324. India’s Greatest Rebellion: Massacre and Revenge in Kanpur (Part 3)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rimpel. And today we're going to confront the darkest chapter of the great uprising of 1857, remembered in India as the first war of independence, remembered in Britain as the Indian mutiny. And the darkest chapter is the terrible massacre at Saticharagat and then later at the Bibigar in Kornpore. Kornpore as it was then, Kornpore as it is now, was then home to one of the largest European communities in India. and it suddenly found itself at the centre of the mutiny. Fear, rumours of rebellion are sweeping down the Ganges towards it.

1:09And in the middle of all of that stands a man called Sir Hugh Wheeler who is really trapped in a fragile entrenchment and he's got hundreds of civilians, women and children around him. And on June the 5th, the mutiny finally hits his city. Now I should warn you, this is an episode that contains some really graphic descriptions of violence that some of you may find distressing. To the Victorians, the events that took place in Kanpur were the most shameful and embarrassing of their entire imperial history. In early 1857, Kanpur, or Cornpur as it was known to the British, boasted the second largest European community in the entire subcontinent, second only, of course, to Calcutta.

1:52By the end of that year, only five men and two women were still alive. The mutiny of whole regiments of previously loyal sepoys and the final indignity of the slaughter of defenseless women and children in the Bibigar, the Angels of Albion, as the British papers called them, all of these images haunted British nightmares for generations. And no new army squaddy or ICS officer arrived in the subcontinent without being first warned, remember Karnpore. The Karnpore massacres were the dark heart of the 1857 uprising. So, I mean, if you haven't listened to the first two episodes, I mean, do try and go back and listen to them because they set the scene well.

2:32But in a nutshell, what you've missed is the humiliation of Indian sepoys in Meerut, which starts this rumbling discontent and a belief that the British are not now to be obeyed. And we covered in the next episode how this storm of discontent gets momentum, led by the sepoys who are saying they're not going to take orders from the British anymore. Why should the British be in charge? They don't have to be. We outnumber them. And discontent from those who are often without means, so the lower socioeconomic groups joining in behind and falling in behind the sepoys as they make their way to Delhi where Zafar, the emperor, sits.

3:16They are going to demand of him that he takes a stand. Who's he going to choose? Is he going to choose to stand with the British who they are hellbent on kicking out and murdering because there is terrible bloodshed along the way or is he going to back the rebels? And that's where we left you in the last episode. So the fate of Delhi is the key matter. You can see this ripple of risings as the news of the violence in Delhi travels from town to town, from cantonment to cantonment, down the Ganges as different groups of sepoys raise the revolt. and everyone is watching to see how the commander-in-chief, General Anson, reacts and will he be able to just quickly recapture Delhi and snuff this whole thing out.

4:05And Henry Lawrence, who is in charge of Lucknow, writes a letter at this time saying, tranquility cannot be much longer maintained unless Delhi is speedily captured. Now, as we saw at the end of the last episode, Anson does not speedily recaptured Delhi. He hesitates and humbugs away and doesn't think it's very serious. And the revolt does spread down the Ganges. Aligar, Etawa, and eventually on the 30th of May, it hits Lucknow, where Henry Lawrence is going to be besieged in the residency. Now, the next station after Lucknow is Karnpor, or Cornpor, as the British called it. And that has the largest British civilian community.

4:45It's a major business centre and remained up until the at the end of the 19th century, the centre where all the boxwallers lived, as they were called, the businessmen. And in Karnpur, there are two people who have a particular interest in making sure that tranquility is not restored. They want an uprising. They want to seize the moment. Who are those two people, Anita? They're really interesting. And particularly, I find Asimullah Khan really fascinating. So he's known as a charity boy because he's sort of been growing up on the largesse of missionaries, largely. His father dies during a famine, and this is a story that often happens in India.

5:22And the men of God come in with a Bible in one hand and food in the other, and they save him. They do, no doubt about it. So, he's brought up by evangelical English missionaries. He learns to hate with a peculiar intensity. Wait for it. Wait for it. And again, this is not a unique story either, because some of those people who went through those sort of mission schools didn't have the best recollections of the way they were treated or the way they were looked down on or the way they had to eject everything that they'd ever believed in before. But undoubtedly, the missionaries, when they do come in after a famine, do save lives of the destitute children who are left behind.

5:58So he does eventually, when he's slightly older, enter the service of Maharaja Nanasaheb. Now, Nanasaheb's a really important figure in the Indian mutiny story. He's a crucial figure, yeah. The adopted son of the last Peshwa of the Marathas. So the Peshwa is like the prime minister of the Marathas. And the Marathas themselves, the great Marathas, if they're referred to in India, even now, are the ones who sort of stand up and push back against the Mughals, they push back against the British. And they're sort of known as the figureheads of any kind of rebellious spirit are the Marathas. And he is taken in by Nana Sahib, who is one of these Marathas.

6:37And it is during that time that he sent to London for his education. And he's kind of an exotic creature in London. He's a beautiful boy also. He's very attractive. Yeah, very lovely looking chap. And he's introduced at that time to a list of some of the most famous celebs that London has to offer. And I'm talking about people like Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray, Carlisle. And they are sort of enamoured by him, but he leaves their company with an almost genocidal hatred of the British. He really doesn't like being the pet. We should say that he also has an affair while he's in London with its thought.

7:13This is not 100 % certain, but there's strong indications that he manages to go out with Lucy Duff Gordon, who's a great sort of bohemian traveller. And they have a thing, it seems to be. But that just leaves him all the more sort of determined not to become a second class citizen when he returns to India. Yeah, I mean, too, you know, sort of exotic enough to have an affair with, but too brown to marry, which is another story that we heard when we did the Duleep Singh episodes. So he returns to India, and he gives this very skewed impression to his master, Nana Sahib, who's paid for him to go to London and get an education.

7:52One thing we should say is he stops on the way, and this is a crucial bit of the story, in the Crimea, and he sees the British being defeated. Yes, we did that. We did that in episode one. You're right. Exactly right. And you're right to remind me. Because it's the first time that he comes away with this impression that they can be fought and they can be beaten and that they bleed the same as anybody else. But when he comes back to Nanasa, not only does he come back with that impression from the Crimea of, you know, they are beatable. These guys are not supermen. They can be fought and pushed back.

8:23But he also has this weird impression that he gives to his boss about what people are like in London. He says, They're very scantily populated. That's England, he says. And what fools we natives have made ourselves so quietly to surrender our country to a handful of tyrannical foreigners who are trying in many ways to deprive us of our religion and our privileges. So he says, you know, they're nothing. What are we doing? Why are we listening to them? And he tells Nana Sahib to annihilate his enemies. He fills them with this fire. He says, wipe them out root and branch is the way he puts it from In the face of all India, let not a soul escape.

9:03And tell us more about Narnasabh. Do you remember he figured in our Irish episode when I read you the lament? Did he tell that there? Yes, it was the ballad of Paddy. You know, Paddy must emigrate. Right, I remember that. And it was stuff about, you know, the Irishman who had to go over during the famine. And, you know, one of the refrains was, we fought that demon Narnasabh for you. And now we're starving and we have to emigrate. So, England, what the hell do you think you're doing with us, Irishman? So his name is front and center in that ballot. So Nanasabh is regarded as a demon because of what obviously happens in this episode in Kanpur.

9:38And Nanasabh was originally born Dondupant. Nanasabh is a title. And he was adopted by the last Maratha prime minister or Peshawar, Bajirau II, the last ruler of the Maratha empire. and the British introduced this thing called the doctrine of lapse, whereby they basically didn't accept this tradition of adoption. Adoption says Dalhousie. Dalhousie is the man who says this is a way of gaining land, just outlaw the adoption, the recognition of adoption, and we can take great swathes of land without firing a bullet. So Narnassar, who should have inherited great swathes of the Deccan, because the Marathas in the late 18th and early 19th century were massively powerful and massively rich, and they made all the other military powers fear them.

10:26And it was their defeat by Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, that started his career. But instead, Nhan Ashab gets almost nothing. He inherits nothing because the British have taken his land and taken his privileges. And he's left with this slightly sort of crummy house in Karnpore, where he's sort of in exile and the british go and visit him and they laugh at him they say um he's someone who would serve his visitors a breakfast of yorkshire pie game pie mutton chop steak sardines and fortnaman marmalade on mismatched china uh with bedroom towels for napkins uh so he's you know he's very keen to be hospitable and he suffers the snobbery of the british who laugh at him for trying to take on Western ways and not quite getting it right by serving bedroom towels rather than napkins and fortnum and mason marmalade which you'd have thought they'd be very grateful for but at lunchtime along with game pie so in all these ways he's got his nose put out of joint too and these two men Azimullah Khan and Narnassab are in some people's accounts of the 1857 uprising the actual masterminds.

11:43There's some people that think that there's a central plan and that these guys are stoking the fires. I personally am less convinced by that. I think they're important and they definitely are the crucial people in Karnapur. But whether they've actually laid a sort of trail of gunpowder across India is less certain in my view. Well, I mean, I agree with you. I think I agree with you because actually, you know, there are two weeks of tension and, you know, completely unpredictable violence which precede what happens in Karnpor. You know, and people are not sure who's going to side with which, you know, area.

12:18You know, some sepoys will want to remain loyal. Some will want to join the uprising. And what about the civilian population? You need them on the side. And they're also dividing in all sorts of different directions. But let's talk about what happens in Karnpor and talk about another person who's very important to this story, the station commandant, a man called General Sir Hugh Massey Wheeler, commanded the Khanpur Division. He's kind of, should I put it, the last of a dying breed of men. Born in Ireland, as so many people who served the East India Company were, in June 1789, he's the son of an East India Company officer who had married the daughter of the First Lord Massey.

12:58He had boy to man been in the Indian army. He'd served a sepoy regiment at the age of only just 16, just a little kid. And he'd been in India virtually continuously ever since. And in that time, he had acquired this ferocious reputation as a soldier and a fighter. His one regret always remained that he'd never served as a staff officer, a circumstance that he put down to the fact and in his words, that he had no friends and had nothing from government that it could withhold from me. But I mean, more likely, I don't know, it's the fact that he was Irish, because we know that the Irish could get so far and no further.

13:35Episodes that we've done with Jane Allmire will tell you that. And also that he had a long-term relationship with the Eurasian wife of a fellow brother officer. Now, this is... This is a double, yeah, this is a double no-no, exactly. Yes, I mean, it's sort of mixing blood, you know, miscegenation at this point. As we said, you know, the Ochtoloni period where actually, you know, sort of mixing up and becoming part of the fabric of India was not a big deal. and then suddenly that changes and you're not to mix. So they're sort of, you know, Harry Potter parlance, mudbloods, if you like, mixing with magical people.

14:10But it's also the fact that she's attached to a fellow officer, which again is a kind of military no-no. Oh, she's also, yeah, he's having an affair. You know, he's a dirty dog for doing it. So Frances Marsden, the woman who's at the apex of this love triangle, is the daughter of an Irish major and his Muslim wife. She was just 15 and she was already eight months pregnant when she married a guy called Thomas Oliver, who is a Bengal officer himself of mixed descent. Within four years, she had had an illegitimate child by Wheeler. She's then pretty much continually pregnant after that. She has another six children, six babies.

14:47Wheeler is at the head of this mishmash family and therefore is not going to get much preferment. Yeah. By this stage, it had become a social no-no to do any of this. I mean, it's kind of just, and the other thing that is kind of snarled upon, because she's 47 years old at the time of the mutiny, and she's six months pregnant. So, you know, they are also, so the whole S-E-C-K-S, sex, they're still doing it. God, they should be old enough to know better. That kind of thing, you know, they get an awful lot of snobbery about that. But what she does have, her only shield, and it's not much, is a marriage certificate.

15:22But that doesn't give her any respectability, Mrs. later Lady Wheeler, is never welcome in other Brit households because of who she is and what her background story is. But Wheeler, remember his name, he's going to be very important. He's very important. And we've seen all sorts of slightly dodgy old food. Wheeler is old, but he's quite together. And he realises how precarious his position is, because he has this tiny European gallows and only 70 invalids from the 32nd foot. outnumbered by a large Indian contingent. And so as this all heats up, he's frantically telegramming for reinforcements.

16:03He wants white troops to balance the enormous cantonment in Kanpur, which is full of Indian sepoys. But he realizes he needs to take action himself. And there's this very delicate balance between sort of blowing an alarm bell by sort of admitting vulnerability and taking some sort of form to protect himself. So eventually, in response to a telegram from Calcutta to begin immediate and obvious preparations, on the 20th of May, which is now, I suppose, two weeks after Mirut has gone up, he starts digging an enormous trench around the barracks, using the earth thrown up on the outside to form a parapet.

16:44So he's fortifying himself. He realizes that the thing is about to blow and he wants to have a proper defensible area where he can retreat with the British community. Trouble is, it's all completely flat. It's not like it's on a hill, you know, it's not a castle that he can defend easily. Delhi has its ridge, but Kampur is completely pancake flat. So his only defense is what he can do with a ditch and a little parapet. And the mud, and there's not much, I mean, it's not much of a parapet either, is it, Willie? because it's only sort of three feet high, which somebody could just fall over, you know, just tumble over.

17:19It's not much of a protection. And eventually on the evening of the 20th, there's a fire in the lines of the infantry and the Europeans think this is a sign that a revolt is going to take place. And the following day, Wheeler orders all the women and children. He blows the alarm bell. He presses the red button and he orders them all to leave their houses in the town and move into this new fortified contunement. Actually, nothing blows. The next couple of days, there is no uprising. So a few of them kind of move back to their bungalows, hoping for the best. But already now there's this sort of slightly panicked community.

17:53Someone called Captain Hayes writes that people of every kind, of every colour, sect, profession were crowding into the barracks. While I was there, buggies and palkygarries, that's all sorts of carriages and palanquins, vehicles of all sorts drove up and discharged cargoes of writers, tradesmen, a miscellaneous mob of every complexion from white to tawny, all in terror of what seemed still to be an imaginary foe. Ladies sitting down rough at the mess table in the barracks, women suckling infants, nannies, ayahs, children in all directions, and officers too. I saw quite enough to convince me that if any insurrection took place or takes place, we shall have no one to thank but ourselves, as we've now shown the natives how very easily we can be frightened, and when frightened, utterly helpless.

18:38You know, Wheeler in many ways is better than many of his compatriots because he does see the threat coming. He does try to build this three foot wall to defend against the chaos that's coming his way. But also what's contained within the wall is going to be really problematic because water, water, if you're going to be stuck behind this wall, even if you can defend this three foot wall, there's only one well to give you water. There's also, you know, sort of the hygiene situation isn't great because there aren't that many toilets. And for all of these people, there are different tawny colored hues and white coming in and, you know, begging to be saved.

19:15Where are they going to go to the loo? Where are they going to wash? How are they going to keep clean? What are they going to eat? All of this is, you know, but they don't have time because at 1.30 in the morning of the 5th of June, Three cracks of a pistol signal what Wheeler has been waiting for, the start of the long-awaited immunity in the lines of the Second Cavalry. Now, at this point, a man called Colonel John Hewitt appears on a charger, having ridden all alone from this entrenchment, shouting, my children, this is not your way, do not do this, thinking that, you know what, they will listen to me.

19:51I have grown up with sepoys. They have respected me. I just have to ask and they won't do it. In fact, that's what he promised Wheeler. He said, you know, his men would never mutiny. They would mutiny over his dead body is what he tells Wheeler. I mean, he's kind of right because the men don't hack him to pieces. They run around him though. They don't listen to a word he says. So Ewert, in complete shock because he's wrong, gallops back to the entrenchment and says to Wheeler, I was wrong, get ready, they're coming. And no sooner, he arrived at the camping ground, horns start blaring, kettle drums start thumping, and Nana Sahib himself commandeers a house next to the theatre and starts issuing orders.

20:34And this lends itself, Willie, doesn't it, to this idea that Nana Sahib is the nerve centre and the planning and all of this was planned. I mean, pick it up from there. So, I mean, what is he doing? The historiography of this is complicated as ever in India with sort of Hindu-Muslim rivalry. A lot of the nationalist historians have bigged up Narnasab as the crucial player in all this and slightly sort of downgraded the Mughals, who in Savarka's account don't appear at all. But Narnassar is an important character, and he is sitting there in the center of all this, and he is trying to proclaim himself Peshawar.

21:11He said, you know, we've overthrown the British now. This is now a new regime. I am restoring the Marathas to power. And he appoints Azimullah Khan as his collector. He takes on the job of tax collecting. And his number one priority is obviously to destroy Wheeler's entrenchment before they get reinforcements or anything else happens. And the story always is that the regiments, like so many other places, were all set to leave Kanpur and march off to Delhi and join the main body of the mutiny in and around the Red Fort. And this was going to be the nerve center of the revolt. But Narnassar says, no, no, no, don't go off to the Mughals.

21:46Stay here. We're going to start the restore the Marathas and we need you guys. So these guys have to wheel around and he directs them to destroy Wheeler's entrenchment. And this is complicated because these are people he's lived cheek by jowl with. Narnasab has been living in the same town as Wheeler. They've all been at the same dinners and lunches. They all know each other. His orders are obeyed. The army turns around and he sends rather sort of courteously a formal letter to General Wheeler notifying him that an attack will commence in 10 minutes on the 6th of June. So Wheeler was shocked and at once ordered all his officers who got off back to their homes to come to the entrenchment.

22:30The whole thing is about to blow. With such expedition was the summons obeyed, records one of his officers, that we were compelled to leave all our goods and chattels, which fell prey to the ravages of the sepoys. And after they'd appropriated all our movables, they set fire to our bungalows. And then shortly after that, the first shot is fired. It comes from a massive nine-pounder cannon on the northwest. It strikes the crest of the mud wall and glides over the barracks roofs. This is about 10 a.m. in the morning. There's a large party of ladies and children on the outside of the barracks. Immediately a bugle call goes to say that fighting is beginning.

23:13And then they hear for the first time a noise that they're going to hear a great deal over the next three weeks, which is the peculiar whizzing of round shot. And the fire grows hotter. And by the middle of the morning, the first casualties occurred. A guy called Maguire, a gunner, is killed from a round shot. People say that they could see it heading towards him, but he evidently was almost sort of fascinated by the sight. And it strikes him bodily and it kills him. So with that first casualty, we're going to take a break now and come back after the break to the siege of Wheeler's entrenchment.

24:05Welcome back. So the storm has now broken upon Garnpour and Wheeler has to deal with what comes with it. The entrenchment, just who's inside it, is a really strange collection of people. we described it just before the break but it really is a rag tag assembly of sahibs and mem sahibs you know the sort of crinoline ladies and and and civilians not serving you know who are in there who've been running things like banks and telegraph offices and other things like that post offices and they are now expected to defend against this oncoming storm and there's some really i mean extraordinary characters in this bridget widowson is is one such a stout muscular sergeant major of a woman who stands in front of all the cowering women and children with a sword drawn in front of them.

24:52They shall not pass kind of aspect to her. And you've also got a man called de Russet, who's a barber who'd made a fortune catering to the peculiar whims of the cross-dressing King Nasiruddin of Oud, who's also a barber, a hairdresser, sort of wielding his scissors and God knows what else to try and protect people from men who are so heavily armed with muskets. and cannon. The siege is now fully in swing. The rebels are tightening their noose around the entrenchment. And it doesn't take long if you've got such a swelled number of people and you haven't really made provision for them for food to start running out.

25:30And the daily ration is quickly limited to a handful of split peas and a handful of flour, which is certainly not, writes one account, more than half a pint together. Now, that is not much. So predictably, people are desperately trying to supplement and they look at the horses. And so the horses start being shot for their meat. Old cavalry horses boiled up, their heads put into pots to make soup or stew, not one morsel to be wasted. But do you remember I was talking about what was within this three foot wall that Wheeler quickly erects to protect his people, there's not enough water and that's decisive.

26:12You can go without food for days at a time, but water you can't live without for very long. There's just one well inside this entrenchment. The rebels quickly realise that if they want to take this, they've got to make sure no one can get to the well, no one can get water. They are basically stationed, pointing at the well that anyone who's brave enough, stupid enough to try and lower a bucket to try and get water is going to get shot at. And so there are crackles and whizzing all around that well almost constantly. You get the framework around this well, you know, the bit where you put the rope and pull stuff up, that's blown to bits almost immediately.