1857 and Its Lessons

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 scholarly 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 particular 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 participants, 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 question 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 population 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 risings, 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 implicated in the dark and foul conspiracy’.13 The persistence of this Muslim version of the ‘conspiracy’ charge was certainly to have some far-reaching 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 involvement. 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 ubiquitous 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 responsible for the initiation of this version of the ‘Muslim conspiracy theory’, provide a foil for William Muir’s more prosaic accounts of Indian participation, 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’. Even in the Agra fort, supposedly the fulcrum of ‘Mussulmanophobia’, where civilians from all over the western part of the province had sought refuge, several had agreed with William, at least at the time. One such was his friend George Campbell who, writing to The Times as ‘Judex’, insisted on ‘the absence of concerted rebellion among Mahomedans’.15 Some particular influences had no doubt shaped William’s own adamant insistence on the military ‘mutiny’ character of 1857 and his total Hiatus: 1857 and its lessons 177 rejection of ‘conspiracy’, notably his long involvement with the missionary societies, whose record he vindicated, agreeing with John Lawrence that the problem had been too little open avowal of Christianity by the government, certainly not too much. In response to Lord Ellenborough’s accusations of missionary provocation, William denied to a fellow evangelical civilian any such causative link, emphasizing instead, as many missionaries would do themselves, an inverse relationship between the location of missionary institutions such as schools, and the main targets of destruction by the ‘insurgents’: The tale that the Sepoys were to be Christianised was no doubt a common and popular one in the hands of the ringleaders, but its mould and colour were all political; – at no point that I have seen was the tale grafted on the alleged existence of a grievance from our missionary institutions or their support by officers of Government.16 Commenting on the reports that came in to him daily from the districts some inconsistencies in William’s stance did surface. For example, in denying the missionary factor he had to admit in correspondence with Calcutta that ‘the wild and baseless rumours which stirred up the sol- diery are utterly different in kind, and are connected not with Missionary operations, but (if arising at all out of any acts of ours) with the political effort avowed and pressed forward of late with redoubled energy for the civilisation and advancement of the nation’.17 Civilian interventions over recent decades he thus not only admitted but considered fully justified. Historian Eric Stokes, noting the inconsistencies in this stance, represented William’s adherence, nevertheless, to the ‘military mutiny’ view as merely a ‘mirroring’ of wider civilian fears which committed them, in solidarity, to ‘exculpating the civil authorities by tireless itera- tion’, in William’s own words, that ‘the character of the affair is that of a Military mutiny’.18 In thus admitting that not all the ‘insurgents’ could be categorized as sepoys, and not all the causes as narrowly military, William explained the participation of other communities and classes as having been ‘caught up’ in events that were not of their own making, and then compromised to such a depth that they had little option but to become implicated in sepoy-instigated activities. Such was also his explanation for the actions of the ‘better classes’ within the army who had been frightened into joining the sepoy leaders and who, once compromised, had no choice but to continue. Others included various ‘agricultural communities’ who, by merely seizing the opportunity to pay off ‘old scores’, then became implicated without any conscious intention of declaring against the government. In his view such groups should afterwards be treated in conciliatory fashion and distinguished from real traitors.19 Many he 178 Scottish Orientalists and India realized, were neither ‘conspirators’, nor even ‘rebels’ in any meaning- ful sense. Such explanations do not answer the question, however, as to who, other than some mainly unidentifiable ‘ringleaders’ within the Bengal army’s regiments, had first roused and instigated both the sepoys and such initially reluctant ‘people’, to respond in a spontaneous and, for William, in an understandably, if not an approvably, ‘rebellious’ fashion. Their ‘ringleaders’, mainly Hindu, he represented as playing on the susceptibilities of the mass of the sepoys whom he considered mere ‘children’ who were easily taken in by the rumours about the greased cartridges. Any ‘heads and fomenters of rebellion’ outside the regiments remained, for the most part, even harder to identify.20 Even the high profile dispossessed or pensioned Hindu chiefs, such as the Maratha figureheads, the Nana Sahib and the Rani of Jhansi, were drawn into leadership roles by events precipitated by others, not of their own vo- lition. Quite recently, in 1854, when escorting a party of memsahibs to visit the Rani’s palace at Jhansi, William had been amused to mis- take her for one of her maids when he encountered her on a staircase, finding her ‘very thin and sedate and pleasing looking’.21 Predisposed, perhaps, in her favour, he considered, as many others would later agree, that the Rani had fallen victim to her ‘brigade’ in 1857, and was not the instigator of her soldiers’ actions.

Muslims: rebel, loyal or prevaricating?

William’s general understanding of causation and patterns of participation now established, how did he perceive particular Muslim responses? Neither the emphasis of the influential Calcutta missionary, Alexander Duff, on a ‘Mohammedan conspiracy’, nor any similarly worded accusa- tion of ‘conspiracy’ by disaffected Muslims carried much weight with him. Suggestions that links forged earlier with Persia or Russia, or that ‘Wahhabi’ affiliation across north India had provided the leadership and funding for the north Indian rebels, William never entertained. His own understanding of Wahhabis, as we have seen, as some kind of ‘Protestant reformers’ possibly explains his forbearance towards that particular movement. Nor did he think that the Mughal court at Delhi was in touch with the sepoy mutineers before the Meerut outbreak.22 The closest he came to suggesting any pre-planning among the Mughal elites was to remind one correspondent of some ‘traitorous proceedings’ within the palace in the mid-1840s that he felt possibly provided a precedent for the king of Delhi’s actions in May 1857.23 More usually, Hiatus: 1857 and its lessons 179 he referred to the elderly Mughal king, Bahadur Shah, and the several ‘restored’ nawabs who mushroomed in the Rohilla region to the east of Delhi in the first months of the risings, as seizers of opportunities suddenly thrust upon them by the rebellion of others, in the manner of the Rani of Jhansi, rather than instigators in their own names of pre- planned rebellion. William’s, on the whole, very dispassionate approach to the question of Muslim rebellion sits rather unexpectedly with what we have seen in earlier chapters of an unsympathetic understanding of Islam in scholarly publications which criticized the military propensities of both the Prophet’s early Islamic state and the subsequent caliphates. ‘Bigotry’ ad- mittedly did occasionally elide into ‘fanaticism’ in some of his accounts of 1857, for example in recounting events in Muzaffarnagar district where some variously ‘wretched’ Muslims, sometimes ‘Mahometan fanatics’, were in ‘constant agitation’ in the committal of ‘excesses’ including the murder of Indian officials from September to November of 1857. But he did not build such isolated ‘fanatical’ acts of aggression into any coherent network of jihad conspiracy in the 1857 context, even though his close knowledge of those same ‘ulama of Muzaffarnagar district who had engaged in bitter debate with Christian missionaries only a few years before might well have led him to assume a conspira- torial connection on the basis alone of a sense of affronted religion, as others, including some Muslims themselves, would certainly argue much later.24 Once the die was cast, however, he noted that some Muslims who put themselves forward as leaders then made use of the classic symbols of Muslim religious identity and authority, including those often associated with jihad, in order to rally support. Many other British com- mentators mentioned the raising of a ubiquitous ‘green flag’ every time a supposed Muslim rebel was mentioned. William, too, occasionally uti- lized such imagery, noting, for example in a letter to brother John, that the main contender for the restoration of Rohilla ancestral influence, one Khan Bahadur Khan, ‘reigns at Bareilly, oppresses the Hindoos, and with his staff daily proceeds in Zeearut [pilgrimage] to salute the flag of Crusade planted in the front of the Cotwalee [police station]’.25 But the green flag was only raised, William noted, after the Khan’s troops had deserted, acting he presumed, in a desperate effort to rouse support in the face of the British recovery of Delhi. In Aligarh district, from where he had received reports of some forcible conversions of Hindus by Muslims, he represented the Muslims as then deciding to defy government in an atavistic revivalist movement in which ‘all the ancient feelings of warring for the Faith, reminding one of the days of 180 Scottish Orientalists and India the first Caliphs, were resuscitated’.26 In each such case he found that the recourse to jihadi symbolism followed specific acts that had already compromised the Muslims concerned, rather than being preliminar- ies to some coherently planned agenda of anti-government rebellion. Far from this, William felt that the majority of ‘reasonable Mussulmans, who have not already compromised themselves irretrievably, see that there is no chance of eventual success for the establishment of Islam, and they can conscientiously quiet down under our rule’.27 The distinctions he chose to draw, other than between the behaviour patterns anticipated or observed of such variously ‘fanatical’ or ‘reasonable’ Muslims, tended to be on the basis of class and occupa- tion rather than on religious differences. From the king of Delhi to the Muslim weavers of the Agra hinterland William’s comments present an unexpectedly differentiated picture that distinguished him from some of the well-publicized views of some colleagues concerning an allegedly widespread Muslim ‘disloyalty’ if not ‘conspiracy’.

The Muslim elites

Bahadur Shah, the ‘last Mughal’, though almost certainly not, in William’s view, a long-term ‘conspirator’, he considered guilty of ac- cepting the invitation of the Meerut sepoys when they appeared at his palace gate on 11 May, and of then allowing the restoration of Mughal government in Delhi to occur in his name. He recognized that the elderly king then became a pawn in the hands of his sons, the sepoy leaders and others who began to flock to Delhi to fight in his name, but he did not extend to him the sympathy for his impossible predicament that we shall note as a particular mark of his attitude to some other, less highly placed Muslims in other theatres of rebellion. William’s rather ambivalent reaction to the fall in status from pensioner king to British prisoner was perhaps captured best in his comments on the incongrui- ties of a native news-writer’s report of the king’s arrest. For reading that Captain Hodson, with joined hands appropriate to an obeisant courtier, had formally requested Bahadur Shah to submit to the British and then shot his three sons on the spot, William merely mused, ‘the decorum of Majesty was preserved to the last. It reads like the “Arabian Nights,” and there is a strange mingling of burlesque with tragedy in the later scenes’.28 Documentary evidence found in the palace that supplemented some already intercepted letters was enough to convince William of the king’s guilt. But unlike many of his colleagues, he initially considered a trial Hiatus: 1857 and its lessons 181 unnecessary to prove this, though the king’s sons, whom he considered among the real ‘fomenters of rebellion’ should have been put on trial, rather than shot on the spot as had happened. He did not commit himself about the transportation to Rangoon decided on for the king’s punishment after trial, but he clearly disapproved of the wishes of a civilian colleague in Calcutta that, as an ‘arch ringleader’, Bahadur Shah should have been summarily shot like his sons and strung up on his palace wall.29 However, any interest he felt in the fate of the Mughal family was perfunctory, or as he called it, ‘a real curiosity’, compared to his deep concern about other classes, notably the Muslim magnates, many now claiming restored nawabi status, and the uncovenanted civil servants mainly in the judicial and revenue services. Some Muslim chiefs scattered around the province who aspired to full nawabi status under the restored Mughal monarchy in Delhi were objects of William’s particular concern, as were also some Hindu rajas and chiefs like the Maratha leader, Scindia, whose sustained loyalty was considered to be crucial to any hopes of a retrieval of the British position. William was well aware of the particular pressures such suddenly recreated figureheads faced from their own troops and followers, many of whom had already committed acts of rebellion. Of particular concern to him were several claimants to nawabi status around whom attempts were made to rouse predominantly Muslim support in the Rohilkhand region to the east of Delhi, where Afghan settlement had increased in the eighteenth century.30 William’s comments on these chiefs not only exemplifies his rejection of any blanket religion-based ‘conspiracy’ charge but also establishes a link, to be taken up in subsequent chapters, with his own efforts for the reconciliation, through educational and other means, of Muslim elites in this particular region. Most influential among these Rohilla chiefs was the nawab of Rampur, whose claims, unlike most of the others, the British had recognized by allowing the family considerable autonomy.31 William and other British officials waited with bated breath on this particular nawab’s decision ‘for’ or ‘against’, realizing the pressures he faced both from his own troops and from neighbouring Rohilla chieftains. Hearing of the nawab’s indecision, based William thought, on ‘maslahat or expediency’, he commented, ‘we must not judge either him or Scindia by too rigid a standard of morality. They have both had difficult parts to play.’32 That the Rampur nawab then managed to maintain his allegiance to the British, as did the Maratha chief Scindia, was to prove a very important factor in the eventual British recapture of the whole Rohilkhand region. William found it particularly significant that the nawab’s ‘troops should have attacked and routed fanatics of the Mussulman faith headed by 182 Scottish Orientalists and India

Syuds’ in one encounter, and that he had also protected and given safe conduct to some Christian women and children.33 Despite the ‘vilest abuse’ from his own troops, he proved in the end the most stalwartly ‘loyal’ of the Muslim chiefs, earning thereby William’s highest accolade as a ‘trump’.34 The ‘friendship’ with Rampur state, which commenced during 1857, was to stand both parties in good stead during William’s Lieutenant-Governorship, when the support of such Muslim magnates proved essential for his educational and other policies. In contrast to the nawab of Rampur’s knife-edge maintenance of ‘loyalty’, a number of other Rohilla chiefs, also claiming descent from the various tribal leaders who had seized or been granted territories during Mughal disintegration in the mid-eighteenth century, certainly did rise in late May 1857. Several of them, notably Khan Bahadur Khan of Bareilly, Walidad Khan of Malagarh in Bulandshahr district, Tafazzal Hussain Khan of Farrukhabad, and the nawabs of Najibabad in Bijnor district, have received considerable attention in the historiography of the rebellions.35 William, significantly, failed to find any evidence for a prior conspiracy among them. Far from it, he thought that each chief had hoped to benefit, in the initial stages at least, at the expense of his neighbours’ potentially rival claims. They were upstarts to William’s mind, seizing the main chance and as willing to play off old scores against each other as against the British. His depiction of Walidad Khan, left a minor landowner by the Company’s resumption of most of his family property, but ambitious after becoming father-in-law to the Delhi heir- apparent, was typical. In spite of committing himself to the king when Delhi rose, Walidad seems to have vacillated between encouraging peasant plundering and maintaining his links with the local British officers. As Eric Stokes expressed it, he finally ‘stumbled rather than entered boldly into rebellion’.36 Indeed, from William’s perspective in the Agra fort Walidad had not seemed to merit even the significance that Stokes’s thorough study of the records has revealed. This probably reflected William’s preference for well-attested claims to legitimacy, as represented par excellence in this situation by the nawab of Rampur. In comparison with his undis- guised admiration for that magnate’s character, Walidad never seemed to William anything more than a mere upstart, a ‘petty nawab’, with no valid claim to restoration of any sort, let alone to a governorship stretch- ing from Delhi to Allahabad which he at one point had the audacity to assert. He was one of the few to whom William freely applied the term ‘rebel’, at the same time pouring scorn on Walidad’s recourse to using guns ‘manufactured out of Telegraph Post piles, with bits of the wire for grape!’37 Walidad’s behaviour during his ‘insolent advances’ to a short- lived period of local glory struck William as both cruel and craven. Hiatus: 1857 and its lessons 183

In contrast, William seemed more sympathetic to the dilemmas faced by a cluster of petty chiefs holding small territories on the west bank of the Jamna to the southwest of Delhi, including the nawabs of Jhajjar, Farrukhnagar and Dadri, and the Raja of Ballabgarh, considering them under particular pressure from the restored Mughal court nearby. His concern after the recapture of Delhi to know ‘whether the Jhujjur chief- tain has compromised himself’ along with his ‘subordinates’ who were already known to be ‘hostile to us’, was typical.38 If evidence was forthcoming, a trial, probably followed by an execution was inevitable, but he feared that the military authorities responsible were unlikely to under- stand the pressures experienced by such ‘leaders’, and being ‘unused to sift and weigh evidence’ such officers might reach regrettable and unjust decisions.39 In one such case he was able to exercise more direct influence over reprisals, albeit only after the event. This concerned the punishments meted out to two brothers, Mahmud Khan, the elder, and Jalal al-din Khan, the joint claimants to the nawabate of Najibabad, a pensioned estate in the British district of Bijnor in which Saiyid Ahmad Khan was sadr amin (civil judge). The disputed stances and activities in 1857 of these nawabs, and of Saiyid Ahmad Khan and some Hindu chaudharis (headmen) of the district, has been the subject of some important re-evaluations.40 Whatever the rights and wrongs in the apportioning of responsibility at the time, the two nawabs, partly on Saiyid Ahmad’s say so, were found summarily guilty of rebellion. The younger brother, Jalal al-din, was shot after capture. William, not directly involved at the time, later concluded that Jalal had been an entirely innocent party, implicated only as the result of his elder brother’s actual involvement. Fifteen years later, William would take the opportunity of his position as Lieutenant-Governor to compensate for the injustice done to their father by ensuring that Jalal al-din’s two sons, infants in 1857 and im- poverished by their father’s execution, were restored to some of their property. Even more important in William’s eyes, was that steps having been taken to ensure them a higher education, the elder then studying in Bareilly College, they should be found employment suitable to their recovered status, preferably in government service.41 Many similar cases show William’s use of his position, first on the revenue board in the 1860s and later when governor, to restore the names and fortunes of those families punished under too sweeping a verdict of ‘Muhammadan conspiracy’. That the case of the Najibabad nawabs is chosen here as a very telling example is also because of the involvement in this family’s fate of Saiyid Ahmad Khan, whose role in 1857 both in Bijnor and more widely in passing judgment on the ‘causes’ of the uprisings and 184 Scottish Orientalists and India the participation of Muslims, will be a prime concern of the following discussion of William’s perceptions of the roles of Muslim government servants.

Muslim government servants

For another distinctive category of Muslims consisted of those who had opted for service of various kinds under the Company. William showed a particular interest in the behaviour patterns in 1857 of subordinate government servants, both Muslim and Hindu, many of them well known to him, like Saiyid Ahmad, from contact during his own earlier postings.42 With some of them he felt he had established strong scholarly friendships, for example with ‘old Asadoollah’, a subordinate judge, whom he remembered to his brother, John, as ‘a very special friend’ who ‘behaved unexceptionally well’, as did the rest of his family at Allahabad.43 His responses to any suspicion of ‘disloyalty’ among this stratum of officialdom may seem overly sentimental, if not naïve, but that ‘I grieve over the defection of so many of our old settlement Dy.-Collectors’ was the kind of confidence William often expressed to like-minded colleagues.44 In a report headed ‘Difficulties of a loyal Mahommedan official’, he described the murder of the principal sadr amins of Agra and nearby Fatehpur Sikri at the hands of the Rohilla chief, Khan Bahadur Khan, following flight from their posts: We knew that they had long been held under surveillance and exposed to indignities for their rumoured loyalty to us. The Principal Sudder Ameen has been spoken against for not coming to Agra when invited back; but it is impossible to overestimate the difficulties a man with a family of helpless women and children would encounter in attempting flight. Whether the unfortunate old man [Muhammad Husain Khan] has been guilty of any disloyalty since he left this will be decided by Major Williams’ investigation. He certainly induced his brother, Hamid Hussan Khan to withdraw from Khan Buhadur’s service when he (the Principal Sudder Ameen) returned home.45 A Deputy Collector whom William had praised only a year previously for his handling of a particularly ‘perplexing and tedious’ land revenue case he nevertheless felt deserved the punishment he got for taking a ‘leading part’ in the killing in Fatehpur district of a British judge allegedly by Muslims. William had known, and highly respected Hikmat Allah Khan, who had 35 years service with the Company, since his own early years as a young officer in Fatehpur, yet the news of the murder elicited from him only the laconic note, ‘H. O. K. [Hikmat Ollah Khan] Hiatus: 1857 and its lessons 185 killed Tucker, and reigns’. There were some limits clearly, even to close bonds created by long and previously exemplary service once murder was suspected.46 Charges and counter-charges against individuals and families would continue in some cases until the 1870s, but William clearly hoped that when former government servants were implicated, their records would be declared clean. This was important to the upholding of his overall view of events as having been narrowly confined to military grievances, but it reflected too, a wish to see his confidence in this particular stratum of the Company’s service, and hence his own judgement, vindicated. His relief when such men remained loyal throughout, or were proved after investigation to have been unjustifiably maligned as rebels, was strongly expressed in the case of some officials who would become prominent in the province during William’s Lieutenant-Governorship and to whom attention will return in some new contexts in subsequent chapters. There are many examples of officials, both Hindu and Muslim, who benefited in their post-1857 service careers because William had noted and recorded specific acts he appreciated as overtly ‘loyal’. Among rewardees whose names will re-occur in examining responses both to William’s Life of Mahomet and to his educational agendas in the 1870s, were Raja Jaikishan Das, brother of William’s chief informant in Agra, Maulawi Nazir Ahmad Khan, at that time a private scholar in Delhi, and Saiyid Imdad al-‘Ali, a tahsildar in Mathura. But particularly important to this study, was the role of William’s colleague in service, the judicial official and scholar, Saiyid Ahmad Khan, whose earlier career, scholarly interests and role in the execution of the Najibabad nawab, have already been outlined.47 On the outbreak of rebellion, and in very similar circumstances to some other Indian officials, Saiyid Ahmad had found himself almost solely responsible, after assisting the evacuation of his British colleagues, for the maintenance of any vestiges of Company influence in Bijnor district. At such a point many other Indian officials, weighing up the odds, opted either for rebellion or for flight themselves. Having opted to stay at his post, Saiyid Ahmad’s own retrospective account of the rebellion in Bijnor remains one of the most detailed accounts of a particular theatre of rebellion from an Indian perspective. His representation of his own role fits not only William Muir’s perception of ‘loyalty against the odds’ of many other government servants, Muslims included, but might also be taken, at face value anyway, as the exemplar for Saiyid Ahmad’s own later roll call of the majority of Muslims he called Loyal Mahomedans of India. That reality was not quite so straightforward has been suggested in a recent article by David Lelyveld who shows Saiyid 186 Scottish Orientalists and India

Ahmad playing a rather more complex ‘political’ part in a struggle for power between the Najibabad nawabs, just discussed above, and some local Hindu chaudharis, in which he finally sided with the latter, giving his testimony in a pun on the word ‘Na-mahmud’ (the ‘non-praised one’), meaning Mahmud Khan, which helped to clinch his whole family’s fate as ‘rebels’. According to this reading of events Saiyid Ahmad seems to have compromised at least some integrity to ensure he himself would not be condemned for complicity in some chaudhari massacres of Muslims that had occurred during the imbroglio. But more imme- diately significant for the study in hand is that, whether or not Saiyid Ahmad’s reasons would repay hard scrutiny, Lelyveld confirms 1857 as the crucial point in his ‘changing political perspective’ and consequent shift to support the ‘legitimate power of a unified State’ that could now only be British, with important consequences we shall see, for his subsequent, post-1857, relations with William.48 When nawab Mahmud Khan had appeared to be gaining the upper hand, Saiyid Ahmad had had to flee himself, reaching Delhi and his starving mother, just after the British recapture of that city. After par- ticipating in the British recapture of the Rohilla territories early the next year, he was reappointed briefly, munificently rewarded, to his former judicial post in Bijnor, prior to a transfer in July 1858 to nearby Moradabad, in the heart of Rohilla country, from where he would begin to play, as we shall see in Chapters Eight and Nine, a key role in the pacification of the region generally, and the education of its inhabit- ants, Muslims in particular. If he was aware of exactly what had actually transpired in Bijnor, William let the matter pass, to join with others in crediting the Saiyid with the playing of an exemplary role in the most difficult of circumstances. In the post-Rebellion scenario their relations, given Saiyid Ahmad’s new stance, would become much closer but, as we shall see, remained liable to fracture, though never to break completely, over particular issues both religious and educational. Saiyid Ahmad was now openly critical, however ‘loyal’, of British policies prior to the rebellions, less for their intrusive effects per se, than for the insensitivities the colonial authorities had exhibited in failing to realize the suspicions being aroused among the population at large concerning the Company’s long-term intentions. His Asbab-i sarkashi-i Hindustan (Causes of the Indian Revolt), emphasizing grievances and fears felt across the population, Muslims included, might be read as a complete condemnation of William’s own insistence that the causes of rebellion were narrowly military rather than more widely socio-political.49 Saiyid Ahmad’s efforts, on the other hand, to exonerate fellow Muslims from the disproportionate ‘blame’ that British interpretations Hiatus: 1857 and its lessons 187 of the causes were increasingly attributing to them, tallied very closely with William’s own view, particularly in their common denial of the rebellions as a ‘long concocted Mohammedan conspiracy’. To bring this home to both the British and to fellow Indians, Saiyid Ahmad spent much time during 1858–9 in searching out the accounts of those Muslims who, not merely remaining passively ‘loyal’, had played like himself vital parts, for example in rescuing European civilians from ‘rebel’ hands. These accounts he intended to publish in both Urdu and English in a journal especially established for the purpose, and en- titled very pointedly, Risalah-i khair khwahan Mussalmanan (An Account of the Loyal Mahomedans of India).50 With the inclusion of a ‘digression’ containing, significantly, the first of several explanations he would soon publish denying that jihad was justified in British India, this and several other publications had the effect of turning Saiyid Ahmad from simply a scholarly government servant into an outspoken and increasingly influential publicist on many issues.51

Mosque and madrasa ‘ulama

Another category of influential ashraf Muslims was rather surprising- ly missing from William’s records. Agra had been for many years the centre of public debates between Christian missionaries and a number of prominent mosque and madrasa ‘ulama, assisted by some government officials such asvakils , medical doctors and college professors. William, it was shown in previous chapters, had lent his scholarly credentials to this missionary cause, even attending some of the religious debates and writing his Life of Mahomet in response to a missionary invitation. Yet, in contrast to his interest in most other aspects of Muslim behaviour in 1857, he did not express, even privately, his views on those ‘ulama associated with the mosques and madrasas of the region who had previously participated in the religious controversies, unless they happened also to be government servants. In reporting, for example, on some ‘Mahometan fanatics’ in Muzaffarnagar district, the home of Maulana Rahmat Allah Kairanawi, the leading ‘alim in the religious debates of the earlier 1850s, neither he nor his correspondents mentioned either this maulana or any of his colleagues. The role of Dr Wazir Khan, an Agra medical doctor, is very well documented in some other ‘mutiny records’ for the Agra, Delhi, and Bareilly theatres of rebellion, yet William’s single fleeting mention of him failed to evoke his very close knowledge of that doctor’s leading role in correspondence and debates with the Agra missionaries. Some other ‘ulama prominent in many accounts as alleged 188 Scottish Orientalists and India

‘conspirators’, notably Ahmad Allah Shah, known as the ‘Maulawi of Faizabad’, attracted little comment from William either. Possibly this was a diplomatic silence, prompted by a natural un- willingness to feed any of the subsequent accusations of missionary provocation as a major cause of both ‘mutiny’ and ‘rebellion’. That his private letters to his brother did not make the link either is more puzzling, and not to be explained away entirely by John Muir’s own increasingly critical feelings about the kind of ‘non-conciliatory’, even aggressive methods of evangelism in which William had participated that might be held to have fuelled such religious fears in the first place among these particular ‘ulama and other Muslims. Even when in 1871 Maulawi Liaqat ‘Ali, alleged leader in 1857 of a group of Muslim ‘rebels’ based on Allahabad, was finally captured on William’s own watch as Lieutenant-Governor, he would advocate a more lenient punishment than his colleagues, reluctant as ever to presume the association of such ‘ulama with jihadi proclivities.52

Aftermath: reprisals and rewards

If British civilians disagreed strongly on both the causes and nature of the uprisings, they certainly differed too on reprisals and rewards. William, unsurprisingly given his views on causation, was prominent among those civilians who favoured Viceroy Canning’s orders for ‘clem- ency’ in all reasonable circumstances, advocating a via media between punishment when deserved, and mercy. In fully proven cases of active involvement, resulting in deaths, he agreed with the executions that were meted out. Imprisonment on the Andaman Islands, he considered, was ‘a most suitable place of banishment for the less guilty mutineers and rebels’.53 But the misgivings already noted in respect to the execution of the younger Najibabad nawab, together with his unusually insight- ful understanding of the thin and wavering line dividing ‘loyal’ from ‘rebel’ stances, already seen in his attitude to both the petty nawabs and the government servants, made him critical of the ‘harsh if not unjust procedure’ being arbitrarily followed by some of his civilian colleagues as well as most military officers.54 His own watchwords were a ‘discrimi- nating justice’ not an ‘indiscriminate vengeance’.55 William spilt most ink on the reprisals in Delhi which, all accounts agreed both at the time and later, hit Muslims harder than Hindus, but which in his view had also failed to discriminate between offenders and ‘the unoffending portion of the community, especially the middle classes of the Hindoos’.56 Among many complaints about the long delays Hiatus: 1857 and its lessons 189 before the citizens were readmitted to the city after its recapture by the British, he used his local knowledge to point out to the Delhi authorities that some loyal government servants in Agra had recounted to him the plight of their own relatives, forced to subsist in hovels in ‘extreme misery’ outside Delhi while awaiting until mid-1859 the government’s permission to re-enter the city. In later years he would come to hear of the death of the mother of Saiyid Ahmad Khan following her privations during the Delhi siege. In the end, as correspondence at Government of India level confirms, the authorities readmitted the Muslims less out of pity for their continuing plight, than of concern they should become too destitute to pay the fines levied on them in return for their property.57 William too was not above some pragmatic considerations, as shown notably in his almost obsessive concern to save from destruction, and then secure for the British, some Arabic manuscripts he had earlier borrowed from various Delhi scholars for the writing of his biography of the Prophet. ‘Do try and save Hishami’, he urged a colleague in Delhi, referring to a ‘beautiful’ fourteenth-century copy of an early Arabic sirat he had earlier used for his own Life of Mahomet.58 Any such ulterior motives were tempered, however, in his case by a genuine concern that those he had identified as innocent bystanders, swept up by events, should not be punished unfairly in the hysteria that followed the British recovery of its north-western province.59 He was more ambivalent on the related issue of the British plundering of Delhi and the initial clamour for the destruction of major symbols of Islamic identity, such as the mosques and madrasas of both Delhi and Agra, and of symbols of restored Mughal power, notably the Red Fort palace in Delhi. While he certainly considered the plundering and destruction of ordinary citizens’ houses ‘overdone’ and criticized it heavily, writing that ‘the retribution has indeed been awful’, he nevertheless felt that it was ‘a meet return for a city which has for so many months nursed this brood of monsters’.60 Matters had got out of con- trol during the first flush of victory, he admitted, but nearly 50 years later he would still defend the reputations of the British military officers concerned. Like John Lawrence, however, he remonstrated against those who would raze all evidence of former Mughal and Muslim rule over the two cities, advocating merely the improvement of the existing fortifications so that there could be no repetition of 1857. There were clearly limits in his own repertoire to the depths to which a ‘righteously governing’ power should sink in punishing those who had resisted its authority, one reprisal too far being the destruction of mosques, and another the army’s allowing of its soldiers to ‘stuff pork into the wretch’s mouth’ when ‘bungling’ the execution of the nawab of Farruckabad’s 190 Scottish Orientalists and India diwan. On the latter he commented, ‘the English ought to be above such proceedings’.61 Another question on which William took a principled stand concerned the accusations of the rape of European women levied against Indian rebels. Asked by Governor-General Canning to investigate the charges, his own initial impression was that ‘the tales of violation are not sustained by any evidence (possibly sustained in one or two excep- tional cases), and that the belief of the people is against it’.62 Within four weeks eight trusted colleagues had forwarded him information which substantially confirmed his own preconception that neither Hindus nor Muslims had committed such rapes on European females, although there may have been some instances of the rape of ‘some women of colour’, a euphemism for Eurasians.63 He agreed with one of these respondents that even if distaste for European females was not a bar in itself, legal considerations were. Loss of caste following an act of rape would certainly have held back Hindus from such a crime. Muslim law, if not actually prohibitive in principle, made rape during warfare prac- tically difficult, for ‘By the Mahomedan law, captives taken in war are not lawful to the captors till the expiry of at least a month and a half’. In William’s eyes, this did not entirely rule out the possibility of rape by Muslims, for many of them ‘have set their laws, human and divine, at nought throughout the rebellion’.64 If this law too might easily have been broken, the fact of the matter, confirmed by all his respondents, was that ‘there are fair grounds for believing that violation before murder was in no case committed’.65 Here, as on many other occasions, William was turned to by colleagues as an ‘authority’ on Islamic law. Finally, how did the events he had witnessed and reported affect William’s view on the appropriate relations between government and Christianity? We have seen that he firmly rejected the accusations of critics such as Lord Ellenborough that missionary activity was a major cause of disaffection. In the aftermath he would continue to repeat the ‘government neutrality’ mantra taught him as a young officer in the 1840s by James Thomason. But as we shall see, without actually disavow- ing any previous statement, he nevertheless quietly adopted as he moved up the career ladder to the Lieutenant-Governorship some rather more cautious personal stances in his subsequent publications on Islam. 1857 had clearly marked a turning point in William’s life, as well as in Saiyid Ahmad’s. In contrast, John Muir had remained cocooned among family and books in his comfortable Edinburgh retirement, immune from any direct effects of what he called ‘these shocking mutinies’. Some letters from William to John concerning 1857 survive, but none of John’s in Hiatus: 1857 and its lessons 191 reply. John’s reactions can nevertheless be elicited from his support for a public campaign, organized by a newly founded Edinburgh India Christian Association, urging the Indian government to cut itself free from the vestiges of its former ‘connexion with idolatry … to avoid all encouragement of caste, and to remove all obstacles to the profession and propagation of Xtianity in India’.66 Evangelical protest against the failure to fully sever all financial links with temples, mosques and shrines patronized by the Company in the past in the form of rent-free lands, or participation in their administration, had rumbled on since the 1840s. Brought to a new head by the blame now being laid on missionaries for allegedly ‘causing’ the rebellions, several societies planned memo- rials to Parliament. John, for his part, provided the SPG with details on the current state of government connections with Hindu ceremo- nials for that Society’s memorial.67 Although he continued to attend the Edinburgh Association’s meetings, the disapproval he expressed privately ‘of the tone of some of the speakers’ was redolent of the criti- cisms he had so often made of missionaries in India. The Edinburgh supporters of mission now proved both too fervent for his own taste in their strong denunciation of the government he had recently served and, probably also, too uninformed in their equally strong denigration of the ‘rebels’ and their religions. John’s stance on this Rebellion-related issue, as on most other issues he faced, was clearly proving less than straightforward. Such complexity is partly to be explained by the shift in his thinking on other matters Indian and Christian that had been occurring during the last years of his Indian service. To take up wholeheartedly this particular cause in criticism of Indian religious practices would now involve some inconsistencies given John’s personal evolution by this time to a stance very far removed from the simple Evangelicalism of his youth. William too, usually very easy to read in contrast to John, had shown during the rebellions that his responses to Muslim issues in contemporary India should not, after all, be read simply as a continuum or corollary of the views he was simultaneously expressing in his Life of Mahomet. However, how that volume would pursue him during the post-Rebellion years will be explored in the next chapters through the tracing of his subsequent relations with Indian Muslims during those years, and particularly through Saiyid Ahmad’s own published response to William’s Life of Mahomet.

Notes

â 1 ï¿½ï¿½ïW. M., Life, vol. 2, p. 96. â 2 W. M. to J. M., in WM 2020, ‘Letters to John Muir’. 192 Notes to Chapter 7

â 3 W. M., Agra in the Mutiny and the Family Life of W. and E. H. Muir in the Fort 1857: A Sketch for their Children (privately published, 1896). â 4 W. M. (ed. William Coldstream), Records of the Intelligence Department of the Government of the North-West Provinces of India during the Mutiny of 1857 [here- after RID], 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1902). Based on Agra Correspondence of Sir William Muir, 1857, Gen. 182–5. EUL. â 5 In the mid-1890s William would still be insisting to Henry Malleson, official historian of the rebellions, and highly critical of the Agra civilians, that he had misinterpreted the situation in Agra. See G. B. Malleson, The Indian Mutiny of 1857, 4th edn (London, 1892), pp. 104–11. Refuted by William in a letter to Colonel Malleson, Edinburgh, 16 September 1896. See RID, 2, pp. 368–9. â 6 W. M. to J. W. Sherer, Agra, 15 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 198. For the nature of intelligence gathering during 1857, and William’s role in it, see Bayly, Empire and Information, chapter 9. â 7 Missionary Alexander Duff coined this phrase in letters from Calcutta published in The Indian Rebellion: Its Causes and Results (London, 1858), p. 46. â 8 W. M., to Helen Muir, Agra, 18 May 1857, RID, 1, p. 31. â 9 W. M., to J. M., Agra, 2 June 1857, RID, 1, p. 35. His italics. 10 S. B. Chaudhuri accused Muir of ‘faulty observation’ consequent on being dependent on reports, not first-hand observation, amounting to a ‘negation of the fundamental proposition of the present work’, namely his own Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies (1857–1859) (Calcutta, 1957), pp. 284–5. 11 W. M. to C. Beadon, 8 January 1858, RID, 1, p. 338. 12 W. M. to Sir Henry Cunningham, to assist Cunningham with his biography of Lord Canning, 29 January 1891. Correspondence and photographs of Sir William Muir 1853–93: Dk.2.14, p. 9. EUL. 13 Duff, Indian Rebellion, pp. 46–7. 14 Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims, Part 2, ‘1857: Raising the Green Flag’. 15 Republished in Campbell, Memoirs, 2, pp. 391–402. 16 W. M. to H. C. Tucker, Agra, 7 August 1857. RID, 2, p. 112. William disavowed ‘Muslim conspiracy’, yet the Church Missionary Intelligencer, contributed to and read by the same Anglican missionaries he was assisting in Agra, disseminated strong statements on ‘dormant fanaticism’ and endemic Muslim propensities for spreading Islam, ‘sword in hand’. Anon., ‘An inquiry into the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny’, Church Missionary Intelligencer (October 1857), pp. 236–9. 17 W. M. to C. Beadon, Agra, 19 August 1857. RID, 2, p. 130. 18 Eric Stokes, ‘Nawab Walidad Khan and the 1857 struggle in the Bulundshahr district’, in The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1978), p. 142. 19 W. M. to C. Beadon, 7 January 1857. RID, 1, p. 334. 20 W. M. to J. W. Sherer, Agra, 2 October 1857. RID, 1, p. 164. 21 W. M. to Bessie Muir, Jhansi, 12 December 1854. WM 2020, ‘Letters to Lady Muir, 1854–56’. 22 He was very dependent on the judgement of Charles Saunders in Delhi for his view of the Mughal court which he then passed on to Calcutta. W. M. to G. F. Edmonstone, Foreign Sec. to Govt of India, Agra, 10 October 1857, RID, 1, pp. 187–8. Notes to Chapter 7 193

23 W. M. to J. W. Sherer, Agra. 9 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 185. 24 Among many Urdu accounts of 1857 which concentrate on ‘ulama leadership based on fear for Islam, see Mufti Intizam Allah Shahabi, Ghadr ke chand ‘ulama (Delhi, n. d.). 25 W. M. to J. M., Agra, 15 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 47. William reported again in late January 1858 that on the desertion of his troops Khan Bahadur ‘in alarm raised the Crusading flag’, and that proclamations were affixed to mosques calling ‘the faithful’ to rally to him. W. M. to C. Beadon, 22 January 1858, RID, 1, p. 356. 26 W. M. to J. M., Agra, 15 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 46. 27 Ibid. 28 W. M. to J. W. Sherer, Agra, 1 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 133. 29 C. Beadon to W. M., Calcutta, 13 October 1857, RID, 2, p. 361. 30 On the Rohilla settlements, see Iqbal Husain, The Rise and Decline of the Ruhela Chieftaincies in 18th Century India (Delhi, 1994). 31 On the Rampur family history, see memo by J. C. Wilson, Commissioner on special duty, Allahabad, 1 March 1858. Govt of India, Foreign (Secret) Procs, nos 148–9, 30 July 1858. NAI. 32 W. M. to J. W. Sherer, Agra, 11 November 1857, RID, 1, p. 258. 33 W. M. to J. W. Sherer, 26 November 1857, RID, 1, p. 286. 34 Ibid., 18 December 1857, p. 308; 5 November 1857, p. 249. 35 See, particularly, William Edwards, Personal Adventures during the Indian Rebellion in Rohilcund (London, 1858); S. A. A. Rizvi (ed.), Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh, vol. 5 (Lucknow, 1960), chapters 3–6; Stokes, Peasant and Raj. 36 Stokes, ‘Nawab Walidad Khan’, p. 146. 37 W.M. to J.M., Agra, 15 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 47; W. M. to H. C. Tucker, Agra, 7 August 1857, RID, 2, p. 111. 38 W. M. to C. B. Saunders, Agra, September 1857, RID, 1, p. 158. 39 W. M. to H. Harington, Agra, 30 November 1857, RID, 2, pp. 264–5. 40 E. I. Brodkin, ‘The struggle for succession: rebels and loyalists in the Indian Mutiny of 1857’, in Modern Asian Studies, 6:3 (1972), pp. 277–90; Hafeez Malik and Morris Dembo (trans), Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s History of the Bijnor Rebellion (East Lansing, MI, n.d.), introduction. 41 ‘Petition of Sahibzada Azim al-din Khan to Sir William Muir, Lt.-Govr, NWP’, n.d., explaining his father’s innocence: ‘Weak he may have been, but guilty of rebellion he was not’; for William’s views see Sec. to Govt NWP to Commissioner, Rohilkhand division, Naini Tal, 7 October 1873 in Govt of India, Home (Public) procs (A), no. 115 (December 1874). NAI. 42 For a fuller discussion of Muslim government servants in 1857, see Avril A. Powell, ‘Questionable loyalties: Muslim government servants and rebellion’, in Crispin Bates (ed.), New Perspectives on 1857: Marginals, Muslims and Malcontents, vol. 1 in series, Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857 (New Delhi, forthcoming). 43 W. M. to J. M, Agra, 15 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 48; fragment of a later letter to J. M., c. December 1857, in WM 2020, ‘Letters to John Muir’. 44 W. M. to J. W. Sherer, Agra, 3 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 170. 45 W. M. to C. Beadon, 26 January 1858, RID, 1, pp. 361–2. Muhammad Husain Khan had 20 years Company service by 1857, and had been principal sadr amin 194 Notes to Chapter 7

in Agra since 1852. 46 W. M., ‘Memorandum regarding Talooka Kote, Zillah Futtehpore’, in Selections from the Records of Government, vol. 4 (Agra, 1856), pp. 499–502, V/23/119, IOR; ‘rough jottings’, 4 July 1857, RID, 1, p. 437; ‘Intelligence diary’, 21 July 1857, RID, 2, p. 13. 47 For Saiyid Ahmad’s service career before 1857, see Chapter Four. 48 David Lelyveld, ‘Of mixed loyalties: Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s account of the Uprising in Bijnor’, Biblio (March–April 2007), pp. 32–3. 49 Saiyid Ahmad Khan, Asbab-i sarkashi-i Hindustan ka jawab mazmun (Agra, 1859). The various Urdu and English editions of the Asbab (Causes) between 1859 and 1901 have been collected in The Causes of the Indian Revolt (Patna, 1995), introduction by Salim Quraishi. 50 Published in Meerut in 1860 in two parts. It seems that Saiyid Ahmad failed to elicit the many personal ‘accounts’ of conspicuous ‘loyalty’ he had anticipated for publication stopped after the first two issues, its coverage limited to case studies from Rohilkhand. 51 Ibid., part 2, pp. 2–41. 52 W. M. to Mayo, Naini Tal, 21; 26 September 1871, Mayo papers, Add 7490/128/170–72, concerning capture and trial of Maulawi Liaqat ‘Ali. CUL; W. M. to Northbrook, 1872. MSS Eur. C.144/13. BL. 53 W.M. to C. Beadon, 19 January 1858, RID, 1, p. 352. 54 W. M. to J. W. Sherer, Agra, 17 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 203. 55 J. M. to C. Beadon, 19 December 1857; 19 January 1858, RID, 1, pp. 310; 352. 56 W. M. to J. W. Sherer, Agra, 17 October 1857, RID, 1, p. 203. 57 E. L. Brandreth, Commissioner Delhi division, to R. Davies, Sec. to Govt, Punjab, 1 August 1859, Govt of India, Foreign (Pol.) Procs, no. 87 (30 December 1859). NAI. 58 For example, W. M. to C. B. Saunders, Agra, 10 October 1857, RID, 2, p. 86. 59 For British reprisals, see Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, The Great Uprising in India 1857–58: Untold Stories Indian and British (Woodbridge, 2007), chapter 4. 60 W. M. to G. F. Edmonstone, Foreign Sec. Govt of India, Agra, 29 September 1857, RID, 1, p. 124. 61 W. M. to C. Beadon, 9 January 1858, RID, 1, p. 340. His italics. 62 W. M. to C. Saunders, Agra, 2 December 1857, RID, 2, pp. 99–100. 63 W. M. ‘Memorandum … of enquiries into the alleged dishonour of European females at the time of the mutinies’, 30 December 1857, RID, 1, pp. 367–79. 64 Ibid., p. 371. 65 Ibid., p. 372. 66 India Christian Association (Edinburgh), Occasional Paper, no.1 (Edinburgh, 1858). 67 ‘Remarks’ by John Muir on a draft SPG memorial to Parliament, enclosed in J. M. to Rev. Ernest Hawkins, Sec. SPG, Edinburgh, 28 November 1857. For SPG discussion of John’s report of the Edinburgh Association’s first meeting, Standing Committee minutes, 12 November 1857, vol. 26, p. 66. USPG.