At this time Inayat Ali had no fewer than four camps in the Mahabun massif: a lower camp at Sittana, two fortresses higher up in the mountains at Mangalthana and Narinji, and a village overlooking the Vale of Peshawar at Punjtar. This last had come to the Wahhabis through an alliance Inayat Ali had formed with the chief of Punjtar, Mokurrub Khan. Inayat Ali’s role in the subversion of the 55th BNI, previously based at Nowshera before they mutinied at Hoti Mardan on 23 May, remains unknown. But the arrival in his camp some five weeks later of more than a hundred armed and uniformed sepoys, nearly all Muslim, must have given him and his Hindustani mujahedeen a powerful fillip. Due to the disturbed state of Upper Hindustan at this time it is unlikely that Inayat Ali received news of the arrests of the Wahhabi leadership in Patna until after he had launched his first strike against the infidels in mid-July. This took the form of a raiding party, led by his cousin Meer Baz Khan, which swept down on to the Yusufzai plain, seized two villages, and there ‘raised the standard of the Prophet’. Perhaps the hope was that the surrounding tribespeople would rally to their banner. In the event, the jihadis failed to take the most basic military precautions, and early next morning were caught off-guard. Herbert Edwardes, Commissioner in Peshawar, afterwards set down a summary of the events of 2 July: ‘Major Vaughan (then commanding the fort at Mardan) fell upon them with about 400 horse and foot and two mountain guns, killed Meer Baz Khan, took prisoner a Rohilla leader named Jan Mahomed Khan, hanged him and Mullik Zureef, the headman of the rebels, burnt two villages which had revolted, fired others and extinguished this spark of mischief. Nothing could have been better than the promptness of this example.’
This setback forced Inayat Ali to pull back from Punjtar to a more secure position in the hills: his fortress at Narinji, on the end of a long ridge overlooking the western slopes of Mahabun Mountain. ‘This mountain village’, recorded Edwardes, ‘was so strongly situated that the police scarcely dared to go near it, and it became a refuge for every evil-doer. Its inhabitants, about 400 in number, welcomed the moulvie with delight. The holy war seemed auspiciously opened with every requisite: a priest, a banner, a fastness, a howling crowd of bigots and several days’ provisions.’ But here too the Hindustanis were caught by surprise, being woken at dawn on 21 July by the crash of artillery as four mountain guns opened up on their village – the prelude to an assault by a combined force of eight hundred horse and foot. They and the rebel sepoys with them took to their heels, leaving behind a banner and sixty dead.
By all accounts the summer of 1857 was exceptionally hot, and Major Vaughan’s men were too exhausted by the climb to continue the chase. This gave Inayat Ali the chance to regroup. He gathered his reserves from Sittana and Mangalthana and reoccupied Narinji, where he rebuilt and strengthened the defences of his eyrie. There he settled down to await the arrival of the first of many waves of mujahedeen from Patna and elsewhere in Hindustan that he and the other leaders had confidently predicted would flock to their banner in the wake of the Wahhabis’ calls for hijrat and jihad. As a result in large part of the measures taken by Commissioner Tayler in Patna, those reinforcements never came. Instead, at sunrise on 3 August a British force twice as large as the first began a fresh assault on Narinji:
The Ghazees had thrown up some formidable entrenchments, and danced and yelled as they saw a small column advancing on their front. Their shouts were answered by British cheers from a second column under Lieutenant Hoste, which had gained the heights by a bye-path and now appeared above Nowrunjee. A general fight took place, 30 of the Ghazees died fighting stoutly, and three were taken prisoners, amongst whom was a moulvie from Bareilly who was summarily hanged. The village was then knocked down by elephants and its towers blown up by engineers. Nowrunjee was at last destroyed.
In this engagement Elahi Bux’s youngest son Akbari Ali became a martyr; he may well have been the moulvi referred to above who was summarily hanged.
The fate of the surviving members of the mutinous 55th was a melancholy one. Having crossed the Indus on rafts of inflated animal skins they entered Hazara with letters from the unrecognised Padshah of Swat directing all good Muslims to help them and denouncing all who did not. This cut no ice with the Hazariwals, who not only informed Major Becher, the British Assistant Commissioner, of the sepoys’ movements but harried them every foot of the way, hurling down boulders on them and picking off the stragglers. ‘The Mahomedan women’, recorded Becher, ‘were shocked by these strange, dark men cooking and bathing almost naked; they were most of them armed with muskets, or rifles and swords, but had little clothing and no cover from the rain and night dews… Every step of their advance now brought new embarrassments; the knapsacks and bayonets and many of the muskets were cast down the rocks, and a large payment of silver could scarcely procure a seer [kilo] of flour.’
The ever-dwindling band struggled on through this wild country until in early July they surmounted the ridge that divided Kohistan from the Khagan valley. They then made their way up the Kunhar River and entered a deep nullah, or ravine, which they knew led to Kashmir and safety. At the head of this nullah was a high mountain pass, but it was blocked with snow. Trapped, they had no option but to stand and fight as the Sayyeds, Kohistanis, Gujars and other local tribesmen moved in for the kilclass="underline" ‘It was a rainy day, and as they appeared through the mists on the hills beating their drums and flaunting their pennons the hearts of the mutineers despaired. Checked everywhere, there seemed no hope, and after a faint resistance and a slaughter of a few of their number, they surrendered their arms, and 124 more prisoners were afterwards made over to the escort which I had despatched to receive them.’ The prisoners were tried by Becher, found guilty of mutiny and executed in different parts of the district of Hazara. ‘They met their deaths’, concluded Becher, ‘with the calmest bearing. Those who were hung spoke only to request that they might be blown from the guns instead… Thus hunted to the last like wild beasts was consummated the miserable fate of the 55th Regiment.’ The Kunhar gully is still spoken of locally as Purbiala nar katha – ‘the ravine of the killing of the plainsmen’.
Meanwhile in Patna, Commissioner Tayler had once again appealed to Major-General Lloyd in Dinapore to disband two of his three Bengal Infantry regiments, and had again been assured that there was no need. He then concentrated his efforts on reducing the threat posed by the other suspected conspirators linked to the rebels in Lucknow and Delhi. A police officer named Waris Ali, with ties to the royal family at Delhi, was found with a bundle of incriminating letters showing that he and a prominent mullah named Ali Kareem were in contact with the Delhi rebels. The letters were coded: one referred to a major commercial enterprise with many partners from the east and west in which extensive profits were to be made; another spoke of a savoury pullao now ready for eating, and urged the recipient to bring all his friends to enjoy it, even if it meant making sacrifices. Ali Kareem was forewarned and initially evaded arrest, but Waris Ali was tried and found guilty of conspiracy to overthrow the Government. Much to young Edward Lockwood’s horror, he found himself in sole charge of Waris Ali’s public execution. ‘When I mounted my man upon the gallows,’ recorded Lockwood, ‘he appealed to his compatriots to rescue him. But the sight of my rosy cheeks and awful European hat, had such a terrifying effect upon the crowd that no one stirred, and when the Surgeon came, the man was dead. I always thought the natives a very tractable, pleasant set of fellows after that.’