1857-What Really Happened-A Reconstruction

It is important that we in today's Pakistan once and for all clearly examine the events of 1857; arrive at a consensus and proceed further with more pressing tasks of today's life! Having close links with Punjab where my great grand father’s father came in 1849 and, having both close relations with both Punjabis and Hindustanis, and a deep interest in history, I feel that things in 1857 were far more complex than what many people try to assert today. Many years ago I heard a saying in Lahore, from a thorough bred Punjabi Tarkhan (carpenter); "Lahore de Darawze Khulle; te Dilli De Darwaze Khoonee" or "Lahore despite being a fortified city, had always its gates open for the conqueror, while Delhi's possession was always contested by the invaders". Outwardly this saying, ironically coined by Punjabis, who suffer from a habit of self criticism, at least as far as the lower classes are concerned, as I personally witnessed, gives the impression that the Punjabis were docile and that the people of Delhi were brave! Before discussing this particular Punjabi saying, I will briefly explain the frame of discussion. A man's mind is continuously on the move, like a caravan, and our conclusions and opinion about many subjects, which we at one time accepted or took as the Gospel truth change, with the passage of time. It is generally a slow process and as time passes we discover that many of the beliefs, to which we struck like religious faith or private property, were as a matter of fact absolutely ridiculous! To come back to the point, I thought about two decades back that Delhi was really a tough city, and all resistance was encountered by a northern invader in between the Sutlej river and Delhi! India the foreigner must note before the British united it in the real sense by roads, railways, telegraph, radio and postage was never one single country in the real sense. We will confine our discussion to the Muslim time since we are discussing Hindustani Muslim claims! Delhi was the main seat of the Mughal government and was an important city even before any Muslims came to India. It was natural that any invader who came to India was resisted by this Muslim government in power at Delhi as per its policy in vogue. The slave kings like Balban followed a strategy of resisting the invaders along the Indus or within the modern provinces of Punjab and Frontier. Later on from 1526 when Babar the first Mughal king defeated the Muslim Lodhi Pathan kings at Panipat about 40 miles north of Delhi, a new trend emerged i.e. the future invasions of India were contested in between the river Sutlej and Delhi. Thus once Humayun came back to India he defeated the Suri Army near Sirhind. Nadir Shah was opposed by the main Mughal army at Panipat and similarly the Marathas were forced to fight by Abdali at Panipat. It may be noted that there was no major siege at Delhi before 1857; i.e. the city gates were open for the invader. The reason why the major battles took place in between Sutlej and Delhi was primarily logistic. The government at Delhi or that controlling Delhi (as the Marathas in 1761) found it difficult to logistically sustain its main army (which by the sixteenth century was very bulky because of camp followers and luxuries) north of Sutlej. It was a policy decision and that was it. In any case what did the Punjabis or the Pathans have in common with the Mughal king? This man was not the ruler of Muslims but that of India. In terms of patronage he was more interested in wooing the Hindu Rajputs who were politically important than the Punjabi or Pathan Muslims or the Hindu Marathas who gave Aurangzeb hell from 1660 onwards! This Mughal preferred the Central Asian or Persian over the local Indian whether Punjabi, Pathan or Hindustani (a small percentage of Hindustani Muslims is of northern descent, despite whatever they claim, while about three fourth are locals just like the Punjabis etc. who converted to Islam). The question of resistance or no resistance had little to do with docility or martial fervour!

Now lets examine 1857. Were the Hindustanis more brave or more martial or more special that they defied the British? At least this is what the Hindustani Muslims claim This claim is as ridiculous as that of Punjabi Muslims of today that they were and are the most martial race of the Indo Pak subcontinent! I believed this for many years but as my interest in the rebellion increased and I carried out more research I discovered a million loopholes in this belief which at least from 1977 to 1983 was held like a conviction by me! The philosophical basis of this transformation was my successive drift towards the concept that all human beings regardless of race or religion are essentially the same, and that all that they do, and all their attributes, good or bad, like bravery, compassion cruelty etc. are basically situational and have nothing to do with race or religion! My belief underwent a radical transformation once I discovered many facts which changed the whole complexion of the facts of 1857! I discovered in 1978 while reading the collection of Despatches and state papers of Fortes cue and the Aligarh district Gazetteer that the Sherwani Yusuf Zai and Shinwari Hindustani Muslim Pathans of Sikandra Rao had stayed loyal while all area between Delhi and Allahabad was out of British control! Later as I read more I discovered that only one out of seven or eight rebel sepoys was a Hindustani Muslim while the rest were Hindustani Hindu Rajputs! By the time I finalised this work in September 1998 which I had first written as a short Term Essay as a cadet in PMA Kakul in July 1982 reached the following conclusions:-

a. The rebellion was not as simple as it appears at first sight. The first important factor about it was peculiar situation of the Bengal Army— that it was a largely homogenous force of Hindustanis who had been recruited for more than one to three generations in it and were from the same general region i.e. between Hissar and Patna, and had certain common perceptions and affinities which enabled them to react in unison, even without a deliberate plan. That culturally, linguistically and historically they had nothing in common with the Punjabi or Pathan Muslims although many of them were from families with Pathan Baloch (as in case of the Baloch of Rohtak and Gurgaon districts), Iranian and Central Asian ancestry.

b. The greased cartridges, the immediate and most important factor which acted as a lethal primer in igniting the fuse of revolt played an important part in propelling the Bengal Army into rebellion. Since they hurt his religious feelings, it became a far more grave matter than allowances or petty administrative matters. The Punjabi troops being an irregular second line as semi military force were never made to face this test since the first priority as far as modernisation was concerned was accorded to the Bengal Army, the most important army of the East India Company. Thus as a matter of fact, the East India Company took the risk of trusting the native soldiers without any discrimination with the Lee Enfield Rifle which at that time was the most sophisticated infantry weapon in the history of warfare since Napoleonic wars. Since the Punjabi and Pathan troops were not made to use the Enfield, they had no grievance against the company.

c. Rebellion started from the army and it was only then that the feudal and at many places the people who joined it. A novel situation emerged. Only those areas where the sepoy regiments rebelled or which they moved to after the rebellion were most seriously affected by rebellion. A vacuum like situation existed in most other areas. Here two things happened; either the local populace mostly low caste Muslims like the Joolahas or butchers raised the standard of rebellion and fought till death or a local feudal or a dispossessed Raja or Talukdar or Nawab assumed control. All other areas remained largely neutral.. In many districts which were not held by the rebel sepoys in the heart of modern UP, which led the rebellion as a province, resolute British civil servants aided by remanent of sepoy units, local levies, police and local notables like Sayyid Ahmad Khan (the future leader of Hindustani Muslims in particular and Indian Muslims in general and the father of the Two Nation Theory) successfully held control and these included many districts like Bijnor, Etawah, parts of Aligarh, Rohailkhand, etc. Thus the rebellion had a great deal to do with the sepoys and a far less with the local population.

d. Most of the Rajas and nobles who asserted authority in absence of the British later on claimed that they were acting on the Britishers behalf! Thus many escaped Scotfree and many escaped the noose like the Nawab of Banda who had played an important part in the rebellion escaped with only confiscation of property. The vast majority of Oudh Talukdars took advantage of the clemency offer of Queen Victoria and emerged as strong as they were before 1857, with an additional guarantee that the feudal will not be touched! The only losers were the vast bulk of the rebel sepoys or the people of Delhi and some feudal and rajas of Delhi territory or the Mughal princes who payed with their life, at a time when tempers were exceedingly high because of excesses against British non combatants and the heavy British casualties in the siege of Delhi. Or there were certain men like Khan Bahadur Khan, Nawab of Farkhabad, Tantia Topi or Rao Sahib who were executed because they were genuinely opposed to the British and were not opportunists like bulk of the feudals including landlords of Oudh and the north western provinces.

It is ironic that none of the major Talukdars who went with Hazrat Mahal into self imposed exile to Nepal, and who later refused British offers to return to Oudh, and resume their estates were Muslims. The reader may note that 99% of the landlords who did not leave India later took advantage of the British offer of clemency for all, who had nothing to do with murder of European civilians and non combatants took the plea that they had never rebelled, but had merely taken control of the civil administration, since there was anarchy, and that they were acting in this capacity on behalf of the East India Company. Thus most of them got all of their land back, and these included most of the large landholders of Oudh, both Muslim and Hindu, including men like the later famous Raja of Mahmudabad! As a matter of fact the feudals greatly benefited from 1857, in terms of reversal of Dalhousie's policy of destroying feudalism. Later studies by many scholars including P. Hardy and Metcalfe prove that the feudals both Hindustani Muslim as well as Hindu greatly benefited from post 1858 British policies in UP and the myth that the Hindustani Muslims were the main losers of 1857, as far as the landlords is concerned, is absolutely baseless. The British policy was situational and rewarded and punished landlords, in each region and district, in accordance with the subjective conditions and there were many districts where Muslim landlords emerged scotfree, while many Hindu landlords accused of complicity in the rebellion suffered and vice versa. Those who want to explore this may read P. Hardy or Metcalfe's book. The only loser and the one whose motives were superior and genuine, and one who had no connection with large part of the Muslims who founded the MAO College Aligarh or were active in the Muslim League, was the sepoy who was mostly from the lower classes or some feudals who were punished with confiscation or executed in the initial days immediately after siege of Delhi was over. As a city it was Delhi and its people that suffered the most; but again not because they were more heroic but because the 3rd Light Cavalry's seizure of Meerut and the subsequent concentration of sepoy regiments at Delhi left them no choice; and the British treated whole of the city as a rebel city!

In justice to Punjabis and specially the Punjabi Muslims, it must be admitted that just 8 years after liberation by the British; and at a time when the Sikhs were in close competition with them for British recognition; psychologically the Punjabi Muslims were in no position to rebel! The British had no doubt liberated them and the Punjabi Muslim-Punjabi Sikh divide in Punjab was far more severe than the Muslim-Hindu divide in UP or Central India.

The Hindustani Muslims even today contemptuously refer to Punjabi Muslims as mercenaries. They forget that they were also performing the same role from 1757 till 1857; fighting against many Muslim powers including Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, against Oudh, against Rohailkhand, Afghanistan and Sindh! And how can they condemn the Punjabi Muslims for not rebelling in 8 years service in the East India Company's army, once the Hindustani Muslims rebelled against the company after 100 years service from 1757 to 1857! And even after this the Hindustanis were as keen to join the army as the Punjabis and as a matter of fact were in lead as mercenaries in the British Indian Army as compared to all other races in India. If after 1883 their recruitment was reduced; it was because of policy reasons and not because they were less willing to join the British Indian Army!!

The hard fact of life of human mind and all intellectual activity is that there are no chosen people! At various stages various nations or groups based on ethnicity ideology or class have believed most fervently that they were the chosen people! The Punjabi Muslims and the Hindustani Muslims are victims of this intellectual hangover of being more martial or more intellectual ! The important fact for the writer or historian is to at least endeavour to be more rational and understanding. As a great French writer once said “neither to laugh nor to cry, but to understand�. I have made an attempt to be rational with the records and happening of a highly complex event. It took twenty years to analyse and yet I must have made many mistakes. It is for the readers to judge this. Although in the final analysis all judgments are subjective judgments. There is no final judgment as far as history writing is concerned!