The Rising and Retribution in 1857

Jawaharlal Nehru writing in 1932 on ‘The Great Revolt of 1857’, emphasised that many an English officer exceeded barbarity a hundred fold. If mobs of mutinous Indian soldiers, without officers or leaders, had been guilty of cruel and revolting deeds, the trained British soldiers led by their officers, exceeded them in cruelty and barbarity. Our perverted histories tell us a lot about the treachery and cruelty on the Indian side and hardly mention the other side.1

Karl Marx had also noted in the thick of 1857 that
while the cruelties of the English are related as acts of martial vigour, told simply, rapidly and without dwelling on disgusted details, the outrages of the natives are still deliberately exaggerated.2

The present paper attempts to retrieve the brutal and violent decimation of rebels of the 26th Native Infantry who were captured near Ajnala in the district Amritsar and finally dumped in a well commonly remembered as the Kalianwala Khuh. Whereas we know much about the Black Hole tragedy, the Kanpur Massacres and the siege of Lacknow Residency, much less has been written about what happened at Ajnala on August 1, 1857. The event is only ceremonially remembered and then forgotten. Sardar Partap Singh Kairon, the then Chief Minister, visited Ajnala on August 14, 1957 and paid a tribute to the martyrs of Kalianwala Khuh and declared that ‘the Punjabis should be proud of these martyrs’. The present Deputy Commissioner, Sardar Kahan Singh Pannu, paid a visit to the Kalianwala Khuh in the month of August 2007. The event was narrated by an old man. The Deputy Commissioner expressed shock that nothing is known about these martyrs.

On Sunday, May 10, 1857, a blazing hot day, the infantry lines in the Meerut Cantonment went up in flames as the sepoys rushed to grab their weapons and headed for the jail.3 On May 11, 1857, a message flashed from Delhi: “The sepoys have come in from Meerut and are burning everything.” At Ambala, Lahore, Rawalpindi and Peshawar, the authorities received it and kept silent. The Chief Commissioner, John Lawrence, was at Rawalpindi on his way to recess at Muree. Robert Montgomery, the Judicial Commissioner, summoned forthwith a conference of the leading officers of the civil station at Anarkali (Lahore) which included Donald McLeod, Financial Commissioner, A.A. Roberts, Commissioner, Major Qmmanney, Chief Engineer, Colonel Macpherson, Military Secretary, Captain Lawrence and Captain Hutchinson. In a general parade on the following morning, about 3000 soldiers were disarmed, their weapons packed in carts and they were escorted to the barracks.4 The sepoys of the 16th, 26th and 49th Regiments of Native Infantry and the troopers of the 8th Light Cavalry at Meena Mir had been disarmed on May 13. By the end of July, through vigorous measures, 13,000 native troops were disarmed in Punjab. Moreover, John Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner, promulgated a “Mutiny Act” on May 14, under the provisions of which courts martial were established.5

On July 30, the disarmed soldiers of the 26th Native Infantry deserted the Meean Mir Cantonment near Lahore. Prakash Singh alias Prakash Pandey led the party. He rushed at Major Spencer who tried to intervene. Before leaving, they murdered the Commanding Officer, Major Spencer. The Sergeant-Major, who came to his aid, was also killed alongwith other two native armymen.6 They escaped during a heavy dust storm which kept the authorities in ignorance of their route. They were first heard of at Doodean, about a mile beyond Bal. They arrived there by 8 am on the July 31, having accomplished a distance of upwards of 40 miles in about 20 hours without exciting any suspicion of their being mutineers and deserters. They fell in with Sultan Khan, Chowkidaar of Doodean. He deceptively denied any knowledge of Ghat and made them over to his son. He himself went off to Ajnala to report the arrival of this large and suspicious body of men. Diwan Pran Nath, the Tahsildar of Sowrian but located at Ajnala, heard of them from Sultan Khan at 10 am Pran Nath communicated the development to the Deputy Commissioner, Frederic Cooper, at Amritsar by mid-day.7 The news of the mutiny had been circulated previously. So all were prepared. Frederic Cooper proceeded with about 80 sowars, 50 of whom were furnished by Colonel Boyd, consisting of Wild’s Towana Horse. The party of sowars included Risaldar Sahib Khan Tiwana with 44 horsemen; Risaldar Burkat Ali and Jamadar Bhai Maqsudan Singh with 24 housemen; and eight sowars of General Harsukh Rai, thus in total 76 horsemen. At Raja Sansi, Sirdar Partap Singh of the Sandhawalia family accompanied with five or six well-mounted and armed attendants.8

The sepoys were prevented from getting to the only two available boats. Arriving at the banks of the river Ravi, a bloody struggle had taken place between the rebels and force of Diwan Pran Nath. Consequently, about 150 to 200 had been drowned and killed. The disarmed sepoys, after covering forty miles of flight, were too weakened and famished to battle the flood.9 Frederic Cooper reached the action of scene by 5 o’clock in the evening. He was accompanied by Sardar Jodh Singh Adalati of Amritsar. The force of Frederic Cooper moved towards the island in two boats, about 30 in each. The Tiwana sowars were ordered to jump out of the boats, match-locks and carbins in hand to invest the lower or downstream side of the island. A number of them threw themselves into the river and were swept away rapidly by the tide. The number counted by Frederic Cooper was 35. About 166 rebels were captured. Sirdar Partap Singh brought in 66 during the night from the surrounding villages and many more were captured.10 In all, 282 were made prisoners. Under the guard of sowars and surrounded by villagers, they were escorted back to the Ajnala Tehsil.11 Due to drizzling rain execution was put off until daybreak. A large supply of rope had been ordered to be sent out to Ajnala. A deep, dry and deserted well was located about 100 yards from the Police Station which formed a handy and convenient receptacle for the corpses of executed soldiery. At daybreak, firing parties were ordered to be in readiness. Ten sepoys were summoned out indiscriminately, their names and company elicited and recorded, after which they were pinioned and linked together, marched to the place of execution, formed in line and their faces covered. Instantly, a party of 15 Sikhs moved up within one yard, fired at their hearts and within a moment they were launched into eternity. The bodies were flung into the pit by the sweepers of the villages. Thus, about 130 were regularly executed. Those who refused to move were dragged and tied to their feet and shot on the ground. Thus, by 10 am, on August 1, 1857, 237 had been executed.12 The remainder met a worse fate. In the tumult of the affair and the difficulty, with a small force preventing the escape of so large a squadron of desperate men, it was forgotten that one of the bastions of the tehsil, in which 66 were confined, had been fortified and only windows admitting light and air closely shut up. When the door was ordered to be opened, expecting resistance and a rush, no sound was heard and upon entry 45 dead bodies were dragged out. Initially, it was thought that the prisoners died of fright, hunger and exhaustion.13 The pit was closed up with charcoal and lime and a high mound of earth raised where a tablet was put “the grave of the mutineers”.14 Subsequently, about 42 were captured and blown away from cannons. In short, within 48 hours as many as 467 sepoys of the 26th Light Infantry had ceased to exist.15

♦

WHAT happened at Ajnala, S.S. Thorburn, a British official, has characterised as ‘a repulsively executed butchery’.16 Dolores Domin calls it “one of the most barbarous massacres which had no legal excuse whatsoever”.17 Compensating their reduced power by increased brutality used in crushing any attempt at rising, the British succeeded in maintaining their hold over the province. Along with Frederic Cooper, John Lawrence and Robert Montgomery had been censured for daring to approve the tremendous retribution. However, Robert Montgomery advanced ‘the doctrine of necessity’ to justify such repression. Frederic Cooper had decided that the rebels should all die. But the supply of rope was not sufficient to hang so many. So it was decided to shoot them in small batches. Cooper narrates the execution thus:

about 150 having been thus executed, one of the executioners swooned away as he was the oldest of the firing party. A little respite was allowed. Again the executions began reaching the number at 237. When none came out, the doors were opened. They were nearly all dead. Unconsciously, the tragedy of Holwell’s Black Hole had been re-enacted. Fortyfive bodies dead from fright, exhaustion, fatigue, heat and partial suffocation, were dragged into light and consigned, in common with all the other bodies, into one common pit, by the hands of the village sweepers.18

A rare distinction belongs to Frederic Cooper of having re-enacted at one place the dual tragedies of the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Well of Death at Kanpur. His arrogance becomes conspicuous when he proclaims that “the whole plan was conceived and executed by a single Anglo-Saxon”.19 John Lawrence congratulated Cooper on his success against the 26th Native Infantry. But at the end of his life, John Lawrence spoke of Cooper’s account of what he had done as ‘nauseous’.20 Similarly, Robert Montgomery, who succeeded John Lawrence as the Lt. Governor of the Punjab, ‘regretted the style of Cooper’s narrative’. He justified the conduct ‘only by necessity’.21 Lord Canning, the Viceroy, expressed the same opinion that “Cooper will be judged by his acts done under stern necessity rather than by the narrative of them”. Even today, the city of Amritsar has a road called the Cooper Road, close to the Queen’s Road, both linking with the Court Road where, along with Sardar Partap Singh Kairon, Giani Gurmukh Mussafar, Comrade Ram Krishan, Dr Anup Singh MP, Sri Jai Chand Vidyalankar and Bhikshu Chaman Lal paid rich tributes in August 1957. Bhikhsu Chaman Lal donated one thousand rupees and promised to collect one lakh rupees for raising a suitable memorial at Kalianwala Khuh. But all these remained in the realm of rhetoric. What to talk of raising a befitting memorial even on the 150th anniversary of the Great Uprising of 1857, no leader of political significance has visited the site till today.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Jawaharlal Nehru, glimpses of World History, OUP, New Delhi, 1982 (first published 1934-35), pp. 484-15.

2. K. Marx and F. Engels, The First War of Independence: (1857-59), Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978, p. 81.

3. Pramod K. Nayar, The Great Uprising : India 1857, Penguin, New Delhi, 2007, pp. 75-78.

4. Frederic Cooper, Crisis in Punjab from the 10th of May Until the Fall of Delhi, Sameer Prakashan, Chandigarh, 1977 (first published 1958), pp. 2-4.

5. Dolores Domin, India in 1857-59: A Study in the Role of the Sikhs in the People’s Uprising, Akademic Verlag, Berlin, 1977, p. 119.

6. Mutiny Records: Correspondence, Part 1, Government Press, Lahore, Lahore, 1911, p. 283.

7. Ibid., p. 390.

8. Lepel H. Griffin, The Punjab Chiefs, T.C. McCarthy Chronicle Press, Lahore, 1865, 168-69. pp. 221-534.

9. Frederic Cooper, Crisis in Punjab, p. 84.

10. Mutiny Records: Correspondence, Part I, p. 388.

11. Ibid., p. 390.

12. Ibid., pp. 393-94.

13. Mutiny Records: Reports, Part 1, Punjab Government Press, Lahore, 1911, p. 274.

14. Mutiny Records: Correspondence, Part 1, p. 394.

15. Ibid., p. 388.

16. S. S. Thorbum, The Punjab in Peace and War, Language Department Punjab, 1970, p. 271.

17. Dolores Domin, India in 1857-59, p. 129.

18. Frederic Cooper, Crisis in Punjab, pp. 162-63.

19. Ibid., p. 88.

20. Phillip Mason, The Men Who Ruled India, Rupa and Co., New Delhi, 2002, p. 171.

21. J. Cave-Browne, The Punjab and Delhi in 1857, Vol. II, Languages Department, Punjab, 1970, (first published 1861), p. 103.
The author is a Professor, Department of History, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. He can be contacted at e-mail: sukhdevssohal@yahoo.com