At first the local district magistrate, a Mr Alexander, failed to grasp the nature of the outrages. Escorted by twenty-two sepoys and about twice that number of local policemen, he advanced on the rebel village believing that his appearance on the scene would be enough to cause the troublemakers to disperse. Indeed, so convinced of this was Mr Alexander that he ordered his men to load their weapons with the blank cartridges used for ceremonials. To his consternation he found himself faced by a small army between four and six hundred strong drawn up in ranks behind their military commander, one Ghulam Masum, mounted on a horse.
The unhappy Mr Alexander now attempted to parley, but before he could say a word Ghulam Masum gave the order to charge and himself bore down on him brandishing a tulwar. Mr Alexander fled, leaving his sepoys to fire a volley of blanks before being overwhelmed by Titu Mir’s peasant army. Only after a long chase through the countryside did Mr Alexander, bedraggled and frightened, reach safety. Fifteen men were killed and many others either wounded or taken prisoner, but still the Calcutta authorities assumed they were dealing with a minor local dispute. Three days after the massacre a second British magistrate, a Mr Smith, repeated Mr Alexander’s error, this time approaching the rebel village in the company of a number of local British indigo planters, all of them mounted on elephants – the armoured vehicles of their day and as effective in counter-insurgency as Russian tanks in Afghanistan or US humvees in Iraq. They had brought with them a large body of armed watchmen, but the closer they drew to the village of Narkulbaria the less enthusiastic these became. ‘One by one,’ notes the official report, ‘the Bengalis dropped behind, and when the party arrived in the large plain in front of the village they found that, with the exception of twenty or thirty up-country burkundazes [watchmen], every native had disappeared. Here they found the insurgents about a thousand strong, drawn up in regular order.’
The magistrate and his party at once turned their elephants about and lumbered off, pursued by a howling mob that soon caught up with them and began to cut down the stragglers. A second humiliating chase across the Bengal countryside followed, leaving the insurgents utterly convinced of their leader’s claims that they were under the special protection of God, and safe from the bullets of infidels.
Now at last the Governor-General of Bengal became involved, and no fewer than twelve infantry regiments together with the Governor-General’s own cavalry bodyguard and some horse artillery took to the field. On the evening of 17 November this substantial force marched out from Calcutta with colours flying and drums and fifes playing and, on the following morning, disposed itself for battle before the stockaded village of Narkulbaria. More than ten thousand professional troops found themselves opposed by a peasant army scarcely a tenth of their number, largely armed with farm implements and staves, but paraded as before in well-ordered ranks. By way of a banner, they flew the body of a dead Englishman suspended from a pole.
A text-book frontal assault followed, with the infantry advancing in extended columns and halting to fire volley upon volley into the massed insurgents. Even so, Titu Mir’s men held their ground for almost an hour before the survivors retired into their stockade. The two guns of the horse artillery were then brought into play before the village was stormed at the point of the bayonet. Titu Mir was among the fifty dead. Almost two hundred of his followers were subsequently tried in court. Eleven received life sentences for treason, and 136 earned themselves sentences of imprisonment ranging from two years to seven. Ghulam Masum, Titu Mir’s second-in-command, was hanged. ‘These people’, recorded the presiding magistrate, ‘pretend to a new religion, calling out “Deen Mohummad”, declaring that the Company’s government is gone. They are headed by fakirs, two or three, and the men who led the attack on us were fine able-bodied fanatics apparently influenced by the decision that they were charmed.’ An enquiry followed and duly reported to the Governor-General that ‘the insurrection was strictly local, arising from causes which had operation in a small extent of country’.
Without the forceful leadership of Syed Ahmad the Wahhabi movement in India began to splinter as sectarian differences resurfaced. Since their leader had himself decreed that a jihad could only proceed by authority of an imam, and since that imam was now dead, the holy war had to be abandoned.
However, at the time of the last stand of the Hindustanis at Balakot three local caliphs appointed by the dead leader had been away on a diplomatic mission in Kashmir. They and a few other others succeeded in recrossing the Indus to the Mahabun Mountain, where they petitioned the Sayyids of Sittana to again give them refuge. A jirga was duly held and some new land was found for them outside the village. But so hostile were the surrounding Pathan tribes to their presence that at least one of the caliphs, Maulvi NASIRUDDIN, decided it was time to move on. He abandoned the mountains for the plains, leaving a mere handful of Hindustani diehards at Sittana under the charge of Maulvi Qasim PANIPATI. There they hung on, and over the months that followed they came increasingly to see themselves as guardians of the shrine of their lost imam and amir. Visitors arrived anxious to know more about the fate of Syed Ahmad the Martyr and how exactly he had met his death. Then it was discovered that no one had actually seen the Imam-cum-Amir die, although several eyewitnesses were prepared to swear that they had seen him and his two dearest disciples fighting fiercely in the very midst of the battle. A cloud of dust had then descended on all three figures, and they had disappeared from mortal sight. So inspired was Panipati by this revisionist testimony that he wrote letters to Patna giving a quite different account of the battle of Balakot. He urged his coreligionists to take heart – and, while they were about it, to send up funds and fresh supplies.
Panipati’s revelations were eagerly seized upon by the new leadership of the Wahhabi movement in Patna. Four members of the original six-man council appointed by Syed Ahmad had died with him on the frontier. Of the remaining two, Fatah Ali had died of natural causes, leaving Shah Muhammad Husain of Sadiqpur as the senior caliph in Patna. The five vacant places on the council were now filled by a younger generation, all accorded the title of Maulvi (preacher). They included Fatah Ali’s two eldest sons, Wilayat Ali and Inayat Ali; the two eldest sons of Elahi Bux, AHMADULLAH and YAHYA ALI; and an outsider, FARHAT HUSAIN, who had married into the three interlinked Patna families by taking as wife yet another of the daughters of Shah Muhammad Husain. These five younger men together became the guiding force behind the Wahhabi movement’s restructuring in the late 1830s and 1840s and its re-emergence as a fighting force in the 1850s.
For some years Wilayat Ali served as Shah Muhammad Husain’s wazir (chief counsellor) before succeeding him as the movement’s leading imam. His brother Inayat Ali then became the movement’s minister for war, Ahmadullah the new counsellor in succession to Wilayat Ali, Yahya Ali treasurer and bursar, and Farhat Husain the movement’s recruiter and chief religious ideologue, running the movement’s madrassah and acting as caliph during Wilayat Ali’s frequent absences from Patna.
Wilayat Ali, it will be remembered, was almost certainly a convert to Wahhabism even before his first meeting with Syed Ahmad. His youngest brother Talib Ali had accompanied Syed Ahmad on his long march and had died as a martyr fighting the Sikhs, so perhaps it was no surprise that Wilayat Ali and the middle brother Inayat Ali should emerge as the most determined members of the Wahhabi council. It appears to have been Wilayat Ali who first grasped the significance of the doubts emerging about their leader’s death, and who made the first public announcements of his survival. He then let it be known that he himself had heard Syed Ahmad foretell his disappearance some years earlier in a sermon. Now he could report the glad tidings that their beloved master was indeed alive and well, but that God, displeased by the faint-hearted response of the Muslims of India to His prophet’s call to arms, had withdrawn him from the eyes of men. Their Imam and Amir ul-Momineen was even now hidden in a cave in the Buner mountains, waited on by his two faithful disciples. Only when his followers had proved their faith by uniting once more to renew the jihad would their lost leader reappear. He would then manifest himself as padshah and lead them to victory against the unbelievers.