At this juncture Rattray’s Sikhs received fresh orders: to report to Arrah, the headquarters of the Shahabad district west of Patna. Rattray and Hedayut Ali duly turned their men about and marched back the way they had come, reaching the little country station of Arrah in late February 1857. Here all the bazaar talk was of the indignities heaped on their local raja, the elderly landowner Kumar Singh, who was said to be so angry with Government that he was plotting an uprising. This, too, was duly passed on to Captain Rattray, who informed Shahabad’s twenty-five-year-old Collector and magistrate, Herewald Crauford Wake. The observant Mr Wake was well aware of the danger Kumar Singh now presented, and in passing on Rattray’s information to William Tayler in Patna added that ‘should these districts be ever the scene of a serious outbreak, he [Kumar Singh] may well take it into his head that it is time to strike a blow for his own interests, and his feudal influence is such as to render him exceedingly dangerous in such an event’.
A month later, on 29 March, a sepoy ran amok on the parade-ground at Barrackpore, and in doing so pre-empted a general mutiny planned for June. After two hangings and the disbanding of one regiment the incident was considered closed. Governor-General Lord Canning professed himself ‘rather pleased with the way in which it has been dealt with’ and his Home Secretary wrote to reassure Tayler and other local officials that it had been no more than a ‘passing and groundless panic’.
Letters and other papers seized during the suppression of what the British termed the Sepoy or Indian Mutiny of 1857 show that there was no overarching conspiracy to free India from a foreign yoke. The uprising was sepoy-led and rose out of a combination of grievances among the troops. But first among these grievances were religious fears, fuelled in part by the insensitivity of the British Government in India but also stoked and fanned by the activities of religious zealots travelling from one military base to another. Among the latter, the Wahhabis can be counted in a class of their own, due to the size of their network and the extent of their propagandising. However, they were far from alone in wishing to see an end to British rule in Hindustan. In Lucknow, former capital of the annexed Kingdom of Oude, there was widespread support for the restoration of the deposed Nawab – support that extended to large numbers of sepoys and sowars in the Bengal Army, many of whom were originally from Oude. In and around Delhi, too, there were just as many who wished to see the old emperor restored to his former glory, and an end to the humiliations heaped on him by the British. But in Delhi the links with the army were fewer, and the feebleness and irresolution of Emperor Bahadur Shah – eighty-two years old, part-Rajput by blood, a Sufi by faith and an opium addict – prevented the plotting from developing much beyond the stage of wishful thinking. Nevertheless, in Patna, Lucknow, Delhi and elsewhere groups of idealists sought the overthrow of the Company Raj and exchanged cautiously-worded correspondence.
Had these various conspirators acted together, the outcome of the 1857 Mutiny would have been very different. That they failed to do so was in some measure due to the Wahhabis, who alone had a well-thought-out plan to overthrow the British and the links to co-ordinate its execution. But theirs was a plan that called for an exclusively Sunni Muslim jihad, and for the strike against the British to come not from a city in Hindustan but from Sittana, and in alliance with the Afghan border tribes. The surviving evidence suggests that the Wahhabi council in Patna, under the leadership of Muhammad Hussain as the movement’s senior imam, with Ahmadullah, eldest son of Elahi Bux, acting as his counsellor, held themselves aloof when approached by other non-Wahhabi conspirators from Lucknow.
On Sunday 10 May 1857 the long-awaited cataclysm finally burst at Meerut, with mobs of soldiers and civilians rampaging through the military cantonment, firing the bungalows and killing every European they encountered. According to the survivors, the shouts most commonly heard were ‘Deen! Deen!’ (‘The Way! The Way!’) and ‘Allah-i-Allah! Mare Feringhee!’ (‘Kill the British’). No one among the British officers took charge and the mutineers were allowed to set out for Delhi unhindered, leaving fifty dead in their wake. Despite the presence in Meerut of a large British force, the military commander failed to order a pursuit and initially refused even to allow a messenger to ride to Delhi with a warning. The result was that next morning the mutineers’ cavalry rode into the city unopposed, again murdered every European they encountered, and forced Emperor Bahadur Shah to receive them with the demand that ‘unless you, the King, join us, we are all dead men’. Although the emperor’s sons were given nominal command of the rebel units it was the mutinous regiments’ own Indian officers – the subedars, risaldars and jemadars – who gave the orders, including the fatal instruction to murder their European and Christian prisoners.
Garbled telegrams sent up and down the line before the wires were cut meant that the news of the fall of Delhi to the mutineers was received in all the larger stations of Hindustan within thirty-six hours of the uprising. Remarkably, the mutiny itself spread almost as quickly, again pointing, if not to co-ordination among the plotters, at least to well-established lines of communication.
As soon as news of the outbreak had been confirmed, emergency councils were held in divisional headquarters all over upper Hindustan and the Punjab. In Patna this meeting took place at the home of the commander of the locally recruited police battalion, the Nujeebs. Here the first signs of a serious split among the Europeans in Patna appeared when the sessions judge, Mr Farquharson, proposed that they all should move at once to the safety of the military cantonment of Dinapore, taking the station treasury with them. This was intemperately dismissed by Commissioner Tayler on the grounds that it would induce a ‘fatal panic’. He then made a vigorous address to all the Europeans present, telling them to stand firm, advice that was ‘applauded to the echo’. Mr Farquharson’s response was to abandon his bungalow and move himself and his family into the opium godown in the city, where he was joined by the Government’s Opium Agent, Mr Garrett, who happened to be the brother-in-law of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Frederick Halliday. For the next two weeks these two and Mr Garrett’s assistant, Dr Lyell, were, in Tayler’s words, ‘incessant in their representations of the danger anticipated’. Their alarm communicated itself to others, leading the workmen employed on building the new railway to down tools and join them in their refuge. Garrett then refused Tayler permission to store in his godown money brought in from the district treasuries of the two nearest district headquarters, Arrah and Chuprah, on the grounds that this would increase the danger to those who were sheltering there. He afterwards informed his brother-in-law Frederick Halliday that he had offered to hold the treasure, but that Mr Tayler had refused his help.