If you wish to test the veracity and significance of the Italian old adage ‘Vengeance sleeps long, but never dies’, you will only have to leaf through the bloodstained pages of Delhi’s gory story during September 1857-March 1858. During these bloody six months, Delhi, the hollowed capital of Muslim rule in India for over six centuries, underwent the most traumatic experience of being at the receiving end of the bloodiest vengeance of a conquering army in her long, chequered history.
Here, in its boulevards, streets and lanes as well as its forts, palaces and humbler dwellings, stalked and strutted about, relentlessly and brazen-faced, for about six months, this monster — British vengeance. And what modes did this vengeance take? Tormenting and torturing princes and populace alike; knifing them and hanging them; bayonetting them, blowing them from the mouth of the guns, subjecting them to slow death by amputation and other devilish devices that fiends have ever conceived in their worst moments of barbarity.
Even Governor-General Lord Canning was constrained to acknowledge: “There is a rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad, even among many who ought to set a better example, which it is impossible to contemplate without a feeling of shame for one’s countrymen. Not one man in ten seems to think that the hanging and shooting of 40,000 or 50,000 men can be otherwise than practicable and right” (quoted in Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal, p. 54). A low figure indeed to atone for the ‘crimes’ of the ‘mutineers’!
In Delhi alone, the number of persons executed (only executed) was no less than 27,000, according to Qaysar al-Tawarikh (vol II, p. 454). After all, were not the British entitled to exact a fulsome retribution for the natives ‘crimes’? Why, then, should the Begum of Oudh ever think of anyone ever dreaming that the English could forgive an ‘offence’? No, the English would not forgive any offence — not during the ‘mutiny’ days, in any case. Such a calamity is simply unthinkable in the flush of ‘victory’. No, they would even punish the innocence, if only to give their enemies, still abroad, a stern lesson in discipline, in loyalty, in slavery.
Otherwise, how would you account for 27,000 executions in the city of Delhi alone? What if only about 100 Europeans, besides British officers, were murdered, some 50 of them prisoners — men, women and children — on May 11 and 16, at Delhi? After all, British ‘justice’ at this critical juncture of their rule in the subcontinent has its own way of taking for granted that each and every Sepoy and citizen in the city was responsible for their murder. What, then, hamstrings British ‘justice’ to bring every living soul in the city to summary trial and slow death? After all, is not one European life worth more than a hundred cheap native heads? Such, it seems, was the grotesque British logic when its hordes triumphantly entered the imperial city of Delhi as victors on September 21, 1857.
In a letter to the Bombay Telegraph, reports Montgomery Martin: “All the city people found within the walls when our troops entered were bayonetted on the spot; and the number was considerable, as you may suppose, when I tell you that in some houses, 40 and 50 persons were hiding. These were not mutineers, but residents of the city, who trusted to our well-known mild rule for pardon. I am glad to say they were disappointed” (quoted in Thompson, p. 75).
“Harmless citizens were shot, clasping their hands for mercy. Trembling old men were cut down. And these panic-stricken wretches, hiding about in holes and corners, when found, entreated the ‘Sahib log’ to shoot them at once, and not cut them with cold steel” (R.M. Martin, The Indian Empire, vol II, p. 449).
To quote Holmes (A History of the Indian Mutiny, vol II, p. 386) “The people of Delhi had expiated, many times over, the crimes of the mutineers. Tens of thousands of men, women and children were wandering, for no crime, homeless over the country. What they had left behind was lost to them forever; for the soldiers, going from house to house and from street to street, ferreted out every article of value, and smashed to pieces whatever they could not carry away.
“A Military Governor had been appointed; but he could do little to restrain the passions of those who surrounded him. Natives were brought forward in batches to be tried by a Military Commission or by Special Commissioners, both of whom had been invested by the Supreme Government with full powers of life and death. These judges were in no mood to show mercy.
“Almost all who were tried were condemned; and almost all who were condemned were sentenced to death. A four-square gallows was erected in a conspicuous place in the city; and five or six culprits (this is obviously an understatement) were hanged every day. English officers used to sit by, puffing their cigars, and look on at the convulsive struggle of the victims. Sir Tehophilus Metcalfe, whose house had been gutted by the mutineers and who, to do him justice, would never have turned his back in the days of their triumph, upon any number of them, was foremost in the work of retribution. To many, however, it seemed that not nearly enough had been done to avenge the massacres of May 11, and to vindicate the outraged majesty of the imperial race.”
One anecdote will show the terror that Metcalfe inspired. An English lady happened one day to be inspecting some ornaments, which a native jeweller had brought to her. Thinking that the prices which he asked for were too high, she exclaimed, “I will send you to Metcalfe Sahib.” In a moment the man had fled, leaving all his goods behind.
