Having completed his official duties in the kutcherry, Mackeson had walked across the road to his bungalow to work on his papers. It was his habit to see petitioners only in the morning, so when a tribesman advanced towards him holding out a roll of paper, Mackeson told him to come back the next day. He was unknown to Mackeson’s staff but had earlier been seen praying outside the office. As recounted to a young officer named Sydney Cotton, newly arrived on the frontier, the stranger then fell down at the feet of the Commissioner and, clasping his hands, implored him to read his petition: ‘Colonel Mackeson then took the paper and commenced to read, and being intent on its contents, the native suddenly sprung upon the Colonel, and plunged a dagger into his breast.’ The Commissioner died four days later.
The assailant was seized and interrogated. He had come from a village outside British territory, in Swat, declared himself to be a talib, and claimed to have acted to stop the British invading his land. Further questioning revealed him to be a ‘religious fanatic’ who saw himself as a mujahedeen set on a course of martyrdom. He was duly tried and hanged. He died, according to Cotton, ‘glorying in his deed of blood’. To prevent his grave becoming a martyr’s shrine his remains were burned and the ashes thrown in the river.
As for the unfortunate Mackeson, fears that his body might be further violated led to his being interred not in the Christian cemetery, which lay outside the perimeter on the cantonment, but in a garden known as the Company Bagh. A black marble obelisk was erected over the grave, inscribed with a fulsome tribute penned by the Governor-General of India himself, Lord Dalhousie.
Because of the name Mackeson had made for himself among the frontier tribes, his friends found his murder incomprehensible. There were rumours, angrily dismissed, that the Commissioner had violated Pathan taboos by making advances to one of their women. There was also talk of a fatwa or religious edict having been proclaimed, and of a reward being offered for his head. The reality was that the murder was both an act of revenge and the first successful blow against the British Government in India by a secret organisation intent on revolution.
This organisation was, in fact, already known to the authorities. Back in 1848 Lieutenant Harry Lumsden had reported the presence of Hindustani outsiders among the Sayyed tribesmen of Hazara. He had captured their two leaders – two brothers named Ali – who after questioning had been returned under custody to their homes in Patna. Then in August 1852 the Assistant Magistrate of Patna, Charles Carnac, had sent details to the Governor-General of a plot involving a sect of Muslims in his city who were ‘mixed up with a band of Moslem fanatics in the distant hills of Sittana and Swat’. A bundle of letters had been intercepted which revealed that a ‘treasonable correspondence’ was taking place between these fanatics in the mountains and members of a prominent Muslim family living in the Sadiqpore district of Patna. The latter were apparently despatching kafilas or caravans of men, arms and funds to the frontier along a secret trail that went from Patna to Peshawar by way of Meerut, Amballa and Rawalpindi, for the express purpose of waging war against the Government of India.
Acting on this information, Mr Carnac had raided the Sadiqpore mansion-cum-caravanserai in Patna, only to find that the occupants had been forewarned and had destroyed all their letters. However, the head of the family, one Maulvi Ahmadullah, had subsequently assembled several hundred armed men in his premises and had declared that ‘he was prepared to resist any further prosecution of the Magistrate’s enquiries and, if attacked, would raise the standard of revolt’.
After taking advice from his home minister and members of his council, Lord Dalhousie had then set out a formal Minute in Council in which he expressed himself satisfied that there was no cause for concern. For years these fanatics had been doing their best to ‘induce the Mussulmans [Muslims] in India to join in a holy war’ and nothing had come of it: ‘The letters now detected seem to me to show that their efforts have met with very little success. They ask for money, they ask for arms and recruits, and the terms in which they write seem to me conclusive of the fact that they have obtained very little of the one and very few of the other.’ The Governor-General had himself seen ‘a sort of ballad’, picked up in the back streets of Calcutta, which enjoined ‘all true Mussulmans to join the standard of the faith and rise against the infidel’. But that sort of thing was only to be expected. His Lordship could see ‘no reason to suppose that there is any more movement or intrigue at present going on than must at all times be expected among the Mussulmans in India’.
This first Minute had then been followed by a second, written by Dalhousie in October 1852 in response to further discoveries of treasonable activities, now involving attempts to subvert sepoys of the Bengal Native Infantry on service in the Punjab. Again, the evidence pointed to a group of Muslim mullahs in Patna being deeply involved in treasonable conspiracy against the state. But Government, according to Dalhousie, was on top of the situation, and the law as it existed was fully capable of dealing with it. Instructions were subsequently sent to all the provinces under British rule reminding the local authorities how they were to deal with such cases. Where it could be proved that treason was being plotted, the ringleaders of plots were to be shown no leniency – but magistrates were to avoid taking any action that might be seen as oppressive by the native population. As for the fanatics up in the Mahabun Mountain at Sittana, they were best left untouched: ‘Since they are insignificant, they may be let alone as long as they are quiet. At any rate, this is not a propitious time for such a movement. We have already irons enough in the fire on the north-west frontier without heating another unnecessarily.’
Barely eight weeks after the Governor-General recorded this second Minute, Commissioner Mackeson had himself led a small punitive force across the Indus River from British territory in Hazara. This was in response to an appeal from a local tribal chief, the Khan of Amb: some Hindustani foreigners had occupied one of his forts on the banks of the Indus and he needed help to expel them. These Hindustanis were the same Moslem fanatics of Sittana of whom the Magistrate of Patna had complained eighteen months earlier. Among the officers who accompanied Mackeson on this raid was a young lieutenant of the 41st Bengal Native Infantry, George Rowcroft, for whom it was his first taste of frontier warfare. ‘Sittana’, he wrote in a private memoir, ‘was a place built and inhabited by Mahomedan Hindustanis and Bengalis; refugees and outlaws, men who had left the British territories either as criminals fleeing from justice, or as fanatics renouncing the “Feringee” [the British] and all his works. They were a thorn in the side of the civil and political authorities on the Frontier, and made frequent raids across the Indus into British territory, often succeeding in carrying off, for ransom, some of our subjects; generally a Hindu trader.’ Having kidnapped a victim they would send a ransom demand to his relatives and, if this wasn’t answered, follow up with a second message accompanied by the victim’s ear: ‘A further neglect to pay up resulted in the head of the victim being sent, and a sarcastic message that they were now relieved of the expense of feeding him.’