After 1857, a British General Forced Condemned Men to Clean Blood Off a Floor Under the Lash, Then Hanged Them. He Was Not the Worst of It.

In the summer of 1857, in a house in Kanpur (then spelled Cawnpore) called the Bibighar, a British general had condemned men brought in and made to clean dried blood off the floor. A man who refused was flogged until he did it. Then he was taken outside and hanged.

We know because the general wrote it down. In a letter later quoted by the historian G. O. Trevelyan, James Neill described his method: “the chief rebels or ringleaders I make first to clear up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep, in the shed where the fearful murder and mutilation of the women and children took place.”

He knew exactly what the order meant to the men he gave it to. “To touch blood is most abhorrent to the high-caste natives,” he wrote. “They think, by doing so, they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so.”

The blood on that floor

The blood was real. By June 1857 the rising had spread from Delhi to Kanpur, Lucknow and Jhansi. At Kanpur the besieged British garrison accepted safe passage from Nana Sahib, the local ruler who had joined the rising, and was fired on as it boarded boats on the Ganges. On 15 July the women and children held in the Bibighar were killed and thrown down a well. The National Army Museum puts their number at 120. Cornwall’s Army Museum at Bodmin says around 200.

“Remember Cawnpore!” became a British war cry. As an explanation for what followed, it has a problem with dates.

The hangings that came first

Neill was at Allahabad in June, weeks before the Bibighar. On 30 June he sent a column of about 800 men up the road to Kanpur under Major Renaud. The Victorian historian John Kaye summarised Neill’s written orders. Villages marked as guilty were to be destroyed and every man in them killed. Sepoys who could not give “a good account of themselves” were to be hanged. One line Kaye quoted word for word: “If the Deputy-Collector is taken, hang him, and have his head cut off and stuck up on one of the principal (Mahomedan) buildings of the town.”

Villages burnt before any news arrived

Renaud carried it out. Kaye wrote that the column left behind it “desolated villages and corpses dangling from the branches of trees.” An officer who marched with it told the correspondent William Howard Russell that in two days 42 men were hanged on the roadside, and that twelve more were executed “because their faces were ‘turned the wrong way’ when they were met on the march.” Every village ahead of the column was burnt when it halted.

Russell drew the conclusion in his diary. These “severities,” he wrote, “could not have been justified by the Cawnpore massacre, because they took place before that diabolical act.” Britannica agrees that some British officers began their severities before they knew of any such murders.

Kaye admired Renaud, “a fine soldier, with his heart in his work,” and still he added a footnote: “I should be untrue to history if I did not record my belief that these retributory measures were distinguished by undue severity.”

What Neill did at Kanpur

Neill reached Kanpur on 20 July, days after Havelock’s force retook it, and took command there on the 25th. The first man he caught, he wrote, was a subahdar, a native officer, “a high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order to clean up the very blood he had helped to shed: but I made the provost-marshal do his duty, and a few lashes soon made the miscreant accomplish his task. When done, he was taken out and immediately hanged, and, after death, buried in a ditch at the road-side.”

Worse accounts reached Delhi with cavalrymen who fled Kanpur. William Dalrymple, drawing on the historians Christopher Hibbert and Andrew Ward, records their stories: prisoners made to lick the floor clean, others sewn into pigskins before hanging, and an order from Neill that Hindus be buried and Muslims burned.

Trevelyan, writing in 1865, saw the point. Neill “desired only to wound the sentiments of the doomed men,” he wrote, and did it “in the crisis of an insurrection of which the immediate cause was the belief that the British Government was attempting to tamper with caste!” The rising had started over cartridges that sepoys believed were greased with cow and pig fat.

Neill was shot through the head at Lucknow on 25 September 1857. Dalrymple quotes his view of the work: “The Word of God gives no authority to the modern tenderness for human life.”

Delhi, after the walls fell

The British fought their way into Delhi between 14 and 21 September. The city, in the National Army Museum’s words, “was then ransacked in an orgy of looting and killing.”

Dalrymple counts some 1,400 people killed in a single neighbourhood, Kucha Chelan. “The orders went out to shoot every soul,” recorded Edward Vibart, a 19-year-old officer, who called what he saw “literally murder.” Survivors were driven out and the Mughal capital was left empty. The organised plunder by prize agents is its own story.

Three princes at a gate

On 22 September, Captain William Hodson rode to Humayun’s Tomb, where members of the royal family had taken refuge. Three princes surrendered to him: Mirza Mughal and Mirza Khizr Sultan, sons of the emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, and Mirza Abu Bakr, his grandson. Hodson sent them towards the city under guard in a bullock cart.

Close to the walls of Delhi, near an archway, he stopped the cart. Dalrymple writes that he ordered the three men to get out and strip naked. Hodson’s own letter takes it from there: “seizing a carabine from one of my men, I deliberately shot them one after another.” He had the bodies laid out in front of the city police station, the kotwali. The gate has been called the Khooni Darwaza, the Bloody Gate, ever since.

Hodson said a hostile crowd was about to rescue the princes. His fellow officer MacDowell, Dalrymple notes, described a small crowd that posed no threat. Hodson’s feelings are not in dispute. “In twenty-four hours, therefore, I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar,” he wrote. “I am not cruel, but I confess I did rejoice at the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches.”

When the British later investigated Hodson, Dalrymple found, the question was not the shooting. It was whether he had overstepped by promising the old emperor his life.

Blown from guns

The National Army Museum’s summary of another punishment: “When trials were held, those convicted of mutiny were blown from cannon. It was a cruel punishment with a religious dimension. By blowing the body to pieces the victim lost hope of entering paradise.”

In 1963 a skull turned up in a pub in south-east England. A note inside named it as that of Alum Bheg, a sepoy blown from a cannon for his part in the rising, whose head an Irish officer at the execution had taken home as a trophy. The historian Kim Wagner told his story in The Skull of Alum Bheg.

A dry well at Ajnala

The fullest account comes from a civilian, who published it himself.

Frederic Cooper was Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar. The 26th Native Infantry, already disarmed and held at Mian Mir near Lahore, rose on 30 July 1857, killed its commanding officer, Major Spencer, and fled north. Near the Ravi, Cooper wrote, “some 150 had been shot, mobbed backwards into the river, and drowned.” The rest were trapped on an island.

They gave up. Cooper’s explanation: “They evidently were possessed of a sudden and insane idea, that they were going to be tried by court-martial.” They were bound, their “decorations and necklaces ignominiously cut off,” and marched to the police station at Ajnala. When the executions began, Cooper counted 282 prisoners.

He had already sent for rope and fifty Sikh levies to form a firing party. The bodies were a “sanitary” problem until “a deep dry well was discovered within one hundred yards of the police station.”

Ten at a time, on the morning of Eid

The next day, 1 August, was Bakr Eid. Cooper sent his Muslim cavalrymen back to Amritsar for the festival, and wrote that this left him free to “perform a ceremonial sacrifice of a different nature.”

“Ten by ten the sepoys were called forth.” After about 150, one of the firing party fainted. At 237, the men shut in a bastion a few hours earlier refused to come out. “The doors were opened, and, behold! they were nearly all dead!” Forty-five had died “from fright, exhaustion, fatigue, heat, and partial suffocation.” Village sweepers threw all the bodies into the well. Forty-two more, taken later, were blown from guns at Mian Mir.

Congratulations from Lahore

The day after, the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab, John Lawrence, wrote to Cooper: “I congratulate you on your success against the 26th N. I. … I trust the fate of these sepoys will operate as a warning to others.” Robert Montgomery, the Judicial Commissioner, added: “All honour to you for what you have done, and right well you did it.”

Cooper printed both letters in his 1858 book, The Crisis in the Punjab, “as a proof that no officer in the Punjab can do his duty without instant and warm recognition.” His case for the killing was deterrence: “Their extermination probably saved the lives of thousands.” His own pages answer him. The men he shot had surrendered expecting a court-martial, and none got one.

Sixty-two years later, in the same district, a British general would make the same argument about a crowd in a walled garden.

How many died is still argued

Nobody counted the dead of the British recovery. In 2007 the Mumbai writer Amaresh Misra argued for almost 10 million deaths over the ten years that began in 1857. The British historian Saul David told The Guardian the true figure ran to “hundreds of thousands” and called Misra’s number an overestimate. Shabi Ahmad, who led the Indian Council of Historical Research’s 1857 project, cautioned that “it could have been migration rather than murder that depopulated areas.” Britannica’s verdict: “In the end the reprisals far outweighed the original excesses.”

What came out of the well

In February 2014, a team led by the researcher Surinder Kochhar, working with the committee of Gurdwara Shaheed Ganj, dug into the well at Ajnala, known locally as the Kalianwala Khooh. The Tribune reported about 90 skulls, 170 jawbones and more than 5,000 teeth, with East India Company rupee coins, two British medals, gold amulets, rings and bangles. The diggers were amateurs, and scientists later wrote that the brittle bones were “severely damaged, fragmented, and commingled” in the process.

In 2022, scientists from Panjab University, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, the Birbal Sahni Institute in Lucknow and Banaras Hindu University published DNA and isotope tests on the remains in Frontiers in Genetics. The dead matched the people of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Jharkhand, which fits the written record that the 26th drew its men from Bengal, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Cooper had made the comparison himself, in print, in 1858. “There is a well at Cawnpore,” he wrote, “but there is also one at Ajnala!”