The Revolt of 1857: Greased Cartridges, a Last Emperor, Massacres on Both Sides and the Side Punjab Chose

Meerut, Sunday, 10 May 1857. The heat of the day is breaking, and the church bells are calling the British families of the cantonment to evening service. In the Indian lines, nobody is going to church.

The day before, the whole garrison had been paraded to watch 85 troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry stripped of their uniforms and shackled. Their crime: they had refused to touch new rifle cartridges they believed were greased with the fat of cows and pigs. Most got ten years’ hard labour.

Now, as the sun went down, the sepoys of three regiments rose. Troopers galloped to the jail and broke the 85 out. Colonel John Finnis was shot from the saddle trying to calm his men. Crowds from the bazaar joined in. Bungalows burned, and dozens of Europeans, women and children among them, were cut down in the dark.

Meerut had almost as many British soldiers as Indian ones that night, but their commander did not give chase. By morning, the cavalry were riding hard for Delhi, forty miles away.

What began in Meerut became the largest armed challenge the British ever faced in India, with heroes and massacres on every side. And Punjab, eight years after losing its own kingdom to the British, made a choice that is still argued about today.

The story usually starts at Dum Dum, near Calcutta, in January 1857. As it was told then, a low-caste labourer asked a Brahmin sepoy for a drink from his water pot and was refused. Soon, he is said to have sneered, you will all be biting cartridges greased with cow fat.

The Army was bringing in the new Enfield rifle. Its paper cartridges were greased so the ball would slide down the barrel, and the drill said to tear them open with the teeth. For a Hindu, beef fat in the mouth was a horror; for a Muslim, pig fat was the same.

When the alarm spread, the Army changed the drill: tear with the hand, grease it yourself. Too late. Rumour said the Company meant to make all of India Christian by breaking caste first.

That spring, chapatis were passed from village to village across the north, each watchman baking more and sending them on. Nobody has ever explained what they meant.

Historians find little direct evidence that greased cartridges were ever widely issued. But a rumour only needs to be believed, by men who already have reasons to believe the worst.

Those reasons had piled up for years. Between 1848 and 1856 Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General, swallowed more of India than any man before him. Punjab was taken in 1849 after two hard wars with the Sikhs (see our story on Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the Koh-i-Noor).

His sharpest tool was the Doctrine of Lapse. If a Hindu ruler under the Company’s protection died without a natural son, the Company could ignore his adopted heir and take the state. That is how Satara went in 1848, and Jhansi and Nagpur in 1854. When the last Peshwa died in 1851, his adopted son, Nana Sahib, was told his father’s pension died with him.

Then came Awadh. In February 1856 the Company annexed it for ‘misgovernment’ and sent its nawab, Wajid Ali Shah, into exile in Calcutta. Awadh was home to a huge share of the Bengal Army’s sepoys, high-caste men from the east the Punjabis called Purbiyas. Their own king had been thrown out, and a new revenue settlement took villages away from the great landholders, the taluqdars.

Across the north, the land tax was heavy, and families that could not pay saw their land auctioned. In 1856 a new law said recruits must serve overseas if ordered, which many high-caste sepoys believed would break their caste.

That is why, when the revolt came, it was not only soldiers who rose.

Barrackpore, near Calcutta, the afternoon of 29 March 1857. Sepoy Mangal Pandey of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry walked onto the parade ground with a loaded musket, calling on his comrades to rise and shouting about Europeans and cartridges.

The adjutant, Lieutenant Baugh, galloped up. Pandey fired, missed, and hit his horse. Baugh’s pistol missed too, and Pandey went at him with a sword. One sepoy, Shaikh Paltu, tried to hold him back; most of the guard stood still.

When General Hearsey rode up and threatened to shoot any man who disobeyed, Pandey turned his musket on himself, pressing the trigger with his foot. He survived. He was hanged on 8 April. At his trial he said he had taken bhang and opium and did not know what he was doing.

The jemadar of the guard, Ishwari Prasad, was hanged too, after Sikh soldiers testified that he had told them not to arrest Pandey. On 6 May seven companies of the 34th were disbanded in disgrace. The British began calling every rebel sepoy a ‘Pandy’.

Delhi, Monday, 11 May. The troopers from Meerut clattered across the bridge of boats over the Yamuna and came to the walls of the Red Fort. Inside lived Bahadur Shah Zafar, 81, the last Mughal: a fine Urdu poet and a Company pensioner whose writ hardly ran beyond his palace walls.

He had not asked for a revolution. British officers, officials and Indian Christians in the city were hunted down that day. A young British lieutenant blew up the great arsenal rather than let it fall. On 12 May, for the first time in years, Zafar held court, and the sepoys bowed to him as emperor.

Regiments poured in from across the north. The city paid. The historian William Dalrymple, working through some 20,000 Urdu and Persian papers in the National Archives, found Delhi’s own people complaining of sepoys who plundered shops and houses and demanded food.

On 16 May, in a courtyard of the palace, sepoys and palace servants killed 52 European prisoners, most of them women and children, under a peepul tree. Zafar protested and was ignored.

From early June a small British force, soon fed by Punjab, dug in on the Ridge north of the city. Both sides knew the revolt’s fate hung on Delhi.

Kanpur, June 1857. Old General Sir Hugh Wheeler had thrown up a mud wall around two barracks on the open plain. Behind it sheltered about 900 people: soldiers, merchants, and some 300 women and children. Outside stood the forces of Nana Sahib.

For three weeks it was shelled in the worst heat of the year; men were shot drawing water at the only well. On 25 June Nana Sahib offered safe passage by river to Allahabad. Wheeler, out of food and out of hope, accepted.

On the morning of 27 June about 500 survivors walked down to the Satichaura Ghat, where some forty boats waited. The boatmen jumped off. Shots rang out, the thatched boats caught fire, and sepoys on the bank opened up on people wading in the river. Who gave the signal is still disputed; some witnesses blamed Tantia Tope, and some historians doubt that Nana Sahib was even there.

Most of the men were killed in the water. About 120 women and children were pulled out alive and taken prisoner. A few boats drifted away downstream under fire; in the end only four men from them survived. One of them, Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson, wrote it down.

The prisoners, with other captured Britons brought in from elsewhere, were moved to a small house built for a British officer’s Indian mistress: the Bibighar. About 200 women and children were crammed inside. In the heat, some died of cholera and dysentery.

By mid-July a British column under General Henry Havelock was fighting its way up from Allahabad. On 15 July, with Kanpur about to fall, the order came to kill the prisoners. Accounts name Hussaini Khanum, a woman of Nana Sahib’s household, as the one who pressed it.

Sepoys were told to fire through the windows; some, by the accounts, fired into the ceiling instead. Then men from the town, butchers among them, went in with swords and cleavers. The next morning the bodies, and by some accounts a few people still alive, were thrown into a well in the courtyard. One count gives 73 women and 124 children.

Havelock’s men entered Kanpur two days later and saw the house. What they found there turned a war into a crusade of revenge.

On the record: rebels killed British women and children at Delhi, at Jhansi, at Satichaura Ghat and at the Bibighar. Some rebel sepoys refused to take part. These killings were real, and nothing that came before or after excuses them.

The revenge had started before Kanpur. In June, Colonel James Neill marched from Benares to Allahabad, and his men hanged people suspected of rebellion with little or no trial. On the road to Kanpur, villages were burned and men hanged from trees.

Historians such as Rudrangshu Mukherjee point out that these hangings came weeks before the Bibighar. They explain nothing away, but they were part of the world in which it happened.

After Kanpur, Neill took the reprisals further. Brahmin prisoners, rounded up with no proof that they had any part in the massacre, were forced to clean the blood from the Bibighar floor, flogged, and then hanged. Some Muslim prisoners were reportedly sewn into pigskins first. Neill was killed at Lucknow that September, and Britain raised statues to him.

An old punishment was used widely: ‘blowing from guns’. A condemned man was tied across the mouth of a cannon, and the cannon was fired.

In Calcutta, the Governor-General, Lord Canning, tried to restrain the killing of people not proven guilty. The British press mocked him as ‘Clemency Canning’. By one estimate, about 150,000 Indians were killed in Awadh alone, 100,000 of them civilians.

Lahore, 12 May 1857. The telegraph brought the news from Meerut. The next morning, at Mian Mir cantonment, four Purbiya regiments were paraded in front of loaded British guns and ordered to pile their arms. On 22 May the same was done at Peshawar.

Punjab’s Chief Commissioner, John Lawrence, then gambled the province on Delhi. He stripped Punjab of British troops, raised about 34,000 new Punjabi soldiers, Sikhs and Muslims, and sent them south. The Corps of Guides marched from Mardan, by the official dispatch 580 miles in 22 days, reaching Delhi on 9 June.

The Sikh princes of Patiala, Jind and Nabha guarded the Grand Trunk Road and sent men to the Delhi Ridge; Kapurthala’s raja sent troops to Awadh. Canning called the loyal princes ‘breakwaters in a storm’, and after the war they were rewarded with land and titles.

Why did Punjab, so newly conquered, fight for its conquerors? Partly memory. Only eight to twelve years earlier, the Purbiya sepoys had been the Company’s soldiers at Mudki, Ferozeshah, Sobraon and Chillianwala, the battles that destroyed the Sikh kingdom. Many Sikhs had no wish to see them win now.

Partly the banner. The rebels had raised the Mughal emperor, and it was Mughal rulers who had ordered the executions of Guru Arjan Dev and Guru Tegh Bahadur. The historian Ganda Singh argued that the Sikhs were never asked to join and never had a stake in restoring Delhi’s throne. And partly pay, and the promised loot of Delhi.

Not all of Punjab stood with the British. Purbiya regiments stationed in the province mutinied at Ferozepur, Jalandhar, Jhelum and Sialkot. The Sialkot mutineers were cut off by John Nicholson at Trimmu Ghat, where about 1,100 were killed.

Punjabis rose too. In the Bar country around Gogera, Rai Ahmad Khan Kharal, about 80, led the Kharal, Fatyana and Wattu tribes against the Company. He was shot dead on 21 September 1857, by local accounts while at prayer, and his comrades fought on for months. Pakistan’s Punjab remembers him as a hero.

Some Sikh soldiers turned rebel as well. A detachment of the Ludhiana Sikh regiment at Jaunpur shot its commander and marched to Lucknow with the treasury. Diaries kept inside Delhi record Sikh sepoys among its defenders.

And then there was Ajnala. On 30 July the disarmed 26th Native Infantry broke out of Mian Mir, killing officers, and fled towards the Ravi. Many drowned or were killed at the river. Of the survivors, 282 were captured and brought to Ajnala, near Amritsar, on the orders of Amritsar’s Deputy Commissioner, Frederic Cooper.

Over the next day, by accounts drawn from Cooper’s own book, about 237 were shot in batches and 45 more were found dead in the cramped bastion where they had been locked, from heat and suffocation. All the bodies went into a dry well. Cooper described it himself in his 1858 book, The Crisis in the Punjab, with no sign of shame.

In 2014 the historian Surinder Kochhar and the local gurdwara committee dug the well out and found the bones. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Genetics matched the DNA to people of the Gangetic plain. Researchers are now tracing their families.

Delhi, before dawn, 14 September 1857. Siege guns had battered breaches in the walls. Engineers ran forward under fire and blew in the Kashmiri Gate, and the columns stormed in. Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans and Gurkhas were in the assault beside the British. John Nicholson was shot in a lane and died nine days later.

It took a week of street fighting to clear the city. What followed was a sack. A 19-year-old officer, Edward Vibart, wrote to his family about it.

The orders went out to shoot every soul.Lieutenant Edward Vibart, letter from Delhi, 1857, as quoted by William Dalrymple

By Dalrymple’s account, men were shot or hanged in their thousands; Delhi was looted house by house and its people driven into the countryside. The great poet Ghalib, who stayed on, kept a diary of the fall in Persian.

Zafar had fled to Humayun’s Tomb. On 21 September (20 September in some accounts) he surrendered to William Hodson, who promised him his life. The next day Hodson went back for three princes, the emperor’s sons Mirza Mughal and Mirza Khizr Sultan and his grandson Mirza Abu Bakr. They surrendered their arms. Near a gate on the road back, Hodson made them strip and shot them himself.

I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches.William Hodson, letter, as quoted by William Dalrymple

The gate is still called the Khooni Darwaza, the Bloody Gate.

Lucknow, 30 June 1857. After a defeat at Chinhat, the British of Awadh’s capital fell back into the Residency compound. About 1,700 fighting men, British soldiers and loyal sepoys, defended it, with hundreds of women and children. On 2 July a shell hit the Chief Commissioner, Sir Henry Lawrence; he died two days later.

They held out for nearly three months. Havelock and James Outram fought their way in on 25 September but could not get out again. Only in November did Sir Colin Campbell break through.

On 16 November his men stormed the walled garden of Sikandar Bagh. Highlanders and the 4th Punjab Infantry, Sikhs and Pathans among them, went in first. About 2,000 sepoys inside were killed; few were spared. The Residency was evacuated; Havelock died of dysentery days later.

In the city, the rebels had their own ruler. Begum Hazrat Mahal, a wife of the exiled nawab, had her young son Birjis Qadr proclaimed ruler of Awadh, and governed in his name as regent. Awadh’s landholders and peasants fought on for her.

Campbell took Lucknow back in March 1858, with Gurkha troops sent by Nepal’s ruler, Jung Bahadur, and the city was plundered. The Begum fought on, then crossed into Nepal. She died in Kathmandu in 1879 and lies in a plain grave there.

Jhansi had been taken under the Doctrine of Lapse in 1854, and the raja’s widow, Lakshmibai, pensioned off. In June 1857 sepoys at Jhansi rose, and about 60 British who had surrendered at the fort were killed after being promised their lives. How far the Rani was to blame has never been settled.

In March 1858 Sir Hugh Rose besieged Jhansi, and on 3 April his troops stormed the town; by one count about 3,000 of its people were killed. The Rani escaped that night and rode for Kalpi.

With Tantia Tope, she seized Gwalior’s fort at the end of May. On 17 or 18 June 1858, in the fighting near Kotah-ki-Serai outside Gwalior, she was killed, dressed as a cavalry soldier.

The best and bravest of the rebels.Sir Hugh Rose, on Rani Lakshmibai, in his report

In Bihar, Kunwar Singh of Jagdishpur, close to 80, joined the Danapur mutineers in July 1857 and besieged Arrah, where about 50 Sikh policemen helped the British hold out. Tradition says that when a bullet shattered his wrist crossing the Ganga, he cut off his own arm and gave it to the river. He beat a British force near Jagdishpur on 23 April 1858 and died three days later.

Tantia Tope kept a guerrilla army moving for most of a year. In April 1859 he was betrayed by a former ally, by British accounts the chief Man Singh, and on 18 April he was hanged at Shivpuri. Nana Sahib was never caught.

Early 1858, the Red Fort. Bahadur Shah Zafar, now 82, was tried by a British military commission for rebellion and for the killings of 16 May. He was found guilty. Hodson’s promise saved his life, but not his kingdom.

On 7 October 1858 he left Delhi in a bullock cart, under guard. The last Mughal emperor died in exile in Rangoon on 7 November 1862 and was buried the same day in an unmarked grave. It was found again only in 1991.

In August 1858 Parliament passed the Government of India Act, and the East India Company’s rule ended. On 1 November 1858 Canning, now the first Viceroy, read a proclamation from Queen Victoria at a durbar in Allahabad.

It promised not to interfere in Indians’ religion, to honour treaties with the princes and take no more of their lands, and to pardon rebels, except those who had killed British subjects. From her hideout, Begum Hazrat Mahal issued her own reply, warning her people not to believe a word of it.

Of 74 regular infantry regiments of the Bengal Army, 54 had mutinied. The new army was rebuilt around men the British now called ‘martial races’: Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans and Gurkhas. Punjab’s part in 1857 shaped who served in the Indian Army for the next ninety years, as the story of Saragarhi shows.

Even the name is a battlefield. In July 1857 Benjamin Disraeli told the House of Commons it was a ‘national revolt’; the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, called it a ‘mere military mutiny’. To British writers it was the Sepoy Mutiny.

In 1909 V.D. Savarkar, then a student in London, wrote The Indian War of Independence. The British banned it before it was even printed; copies were printed in Holland and smuggled in. After 1947, Nehru’s government adopted ‘First War of Independence’.

The historian R.C. Majumdar argued in 1957 that it was not the first, not national, and not a war of independence. In 2007, at the 150th anniversary, the Lok Sabha’s Deputy Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal and other Punjab MPs protested the official celebration; some Sikh groups say the first war against the British was the Anglo-Sikh war of 1845–46.

It is tempting to tell 1857 as heroes against villains. The record does not allow it.

About 6,000 of the roughly 40,000 British in India were killed. Nobody counted the Indian dead. One estimate often cited puts them near 800,000, counting the famine and disease that followed; others are lower. Either way, most of the dead of 1857 were Indian.

There were people who did right as well. Indian servants and villagers hid British families; a local raja, Dirigbijai Singh, sheltered the four survivors of Satichaura. Some sepoys fired into the ceiling at the Bibighar rather than at the women. Canning, despised for it at home, tried to stop the killing of the innocent.

1857 was not one thing. It was a mutiny of soldiers who feared for their faith, a rising of peasants and landholders who had lost their land, and a last stand of dispossessed rulers. In some places it was all three.

It was also a war in which both sides murdered the defenceless. The women and children of the Bibighar and the sepoys in the well at Ajnala deserve the same plain telling.

As for Punjab, its soldiers did help the British retake Delhi, for reasons that made sense to men who had lost their kingdom to Purbiya bayonets. That is not the whole story. Rai Ahmad Khan Kharal died fighting in the Bar, and Sikhs mutinied at Jaunpur. The choices of 1857 were made by people, not by communities, and people chose differently.