Golden Afternoon (6 page)

A little over sixty years later, in a last echo of those terrible days, the terrified, bloodstained little ghosts of those who died in the
Bibi-ghur
at Cawnpore crept out from the blackness of the well into which their bodies had been thrown, to haunt a man by the name of Dyer, who, though born seven years after their deaths, had been brought up by people to whom the Mutiny and its horror-stories were part of current history and their day-to-day lives.

He had joined the army and done well there, and shortly after the end of the First World War (by which time he had reached the rank of General) he was called upon to cope with a savage explosion of violence, anarchy and rioting that had broken out in the Punjab, whipped up by agitators demanding immediate independence. The burning and looting inevitably led to bloodshed, and in Amritsar, a centre of the violence, the mob killed five Europeans, three of them, Scott, Stewart and Thompson, bank managers whom they beat up with
lathis
^*
before dragging them up to the flat rooftops of their respective banks and throwing them down on
to the pavements below, where the mob doused them with kerosene oil and set them alight. Mr Robinson, a railway guard, was also beaten to death by the
lathis
of another ‘unarmed' mob, while Sergeant Rowlands, an electrician peacefully on his way to work at the Municipal Power House and unaware of any trouble, was attacked and had his hands hacked off before being battered to death.

There was very nearly a sixth victim, a Miss Sherwood, whom the mob beat and left for dead. Poor Marcella Sherwood, a woman doctor who for fifteen years had worked selflessly for the Zenana Mission Society and the women of Amritsar, heard of the rioting and, though warned of the danger, sped off on her bicycle to make sure that all her pupils got safely back to their homes. She was well known and liked by the citizens. But by now the mob had embarked on an orgy of blood and violence, and seeing her appear a group of youths began yelling, ‘She's English! Kill her! She's English!' A man in the crowd shouted back that she was a good woman, a healer and a teacher; but the crowds were drunk on destruction and one of the youths pulled her off her bicycle by her hair and pushed her to the ground. She managed to scramble up and run, only to be brought down again; and at that the frenzied mob closed in like hounds at a kill, snarling, ripping and kicking the defenceless woman until they reduced her to a bloodstained pulp. Shouting exultantly that she was dead, they left her lying in the gutter and rushed away in search of further entertainment; yelling, of
all
things, ‘Victory to Gandhi!'

For it was Gandhi's tragedy (and India's even more so) that this Mahatma who preached peace and non-violence understood the mind of the British so much better than the mind of his own people, and never seems to have realized that any gathering of the latter must, when whipped up by inflammatory speeches by an agitator, inevitably lead to violence. It is only too possible that this revered and world-famous apostle may, after all, have been personally responsible for more deaths than Stalin. Though not, as it happened, for Marcella's, who by some miracle survived — her battered and unrecognizable body having been retrieved and cared for, at the risk of their lives, by a bazaar shopkeeper and his wife. But this savage attack on a harmless woman, and the brutal murders of the five non-combatant Europeans for no better reason than their nationality, served to convince many more people than Dyer that what they were seeing was a rerun of the opening days of the Mutiny.

Murderers like Dundu Pant are extolled as heroic freedom fighters,
while men like Dyer are execrated in films,
^*
books and newspaper articles, though Dyer acted as he did for one reason only: he firmly believed that he was preventing another Mutiny and a second Cawnpore. For the repercussions of that brutal Massacre of the Innocents, like a stone flung into a stagnant pool, had sent ripples out across India, driving men to acts of savagery that they chose to term ‘reprisals'. And sixty-two years later the last of those ripples was to lap against the walls of the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, when a man who had seen the smashed and mangled, near-dead body of Marcella Sherwood,
^†
and feared a repetition of that appalling slaughter, ordered his troops
^†
to fire on an ‘unarmed' (if you don't count
lathis
and clubs as arms) mob of thousands, who had already tasted blood and were being urged by a series of well-known rabble-rousers to march on the Cantonments and kill all the ‘
Angrezi
monkeys'.

There is a postscript to all this.

Many years later, long after India had achieved her independence and become two separate countries, while on a visit to Indian friends in Calcutta I had an interesting conversation with one of that city's lively and cynical young writers. We had been commenting on his country's rewriting of British–Indian history, with special reference to such matters as the bricking-up, post Independence, of a narrow alleyway leading out of the Jallianwala Bagh, with a view to impressing on foreign tourists the extreme brutality of the British (it makes that terrible episode look even nastier if there was no other way out of it — and nowadays there isn't).

Then there was also the recent removal by the Calcutta City Council of a monument to all those who died from suffocation in a single night in the notorious Black Hole of Calcutta — a gruesome incident that occurred over a century before the massacre of Cawnpore — and the fact that, in addition to abolishing the monument (no loss; it was not a thing of beauty), the Council had pronounced the entire incident to have
been a malicious invention; a lying piece of British propaganda without a grain of truth in it, fabricated for the sole purpose of discrediting that heroic freedom fighter, and the local Nawab, one Suraj-ud-daula (in those days the larger part of India was ruled by Muslim potentates).

I said that this seemed a pretty silly thing to do, considering the amount of evidence that existed, including letters from the only two survivors, and that I was surprised — if this type of Orwellian ‘
1984
' Newspeak was becoming so popular in India — that while they were about it they hadn't decided to repudiate the Cawnpore massacre as well. At which my chatty acquaintance laughed and said: ‘Don't worry. We will! Just give us time. It's early days yet, and Cawnpore isn't nearly as easy to dismiss as the Black Hole was, because the evidence is still all there.'

When I asked what evidence, he said: ‘The bodies, of course. They're still down there, and if we began to say that the whole affair was only a propaganda horror-story cooked up by your lot, someone has only got to take the top off that well and there they all are. Bones last for thousands of years and it's easy to find out how the owners died and what sex they were. And to date them. Besides, there must be a lot of other things down there. Hooks and eyes. Buttons. Whalebone from stays. Hairpins — any number of things besides a couple of hundred skeletons. But the bodies from the Black Hole were thrown into the Hoogly, which is a tidal river. See?'

I said I saw. And I did.

‘I daresay that one of these days,' mused Young India, ‘when the ground has been cleared and people have forgotten where that well was, or what happened here, some business corporation will build a whopping great housing estate on the site, all concrete beehive flats. And if anyone remembers the
Bibi-ghur
affair, we shall say that it was just a story that was put about to discredit us — another “lying bit of
Angrezi
propaganda”.'

He laughed again, and I said it was quite a thought. But that nothing would induce me to live in one of those flats. Would he?

‘
The gods forbid!
' agreed my cynical acquaintance with unexpected fervour; and shuddered as he said it.

The little temple on the river-bank, from where Tantia Topi, the general in command of the Nana Sahib's forces, watched the massacre at the boats, was still there when Charlie Allen took us to see the sites in the autumn of 1927. But as soon as the Mutiny was over, the
Bibi-ghur
was destroyed and a garden planted on and around the place where it had stood. The well was properly capped and sealed and a sorrowing angel in white marble was placed on top of it, and the whole enclosed in a circular screen of ornately pierced and carved red sandstone. I gather that after Independence all this was swept away and the angel removed to the nearest Christian church. Which is no loss, since she was a singularly stodgy-looking Victorian angel in the worst tradition of British funerary sculpture.

Presumably the red sandstone enclosure has gone too; and if so the prophecy of my cynical young Calcutta acquaintance may well come true even sooner than he imagined. Although, as we agreed, one would not fancy living in any building that was erected on or even near that unchancy spot, for though it might be all right by daylight, it would not be by night — by no means at night. Back in the thirties I met, in New Delhi, a middle-aged Englishwoman who claimed to be psychic, and who had been invited out to spend a cold weather with relatives stationed in Cawnpore. She had looked forward to spending two or three months with them, but had left after less than ten days, and was in Delhi arranging for a return passage because, she said, she could not endure the ghosts that haunted the garden of her host's bungalow.

They were not there during the daytime, she said, but she had seen them again and again at dusk, and once or twice by moonlight — running distractedly across the open lawns to hide among the bushes and the tree shadows. Some appeared to be carrying babies in their arms, while others dragged older children by the hand; and when the moon was up she could see that their trailing skirts were tattered and stained with ugly blotches and that their eyes and their gaping mouths were dark pools of terror in their pallid faces. She had thought at first that they were gypsies.

I remember a sceptical listener suggesting that she had obviously allowed a surfeit of Mutiny horror-stories to prey on her mind until they gave her hallucinations; an explanation that the lady rejected with considerable indignation, insisting that prior to this visit all she had ever known about the Indian Mutiny was that there had been one! She had never been interested in colonial history, and as for her hosts, they had been far more interested in having a good time than in local folk tales, and it had not occurred to them to tell her grisly stories of a time they plainly regarded as being in the remote past. It was only when she inquired at breakfast one day about the groups of oddly dressed gypsy-women she
had seen every evening, running across their lawn, that she realized that what she had seen were not living people, but the silent re-enactment of something that had happened back in the middle of the previous century.

Do I believe in ghosts? Yes, I certainly do. You cannot be born and spend your formative years in a country like India without accepting the truth of that famous statement that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Hamlet: ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' There are indeed.

There are also more predators, one species of which I was to encounter for the first time within a few days of our arrival in Cawnpore.

In most hot countries it is customary to take a siesta during the afternoon, and since the habit had been adopted by the British in India, I was disappointed to discover that the ‘grown-ups' (of whom I was now one, though I still found that difficult to accept) were apt to take to their beds during the hottest part of the day; a practice that seemed to me a terrible waste of time. However, I dutifully followed their example, and one afternoon, not long after our arrival in Cawnpore, I was jerked out of this post-prandial catnap by a terrific uproar from outside the house.