Crack! Crack!
Sounds rang out in the quiet night.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Sounds rang out in the quiet night.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Lady Amelia and her husband were woken up by another report. John got out of the bed and hurriedly walked in the dark towards the window in his dresser, his eyes adjusting themselves to the darkness. Amelia watched him throw open the window and shout "Who is there? What is afoot at this hour of night?" More gunfire sounded in reply, startling her out of her body. John stumbled across the room to the door. He looked at her once, and even in the darkness, she discerned that he was telling her with his gaze to remain abed; and he walked out. She heard his steps thudding down the stairs. In spite of the warm night, she drew the covers to her chin as she was shuddering ever so slightly and leaned back against the headboard to wait for him. The door opened after what seemed like an hour to her, but was only minutes, and John walked in. He asked her to get a light as he sat down at the wide table which he used as a study. Lighting a short wax candle, Amelia walked across to place the candle on the table. As he raised his head, his eyes met hers and she saw that he had gone pale, and in his eyes she saw something she had never seen before, a hint only, of fear.
It was the night of the tenth day of July, 1806 in Vellore, a quiet town on the banks of the Palar river. A mutiny had broken out in the fort of Vellore, of which Colonel John Fancourt was the commandant. The fort itself, built in 1566 by the erstwhile kings of Vijayanagara, had passed through several owners including the Maratha Nayaks, the Mughals, the Nawabs of Arcot, and the Sultans of Mysore. It was known for being one of those forts that were nearly impregnable and a couple of decades earlier, Hyder Ali, the king of Mysore had laid a futile seige to it. On June 9, 1806, the marriage of Badr-un-Nissa, the daughter of the late king of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, had taken place in the fort and several of the sepoys had assembled for the feast. Unusually, most of the sepoys had spent the night in the fort, for there was to be a parade in the morning.
The Vellore Mutiny happened more than half of a century before the rebellion of 1857, which is famous as the First War of Indian Independence. While the events of 1857 were without doubt a watershed event in Indian history, as they resulted in India being taken over from the East India Company by the British Crown, it was by no means, the first sign of resistance to the British. The phrase "First War of Independence" lends an image of Indians having been subjugated completely prior to the said war. In reality, the British had never really conquered the whole of India, although by 1857, they certainly controlled almost the whole of it. The 'conquest' of the East India company was a long drawn out process of several decades as they cajoled, threatened, bought off, persuaded, forced or even killed the kings and princes of the Indian sub-continent until most of India was directly or indirectly under their rule. But this process was not without bloodshed or resistance.
The British fought several wars in India in the century leading up to 1857 including the Carnatic Wars of the 1760s; four Anglo-Mysore Wars spanning as many decades from 1760 to 1799 against the father and son rulers of Mysore, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan; three wars against the most powerful federation or political power of the time, the Marathas; and two wars against the Sikh Empire of Ranjit Singh. The First Anglo-Maratha conflict incidentally, occured in the same years as the colonies of the New World rose against the crown in the American Revolutionary War. Apart from the wars, there were many rebellions as well as princes, chieftains and sometimes the native sepoys and soldiers employed by the British rose against their paymasters. These include the rebellion by Puli Thevar, the guerrilla war in the hill country of Wayanad led by Kerala Varma Pazhasi Raja, the rebellion of Rani Velu Nachiyar, the Velu Thampi rebellion, the Polygar Wars of Veerpandiya Kattabomman, the Paika Rebellion in Odisha, the Barrackpore rebellion and the resistance offered by Rani Chennamma of Kittur. Each of these and several others are locally well known, but their fame varies in the wider landscape of Indian history.
The Vellore Mutiny had some similarities to 1857. The immediate reasons were religious as in 1857. The native soldiers had been prohibited from wearing religious marks on their forehead and ordered to trim their moustaches and beards, hurting the sentiments of both Muslim and Hindu sepoys. In the month of May, two soldiers were given a severe lashing in Vellore for disobeying the orders, and surely just as the hanging of Mangal Pandey in 1857 had caused tensions to boil over, so did the punishment to these unknown soldiers. Thirdly, there was royalty involved, although their eagerness to participate is as questionable as that of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the aging Mughal monarch. These were the sons of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore against whom the British had fought a series of hard battles. Tipu had been killed in 1799, and the crown of Mysore had been restored by the British to the Wodeyars, the traditional rulers of Mysore who were for the time being vassals of the British. Tipu's sons had been living in Vellore under British pension and the rebels declared Fateh Hyder, Tipu's second son as king and rose the flag of the Mysore Sultanate over Vellore.
The similarities however end there. Lady Amelia's account is the only surviving eye witness account of the rebellion which lasted barely a day. At two in the night, the Indian sepoys massacred their British officers as well as most of a British company of soldiers as they slept in their barracks. This was the sound that awoke Amelia and her husband, who had actually been sympathetic to the feelings and complaints of the native sepoys. He would be wounded in the fight for control of the fort and would not survive the day. By morning, news of the rebellion had reached Arcot, prompting Robert Rollo Gillespie, the commander at Arcot to rush with a large infantry force towards Vellore. Gillespie, with an advance force, scaled the fort with some help from the surviving British forces inside and led the charge against the Indian sepoys. The sepoys were beaten and caught and as many of hundred of them were summarily executed by lining them up against a wall and shooting them down. By the time the infantry arrived, the rebellion had almost broken and most of the Indian sepoys laid dying or dead.
The rebellion lasted a little over twelve hours and had ended by four in the afternoon on July 10, 1806. Lady Amelia had escaped from her house with three children, helped by an Indian Ayah and another Indian soldier who helped her and her children to hide in a stable. She was rescued by Gillespie's forces. The surviving rebels were court martialled and as many as eight of them were punished by being blown away by cannons, six were hanged and five were shot dead by firing squad. Robert Rollo Gillespie's exploits were praised by a British poet Harry Newbolt, in a poem. But the unknown, anonymous Indian soldiers who had risen against the British are not even as famous.
Today is the two hundred and sixteenth anniversary of the Vellore Rebellion.
Sources:
2. "India's Struggle for Independence" by Bipan Chandra
3. "The Last Mughal" by William Dalrymple
4. Lady Amelia's account
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