The proving in the law-courts that the chota godown in Patna was the centre of treasonable activity against the Government of India, and had been so for many years, was a very public vindication of Bill Tayler’s conduct in detaining Ahmadullah Ali and the other leading Wahhabis back in 1857. There was now a great clamour, led by The Pioneer and other British newspapers in India, for Tayler’s name to be cleared. Tayler himself was quick to reissue the defence of his actions that he had published in the wake of his dismissal, and again began to bombard the government authorities in India with intemperate letters accompanied by testimonials from the great and good. Finally in 1868 it seemed as if Tayler’s name would at last be cleared when the Duke of Argyll, newly appointed Secretary of State for India, was prevailed upon to reopen his case. At this same time, however, William Tayler’s nemesis, Sir Frederick James Halliday, former Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, was appointed to the Council of India, which advised the Secretary for State for India. The Duke duly took the Council’s advice – and opted to support the status quo.
Membership of the Council of India was for life, and Sir Frederick Halliday lived until 1901. William Tayler died in 1892 without ever clearing his name. ‘To the hour of his death,’ wrote Edward Lockwood, who had been Tayler’s assistant in Patna in 1857, ‘he thought and talked of nothing but the alleged injustice done to him, carrying on at the same time a hopeless war with those who had kept him from honour, by refusing to acknowledge him as the Saviour of Patna during the Indian Mutiny.’ Lockwood compared Tayler to British India’s first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, a small man but a great one, also brought low by his enemies: ‘He was no bigger than Warren Hastings, and both like Virgil’s bees Ingentes animos augusto in pectore versant [With mighty souls in little bodies present]… They both would have saved themselves, and everybody else, a great deal of trouble had they used honey in the place of gall for ink.’
The Victoria and Albert Museum has in its South Asian collection 667 jewels and curios amassed by William Tayler during his years in India and bought from him in 1874. Among them is a seal ring in the form of an octagonal engraved carnelian set in silver. It carries the Quranic motto ‘Verily He is the certain Truth’ and is dated 1278 AH, corresponding to 1861–2. How it came into Tayler’s possession is not known, but in the museum’s inventory it is noted that the ring had formerly belonged to ‘Ahmad-ullah, the Wahhabi rebel of Patna’.
The successful outcome of the Amballa and Patna trials greatly encouraged those in Government who regarded the Wahhabis as a major political threat. In their wake a somewhat shady Special Police Department, armed with extra-judicial powers of arrest, was set up under the leadership of J. H. Reily, the Deputy Inspector-General of Police in Bihar. Little is known about this special police unit but it is clear that a number of Wahhabi cells in eastern Bengal were turned over by its men, which led to further underground groups being uncovered. It soon became apparent that well-organised Wahhabi networks existed in many rural areas of Bihar and Bengal. By repeating the same successful tactics of inducing or forcing some of the accused to turn state’s evidence, enough witnesses were found to bring the rest to court, resulting in a further series of high-profile trials in 1870 and 1871.
One of the many trails uncovered by Reily led his team to the Punjab. In October 1868 he visited Hoti Mardan, as close to tribal territory as he could safely go, and from there he sent an emissary to the Hindustani camp. Since the Ambeyla war five years earlier the Hindustanis under Abdullah Ali, son of Wilayat Ali, had been denied access to their traditional sanctuaries on the Mahabun Mountain and had been driven from one refuge to another on the Hazara side of the Indus. It was at one of these temporary camps that they were found by Reily’s emissary, who reported back that the Hindustanis now numbered 362 fighting men, divided into eight units. They had seventy women and children with them and were living in very straitened circumstances. Reily then wrote to his superiors recommending pardons for all the Hindustanis – except for Abdullah Ali, their leader, and his deputy Faiyyaz Ali, a brother of Ahmadullah and Yahya Ali, both now in prison. Shortly afterwards Reily seems to have been visited in the Hazara hills by Abdullah Ali himself or by an emissary from the Hindustani camp – a mysterious meeting that may have been part of an unauthorised bid to bring about a peace deal with the Hindustani Fanatics. It evidently failed, and was subsequently hushed up, but at that meeting Abdullah Ali (or his emissary) made a statement of sorts, witnessed by the Assistant Commissioner of Rawalpindi, giving a great deal of information about the Wahhabi organisation, naming names of active members and supporters. Armed with this statement, Reily proceeded to Delhi, where an informant claimed to have seen a letter bearing the seal of Prince FIROZE SHAH, a nephew of the recently deposed last emperor, Bahadur Shah.
Prince Firoze Shah was the only member of the Mughal royal family to have participated actively in the 1857 uprising. With the collapse of the rebellion he had fled from Hindustan into Pathan tribal territory and, according to Reily’s informant, subsequently used the Wahhabi supply chain to write to supporters in Delhi calling for jihadis to join him in the mountains. More arrests were made and statements were taken which pointed to the involvement of the leading maulana (learned teacher) of the school of Shah Waliullah: Maulana Sayyid Nazir Husain of Delhi, famous for his expositions of Hadith.
A mass of correspondence was subsequently seized from Sayyid Nazir Husain’s home, including letters from Wahhabis convicted in the Amballa and Patna trials and from Abdullah Ali, the Wahhabi amir leading the Hindustanis on the frontier. These letters appeared to bear out a claim made by Abdullah Ali himself in his recent statement to Reily: that the respected maulana was the leader of the Wahhabis in Delhi and had been since before the Sepoy Mutiny.
Reily presented his case to the Punjab Government, under whose jurisdiction Delhi still came at this time, and Sayyid Nazir Husain was arrested. After six months’ detention he was released without any charges being brought against him. Why the authorities decided not to proceed against the maulana remains a mystery; it may be that they were concerned about the circumstances in which Abdullah Ali’s statement had been obtained, or it could be that Sayyid Nazir Husain’s standing in Delhi was such that the authorities felt it best not to take the case against him any further. The maulana lived on to the venerable age of ninety-seven and always denied any links with the Wahhabis, just as he denied having played any active or supportive role in the Delhi uprising in 1857. One of his biographers states that of the hundreds of students who sat at his feet up to the time of his death in 1902, many were from Afghanistan and others came from as far afield as Kashgar, the Hijaz and Nejd.
Sir John Lawrence’s successor, Lord Mayo, began his Viceroyalty by expressing his determination to ‘put down Wahabeeism in India as he had put down Fenianism in Ireland’. A Special Commission was set up to examine the extent of the threat posed by the sect, one outcome of which was the first detailed report on the Indian Wahhabi movement and its origins, compiled by T. W. Ravenshaw, the City Magistrate at Patna. His report demonstrated the extraordinary extent of the movement’s organisation, and its history of armed jihad. Then the whole Wahhabi issue came dramatically back to the boil with the murder of two of the highest officials in the land.
The first was the stabbing to death in Calcutta on 20 September 1871 of the acting Chief Justice, Justice John Norman, as he was on his way into court to preside over a Wahhabi trial. His assailant, a Pathan named Abdullah, went to the gallows without giving any coherent account of his motives. A visitor to India named James Routledge attended his trial and observed that the prosecutor soon abandoned ‘any hope of discovering the motive of the crime’. But he further noted that ‘a very uneasy feeling prevailed throughout India at this time… People saw in the murder the beginning of a system of warfare in which one man of a body of thugs of a new order would draw a lot which would condemn him to give his life, if need be, to destroy that of some distinguished Englishman. Looking at the circumstances of the case, with many notes before me, I have no doubt that the cause of the murder was the Wahabee trials.’