
Mangal Pande made a cut with a tulwar at me, but did not strike me. He struck the adjutant. The next cut I received myself… At the same time I was knocked down from behind by one or two blows from a sepoy’s musket. I could not recognize the features of the man who struck me; he was regimentally dressed. On rising I advanced again towards [Pande], and caught him by the collar of the coat with the left hand. I struck him several times with my sword, and received another cut from his tulwar. I was again knocked down from behind.
Baugh, meanwhile, had received three wounds: a sword cut that had entirely disabled his left hand, another deep cut on his neck and a gash on the back of his head – the last from a musket butt. He and Hewson were saved from certain death by the intervention of a Muslim sepoy, Shaik Pultoo, who, though injured, managed to grab Mangal Pande round the waist and hold him until the Europeans had made their escape. Shaik Pultoo only released Mangal when members of the quarter-guard threatened to shoot him if he did not.
Colonel Steven Wheler, fifty-five, the commanding officer of the 34th, now arrived on the parade-ground. A God-fearing man with a reputation for proselytizing, Wheler had been in temporary command when the original 34th was disbanded in 1844, and had only returned to the new regiment in 1856 after an absence of seven years. For all three reasons he was not popular with his men. Making straight for the quarter-guard, Wheler ordered the jemadar to take his men and arrest the sepoy. ‘The men won’t go,’ murmured the jemadar. Wheler had to repeat the order twice more before the jemadar instructed his men to advance. But after about a few paces they stopped and refused to go on. ‘I felt it was useless going any further in the matter,’ Wheler told the subsequent court of inquiry. ‘Someone, a native in undress, mentioned to me that the sepoy in front [was] a Brahmin, and that no one would hurt him. I considered it… a useless sacrifice of life to order an European officer, with the guard, to sieze him, as he would no doubt have picked off the European officers, without receiving any assistance from the guard itself. I then left the guard, and reported the matter to the Brigadier.’
By now word of the commotion had reached Major-General Hearsey. Fearing a general outbreak, he dashed off two quick notes to the officers commanding the European troops at Chinsurah and Dum-Dum, asking them to march at once for Barrackpore. His intention was to hold the Governor-General’s residence with any troops who remained loyal until help arrived. But he decided not to send the letters until he had gauged the seriousness of the outbreak for himself. Accompanied by his two sons, Hearsey galloped towards the 34th’s parade-ground, which was crowded with ‘sepoys in their undress and unarmed’. There he found a group of European officers – some mounted, some on foot – including Brigadier Charles Grant and the station commander, Major Ross. Colonel Wheler was nowhere to be seen. The officers told Hearsey that the sepoy had cut down the adjutant and sergeant-major of the 34th, and was now pacing up and down in front of the quarter-guard, ‘calling out to the men of the brigade to join him to defend and die for their religion and their caste’.
As Hearsey turned his horse in the direction of the quarter-guard, one of the officers called out, ‘His musket is loaded!’
‘Damn his musket!’ replied the general.
At the quarter-guard he found the jemadar and a dozen men. ‘Follow me!’ ordered Hearsey.
‘He is loaded!’ responded the jemadar, ‘and he will shoot us.’
Pointing his revolver at the jemadar, Hearsey repeated the order.
‘The men of the guard are putting caps on the nipples,’ came the jemadar’s hasty reply.
‘Be quick and follow me!’ said Hearsey gruffly. He then headed towards Mangal Pande, followed by the guard, his two sons covering the jemadar with their pistols. As they approached the mutineer and quickened their pace, Hearsey’s eldest son called out: ‘Father, he is taking aim at you, look out sharp!’
‘If I fall, John,’ said Hearsey, ‘rush upon him, and put him to death.’ At which point a shot rang out, causing all but three of the guard to duck in self-defence. Hearsey wrote:
It appeared the mutineer had suddenly altered his mind, I suppose, seeing there was no chance of escape… He turned his musket muzzle towards his own breast hurriedly, touching the trigger with his toe. The muzzle must have swerved, for the bullet made a deep graze, ripping up the muscles of the chest, shoulder and neck, and he fell prostrate; we were on him at once. The guard calling out – ‘He has shot himself ’. A Sikh sepoy of the guard took his bloody tulwar from under him, for in falling he partly covered his sword with his body. His regimental jacket and clothes were on fire and smoking. I bid the jemadar and the sepoy to put the fire out, which they did… Dr Hutchinson being present, it was soon ascertained that the wound, though severe, was superficial, and the man was conveyed to the hospital…
Mangal Pande’s intention had been to incite the whole regiment to mutiny. ‘Come out, you bhainchutes, the Europeans are here,’ he is said to have shouted on emerging from his hut. ‘From biting these cartridges we shall become infidels. Get ready, turn out all of you.’ A separate statement by the same witness has Mangal warning the men that the ‘guns and Europeans had arrived for the purpose of slaughtering them’. He was presumably referring to the arrival that day of fifty men of the 53rd Foot from Calcutta. Hewson recalled him saying: ‘Nikul ao, pultun; nikul ao hamara sath [“Come out, men; come out and join me – You sent me out here, why don’t you follow me”].’ Mangal himself admitted that he had recently been taking bhang and opium, and was not aware of what he was doing at the time of the attack.
It seems likely, therefore, that an intoxicated Mangal acted before his co-conspirators were ready. Certainly his false references to the murderous intentions of Europeans and the loss of religion were repeated in many other mutinies, and they had clearly been decided upon as the best way to win over waverers. But in the case of the 34th Native Infantry, there had been no specific dispute over the issue of cartridges – though the men had expressed their suspicions about the paper for the new Enfield cartridge – and the time was not yet ripe for mutiny. Nor had enough members of the other Barrackpore regiments, particularly the 43rd and 70th, been won over to the cause of mutiny, and even the 34th was not of one opinion. Like the 19th Native Infantry, its pro-mutiny faction was dominated by high-caste Hindus. This explains why, during the drama of 29 March, one sepoy told Colonel Wheler that no one would use force against Mangal Pande because he was a Brahman. Captain Drury confirmed this impression when he told the court of inquiry that the quarter-guard would have refused any order to shoot Mangal on account of their fear of the bad ‘opinion of their comrades in the lines as it was impossible to say, there being a large proportion of Brahmins in the regiment, who approved of what he was doing and who did not’.
Many believed that Colonel Wheler’s proselytizing was to blame for his regiment’s disaffection. Wheler himself admitted that he had been in the habit of speaking to ‘natives of all classes, sepoys and others’ on the subject of Christianity ‘in the highways, cities, bazaars and villages’, though ‘not in the lines and regimental bazaars’. He had, he said, often addressed sepoys of his own and other regiments with the aim of converting them to Christianity. Such an officer was, in Canning’s opinion, ‘not fit to command a regiment’.
Other opinion was divided. An anonymous correspondent to the Friend of India asked ‘by what law a man who lives as a Christian, and peaceably endeavours to induce others to be Christians like him, is made an offender’. The Bengal Hurkaru responded with the comment that the ‘least likely way of making Christians of the Natives in this country, is to get turned out of it ourselves’. As far as most sepoys were concerned, however, proselytizing was not an issue. Lieutenant Martineau later testified that he had never heard any sepoys at Ambala speak complainingly of the efforts of Wheler and missionaries in general to convert natives to Christianity and did not think ‘they cared one bit about it’. Anson did not believe the disaffection of the Bengal Army could be ‘traced to the preaching of Commanding officers’ because Wheler was an isolated case. The Bengal Hurkaru also had ‘no reason to suppose that the prevalence of disaffection and insubordination in the Bengal Army had been caused by the proceedings of proselytizing officers’. Yet, it added, what was ‘more likely to cause general disaffection in an army of illiterate natives than the suspicion of a design against their national faith’, what ‘more likely to excite such a suspicion than the spectacle of a military Commander… teaching and preaching a foreign religion’. In other words, the actions of Wheler and men like him were grist to the mill of those who wished ‘to win away the allegiance of the sepoys from Government’.
In civil society as a whole, many Indians had become increasingly wary of the government’s policy of Anglicization. In 1813, to ensure the twenty-year renewal of its charter, the East India Company agreed to spend £10,000 a year on educating Indians and to remove the long-standing ban on Christian missionaries. As a result of the first initiative, Anglicizers and Orientalists began a fierce debate as to what kind of education – English or classical Indian – should be funded. The question was finally settled in 1835 when Thomas Babington Macaulay, law member to the new Legislative Council of India, penned his notorious ‘Minute on Education’ that recommended raising up an English-educated middle class ‘who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in colour and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.
Already a new Anglicized élite in Calcutta had begun ‘to create institutions to serve its own interests’. Founded in the 1810s and 1820s, these were largely educational establishments that taught English language, literature and Western sciences, and included the Hindu College, the Calcutta School Society, the Sanskrit College and the Oriental Seminary. They were supplemented by missionary schools that generally taught Indians of all religions and castes free, notably Dr Duff’s Free Church Mission in Calcutta. But even the Calcutta élites who accepted the necessity of learning English were split between conservatives who wanted to limit the incorporation of foreign culture within Hindu society (including members of the Hindu Dharma Sabha) and ‘cultural radicals who rejected Hindu social norms in favour of English culture and secular rationalism imported from Europe’ (led by the brilliant young Eurasian Henry Derozio, who supported the abolition of suttee in 1829, just two years before his untimely death at the age of twenty-two). Yet these cultural developments hardly registered in rural communities and military cantonments. The abolition of suttee (self-immolation by high-caste widows), for example, caused barely a ripple among the Company’s Indian troops.
The upshot of the 34th Native Infantry’s aborted rising was that Mangal Pande and Issuree Pandy, the jemadar of the quarter-guard, were found guilty of mutiny by separate native courts martial and hanged on 8 and 21 April respectively. The jemadar’s fate was sealed when three Sikh members of his guard testified that he had ‘positively ordered them not to’ arrest Mangal Pande. Both executions took place on the parade-ground at Barrack-pore in the presence of the four Indian regiments and a strong contingent of Europeans. But the behaviour of the two condemned men could not have been more different: Mangal Pande, still suffering from his self-inflicted wound, met his end with quiet dignity; Issuree Pandy, defiant and remorseful in turn, was loud in his pleas for deliverance. Of the latter’s execution, General Hearsey wrote:
The Prisoner shouted out lustily on his coming on Parade in a cart & when his hands were being pinioned. He addressed himself to the sepoys & men of the Regiment, then shouted to the officers & to the Honourable Company for mercy. I let him have his full say, and he ended with ‘Seeta Ram’ ‘Seeta Ram’ just before he was turned off. I sincerely hope this will be the last of hanging on the Parade at Barrackpore, for I shall get the ‘sobriquet’ of General Executioner. The quarter distance columns were brought up to about 50 paces of the gallows where the Jemadar was suspended ‘Dead’, & I addressed them in these few words in Hindoostanee. ‘Men, Sepoys, witness the punishment for mutiny.’
The executions were not the end of the matter. Canning and his councillors decided that all seven of the 34th’s companies present on 29 March were guilty of passive mutiny and they were disbanded on 6 May.
The reaction of the Hindoo Patriot to the violence at Barrackpore was to indicate a cause far deeper than the cartridge question. ‘Months before a single cartridge was greased with beef-suet or hogslard,’ it commented on 2 April, ‘we endeavoured to draw public attention to the unsatisfactory state of feeling in the sepoy army… There is no want of distinctness or prominence in the symptoms which have already appeared to warn us against the existence of a powder mine in the ranks of the native soldiery that wants but the slightest spark to set in motion gigantic elements of destruction.’
The Indian government was well aware that agitators were manipulating the cartridge question for their own sinister ends. So in early April, to remove any remaining objection to the new cartridges, it altered the firing drill for both rifles and muskets. Instead of tearing the top of the cartridge with their teeth, sepoys would now do so with their left hand. With this concession in place, Canning authorized the musketry depots to commence firing practice. Any further postponement, he observed on 3 April, would be viewed by the sepoys as a victory; the government would be seen to have ‘admitted the justice of the objection or at least as having doubts upon it, and the prejudice would take deeper root than ever’.
Canning was now quietly confident that the worst of the cartridge crisis was past. On 9 April he wrote to Granville:
I have had a very mauvais quart d’heure since my last letter… in the matter of the Mutiny; but it is well over, so far as danger goes; although troubles enough will spring out of it. It has been a much more anxious matter than Persia, ten times over; for a false step might have set the Indian army in a blaze. As it is, I am rather pleased with the way in which it has been dealt with. Do not whisper it, but, to say the truth, I have been rather glad to have the Commander-in-Chief up in the far North-West. He has plenty of pluck and plenty of coolness; but I doubt his judgement as to when and what to yield.
In a separate letter that day to Vernon Smith, the President of the Board of Control, Canning said that he was not particularly bothered about the postponement of regiments leaving Britain for India as long as they embarked by steamship ‘not later than June’. Two weeks later he rejected Vernon Smith’s offer of extra British regiments instead of more Company Europeans. ‘I am opposed to putting into the hands of the Government at home an increased power to diminish our main strength here for the sake of meeting exigencies elsewhere,’ he wrote on 22 April. Canning preferred to reduce each regiment of native infantry from one thousand to eight hundred sepoys, thereby saving enough money to raise four new European regiments of Company infantry. But these plans were rapidly overtaken by events.
The first live firing of Enfield rifles, using cartridges greased by the sepoys with a composition of ghee and beeswax, took place at the Ambala musketry depot on 17 April. The Indian troops at the depot had warned Lieutenant Martineau that it would lead to an outbreak in the station, and the increased frequency of arson attacks seemed to confirm this. As early as 26 March an attempt had been made to burn down the hut of the first Indian officer to declare his willingness to fire the new cartridges. The fires resumed on 13 April, when the authorities at Ambala first received orders to commence firing practice, and continued on into May. That no one would identify the incendiaries despite the offer of a large reward was, Martineau was told, ‘a certain sign of general dissatisfaction and some impending outbreak’.
Live Enfield cartridges were also fired – without incident – at the Sialkot and Dum-Dum depots in late April. After a visit to Sialkot in early May, Sir John Lawrence informed Canning that the sepoys were ‘highly pleased with the new musket, and quite ready to adopt it’, not least because they realized the advantage it would give them in mountain warfare on the North-West Frontier. At Dum-Dum one of the first soldiers to fire an Enfield cartridge was Subedar Bholah Upadhya, a Brahman from the 17th Native Infantry. His loyalty was rewarded when his commanding officer, Major Burroughs, recommended him for the vacant subedar-majorship, though he was second in seniority. The subedar who was passed over, a member of the Ahir caste named Bhondu Singh, would later lead the regiment in mutiny at Azimgarh on 3 June. In the preceding weeks the men of the 17th frequently voiced their suspicions about the new cartridges. Unable to understand their objections in the light of the government’s concessions over greasing and loading, Burroughs sought an answer from his shrewdest and most intelligent havildar, Juggernath Tewarry. While refusing to enter into specifics, Juggernath pointed out that it was the object of all smart sepoys to get into their regiment’s rifle company (if it had one), and once there to use patches greased in the government magazines.
‘We do not know what that grease is made of,’ added Juggernath, ‘but did you ever hear any sepoy objecting to it?’
‘Then why,’ asked Burroughs, ‘is an objection made now?’
‘From villainy,’ replied Juggernath, but would say no more.
As commander of the Ambala musketry depot, Lieutenant Martineau was in an ideal position to assess the temper of the army. Yet even he was in the dark. On 5 May 1857 he revealed his fears to Captain Septimus Becher, assistant adjutant-general with Army Headquarters at Simla in the hills:
Feeling… is as bad as can be and matters have gone so far that I can hardly devise a suitable remedy. We make a grand mistake in supposing that because we dress, arm and drill Hindustani soldiers as Europeans, they become one bit European in their feelings and ideas. I see them on parade for say two hours daily, but what do I know of them for the other 22? What do they talk about in their lines, what do they plot? For all I can tell I might as well be in Siberia. I know that at present an unusual agitation is pervading the ranks of the entire native army, but what it will result in, I am afraid to say. I can detect the near approach of the storm, I can hear the moaning of the hurricane, but I can’t say how, when, or where it will break forth.