Scrutiny of a Mutiny

THE RED FORT (383 pp.)--James Leasor--Reynal ($5).

As history is written it seems only a long minute since the great subcontinent of India was ruled by a unique commercial enterprise called the East India Company. A century ago that rule came to a bloody end with the Indian Mutiny. In a splendid narrative, British Newsman James Leasor has brought a bewilderingly confused mass of material into focus where it belongs--on the Red Fort of Delhi and the old walled city where the last of the Moguls sat in splendor and squalor amid his treasure, eunuchs and his 700-year past.

The mutiny itself--mostly horror but also part farce--began, as the schoolbooks say, with the news that the new type of rifle cartridge issued to the East India Company's troops was greased with beef and pork fat. One would be horrible to cow-venerating Hindus; the other would be offensive to pork-abhorring Mohammedans. The troops in India were a fantastically mixed lot--and Indians do not mix well. There were not only the company troops but regiments in the service of Queen Victoria, and in the ranks discipline was snarled up in India's ancient caste system, e.g., a low-caste sergeant would kiss the feet of a Brahman private.

Not Cricket. The ordinary Indian soldier was called a sepoy, and there were 257,000 of them to 34,000 British troops in all India. Unhappily for the British, the Crimean War and a brace of local disasters had shown that the sahibs were not invincible. Also the Feringis (Europeans) were bigoted enough to abolish suttee. The rumor spread among Moslems and Hindus that the British were trying to make Christians of them. The greased cartridges hit a bull's-eye of hate, and at Meerut 85 sepoys refused duty. After a suitable court-martial, the older mutineers were shackled on parade to be carted off to the Andaman Islands, 600 miles off the Indian coast. Their comrades revolted, killed all the officers and wives they could find, unshackled the sepoys and, for want of another place to go, marched on Delhi.

Within the blood-colored walls of that fantastic city, like a queen bee in the great swarming hive of India, sat the ancient Mohammedan King of Delhi, a company pensioner, who suddenly found himself the unwilling leader of what today might be called a national war of liberation. As the mutineers in their elaborate British uniforms streamed into his city, all the pious old gentleman could do was to ask them not to loot too much (most of the British in Delhi were massacred in the first few days succeeding the mutiny) and consult the entrails of a goat in the hope of a suitable augury.

Ladders over the Dead. Behind the city's seven miles of wall, in control of masses of artillery, the rebels seemed to be sitting pretty. But slowly, despite a military organization like a Pentagon without a car pool (there were only 273 miles of railway line in all India), the British moved to assault the walls they had fortified and the men they had trained. To move a division required several thousand bullocks. Elephants were the heavy-weapons carriers, and when they became casualties, disease carriers; their huge, rotting corpses littered the plains.

The siege lasted more than four months. The British outside the city could see their enemies on the walls and hear the bands play their own British marching songs. The besiegers began the operation with 22 guns and played cricket behind the lines, but ended it in old-fashioned style with drawn swords atop scaling ladders. The British soldiers used ladders of bamboo, and to give them the needed height planted them on the piled bodies of their own dead. Of the final besieging force of 5,000 or so men, nearly one-third were killed or wounded. It is almost incredible that they forced to surrender a mutinous garrison of about 30,000 trained soldiers, and Author Leasor's account of the final engagement is as thrilling as anything written of Waterloo or Gettysburg.

When Delhi fell it was a city of corpses and fabulous treasure. With his own hand Major William Hodson (the dashing leader of "Hodson's Horse") shot the old King's sons and grandson. The King himself was put on a food allowance of two annas per diem (about a nickel) and exiled to Burma, after vainly shopping for asylum in South Africa.

Intruders in the Dust. As a military record, the crushing of the sepoy mutiny seems as remote and exotic as the defeat of Hannibal's war elephants. Yet the mutiny signaled the birth of modern India. That in this India--the country of Gandhi and Nehru--the hatreds of beef and pork, Hindu and Moslem, can be as strong as their joint hatred of the raj, was shown only too clearly in the "communal riots'' of 1946-48, in which far more people were killed than in the entire sepoy mutiny. Leasor's book will flatter few Indians. On his showing, the intruders in India's dust have less to be ashamed of than a generation of critics have supposed. Said Macaulay: "To have found a great people sunk in the lower depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own."

The British who stormed Delhi, as well as the British who left India, confirmed that title.

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