7
The Ambeyla Disaster
In our ancient capitals once so well-known, so rich, so great and so flourishing nothing is now to be seen or heard save a few bones strewn among the ruins or the human-like cry of the jackal.
By the end of September 1857 Delhi was a ghost town, entirely cleansed of Muslims, who were now increasingly viewed by the British as the real enemy. ‘There has been nothing but shooting these villains for the last three days,’ wrote a young British officer in a letter home from the Delhi camp, ‘some 3 or 400 were shot yesterday. All the women and children are of course allowed to leave the city and the old men. I have seen many young Mussulmen, who no doubt had a hand in murdering our poor women and children, let pass through the gates, but most of them are put to death.’ Areas of the city believed to have given aid and succour to the rebels were flattened, including several mosques. Even the city’s great Jumma Masjid was threatened with demolition. For a time it served as a barracks for Sikh troops, and two years passed before it was finally released to a body of Muslim trustees.
Up on the Punjab frontier the British authorities were equally ruthless. Apart from those rebels killed in the field, quite a number were found guilty of mutiny or sedition and executed: 20 hanged, 44 blown away from guns and 459 shot by musketry. Then in October 1857, just as order appeared to have been restored, a night attack was made on the camp of one of Herbert Edwardes’ assistant commissioners. The raiders were identified as Hindustani Fanatics. Against all the odds, they had regrouped under Inayat Ali and had once more joined forces with a local ally, Mir Alam Khan of Punjtar. Edwardes decided that they must now be finished off once and for all.
In mid-April 1858 five thousand fighting men gathered under cover of darkness near Hoti Mardan and set off across the plain towards the Mahabun Mountain. They were led by the local military commander, Major-General Sir Sydney Cotton, accompanied by Edwardes as his political adviser. Despite his advanced age, Cotton had learned in his five years as the area commander that frontier warfare demanded very different tactics from those he had employed as a cavalry officer in the plains. ‘Protracted warfare in the mountains has proved to be fatal to success,’ he afterwards wrote. ‘There is a sporting phrase which is very applicable to this description of mountain warfare, “In and out clever.” The proper mode of punishing the hill tribes, and that which is attended with the least risk, is to go in upon them suddenly and unexpectedly, without affording them time to assemble, or otherwise make preparation.’
Despite their considerable numbers, Cotton’s troops moved fast and succeeded in penetrating deep into Mahabun Mountain before their presence was discovered. Soon after dawn the first column passed the village of Punjtar unopposed and started the long climb up to the main Hindustani stronghold at Mangalthana. ‘The advance reached the height about eleven a.m.,’ wrote Cotton. ‘Not a shot had been fired at us, as we laboured up the steep and wooded road, and on entering Mangul Thana we found the fort abandoned, and every sign of a hasty and recent flight.’
Cotton was not to know that the Hindustanis’ amir, Inayat Ali, had died of fever just days earlier. The mujahedeen were leaderless and seemingly unable to offer any resistance. At Cotton’s approach they scattered into the surrounding hills and ravines. All Cotton could do was mine and blow up all the buildings at Mangalthana and return to his camp on the edge of the plains. It was put about that the raid was over, but this was a bluff. Two weeks later Cotton struck again, acting on the reports of his scouts that the Hindustanis had regrouped at Sittana together with their Sayyed allies under Sayyed Umar Shah, brother of the late Padshah of the Swatis, Sayyed Akbar Shah. This time Cotton divided his force and advanced on the Hindustanis’ lower camp at Sittana from three sides. Once in position, the three columns began to fan out until their enemy was in effect surrounded. Unable to break through this tightening ring, the Hindustanis gathered on the crest of a ridge to make a last stand. Cotton’s official report gives no numbers, but comments that their fight to the death was ‘marked with fanaticism; they came boldly and doggedly on, going through all the preliminary attitudes of the Indian prize ring, but in perfect silence without a shout or a word of any kind. All were dressed in their best for the occasion, mostly in white; but some of the leaders wore velvet cloaks.’ Sayyed Umar Shah was very probably among the dead.
Had Cotton’s troops held their positions, every last muja-hedeen could have been finished off the next day. But with night approaching and all objectives taken, Herbert Edwardes decided that it was time to withdraw. Cotton was the senior officer and the military commander, but it was customary to heed the advice of the political officer present, and so he did – a decision both he and Edwardes came to regret. When Cotton later set down his account of the action he chose his words carefully: ‘The Commissioner’, he wrote, ‘considered that adequate punishment had been inflicted on them, and called upon me to withdraw the troops, not deeming it expedient to raise against the British Government, by further pursuit of the enemy in the hills, the Judoon and other independent hill tribes who had naturally become excited by the presence of so large a British force in and amongst their mountains.’
Sydney Cotton could at least congratulate himself on having showed how it could be done. The hitherto impregnable mountains of Swat and Buner had been penetrated successfully by a large military force, and what had been done once could be done again – provided the force came ‘in and out clever’. It was a lesson that his successors signally failed to learn.
But when Cotton’s army marched down from the Mahabun Mountain it left behind alive ABDULLAH ALI, twenty-eight-year-old eldest son of the late Wilayat Ali, and his three small sons. He was subsequently chosen as Inayat Ali’s successor as amir of the Hindustani Fanatics. It appears too that a number of sepoys, most likely remnants of the mutinous 55th BNI, survived. They and a handful of mujahedeen who had also escaped Cotton’s net hid out in the mountains until given sanctuary by the new leader of the Sayyeds of Sittana, SAYYED MUBARIK SHAH, son of the late Padshah of Swat. The sanctuary was an abandoned settlement named Malka, just a few miles to the north-east of Mangalthana on the northern slopes of the Mahabun Mountain, looking down on the Chumla valley and the mountains of Buner beyond. Here this last core of the Hindustani Fanatics remained in hiding, cut off from the Indian plains and entirely dependent on the charity of their neighbours.
In November 1858 Lord Canning proclaimed an end to East India Company rule in India and the transfer of authority to the British Crown. The Company’s Bengal, Madras and Bombay Armies were dismantled and the high-caste regiments replaced by mixed corps composed of different ethnic groups, castes and religions. At the same time, so-called ‘martial races’ such as the Sikhs and the Gurkhas who had proved both their loyalty and their fighting spirit in the Mutiny were recruited in increasing numbers. In March 1862 Lord Canning went home to die and was replaced as British India’s second Viceroy by Lord Elgin, who himself sickened and died of heart failure in the Himalayas in November 1863. The office then went to John Lawrence, the hard-nosed administrator who had steered the Punjab through the Mutiny and its aftermath as its first Lieutenant-Governor. Unlike his predecessors, Lawrence knew the country and its people, but he was in England when Elgin died and it was eight weeks before he could be sworn in as Viceroy, too late to have any say in the political and military disaster that became known as the Ambeyla Campaign.