THE DEVIL’s WIND

 Authour : Manohar Malgonkar

Publisher : Hamish Hamilton London, Year 1972, Pages 303

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Excerpts :

( ) Goodwill. How we pushed and pulled that word around. We lived with it and went to sleep with it. We cringed and smirked and suffered agonies for it, we intrigued, cowered before their meanest functionaries, pandered, entertained, bribed, and were mercilessly exploited. “They” kept the whole thing dangling, and it all depended on our putting up a “case”; meanwhile we had to build up goodwill. It cost us a lot of money, this process of manufacturing goodwill. Persian carpets, diamond rings, cases of brandy, English carriages and saddles,  “Oriental” swords (which meant swords with jewel encrusted hilts.

( ) Those who were merely country-born, they were the untouchables of the order, never to be permitted into the drawing-rooms. “Country-born” meant Indian, just as “country-bred” meant born to Indian mothers from English stock. Both were terms applied to horses as well as to human beings.

( ) The first Scindia had been a slipper-bearer in the service of my great-grandfather, the first Bajirao, and the meteoric rise of the Scindia family had been almost wholly due to Bajirao’s support and benevolence. I did not trust the Scindia-few of us did.He was far too friendly with the British. Yet I was impressed by his worldliness too. Whoever won or lost, the Scindia would never lose. So I sent off one of my elephants with the two hundred of Scindia, loaded with some of Bajirao’s heaviest gold pieces, to be tucked away in the Scindia’s vaults.

( ) The cartridges were to be bitten to open them, and sepoys who protested were paraded, “broken” and sent to jail, their leaders mowed down to the man. The Britishers were determined to force the issue. So on May 9, under a livid sun, and when the heat was like a fire lit under the earth so that you could not have stood on the parade ground with unshod feet, the whole of the Meerut garrison, British and Indian, was lined up to witness the spectacle of  soldiers being “broken”. The offenders who had refused politely not to touch the new cartridges were stripped of their equipment and uniforms and made to stand in their breechclouts while the blacksmiths called up from the city riveted fetters on their wrists and legs.

( ) The cavalry sepoys ran as they were. Some went to their officers’ bungalows to wreck their vengeance, other to loot the bazaar shops. The 20^th Infantry marched straight to the armoury, getting there only seconds before the white soldiers. So the revolt had begun, on Sunday, May 10, 1857. They looted the Meerut bazaar and set fire to the shops; they hunted down their officers as though they were wild animals, and some went berserk and broke into their officers bungalows and butchered their wives and children.  All the white families into the Entrenchment, under the command of General Wheeler “Humlah.” What the British had termed their “steel framework” had been dismantled. The sepoys were on their own.

( ) It was about this time that a fat bullock strayed near the outer wall and was felled by a volley from within. A dozen white soldiers rushed out and began to drag their prize away. Our snipers opened up and killed one man and shot another through the arm. But by that time they had managed to severe a leg from the bull and carry it inside. The dead soldier lay bloated beside the bull. A pie-dog, stomach bloated with carrion and body hairless, listlessly tore away at the cartilage of the bull’s knee and then, it turned and began to gnaw at the skull of the soldier. I raised my rifle and squeezed the trigger. The dog fell and as it rolled over, a red-faced soldier leaped over the wall and picked up the dog and, holding it against his chest, scrambled back over the wall while his comrades cheered with hoarse voices.

( ) A strong British column sent from Calcutta, had crossed Benaras and reached Allahabad on the 9^th and could reach Kanpur by the 23^rd June. A thousand white men and an equal number of Sikh sepoys; commanded by Neill and his deputy Renaud. Their savagery was such that whole villages were surrounded and burned, with entire villagers burned alive. “Slaughter all men, take no prisoners” was Neill’s order. It was his declared policy to instill fear and terror. They organized hanging parties, men were speared like hogs. Bets were laid as to which one would spear the most. Villagers were killed merely because they looked the other way when his column passed. How could we win when our own people were fighting against us in ever-increasing numbers? The British had proved themselves as world beaters in the art of waging wars, they were the professionals and all others clumsy amateurs.

( ) All white population consisting of about 750 were given fifty boats to escape via Ganges to Allahabad on 27^th June. The whole city thronged to the embankment at Satichaura to see the last white man leave Kanpur. The refugees came to the river in a long, untidy procession of bullock carts, elephants, palanquins and bamboo litters, hobbling, haggard men on foot, their bodies encrusted with grime, clothes in tatters, legs thin or swollen. Among the crowds watching were disbanded sepoys from Kanpur, Azamgarh and several other places. Suddenly firing broke out, boats overturned. The white men from the boats and sepoys shouting “Sabko maro” went on the whole night. I was shouting hoarsely to stop firing, but no one listened. Some boats, captured upto three days later, all were put to death. Only four whites survived Satichaura.

( ) On July 12 Brig Jwala Prasad  came upon the enemy beyond Fattepur and went into attack. The British forces were, using the Enfield rifle with the bullets our men had rejected. Their range was twice as much than our  “Brown Bess.”  Two hundred of our men were killed when Jwala Prasad decided to withdraw. Their Indian coolies with them formed a human chain to bring up the rifles, ammunition etc needed for the attack, even the food, the cases of rum. Again a case of Indians siding with the British. By nightfall we were fleeing in all directions, leaving the Kanpur road wide open. Next morning July 17, the British flag once again flew over Kanpur.

( ) Bibighar, the residence of Azizan, in which 170 white women and children had taken kept prisoners were slaughtered. Havelock on reaching Kanpur hanged Azizan, and Neil rounded up Kanpur’s most prominent and respectful citizens and ordered them to be hanged. Before hanging they were made to atone for the sin of Bibighar by cleaning its floor by crawling on all fours and lick off the mess of clotted blood, urine and faeces. Neil transformed the ancient banyan tree of Kanpur into a “hanging Garden”, leaving the bodies dangling from the branches, to be pecked at by scavenging birds till the limbs rotted and fell to waiting dogs.

( ) Azim returned to Chaurasi to inform that the whole of Bithoor had been burned down. The ladies there had taken refuge in the tykhana and no infurther information was available. By July 1 I was the commander of an army five thousand with headquarters at Chaurasi. The British believed I had taken Jal Samadhi with my family. Havelock succeeded in breaking through to the besieged Lucknow residency, but the sepoys quickly closed the ring again, bottling up the relieving force together with the relieved. Metcalf appointed himself as the executioner at Delhi, organized a hunt so that not a single Mogul heir should be left alive. Women were dragged out screaming and pounced upon in bazaars, so that the word rape itself acquired plurality. People spoke of villages and towns raped, not of single women. Jung Bahadur, Maharaja of Nepal sent Gurkha troops to aid the British, just as the Sikhs had done for them besieging Delhi.

( ) Campbell crossed the Ganges into Oudh – and the sepoy resistance in Lucknow ended. November 17 was a hundred times scary and loathsome than Satichaura. Every single British soldier wrecked a personal vendetta against the men, women, children, bricks and mortar of the city. The orgy of killing, rape, vandalism did not abate for weeks. It cannot be washed away by banning all mention from history books. During this time we attacked Kanpur and forced Wyndham  to retreat to the Entrenchment. The city was ours for a week, when Campbell returned on Dec 6 and attacked. We were routed and Kanpur fell to the British a second time. Campbell sent Grant to destroy Bithoor. His soldiers ripped up, dug out, toppled and burned anything that would burn. Nanak Chand like a sewer rat emerged and informed about the gold in the well. It took 12 days to empty the well and another week to divide the loot according to “Established Practice.”

( ) The revolt had failed and we could do only harass by “mountain rat” practice. I was a hunted man, an outlaw with a price on his head, whose poster was on every tree and street corners all over Oudh. After the fall of Lucknow, Queen Hazrat Mahal had fled to the Fort of Baunda,  came to my rescue. She informed that she would keep the women of my family with her, and if when under pressure flee to Nepal taking them with her. I proceeded to Baunda to deposit the women of my family there,, having nothing to fear as there were thousands of devoted followers around me.  Women outnumbered the men in our party. Hunger and thirst were our inseparable companions. Jaggery boiled in water was our meal. The British had painted me as brutal, vindictive, malevolent replacing Napolean Bonaparte as the hate object in the world. Housewives in England invoked curses upon me and stuck pins into my newspaper photographs. The British needed a Indian villain to justify their brutality and I was made into one. White hunting parties were out looking for me, for mansions to be looted, fat bankers to be held for ransom. On the GT road, from Allahabad to Kalpi, there was not a single tree which did not have a human body dangling from it.

( ) This day, 17th November 1857, should ever be observed in Oudh as a day of mourning. What the British did to Lucknow cannot be balanced against a hundred Satichauras, cannot be washed away by banning all mention of it from history books, cannot be atoned for by a hundred years of the most unblemished adminstration. It was as though every single soldier was wrecking a personal vendetts against the men, women, and children of the city, and even against its bricks and mortar; the orgy of killing, rape, and vandalism did not abate for weeks.

In all this, the white men were helped by the the Sikh sepoys, the Ferozpore contigent, the Indian coolies who carried the ammunition boxes, tents, cases of rum, food supplies on headloads, the entourage of Bibis of the British officers.The Indian camp followers vieying with each other to tow their guns through the mud. The slaves were assisting their masters to conquer their own motherland and thus perpetuate their slavery.

Sir Colin Campbell then personally charged one of his subordinates, Brigadier Hope Grant, to destroy Bithoor as thoroughly as he himself had destroyed Lucknow. Stevenson, who had carried out the first sack of Bithoor, the British general felt, had left behind no evidence that the place had been visited by an avenging force.

So Hope Grant, set out to emulate the thoroughness of his chief. Like machines of destruction, his soldiers ripped up and dug out and toppled, broke glass and burned anything that would burn. Not even a single stone remained standing on another to reveal that a neat little township had once stood there.

( ) My boyhood companion Mani, who was now Rani Jhansi, had joined forces with Tantya Tope, and together they marched to Gwalior to force the Scindia to join. Scindia like an excellent billiards player, sensed the winning side and ran away to put himself under protection of the nearest British garrison.

( ) Being hunted all over India, we decided to take refuge in Nepal. The price negotiated with the Maharaja was Rs One Thousand per day for our entire group of three hundred; paid by giving our Naulakha Har for 4 lakhs (presently valued at 50 lakhs), giving us thirteen months of stay. We made camp at Butwal. Sometime in June news came that Tantya Tope had been captured and executed. With the monsoon came the Terai fever and many of my group fell to it and died. Balarao died on Sept 19, his ashes were declared by the Maharaja as Nana Sahebs and I was officially declared dead. But the British were not taken in and the search continued. Scores of persons were arrested all over India, taken to Kanpur and put to rigorous identification parades before being released. In 1862 they employed a large number of paid agents dressed as sadhus mingling with pilgrims to help search for me. In 1871 Jayaji Scindia sent messege inviting me to come live in Gwalior, which I refused.

( ) Fourteen years had gone by in Nepal and we were reduced to a dozen. The Maharaja was facing a coup so I was no longer protected and had to leave. I proceeded to Gwalior stopping en- route at Kanpur to perform my father’s shradhdh on 28 Jan 1873 at Sirsaya ghat on the Ganges. I am now on my way to Malwan, a port in Maratha territory, to board a ship. Arriving in Mecca where Azim joined me, I am now in Constantinople having been appointed the Shareef’s agent to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. We want for nothing that money can buy, for Scindia has transferred the elephant load of gold placed with him in 1856,

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 My Take :

Background of the Book :  History is always written by the victors, and the defeated painted as black as possible. Here is a narrative of what actually happened and what the winning side did, from the diaries of Nana Saheb Peshwa, in the book "Devils Wind" by Manohar Malgankar.

 

The Maratha kings were reduced to a skeletal relic from about 1700 onward, and the Maratha Confederacy was ruled by the Peshwa (the Prime Ministers) of which the last was  Bajirao. He had so antagonised the hereditary chieftains and principal feudatories that they had turned against him and in  1802 while trying to put down a rebellion by Holcar, he had to run away and into the open arms of the British; whose  tantalizingly open trap door  slid shut. Bajirao was reinstated in Poona with British support. By 1817, the John Company, having gobbled up the limbs of the Maratha Empire, was ready to chop off its head: the Peshwa. Trumped up charges were put up against him and in November he had to run away again. For five months he dodged the hat men, but surrendered, to be extradited to an area of six square miles in Bithoor, a small village 12 miles from Kanpur, with a lifetime pension of One Lakh Pounds sterling per year.

Nana Saheb was his son, and the British East India Company described him as a monster to frighten their children after the  ‘Mutiny’ of 1857.

Bajirao died in 1851, but the British had decided as early as 1841 to give me nothing. They had discovered that he had managed to bring with himself a large part of the Peshwa wealth, so what did his son need a pension for ? bajirao had only wealth to bequeath and nothing else. The rank of Peshwa which he sought to bestow was not his to give; the British had not allowed it even to him. The original gaddi, the seat of the Peshwa had been broken and burnt by Elphinstone when he planted the British flag on his palace in Poona. Deshmukhi, the right to collect tribute from his vassals, no longer existed. His ‘dominion’ had been whittled down to a landlord status over a microscopic holding of six square miles around Bithoor, allotted to him by his masters.

It is always the actions done by the losers that are trumpeted and proclaimed all over as brutalities done by them.

A must read and ‘keep in your library’ book, to know the diaries of the defeated.

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Subject type : Historical events

Narrative Style : First person

Readability : Excellent

Reader’s Interest : Vividly Maintained

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