Loading ...
Cawnpore Triumph - Cawnpore Tragedy
June 27The entrenchment at Kanpur was duly vacated by the garrison which according to one estimate now amounted to not more than 350 persons of whom majority were women and children and a good number of non-combatants. By 8, in the morning, they had reached the Sati Chaura Ghat adjacent to the Fishermen’s Temple. The news had spread like wildfire throughout the city. “The hat men are leaving” was the cry that reverberated and echoed in the skies of Kanpur. The city had at long last been liberated and there was wild enthusiasm amongst the whole populace who had assembled in thousands on the river bank to see the white men depart.
Nana Sahib had sent sixteen elephants including his personal elephant Airawat ,about two dozen bullock carts, and more than a hundred palanquins to the Entrenchment. Nana’s personal elephant was to carry General Sir Hugh Wheeler and his family. Everyone went to see the grand spectacle. The atmosphere was like that of a carnival with everyone dressed in their most colourful clothes. The sepoys looked smart in their red and blue uniforms, plumed headgear — . after all it was their day-it is they who had brought it about.
But there were other sepoys whose uniforms was not familiar to the local people. Who were they and what brought them to Kanpur? These were the 6th BNI from Allahabad and 37th BNI from Varanasi who had been driven away from their stations by Col Neill of Madras Fusiliers. These are the same sepoys who had been disarmed on the parade ground and then fired upon by the British troops Many of them died in the shooting and many were wounded. The wounded sepoys were immediately dispatched by the British soldiers and a great majority managed to escape. to their homes. But when they reached their village they found to their horror that everything had been burnt down and gruesome sights awaited them as they beheld the charred and blackened skeletons of their near and dear ones hanging from the nearby trees - a sight they would never be able to erase from their memory. So, they had come to Kanpur, their hearts burning with a fearful hatred.
Everything went off without hitch till the last moment. In fact some of the sepoys were sorry to see their erstwhile masters depart. Suddenly pandemonium broke out; screams and war cries rent the air On a bugle call, the boatmen of 28 boats jumped into the river. Soon the thatched roofs of boats were in fire, heavy musketry fire started followed by salvoes from the artillery. The departing British had been caught in an ambush Almost all the men were killed. Later we came to know that a few had managed to escape. Among the male survivors of the Kanpur garrison, were privates, Sullivan and Murphy and two officers, Captain Mowbray Thomson and Lieutenant Delafosse.
About a hundred and ten women and children were fished out of the bloody waters and removed to the Bibighar, a commodious building patterned on a harem.
I’m just curious, how did / do you find these pictures? They’re fantastic!
Yah, awesome pictures. I really liked the picture of wheeler barrock
I trust you will post an accurate history of the fate of the women and children , not just of the Wheeler Entrenchment , but also the Fattegarh Fugitives in the “commodious” Bibighar. Yes , everyone of the helpless women and children were murdered and their mutilated bodies thrown down the Well. Shame on you.
The aim of this blog is to give a balanced account of the incidents that took place. Horrible deeds of cruelty were perpretated on both sides. According to an English historian Rev Dr Frank Bright “the contest seem to lie between two savage races, capable of no thougfhts but that, regardless of all justice or mercy, their enemies should be exterminated.” Atrocities committed on both sides .will be presented without prejudice and acts of valour and compassion will be highlighted with dispassion. Nothing will be whitewashed– the Bibigarh massacre included
Thank you for your response, I was concerned that a scewed , nationalist perspective would be the only one presented , In my reading there is often a playing down of the Nationalists acts of barbarity and a playing up of the British savagery , in what all to often appears to be an attempt to vilify the British and to present a sanitised and more palatable perspective , and therefore a justification; of the Nationalists actions. Notwithstanding that , this blog is excellent and I look forward to the daily updates as the events unfold, and I trust that its scope will not be limited to 1857 , as the Uprising continued until 1859.
Further to my last posting re: inaccuracies , here is one from this blog, which I am posting here , as it is impossible to post on the relevant page. The Enfield Rifle page is good , up until the final paragraph , which states that the Meerut Sepoys and Sowars refused to put the Lee-Enfield .303 cartridges in their mouth (sic). This error occurs again and again and is in fact contradicted in on the same page of the blog !! The Lee- Enfield is a completely different weapon and post-dates the Enfield .577 by some decades !!!
To describe the Bibighar as ” commodious ” is disingenuous to say the least.
“Commodious ‘ for a “bibi and her extended family” for whom it was originally intended but certainly not for about two hundred ladies and children
When I visited Kanpur and the Bala Rao Gardens , I had no problem finding the Well , but had some difficulty finding the Bibighar. Where is it exactly in relation to the Well ? Is it immediately to the right of the Well or is it further away ??
The well was and still is in the Nana Rao Park (Not Bala Rao). Over the well in which the bodies of women and children were thrown, the British erected a marble sculpture , known as Marochetti’s Angel sculpted by Baron Carlo Marochetti, based on a figure sketched by Lady Canning, the Viceroy’s wife. This was surrounded by a beautiful garden for the financing of which, the residents of Kanpur had to pay a punitive fine of GBP 30,000 for their support to Nana Sahib’s rule. Till August 15, 1947, no Indians were allowed to enter the area covered over the well.. On India’s attaining independence,, the sculpture along with a portion of the memorial was transferred to the compound of All Soul’s Church where it still stands.. In place of it in the memorial garden, a bust of Tatia Topi was erected and the Memorial Gardens itself was renamed Nana Rao Park.. Bibighur was only 40 feet away from the well. It had already been demolished and its surrounding trees cut down when Lord and Lady Canning visited Kanpur on October 15, 1859.
The amount of information provided here is mindboggling! I, and I am sure all the other visitors have learnt a great deal of our history after reading the 1857mutiny blog.
Thank you for your reply , however , you have not answered my question !!
In Nana Rao garden , at the well , facing the bust of Tatia Topi , is the Bibighar 40 feet to the right of the well or not ??
It is difficult to pinpoint the location of Bibighur with reference to the well After going through some contemporary sketches, my finding is that Bibighar was 40 feet behind the fatal well.
In the comment above, in the second line add the following between that and Bibighur “as you stand facing the bust of Tatia Topi”
In reference to the above comment . Imagine that the Well is that of a clock face , with the bust of Tatia Tope being at 12 o’clock and you are standing in the position that would be 6 o’clock , is the Bibighar at the position that would be 3 o’clock and 40 feet therefore , to the right ??
When I visited the gardens I strongly suspected that the Bibighar was in the small copse of trees to the right of the Well , but I also found the foundations of another building further away from the Well , could this be The Cawnpore Hotel ??
Your post seems to use Col Niell and his actions towards 6th BNI and 37th BNI as justification for the massacre, can you provide some links etc to any references of these actions? The main previous information I have about Col Niell mainly relates to him returning to the area close to the time of the massacre of British civilians in Fatehpur.
I do not know from where Mr Evans got the information that the British civilians were massacred at Fatehpur. The fact is that on the outbreak of the Mutiny at Fatehpur on June 9, 1857, most of the Europeans at Fatehpur escaped to Banda, the headquarters of a district south of Fatehpur across the river Yamuna. However, the district judge Mr R T Tucker did not abandon his station and was killed fighting to the last..The following was Colonel Neill’s instructions to Major Renaud when he was hurrying with an advance guard for the relief of Kanpur;”The town of Fatehpur which had revolted. was to be attacked , and the Pathan quarters destroyed with all their inhabitants. All heads of insurgents, particularly at Fatehpur to be hanged. If the Deputy Collector is taken, hang him , and have his head cut off and stuck up on one of the principal buildings of the town.”( See sir J W Kaye’s History of Sepoy War , Book V , Chapter ii). Perhaps the darkest stain on the British was the treatment meted out to the civilian population. Long before the Kanpur massacre “martial Law had been proclaimed ; ———and soldiers and civilians alike were holding Bloody Assize, or slaying Natives without any assize at all, regardless of sex or age. Afterwards, the thirst for blood grew stronger still. It is on the records of our British Parliament , in papers sent home by the Governor-General that ‘the aged ,women and children are sacrificed, as well as those guilty of rebellion’. They were not deliberately hanged, but burnt to death in their villages— perhaps now and then accidentally shot. Englishmen did not hesitate to boast, or to record their boastings in writing, that they had ’spared no one’ and that ‘peppering away at niggers’ was very pleasant pastime ‘enjoyed amazingly’ (See Sir J W Kaye’s The History of Sepoy War Book v, Chapter II). A distinguished Indian who visited Allahabad shortly after the Mutiny writes “To bag the nigger had become a favourie phrase of the military sportsmen of the day.’Pea fowls, partridges and Pandies rose together, but the latter gave the best sport— In those bloody assizes, the bench , bar and jury were none of them in a bland humour, but were bent on paying off scores by rudely administering justice with the rifle,sword and halter— making up for one life by twenty— There were those who had special reasons to have been anxious to show their rare qualification in administering drumhead justice.Scouring through the town and suburbs, they caught all on whom they could lay their hands— porter or pedlar— shopkeeper or artisan, and hurrying them on through a mock-trial , made them dangle on the nearest tree.Near six thousand beings had thus been summarily disposed off and launched into eternity. — For three months did eight dead carts daily go their rounds from sunrise to sunset, to take down the corpses which hung at the cross roads and market places, poisoning the air of the city, and to throw their loathsome burden into the Ganges.” (See The Treavels of a Hindoo by Bhola Nath Chunder, Two volumes, London 1869) .Neill was the prime mover behind such mindless atrocities and massacres.Neill did not proceed immediately for the relief of Kanpur which was his assigned task. Instead, he got busy hanging and executing the”niggers” on the way . as an authority on the events has writtem”It was Neill’s hand that signed in letters of bloodthe doom of Kanpur and decreed yje ordeal of Lucknow.” It was the established policy of the British to burn indiscriminately all the villages falling on their line of march..William Tate Groom, an officer of The First Madras Royal Fusiliers whose Colonel was Colonel Neill writes in a letter to his wife about his three night’s march from Benares to Allahabad “Marched through a country in a state not to be described,, villages and towns all in flames, and the shrieks of the unfortunate villagers being plainly heard all along the road (See William Tate Groom’s With Havelock from Allahabad to Lucknow, 1857, London 1894 pages 5 and 6). Sir George Campbell,(1824-1892 ), Lieutenant Governor of Bengal from 1871 to 1874 and who was engaged in the Mutiny about Delhi wrote in his memoirs which was edited by Sir C E Bernard after his death “I know that at Allahabad there were far too wholesale execution— result of Neill’s irruption– there is no doubt that people were put to death in the most reckless manner. And afterwards Neill did things most more than the massacre, putting to death with deliberate torture, in a way that has never been proved against the natives.” Let us therefore refrain from talking only about Satichaura Ghat and Bibighar.. There is no doubt that these massacres were horrible but equally horrible was the massacres and mass executions perpetrated by Neill and his cohorts.
The British savagery after the massacre at the Bibighar was as acute as it was due to the cold blooded and cowardly nature of the murders. Neil’s actions before the massacre of the Bibighar were executed in hot blooded and indiscriminent revenge for the atrocities of Meerut , Delhi etc whereas the massacres in Cawnpore perpetuated by the Nana’s followers were calculated and coldblooded in the extreme. The women and children were captives for nearly three weeks and their fate was in the hands of the Nana, who at any time could have spared them from coldblooded murder. Yet at the 11th hour, on the eve of their rescue, authority from the Nana’s household permitted the Sepoys and the butchers from the bazaar to murder in coldblood defenceless women and children. All sides in this terrible affair are guilty to a greater or lesser extent of atrocities , but the Nana’s culpability in coldblooded murder is to a degree the more reprehensible and hypothetically speaking probably lost independance for India for another 90 years.
“Neil’s actions before the massacre of the Bibighar were executed in hot blooded and indiscriminent revenge for the atrocities of Meerut , Delhi etc”
I have to say that this blog does seem rather biased. There is no mention that I could find of the massacre at Meerut where the mutineers slaughtered the british civilians in the cantonment, hacking some women and children to pieces whilst decapitating others. At least one woman was set alight (Mrs Dawson) and one pregnant woman was killed (Mrs Captain Chambers).
The only mention of the massacre of the surrendered british at Delhi was a rather vague “After this a general elimination of British officers started.”.
Also, there is no mention of the attrocities at Jhansi where, to quote wikipedia:
“A small group of Company officials and their families took refuge in Jhansi’s fort, and the Rani negotiated their evacuation. However, when they left the fort, they were massacred by the rebels.”
It wasn’t just a simple massacre either. In total there were 66 Britons: 30 men, 16 women and 20 children. They separated the prisoners into three lines, one of men, one of women and one of children. They first slaughtered the men in front of their wives, then the women in front of their children and finally butchered the children. All this whilst the townsfolk cheered and threw marigolds at the murderers.
These events all took place early on in the mutiny and were known to the British. Given that the soldiers knew of all these atrocities it makes the acts of Neill’s forces if not excusable, then at least understandable.
Saying ‘you started it’ may not be a particularly moral argument, but it is a very human one.
Still, once they discovered the incident at the Cawnpore well things changed rather drastically. One soldier writing:
“I have spared many a man in fight, but I will never spare another. I shall carry this with me in my holsters, and whenever I am inclined for mercy, the sight of it, and the recollection of this house, will be sufficient to incite me to revenge.”
If you had been a British soldier at the time, would you have been inclined to show mercy to the mutineers?
Yes, this blog is written from the point of view of a Sepoy. Deal with it!
Everything that you have read, including things in Wikipedia, is based on writings by British, and that writing is so completely balanced, so pure, so fair and without any exaggeration that nothing more needs to be said. - yah sure!
Do you even know how many British died? And do you have an idea of how many natives died?
Are you sitting down?
Number of British killed 2,000 in action and 8,000 by disease; each one was counted.
And how many natives were killed?
1,000,000+, some say as many as 10,000,000 were killed.
ONE MILLION PLUS.
In Awdh alone, 100,000+ died in a single battle.
Now you take out your little scale and talk about the balance all you want.
Firstly, I would recommend you modify your tone. I find it hard to take anyone seriously when they can’t/wont write in at least a neutral style.
Hmm, and I think I recall reading somewhere that this blog, although written from a sepoy PoV intends to try to be fairly balanced. It would be perfectly possible and quite interesting to report these attrocities from the PoV of a sepoy.
Anyway, down to business. Your claim that I’ve read only British reports is false (and fairly presumptuous). I have read passages from books by Indians of the time, modern day Indians, the britons involved in the actual events both sympathetic towards and violently against the mutineers.
As for the alleged bias of the British writings, I have to say that, whilst the tone is ocasionally in favour of the British, as one would expect, the factual contents are generally very accurate. To give one small example, after the massacre of the civilians at Meerut at the outset of the mutiny, there were tales circulating of sexual violations and other such acts. The British soldiers who had been there were quick to refute these claims and head of the N.W Intelligence Department sent a letter to Lord Canning saying as much.
A lot of the British accounts were backed up by contempory native ones too.
But anyway, that’s all irrelevent since all the facts I quoted in my previous post are pretty irrefutable.
Besides, if you are going to discount all the British accounts as biased, whos accounts are you going to look to? The contempory Indian ones? Why would they be any more accurate?
Right..numbers of deaths. Its fairly obvious that the British were going to have massively fewer deaths than the rebels for several reasons:
The British were massively better soldiers than the mutineers. In almost all battles the British were heavily outnumbered and still victorious. At Betwa the British with only 1200 men (500 of which were actual Britons) under general Rose were caught between the walls of Jhansi (containing several thousand mutineers and the Rani’s private army) that they were besieging and a 20,000 strong army lead by Tantia Tope. General Rose cooly launched a diversonary assault at Jhansi to discourage the rebels inside the walls from attacking, wheeled his entire force around and soundly thrashed Tantia’s horde. Those were odds of 500 Britons vs around 25000 Indians- 1:50 odds
There were very few British actually involved in the fighting. When the rienforcement armies came to India, the majority of them were made up of loyal natives with only a core of Britons. Since there were not many British in the theater, there were not many there to die.
The mutineers themselves killed many natives. When they took Meerut and Delhi there was quite a lot of pilliaging and murdering going on. The Rani of Jhansi’s first action of the mutiny was to have a war against one of her neighbouring states and when there became insufficient funds to pay for all the mutineers, they turned to robbing and pillaging the countryside for their food and pay (something the British hang their own soldiers on the spot for).
The thing is though…its a bit of an irrelevent point. You say 100,000+ died in a single battle but it was their choice to fight. The British didn’t want the Mutiny. There wouldn’t have been any deaths at all if the Mutineers hadn’t rebelled.
As for balance..well, I’d weigh 100,000 dead fighting a battle they chose to fight light against 300 innocent women slaughtered in cold blood.
Kiran,
I object to being quoted as being ”biased”, this is simply not the case. My remarks are intended to be bi-partisan, as they should be when dealing objectively with historical events. I am certainly no apologist for either side and it is an indisputed fact that although the massacres of Europeans at Meerut, Delhi and Jhansi would have been known to the British forces the sheer unadultereated savagery of the murder of the women and children at the Bibghar sent the British forces into paroxyms of rage and instilled an almost superhuman determination to avenge the deaths of these innocents.
Add A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.