Seven HIATUS: 1857 AND ITS LESSONS ON THE last page of William’s most controversial chapter in his Life of the Prophet, ‘The belief of Mahomet in his own Inspiration’, he added a dramatic postscript penned in his family’s cramped quarters inside the Agra fort. I have received and corrected the proofs of the last fifty-six pages under difficulties. All my MSS. and books of reference have been placed in se- curity from the ravages of our mutineer army, and are inaccessible to me at present. (W. M., Fort Agra, 18 July 1857)1 Two months earlier, on 10 May, some sepoys stationed in Meerut to the north-east of Delhi had murdered some of their British officers and marched overnight to Delhi to request the octogenarian pensioner Mughal king to head their cause, an indication of the symbolic power this dynasty could still exert. By mid-July the king was besieged in his own fort city by British forces while the call to rise had spread among sepoys and civilians in many parts of the province. When a ‘rebel’ attack on Agra from the south, en route to Delhi, seemed imminent, the European population of Agra, including the Muir family, had taken refuge in the fort where they remained until Delhi fell to relief forces from the Punjab in late September. William’s regular correspondent in Britain during these months and afterwards, apart from his mother, was his brother, John, by then in schol- arly retirement in Edinburgh where he was engrossed in finalizing the long-planned first volume of hisOriginal Sanskrit Texts. Understandably, the brothers’ letters to each other after mid-May 1857 were concerned almost solely with the uprisings. Even though each continued with his 174 Scottish Orientalists and India literary endeavours, William was severely constrained by the conditions in Agra. The brothers’ surviving private letters complement a mass of official intelligence records for their views on unfolding events.2 Almost 40 years later William would publish a short account of his family’s ‘life in the fort’, based on his diary and some letters no longer extant, for the benefit of his own children and grandchildren, which he instructed should be kept private to the family.3 Yet a few years later, in 1902, he commissioned a relative to publish the records he had collected and transmitted as intelligence officer during 1857.4 In his self-styled capac- ity as ‘chronicler’ of events he had amassed 11 volumes of copies of letters, memoranda, telegrams and informers’ messages, and various miscellaneous papers that were transmitted ‘up and down country’ from Agra until the government’s removal in January 1858 to Allahabad, the newly designated provincial capital, by when restoration of British power seemed certain. The Muir records have been paid very little attention by latter-day historians of the rebellions. Some more active British participants in the military events would disagree with the versions recorded by William, envying him the relative ease of his Agra fort refuge. In fact, William’s decision to publish his papers so long afterwards was partly to vindicate his own actions and those of some fellow Agra civilians during the worst crises there in the summer of 1857. For various official and unofficial his- tories had blamed the Agra civilians and the Intelligence Department, William’s particular responsibility, for a degree of complacency, based on misinformation, that had resulted in many deaths and near disaster in Agra both before and after the fall of Delhi to the British.5 These ‘intelligence’ papers, necessarily more official than the family letters, give William’s views on daily events at a time when it seemed very likely, at least until the recapture of Delhi in late September 1857, that north-west India would be lost to the Company.6 This chapter will draw on the brothers’ correspondence and William’s ‘intelligence records’ to show how William perceived the motives of those who remained ‘loyal’ as well as ‘rebel’, as a basis for understanding some of his later agendas for recovery of confidence in the post-Rebellion period. The role of Saiyid Ahmad Khan, well known to William since the late 1840s and a civil judge in Bijnor when rebellion spread to that district, is of particu- lar concern here since his subsequent close interaction with William on matters concerning Muslim religion, civilization and education will be the subject of two of the remaining chapters. Hiatus: 1857 and its lessons 175 1857: Mere mutiny or a ‘long-concocted Mohammedan conspiracy’?7 Situated so very close to the vortex of the rebellions it comes as a sur- prise, considering his generally very critical views of Islam in his Life of the Prophet and his early articles on Islamic history, that William interpreted its causes and nature in ways very sympathetic to its par- ticipants, particularly Muslims, whether or not he perceived them as ‘insurgent’ or ‘loyal’, or, as he often did, as uneasy vacillators between the two positions. Like several other civilian observers, including John Lawrence in the Punjab, William was adamant from the beginning and in most subsequent statements that this was a military revolt, its causes limited to grievances about service in the army, with the cartridge ques- tion at their core. Military mistakes had precipitated its onset and then continued to jeopardize the Company’s position during its course. But neither the initial outbreak, nor even its subsequent spread, indicated in William’s view, any widespread popular grievances concerning the Company’s rule. He wrote to his mother a week after the initial Meerut outbreak that, ‘The character of the affair is that of a Military mutiny, – a struggle between the Government and its Soldiers, not between the Government and the People.’8 He repeated to John in early June that any ‘controversy’ was ‘simply between the Government and its Native sol- diery’, not the ‘People’, and then adhered firmly to this view on most occasions.9 When, on the hundredth anniversary of the uprisings in 1957, re-evaluations of the ‘causes’ were encouraged in India, one of the most influential Indian publications represented William Muir as the ‘greatest protagonist of the theory that the revolt of 1857 was only a mutiny of troops’.10 For William had continued to deny, in the face of much evidence of a more widespread ‘rebellion’ all around him, that the civilian popula- tion of the north-west had shared the mutinous sepoys’ views of the Company. He attributed any examples of civilian rebellion to irresist- ible pressure from armed and stronger sepoy forces, not to any positive inclination on the part of ‘the people’ to oust the British. He had found no evidence of any conspiracy or long-term pre-planning even among the regiments before the mutiny erupted at Meerut, and certainly not among the civilian population. Investigations in the Meerut region, he reported, ‘will not fit in easily with the popular notion of a long pre- conceived plot’.11 That he maintained this view for the rest of his life, in spite of the growing popularity of conspiracy theories, was demon- strated in the 1890s when he reaffirmed his initial view of ‘a people that had yielded to an overwhelming pressure, but were not in themselves disloyal to us’.12 Reflecting these views, he usually referred to those who 176 Scottish Orientalists and India did rise, whatever their background, as ‘mutineers’, or ‘the enemy’; only very occasionally did he use the term ‘rebel’. He absolved Muslims, in particular, of the charges of ‘conspiracy’ that in various forms began to surface in the early months of the ris- ings, to climax both in Britain and India after the fall of Delhi. Villains in such set pieces included the kings of Delhi and Lucknow and their relations and ministers, various ‘ulama, including Maulawi Ahmad Allah Shah, the ‘maulawi of Faizabad’, whom William referred to as ‘the great Lucknow Moulvie’, and various alleged allies, including some Persian contacts and Maratha leaders. William’s missionary friend, Alexander Duff, was meanwhile particularly influential in asserting from Calcutta that members of the former ruling Muslim elites had been ‘deeply impli- cated in the dark and foul conspiracy’.13 The persistence of this Muslim version of the ‘conspiracy’ charge was certainly to have some far-reach- ing effects on British policy in the ‘aftermath of revolt’. But it has long been recognized that its widespread adoption owed more to hysteria than to any sound basis in the realities of Muslim patterns of involve- ment. In the cool hindsight allowed by an interval of almost 150 years, a recent study by Alex Padamsee has revisited the construct of Muslim ‘conspiracy’ within a predominantly Anglican civil service, not as the product of such civilians’ scientific observation of Muslims involvement in ‘Mutiny’ events, but as the growth of a corporate social fantasy which for reasons of the subconscious, but psychologically necessary needs of British self-representation, conjured out of the events of 1857 a ubiqui- tous Muslim ‘conspirator’ never previously observed. Leaving aside the post-1857 consequences of such representations, which are the espe- cial foci of Padamsee’s study, the letters home of the particular civilian, Alfred Lyall (only one year out of Haileybury, and posted in district Balandshahr, close to Delhi), whom Padamsee considers most respon- sible for the initiation of this version of the ‘Muslim conspiracy theory’, provide a foil for William Muir’s more prosaic accounts of Indian par- ticipation, Muslim or not, in the same and simultaneous events.14 For whatever the potency of the idea in later years, William Muir stood his ground among an almost equal number of British civilians who at the time had dismissed the notion of ‘Muslim conspiracy’.