title: 3. Mutiny, Uprising, and Rebellion
author: Empire
contenttype: podcast
publication: Empire
published: 2022-08-22T21:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR6943835358.mp3?updated=1703674337
word_count: 8784
If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, ad free listening and a weekly newsletter sign up to MPa Club at www.mpa.orguk.com Hello and welcome to MPa with me Anita Arnon And me William Del Rampola So this is so very much your territory William and I'm absolutely just absorbed by these amazing stories and we left the last podcast with Eastern Deer Company at the very height of its powers these are the glory days of this corporation that has become a country eater if you like 1799 that's about the period but then things start to change after the impeachment of Warren Hastings which we talked about in the last podcast something happens in Britain where they start allowing other companies in so they start just slicing bits off East India Company interest and allowing others why do they do that so it's a very interesting story and you've got to look at this today from the point of view of you know the great corporations of our time we we live with companies like Tesla and and and Facebook and ExxonMobil these Walmart these vast multinational companies Amazon and in some ways they are more powerful the states you know a big company like Amazon or Walmart has a turnover greater than most countries in sub zaharan Africa a country a company like Amazon has a turnover greater than most countries in Europe only America can have a greater wealth than that than it and what you see with the company is that for much of its career while you know it's most famous for bringing down governments in India and bringing down first the Rajadayala then to Bussalta and then the Maratis and so on at the same time it's also in a sense challenging the British state because first of all as early as 1690 which just 90 years into its existence it's caught bribing parliamentarians in the first ever case of corporate corruption in the world a corporation rallies is that it can use its wealth and give wards of cash to MPs I mean this is lobbying to and corruption together isn't it I mean this is but it's a big company and know of this this phrase exactly I mean this sort of goes on in you know there are shenanigans like this in every democracy in the world and and this is why people have to monitor this sort of thing but the company invents it so they are literally bribing MPs because of this vital issue that the company has got a monopoly on all trade to the east of the Capricorn hope so let's say that I'm a big entrepreneur in London and I suddenly want to get into the textile trade and I fancy that I can take my ship to to Calcutta and I can load up from cotton sell it for profit back in Liverpool wherever I've come from but I can't because the minute I write docket Calcutta the the east of the company can arrest me and can say I've got the rights of a monopoly by the royal charter therefore you are breaking the law and and we can put you in prison so this carries on and what you find is that the company not only is playing Indian rulers against each other and there's a crucial moment very early on which I think is very much it reminds me of the way the Amazon behaves for example there's one moment when the company soon after the founding of Madras the Nawab of the Canatic who's the local boss of the area turns up and says you guys haven't paid a penny of tax for 10 years he surrounds the city and looks like he's got a margin and and and kill everybody and the company doesn't send an army at it sends one man called Manuchi who's a fluent Persian speaker and he says to him look you can kill every one of us that's fine but the people that will suffer are your weavers and your traders they will they will have no no business they will have nothing to do they will be unemployed and they will die of starvation and the business will go just up the coast to to a rissa or to or to Bengal exactly the language that the guys use today when when you know someone tries to tax them they'll just move their business to Dublin or wherever it is or to the Bahamas and you see throughout the 18th century this battle between the power of the corporation and the power of the British state and the company weakens for the first time because it looks for a long time so the company is going to be more powerful for example not only can it after it gives up trying to just blatantly bribe MPs which is its initial strategy it realizes that you can love you people that you can take them out to lunch that you can offer them places on the board you can do all sorts of things just like modern corporations do and they also realize that retired company returnees who've come back to Great Britain can buy rotten barris and get themselves elected to parliament by the 1780s you've got a quarter of parliament of returned East India company men who basically bought their seats with their Indian earnings so there's a huge fear in in Britain the East India company's not any good takeover but in the box it totally subverted and then on top of that there's a there's some figures that show that some points as many as two-thirds of the MPs have shares in the East India company so they're not going to pass any legislation which which does in their savings but in the end the tide turns it begins to turn in 1780 when the regulating act is is passed the company's bailed out in return for a 50% share by the Crown and that increases in the years that follow and the big cut is in the early 19th century when the monopolies broke and finally after years of lobbying by other interest groups and this is greatly connected with the opium trade there's all sorts of traders they want to get their their hands on the narco business and it's their influence as much as anything else the eventually needs parliament to pass a lack which allows other traders to operate in in deer and to the east do they chip away sufficiently to really change what the East India company is for you know does it does it become something different to the the big octopus trading company that it does so a lot you know a lot of the money goes to to Lena fit her operators like Jardine Matheson who end up making all the the narco fortunes and just like that they're like the medallined cartel they're like Pablo Escobar but in 18th century Hong Kong rather than in in the early 19th century Hong Kong rather than in 20th century Colombia and so eventually the the company has its right to trade removed altogether it ceases to be involved in business I think in the 1840s and becomes just a governing corporation and and the final stage which we'll see is when is is after the great uprising in 1857 when the companies have all its short together but we'll come to that we'll come to that but I mean there is I mean perhaps we won't go into it in too much detail but sort of aiding and abetting the limitation of the East India company you have a certain amount of local trouble in Afghanistan don't you I mean can we touch on it without going because I know we might do a whole podcast so it's the first time that the company has a really major reverse and loses an entire army and in the 1839 having already now turned the Ganges into a sort of British motorway where steamships can sail up and down to particularly al-Habad is the great port and they make a fortune trading up and down right through the heartland of India initially exporting Indian goods to England by the beginning of the 19th century operating in reverse with importing British goods to India and the dream that they have which is totally impractical but they think they can do it is to do the same with the Indus in fact the Indus is far more difficult to trade on because it's a flat it's a far shallower river and you can't get steamships up the Indus in the same way you can't the Ganges but that doesn't stop them dreaming of doing this and they have this idea that just like they've taken over the whole of the United provinces what does now it would to produce and taken over the heartland of India for British trade they can now do the same in Central Asia and they can sail their steamships up the Indus and bring all the goods that used to be the caravans coming from Tartaray and from Central Asia and flood it all with because now we have industrialisation in England and flood it with Manchester cotton and the manufacturers of Manchester will suddenly pour into the stards I mean that's the plan but it doesn't work out it doesn't work out because the tries to take over Afghanistan on the on the cheap and the Afghans won't have it so in 1842 there's the famous retreat from Kabul there's a massive uprising and an entire army is lost in legend one man Dr. Brighton makes it through to Jalalabad this is a subject for another day it's a wonderful story but I think it's really useful because you know when we talk about the Ganges becoming like a motorway or you know trying to turn the Indus Valley into another thoroughfare this is not happening in a vacuum there are people in India there are people governing and living their lives in India can we focus in on one particular area I know it's it's an area great expertise for you but can we look at Delhi which is now the capital but it's also such an interesting crossroads in history and why don't we start at that point where the Eastern do company now has kind of lost its monopoly it is a governing body and we're looking sort of around about 10 of the century what is happening in Delhi and sure so this is so this is the 1803 the company defeats the marathas and takes over the person of the Mogul Emperor now this is the descendant of of of Shah Jahan Akbar or Anxib these rulers who had turned the whole of India Pakistan Bangladesh and Afghanistan into their personal empire but now the still a descendant of theirs on the throne and the red fort in Delhi but he doesn't even rule the whole of Delhi a British resident from 1803 becomes the real power in Delhi governing the municipality and so the Mogul Emperor and the famous last Mogul Emperor is called Zafar which means victory ironically you know he never won any battle but Bahadur Shah Zafar is sitting in the red fort but he is a remarkable man this is a man that has no money has no resources he can't send an army anywhere he certainly can't build the Taj Mahal like Shah Jahan had done but what he can do is inspire his people to the arts and in this wonderful last moment which which the British called the golden calm and which lovers of Urdu poetry regardless you know the great golden age of Urdu similar to what I suppose you know the English theatre was to the age of Shakespeare and Marlow in Delhi at this period you suddenly have these fantastic geniuses so I mean we're talking about poets who are quoted even today so you know the poet laureate is a guy called Zolk isn't he and then there's Garlib who everybody anybody has any connection with India knows something of Garlib which you might be reading something of the poetry of the time so we get a flavor of what it's like what I'm going to read is actually not a bit of Garlib's poetry but one of his letters just to give you a flavor of who he is Garlib is this peacock who knows he's a genius and can't quite get over the slightly dull Zolk has been given the job of poet laureate not him and I think this letter sums up who Garlib is this is written to a friend whose girlfriend is just dying and the man is in mourning and Garlib says cut it out. Mirza Sab I don't like the way you're going on in the days of my lusty youth the man of perfect wisdom cancelled me abstinence I do I do not approve of disilluteness I do not forbid eat drink and be merry but remember that the wisefly settles on the sugar and not on the honey what I've always acted on this cancel you cannot mourn another's death unless you live yourself give thanks to god for your freedom and do not grieve when I think of paradise consider how if my sins are forgiven me and I am installed in a palace with the hurry to live forever in that worthy woman's company I'm filled with fear and dismay how we're is him to always find her there a greater burden than a man could bear the same old palace all of emerald made the same old fruit treat to cast its shade and god preserve her from all harm the same old hurry on my arm come to your senses brother and take another take a new woman with each returning spring for last year's almanac is a useless thing men so gale was definitely a man and lived in a very decadent age but an age which is remembered in india as well it's just so productive for beautiful things beautiful words beautiful music beautiful music beautiful poetry and the golden age of or do poetry and but also and I think this is very interesting a time of great learning and today you know we don't associate madrasas with with high scholarly achievement but let me read you another short passage so this is a man called Henry Sleeman this is how he describes the madrasas of deli at this period perhaps there are few communities in the world he writes among whom education is more generally diffused than the mohabadins of india he who holds an office worth 20 rupees a month commonly gives his sons an education equal to one of our prime ministers they learn through the medium of arabic and personal languages what young men and archaeologists learn through those of greek and latin that is grammar rhetoric and logic after seven years of study the young mohamadin binds his turban upon ahead almost as well filled with things which are pertain to those branches of knowledge as a young man roar from Oxford he will talk us fluently about socrates in Aristotle play tone depocrates garland avocena a lie socrates Aristotleis afflatoon bocrat jellinos and buallisena and what is much to his advantage in india is that the languages in which he has learnt and what he knows are those that he will require throughout his life so what you have in this brief and gorgeous moment is a world where the mohars have lost power but they have not lost their civilization and the whole of india looks to deli as a center of culture learning in a school of manners i mean isn't this interesting because it is the decline of the muggle empire empire is almost on a parallel track to the decline of the east india company and those those those dates are the sun sets on both in a way so so what's really fascinating about this is you know as you say sort of challenges the straight jacket of what we assume we know of what madrasas were like but also it challenges what we know of the british in india as well don't we because there is not this superiority there is not this separation that data becomes the the byword for the Raj it's different isn't it the the white muggles that you write about so well it's completely different and it's and it's very surprising if you come to it having only a thought of the Raj as being like cousin and kippling and east as east and west as west in the early days of the british in deli but also at the same time in tans like luck now and the hydra band the british officials are so taken with this poetic artistic prosperous cultured life in muggle india that many of them take local wives or girlfriends many of them have angloindian children live in a world which is half muggle they you know they will wear muggle robes they may meet eat tali's on on on muggle dishes they may sit on the floor rather than on chairs they make a commission muggle artists and have them in their house painting away while they're getting on with their their official work and in deli particularly you have this the the the first british resident is a man called sedavid octaloni he's a scot though he's born in boston a refugee from the american revolution which has kicked all the brits out of america and he comes to indian and plans never to and he has allegedly thirteen indian wives each of whom has her own elephant and every day they do this loop around the red fort i heard about this he has you know they're parade of love exactly and his assistant is a man called william phraser william phraser is a great Persian scholar he's interested in sufi and islamic philosophy any relation to your wife and he is a distant relation of my wife and he commissions the great phraser album which is the the highlight of of what is called company school painting which is basically muggle painting but commissioned by by east india company officials and so you have this brief moment where it looks like the two worlds can join in a fruitful fashion even though the power is with the east india company and even though the east india company is still this militaristic and extractive force but of course it doesn't last and by the eighteen thirties this world is is dying off the kind of white moguls who grow their beards and wearing dyn robes become regarded as figures of fun rather than the norm is it simplistic to say that this honeymoon period is kind of ruined by god that actually it is it is the the arrival of missionaries who are seeking to save indian souls several things are going on at once so first of all this is just the fact of east india company power alongside the extraction and the looting that the east india company does there has been from the 1780s an interest in Indian culture we talked earlier about about William Jones and and Hastings and the Royal Ageatic Society that on a social basis is is matched by mass into marriage and the 1780s one in three brits are leaving their wills money to either Indian women or to Anglo-Indian children so far more than than we realize there is a whole mixed world developing with full of Anglo-Indian children and kids that speak both sets of languages and parents that are interested in each other's lives and the Indian women sometimes sit in chairs and wear western clothes and use live and forks the the British men are sometimes sitting on the floor eating with their hands taking part in mucle moshiras or poetry contest and you know it looks rather attractive world and you think this is wonderful but of course it doesn't last and the reason is power once the brits have got supreme power they begin to show their racism they begin to look down on Indians they begin to behave as if all Indians are inferior creatures and this comes alongside a wave of even gelical Christianity which teaches its adherence not to admire Hinduism as a source of ancient knowledge with William Jones you know reads the Mahabharat with wonder and prefers it to the Iliad in the Odyssey but men 40 years later just see this as poor benighted heathens with their foolish fables oh I mean I've actually read tracks from from early missionaries who say this is Satanism this is Satan speaking through this this strange alphabet and this comes to Delhi that kind of attitude with one man in particular a man called the Reverend Jennings so I think arrives in the 1840s and he has the goal to set himself up in the gateway of the red fort where he puts a printing press that produces tracks exactly of that sort calling Hinduism the religion of the devil and denouncing Islam as as a form of Satanism as you'd say and converting not many only a handful but enough people for there to be real anger and and I'm not knowing a lot and knowing a lot of people and fatally to the company begin having been initially rather suspicious of the missionaries as this evangelical further grows in Britain and is exported with evangelicals running the company you begin to find the company drawing close to the missionaries so they're given official residences they are allowed to travel and company horses and and use company transport and so on and in Indian eyes the two become linked and people begin to think that we have a company that wants to convert us to Christianity this doesn't sound like it's going to end well let's take a break and join us after the break and we find out what happens next so just before the break things are starting after this beautiful golden age of poetry and I love I love this idea of sort of poets great poets you know embarking on what what is the equivalent today of a rap battle to try produce them is beautiful and verse they're given they're given a meter in the morning and they have to come out with with with verses in that meter and they pass it back because in forwards like a rap battle and one poet at one side of the room will give a couplet and then the other person is looking to get another guy has to continue it and they've given basically a morning to prepare rhyme schemes and so on and it and it it all sounds rather lovely but just before the break we were talking about the the arrival of the missionaries and the behavior of the missionaries and then suddenly there is after the time of octaloni who falls in love with many a brown woman there is now the other ring of the brown people they are less they are in league with Satan and we can actually see this decline statistically it doesn't just a feeling that historians kind of might have I said earlier how so many of these company kids who are sent out at 16 just die and this needs to end this legal disputes with the company and they're bored of having to fight off relatives who think they should have been left of fortune in India so they pass the law that the every company servant that goes out to India has to have a will made and he has to keep it in in in London right and can update it and all these will survive there in the British Library today you can get out of volume and they're by years so there's you know 1787 85 and so on and they're enormous volumes they're heavy as a crate of wine big leather band volumes and if you look at the 1780s volumes one in three company men is leaving everything to the Indian woman it's down to about one in four by 1800 down to about one in five by 1820 and by 1840 it's kind of over there are no mention of brown women at all that doesn't mean of course that yeah sex is going on and not taking wives in inverted comments and but it's now listed it's now hidden it's now definitely not recorded in legal documents and so you have a chilling in a separation and when I was writing the last mogul which is the book I written about this you get the impression very clearly that there are two not only two different worlds living side by side but even different sort of time timelines and on each day so the brits are getting up sort of four in the morning and going riding and cantering round and then they're going on parade and then they're doing their business and they're kind of days it's kind of pretty well finished by lunchtime this is when the moguls are getting up and we are and we are and we are definitely with them too and they the moguls sort of you know have the begin to sort of made sort of venture out of bed and just reach for breakfast second breakfast in two hours time and then you have the purge competition about nine o'clock at night just as the brits are going to sleep yeah and and they're just sort of leaving the coties of the quarters and at six in the morning when the when the brits are coming back from their morning ride the two will meet briefly but heading in the opposite direction and this is literally that the two sides have lost the ability really to communicate with each other that there is now a complete separation and this brief moment you had when they all joined in these these utilitarians these evangelicals dislike India they regard it as an inferior heathen pagan culture and that is manifested daily when for example collectors will put up that is the what the officials are called by the state and their job is just to collect tax and they put up the 10 commandments in India outside their collector or when evangelical kernels will start reading summons to their Brahmin seapoids on parade and as you say this is clearly not going to end well well yes I mean is it is it fanciiful say because we are now approaching that date that date that changes everything and and officially and encodes that kind of racism that you're you're describing starting to bubble up which is 1857 is it possible that you know how they kept the same hours all this all this might have been avoided and I it's a silly oh it's partly silly but I wonder actually if you are having two people who understand each other and talk to each other more and can just explain to each other what is going on a bit better and don't live in steep suspicion of each other there's a huge array of different issues growing I mean first of all just the the bridge behaving more and more badly more exclusively in the early days you know Indians were admitted to their houses and there was never you know we don't want to create this as a sort of garden of Eden situation because it was always a racist society and it was always a certain degree of mutual dislike but you also had these men who clearly went over culturally and and and really did love the country and really did love Indian women and really loved their angu Indian children and really took an interest in poetry and theology and sufism and admired the madrasas and that just gives way to sort of loathing and disdain yeah disgust and white holy areas and you know you know you know you the human beings the humiliation of anyone who dares to even you know they're shadowed to fall over across these things and the Indians feel it and you find in the letters this time that they're aware of this growing disdain this growing dislike and they hit it and they bridle under this and a few of them this is a character called as in Malakhan who goes to London he's incredibly handsome young Muslim noble money has an affair with various society ladies but on his way back he goes to the Crimea and he sees the British being defeated by the Russians at this stage of the Crimean War and he says you know we can do this too and he comes back and begins to organize and you get the beginnings of a of a really serious resistance growing across the country but what sparks off the big uprising and it has so many different you know there are so many ways you can resent what's happening in India and the way that the British are dominating and being rude and vile and arrogant and racist but what sparks it off is religion and particularly the notion that the British are not just keen to convert you but are about to convert you by force so the cartoonish version of this is that bullets were handed out to Indian sea boys that were covered in pig fat and the phrase by the bullet comes because you would have to bite into these things poor the gunpowder into your gun and fire it now for Muslims pig fat immediately as a no no also for Hindus who you know it can drag you out of cast and if you are out of cast then you are out of the cycle of reincarnation your soul is forever cut loose it cannot come back it cannot be in the cycle of regeneration so this is the worst thing that can happen is it true it's kind of true elements that are true so what happens is that we talked about the defeat of the East India company armies by the Afghans in the first Afgham war and what one of the main reasons that is the Afghans have these jazails which fire very long distances while the British still have these old fashioned brown best muskets the same gun that was used at the Battle of Kaladin for example and they can't fall back so the company decides to replace the entire stock of East India company army guns with the Enfield rifle now the Enfield rifle has rifling in the barrel which means that the bullet spins the ball spins and goes further and more accurately but it's much more difficult to get down the barrel when your muzzle loading when you're pushing the stuff down from the front and so you get around the rifling by greasing the cartridge and the idea is you bite the top off you pour it in the barrel and you ram it down now I don't think these are ever actually issued to the sea poise but they're issued to the white troops initially and rumors begin to spread that they are covered with this this this this fat now this seems to be actually some error at the dum dum arsenal because not only was the the fat offensive richially to both hindus and Muslims it was also offensive to white troops had to bite because it was coated thickly on like badly and you don't want to bite this you know it's horrible it's horrible to taste because you're mass full of full of vazeline you don't want it and already the atmosphere is so fraught to the stories of kernels trying to convert their troops and missionaries allied to the company going out into the bazaars and turning people into Christians that the two are put together and and the effort to put emfield rifles into the eastern economy army is taken to be a signal that the British are about to convert all their troops and maybe the whole of India to Christianity and the flashpoint comes on the 11th of May 1857 when the rifles issued to old Afghan veterans who fought and and survived this Afghan war loyal troops who've given their whole life to company service and they're told to bite these bullets and use them they refuse to do so and they are arrested and sentenced to hard labor and that night their brethren free them from the lock up and turn on their troops who at this point have gone to even song in the church in in in mirrored where the mutiny breaks out and at this point it is just a mutiny it's just the soldiers mutinyering against their officers but they then ride down to Delhi the following morning and ride into the town massacre all the Christians and immediately it stops being a simple mutiny and becomes an uprising of the people of India this is the signal that they're waiting for and that and but basically it is the Indian Christians as well as the British Christians who are massacred on that first day so it is it isn't a white thing it is a it is a conversion thing it seems to be a religion thing can I can I just say in it from the Indian perspective you know the first bullet that is fired is fired I mean people everybody knows his name mongol pande is the name of the first man who fires at his commanding officer saying we will not do this you will not make us do this and he is in the hagiography of India almost in a saint like position Indians don't cope so well with the massacres that happen afterwards but they do talk a lot about the reprisals so the number of answers to that individual so mongol pande definitely was one of the first people to rise up but there's no evidence I've seen in five years of research in the papers in Delhi that anyone in Delhi knew knew his name he's made a pan Indian hero in the 20th century by a writer called Vyersavaka who's now the the the totemic sort of inspiration behind the RSS and the current BJP government and Vyersavaka writes about called the first war of independence which is a rewriting of this history which puts him on front but one of the things that Savaka is sort of covering over is what is to Hindu nationalist and embarrassing fact that an army which is 90% Hindu Brahmin and Rajput goes actually to Delhi 100,000 out of the 160,000 troops of mutiny go straight to Delhi and put the mogul emperor back on the throne now today that's obviously anathema to the RSS and what you have is in in May 1857 these Rajput and Brahmin Hindu sea poise throwing off their allegiance to the East India Company and going to put the mogul emperor back on the throne and they turn up at the red fort on the 12th of May 1857 the day after they mutiny didn't be wrote and they said lead us and this poet emperor who is a Sufi he's 82 years old in his youth he was a great sportsman and may well have been up for dramatic military events in that period in his life but he's now 82 he's a bit dotty his whole life is poetry you know he's no Che Guevara he's the wrong guy and his sons aren't up too much so the uprising instantly has a problem because there's no leadership and the different regiments which have mutinyed against their offices individually and come to Delhi are still under those individual offices and none will sort of willingly obey another regimen and so while you have an amazing take up of this uprising initially in the Bengal army and then in the populace and in the Bengal army I think the figures out that there are 169,000 soldiers in the Bengal army there's also Madras army and there's also Bombay army but it's the Bengal army which mutinies out of the 169,000 sea poise in the Bengal army 139,000 mutiny and 100,000 march to Delhi so suddenly from all over Northern India these files of troops who have either shot dead their offices or just walked out of their barracks are heading for Delhi and this enormous number of troops turn up and initially they come with ammunition and with food and with horses and with fodder and all the stuff that they do any normal functioning military unit would have but because the very racist policy of the Brits was always never to allow Indians to rise above subordial level which is kind of sergeant level they haven't got any idea of of greater strategy and there's a few remarkable men among them like Bhakt Khan who do have a sense of strategy in innate sense of strategy but they're not trained to think strategically they're trained to obey orders and they don't have enough after a couple of months they don't have enough weaponry they don't have enough ammunition they try and turn the firework makers of Delhi into arms factories but that doesn't work and famine soon breaks out in the city and the Brits come back the first there's a small army on the ridge and though the mutiny is spread now right down the Gangeshik plain through Kampur and Lucknow Delhi remains the focus I mean you've said the K-Wed Kampur so Kampur is the scene of something that galvanizes the British they're panicking already because just the sheer movement of Indian troops converging on one place must be terrifying but then they are there are reports of what has happened in Kampur the slaughter of women and children shoes of babies found in the mud how much of that is propagandar how much of it is real so the massacre is real the stories of rapes of fiction and I've gone quite closely into this in Delhi which was the area of my study and there are some horrific murders children are pinned against the walls there are vile scenes of bloodletting at the beginning are these by sea poise are these sort of opportunistic thugs who sort of get swept up in the both very quickly that which is why India's object to the phrase mutiny because while it starts as a mutiny unequivocally it very quickly spreads into an uprising supported by many parts of the population interestingly though the sea poise who are from Bihar and are known by the people of Delhi as Telingers because they originally were recruited from Telangana people like like Ghalib who are these very sort of snotty aristocrats regard these as barbarians the poet Ghalib to remind people yeah yeah yeah what are these soldiers from far away doing in our civilized city so it doesn't like there's a universal take up but there's a large take up and it looks very very shaky for the British but by the end of the 12th of May 1857 the telegraph operators the telegraph has just been sent and spread out the wires across India and telegraph operators managed to get the news out and they tipped up on most code that Delhi has written the sea poise are here they are killing and that message gets crucially to Lahore so that by dawn the next day all the sea poise there are disarmed by the very few white troops they're put out of parade they're made to pile up their arms and then they have the guns turned on them and they're turned away they have to leave their weapons behind them from that moment there is resistance by the by the very small number of white troops and they managed to recruit whole new armies from the Sikhs who remain loyal to the company and from the waziris and the pashdunes of the frontier who are delighted for an opportunity to to get another crack at luting Delhi which they haven't done for a bit and there's still legends among their people of all the riches of Delhi and the beauty of Delhi women and so on so they sign up for this I know there's a lot of sort of anxiety and soul searching over why the Sikhs join the British who you know have at this point they've you know two Anglo-Sikh Wars later and the deposition of a boy king which has caused so much grief is a possible explanation those who fought in those Anglo-Sikh Wars are the very seapoise now who they're being asked to go and get their own back against is that could that be a possible explanation that's also said to me the case yeah I mean I haven't studied the Punjab in detail so I can't confirm that but certainly you read in the literature that the Sikhs see it as an opportunity to get back at the at the the eastern Delhi company seapoise and why they wouldn't want to get back at the eastern Delhi company offices I know it is really left unexplained by this thing whatever happened yeah we're perfectly true but whatever happens with so with greater numbers the telegraph is called people there are native soldiers who are joining the British side and they push back and they push back very very hard and two or three things in a sense save the company at this but firstly it doesn't really spread south of the vindias the whole of south injuries is more or less peaceful there are odd outbreaks in some places and a whole variety of different groups rise up some tribal groups for example take the opportunity you get the famous Rani of Jansi rising up in in Madhya Pradesh. No one in the pantheon of nationalistic goddesses yeah and many of the British allied rulers the the people who will be later be called the Maharajas remain loyal to the company and they hold things together so from what looks initially like a complete catastrophe slowly the British fight back the seapoise are uncoordinated they haven't got the weapons they haven't got the ammunition they don't go on the strategic offensive and so by the mid-summer a lot of the seapoise are unpaid unfaid they go home there's the harvest and they want to get they want to go back to their fields so the numbers begin to drop and from a peak of about a hundred thousand in Delhi it sinks to about fifty thousand by August and the final act which is very tragic because now the city is being bombarded by a a British force up on the ridge overlooking the city there is famine there is disease the city is is is not completely but pretty well besieged no food is coming and the people of Delhi have not asked for any of this and the rest of the remind us of the middle they haven't really not asked for any of this they're just some of the enthusiastic supporters of this uprising some likes offer feel that they're caught between two forces they can't and that they can't win whatever they can get out and they can't get out yeah and so finally in early September 1857 the big guns are pulled by elephants down from the the big arsenal at Farozipur and this line of enormous cannons including you know what effect of the big superguns of their day are lined up outside the gate of the city known as the Keshe Meary Gate and on the 12th of September 1857 they go in and there is amazing resistance one of the great heroic moments these guys who've given up everything and got nothing to lose fight to the death and by the end of that day the British have been held just about a hundred yards into Keshe Meary Gate they've got through the gate but they haven't got further and for five days those flat battle lines hold and it could go either way the whole fate of India and the whole fate of the British in India and then by pure bad fluke on the fifth day there is an eclipse and this even today I've been in in in India today people will hide inside to avoid the bad luck of the eclipse it's considered to be the the day of ultimate bad luck if you're a high-casten do you will draw the curtains and not go out you won't go to offices you won't do anything on the day of the eclipse and by pure ill fortune everyone's forgotten this is coming because it's the middle of a war suddenly at midday the sun goes black the next morning when the British wake up the trenches opposite them are deserted and they gingerly step forward thinking this may be an ambush there may be some trap but the trenches are empty the guys have fled they think this is the sign of the end of the dynasty escaped bad luck and and and and they've allowed them in and Zafar at this point relises it's all over and he takes his family a most sacred relics a hair of the prophet and and various sacred texts and he floats down the river gives it to the great Sufi Shrine in the Zamodine and awaits his fate in Humayun's tomb but meanwhile the Brits are going in and it's one of the most terrific moments in all British Indian history now it's so okay so Indians make much of what happens next and it is often referred to as the devil's wind that blows over India which is just a scene of mass slaughter men, women and children no matter and it's it's almost fueled into some fever dream of violence because of those stories that had been perhaps as you're saying you know inflated from from Karpur and so on but it is bad it is not just bad and I think it's it's not remembered enough I mean it's far far worse than say Jolly Mwala Bagh which is that which we'll talk about in a later podcast which is remembered as the worst massacre the British did it wasn't this is on an infinitely greater scale in Delhi the gates are shut and every male above the age of 16 is regarded as an enemy competent and is beneted and this isn't sort of you know woke imaginings of some sort of hip historians or something this is there in the British letters themselves here is Edward Viber age 19 the orders went out to shoot every soul it was literally murder I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but one such I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again the women were all spared but their screams on seeing their sons and husbands butchered were most painful heaven knows I feel no pity but when some old grey bearded man is brought before you and shot before your eyes hard must be that man's heart I think who could look on within difference there are also stories of I mean just cruel brutality so in carnpool reports that Indians are told to lick up the blood that has been spilled of British people killed by the sea poise they have to lick it up humiliations also old men strapped to cannons and cannons fired while they're strapped to them this is the description of the British then leaving Delhi to follow the mutiners who fled to Lucknow the march out of the city was simply awful this is a guy called Richard Butter our advanced guard consisting of cavalry and artillery had burst and squashed the dead bodies which lay swelled to an enormous size in the Chani chag and the stench was fearful men and officers were sick all round and I thought we'd never get through the city it was a ride I don't care ever to take again and the horse felt it as much as I did for he snorted and shook as he slid rather than walked over the abominations with which the street was covered dead bodies were strewn in all directions in every attitude that the death struggle had caused them to assume in every stage of decomposition in many cases the positions of the bodies were appallingly lifelike some lay with their arms up lifted as if beckoning and indeed the whole scene was weird and terrible beyond description the atmosphere was unimaginably disgusting laden as it was with the most noxious and sickening odours and so this devil's wind continues to sweep across India pursuing what's left of the mutiners but it also blows a change through British government thinking doesn't it that if this can happen on company watch something's got to change so this is the thing which ends not just the mogul dynasty but also the East India company and from this moment as reports reach that they ran you can't possibly have a corporation governing our greatest colony as they nasi it we've got to go in ourselves and govern it properly so for the first time you get talk about the actual what we would call I suppose the nationalization of the East India company but before that happens they've got to do something with them with the mogul emperor and he's ready patched up a deal on his surrender with the man called Hodson that he won't be shot but he is put on trial and by this stage he's lost it he's seen his sons slaughtered before him he's seen his city half destroyed and he sits crouching on a charpoi winding and unwinding his turban offering no defense when he's put on trial and there's a description of him sitting in the cell just writing he's been bitten pen and paper but he's writing poetry with a burnt stick on the wall and years later people start performing what they say of these last verses this is translated by another deli ex I'll call Amidali when in silks you came and dazzled me with the beauty of your spring you brought a flower to bloom loved within my being you lived with me breath of my breath being in my being nor left my side but now the wheel of time has turned and you are gone no joys abide you pressed your lips upon my lips your heart upon my beating heart and I have no wish to fall in love again but they who sold loves remedy have shot shop and I seek in vain my life now gives no ray of light I bring no solace to heart or eye out of dust to dust again of no use to anyone am I deli was once a paradise where love held sway unrained but its charms lie ravished now and only ruins remain no tears were shed when shroudless they were laid in common graves no prayers were read for the noble dead on mark to remain their graves the heart distressed the wounded flesh the mind ablaze the rising sigh the drop of blood the broken heart tears on the lashes the eye but things cannot remain as offer thus or who can tell through God's great mercy and the prophet all may yet be well the last muggle emperor has fallen the east India company is on its way out and the era of the British Raj is about to begin you've been listening to empire with me and nita anand and me william darum pa you'll miss again