Andrew Ward seems to have made a career out of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and especially the violent events at Cawnpore, the bloodiest chapter of the whole uprising. He published a novel about it, The Blood Seed, in 1985. Now arrives this paperback edition of Our Bones are Scattered, his voluminous account of the whole affair from start to finish. As critics routinely wrote of the hardback, it's unlikely to be superseded.
A writer with a large cache of historical material can use it in several different ways. At one extreme there's the meticulous historical account, comparing and evaluating sources. At the other is fiction, an imaginative re-creation of how things were. What Ward has opted to write this time is a narrative that's historically impeccable, but also reads like a novel. Publishers rub their hands in glee at this kind of thing as it appeals to both historians and the general reader. And Ward really has brought off the feat with aplomb. This book both reads immensely well and appears exhaustive in its coverage. It appears definitive and is genuinely engrossing.
The British garrison at
Cawnpore (modern Kanpur, sited on both the Ganges and the Grand Trunk Road) suffered particularly extensive brutality on both sides. The expatriate community holed up behind an entrenchment, holding out almost until reinforcements arrived, but not quite. The slaughter when the garrison fell was bad, but all historians agree that the reprisal killings that followed were much more numerous than the original murders. There were even protests by British officers at what seemed like indiscriminate
executions.
Everyone agrees that the protest against the pork and beef grease used on the new Enfield rifles was merely the touch-paper that set off a revolt fueled by deeper-seated grievances. There was the enfeeblement of the old aristocratic rulers, the extensive work of missionaries, new laws banning suttee and allowing the re-marriage of widows, and the replacement of the traditional scholarly language of Persian by English. All these made the traditionalists feel their new masters were eroding the very fabric of Indian society, so that when the arrests of the sepoys (Indian soldiers) who refused to use the new rifles occurred, a huge backlog of resentment was unleashed. The initial refusal happened in Meerut, but by the end of the very next day the whole of Delhi, 65km away, was in the hands of anti-British forces.
In relating events through the experience of specific individuals, Andrew Ward brings the story into vivid life. There's a Eurasian, the evangelizing William Jonah Shepherd, who later published the most reliable of all the eye-witness accounts of the Cawnpore events, a major-general, Hugh Massey Wheeler, the notorious but in reality astute Nana Sahib. You read of Europeans being dragged on ropes through the midday sun and Indians being blown apart by cannons. You read the Britons' letters home verbatim, but Ward warns that the testimony of the Indians has to be understood as coming through the filter of their English scribes -- and possibly being, to some degree at least, what their rulers wanted to hear.
Scholars have debated how far the uprising was planned and later coordinated, and Ward's extensive notes, sometimes one per sentence through a whole paragraph, show he knows all the ins and outs of the arguments. But what he presents is a story, with the debates taking place, not among historians, but in the minds of his protagonists.
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