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    India's Historic Battles: Lucknow, 1857
    India's Historic Battles: Lucknow, 1857
    India's Historic Battles: Lucknow, 1857
    Ebook194 pages1 hour

    India's Historic Battles: Lucknow, 1857

    By Rosie Llewellyn Jones

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    The city of Lucknow was the epicentre of the uprising of 1857.

    In Lucknow, 1857 - part of a new series of books on India's historic battles - historian Rosie Llewellyn-Jones examines the conflict in detail, from the British annexation of Awadh to the Indian response nad the subsequent revolt by sepoys. The defeat of a unit of the East India Company's army at Chinhat led immediately to the siege of the extensive British Residency in the heart of the city. Here, nearly 3,000 people - British, Indian and Anglo-Indian - held out for four and a half months. The winter saw huge defensive barricades being built around Lucknow, but with their superior firepower, the British recapture was the inevitable outcome.

    This richly illustrated field guide draws on Llewellyn-Jones's intimate knowledge fo the city to paint a vivid picture of the events that unfolded in this historic urban battlefield.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 2, 2022
    ISBN9789354894107
    India's Historic Battles: Lucknow, 1857
    Author

    Rosie Llewellyn Jones

    Dr Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, MBE, studied Urdu and Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She was awarded a first-class honours degree and completed her PhD there, which was subsequentlly published as A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow in 1985. She visits the subcontinent as frequently as possible and was an invited speaker at a recent Jaipur Literature Festival. She has been the archivist at the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for ten years and a Council Member of the Royal Asiatic Society. She was awarded an MBE in 2015 for services to the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA) and British Indian studies.

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      Book preview

      India's Historic Battles - Rosie Llewellyn Jones

      Preface

      THE CITY OF LUCKNOW, SITUATED 250 miles south-east of Delhi, was the epicentre of revolt and the most bitterly contested site during the Uprising of 1857 and 1858. The prolonged siege of the British Residency, its eventual relief and the recapture of the city is one of the great epics of nineteenth-century history. It produced some of the most famous characters of the Uprising, including Begam Hazrat Mahal, a divorced queen with a teenage son who became king for a season, and the charismatic but quarrelsome Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah.

      Among the British were Brigadier General Sir Henry Lawrence, newly appointed chief commissioner of Awadh; Brigadier General Sir Henry Havelock, who repeatedly attempted to reach the besieged Residency and finally succeeded; Sir James Outram and Sir Colin Campbell, who recaptured the city, and the controversial Brigadier William Hodson. Many of the sites so fiercely defended, so desperately attacked, so poignant in their ruined state, still exist today. This book tells the story of those places and the people who fought and died there.

      Much was destroyed by the British after their recapture of the city in March 1858. The intricate passageways and little courts that wound through the riverbank palaces were all swept away. New roads were thrust through the garden palaces, dividing them in two. But the Residency compound, here called the garrison, was scrupulously preserved as a monument to the endurance of those besieged within it during the summer and autumn of 1857.

      The city at peace. Lucknow in 1856. Ahmad Ali Khan.

      Lucknow forms only a chapter in the history of the Uprising but it is an important chapter and by concentrating solely on the city, a more detailed picture of what happened there can be drawn.

      Rosie Llewellyn-Jones

      London, February 2022

      1

      Setting the Stage

      THERE WERE A NUMBER OF causes of the Uprising, also known as the Indian Mutiny, the Sepoy Rebellion or sometimes the First War of Independence, although the latter name is disputed. What began as an army mutiny, when Indian soldiers turned on their Br itish officers, quickly became a revolt against British rule, which spread across northern India. It started in May 1857 and was concluded by November 1858 with a general amnesty when the British government took over from the English East India Company. This was the start of the ‘British Raj’ or rule, which lasted until Independence. Lucknow was the capital of Awadh (also Oudh or Oude), a small kingdom that would fit comfortably into today’s Uttar Pradesh. There was a specific reason for the Uprising here and this was the annexation of the kingdom of Awadh by the East India Company, followed by radical and unpopular reforms.

      Battles

      Four major military events took place near and in Lucknow, which will be examined in detail in this book. They were:

      The siege of the Residency began on the night of 30 June and lasted for four and a half months until mid-November 1857. Although there was almost constant bombardment of the entire Residency area (around 33 acres) by Indian groups outside the perimeter and counter-attacks by those within, there were no pitched battles on the site.

      Background to the conflict

      Awadh had been ruled by the nawab wazirs, on behalf of the Mughal emperors, since 1720. The word nawab comes from the Persian ‘na’ib’ which means deputy. The first nawab, Burhan-ul-Mulk, had migrated from Naishapur in eastern Persia and became a trusted officer at the Mughal court in Delhi. When he was sent as governor to the province of Awadh to rule on the emperor’s behalf, Burhan-ul-Mulk realized that the once-great Mughals were rapidly losing their grip on power in India. Awadh was one of three provinces that now became independent of the empire. Burhan-ul-Mulk’s descendants were to rule Awadh for the next 136 years, until it was annexed by the East India Company in February 1856. The seventh nawab, Ghazi-ud-din Haider, had been offered the title of ‘king’ by the Company in order to bind him more closely to the British. There was no real change in his status, except that the nawabs now became kings and Awadh was therefore referred to as ‘the kingdom’. A British Resident, appointed by the Company to report back on the ruler and the court, lived in the Residency with his own large entourage and to many observers it seemed as if there were two centres of power in Lucknow—the king and the Resident.

      The British Residency before the siege. Charles Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny, 1858.

      Awadh had long been attractive to the East India Company, which had been making territorial gains in India since the mid-eighteenth century. It was a rich, fertile province lying in the Gangetic plain, which generated large sums of money for the nawabs from land revenue with smaller amounts coming from taxes on transport, trade and markets. After the capture of Delhi by the Company in 1803, Awadh acted as a geographical buffer between the old Mughal capital and the British capital at Calcutta. It was an annoying obstruction (in Company eyes) to its expansion into the Upper Provinces from its base in Bengal. Cawnpore (now Kanpur) and Allahabad, which had formerly been part of Awadh, had already been taken over by the Company but the bigger prize was Lucknow and the remaining territory of Awadh. The governor general, Lord Dalhousie, had pursued an aggressive forward policy during his time in office, deposing rulers and attaching kingdoms including the Punjab, to the Company’s expanding portfolio. Dalhousie was due to leave India in March 1856 and he admitted privately that he would like to add Awadh to his tally before he went: ‘I should not mind doing it as a parting coup,’ he said.

      The kingdom is taken over

      In December 1855, Sir James Outram, the new British Resident, was instructed by Dalhousie to offer the king, Wajid Ali Shah, the unpalatable choice of voluntarily stepping down and handing his kingdom over to the Company or having it forcibly annexed. The king refused to step down and so Awadh passed into the Company’s possession on 7 February 1856. There was none of the anticipated opposition at the time. The king had ordered his bodyguard to disarm and there was a mute, shocked silence as the Company took over the administration and began dismantling the trappings of royalty. Thirty thousand officers and men from the king’s army were discharged and pensioned off, but allowed to keep their weapons, which they had brought with them on signing up. Many of these soldiers were to form part of the fighting force against the Company the following year. They were to become ‘rebels’ through no fault of their own.

      A romanticized view of the British entry into Lucknow through the Rumi Gate. Charles Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny, 1858.

      Another unhappy group of people, and ready for a fight, were the taluqdars, the landholders of Awadh. Company officials, newly drafted in as administrators, had hastily passed the Summary Land Settlement Act of 1856, which was an attempt to regulate the collection of land revenue from the countryside. As a result, a number of hereditary taluqdars had much of their land taken away and in a few cases were actually imprisoned for debt because they could not meet the Company’s demands. Wealthy taluqdars could hold considerable numbers of villages, as many as two hundred in some cases. Revenue collecting runs right through the history of Awadh. Money due to the treasury often had to be extracted by force when landholders either refused to pay up, or were unable to do so. Soldiers from the king’s army were used to surround the mud-brick forts which dotted the countryside, isolated by the surrounding jungle or by deep trenches. Iron safes were cemented into the floors of the forts, where specie was kept. The forts were guarded by part-time soldiers, one or two hundred around the smaller structures but as many as 2,000 at larger establishments, with cavalry too. They could draw on the fort’s armoury for weapons, which included small cannon. These private armies were paid directly by the taluqdar and so they not only relied on him for a living, but had a certain loyalty to their master as well. When some of the largest landowning taluqdars like Raja Nawab Ali Khan of Mahmudabad, Loni Singh of Mitauli and Raja Beni Madhao Singh of Amethi joined the Uprising in June 1857 and provided support to the still amorphous opposition gathering around Lucknow, their private armies came with them too.

      Mahmudabad Qila, a taluqdar stronghold about thirty miles from Lucknow, 1976. Author’s collection.

      ‘Plan of the entrenched position of the British Garrison at Lucknow 1857’. Captain F.H.M. Sitwell.

      Scale 400 feet to 1 inch. Overall size: 26 inches x 40 inches.

      The city of Lucknow

      At the time of the Uprising, there were two distinct ‘parts’ to Lucknow, the old medieval area marked on British maps as ‘dense city’ and the new, post-1775 nawabi area that ran along the southern bank of the Gomti river. Three large palace complexes had been erected there, two of which, the Chattar Manzil and the Qaisarbagh, featured prominently in the Uprising. The Haider canal with its deeply cut sides marked the southern boundary of the city and was crossed by the Charbagh bridge, a pinch-point into the city and the scene of fierce fighting. On the far side of the canal

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