Siege of Kanpur
The Siege of Kanpur is an event in the context of the Indian Uprising of 1857 . The British military , civil servants and civilians entrenched in the garrison of Kanpur were besieged for several weeks by Indian insurgent troops led by Nana Sahib . After long and heavy shelling, in which a large number of those entrenched were killed, the military in the garrison accepted the terms of surrender offered by Nana Sahib. These promised a free withdrawal. However , the Indian troops opened fire as they boarded the boats at the Sati Chowra gangway port . The surviving British men were almost all shot on the spot. Only a handful managed to escape. About 125 British women and children survived and were brought back to Kanpur. In Kanpur, they were locked up together with other British refugees - mostly women and children - in a house called Bibighar . Shortly before British troops captured Kanpur, these prisoners - a total of 73 women and 124 children - were slain with axes and hatchets.
For the British public, the massacres in Kanpur were an event of traumatic proportions that preoccupied them more than the Crimean War , which had significantly more casualties . Contemporaries like the distinguished historian George Trevelyan described the siege as " the most terrible tragedy of our age " or " the greatest disaster for our race ". Together with the siege of Lucknow , the events in Kanpur are still among the " great victim dramas " of the uprising from a British perspective . The massacre of defenseless women and children that followed the siege caused the British to intensify their already very aggressive warfare and resort to tough repression. These initially met with broad approval from the British public. In retaliation for the massacre that took place in Kanpur, individuals demanded the complete destruction of Delhi and the execution of all who were in any way associated with the uprising. Shortly after 1857, however, there were increasing voices among the British public who judged the reprisals to be inappropriate.
course
Nana Sahib
The uprising in Kanpur was led by the 35-year-old Brahmin Nana Sahib , an adopted son of Baji Rao II , the last Peshwa of Pune . Pune was one of the more important Marathas principalities, but its ruler Baji Rao had been dethroned by the British and exiled in Bithur . Until his death in 1851, he received a generous annual pension from the British. On the other hand, the British refused to allow his adopted son and heir Nana Sahib to continue this pension payment. In his sense of honor, Nana Sahib also felt offended because the British did not recognize him at least nominally as Maharaja of Bithur.
After the outbreak of the uprising, insurgents turned to Nana Sahib with a request to take a leading role in the uprising. After initial hesitation, he initially agreed to lead sepoy troops on their way to Delhi. However, members of his court dissuaded him from submitting himself as a high-ranking Hindu to the Muslim mogul in Delhi. Papers found after the end of the uprising suggest that Nana Sahib was considering not only retaking the throne of his adoptive father, but also making neighboring principalities his vassals. The conquest of the city of Kanpur on the road connecting Delhi and Benares should be the first step in this direction.
Kanpur and General Wheeler
Kanpur, on the west bank of the Ganges , was founded as a garrison by the British East India Company in the course of the 18th century. The Indian troops stationed here in 1857 comprised three infantry regiments, a cavalry regiment and a company of artillery. The total strength of the Indian troops was around 3,000 men. About 300 British soldiers served in Kanpur. The commanding officer was General Hugh Wheeler , who was married to an Indian woman . At the beginning of June General Wheeler was so convinced that the Indian troops would remain loyal that he sent fifty of his soldiers and two officers to Lucknow, where an uprising was feared. If there was an uprising, he was also of the opinion that the troops would withdraw to Delhi, the center of the uprising. General Wheeler had therefore stored little food and made little effort to prepare his garrison for a possible siege. As the signs of an uprising increased, however, the Europeans and Eurasians living in the city withdrew behind the garrison's entrenchments. On the night of June 5th, the uprising broke out, which quickly seized all Indian troops in Kanpur. At that time, almost 1,000 people were gathered in the garrison. In addition to the 300 European soldiers, there were about one hundred other European men, eighty sepoys who remained loyal, four hundred women and children and a number of Indian servants. An attack on those entrenched in the garrison did not take place because the insurgents first looted the abandoned houses in the city. The defenders were adequately equipped with muskets and ammunition. However, they had only a few guns available for their defense.
Course of the siege
Nana Sahib, on the other hand, not only had a very large army, which was reinforced by Indian volunteers over the next few days, but also sufficient artillery. The bombardment of the garrison quickly led to high losses among those barricaded there. None of the garrison buildings were built strong enough to withstand artillery fire, so that the besieged found nowhere protection from the bombardment. There was a lack of water and food. After part of the garrison had been shot, most of the besieged were exposed to the unbearable sunlight.
By the time the heaviest attack on the besieged, a third of those entrenched in the garrison had died. Only a small part of the dead could be buried within the garrison. Around 350 corpses were thrown into a well that could not be used to supply the besieged with drinking water. The survivors were in deplorable condition. The vast majority were sick or wounded. Hardly anyone was still fully dressed. Since the siege began, none of those entrenched there had been able to wash because of the lack of water. More unbearable than the smell of the sweaty bodies, however, was the odor of corpses that rose from the trenches in front of the garrison. It attracted large flocks of flies, which constantly harassed the survivors. A number of the besieged, especially among the women, went mad.
In the hope of reinforcement from Lucknow, the besieged held out until June 25th. The terms of surrender offered by Nana Sahib had, however, met with skepticism from General Wheeler. They read:
- All those who are in no way involved in the deeds of Lord Dalhousie and who are ready to lay down their arms will be able to safely withdraw to Allahabad
Officers urged General Wheeler to surrender because they were convinced that with the onset of the imminent rainy season, the garrison could no longer be defended. However, they were able to negotiate improved withdrawal conditions. Boats should be made available for their departure to Allahabad . Carts and elephants should be made available for the injured as well as the women and children on the way to the exit point. The departing should not be disarmed either. While the British were getting on the boats, Indian troops opened fire, and many British were killed. It can no longer be clarified today whether the incident on the banks of the Ganges was a deliberate ambush or whether the Indian troops opened fire due to a misunderstanding. The surviving British men were executed on the spot. About 125 surviving women and children were brought back to Kanpur as prisoners, where they were detained in Bibighar along with other British refugees - also mostly women and children who had escaped the siege of Fatehgarh . In contrast, two young women, Eliza Wheeler and Amelia Horne, were kidnapped by insurgent soldiers. The (alleged) fate of Eliza Wheeler, the youngest daughter of General Hugh Wheeler and his Indian wife, preoccupied the imaginations of their Victorian contemporaries and was the subject of numerous later plays and essays. It was rumored that Eliza Wheeler killed her kidnapper and several of his family members and then committed suicide by throwing herself into a well.
The Bibighar massacre
As British troops approached Kanpur under the orders of Henry Havelock and James Neill , Nana Sahib had the women and children brought to Kanpur executed. Since his troops refused to do this, butchers were requisitioned in the Kanpur bazaar, who killed the women and children with swords, axes and hatchets. One of the executioners is reported to have needed a new sword twice before all the women and children in Bibighar were slaughtered. The execution lasted more than an hour, and even then not all were dead. The dead and dying were left for the night. The next morning, three women and three boys are said to have been alive. Like the dead, they were thrown into a well until it was filled. The remaining body parts were thrown into the Ganges. Henry Havelock and his troops arrived in Kanpur the day after this incident and found pieces of clothing, hair and individual body parts at the site of the mass execution. The incident was the reason for the British troops to conduct the already very cruel retaliatory campaign with even greater severity.
The Siege of Kanpur in Contemporary Writings
The siege of Kanpur, successfully carried out by Indian insurgents, and the murder of the defenseless women and children in Bibighar was an event that Christopher Herbert describes as traumatic. Immediately after the events, numerous writings appeared about this experience and the British public grappled with these incidents throughout the second half of the 19th century. Christopher Herbert describes a number of his writings as semi-pornographic because they depict the rape and abuse of women (often just invented) in bloodthirsty details and in graphic details that are unusual for Victorian standards. The monograph “ Cawnpore ” by Sir George Trevelyan , published in 1865, stands out from this. This dealt with the events much more objectively and in a more neutral tone, although George Trevelyan also dealt with the actual causes of the uprising - the conquest of land by the British, the application of the Doctrine of Lapse , the Christianization efforts in India as well as the intended and unintentional violation of Hindu and Muslim religious feelings - is not addressed. Despite this comparative neutrality, George Trevelyan in his book assumes that the British acted morally, compared to a cruel act on the Indian side. Trevelyan celebrates those besieged in the garrison as immortal heroes and particularly highlights the heroic deeds of individuals, such as those of civilian John Mackillop, who fetched water from the well for those in the garrison at great risk.
literature
- William Dalrymple : The Last Mughal - The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857. Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2006, ISBN 9780747587262 .
- Saul David: The Indian Mutiny: 1857. Penguin Books, 2003.
- Saul David: Victoria's Wars. Penguin Books, London 2006, ISBN 978-0-141-00555-3 .
- Niall Ferguson : Empire. The Rise and Demise of the British World Order. 2003, ISBN 0465023282 .
- Christopher Herbert: War of no pity. The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2008, ISBN 978-0-691-13332-4 .
- Christopher Hibbert: The great mutiny: India 1857. Penguin Books, London [u. a.] 1988.
- Lawrence James: Raj - The Making of British India. Abacus, London 1997, ISBN 978-0-349-11012-7 .
- Dennis Judd: The Lion and the Tiger. The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600-1947. Oxford 2004.
- Andrew Ward: Our bones are scattered - The cawnpore massacres and the indian mutiny of 1857. John Murray Publishers, London 2004, ISBN 0-7195-6410-7 .
Single receipts
- ↑ a b Dalrymple, p. 303
- ↑ see the detailed studies by Christopher Herbert: War of no Pity. The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma , Princeton University Press, Princeton 2008, ISBN 978-0-691-13332-4
- ↑ Both quotations come from George Trevelyan: Cawnpore , 1865 - quoted from Herbert, p. 183
- ^ Ward, p. 243
- ↑ James, p. 234
- ↑ A more detailed characterization of Nana Sahib can be found in Hibbert, pp. 172–177.
- ↑ Hibbert, pp. 168f
- ↑ a b Hibbert, p. 177
- ↑ James, p. 248
- ↑ a b David (2006), p. 310
- ^ Ward, p. 241
- ↑ Hilbert, p. 189
- ^ Herbert, p. 148 and p. 149
- ↑ a b David (2006), p. 316
- ↑ Herbert, p. 4
- ↑ see Christopher Herbert: War of no Pity. The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma , Princeton University Press, Princeton 2008, ISBN 978-0-691-13332-4
- ^ Herbert, p. 183