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 security 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 his Original 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 capacity 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 histories 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 surprise, 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 soldiery’, 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 irresistible 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 preconceived plot’.11 That he maintained this view for the rest of his life,
in spite of the growing popularity of conspiracy theories, was demonstrated 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 especial 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 soldiery 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 iteration’, 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 meaningful 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 volition. Quite recently, in 1854, when escorting a party of memsahibs
to visit the Rani’s palace at Jhansi, William had been amused to mistake 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 accusation 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 preplanned 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’ admittedly 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 conspiratorial 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 commentators mentioned the raising of a ubiquitous ‘green flag’ every time
a supposed Muslim rebel was mentioned. William, too, occasionally utilized 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 preliminaries 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 occupation 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 accepting 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 incongruities 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 heirapparent, 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 undisguised 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 stretching 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 shortlived 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 chieftain 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 understand 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 impoverished 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 immediately 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 participating 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 inhabitants, 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 Â�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 entitled 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 surprisingly 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 as vakils, 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 unwillingness 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 ‘clemency’ 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 insightful 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 ‘discriminating 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 control 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 exceptional 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 practically 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 disavowing 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 memorials to Parliament. John, for his part, provided the SPG with details
on the current state of government connections with Hindu ceremonials 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 criticisms 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
╇ 1�������
W. M., Life, vol. 2, p. 96.
╇ 2 W. M. to J. M., in WM 2020, ‘Letters to John Muir’.
192 Notes to Chapter 7
╇ 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).
╇ 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 [hereafter RID], 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1902). Based on Agra Correspondence of Sir
William Muir, 1857, Gen. 182–5. EUL.
╇ 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.
╇ 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.
╇ 7 Missionary Alexander Duff coined this phrase in letters from Calcutta published in The Indian Rebellion: Its Causes and Results (London, 1858), p. 46.
╇ 8 W. M., to Helen Muir, Agra, 18 May 1857, RID, 1, p. 31.
╇ 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.