SKETCH MAP
TO ILLUSTRATE
HAVELOCK’S OPERATIONS
DURING JULY & AUGUST.
1857
From a Government Survey.

Bombay, like its sister presidency Madras, was affected only in a slight degree by the storms that troubled Bengal and the northwest. The Bombay troops, though, as the sequel shewed, not altogether equal in fidelity to those of Madras, did nevertheless pass through the perilous ordeal very creditably—rendering most valuable service in Rajpootana and other regions of the north. There was a wealthy and powerful native community at Bombay—that of the Parsees—which was nearly at all times ready to support the government, and which greatly strengthened the hands of Lord Elphinstone by so doing. It consisted of merchants, shipowners, and bankers, many of whom had made large fortunes in the ordinary way of trade. Those Parsees may always be distinguished from the other natives of India by something peculiar in their names—Jamsetjee, Nowrojee, Cursetjee, Bomanjee, Rustomjee, Hormuzjee, Luxmonjee, Maneekjee, Sorabjee, Furdoonjee, Soonderjee, Ruttonjee, Wassewdewjee, Dhakjee, &c. The Parsees are the descendants of those Persians who, refusing to exchange the religion of Zoroaster for that of Mohammed, migrated to India more than a thousand years ago; those still remaining in Persia are few in number and degraded in position; but those at Bombay are wealthy and active, and bear a high character both morally and intellectually. The property in the island on which the city of Bombay stands is chiefly in the hands of the Parsees; and it is usual for the European commercial firms of Bombay to have a Parsee capitalist as one of the partners. Although wearing the Asiatic costume, and adhering very rigidly to their religious customs and observances, the Parsees assimilate more than other eastern people to the social customs of Europeans: they nearly all speak English, and have it carefully taught to their children. There is something remarkable in a Parsee holding the dignity of a baronet, in English fashion; such was the case a few years ago, when a Parsee of enormous wealth, and of liberality as great as his wealth, was made by Queen Victoria a baronet under the title of Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. It will at once be seen that such a body as the Parsees, having little or no sympathy with Hindustani sepoys, and having their worldly interests much bound up with the English, were likely to be sources of strength instead of weakness in troubled times. They headed an address to Lord Elphinstone, signed by about four hundred natives of various castes and creeds.[[76]] It was not more adulatory, not more filled with enthusiastic professions of loyalty, than many addresses presented to Viscount Canning in Bengal; but it more nearly corresponded with the conduct of those who signed it.

If Bombay city, however, remained nearly undisturbed during July and August, there were symptoms that required close watching in various districts to the north, south, and east. Kolapore, one of the places here adverted to, is distant about a hundred and eighty miles south from Bombay. It is the chief place of a raj or state of the same name, and was in the last century a scene of frequent contest between two Mahratta princes, the Peishwa of Satara and the Rajah of Kolapore, each of whom struggled against the claims to superiority put forth by the other. About half a century ago began those relations towards the Company’s government, which, as in so many other parts of India, led to the gradual extinction of the rule of the native rajah; the British govern ‘in the name of the rajah,’ but the rajah’s authority remains in abeyance. The military force belonging specially to the state, at the time of the mutiny, amounted to about ten thousand men of all arms. It was, however, among the Company’s own troops that the disaffection above adverted to took place. The 27th Bombay native infantry, without any previous symptoms of disaffection, suddenly mutinied at Kolapore, on the day of a festival called the Buckree Eed (1st of August); or rather, a portion of the regiment mutinied. While the officers were assembled in the billiard-room of their mess-house on the evening of that day, a jemadar rushed in and informed them that some of the sepoys had risen in revolt; the officers hastened out; when three of them, ignorant of the place, or bewildered in the darkness, went astray, and were taken and murdered by the mutineers. The mother of the jemadar went to the house of Major Rolland, the commanding officer, to warn the ladies of their danger, and to afford them means of escape. No sooner had the ladies hurried away, than the house was surrounded by mutineers, who, disappointed at finding it empty, revenged themselves by slaughtering the old woman. After plundering the treasury of forty thousand rupees, the mutineers retired to a religious edifice in the town, and marched off in early morning by the Phoonda Ghat towards Wagotun, on the coast. The native commissioned officers of the regiment remained faithful; none of them accompanied the mutineers. The outbreak ended most disastrously to those concerned in it. When they got some distance from Kolapore, they found themselves without food and without friends; and gradually nearly all were destroyed by detachments sent against them, headed by Major Rolland and Colonel Maughan, the latter of whom was British resident at Kolapore. There were circumstances which justify a belief that this was not so much a mutiny after the Bengal type, as an association of the bad men of the regiment for purposes of plunder.

This event at Kolapore threw the whole of the south Mahratta country into a ferment. At Poonah, Satara, Belgaum, Dharwar, Rutnagherry, Sawunt Waree, and other places, the threads of a Mohammedan conspiracy were detected; and fortunately the germs of insurrection were nipped in the bud. When Mr Rose, commissioner of Satara, found that the deposed royal family of that state were engaged in plots and intrigues, he took a small but reliable English force, entered Satara before daylight on the 6th of August, surrounded the palace, and ordered the rajah and the ranees to prepare for instant departure. Resistance being useless, the royal prisoners entered phaetons which had been brought for that purpose, and before eight o’clock they were on the way to Poonah—to be kept under the eye of the Bombay authorities until the political atmosphere should become clearer, in a navy depôt on an island near Bombay city. A plot was about the same time discovered at Poonah, concerted between the moulvies of that place and of Belgaum, for massacring the Europeans and native Christians of those stations; letters were intercepted at the Poonah post-office, which enabled the authorities to shun the coming evil. Many arrests of Mussulman conspirators were made; and it was then found that matters had gone so far as a preparation to blow up the arsenal at Poonah. The authorities at once disarmed the natives of the cantonment bazaar. From most of the out-stations, being troubled by these events, the English ladies were sent by military escort to Bombay or to Poonah. Among other measures of precaution, the remaining companies of the 27th native regiment were disarmed at Kolapore and Rutnagherry; and examples of the terrible ‘blowing away from guns’ were resorted to, to check this incipient revolution. The 28th Bombay native infantry, stationed at Dharwar, and the 29th, stationed at Belgaum, had been raised at the same time as the 27th; and a few symptoms of insubordination were manifested by sepoys of those regiments; but the timely arrival of a European regiment restored quiet. The English were greatly exasperated when the fact came to light that one of the conspirators detected at Belgaum was a moonshee who had been receiving a hundred and fifty rupees per month for instructing officers of regiments in Hindustani.

The three presidencies were all anxiously watching the state of feeling in the large and important country of Hyderabad, the dominions of the Nizam; for that country borders on Nagpoor on the northeast; while on the southeast and on the west it is conterminous with districts belonging to Madras and to Bombay respectively. Its two largest cities, Hyderabad in the southeast portion, and Aurungabad in the northwest, contained many English families belonging to military and civil servants of the Company; or at least the families were at stations not far from those cities. By the terms of various treaties between the Nizam and the Company, the latter had the right of maintaining a large military cantonment at Secunderabad, a few miles north of Hyderabad city. This cantonment was three miles in length, and was well provided with officers’ bungalows and mess-houses, European barracks, sepoy lines, horse-artillery lines, foot-artillery barracks, native bazaars, parade-ground, hospitals, arsenal, and all the other requisites for a large military station. The cavalry lines were two miles north of the cantonment, at Bowenpilly. The military station for the troops belonging to the Nizam as an independent sovereign was at Bolarum, somewhat further away from Hyderabad, but still within easy reach of Secunderabad. At the time of the mutiny the British resident at Hyderabad was placed in a position of some difficulty. Although there was a large force at Secunderabad, it comprised scarcely any British troops; and therefore, if trouble arose, he could only look to defence from natives by natives. The capital of the Deccan, or the Nizam’s territory, comprised within itself many elements of insecurity. The government and a large portion of the inhabitants were Mohammedan; the rabble of the city was numerous and ruthless; the Nizam’s own army was formed on the same model as the contingents which had so generally mutinied in Hindostan; the Company’s own forces, as just mentioned, were almost entirely native; and the city and province were at all times thronged with predatory bands of Rohillas, Afghans, Arabs, and other mercenaries, in the pay of the nobles and jaghiredars of the Hyderabad court. It is almost certain that if the Nizam had turned against us, Southern India would have been in a blaze of insurrection; but he was faithful; and his chief minister, Salar Jung, steadily supported him in all measures calculated to put down disturbance. The news of the rebel-triumph at Delhi set in tumultuous motion the turbulent Mussulmans of Hyderabad; and it has been well observed that ‘a single moment of indecision, a single act of impolicy, a single false step, or a single admission of weakness, might have turned Hyderabad into a Lucknow and made a second Oude of the Deccan.’ The Nizam, his prime minister, and the British resident, all brought sagacity and firmness to bear on the duties of their respective offices; and thus the Deccan and Southern India were saved. What might have been the case under other circumstances was foreshadowed by the events of the 17th of July. On the preceding day, intelligence was received at the Residency, which stands clear of the city, but at the distance of some few miles from the British cantonment at Secunderabad, that the mob in the city was much excited, and that a scheme was on foot to press the Nizam to attack the Residency. Notice was sent from the Residency to Salar Jung, and preparations were made. Early in the evening on the 17th, a Rohilla rabble stole forth from the city, and made for the Residency. An express was at once sent off to cantonments for aid; and in the meantime the guard, with three guns, went out to attack the insurgents. Captain Holmes plied his grape-shot effectively from the three guns; and when cavalry and horse-artillery arrived from Secunderabad, the Rohillas received a total discomfiture. This was almost the only approach to a mutiny that occurred in the portion of the Deccan near the Carnatic frontier.

Aurungabad, on the Bombay side of the Nizam’s dominions, was, in regard to mutinies, less important than Hyderabad, because more easily accessible for European troops; but more important, in so far as the sepoy regiments of Malwah and Rajpootana were nearer at hand to be affected by evil temptation. The city is about seventy miles distant from Ahmednuggur, and a hundred and seventy from Bombay. Uneasiness prevailed here so early as June. The 1st cavalry and the 2d infantry, of the corps called the Hyderabad Contingent, were stationed at Aurungabad; and of these, the former shewed signs of disaffection. Captain Abbott, commanding the regiment, found on the morning of the 13th that his men were murmuring and threatening, as if unwilling to act against mutineers elsewhere; indeed, they had sworn to murder their officers if any attempt were made to employ them in that way. Fortunately, the ressaldars—each being a native captain of a troop of cavalry, and there being therefore as many ressaldars in a regiment as there were troops or companies—remained faithful; and Captain Abbott, with Lieutenant Dowker, were enabled to discuss with these officers the state of the regiment. The ressaldars assured the captain that many of the troopers had begun to talk loudly about the King of Delhi as their rightful ruler. The resident at the court of the Nizam, through the military secretary, Major Briggs, advised Captain Abbott—seeing that no aid could be expected from any other quarter—to speak in as conciliatory a tone as possible to the men, and to promise them that they should not be required to act against the insurgents at Delhi, provided they would be obedient to other orders. Quiet was in this way restored; but it being a dangerous precedent thus to allow troops to decide where and against whom they would choose to fight, Major-general Woodburn, who had been placed in command of a movable column from Bombay, marched through Ahmednuggur to Aurungabad. This column consisted of the 28th Bombay native infantry, the 14th dragoons, Captain Woolcombe’s battery, and a pontoon train. When Woodburn arrived, he found that the ladies had all left the Aurungabad station, that the officers were living barricaded in the mess-room, and that all the Nizam’s troops exhibited unfavourable symptoms. The first native cavalry, when confronted with Woodburn’s troops, behaved in a very daring way; and about a hundred of them made off, owing to the unwillingness of the general to open fire upon them, although Abbott and Woolcombe saw the importance of so doing.

In the country north of Bombay, and between it and Malwah, many slight events occurred, sufficient to shew that the native troops were in an agitated state, as if oscillating between the opposite principles of fidelity and treachery. It was worthy of note, however, that the troops thus affected were, in very few instances, those belonging to the Company’s Bombay army; they were generally contingent corps, or Mahrattas, or Rajpoots, or men imbued with the same ideas as the Hindustanis and Oudians. Towards the close of July, a few troopers of the Gujerat Irregular Horse endeavoured to incite their companions to mutiny; they failed, and then decamped; but were pursued and captured, and then hung in presence of their own regiment.

Still further northward lies the country which, under the various names of Scindia’s territory, Holkar’s territory, Malwah, and Bhopal, has already been described as the chief seat of the Mahratta power, and which corresponds pretty nearly with the region marked out by the Company’s officials as ‘Central India.’ We have seen in former pages[[77]] that Scindia, chief of the Mahratta state of which Gwalior is the capital, offered the aid of his Contingent army to Mr Colvin in May; that Lieutenant Cockburn, with half a cavalry regiment of this Contingent, rendered good service in the region around Agra, until the troopers deserted him; that the fidelity of Scindia to the British alone prevented his troops generally from joining the rebels, for they belonged to the same Hindustani and Oudian families, though serving a Mahratta prince in a Mahratta state; that after certain detachments had mutinied at Neemuch and elsewhere, the main body rose in revolt at Gwalior on the 14th of June, murdered some of the English officers, drove away the rest with their families, and formally threw off all allegiance to the Company; and that Maharajah Scindia, under circumstances of great difficulty and peril, managed to keep peace at Gwalior—retaining and feeding the troops at that place, and yet discountenancing their mutinous tendencies against the British. If he had not acted with much tact and judgment, the Gwalior Contingent would have marched to Agra in a body, and greatly imperiled the British ‘raj.’ Not only did he keep those troublesome troops near him during the remaining half of June, but also during July and August. Scindia’s special army, entirely under his own control, were chiefly Mahrattas, who had little sympathy with the soldiers of the Contingent; but they were too few in number to put down the latter, and therefore he was forced to temporise—partly by persuasions and promises, partly by threats. Major Macpherson, the British political agent, and Brigadier Ramsey, the military commandant, ceased to have influence at Gwalior; it was Scindia’s good faith alone that stood the British in stead.

Mount Aboo—Military Sanitarium in Rajpootana.