From these and other accounts gathered as judicial evidence in later years, it is clear that the great majority of recruits who went to Sittana in order to fight were poor, illiterate and unskilled young men, while those who trained and indoctrinated them were almost invariably mullahs or maulvis, older and better-educated. The same pattern continues to this day.
In March 1849, following two fierce-fought wars against the Sikhs, the Punjab became a province of British India, administered for the British Government by the East India Company acting on the orders of a Governor-General in Calcutta and a Court of Directors in London. This was a time of innovation and change in British India during which a great many reforms were introduced, including the promotion of education on English lines. In Britain Evangelical Christianity was on the rise and many of the civil and military officers who went out to India to make a career for themselves began increasingly to see it as their Christian duty to spread the good word. This increased religiosity went hand in hand with a growing sense of racial superiority, characterised by the absolute conviction of Herbert Edwardes, who stepped into Frederick Mackeson’s boots as Commissioner of Peshawar in 1853 after his murder, that God had awarded India to Britain because ‘England has made the greatest effort to preserve the Christian religion in its purest form’.
These reforms and changing attitudes led to increasing disaffection in many sections of Indian society. Muslims and Hindus began to feel that their religious customs were under threat, none more so than the infantry sepoys and cavalry sowars of the Bengal Army. A majority of the former were orthodox high-caste Hindu Brahmins and Rajputs, while a significant proportion of the latter were Muslim cavalrymen of Pathan–Afghan origin whose forebears had settled in Delhi and in Rohilkund, the fertile plains east of the Jumna. One such Muslim was a soldier named Sheikh HEDAYUT ALI, whose grandfather had joined the ranks of the Bengal Army in 1763 and had been followed in his turn by his son and grandsons. Hedayut Ali was later to prove his loyalty to the salt he had eaten, but in 1842, as an adolescent boy in barracks, he had watched the regiments return from the Afghan War to the military cantonment of Ferozepore, and had observed how discontented the soldiers had become:
The Hindoo Sepoys who had returned from Cabul were not allowed by the Hindoostanees to touch the cooking utensils, being looked upon by them as outcastes… The Sepoys spoke that they [had] lost caste by going to Cabul, because, they said, they were obliged to wear skins of animals, and because they could do there none of the acts prescribed by their religion in consequence of [the] intensity of the cold weather. The Moosulmen Sepoys also did not perform their work with loyalty, because, they said, the British Government forced them to fight with people professing the Islam creed, which is forbidden in the Koran. They also boasted among themselves, that they had always fired upwards and never took aim.
As well as the usual grumbles over pay, accommodation and promotion, the sepoys also felt themselves becoming increasingly distanced from their British officers. According to Shaik Hedayut Ali, the sense of comradeship that had once existed between the British officers and the Indians they commanded had all but disappeared.
The Wahhabis were able to turn such discontent to their advantage. Throughout the 1840s and early 1850s they continued to send their missionaries out into the towns, villages and military cantonments, preaching jihad and the imminent return of the Hidden Imam. To encourage jihadis to proceed to their mountain hideout, they printed and circulated notices declaring that it was incumbent on all true Muslims to do as the Prophet had done: ‘At the present time in this country, hijrat is a stern duty,’ reads part of a Wahhabi pamphlet from this time. ‘Truly learned men have written this. Now he who forbids this, hear faithful, let him declare himself a slave to sensuality. He who, having gone away, returns leaving his conscience in the land of Islam and does not again depart hence, let him know that all his past services are in vain. Should he die without departing hence, he will in the end lose the way of salvation.’ Other pamphlets spoke of the duty to wage holy war against the English, and on the traditions of the Prophet regarding jihad. The movement’s debt to the founder of Wahhabism was explicitly acknowledged by its publication of a work variously entitled Tawarikh Kaisar Rum and Misbah-us-Sari, described as ‘a history of Abdul Wahhab, his persecutions and wars against the Turkish apostates’.
The two Ali brothers, Maulvis Wilayat Ali and Inayat Ali, spearheaded the proselytising programme, both undertaking extended tours across the country. In April 1843 the Superintendent of Police of Murshidabad in Bengal reported that one Inayat Ali had been found acting in ways ‘inimical to our government’. He was said to have used ‘the topic of a religious war and the resurrection of Syed Ahmed as a pretext for calling for aid’, and it was recommended that his movement should be watched. The Secretary to the Government of Bengal responded with a note that Government was ‘disinclined to attach much importance to this preaching’. In 1847, as recorded earlier, the two Ali brothers were arrested in Hazara by Harry Lumsden, sent under custody to Patna and bound over to remain in the city for five years. Ignoring these restrictions, they continued to travel freely throughout northern India.
Meanwhile, another Ali on the Wahhabi Council in Patna, Yahya Ali, youngest son of Elahi Bux, was focusing his efforts on restructuring the organisation. Under his aegis, which lasted right through into the mid-1860s, the Path of Muhammad movement became increasingly sophisticated and increasingly covert. As evidenced in testimony presented in trials two decades later, it continued to expand its organisation until a network of interlinked provincial, regional and district groups had been established across much of Bengal, Bihar, the North-West Provinces and Punjab – all unknown to the authorities.
A district network was usually initiated by a Wahhabi missionary seeking out a suitable base where he could establish himself, often marrying into the local Muslim community. He then set himself up as a schoolmaster or religious teacher and, having gained a following in the district, appointed three lay figures to act as tax-gatherer, postmaster and general manager. Once established, these four local representatives acted independently of each other: the mullah taught and proselytised, the tax collector gathered funds, the postmaster arranged the transmission of messages and the movement of recruits, and the general manager co-ordinated. By this compartmentalising of duties the Wahhabis avoided the attentions of the British authorities. A mullah might be called before the district magistrate to account for his seditious preaching, but was almost always allowed to carry on because he appeared to be working in isolation. As Sir William Hunter put it, ‘An English Magistrate in India had all the reluctance of a Prefect of the Augustan Empire to intermeddle with the various beliefs and superstitions of the races over whom he rules. Treason can thus safely walk under a religious habit.’
Every local group was linked to Patna through a number of regional centres, while Patna itself was linked to the frontier by the movement’s own dak or posting system of safe houses, which enabled messengers, supplies and recruits to be moved up and down the line in secrecy and safety. To maintain confidentiality the movement adopted a number of security measures. Its leading members all used aliases, its communications were so written as to appear to be innocuous business letters, and a code was devised for key words. God was always spoken of as the mukhtar or ‘agent’, jihad was termed a ‘lawsuit’, recruits for jihad were called variously beoparis (merchants), musafirs (travellers) or khitmutgars (servants), bands of recruits being sent up the line were called kafilas (caravans), money orders were referred to as ‘white stones’, money as ‘books’ or ‘merchandise’, gold coinage as ‘rosaries of red beads’, and the coins themselves as ‘large Delhi gold-embroidered shoes’ or ‘large red birds’.