Ordered by Mackeson to give up the Khan of Amb’s fort, its Hindustani occupants responded with a defiant letter declaring that they would die first. Accordingly, on 6 January 1853 two regiments of Sikh infantry were ferried across the Indus and advanced on the fort from below, while at the same time a party of matchlock-men supplied by the Khan of Amb took up a position on the heights above. The sight of columns of troops advancing in good order was enough to send the occupants scurrying up the mountainside. ‘In spite of the boasts of the Hindustanis,’ wrote Colonel Mackeson in his official despatch, ‘they were all, to the number of from 200 to 300, in full flight from the fort of Kotla.’ In the meantime, the Khan of Amb’s matchlock-men had seized the Hindustanis’ main base at Sittana, higher up in the mountains. But here, too, the Hindustanis dispersed into the surrounding crags and ravines, leaving behind a small rearguard party to hold off the attackers. According to George Rowcroft’s account, by the time the Sikhs arrived the fighting was over: ‘The latter, on arriving at Sittana – a partially fortified village surrounded by a dense belt of dried thorns – found that the able bodied portion of the occupants had fled, and the few (some dozen or fifteen of sick and wounded) left behind, had been promptly disposed of by the gallant Tunawallis.’
The camp at Sittana was levelled, the belt of thorns fired, and the expedition withdrew, taking with it a number of wounded prisoners. In Peshawar the Guides’ Assistant Surgeon, Dr Robert Lyell, treated these wounded men and was impressed by their fortitude and their refusal to talk. Only after one of his nursing assistants had gained their confidence did they begin to give information about themselves and their organisation, whereupon it became clear that this was no rabble of outlaws but a disciplined army, well organised and with a clear agenda. It had an established chain of command, and was currently led by the younger of two brothers named Ali following the recent death of the elder brother. Although they lived frugally on stewed pulses and unleavened bread, they were armed with carbines and were kept well supplied by their supporters in the plains. The prisoners boasted that many pious Muslims contributed to their cause, including the rulers of a number of leading Muslim princely states in India.
Mackeson could have put an end to the Hindustani Fanatics at Sittana in January 1853. But the Commissioner had just received the Governor-General’s Minute, telling him to leave things as they were. So he did not order a pursuit, later justifying his inaction on the grounds that he had done all that was required of him: ‘He considered their flight, without offering resistance, would generally increase the contempt in which they were held by the surrounding tribes, and would be more useful to us than any persecution of them could be.’
Mackeson’s failure to follow up his raid probably cost him his life. Had he done so, the history of the North-West Frontier might well have been very different. But Frederick Mackeson, like Lord Dalhousie before him and many others who came after, underestimated the Hindustani Fanatics. Intelligence existed to show the movement’s true nature, but this information was disregarded. It was not the first time the Hindustani Fanatics were let off the hook, and it was certainly not the last.
What the British came to know as the Fanatic Camp at Sittana had been established almost a quarter of a century earlier on the eastern slopes of Mahabun Mountain overlooking the Indus Valley. It was on land granted in perpetuity as a religious gift by the local Yusufzai back in the sixteenth century to a renowned saint named Pir Baba, who was a Saiyyed descended from the Prophet. After the Sikhs annexed neighbouring Hazara and the Vale of Peshawar, Sittana became a refuge and a rallying point for resisters – or, as a British intelligence officer put it, ‘the refuge for outlaws and offenders from Yusufzai and Hazara, and the rendezvous of all the discontented Khans and their followers’. Then in the winter months of 1827–8 a very different kind of resister appeared on the Frontier: SYED AHMAD of Rae Bareli, founder and first of the Hindustani Fanatics.
Syed Ahmad was born Syed Ghullam Muhammad in 1786 in the town of Rae Bareli, on the Gangetic plains between Lucknow and Allahabad in the kingdom of Oude. As his first name implies, his family claimed descent from the Prophet, which marked him out as someone to be respected by virtue of his inherent sanctity and to be accorded the honorific title of shah (king). According to his several biographers, he grew up into a model of perfection: tall, strong and fair, with close-knit eyebrows and a long and bushy beard. He was said to have had a great appetite for physical sports, including wrestling, swimming, archery and shooting. This gave him an imposing physique that set him apart from most clerics, yet he was apparently taciturn and gentle in demeanour, with a quiet voice that could be heard by all who wished to hear him. As one biography put it, ‘All the perfections… were implanted from his birth in this holy man, as evidenced from the delight which he took in the exercise of piety and practice of virtue from his childhood.’ Like the Prophet, he fell from time to time into deep ecstatic trances, indicating that he was in direct communication with God.
After his father’s death in 1800 the fourteen-year-old moved to Delhi to become a talib of the leading scholar of the age, SHAH ABDUL AZIZ, principal of a small but greatly respected religious school known as Madrassah-i-Rahimiya, tucked away in the back streets of the old city. According to the author of Sirat-ul-Mustaqim, the best known of the biographies, ‘When he was admitted into the society of the venerated Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who received him as a disciple of the Nakshbandia school, by the propitious effects and influence of the enlightened spirit of his instructor, the concealed excellencies of his nature developed themselves in a natural succession of wonders.’ Among these wonders were three dreams: in the first the Prophet fed the boy with three dates; in the second the Prophet’s daughter Fatima bathed him, washed him and dressed him in garments ‘of exceeding richness’; in the third God placed him on his right hand, showed him his treasures and said to him ‘This I have given to you, and I shall give you yet more.’ Clearly Syed Ahmad was destined for great things – although it should always be borne in mind that the hagiographers who wrote about him did so as leading practitioners of the cult of Syed Ahmad that developed after his untimely demise.
Syed Ahmad was extremely fortunate in having Shah Abdul Aziz for his teacher, for he was the eldest son and religious successor of the renowned Sufi scholar and reformer SHAH WALIULLAH of Delhi, who has been described by a leading modern historian as ‘the bridge between medieval and modern Islam in India’. Half a century earlier Shah Waliullah had set out to make Islam more accessible by translating the Quran, the word of God divinely revealed to his Prophet Muhammad, from Arabic into Persian. He had also called for moral reform and a return to the pristine Islam of the days of the Prophet as set down in the Quran and the Hadith, a corpus of accounts of the deeds and sayings of the Prophet as remembered by his companions. As part of this process of reform Shah Waliullah had broken with religious convention by setting himself up as a mujtahid, one who makes his own interpretations of established religious law by virtue of informed reasoning.
In the public mind, however, Shah Waliullah had been best known for his unavailing efforts to restore Muslim rule to Hindustan, culminating in a famous appeal to the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali to invade India, destroy the Hindu Marathas in battle and bring back the golden years of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. In the event, Ahmad Shah had been forced to retreat to Afghanistan and the Marathas had once again become the dominant power in northern India. But the dream of an Islamic revival and of Hindustan under sharia had been kept alive by Shah Waliullah’s four sons, with the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya acknowledged as the most influential seminary in all Hindustan.