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Chapter 4

It was fortunate, perhaps, for the rulers of that day that Peace was but of short duration, and that the “passion for military glory” had again something to feed upon. The Sikh Army, having risen against its own leaders, was vapouring on the banks of the Satlaj, and threatening to cross the British frontier. No war could have been more welcome to the Sipahi than a war with the Sikhs. For they were an insolent and minacious race, and it was known that they had talked of overrunning Hindustan, and pouring on to the sack of Delhi and the pillage of Calcutta. They took the first step, and the war commenced.

The Patna conspiracy

Whilst the Governor-General and the Commander-in-Chief were at the head of the Army on the frontier, and all eyes were turned towards the scene of that sanguinary conflict on the Satlaj, lower down, on the banks of the Ganges, four hundred miles from Calcutta, an incident was occurring, which, in quiet times, might have made itself heard all over the country, but which, lost in the din of battle in that momentous winter, gave only a local sound. Discovery was made of an organised attempt to corrupt the soldiery in the Lower Provinces. On Christmas-eve the Magistrate of Patna received a letter from Major Rowcroft, informing him that the Munshi of his regiment – the 1st N.I. – was in treasonable correspondence with a rich and influential landowner in the neighbourhood, who had been tampering with the allegiance of the Native officers and Sipahis in the contiguous station of Danapur.

Of the truth of the story there was no doubt. To what dimensions the conspiracy really extended, and from what central point it radiated, is not known, and now never will be known. It was a season of considerable popular excitement, aggravated in the neighbourhood of Patna by local causes, and eager efforts had been made to prepare the people for revolt.

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Reports had been for some time current to the effect that the British Government purposed to destroy the caste of the Hindus, and to abolish Muhammadanism by forbidding the initial ceremony through which admission is obtained to the number of the Faithful. And to this was added another lie, scarcely less alarming, that the Pardah was also to be prohibited, and that Muhammadan females of all ranks were to be compelled to go about unveiled. Stories of this kind, it has been observed, however monstrous in themselves, are readily believed, if there be but only a very little truth to give them currency. The truth may be from within or it may be from without. It may be direct proof or indirect confirmation. It little matters so long as there is something which men may see and judge for themselves. There had been many exciting causes at this time. to rouse the resentments and to stimulate the activities of the Maulvis and the Pandits, such as the new law of inheritance and the new educational measures; and now the introduction of the messing system in the gaols was a patent fact which all might understand. It was an incident, moreover, of untoward occurrence, that about this time, when designing men were eagerly looking out for some false move on the part of the Government, the Magistrate of Patna, at the request of the Principal of the College, alarmed the inhabitants of the city by instituting inquiries enabling him to form something of a census of the population, showing their different castes, professions, and employments – a movement which was at once declared to be a part of the great scheme of the Government for the forcible conversion of the people.

But it was necessary that the soldiery should be gained over by some alarming fiction of especial application to the Sipahi himself. Already had indirect agency been set at work for his corruption. He found the lie in full leaf in his native village. When he went on furlough, his relatives told him that if he did not make a stand for his religion he would soon have to fight against his brethren and kinsmen126. When he returned to his regiment he found that everyone was talking on the same subject, and that it was currently believed that the introduction of the messing system into the gaols was to be followed by its

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introduction into the Army, and that the Sipahi was not much longer to be allowed to have uncontrolled dominion over his own cooking-pot.

If, then, there had been nothing more than this, the time would have been propitious, and plotters might reasonably have thought that the opportunity was ripe. But in that winter of 1845–46 a seditious enterprise of this kind in the Lower Provinces was favoured by the circumstances of the great war with the Sikhs, which was drawing all the resources of the Government to the North-Western frontier. There was a vague belief that lakhs of Panjabi fighting-men would soon be streaming over the country, and that the English would be driven into the sea. Many, then, with eager cupidity, bethought themselves of gutting the opium godowns of Patna, where a million and a half of Government property lay stored; and all the dangerous classes of the city were ripe and ready for pillage and for slaughter. A rising of the Sipahis at such a time, or their acquiescence in a rising of the people, might, have been fatal to the continued supremacy of Government in that part of the country. The plotters scarcely hoped to accomplish more than the latter of these two means of overthrowing the English. At all events, it was safer to begin with the milder experiment on the fidelity of the Sipahi. So delegates went about in the Lines saying that the great King of Dehli had sent a confidential agent to give a month’s pay to every Native officer and soldier in the regiments in order that if any outbreak should occur in their part of the country they should not lift a hand in support of the Government. All the landowners, and the cultivators, and the townspeople were ready, it was said, to rise; and if’ the soldiery would only remain inactive, the British power might be destroyed before it could perpetrate the outrages by which it sought to overturn the religions of the country.

A Jamadar of the 1st Regiment heard this story, gravely listened to all that was urged by the emissary of sedition, and said that he would consider of the matter127. Then he repeated all that had happened to his commanding officer, and measures were soon taken to test the reality of the plot. There was at all events one substantial proof that the story was no fiction.

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There was money counted out for the work of corruption, and tied up in bags ready for immediate delivery. It was agreed that the Jamadar and another officer in Rowcroft’s confidence should take the money, and matters were soon conveniently arranged so as to bring about the disclosure. A detachment of the regiment was about to proceed to Gaya; with this went the two faithful Jamadars. On the way they met or were overtaken by two well-dressed Muhammadans in an ekka, or native wheeled-carriage, who gave them the money, saying that others had taken it, and that larger supplies were forthcoming for the same purpose. Nothing could stamp the reality of the design more surely than this. Men are in earnest when they part with their money.

Another Native officer of the 1st traitorously took the corrupting coin, and a Munshi of the regiment was found to be deeply implicated in the plot. But Rowcroft’s opportune discovery of the attempt to debauch his men, and the measures which he wisely adopted, rendered the further efforts of the conspirators utterly futile and hopeless. The military offenders were soon in confinement; the civil magistrate was tracking down the instigators of sedition; and if no great success then attended the attempt to bring the necks of the most guilty to the gallows, it was sufficient for the public peace that the plot was discovered. What the amount of real danger then was it is difficult to determine. Two other Native regiments at Danapur were tampered with in like manner, but the discovery of the plot in Rowcroft’s corps rendered other efforts abortive. Many great names were used by the agents of sedition, but upon what authority can only be conjectured. It was stated that a royal mandate had come from the King of Dehli; that the Rajah of Nipal was ready to send a great army sweeping down to the plains; and again it was said that the Sikhs were the prime movers of the plot128. All this can be only obscurely shadowed on the page of history. But it is

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certain that a scroll was found, described by a witness as being many cubits long, on which the names of some hundred of respectable inhabitants of Patna, Hindus and Muhammadans, were attached to a solemn declaration binding them to die in defence of their religion, and that it was honestly believed by large numbers of the educated no less than the ignorant people of that part of the country, that the one cherished object of the British Government was to reduce all the people of India to the no-caste state of the Faringhis. Of the reality of this belief there is no doubt; so a Proclamation was put forth by the Governor of Bengal, declaring that as the British Government never had interfered, so the people might be assured that it never would interfere in any way with the religions of the country.

The Jamadar and the Munshi of the 1st Regiment, who had been seduced into traitorous courses, were tried by court-martial. and sentenced to death, with the usual reluctance manifested by a tribunal composed only of Native officers129. But it was not necessary to strike terror into the minds of an army hovering on the brink of general mutiny; so the sentence was not carried out. Whatever danger there may have been had passed away130. The victories of Hardinge and Gough had a grand moral effect from one end of the country to the other, for it had been believed that the British were sore pressed. and that their power would be shaken to the centre by this collision with the Sikhs. Victory made all things right again, and for a while we heard nothing more of mutiny or sedition. With intervals of comparative repose, distinguished by an occupation of the Sikh country, very flattering to the Sipahi’s pride, and very profitable to his purse, the operations which resulted in the fall of the

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Sikh empire then lasted for more than three years. The story has been told in the first chapter of this work. The Panjab, like Sindh, was turned by a stroke of the pen into a British province, and the same difficulties bristled up in the path of the Annexer. The Sipahi, called to serve in the Panjab, had no longer the privileges of foreign service; and, in spite of the lesson taught by the Sindh annexation, he could not understand why the conquest of the country should be inaugurated by the reduction of his pay.

1849–50. Mutiny in the Panjab

And so the regiments in the Panjab at that time, and those which were moved across the Satlaj from our older provinces, determined to refuse the reduced rates, and to stand out boldly for the higher allowances. All the regiments, suffering or soon to suffer from the incidence of the reduction, took counsel with each other, and promised mutual support. Delegates from the several corps went about from station to station, and letters were exchanged between those at a distance. The first manifestation of open discontent was at Rawalpindi.

July 1849

There, one morning in July, Sir Colin Campbell, a soldier of the highest promise, already budding into fame – the “war-bred Sir Colin,” as Napier then called him – received the significant intelligence that the 22nd Regiment had refused to receive their pay. Outwardly, the Sipahis were calm and respectful , but their calmness indicated a sense of strength, and Campbell felt that all the other Native regiments in the Panjab would probably follow their example. Such a combination at any time and in any place would have been dangerous and alarming; but the peril was greatly aggravated by the peculiar circumstances of the times. For it had grown up in a newly-conquered country, swarming with the disbanded fighting-men of the old Sikh Army, and it was believed that our discontented Sipahis, if they had once broken into rebellion, would have soon found their ranks swollen by recruits from the Khalsa soldiery, eager to profit by the crisis, and again to strike for the recovery of their lost dominion. We had just seen the downfall of an empire precipitated by the lawlessness of an army, driven onward by the impulses of its greed; and now it seemed as though our own soldiery, having caught the contagion, were clamouring for donatives, and that it required very careful steering to save us from being wrecked upon the same rock.

Sir Charles Napier had, at that time, just appeared upon the

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stage. He had hastened from Calcutta to Simla to meet the Governor-General, who was refreshing himself with the cool mountain air; and there the news reached him, not that one, but that two regiments at Rawalpindi had refused to take their pay, and that there was every prospect of four more regiments at Wazirabad, and two at the intermediate station of Jhilam, following their example. Then Dalhousie and Napier took counsel together, with some of their staff-officers, and it was debated whether it would not be wise to strike a vigorous blow at the incipient mutiny by disbanding the regiments which had already refused to accept their pay. To this course, proposed by Colonel Benson, an old officer of the Company’s service, held in deserved regard by many successive Governors-General, Napier resolutely objected, and Dalhousie concurred with the Chief. Hoping for the best, but still prepared for the worst, the old soldier instructed Campbell to point out to the recusant regiments the folly and wickedness of their course; but he wrote privately to him that in the event of their obduracy, he and other commanding officers must bring the power of the European regiments in the Panjab to bear upon the coercion of the mutinous Sipahis. But before these letters arrived, Campbell had tided over the difficulty. “The combination amongst the men of the 13th and 22nd Regiments,” he wrote to Napier, on the 26th of July, “gave way to fear on the 18th, the day before your prescription for bringing them to their senses was despatched from Simla.” The fact is that, at that time, they were not ready; they were not strong enough for the resistance of authority; and they were not prepared to be the protomartyrs in such a cause. There was a European regiment at Rawalpindi; there were European regiments at other stations not far removed; and so it was held to be a wiser course to wait until the new regiments should arrive from the older provinces and unite with them in the dangerous work of military rebellion.

That these regiments were prepared to resist was soon too apparent. From Simla, Napier proceeded on a tour of inspection to the principal military stations in the Northern Provinces of India; and at Delhi he found unmistakable signs of a confederation of many regiments determined not to serve in the Panjab except on the higher pay. One regiment there, warned for service beyond the Satlaj, declared its intention not to march; but it was conciliated by a liberal grant of furloughs, which had before been withheld; and it went on to its destination.

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Napier believed that the spirit of disaffection was wide-spread. No had heard ominous reports of twenty-four regiments prepared to strike, and when he entered the Panjab, he was not surprised to find that mutiny was there only in a state of suspended activity, and that at any moment it might burst out, all the more furiously for this temporary suppression.

At Wazirabad it soon openly manifested itself. In command of that station was one of the best soldiers of the Company’s service. At an early age John Hearsey had earned a name in History, as one of the heroes of Sitabaldi, and thirty years of subsequent service had thoroughly ripened his experience, so that at this time he had perhaps as large a knowledge of the Sipahi, of his temper, of his habits, of his language, as any officer in the Native Army. With this large knowledge dwelt also in him a large sympathy. It commonly happened in those days that the man who best knew the Sipahi best loved him; and Hearsey, who had seen how good a soldier he could be before the enemy, respected his good qualities, and looked leniently on his bad. He believed that, with good management, a Sipahi regiment might be kept, under almost any circumstances, in the right temper, and he had great faith in the magic efficacy of a good speech. When, therefore, one of the regiments at Wazirabad openly refused its pay, Hearsey drew up the men on parade, and addressed them in language so touching, so forcible, and so much to the point, that many hung down their heads, ashamed of what they had done, and some even shed tears of penitence. The pay was then offered to them again. The first four men who refused were tried at once, and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour. The whole brigade was then turned out to see the sentence carried into effect. There were four Native regiments at Wazirabad; but there was also a Regiment of the Line and detachments of European Artillery, Horse and Foot. In the presence of this force, the convicted Sipahis were manacled as felons and sent off to work on the roads. After this, there were no more refusals; the men took their pay and did their work.

But discipline had not yet been fully vindicated. Three ringleaders, who had been known to go from company to company, instigating and fomenting rebellion, were tried by court-martial, and sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment. But Napier, who regarded in a far stronger light both the enormity of the offence and the magnitude of the danger, ordered a

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revision of the sentence, and death was recorded against the culprits; and against two others who were tried for the same offence by the same Court131. Then justice was satisfied, and mercy might stretch forth its hand. The sentence was commuted to transportation for life.

January 25 1850

“In eternal exile,” said Napier, in his general order to the troops, “they will, expiate their crimes. For ever separated from their country and their relations, in a strange land beyond the seas, they will linger out their miserable lives. It is a change, but I do not consider it an amelioration of their punishment. They will remain living examples of the miserable fate which awaits traitors to their colours.”

But the spirit of disaffection was not suppressed, though locally for a time it was subdued. It was declared that the Post-office runners laboured under the weight of the Sipahis’ letters, which were then passing from cantonment to cantonment; but a large number of these letters were seized and examined, and they were found to contain nothing on the subject of the allowances132. Napier, however, anticipated a crisis, and was prepared for it. Taking post at Peshawar, the extremest corner of our new Panjab territory, where was a strong European force, he believed that he would ere long be compelled to sweep down with the English regiments, picking up reinforcements as he went from station to station, and to crush a general rising of the Sipahi troops. And soon it appeared to him that the crisis had come. The 66th Regiment broke into mutiny at Govindgarh. Bursting out, on parade, with vehement shouts of disapprobation, they attempted to seize the gates of the Fort, so as to cut off all communication with the loyal troops outside the walls. There was no European regiment at Govindgarh, but the 1st Native Cavalry, under Bradford, were faithful among the faithless, and, aided by the cool courage of Macdonald of the 66th, they made good their entrance through the gate133. The Fort was saved. The European

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officers were saved. And the guilty regiment was doomed to a moral death. The 66th was struck out of the Army List. The men were disbanded in a body, and their colours given to a corps of Gurkhas, from the hill-tracts of Nipal, who were known to be good soldiers, with no Brahmanical daintiness about them, and a general fidelity to their Salt.

“ When the 66th was disbanded,” says Sir Charles Napier, “the mutiny ceased entirely. Why? The Brahmans saw that the Gurkhas, another race, could be brought into the ranks of the Company’s Army – a race dreaded, as more warlike than their own. Their religious combination was by that one stroke rendered abortive.” But, far other causes than this helped to subdue the spirit of disaffection which was then ripening in the Panjab. The Sipahis had struck for higher allowances than those which had been granted to them by the strict letter of the Regulations; but Napier thought, that however unsoldierly, however culpable their conduct might be, some grounds of dissatisfaction existed. The change, which the Sipahis resented, was declared by the Chief to be “impolitic and unjust”; and, pending a reference to Government, orders were issued for the payment of compensation to the troops, on a higher scale than that sanctioned by the latest regulations134.

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Dalhousie and Napier

Then arose that memorable conflict between Napier and Dalhousie, which ended in the resignation by the former of an office which many had predicted that he could not long continue to hold. Both were men of imperious temper, and a collision between them was, from the first, clearly foreseen. When the Military Chief took upon himself to readjust the allowances of the troops in the Panjab, the Civil Governor was at sea beyond the reach of an official reference. He returned to find what had been done, and he resented such an encroachment upon the prerogative of the Government. Napier had justified the exercise of an authority not constitutionally belonging to his office, by the assertion that the danger was pressing, and that action, in such an emergency, did not admit delay. Dalhousie denied the premises; he insisted that there had been no danger. “I cannot sufficiently express,” he wrote, in an elaborate Minute on Napier’s proceedings, “the astonishment with which I read, on the 26th of May, the intimation then made to the Government by the Commander-in-Chief, that in the month of January last a mutinous spirit pervaded the army in the Panjab, and that insubordination had risen so high and spread so wide, as to impress his Excellency with the belief that the Government of the country was placed at that time in a position of ‘great peril.’ I have carefully weighed the statements which his Excellency has advanced. I have examined anew the records that bear on the state of public affairs at that period, and I have well reflected upon all that has passed. While I do not seek to question in any way the sincerity of the convictions by which Sir Charles Napier has been led to declare that the army was in mutiny and the empire in danger, I, on my part, am bound to say that my examination and reflection have not lessened in any degree the incredulity with which I first read the statements to which I have referred.” “There is no justification,” continued his Lordship, “for the cry that India was in danger. Free from all threat of hostilities from without,

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and secure, through the submission of its new subjects, from insurrection within, the safety of India has never for one moment been imperilled by the partial insubordination in the ranks of its army. I have confronted the assertions of the Commander-in-Chief on this head with undisputed facts, and with the authority of recorded documents, and my convictions strengthened by the information which the Government commands, I desire to record my entire dissent from the statement that the army has been in mutiny, and the empire in danger.”

This was, doubtless, the popular view of the matter; and it was readily accepted at the time. What amount of danger really existed was never known, and now never will be known. Whatever it may have been, it was tided over; and the quietude that followed this temporary explosion seemed to warrant the confidence which the Governor-General had expressed. But Napier held to his opinion with as much tenacity as Dalhousie. Nothing could shake the belief of the old soldier that the exceptional course he had adopted was justified by the exceptional circumstances of the times. Still he knew the duty of obedience; he knew that in a conflict between two authorities the lower must yield to the higher, and that he had no right to complain if the latter asserted the power vested in him by the Law. “And I do not complain,” he emphatically added. But strong in his conviction of right, and master of himself, though not of the situation, he felt that he could retire with dignity from a position which he could not hold with profit to the State. And he did retire. On the 22nd of May, he addressed a letter to the Horse-Guards, requesting that the Duke of Wellington would obtain her gracious Majesty’s permission for him to resign the chief command of the Indian Army. “And the more so,” he added, “as being now nearly seventy years of age – during the last ten years of which I have gone through considerable fatigue of body and mind, especially during the last year – my health requires that relief from climate and business which public service in India does not admit.”

But there is no blame, in such a case, to be recorded against the Governor-General. When an old and distinguished soldier – a warrior of high repute, and a man of consummate ability – deliberately declares that he regards the system under which he has been called upon to command an army as a system at

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once faulty and dangerous; that he conceives the power of the civil magistrate to be so absolute that the arm of the chief soldier is paralysed; and that, so enervated and emasculated by restrictions imposed upon him by law, he cannot wield the sword with honour to himself or advantage to the State, and that, therefore, he desires to lay it down, he utters words which, whether he be right or wrong in his estimate of what ought to be the just balance between the civil and the military power, are honest, manly, dignified words, and ought everywhere to be received with respect. Few men had a better right than Sir Charles Napier to criticise an Act of Parliament. He had a right to think that the law was a bad law; and he had a right to say that it was bad. But the law, whether good or bad, was not made by Lord Dalhousie, but by the British Parliament. It was Dalhousie’s business to administer that law, and to maintain the authority vested in him by the Imperial Legislature. Of this Napier had no right to complain, and he declared that he did not complain. But the contest was on every account an unseemly and an unfortunate one. It was another and a culminating instance of that excessive centralisation which weakened the authority and degraded the character of the military arm, and taught the soldiery that the greatest chief whom England could send them was as much a subaltern of the civil governor as the youngest ensign on the Army List.

And it taught even more than this. It taught thinking men, not for the first time, that even the chief members of the Government were at war among themselves, and the lesson shook their faith in the stability of a power thus disunited, thus incoherent. “I am now sixty years of age,” wrote an intelligent native official to Sir George Clerk. “I have heard three sayings repeated by wise men, and I myself have also found out, from my own experience, that the sovereignty of the British Government will not be overthrown save by the occurrence of three objectionable circumstances.” And the first of these circumstances he thus stated: “Formerly the high, dignified Sahibs had no enmity among themselves, or at least the people of India never came to know that they had enmity. Now enmity exists among them, and it is as well seen as the sun at noonday that they calumniate and bear malice against each other135.” Such conflicts of authority are keenly watched and

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volubly discussed; and a significance is attached to them out of all proportion to the importance with which amongst us like contentions are invested. The natives of India know that we are few; but they feel that union makes us many. Seen to be at discord among ourselves, we shrivel into our true proportions, and it is believed that our power is beginning to crumble and decay.

During the administration of Lord Ellenborough there had been disunion among the higher authorities, arising out of nearly similar causes. The unauthorised promises given by the Commander-in-Chief to the Native troops proceeding to Sindh had stirred the resentment of the Governor-General, and his grave displeasure was excited by the zealous indiscretions of the Madras Government. But he had studiously veiled from the public eye the differences that had arisen. There was nothing to which he was more keenly alive than to the necessity, especially in troubled times, of maintaining a show of union and co-operation in the high places of Government. It was his hard fate at last to be compelled, by the fiat of a higher power, to exhibit to the people of India, in his own person, the very spectacle which he had striven to conceal from them, and to declare, trumpet-tongued, that the English were vehemently contending among themselves. But so long as he exercised the supreme control he was careful not to reveal the local dissensions of the Government, lest he should weaken the authority it was so essential to uphold; and little even is now known of the strife that raged at the time, when the great difficulty of garrisoning Sindh was filling the minds of the rulers of the land. But the strife between Dalhousie and Napier was proclaimed, almost as it were by beat of drum, in all the Lines and Bazaars of the country; and all men knew that the English, who used so to cling to one another, that it seemed that they thought with one strong brain and struck with one strong arm, were now wasting their vigour by warring among themselves, and in their disunion ceasing to be formidable.

This was apparent to all men’s eyes; but the Sipahi had his own particular lesson to learn, and did not neglect it. How it happened that the bitter experience which the English Government had gained, on the annexation of Sindh, made no impression upon the minds of those whose duty it was to provide against the recurrence of similar disasters, it, is

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impossible to explain. All we know is, that five years after a misunderstanding between the Government and the Army with respect to the rates of pay and allowance to be disbursed to the Sipahi, in a newly-acquired country, had driven into mutiny a large number of Native regiments, and greatly perplexed the rulers of the day, a similar conjuncture arose, and there was a similar misunderstanding, with similar results136. The Sipahi had not learnt to reconcile himself to the British theory of Annexation, and so he resented it in the Panjab as he had before resented it in Sindh. In the latter country the excitement was far greater, and the danger more serious, than in the former; but in both there was an outburst on the one side, and a concession on the other. That was given to the mutinous soldier, not without loss of character by Government, which might before have been given to the loyal one with befitting dignity and grace. When the emergency arises, it is hard to say whether there be greater evil in concession or in resistance. Napier thought the one thing, Dalhousie thought the other; and each had strong argument on his side. But both must have bitterly regretted that the contingency was ever suffered to arise, that no one in authority, warned by the lessons of the Past, had learnt to look at the consequences of Annexation with a Sipahi’s eyes, and anticipated, by small concessions, the not irrational expectations which, at a later stage developing into demands, had all the force and significance of mutiny. Had this been done; had the Sipahi been

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told that in consideration of increased distance from home, and other circumstances rendering service in Sindh and the Panjab more irksome to him than in our older provinces, certain especial advantages would be conferred upon him – advantages which might have been bestowed at small cost to the State – he would have received the boon with gratitude, and applauded the justice of his masters; but after he had struck for it, he saw not their justice, but their fear, in the concession, and he hugged the feeling of power, which lessons such as these could not fail to engender.

Footnotes

126. Some of the men of the 1st Regiment told Major Rowcroft that the villagers had said, “Our village furnishes 500 men to your Army; but if you will not listen to us, we will send 2000 jawans (young men) to oppose you.”

127. The Jamadar was a Brahman, by name Moti-Misr. He had been pay-havildar to Rowcroft, when the latter was adjutant of the regiment, and was greatly attached to him.

128. The principal actor in the Patna conspiracy was one Khojah Hasan Ali Khan. It seems that at the Sonpur Fair, a short time before, he had appeared in great state, and received a considerable number of influential people in his tent, with the object of instilling into them a fear of religious conversion, and encouraging their determination to resist. He escaped for want of evidence. There was also a wandering bookseller, who, on the plea of selling Persian volumes to the Munshis of regiments, readily gained access to them without exciting suspicion.

129. Not long after the discovery of this plot, Major Rowcroft was seized with severe illness, not without suspicion of poison, and obliged to proceed to England. Jamadar Moti-Misr told him that on his return to India, he would, doubtless, be able to lay before the Major further facts illustrative of the extent of the conspiracy. But when Rowcroft rejoined the regiment both Moti-Misr and the other faithful Jamadar were dead.

130. It is stated in an interesting pamphlet, published by Mr. Stocqueler, in 1857, that it was said at Danapur, after the discovery of this conspiracy, that although the English had then escaped, there would be, in 1857, when they had ruled a hundred years, such a tomasha as the country had never seen. I can find no trace of this in any contemporary documents, nor have my inquiries from officers who were then at Danapur enabled me to confirm the truth of the story.

131. Sir Charles Napier, in his Indian Misgovernment, says that four were tried at first, and one afterwards; but the fact is as stated in the text.

132. Sir Henry Lawrence, in Calcutta Review, vol. xxii. The statement is made on the authority of Major W. Mayne, President of the Govindgarh Court of Enquiry.

133. An opportune blow from Macdonald’s sword appears to have caused the gate to be opened. See statement published by Sir H. Lawrence in Calcutta Review, vol. xxii.

134. The bare statement in the text will suffice for the general reader, but not, perhaps, for the professional one. It may be stated, therefore, that it had been for many years the rule of the Indian Government, whenever the prices of the common articles of consumption used by the Native soldiery exceeded a certain fixed price, to grant them compensation proportionate to the additional cost of supplies. This bounty seems first to have been bestowed in the year 1821 on the Native troops serving in the Western Provinces, and was limited to the single article of ROI, or flour. Whenever attah was selling at less than fifteen sirs (or thirty pounds) the rupee, a proportionate compensation was granted. But, subsequently, in 1844, the application of this order was extended by Lord Ellenborough, and compensation also was granted to the Native troops serving in Sindh, when certain minor articles of consumption were selling at a high price. In the following year a new order relative to this same subject of compensation-money was issued by Lord Hardinge, who had by this time succeeded to the government. Instead of granting a separate money-compensation for each particular high-priced article of consumption, all the several articles were massed, and some being cheaper than elsewhere, a general average was struck. It was then officially announced that thenceforth compensation would be granted to the Sipahis “whenever the price of provisions, forming the Native soldier’s diet, should exceed 3 rupees and 8 annas, the aggregate of the rates for the several articles laid down in the General Orders of the 26th of February, 1844.” Whenever, in other words, the Sipahi was unable to obtain his daily rations at a cost of 3 rupees 8 annas a month (which cost was calculated in accordance with the aggregate fixed rates of the prices of provisions, beyond which compensation, under the old regulations, was granted for each article), the excess was to be defrayed by the Government. The regulation of 1845 was not so favourable to the troops as that of 1844, and Sir Charles Napier, believing that the application of the former rule to the troops in the Panjab was a mistake. directed the regulation of 1844 again to be brought into force.

135. MS. Correspondence, translated from the Persian.

136. This uncertainty with respect to the pay and allowances of different branches and different ranks of the Indian Army was emphatically commented upon by Sir Henry Lawrence in an article bearing his name in the Calcutta Review: “Of all the wants of the Army, perhaps the greatest want is a simple pay-code, unmistakably showing the pay of every rank, in each branch, under all circumstances. At present there are not three officers in the Bengal Army who could, with certainty, tell what they and the people under them are entitled to in every position in which they are liable to be placed. The Audit-office seldom affords help. It is considered an enemy ready to take advantage of difficulties, not an umpire between man and man. During the last thirty years I have seen much hardship on officers in matters of accounts, and of the several instances of discontent that I have witnessed in the Native Army, all were more or less connected with pay, and in almost every instance the men only asked for what they were by existing rules entitled to. Half a sheet of paper ought to show every soldier his rate of pay, by sea, by land, on leave, on the staff, in hospital, on duty, &c. There ought to be no doubt on the matter. At present there is great doubt, though there are volumes of Pay and Audit Regulations.”

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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