Diya Bose

May 10 that year was an exceptionally warm Sunday even by Indian summer standards. Despite a decent amount of rain the night before. It was eight in the morning and Meerut’s St. John’s Church was already starting to fill with British families in their pretty summer outfits. Among them were Lieutenant Hugh Gough and an eighteen-year-old officer named Cornet John MacNabb and Lieutenant. Seated next to MacNabb in the pews was the city’s commissioner Hervey Greathed and his wife Elisa who shared a few pleasantries with MacNabb. She was blissfully unaware that MacNabb and much of this congregation would be dead by dusk. The cantonment of Meerut was home to three native regiments, two infantry and one cavalry. This was the strongest European military presence in all of northwestern India at the time. And yet, as we’ll soon see, not the safest for them. The day before was eighty-five members of the native infantry regiments were brought to parade ground with a large gathering of both native and British onlookers surrounding them. These eighty-five were no longer to be sepoys, they’d been court-martialed for insubordination and sentenced to ten years of hard penal labor. Although this was quickly reduced to five, the move was widely condemned by both Indians and British alike. Even the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, George Anson, found that the “insubordination” was to be expected given the issue and could have easily been avoided. The eighty-five condemned were still clad in their uniform as they were brought to the ground under a guard of Rifles and Carabineers. Once at the designated spot, the sentence was read out aloud. The soldiers were now felons. First to be stripped was their accoutrements. Then went the uniforms. Once stripped down to the bare essentials, a group of ironsmiths came forward to shackle them. All this in full view of friends and comrades. The whole idea was to maximize the disgrace, perhaps as a preventive measure. To set an example. But that didn’t quite work out as expected. Instead, it triggered compassion and solidarity. These were decorated soldiers who had served the East India Company with unquestioning loyalty in faraway lands for years. Public humiliation was the last thing they ever looked forward to as a reward for this loyalty. They begged the General to spare them the ignominy and disgrace. When that failed, they turned to their comrades in the crowd and chastised them for being silent spectators to a disgrace that could befall them tomorrow if not checked today. Everybody stood moved by their appeals. Everybody felt a personal moral obligation to do something. But with the armed-to-the-teeth British dragoons around, nobody dared say a word. The eighty-five were marched off to their cells and placed in the custody of an Indian trooper. As for the comrades, the Indian sepoys in the gathering, they didn’t just disagree with the treatment of the condemned, but also secretly agreed with the very reason of their insubordination. The solidarity was strong, at least in spirit if not action. It was time to go beyond. That night, sepoys from all regiments huddled together at the barracks to plan a course of action. The objective was not mere revenge but a complete overthrow of regime. The plan was ambitious and resources thin, but they had the numbers. So there was home. And, of course, emotions ran wild. The lead was taken by the regiment to which the condemned had belonged, the Third Cavalry. The first order of business was the release of the eighty-five convicted comrades. Hundreds of sepoys from the regiment galloped to the jail to fulfil this task. And in the process, also released several other convicts who were in for genuine crimes—thugs, bandits, dacoits. The infantry wasn’t willed enough to take the plunge yet but that changed when one of the cavalry troopers rode past their barracks shouting that the Europeans were coming to take away their weapons. This riled up both 20th and 11th regiments and one of the sepoys ended up firing his musket. The shot was aimed at the commander of the 11th, Colonel Finnis, who died immediately. The first shot had been fired. The first British had fallen. What followed, as sources describe, was a wave of unprecedented carnage and confusion. The sepoys and the convicts ran amok through the streets of Meerut, killing every White individual in sight, burning every European home they passed by. By the time the sun set, forty-one Europeans lay dead. MacNabb had been waylaid by a mob while on the way to safety and hacked to pieces. Later his corpse was found in a ditch and could only be recognized by his height. All of this precipitated within a space of one afternoon. Wasting no time after the outbreak, the mutineers left for Delhi the same night. By daybreak, the entire Indian contingent of Meerut was on the road to Delhi. The Mutiny of 1857, India’s first war of independence, was now in session. Today India observes the 167th anniversary of this landmark episode, that not only ended the East India Company but also the last remaining sigils of the Mughals. It did not set India free, but it successfully seeded an unbroken chain of events that ultimately led to it less than five generations later. --------------------------------------------------------- References: 1. The Indian Mutiny, 1857 by Saul David 2. The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 by R C Majumdar

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