BOOK: Saul David, "The Indian Mutiny"

Saul David: The Indian Mutiny. London: Penguin Books, 2003. 0141005548. xxiii + 504 pp.

I'm not sure when I first heard of the famous Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, but I suspect it may have been in fiction — I vaguely remember it being mentioned in one of Jules Verne's novels (some googling suggests it must have been The Steam House), and of course in Doyle's The Sign of the Four, one of my favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. I never read up on the mutiny in any real detail, however, and it was with a view to remedying this that I bought the present book more than ten years ago.

Now that I finally got around to reading it, I found that I wasn't really quite as interested in the subject as I probably imagined I would be when I bought the book. (There seems to be a pattern here, as I already concluded the same thing about the previous two books about Indian history that we've seen on this blog — John Keay's India and The Honourable Company.) This, of course, is in no way the fault of the book, just a mismatch between me and the book. Apart from that, I can't really complain about it. It is well written and the author is clearly keenly interested in the topic and has resarched it in great detail.

But, as is often the case with historical events that involve a lot of fighting, the most interesting part of the story for me was the lead-up to the mutiny rather than the mutiny itself. I had been vaguely aware of the idea that the Indian soldiers objected to the presence of animal fat (beef or pork, depending on whether they were Hindus or Muslims) in rifle cartridges, but it turns out, unsurprisingly enough, that the real underlying causes of discontent were deeper than that.

Soldiers' wages had not been increased for more than 50 years by then, while the costs of living, as well as the wages of many civilian occupations, had increased significantly over that period (pp. 28–9). This also meant that the social status associated with being a soldier had declined. Moreover, in an earlier period the soldiers might have had the chance to seek better terms from some other employer, some Indian maharaja or another, but by the mid-19th century the British had annexed so much territory in India that soldiers had few alternatives but to work for them. The amount of warfare also declined and with it the opportunities for soldiers to supplement their income by looting (p. 31).

Speaking of annexations, it seems that the British had signed treaties with a number of native princes, according to which these local dynasties could continue ruling their territory, but if a prince died without an heir his country would ‘lapse’ into British hands. It was not uncommon in India for a prince to adopt an heir if he had no sons of his own, but the British refused to recognize such adopted heirs and used this excuse to annex several princely states in the first half of the 19th century (pp. 6–8). The mutiny basically started as an organized conspiracy consisting partly of disaffected Indian soldiers and officers, and partly of dispossessed princes who hoped to regain their thrones (pp. 45, 229, 390, 397–8); the bulk of the mutineers joined it because these princes promised them better pay and status than they had had under the British. The mutineers may also have felt encouraged by exaggerated reports of recent British defeats in the Crimean war (p. 49).

The rumours of beef or pork fat on the rifle cartridges were spread by the conspirators to get more of the soldiers on board with the mutiny.* They were apparently not entirely unfounded, in the sense that when starting a new process of manufacturing rifle cartridges, the government had not taken sufficient precautions to ensure that those types of fat would not be used (pp. 54–5); but the British, to their credit, were pretty serious about not wanting to offend the religious feelings of their Indian soldiers, and even went so far as to offer to provide non-greased cartridges and money with which each Indian unit could then buy their own grease and apply it by themselves (p. 55). The agitators then changed their objections and started claiming that the paper in which the cartridges were packed was greased with objectionable fat (pp. 55, 58) — it would all have been funny if it hadn't been about to lead to so much bloodshed...

[*Part of the reason why this issue was so effective was that religion is a social phenomenon and not just a personal one (p. 81). Even if e.g. a Hindu soldier did not think there was any beef fat on the cartridges, he would still lose caste with other Hindus as long as enough of *them* believed the rumour about beef fat.]

There were also some organizational issues with the British Indian army that made it easier for the mutiny to erupt. Promotion, both of Indian soldiers and of British officers, was almost entirely by seniority, which made it harder to motivate people and reward competence; it also led to an overabundance of exhausted, worn-out officers in their late 60s in the higher ranks — not exactly the best prospect for a vigorous response. Moreover, in what was otherwise a commendable effort to cut down on the abuses of an earlier period, most of the officers' powers to punish their soldiers had been taken away from them in favour of a much more centralized and impractically bureaucratic process, with the result that the officers' authority over their men declined considerably (pp. 41–4).

*

Once the mutiny actually started, the book got considerably less interesting for me. We see a more or less similar story repeated in one town after another: rumours begin to fly, the sepoys grow restless, and finally someone steps forward and shoots an officer or something like that, and the rest then follow and the mutiny is on. The British, whether soldiers, officers or civilians, then barricade themselves in some fort or barracks, and those that don't get there in time are massacred by the rebels, and their houses broken into and looted. In some instances the British managed to disarm the units whose loyalty they doubted and thus prevent them from mutinying, but there were also surprisingly many examples of British officers swearing up and down that *their* unit would surely remain loyal, only to find out very shortly how very wrong they were.

The book goes into a lot of detail about this, we hear the names and ranks of countless officers, the exact counts of different types of soldiers involved, etc. etc., which is no doubt very interesting for some people, but not for me. There are too many of these people, and most of them don't have a sufficiently big impact on the story as a whole that I could be bothered to remember their names.

The mutiny didn't really affect all of India, but seems to have been concentrated around the North-Western Provinces (so named because they lie north-west of Bengal; not really that much in the north-west of India as a whole); we see the mutiny erupt at Meerut (a little north of Delhi), then Delhi itself (where the ‘King of Delhi’, a descendant of the former Moghul emperors now subsisting on a British pension, reluctantly agreed to join the mutiny, though he had little real control over it; pp. 104, 119, 122), Ferozepore and Peshawar (in the Punjab), Agra, Lucknow, Cawnpore (in Oudh), Benares and Allahabad, etc.

A fair share of massacres and atrocities were perpetrated in the process. Perhaps the most tragic of these occurred at Cawnpore, where the Britons (both soldiers and civilians) were besieged for several weeks in terrible circumstances; finally their position grew desperate enough that they accepted an offer of safe passage from the rebels (p. 208) and surrendered, but were then treacherously massacred very soon afterwards (p. 215). There was another massacre of British civilian prisoners at Cawnpore about a week later (pp. 253–4).

I almost felt sorry for the victims at that point, until I remembered that they were, after all, occupying a country belonging to another people. I can hardly blame the Indians for massacring British people in India, just like I couldn't blame the Britons of today if they suddenly decided, for whatever reason, to massacre the Indians currently living in Britain. Ideally every people should live within its own boundaries and have as little as possible to do with other peoples; then there would be no need of massacres and atrocities. My ideal world would be one of small, isolated, homogeneous communities, each surrounded by a palisade wall and eyeing with well-deserved suspicion and distrust the neighbours who live beyond it.

Anyway, the British, for their part, eventually responded with atrocities of their own, indiscriminate reprisals and mass executions imposed by summary courts that didn't inquire too closely into how much any given individual was or wasn't guilty of involvement in the mutiny; and often the victims were forced to eat pork or beef before being killed (pp. 233, 237, 259, 334). Governor Canning, to his credit, tried to rein in these excesses, but he was under pressure from Britain, where the public opinion was baying for blood, having been agitated to a frenzy by reports of rebel atrocities (pp. 237–8).

The British sent some troops from Britain and also redirected some units originally on the way to China, but these reinforcements were slow in coming. There's an interesting discussion on pp. 280–2 arguing that the rebels were closer to liberating India than is commonly supposed: “If the rebellion had spread into western and southern India, some of the ruling princes and significant elements of the Bombay and Madras Armies would have turned against the British, and the game might well have been up.”

The mutiny started in May 1857, and it was not until September that the British took control of Delhi again (p. 302); by then the mutiny was clearly on a downward trajectory, but it was not over until late spring 1858. Some of the rebel leaders went into hiding and were only captured years later (pp. 369–70).

[An interesting detail: British officers occasionally exchanged messages in Greek, so the rebels wouldn't understand them if they intercepted them (pp. 311, 322).]

The British carried out various reforms in the wake of the mutiny. The government of India was officially transferred from the East India Company to the British crown (p. 370; but I wonder how much that meant in practice considering that the EIC had not been functioning like an actual business company for decades by that point). Amnesty was offered to the rebel rank and file (p. 371). Native princes who had stayed loyal were also rewarded, among other things with a promise that the British government would recognize adopted heirs in the future (p. 376). Numerous changes were also made in the Bengal army, not only to prevent future mutiny but also to modernize and strengthen it (pp. 377, 399–404).

*

All in all, parts of this book were interesting, especially those dealing with the causes of the mutiny and with the post-mutiny reforms; but the details of the military operations were really not for me. Incidentally, I can't help thinking that the mutiny would make for a fascinating alternative-history scenario: what would the subsequent history of India (and for that matter, of the British empire) have been like if the mutiny had succeeded? Many British imperialist moves in the later parts of the 19th century were motivated by securing their control of India and the routes that led to it, so if they had lost India in 1857, the subsequent history of their imperialism might have turned out to be much less ambitious. And in India itself, in place of the huge republic that we see today, there might be a patchwork of princely states, perhaps loosely connected under a neo-Mughal emperor in a manner reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire. It would be a more colourful picture, that's for sure, and I'm always in favour of more disintegrated political structures; but I'm not sure if it would actually be better for the ordinary people living there.