At the beginning of May 1831 Gardner and a group of Pathan tribesmen, whom he termed his ‘trusty band of Khaibaris [people of the Khyber]’, were in the process of offering their services to Mir Alam Khan when ‘a certain Muhammad Ismail arrived from the fanatic chief Syad Ahmad with a demand for aid from the mir [chief], as from all neighbouring Muhammadan chieftains’. Gardner’s ‘Muhammad Ismail’ was none other than Syed Ahmad’s first disciple, Shah Muhammad Ismail, then engaged in making a desperate bid to win back some of the allies who had deserted his master. Gardner suggests that he and his fellow mercenaries were won over to Syed Ahmad’s cause by ‘an impassioned address which I heard Muhammad Ismail deliver to a large assembly of the wild Eusufzai mountaineers. The enthusiasms which he aroused suggested to me that I might do worse than join the Syad his master, as I saw a good opportunity of getting together such a body of followers as would make my services valuable to any ruler to whom I might subsequently offer them.’ Some money may also have been promised, for Gardner, at this time masquerading as a Muslim and carrying a copy of the Quran suspended round his neck, agreed to fight for the Hindustanis.
Shah Muhammad Ismail then hurried on ahead to rejoin Syed Ahmad in the Khagan valley while Gardner and some two hundred and fifty Pathans, ‘all burning with religious zeal’, came on at a steadier pace. According to Gardner, they then lost their way, as a result of which they arrived at Balakot ‘just an hour too late’. The battle was already under way and it was clear that it was turning into a massacre: ‘I well remember the scene’, Gardner later wrote,
as I and my Eusufzai and Khaibari followers came in view of the action. Syad Ahmad and the maulvi [Shah Muhammad Ismail], surrounded by his surviving Indian followers, were fighting desperately, hand-to-hand with the equally fanatical Akalis [Sikh warriors] of the Sikh army. They had been taken by surprise, and isolated from the main body of the Syad’s forces, which fought very badly without their leader. Even as I caught sight of the Syad and maulvi, they fell pierced by a hundred weapons… I was literally within a few hundred yards of the Syad when he fell, but I did not see the angel descend and carry him off to Paradise, although many of his followers remembered afterwards that they had seen it distinctly enough.
Seeing which way the battle was going, Gardner held back his men until the fighting was done and then moved in to claim a share of the booty: ‘The death of the Syad broke the only link that held the followers together, and in the retreat many of the parties from different regions fell upon one another for plunder. My Khaibaris and Eusufzai were equal to the best in this matter and cut down several of the Hindustani fanatics who had joined them for protection.’ It is said that thirteen hundred Hindustanis and their adherents died at Balakot, but the real figure was probably closer to half that number.
On receiving the news of Syed Ahmad’s death the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh gave orders for gun salutes to be fired from every fort, and for the Sikh holy city of Amritsar to be lit up in celebration. Accounts differ as to what happened to the remains of the Amir, Imam and Padshah. In the final stages of the battle a group of Wahhabis tried to carry away the body but were dispersed by gunfire, whereupon a single Wahhabi hacked the head off with his tulwar and attempted to make off with it. He was then struck down, and the head and body were found separately by the Sikhs. According to one report, both parts were subsequently chopped into small pieces and thrown into the nearby river in order to prevent the grave becoming a place of pilgrimage. Another version has the Sikhs burning the body on the battlefield and carrying the head back to Peshawar to be impaled on the battlements of the city’s fort.
4
The Call of the Imam-Mahdi
Those who would prevent others from hijra and jihad are in heart hypocrites. Let all know this: in a country where the predominant religion is other than Islam, the religious precepts of Muhammad cannot be enforced, [therefore] it is incumbent on Musalmans to unite and wage war with Kaffirs.
The catastrophic end to Syed Ahmad’s campaign to bring about dar ul-Islam in a distant corner of the Punjab did not go unnoticed in the rest of India. For all that his teachings had offended Sunnis and Shias alike, Syed Ahmad had become more than just a preacher of reform. He had taken the struggle to the enemy, and every scrap of news of his jihad against the Sikhs that filtered down from the Punjab had excited interest. The reports of his martyrdom in the summer of 1831 were received with dismay by Muslims up and down the land. In Bengal it was the spur that set off Titu Mir’s Wahhabi revolt.
Titu Mir, it will be remembered, was the Bengali ‘enforcer’ who went to Mecca on Hajj at the same time as Syed Ahmad and his band of pilgrims. On his return to Delhi he quit the service of his royal employer and went back to Bengal to preach the message of Wahhabism through the countryside north and east of Calcutta. The name he gave his movement, Deen Muhammad or Way of Muhammad, suggests an affinity with Syed Ahmad’s Path of Muhammad. In Bengal the countryside was largely owned by wealthy landlords whose oppression of the peasantry working their fields was legendary. Titu Mir exploited this discontent by recruiting peasants and weavers to his cause. By the time the news of the death of Syed Ahmad reached Bengal in the late summer of 1831 he had gained several thousand adherents, distinguishable from their fellow Muslim and Hindu neighbours by the long beards and plain dress worn by the men, the almost complete withdrawal of their women behind the folds of the purdah and the burqa, and their contempt for all forms of religion other than their own. In October 1831 their leader called all the members of his Wahhabi sect together in the village of Narkulbaria and ordered them to prepare it for a long siege. They laid in supplies and built a strong bamboo stockade round the village, which now became their constituted dar ul-Islam.
Two weeks later Titu Mir marched out at the head of a band some five hundred strong armed with clubs and farm implements and attacked a nearby village in the name of jihad. They killed a Brahmin priest, cut the throats of two cows and dragged them bleeding through a Hindu temple – acts deliberately intended to outrage Hindus. At the same time their leader proclaimed an end to British rule in Bengal, evidently in the expectation that Muslims throughout the countryside would rise up and join him. Over the next few days more attacks on nearby villages were carried out, deliberately intended to terrorise both Muslim and Hindu communities. As the magistrates later noted, everything was done according to a set plan: each morning the rebels marched out in ranks under a military commander to attack and plunder a particular target, and every evening they marched back with their booty.