Wilayat Ali’s death left his brother Inayat Ali free to act as he judged fit. He at once descended on Sittana, assumed the imamship of the Fanatic Camp and ordered the Hindustanis on to the offensive – their first aggressive act being the seizing of the fort at Kotla from the Khan of Amb.
Despite the alarms raised in Patna a year earlier by the discovery of Inayat Ali’s letters, the Wahhabi network was still untouched. In concert with his colleagues at the chota godown the movement’s new amir-cum-imam now stepped up his plans for the great jihad against the British. As the Bengal magistrate James O’Kinealy later put it: ‘He laboured to organise his followers and fire them with a hatred of the English Kafirs. The crescentaders [Muslim jihadis] even drilled daily, sometimes twice a day, and on parade were taught to recite songs extolling the glories of jihad, and on Fridays after the jumma prayers they listened to sermons descriptive of the joys of paradise, and exhorting them to wait patiently until the time appointed for the subjugation of British India would arrive.’
News of the Wahhabi build-up in Sittana eventually reached the ears of the British authorities in Peshawar and Lahore, who complained to Lord Dalhousie that the fanatics were ‘trying to seduce poor and ignorant Mohammadens to join them, by false accounts of security and abundance’. The Governor-General’s response was to issue an amnesty. The Hindustani Fanatics at Sittana were given one month to turn themselves in. If they did so, they would be given ten rupees each to cover their expenses and a safe-conduct back to their homes. If, however, they failed to surrender, they could expect no mercy: ‘After this notice any Hindustani or other British subject found in arms, or otherwise attached to the Moulvis, will be treated as a Moofsid [enemy], and the least punishment he will receive will be three years on the road in irons. This circular is issued in mercy to the poor and ignorant, who have been deluded. Woe to those who neglect the warning! Their blood will be upon their own heads.’
The Wahhabis’ response to Lord Dalhousie’s amnesty was a redoubling of their propaganda campaign. Large numbers of printed prophecies and ballads now began to circulate in Delhi and other towns in Upper Hindustan. One of these was the Ode of Niyamatulla, purportedly written in the twelfth century, which concluded with the following lines:
This dating clearly demonstrates that Inayat Ali planned to launch his great jihad against the British in India in the cold weather months of 1853–4. That he failed to do so was almost certainly a result of the disruption caused by Colonel Mackeson’s raid in January 1853 and the Hindustanis’ humiliating expulsion from Sittana (as described in the Introduction).
The consequence of Mackeson’s raid was that the jihad had to be rescheduled and the prophecies revised. Inayat Ali knew now that he had found an enemy. Colonel Mackeson’s assassination nine months later can be seen as Inayat Ali’s revenge, and the Hindustani Fanatics’ first telling blow against the hated Nazarenes.
British rule in northern India had officially begun in 1765, when the East India Company received a royal order from the Mughal emperor appointing it Diwan or local administrator of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. However, the popular understanding was that the Nasrani Raj dated from the battle of Plassey, fought in Bengal on 23 June 1757. It now began to be put about that British rule in India would last for a hundred years and no more. Because it had begun in June 1757, so it would end in June 1857, the centenary of Plassey.
In 1855 printed copies of the Wahhabis’ war song Risala Jihad (The Army of Holy War) began circulating in the streets of Delhi along with rumours of a great awakening. Such rumours and prophecies fell on receptive ears. When asked to explain why his fellow Muslims had joined in the Sepoy Mutiny, the soldier Shaik Hedayut Ali had this to say:
It is said in the Koran that the British administration will once extend as far as Mecca and Medina, after which the Imam Mahdee will be born and wrest the kingdom from them. But some of the Moulvies have declared that the British dominion in India will continue for one century, and then disturbances will arise in the land. The Moosulmen learning this, imagined in their ignorance that the British administration was now to go away, and they therefore joined the Sepoys in the mutiny.
5
The Early Summer of 1857
The tenets originally professed by the Wahabees have been described as a Mahomedan Puritanism joined to a Bedouin Phylarchy, in which the great chief is both the political and religious leader of the nation… With the Soonnees the Wahabees are on terms of tolerable agreement, though differing on certain points, but from the Sheahs, they differ radically, and their hatred, like all religious hatred, is bitter and intolerant. But the most striking characteristic of the Wahabee sect, and that which principally concerns this narrative, is the entire subservience which they yield to the Peer, or spiritual guide.
The ancient city of Patna extends for several miles along the southern bank of the Ganges some four hundred miles upstream from Calcutta and a hundred and fifty miles short of Benares. In the summer of 1857 a railway line linking these three cities was in the process of being laid, but until its completion the only comfortable way to travel up-country was by river. The less comfortable alternatives were to travel by palanquin, carried on the shoulders of relays of porters, or to go by dak, a coach-staging system which involved travellers staying overnight in dak-bungalows.
Like most large towns in northern India with a British presence, Patna in 1857 was divided into three areas: the old city, which the British knew as the native town, with a population of three hundred thousand predominantly Muslim inhabitants; the civil station laid out on its western outskirts, consisting of government offices and the homes of the city’s small population of European ‘civilians’ in government employ; and, further west again, the military cantonment of Dinapore, with a garrison of three regiments of Bengal Native Infantry together with one British infantry regiment. Patna was the collection centre for Bengal’s most important cash-crop, opium, and the headquarters of a region of local government known as the West Bihar Division, an area comparable in size and shape to Ireland, made up of six sub-divisions or districts. Each of these districts was administered by a British member of the Bengal Civil Service known as a Collector, whose duties included acting as the local magistrate, supported by a deputy who was usually a learned Muslim. The collectors reported to the Commissioner, based in Patna, who was himself supported by a junior assistant and a city magistrate. The division also had its own sessions judge, also based in Patna, to whom all judgments by the district magistrates were referred. In all, the division’s administrative and judicial systems were in the hands of scarcely more than a dozen Europeans. To maintain law and order they could call upon a locally raised police force known as the Nujeebs and, in times of civil disturbance, upon the troops stationed at Dinapore.