Taylor was now desperate to salvage something from the political disaster for which he himself was largely responsible. He accepted this compromise, with the proviso that the expulsion and destruction should be real and not merely nominal, and to this end it was agreed that he and a small escort should accompany the Bunerwals. The latter would send a force of two thousand tribesmen led by four of their chiefs, and Taylor would accompany them, together with an escort of seven British officers and four companies of Guides Infantry. ‘Bobs’ Roberts, who had a quite extraordinary knack of finding himself in the thick of the action, was one of the officers selected to accompany Taylor.
On the afternoon of 19 December Reynell Taylor and the officers mounted their horses and set off across the Chamla valley with their infantry escort and the four Buner khans. But instead of the two thousand flintlockmen promised by the Bunerwals, there were barely a hundred. Furthermore, the Bunerwals’ private agreement had angered the several smaller Yusufzai tribes who had their homes in the Mahabun Mountains, particularly the Amazais, who had suffered heavy casualties defending their land on the Laloo ridge. ‘The Amazais’, Roberts later wrote in his autobiography, ‘did not attempt to disguise their disgust at our being present in the country, and they gathered in knots, scowling and pointing at us.’
Despite the Amazais’ hostility, Malka was reached late on 21 December. Inevitably, it was deserted. But it was also far more substantial than had been anticipated, ‘containing several large edifices amongst which the Moulvie’s hall of audience, barracks for the soldiers, stabling and a powder manufactory formed conspicuous objects. There was no regular fortification but the outer walls of the houses were connected and formed a continuous line of posterns.’ The next morning the British officers watched as every building was set on fire, sending up columns of smoke visible for miles around. Also viewing this spectacle was a large and very angry crowd of Amazai, who became visibly more agitated with every passing minute, pressing forward until the British officers and their escort were hemmed in on every side.
All thoughts of pursuing the Hindustanis any further had to be abandoned. ‘We were a mere handful compared to the thousands who had gathered,’ wrote Roberts. ‘Our position was no doubt extremely critical, and it was well for us that we had at our head such a cool, determined leader.’ Reynell Taylor went over to the Amazai headman and told him in a firm voice that since the object of their visit had been accomplished, they were now ready to retrace their steps. But at this the Amazais became still further excited: ‘They talked in loud tones, and gesticulated in true Pathan fashion, thronging round Taylor, who stood quite alone and perfectly self-possessed in the midst of the angry and dangerous-looking multitude.’
At this moment of crisis a grey-bearded Buner khan with one arm and one eye, ZAIDULLA KHAN of Daggar, forced his way through to Taylor’s side, raised his one arm and called for silence. He then made what Roberts termed a ‘plucky speech’, telling the assembled Amazai that they could of course kill the Englishmen and their escort, but that to do so, ‘“You must first kill us Bunerwals first, for we have sworn to protect them, and we will do so with our lives.”’ It was a remarkable demonstration of the Pathan code of nanawati. As Zaidulla Khan’s later conduct demonstrated, he regarded the British as his enemies; yet having agreed to accompany them to Malka and back, he felt honour-bound to protect them with his life.
Although the journey was frequently interrupted by ‘stormy discussions’ between the Amazais and the Bunerwals, Taylor and his escort returned safely to Ambeyla. The military camp at the head of the pass was at once broken up and by Christmas Day 1863 both the Ambeyla Pass and the Mahabun Mountain were free of the taint of the infidel. ‘The colony of fanatics’, wrote Major James in his final report, ‘so perversely hanging on our borders, a blemish on our administration… has been half-destroyed, forced to retreat to more inhospitable and uncongenial regions, and will shortly, I trust, be eradicated for ever.’ Army records indicate that in excess of seven hundred Wahhabi mujahedeen died in the fighting. Yet the fact was that Amir Abdullah Ali and perhaps as many as two hundred of his fellow Hindustanis lived to fight another day.
So too did an Afridi tribesman named SHERE ALI, a cavalry trooper who had served first Hugh James and then Reynell Taylor as his mounted orderly. Shere Ali was at Taylor’s side throughout the Ambeyla campaign and was rewarded by him with a horse, a pistol and a certificate. As his personal orderly Shere Ali subsequently attended Taylor ‘with eager zeal and devotion in rough work, and in peace he had been the playfellow of my children, one little girl having him entirely at her beck and call. In his rough posteen [sheepskin jacket] and boots, and armed always like men of his clan with sword and knife, he would carry her all over the place and attend her on her pony rides.’ But popular as Shere Ali was among the European officers he served, he was nevertheless Afridi to the core: ‘Like the rest of his tribe, he was constantly involved in blood feuds, and I well remember the look on his face when he informed me he had obtained a month’s leave for the purpose of killing some hereditary enemies who taken advantage of his absence to shoot a woman of his family while drawing water.’
This blood feud had been maintained in Shere Ali’s family for generations and it continued after Taylor’s departure, when as their mounted orderly Shere Ali served two more Commissioners of Peshawar. However, in March 1867 he spotted a kinsman involved in his family feud walking near the house of the then Commissioner, Frederick Pollock, and killed him. He duly appeared before Pollock and was found guilty of murder, but because of the extenuating circumstances and his long record of service Pollock declined to sentence him to death, and instead ordered him to be transported for life. This was badly received by Shere Ali, who before his removal from the court begged that his sentence might be commuted to death. Pollock refused, so Shere Ali was sent away in chains to the Government of India’s penal colony on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. There, lost to the outside world and forgotten, he continued to believe that Pollock and the British Raj he represented had done him a great injustice.
8
The Wahabees on Trial
Our prison gates have closed upon batch after batch of unhappy misguided traitors; the Courts have sent one set of ring-leaders after another to lonely islands across the sea; yet the whole country continues to furnish money and men to the Forlorn Hope of Islam on our Frontier and persists in its blood-stained protest against Christian rule.
In 1884 a remarkable autobiography was published in Delhi. It was entitled Kala Pani: Tarikh e Ajeeb (The Black Water: a Strange Story) and was the first printed memoir by an Indian Wahhabi, telling of his arrest, trial and transportation across the kala pani or black water – in this instance, the salt waters of the Bay of Bengal – to the Andaman Islands, where he spent sixteen years in exile. Its author was Muhammad Jafar of Thanesar, the petition-writer named by the mounted police daffadar Ghazan Khan in the evidence collected by his son and presented to the district magistrate at Thanesar in the late autumn of 1863: evidence suggesting that ‘Munshi Ja’far of Thaneswar, whom the men call Khalifa, was the great man who passed up the Bengalis and their carbines and rifles.’