For many months British rule in North and Central India hung almost by a thread. But the fate of the Revolt was settled by the Indians themselves. The Sikhs and the Gurkhas supported the British. The Nizam in the south, and Scindia in the north, and many other Indian States, also lined up with the British. Even apart from these defections, the Revolt had the seeds of failure in it. It was fighting for a lost cause, the feudal order; it had no good leadership; it was badly organized, and there were mutual squabbles all the time.
Some of the rebels also sullied their cause by cruel massacres of the British. This barbarous behaviour naturally set up the backs of the British people in India, and they paid it back in the same coin, but a hundred and a thousand times multiplied. The English were especially incensed by a massacre of English men and women and children in Cawnpore, treacherously ordered, it is stated, after promise of safety had been given, by Nana Sahab, a descendant of the Peshwa. A memorial well in Cawnpore commemorates this horrible tragedy.
In the midst of the horrors of the Revolt and its suppression, one name stands out, a bright spot against a dark background.
* At the time, John Bright MP, a steadfast critic of British policy in India, somewhat reluctantly agreed that the Mutiny had to be pacified; we could not “allow every Englishman in India to be murdered”, he wrote in a letter that September. “But he subsequently expressed his deep indignation” recalled his biographer G. Barnett Smith “at the severities and cruelties practised by the British troops and their commanders on the natives of India”. Dead rebels went unburied, living rebels were shot, hanged or blown from the cannon’s mouth. “An English general, Neill,” Nehru tells us, “who marched from Allahabad to Cawnpore, is said to have hanged people all along the way, till hardly a tree remained by the roadside which had not been converted into a gibbet.” It was brutality from an age long past: see Charles Dickens on The Harrying of the North.