The Raj Hanged Mangal Pandey Ten Days After Barrackpore, Dismissed Seven Companies of His Regiment Four Weeks Later and Made His Surname a Word for Every Rebel

On the afternoon of Sunday, 29 March 1857, Shaikh Paltu, a Muslim sepoy of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry (the official papers spell him Sheik Phultoo), was walking back to the lines at Barrackpore, the army station just north of Calcutta, when he saw a man from No. 5 Company come out of his hut “in his coat and hat and accoutrements, and musket in his hand.” A week later Paltu told a court-martial what the man was shouting: “From biting these cartridges we shall become infidels; get ready, turn out all of you.”

The man was sepoy No. 1,446, whom the record calls Mungul Pandy and history calls Mangal Pandey. tuput has a shorter account of him that gives the outline. This piece goes through the papers printed for Parliament in 1857 as the Appendix to Papers relative to the Mutinies in the East Indies: the court of inquiry, the court-martial, Lord Canning’s minutes, the order that dismissed Pandey’s comrades, and the origin of the word “Pandy.”

Fifty soldiers at the landing and a guard that did not move

Major-General J. B. Hearsey, who commanded the division, filed his own report on 9 April. Officers had told him, he wrote, that the sepoy was calling on the brigade “to defend and die for their religion and their caste, for the Europeans had arrived.” Hearsey explained that the man was alluding to fifty soldiers of Her Majesty’s 53rd Foot, landing at the flagstaff ghat from a steamer out of Calcutta.

The witnesses agree on the outline of what followed. Sergeant-Major James Hewson walked out and Pandey fired at him and missed. The adjutant, Lieutenant Bempde Baugh, galloped up and Pandey shot his horse. Baugh fired a pistol, missed, and went in with his sword, and Pandey cut Baugh on the hand and neck and Hewson on the head. Paltu, unarmed, got his arms round Pandey’s waist and held him while the officers retreated.

The quarter-guard, a jemadar (the lowest rank of Indian commissioned officer), a havildar, a naik and twenty men, was within sight. Jemadar Issuree Pandy gave no order to move. Hewson and Paltu said that sepoys in uniform struck the officers down from behind with musket butts. The General Order of 4 May says only one of them was identified, Hurry Lall Tewarry, who had deserted.

Hearsey rode in with his sons and staff. By his own account he ordered the guard to follow him, pointed his revolver partly at the jemadar when the man hesitated, and, told that Pandey’s musket was loaded, answered “Damn his musket.” Pandey, “seeing there was no chance of escape,” as Hearsey judged it, turned the musket on his own breast, “hurriedly touching the trigger with his toe.” The bullet grazed his chest, shoulder and neck and set his jacket on fire.

Hearsey then asked the men of the 34th why they had not seized him. They answered, he wrote, “in one voice” that Pandey was mad and had taken bhang, a cannabis preparation, “to excess.” Their own colonel gave a different reason. When the guard halted, Lieutenant-Colonel S. G. Wheler told a court of inquiry, “Some one, a native in undress, mentioned to me that the sepoy in front is a Brahmin, and that no one would hurt him.”

A court of inquiry on Monday, a court-martial the next Monday

A special court of inquiry of three British field officers opened at the 34th’s mess-house on 30 March, heard Paltu, a jemadar, a havildar, the guard’s bugler, Baugh and Hewson, and returned on 6 April to question Wheler and Captain C. C. Drury about the quarter-guard.

The court-martial opened the same day, at eleven in the morning, in the same mess-house. Its president was Subadar-Major Jowahir Lall Tewarry of the 43rd, and its members were Indian commissioned officers drawn from several regiments, one of them the 34th itself. Captain G. C. Hatch acted as judge-advocate. The prosecutor was Pandey’s own colonel, Wheler.

Pandey was brought in with his handcuffs taken off. He told the court he objected to no member and pleaded not guilty to two charges: mutiny, for using “words tending to incite the men of his regiment to turn out, and join him in resistance to lawful authority,” and violence against Hewson and Baugh. The court heard Wheler, went to the bedsides of Hewson and Baugh, then heard the drummer, John Lewis, and Paltu. Pandey declined to cross-examine any of them. Asked for his defence, he said: “I did not know whom I wounded and whom I did not; what more shall I say? I have nothing more to say.” He called no witnesses.

Drury, asked about his character, answered “Good,” and said he had no previous convictions. The record gives his age as 26 years, 2 months and 9 days, and his service as 7 years, 2 months and 9 days. The court found him guilty on both charges and sentenced him to hang. Hatch reported that fourteen officers voted for the verdict on each charge and eleven for the death sentence. The court rose at half-past six.

”Of my own will,” and “you have sent me out here”

In the week after the shooting, the field officer of the week and an interpreter questioned Pandey with the sepoy who attended him sent out of the tent. Asked whether he had acted of his own free will or on the instructions of others: “Of my own will. I expected to die.” Asked whether he meant to kill the adjutant or would have shot anyone else: “I should have shot any one who came.” Asked about drugs: “I have been taking bhang and opium of late, but formerly never touched any drugs. I was not aware at the time of what I was doing.” The officers noted that he was “asked frequently” for the names of anyone connected with the affair, was told he had “nothing to fear from his own regiment by disclosing anything,” and “refused to state more than the above.”

The drug plea settles little. Paltu told the court Pandey “eats bhang” but did not know whether he had taken any that day.

Other witnesses put different words in his mouth. Hewson heard him call: “Come out, men, come out, men; you have sent me out, why don’t you follow me?” Hearsey’s report has him crying, “You have excited me to do this, and now, you [abusive term], you will not join me.” Wheler took the same words as proof that “many of the men must have been implicated with him.” Canning’s minute of 30 April said his language “showed that his comrades had instigated him to it.” The Government’s General Order of 4 May records that he called on his comrades “to come to his support for the reason that their religion was in danger.”

Two other men gave evidence of a wider plan. Jemadar Durriow Singh told a court of inquiry in April that Subadar-Major Ram Lall and others had meant to seize Fort William on 26 January with help from the King of Oudh, on the word of a havildar. Hearsey wrote that the statement was “connected” but that “no evidence to prove such statement can be found,” though he had “but little doubt” it was “founded in truth.”

Hanged before the brigade at half-past five

Hearsey confirmed the sentence on 7 April and ordered the execution “on the Brigade Parade to-morrow morning, the 8th instant, at half-past 5 o’clock, in the presence of all the troops off duty, at the station.” That is ten days after the shooting. Britannica says the hanging had been set for 18 April and was moved up for fear of a revolt. The papers printed for Parliament run straight from verdict to order, and we found no earlier date in them.

On 10 April Canning wrote a minute refusing Hearsey’s request for a General Order praising Baugh and Hewson. The two officers would get the Government’s thanks, he said, but a General Order would “give a notoriety and importance to his crime.” He added that Hearsey’s divisional order had better not have called Pandey’s state “religious frenzy,” since he “would have preferred that this feature of the case had been left unnoticed.”

The jemadar who said “you will be hung”

On 10 April the same president and the same prosecutor began the trial of Jemadar Issuree Pandy for not using “his utmost or any endeavours to suppress a mutiny” begun by Pandey. Two Sikh sepoys of the guard, Sobha Singh and Atma Singh, testified from custody that men of the guard had wanted to go out. Sobha Singh quoted the jemadar: “Don’t go out, unless I give you orders; am I not in command of the guard?” Atma Singh quoted him: “If you kill that sepoy you will be hung, and if he kills you what shall I do?” Drury said that earlier the jemadar had taken him aside and told him, “or words to that effect,” that “they will take the man’s part; they are with the man.”

One member of the court, Subadar Sewumbir Pandy of the 34th, turned out to have warned Drury to take shelter that afternoon. The judge-advocate told the court that this “ought to have been stated” to him when the charges were read. The court sat on. On 13 April it found Issuree Pandy guilty, with fourteen votes on each charge and twelve for death.

A dispute between Calcutta and Simla over whether Hearsey could confirm a sentence on an Indian commissioned officer held the hanging up until General Anson confirmed it on 20 April. Canning wrote to London, in a letter Kaye prints, that the execution of a native officer “convicted by his brother officers, will have a most wholesome effect.” On 21 April the Government told Hearsey that if he wanted four howitzers, manned by native gunners, they could be sent that evening. He answered that it was too late and that the hanging was at six. His report says the jemadar confessed on the scaffold and told the troops to take warning.

Seven companies, one order

A court of inquiry under Brigadier C. Grant concluded in mid-April that “the Sikhs and Mussulmans of the 34th Regiment Native Infantry are trustworthy soldiers of the State, but that the Hindoos generally of that corps are not trustworthy.”

Canning refused to act on that religious line. In his minute of 30 April he wrote that he would have been glad of any punishment short of disbanding the seven companies at Barrackpore, but that “no penalty less general than this would meet the exigencies of the case, or be effectual as an example.” He saw “no possibility of drawing a line of separation between creeds,” and thought the attempt “impolitic and dangerous.” “All must suffer together.”

General Order No. 645 of 4 May carried this out. It said the sepoy “has been tried, condemned, and hanged” and that the jemadar had “paid the penalty.” Of the rest it said: “Silent spectators of a long continued act of insolent mutiny, they have made no endeavour to suppress it, and have thereby become liable themselves to the punishment of mutineers.” All Indian officers and men of the seven companies were dismissed from the Army of Bengal. Eleven men were named as exceptions, and so was anyone who could prove he was away from the lines on 29 March. Of the Indian commissioned officers, only three escaped. The three companies at Chittagong, “against which there is no reproach,” were spared.

The order told the sepoys their fears had been answered. It had been “carefully and clearly shown to them,” it said, that the cartridges “contained nothing which could do violence to their religious scruples.” If they still distrusted the Government, “the fault is their own, and their punishment will be upon their own heads.”

The dismissal took place on 6 May, before sunrise, in front of all the troops at Barrackpore. Kaye records that the 19th Native Infantry, disbanded at the same station on 31 March after the trouble at Berhampore, were allowed to keep their uniforms, and that the 34th were not: “the uniforms which they had disgraced were stripped from their backs.” They were marched out under a European escort. Kaye counted five hundred more men, mostly Brahmins and Rajputs, put out of the army.

The colonel who led the prosecution

Wheler had appeared in every one of the courts, as prosecutor or witness. “Were it necessary to come to an opinion upon this evidence alone,” Canning wrote, “I could come to none more favourable to Colonel Wheler than that he is entirely unfit to be entrusted with the command of a regiment.”

The council also had Wheler’s letters. From late January the sepoys of his regiment had been saying that the Government meant to make them Christians by force, and Wheler had told them on parade that this was impossible. Asked in April whether he spoke to sepoys about Christianity, he wrote that he had done so for twenty years, and, asked again, that he had “often” done so to men of his own regiment and that converting them “has been my object.” General Low wrote of his “habitual and persevering personal endeavours to convert Hindoo and Mahomedan sepoys.” On 12 May the Government asked the Commander-in-Chief to put Wheler’s conduct on 29 March before a court-martial or some other formal investigation. The outcome is not in the papers we opened.

Where “Pandy” came from

George Bourchier, an officer who served against the Bengal army in 1857 and published his account the next year, explained the word in a footnote: “The first two men hung at Barrackpore were pandies by caste, hence all sepoys were pandies, and ever will be so called.” Pande was a common surname among the high-caste sepoys of the Bengal army, and Yule and Burnell’s glossary of 1886 defines Pandy as “the most current colloquial name for the Sepoy mutineer during 1857-58.” The two men hanged at Barrackpore that April were Mangal Pandey and Jemadar Issuree Pandy. Yule and Burnell also quote H. Greathed’s letters from the siege of Delhi in 1857: “I leave this feeling to the Pandies, who have sacrificed honour and existence to the ghost of a delusion.”

The same ceremony was repeated at Meerut. On 24 April, of ninety troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry told to take cartridges, only five obeyed, and eighty-five were sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. On 9 May, Kaye writes, they were paraded before the garrison, stripped of their uniforms and shackled. The next day their comrades broke them out of jail, and the National Army Museum dates the rebellion “in earnest” to that day. What the British did to the people they called Pandies after that is told in the British revenge for 1857.

What the papers leave out

Almost everything above was written by men who wanted Pandey hanged. Sharmistha Gooptu asked in Outlook in 2005 whether official documents such as the proceedings of his trial should by themselves be used to reconstruct the past. The papers say little of his family or why he enlisted, and Outlook’s review of Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s 2005 biography of him spoke of “the paucity of real information.”

Even the basics disagree. Britannica gives his birth as 19 July 1827 at Akbarpur near Faizabad and notes that some name a village near Lalitpur; a Lok Sabha member said in 2005 that he was born in Ballia. Britannica puts him in the 6th Company and has him joining in 1849; the charge sheet says the 5th Company, and the court’s figures of 26 years of age and 7 years of service, which Outlook’s review repeats, put his birth in early 1831 and his enlistment in early 1850.

Ketan Mehta’s Hindi film Mangal Pandey: The Rising, released on 12 August 2005, added invented characters. No officer named William Gordon, the film’s British lead, played by Toby Stephens, appears in the Barrackpore papers, and nothing in them matches the courtesan Heera, played by Rani Mukerji. The historian Saul David told the Sunday Telegraph he knew of no evidence for the film’s opium massacre or slave auction, though the Company did trade in opium. On 24 August 2005 the Lok Sabha member Ramji Lal Suman said people in eastern Uttar Pradesh were blocking roads and pulling up railway tracks over the film. On 22 February 2006 Justice A. K. Sikri of the Delhi High Court threw out a defamation suit by two of Pandey’s relatives, Raghunath Pandey and Omkar Nath Pandey, and ordered the film to state that Heera is fictional and that Mangal Pandey died a bachelor.