The Skull of Alum Bheg Read online

  One outcome of the Barrackpore mutiny, was a lasting fear amongst the sepoys of the Bengal Army of being disarmed by British troops and having the artillery turned against them. Considering the British slaughter of hundreds of sepoys in 1824, this was perhaps not an illogical fear, yet amongst the sepoys it turned into a recurring nightmare and became something of a bête noire. Another result of the events at Barrackpore was that the dominance of high-caste Hindus came to be seen as the root cause of discontent within the Bengal Army.39 The maintenance of a high-caste army, which had retained much of the mentality of mercenaries, was thus considered incompatible with the requirements of an efficient and modern military force required to serve the empire.40 In 1834, a General Order was accordingly passed to allow for the recruitment of a wider range of Hindu and Muslim groups in order to break the high-caste monopoly of the Bengal Army.41 General enlistment constituted an open challenge to the social exclusivity maintained by the high-caste sepoys; if low-status groups could enlist alongside the Rajputs, Bhumihars, and Brahmins, service in the Company’s army no longer constituted a guarantee of high status. It directly undermined the identity and ritual purity of the sepoys, and furthermore challenged the guaranteed networks that had ensured employment within these communities. A new General Enlistment Order, passed in 1856, explicitly decreed that new recruits would have to serve wherever they were ordered, including overseas.42

  While this applied only to new recruits, it obviously caused concern among all the sepoys, as it seemed to suggest that they might all in time be deployed regardless of the original terms of their enlistment. ‘When the old Sepoys heard of this order,’ the Indian police officer Shaik Hedayut Ali noted,

  ‘they were much frightened and displeased; they said, “Up to this day those who went to Afghanistan have not been re-admitted to their caste; how are we to know where the English may not force us to go: they will be ordering us next to go to London.” As I have said above, any new order issued by the Government is looked upon with much suspicion by the Native Army, and is much canvassed in every Regiment.’43

  The days of special treatment, when the British had to ask for volunteers for their overseas campaigns, were definitively over.

  There were also more conventional issues over promotion that occupied the sepoys, and British commentators identified the reliance on seniority to determine promotion as a major problem within the Bengal Army: it provided no incentive to younger soldiers while senior Indian officers were as a rule too old to be effective by the time they were promoted. When explaining to Sleeman the new practice of promoting younger men, one Muslim officer nevertheless provided a very different view:

  ‘We all feel for them, and are always sorry to see an old soldier passed over, unless he has been guilty of any manifest crime, or neglect of duty. He has always some relations among the native officers, who know his family, for we all try to get our relations into the same regiment with ourselves, when they are eligible. They know what that the family will suffer, when they learn that he has no longer any hopes of rising in the service, and has become miserable. Supercessions [sic] create distress and bad feelings throughout a regiment, even when the best men are promoted, which cannot always be the case; for the greatest favourites are not always the best men. Many of our old European officers, like yourself, are absent on staff or civil employments; and the command of companies very often devolves upon very young subalterns, who know little or nothing of the character of their men. They recommend the men whom they have found most active and intelligent, and believe to be the best; but their opportunities of learning the characters of the men have been few. They have seen and observed the young, active and forward; but they often know nothing of the steady, unobtrusive old soldier, who has done his duty ably in all situations without placing himself prominently forward in any. The commanding officers seldom remain long with the same regiment; and, consequently, seldom know enough of the men to be able to judge of the justice of the selections for promotion.’44

  The sepoys had a very strong sense of what was fair and just, based on a set of moral principles that they perceived to be embedded within the terms of their contract. Changes to the rules of promotion, that seemed entirely logical to the British, might thus be perceived as gross infringements of the traditional terms of their service by the sepoys. According to the Muslim officer, Indian troops ‘all feel that the good old rule of right, (huk) as long as a man dies his duty well, can no longer be relied upon.’45

  Low pay was another chronic issue for the sepoys of the Bengal Army, and especially those like Alum Bheg who were stationed far away from their homeland. For service outside the British territories, sepoys received batta in order to cover the increased cost of foodstuffs while in the field, but also as an incentive for the men who would be separated from their homes for longer periods. Once the campaign was over, however, the batta ceased to be paid and for those sepoys permanently posted in recently occupied territories this caused bitter resentment.46 Minor mutinies had broken out over the issue of batta after the conquest of Sindh in 1843, and again became a cause for contention following the annexation of Punjab in 1849. Due to their close links, the sepoys in different regiments were able to organise their protests, and ‘delegates from several corps went about from station to station, and letters were exchanged between those at a distance.’47 At the time, the British feared that the newly defeated Sikhs might join forces with the mutinous sepoys, and at Delhi, officers found ‘unmistakable signs of a confederation of many regiments determined not to serve in the Punjab except on the higher pay’.48 Five ringleaders of the mutiny in one regiment were subsequently sentenced to transportation for life, and the 66th Bengal Native Infantry, which had tried to seize the fort at Amritsar in 1850, was disbanded and its name struck from the army list.49 Time and again, the sepoys and the Company clashed over issues such as pay, as the sepoys insisted on the traditional prerogative of soldiers to seek better terms of service. Some events, however, were beyond their reach.

  For men like Alum Bheg, their close ties to their villages also created tension in terms of loyalty. When the British annexed Awadh in 1856, effectively usurping the control of the sepoys’ homeland, it had a far greater impact on their troops than the British ever realised. The British dispossessed the King of Awadh on the pretext of his alleged despotic misrule, and the takeover caused immense disruption in the region.50 The police officer, Shaik Hedayut Ali, explained the sense of betrayal experienced by the sepoys over what they perceived as an illegitimate annexation: ‘They were all of opinion that the Government had acted unjustly in annexing the country of Oude, and they all sympathised with the king and his Sirdars.’51 The sepoys, Hedayut continued, ‘were all indignant at the king of Oude being dispossessed of his kingdom, and talked openly amongst themselves as to the little faith that could be placed in the English after their treatment of the king, who himself and his progenitors had been so faithful to them.’52 Part of the sepoys’ objection thus appears to have been that the British had proven themselves to be duplicitous in their dealings with the King of Awadh, and the moral legitimacy of their rule thus undermined. It did not help that the entire army of the King, some 50,000 men, were disbanded, again bringing into question the long-term political strategy of the British in India. ‘Oude was the birthplace of the Purbeah race,’ according to Mainodin Hassan Khan, an Indian police officer well acquainted with the sepoys,

  ‘and these feelings of dissatisfaction affected the whole Purbeah race in the service of the British Government. To the native mind the act of annexation was one of gross injustice, and provoked a universal desire for resistance. The King, and all those connected with him, although bowing to the hand of fate, became henceforward the bitter enemies of the English.’53

  As a sign of things to come, the annexation had in 1856 prompted sepoys of the 34th BNI to send letters to their brothers in other regiments of the Bengal Army:

  ‘These letters reminded every regiment of th
e ancient dynasties of Hindustan; pointed out that the annexation of Oude had been followed by the disbandment of the Oude army, for the second time since the connection of the English with Oude; and showed that their place was being filled by the enlistment of Punjabis and Sikhs, and the formation of a Punjab army. The very bread had been torn out of the mouths of men who knew no other profession than that of the sword. The letters went on to say that further annexations might be expected, with little or no use for the native army. Thus was it pressed upon the Sepoys that they must rebel to reseat the ancient kings on their thrones, and drive the trespassers away. The welfare of the soldier caste required this; the honour of their chiefs was at stake.’54

  By thus tying together the annexation of Awadh with the General Enlistment, the letter pointed to a concerted effort on part of the British to undermine the very livelihood of the sepoys, and by extension the well-being of their families. Resisting British reforms within the army was thus presented as a matter of duty upon which the izzat, or honour, of the sepoys ultimately depended. What the British were doing in India more generally, and the changes that were taking place within the Bengal Army more specifically, were in other words perceived as part of the same existential threat. British officers at the time had but a vague sense of the range of issues that concerned their Indian troops—and rarely any real understanding of the nature of their grievances. When Shaik Hedayut described the widespread resentment of the sepoys, he added that:

  ‘Don’t let any English gentlemen think that the above is not true because they were not acquainted with it at the time: a native of Hindoostan seldom opens his mind to his officer; he only says what he thinks would please his Officer. The Sepoys reserve their real opinion until they return to their lines and to their comrades.’55

  * * *

  While Alum Bheg and his men would head back to their huts after a long day of parades and guard-duty, the British population of Sialkot took shelter in their bungalows, which they tried in vain to insulate against the punishing heat:

  ‘thatched shades had been erected over our doors to break the glare; khaskhas mats had been placed in the doorways, with water at hand for sprinkling; windows had been darkened, pan’khas swung up, and arrangements made in general for keeping the heat out, and maintaining a cool temperature within; and to avoid all needless exposure, the programme for out-door work had been shifted to the cooler hours of the morning and evening…’56

  Dr James Graham, the Superintending Surgeon at Sialkot, and his daughter Sarah were making the final preparations for their upcoming trip to the hills—the annual ritual for so many Anglo-Indian families to escape the warm weather of the plains.57 The Grahams were one of those extensive Protestant Irish families with close links to India and they were well-acquainted with the Lawrences—John Lawrence was then Chief Commissioner of Punjab and his younger brother Richard Lawrence, Captain of Police at Lahore. As the senior member of the family, Dr Graham was much concerned with the future of the family, and preoccupied with arranging marriages and manoeuvring relatives into good positions within the Company administration. Dr Graham had no less than three sons serving in the Bengal army, as well as his nephew, also named James Graham, who was an officer in the 14th BNI. Dr Graham had made substantive investments in the stocks of the Delhi Bank and although Sarah’s mother had passed away, father and daughter ‘lived in splendid style’, according to one Sialkot resident, ‘like a prince upon his three thousand rupees a month.’58 The Graham residence, ‘the finest in the whole station’, was located just behind the barracks of the European infantry and the 46th BNI lines on the very northern side of the cantonment.’59 In a letter to his nephew James at Landour, Graham wrote excitedly of the hill-station north-east of Jammu that he and Sarah had decided upon:

  ‘It is by far the finest site for a convalescent depot of any yet discovered in India. At the top of this mountain you have level ground extending sixteen miles, no thick bush jungle, no thick forest, but wooded like a nobleman’s park. It is from eight to nine thousand feet high with a beautiful puka fountain which pours out water throughout the year…’60

  Their departure was planned for 16 May to ‘escape the hot winds, the furnace heat of which you know I dislike.’61

  Others, however, were prepared to brave the weather and stay in Sialkot during the hot season. Just a few bungalows down the road, right next to the church, Reverend Thomas Hunter and his wife Jane were doubling down on their arduous schedule of missionary work.62 Hunter had been ordained just two years before with the explicit purpose of establishing the Church of Scotland Punjab mission. Punjab had only just been opened up by the British conquest, and for missionaries so concerned with carving out their own kingdom in which to spread their particular interpretation of the gospel, this made the region particularly attractive. Thomas had married Jane Scott, a devout Sunday school teacher, the very same day he was ordained and a month later they had set out for India. Photographs taken of the couple before they left Scotland show Thomas to be stern-looking, with rimless glasses and a puritan beard, while Jane appeared quite mirthless and dressed all in black. After arriving in India, Thomas Hunter decided upon Sialkot as the site of the mission, writing to his church back in Scotland:

  ‘Permit me with the utmost respect and diffidence to give a sketch of a plan of operations we have often dwelt upon as likely, under the blessing of Almighty God, to further the cause of Christ in the Panjab. Of course the conversion of souls, not the education of the young, is the Church’s design in sending her ministers to India. The time was when education was the only means open to our Church, and with praiseworthy zeal have we lavished large sums in preparing—simply preparing—ground for the reception of good seed, for educated men do listen to, and reason on, Bible truth. But now the Government comes forward, and offers to take the work off our hands. Is not this a call to redouble our exertions in teaching and preaching Christ crucified? And how? If you still propose entrusting me with the Church’s work in the Panjab, I should humbly propose that no educational institution be formed, but that I should be as one of the natives, never resting until I have thoroughly mastered the language and customs of the country, and also labouring, in season and out of season, to proclaim the great salvation, directly, faithfully, fearlessly […] I am perfectly willing to go alone, and commence the work. If health be granted me, you will always have one labourer in possession of this highly interesting field; if the Lord be pleased to lay me aside, and also my truly missionary wife, still, even this will not be such a loss, as if an institution were depending for life on one. […] I should not write so strongly did I not see and feel the importance of very early embracing an opportunity thus presented us for preaching and teaching nothing but the doctrine of the Cross.’63

  The eager missionary accordingly proposed to embark on a mission of pure preaching, leaving aside the education of Indians, which was the usual strategy favoured by missionaries as a gateway to conversion. In the same letter, Thomas Hunter had also pointed out that Sialkot ‘is a station for European troops, and thus perfectly safe.’64

  The couple arrived at Sialkot with their new-born son in December 1856 following an arduous three-month journey of more than 1,700 miles from Bombay, during which they had been much plagued by sickness.65 They brought along a Muslim convert, Mohamet Ismael, to help in their work, but found to their consternation that Sialkot was not the virgin soil they had imagined it to be. Apart from the cantonment church and the Catholic chapel, the American Presbyterian Church had just built a mission just south of the old city, while French lay-nuns had recently established a convent on the western outskirts of the cantonment. The Hunters had been beaten to the draw and, considering its size, Sialkot was by the beginning of 1857 practically overrun by zealous Christians. This is not to say that Hunter’s rivals had had much success. The American mission had been struggling from the outset and apart from a small school for non-Christian boys, their orphanage had just three children, with two Indian c
atechists in training. After two years, they had made not a single convert in spite of a vigorous, if somewhat amateurish, programme of preaching at markets and fairs in Sialkot and the surrounding villages. The American missionaries were notably poor and only survived by the charity of British officials and other clergymen when the meagre financial support from the home church in far-away America failed to arrive.66 The head of the mission, Andrew Gordon, was nevertheless worried about his ‘turf’ when the Hunters arrived and set up camp, noting grumpily that when the newcomers ‘set out for this field with the design of opening in it a new mission, they seem not to have been aware that it was already efficiently occupied, whilst other needy and inviting fields lay before them.’67 Gordon, however, managed to overcome his initial misgivings of the Hunters and the two groups of missionaries eventually established a friendly relationship and divided up their respective areas of proselytising. With the American mission south of the city, Thomas and his wife moved into a house in the cantonment to the north, between the church and the Sudder Bazaar.68 ‘Instead of proving an objection’, Hunter sought to convince his church back home, the presence of the American missionaries ‘is likely to be a great advantage. We can heartily co-operate, and enjoy the results of their Christian as well as missionary experience. They are also about three miles away on the farther side of town; so they cannot interfere with our operations.’69