This was the region that became the charge of William Tayler when he was appointed Commissioner of Patna in April 1855. Bill Tayler was then aged forty-seven and, in the words of a later champion, ‘in the prime of life… a gentleman and a scholar, possessing great natural abilities which he had lost no opportunity of cultivating, an elegant mind, and a large fund of common sense’. Before his commissionership Tayler had spent over a quarter of a century in Bengal in the service of the East India Company. As he worked his way up the civil service ladder in a variety of administrative posts he had shown himself to be a good all-rounder. But he was not the most tactful of men, and in the course of his career he had made a powerful enemy of a fellow member of the Bengal Civil Service, his senior by two years. This was Frederick James Halliday, whose talent for secretariat work had taken him up the promotional ladder with remarkable speed. By the age of thirty Halliday had secured his first secretary-ship, and within a decade had become the éminence grise of the Government of Bengal, so much so that it was said of him that he ‘exercised all the powers, though not bearing the responsibilities, of Governor’. Not for nothing had he acquired the nicknames the Big Fiddle and the Bengal Giant. As Secretary to the Home Department, it was Frederick Halliday who guided Lord Dalhousie’s hand and pen during the first six of his eight years as Governor-General. Then in May 1854 Bengal ceased to be a presidency under the direct control of the Governor-General of India and became a province under a lieutenant-governor. Halliday became its first Lieutenant-Governor.
The contrast between Tayler and Halliday could hardly have been greater: the one a small man of slight physique, with wide-ranging interests extending from poetry and sketching to field sports and antiquarian collecting; the other a big man in every sense, described by Buckland in his Dictionary of Indian Biography as ‘of lofty stature and splendid physique… the embodiment of great power, an impression which was strengthened by whatever he said or wrote’. Halliday was single-minded and ambitious, causing even his great admirer Lord Dalhousie to remark in private that ‘he has so managed that I believe he has not in Bengal a single influential friend but myself’. He was also a bully, and never hesitated to use his forceful personality to get what he wanted. Tayler and Halliday had first come into conflict when the latter blocked Tayler’s appointment to a post already allocated to him and gave it to his own choice, a Mr Edward Samuells. Later there had been a second brush when Halliday had dismissed Tayler’s allegations that the police in his district were conniving with local robbers to conceal their crimes. A third and more serious difference between the two men occurred in April 1855, soon after Bill Tayler’s appointment as Commissioner of Patna, when he wrote to warn the Government of Bengal that reforms being pushed through by Halliday were contributing to local unrest: ‘I brought to the notice of Government… that there was a deep and growing dissatisfaction and excitement throughout Behar, particularly among the Mahomedans, arising from the suspicions with which several measures of the Bengal Government, and especially those connected with education, were contemplated.’
Among all sections of the populace there were deep-rooted fears that Government was interfering in their caste-practices and religion, but at the back of Tayler’s mind was the Wahhabi conspiracy uncovered in Patna by his predecessors in 1852, which had resulted in the two dismissive Minutes from Lord Dalhousie. At the time of the writing of the second of these, Frederick Halliday was on home leave. However, as Secretary to the Home Department he had undoubtedly played a guiding role in the drafting of the first. Now, three years on, all those Wahhabis named as conspirators in the original reports dismissed by Dalhousie were still in residence behind the high walls of their caravanserai at Sadiqpore, and as active as ever.
One year later the Government of India added further fuel to the general discontent when Lord Dalhousie, as his last act before leaving India in 1856, sent in troops to annexe the Kingdom of Oude on the grounds of ‘barbarous government’. Oude was the last surviving Muslim kingdom in northern Hindustan, and its swallowing-up by the East India Company angered Muslims and Hindus alike. The annexation also brought many demobilised sepoys from Oude to Patna in search of new employment, exacerbating the tension in a city that was already, in Tayler’s view, ‘a very sink of disaffection and intrigue’.
To add further to Tayler’s worries, he had on his doorstep a powerful Rajput aristocrat by the name of Kumar Singh of Jagdishpur. The elderly Raja Kumar Singh owned extensive estates in Shahabad district west of Patna but had become so debt-ridden that the Bengal Government’s board of revenue had stepped in to manage his affairs on behalf of his creditors. Early in 1857 Halliday ordered the board of revenue to stop bailing out Kumar Singh, effectively ruining him. Up to this point Kumar Singh had been a good friend to Bill Tayler and, for all his troubles, had always professed his loyalty to the British Raj. Although required to carry out the order against Kumar Singh, Tayler wrote to Halliday to protest, and to warn him that this move would alienate Kumar Singh and his many fellow Rajputs in the region. Halliday’s response was to initiate proceedings to have the troublesome commissioner transferred down-country to Burdwan.
In January 1857 the first of a series of disturbances occurred among the sepoys at the military depot of Barrackpore outside Calcutta, fed by rumours that new cartridges being introduced to the infantry were greased with cow and pork fat. Despite assurances from Halliday and from Lord Dalhousie’s successor as Governor-General, Lord Canning, that the Government would continue to treat ‘the religious feelings of all its servants, of every creed, with respect’, these rumours spread up-country.
A year earlier the sepoy Hedayut Ali had transferred from the regiment in which he and several of his brothers were serving, the 8th Bengal Native Infantry, based in Dinapore, to join a new Sikh Bengal Police Battalion being raised in Lahore by a battle-hardened frontiersman named Captain Thomas Rattray. In January 1857 Rattray’s Sikhs began the long march south to Calcutta to take up their new responsibilities in Bengal. Riding at their head beside Rattray-Saheb as his second in command was Hedayut Ali, now promoted to subedar, the most senior Indian officer in the battalion. In the months that followed these two strong-minded men became a formidable double act. ‘A rare specimen of an Oriental soldier’ was how one of their admirers chose to describe Subedar Hedayut Ali. ‘His physique was splendid, and the sight of him, with his drawn sword, running at the head of the Sikhs by the side of Colonel Rattray, was one the enemy never cared to stay very long to contemplate.’
On the road to Calcutta the Sikh column met units from the Bengal Army going in the opposite direction, and Hedayut Ali learned from them that the troops in Barrackpore were on the verge of mutiny: ‘They spoke to our men of the new cartridges, as having been made up with the fat of cows and pigs, and that in consequence of these cartridges, the Sepoys of Barrackpore were ready to make a disturbance, and that the chief people of Calcutta and Barrackpore were promising to aid them with money.’ Hedayut Ali had no doubts as to where his own loyalties lay: ‘I have my home always with my Regiment, and know none for my patron except Government. It was for this reason that when the country began to rise against Government, I informed my Commanding Officer with all the circumstances connected with this insurrection.’ He went directly to Rattray, recounted everything he had heard – and was told that he must be mistaken. In mid-February the Sikh battalion halted at Ranigunge, 120 miles short of Calcutta, where the subedar learned from sepoys of the infantry regiment stationed there that plans were now well advanced for the mutiny at Barrackpore, and they themselves were standing by to join in. This time Rattray believed Hedayut Ali, and immediately spoke to the commanding officer concerned. The colonel responded just as Rattray had earlier, but the latter was now sufficiently troubed to send forward a written report to the military authorities in Calcutta.