First war of independence: 1857

[ramana]

From Ind Express, 20 Sept., 2007

Delhi's LAst stand


<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Delhi’s last stand: September scenes</b>

Amaresh MisraPosted online: Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 0000 hrs Print  Email
The old city of Delhi, Shahajahanabad, saw the final phase of the four-month British versus Sepoy battle rage from September 14 to 21,1857. Today, some observers perceive it as a veritable Stalingrad of the 19th century.<b> Modern India is yet to recognise its full significance</b>. The coup of May 11,1857 that was staged by the sepoys took the British by surprise. It transformed overnight the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ into what both British radicals and conservatives now term a ‘national war of independence’.


<b>How the Delhi struggle affected the rest of India is revealed by one major episode</b>. In June 1857, a big, China-bound British expeditionary force was diverted to India. Assembled at Bombay under Colonel Woodburn, it was to march through western India and intercept the formidable Neemuch Sepoys who, after ending their allegiance to the British on June 3, were marching towards Delhi via Agra.

The Agra Fort was still in British hands. In fact the British United Provinces Government ran effectively from Agra as Lt Governor Colvin was stationed there. A few hundred miles away was <b>Delhi, surrounded by dainty gates and pavilions and adorned with gardens and markets. It was an aesthetic, modern city at that point in time. However, it was not designed to withstand a siege. </b>

The British knew that intercepting the Neemuch Sepoys was critical. On June 19, the Nasirabad Brigade had demoralised the British force, besieging Delhi from the ridge. The ridge stood on an elevated plain and the British located there were in a better position. Yet in a night-long skirmish, the Nasirabad men climbed the ridge and reached the British camp, and unnerved their opponents. Woodburn, too, was unable to intercept the Neemuch Sepoys.

<b>Throughout the Delhi siege, Indian morale was high. The sturdy sepoys of peasant stock from UP and Bihar, known as the ‘poorabias’, ruled the roost. The ‘poorabias’ were soon joined by ‘pashchamiyas’, or Jat-Gujjar-Mewati peasants and nomads from Haryana and western UP. The diaries of Munshi Jiwan Lal and Mainoddin Hussein, two British spies, reveal an extraordinary picture of a city warring against the British but also at war with itself. </b>Bahadur Shah Zafar’s attitude was pro-peasant. In fact Zafar, a Sufi, inaugurated what can be called the world’s first revolutionary Sufi state. Here, as per Sufi precepts, neither atheism nor religion but justice was meant to prevail. <b>The sepoys turned Zafar’s Sufi state into a constitutional monarchy. Charters, promising land to the tiller and capital to merchants were issued in a plebian spirit that would mark the Paris Commune in 1871.</b>

<b>Whether Hindu or Muslim, most of Delhi’s urban elite had emerged in the post-1803 period, after the British wrested Delhi from the Marathas. They had a vested interest in maintaining British rule.</b> During the battle, several of them acted as British spies and were often arrested by the sepoys and Mughal princes. It was such subversion that led to the blowing up of the sepoy magazine on August 8. By September, several sepoy units had left Delhi to fight in other theatres and not because, as some British historians have argued, their morale was sinking. British troops equalled that of the Indians.<b> Bakht Khan, Sirdhari Singh and Bhageerath Misra, the three main sepoy leaders representing respectively the Bareilly, Neemuch and Nasirabad/City Brigades, had decided to defend Delhi to the last while keeping their options to fight on, should Delhi fall.</b>

<b>On September 14, the Brit</b>ish, with numbers comparable to those of the sepoys (roughly 10,000), and bolstered by better artillery, <b>breached Delhi’s Kashmiri Gate.</b> Hoping for a rout, the British troops were dismayed to find sepoy detachments fanning out, forming an irregular curve and threatening the British camp. By September 15, the British were halted. <b>Hodson, Nicholson, Reid, all legendary British officers, went on record to state that they had never seen European infantry in such dire straits. The fighting on September 14 and 15 alone cost the British over 2,000 men.</b>

A sepoy counter-attack would have ended the battle. <b>At that crucial moment Bhageerath Misra was assassinated, leading to confusion in the Nasirabad/City Brigade. Bakht Khan leading the Bareilly Brigade on Delhi’s outskirts also received faulty intelligence. The Indians then ran out of ammunition.</b> This was the chief reason why the British ‘earned a victory by default’. Still, it took the British seven days to cover the few kilometres that separated Kashmiri Gate from the Red Fort. <b>The 10,000-strong British force lost more than 6,000 men. When the Union Jack went up on the Red Fort on September 21, the British ‘were a shattered and a demoralised force’.</b> They could not even spare 2,000 soldiers to pursue the sepoys who had melted into the countryside to fight for another day.

Misra has authored ‘War of Civilisations: India 1857 AD’
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