Hundreds of lamps flickered & glowed softly, illuminating the two recently built palaces, Tipu Mahal & Hyder Mahal. Women in fine silk ghararas delicately chewed pan & enquired about the bride’s jewellery & mehr (bride price). Men in outlandish turbans drank copious amounts of wine & gossiped about the wedding party. What a downfall from Mysore royalty to pensioners of the British East India Company in a small southern town!
Bursts of laughter clashed with the deep notes of the Swarabat (a string instrument like a bass guitar). Roshani Begum, a Muserratti & the mother of Tipu Sultan’s eldest son Fateh Hyder, danced in a frenzy. After six long years of uneasy adjustment to life as commoners in Vellore, the wedding of Tipu Sultan’s daughter a rare occasion for celebration. It was a brief return to the customs & traditions of royalty.
Corporal Jennings stood against a tree, finding relief in the coolness of the night. People, so many people, flitting about gaily like coloured fireflies! He wondered how they could stand the constant heat & dust. But it wasn’t the heat that kept him awake. Something was brewing, & it wasn’t pleasant. The air was filled with excitement, with a coating of nervousness, or perhaps malice. Jamadar Sheikh Khassim passed by him with a smile that stretched his lips thin, almost a grimace. Sheikh Khassim was on patrol duty, which was strange. Where was the British officer who was responsible for the night patrol at the Vellore fort?
The moon rose higher, & people reluctantly staggered out in small groups-some to their beds, others to drink some more. By 2 AM, nothing moved except for the occasional rat in the bushes.
Corporal Jennings had fallen asleep, squatted against the tree. A shot sang past his head, missing him by an inch. Instantly, Jennings was awake. Like a dream, or a nightmare, he watched as the Indian sepoys cut down British soldiers with maniacal cries of ‘Ding Ding Vellaikara’ (Death to the White Man).
Sheikh Khassim turned around, looking for more soldiers to kill. Afterwards, Jennings was never quite sure if it was self-preservation, or if he was pushed by a falling soldier. The ground rose up to meet him, & he played dead. The sounds of fighting receded, as the sepoys ran to the European Barracks, where the British officers slept.
Sheikh Khassim ran to the palace. His face glistening with sweat & blood, he sent a triumphant message to the sons of Tipu Sultan. The time had come!
Prince Moiz-ud-Din’s servant looked at the Jamadar with an inscrutable face. His blank eyes hardly indicated happiness or excitement, but the Jamadar did not notice. The servant gave him what he asked for - a red flag with its distinctive stripes. Sheikh Khassim’s eyes welled up as he looked at the piece of cloth, lying limp in his hands. This flag had stricken awe into the hearts of many British soldiers years ago, as Tipu Sultan defeated them in battle after battle.
On the morning of 10th July 1806, the red flag flew high above Vellore fort. The Royal Tiger roared once again. Vellore was theirs!
Half-a-century before the First War of Independence in 1857, India rose up in revolt against the British East India Company in Vellore, in southern India. On 10th July, 1806, over 1500 Indian sepoys in Vellore fort overthrew the 383 British officers stationed there, & raised the flag of Tipu Sultan, the erstwhile ruler of Mysore. The sepoys proclaimed Fateh Hyder Bahadur, one of Tipu Sultan's sons, as their new King.
The rebels had chosen the day wisely. Sepoys usually lived outside the fort with their families. By special permission, they were assembled inside the fort to participate in an early morning march the following day, i.e. 10th July. The wedding of Tipu Sultan’s daughter at around the same time, meant that vendors & visitors were milling about the fort for days before the special occasion. An additional stroke of luck was the patrol duty (usually held by a British officer) that fell to Jamadar Sheikh Khassim, a subedar in the British army, & the leader of the rebelling troops.
The rebellion began well. The first shots were heard between 2 & 3 AM. The unsuspecting British officers & their families, fast asleep in their quarters, & the British soldiers in the adjacent ‘European barracks’, got little or no opportunity to fight back. Soon, the sepoys overwhelmed the few British officers inside the fort & proclaimed victory. As the sun rose the next morning, the rebels had the fort in their command.
Then they proceeded to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The jamadar had planned everything to a T, but he forgot to account for human nature. To their chagrin, the rebels found that Tipu Sultan’s sons were less than enthusiastic about leading them. Groups of sepoys wandered off to burgle homes and kill British officers. As they cut down whoever they could find (not very efficiently, as a few officers escaped by hiding under their beds), the sepoys yelled out triumphantly, ‘Ding Ding Vellaikara’ (Death to the White Man, referring to the bell that tolls at funerals). They got so busy plundering homes that they forgot to secure the fort, pull up the drawbridge & close the outer gates.
A few officers’ families managed to escape & alert the officers in the British garrison in nearby Arcot. By the next morning, when the sepoys should have been barricading the fort, they stopped to raid the Paymaster’s office, drink arrack, & top it off with paan (betel leaf).
Around 8.30 AM on 10th June, officers outside the fort led by Sir Robert Rollo Gillespie, mounted an attack. Officer Blakiston blew up the main gate (two other outer gates were already open), & the British troops entered the fort. By this time, the revolt had petered out. With no leader or plan ahead, the rebels were hunted down & rounded up for punishment.
A hundred sepoys were executed by firing on the spot, with no trial. A few more were tied up to cannons & blown, & yet others were sentenced to jail. Totally, about 800 Indian sepoys & more than 300 British soldiers lost their lives.
What were the causes of this revolt, or ‘Mutiny’?
The British had only a few years before defeated & killed most of the kings & native chieftains in south India who had rallied the people against the Company - Tipu Sultan, Pazhassi Varma, Veerapandiya Kattabomman, and many other Palayakkarars or ‘Polygars’. The British force absorbed many mercenaries from the defeated armies. While the sepoys may have changed uniforms, their hadn’t forgotten their ties to their earlier rulers.
With great power came great irresponsibility on the part of the British. Unlike the earlier set of British officers, newer recruits did not mingle much with their men, or care to learn the local language & customs. Sepoys were flogged for trivial mistakes. Missionary activity added to the general unease of the population who already had to contend with new rules & rulers.
To make matters worse, the newly-appointed Commander–in-Chief, Sir John Craddock, decided to standardize the sepoy uniforms, based on inputs from Colonel Agnew & Major Pierce, the officers in charge of the army. An innocuous step in itself, it became a powder keg when mixed with the ignorance & arrogance of the typical Company official. The new rules forbade wearing caste marks, earrings, beards & turbans. Instead the round hat that was worn by Christian Europeans, or newly converted Christians, was mandated. The hat had a leather cockade (an ornament) made of animal skin, & the sepoys suspected it could be cow or pig skin. Further, a turnscrew, used to load muskets, and resembling a cross, was to be kept by the sepoy at all times.
The new uniform was perceived as a deliberate insult to their religion, and an attempt to convert the sepoys to Christianity. In fact, at a few earlier parades, the sepoys wearing the new uniform were booed and jeered at by the common people who were watching . Craddock thus managed to antagonize both Hindus & Muslims. Discontent & anger simmered & bubbled among the sepoys.
The women of the royal family included many skilled artists and performers like Roshani Begum (mother of Tipu Sultan’s eldest son). The performers, known as muserrattis, were women of high status & wrote & directed their own plays. The wedding festivities saw performances by the muserrattis, through which they instigated the sepoys.
Wandering minstrels or fakeers did their bit to add masala to this potent brew. As they roamed freely across the country, they carried songs & stories that whispered rebellion against the British rulers. The fakeers had a simple message – ‘They are few, & we are many’.
The 1801 proclamation by Marudhu Pandyan, one of the rebel chieftains who had fought the British & had been hanged, called upon people of all castes, communities & religions in ‘Sembu’ or Jambu Dveepa ( as the Indian peninsula was called) to unite & overthrow the barbaric British. The proclamation & the hanging were still fresh in the minds of the sepoys. In fact, a copy of this notice was found pasted in Madras after the Vellore mutiny.
In May 1806, twenty-nine sepoys protested against the new rules. They were sent to Fort Saint George in Madras for a court-martial. Two sepoys, Anantaram, a Hindu, & Sheik Abdul Rahman, a Muslim, were flogged brutally (the court sentenced them to nine hundred lashes), & finally dismissed from service.
The protests disturbed the British. Sir John Craddock tried to rescind the new rules & wrote to Lord William Bentinck. Though Bentinck was displeased that these changes (which he realized touched a sensitive subject) were not brought to his attention earlier, he finally decided to let the rules stand. Both Craddock & Bentinck had their own problems with the British civil government in Madras & the Board of Directors of the East India Company, & did not want to risk appearing weak.
After the Mutiny, & the immediate knee-jerk reaction of executions & arrests, the British tried to investigate the causes. An initial inquiry threw the blame almost entirely on Tipu Sultan’s sons, especially, Muiz-ud-Din, for instigating the revolt.
Bentinck was dissatisfied with this report. It was based on often-conflicting testimony from captured sepoys who would likely have said anything that would get them out of trouble. It also deflected blame away from the British officers whose brainchild, the new uniform, had caused a problem.
Bentinck constituted a new committee to investigate the mutiny. While the final report of this new committee was not conclusive, some facts did emerge. The royal family might have ridden on a wave of popular sentiment, but it was unlikely they caused or participated in the conspiracy to overthrow the British. The Indian officers, known as sardars or subedars, who formed the link between the British & the sepoys, emerged as the prime instigators.
Why did the subedars go against the British? Was it only the new uniform, or was there something more to the revolt?
Indian sepoys were famed for their loyalty to their officers. Despite poor pay & poorer working conditions, they had stuck to their regiments & garrisons. There were occasional protests against delayed payments, but these were not violent. One reason was that the East India Company, from the late 1700s onwards, had become one of the largest employers in the land. The pension was highly prized, offering some security & prospects of a dignified retirement for the sepoys. Moreover, a sepoy could rise up the ranks to a subedar or sardar, who was next in command only to the British officers.
From the late 1790s, more British soldiers were recruited who formed a layer between the subedars and the higher officers. The prestige, power & remuneration of the subedars declined. They sweated it out for a pittance with no prospects of promotion. At the same time, they saw young British arrivals to the country affording a better lifestyle for the same or less work.
Often, the subedars were humiliated by the British officers in front of the very sepoys they were supposed to command. The new uniform was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. How could the sardars enforce a rule that they themselves did not agree with?
An anonymous letter sent to Colonel Agnew sounds very much like the complaints of the modern worker against large corporations. The letter detailed the grievances of the subedars - their low pay, lack of career advancement prospects, & indifference or outright disrespect from the senior management. The new uniform makes a guest appearance at the end of the letter, making it doubtful if this could have been the sole motivation behind the revolt (Alan Douglas Cameron's 1984 thesis on this subject, listed in references, is a fascinating read!).
The actions of the sepoys themselves were contradictory, & quite unlike a planned conspiracy to overthrow the British government. The revolt lost steam soon after killing the British soldiers; the sepoys left most of the British women & children unharmed; they spent their time looting the officers’ homes instead of securing the fort; most importantly, even those who named the princes as the instigators could barely identify them.
After the revolt was quelled, Tipu’s family was exiled to Calcutta (Kolkata), and the princes named as conspirators escaped execution. The British did not want to make martyrs of the princes, but they also did not want the royal family to be the focal point for further uprisings in Vellore or neighbouring territories.
Sir John Craddock & Lord William Bentinck were both dismissed by the East India Company. The Company even refused to pay for their return to England. The new rules were rescinded, better working conditions & incentives for the sepoys were mooted, & the British resolved to take greater care in accommodating the customs & traditions of the Indian forces. With most of the rebelling sepoys executed or imprisoned, & the departure of the Mysoreans from Vellore, the British had finally resolved all problems. Or so they thought.
Fifty years later, in 1857, Indians united once again to overthrow their foreign rulers. The First War of Independence, the Revolt of 1857, or the Indian Mutiny as it was variously known, followed almost the same pattern as the Vellore Mutiny, and ultimately met the same fate. It seemed that neither the British nor the Indians had learned from their earlier mistakes.
Though early revolts like the Vellore Mutiny did not succeed in dismantling British rule, they were far from insignificant. These uprisings revealed a simmering discontent that was beginning to spread across the subcontinent. The courage displayed in Vellore and other early acts of resistance ignited a spark that, over the next hundred years, would grow into a full-blown movement for freedom. In its failure, the Vellore Mutiny became a powerful symbol and inspired people to unite for a common cause – Independence from the British Raj.
(If you liked this piece of Indian history, you might also like the blog about about Velu Nachiyar & Kuyili, the fearless women who took down the East India Company 77 years before the 1857 revolt https://kamakshi.stck.me/post/37522/Rebellion-in-the-Raj-Rani-Velu-Nachiyar)
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References Wikipedia
The Vellore Mutiny by Alan Douglas Cameron
Lady Amelia Farrer’s account of survival
Roshani Begum
Swarabat
Tipu Sultan's family & Vellore Mutiny
https://thewire.in/history/tipu-sultan-forgotten-connection-indias-first-sepoy-mutiny
Britain’s Smaller Wars
The history of the Vellore mutiny , Aid India
9. The First Mutiny against the British
https://www.thehindu.com/features/kids/first-mutiny-against-the-british/article7402914.ece
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