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The man who started the Revolt
THE UPCOMING film on the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857, with Aamir Khan in the title role of Mangal Pandey and Toby Stephens as the sympathetic British officer portraying Captain William Gordon, a Scotsman, who is convinced that the East India Company did injustice to the Indians, is sure to excite public interest.
Some years ago a demand was made to name a street after Mangal Pandey in Delhi and also install a statue of the man who started the revolt. Mangal Pandey was a young Brahmin sepoy, who had joined the East India Company at the age of 19 and put in seven years of service without any complaint. But Pandey was incensed by the order which enjoined on all officers and men to bite the greased new Enfield rifle cartridges, Hindus objected to it as they felt the cartridges were greased with cow's fat while Muslims felt that pig's fat had been used.
Pandey refused to bite the cartridge in Barrackpore and called upon his fellow-sepoys to follow suit. But few did. However his defiance did not enthuse the other sepoys as they thought he was under the influence of bhang, abusing profusely while wearing the coat of the 34th Native Infantry but a dhoti instead of trousers. Pandey injured two British officers before a sepoy, Sheikh Paltu, held him from behind.
Mangal Pandey then tried to shoot himself but only superficially injured the bulging muscles of his chest. He was disarmed by Major-General Hearsey, tried and executed on April 8.
It was only a month later that the Mutiny broke out at Meerut on May 10. The next day the rebel sepoys marched to Delhi and entered the city through the Rajghat Gate. They made their way to the Red Fort and forced an unwilling Bahadur Shah Zafar to take overall command. The aged emperor refused but felt the ire of the sepoys who began to insult himZafar then reluctantly agreed to their demand and the rest is history. Until September, the sepoys held control of Delhi after an orgy of bloodshed.
Among the places seized by them initially outside Delhi was the Pir Ghaib monument on the Ridge, which was actually a shikargarh-cum-astronomy of Feroz Tughlak, with two chambers leading to a mosque, where the mysterious Pir stayed and disappeared just as mysteriously as he had appeared. But the sepoys did not hold on to the monument for long as the Ridge became the encampment of the British troops, who launched attacks on Delhi city from there and eventually blew up the Kashmere Gate and recaptured Delhi after the rains.
The Pir Ghaib monument, a relic of the Mutiny, is in a bad state and the Archaeological Survey of India seems helpless to save it from vandals and encroachers. Now that some of the focus could be on it in the film being made, maybe Pir Ghaib would be saved.
Though Mangal Pandey did not have any connection with Delhi as such, he was nevertheless hailed as a hero in the city and in Meerut, where a temple commemorates him. Every sepoy who had rebelled in Delhi and elsewhere was dubbed "Pande" by the British troops and their retaliation was termed "Pande-bashing", just as even Indians in Britain these days are among the victims of "Paki-bashing". A temple on the Ridge was nicknamed the "Pande Quarter" after it was taken over by British troops. But before that they were forced to flee to Karnal.
"Harriet Tytler, wife of a Captain (Robert) Tytler in the 38th Native Infantry, was eight months pregnant when the English evacuated Delhi. She lived in an old bullock-cart covered in thatch on the great ridge overlooking Delhi. Her baby was born in some old straw strewn on the floor," says an old journal.
Such was the zeal for the cause that not only the sadhu and the mullah had united but also woman, who generally preferred to remain within the confines of the zenana. There were examples of their bravery at the Kashmere Gate in Delhi, where the Ghazi woman particularly the one nicknamed "The Fair Maid of Delhi," played havoc with the British troops operating from the Ridge. The following incident is an eye-opener:
A soldier of the Highlanders' regiment, seeing the wounded and the dead, on being prompted by his officer, got suspicious and scanned the top of the peepul tree. He brought down a body "in a tight-fitting red jacket and tight-fitting rose-coloured silk trousers; and the breast of the jacket bursting open with the fall, showed that the wearer was a woman. She was armed, with a pair of heavy old-patterned cavalry pistols..."
Well that brave woman had laid low many before she was discovered and made to pay the ultimate penalty. Such deeds of heroism did not go unnoticed by members of the opposing force, for it was they who recorded them for not only their countrymen but also posterity, though they dubbed the Amazons as "the three bags of Rampur".
According to Percival Spear, the `Mutiny was the swan-song of the old India' when the medieval talwar and the modern bayonet clashed. But the victors got the message and the vanquished did not die in vain, for they inspired a new generation of freedom fighters. Whenever the anniversary of the Ghaddar comes around the message is repeated. It has been so all these years - and it will be even more so when the film, "The Rising", is released.
R.V. SMITH
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