Hul! Hul!

HUL! HUL!

PETER STANLEY

HUL! HUL!

The Suppression of the Santal Rebellion in

Bengal, 1855

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by

C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,

New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA

© Peter Stanley, 2022

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United Kingdom

Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

The right of Peter Stanley to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781787385429

This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources.

www.hurstpublishers.com

For all the Hul’s unnamed victims; Santals, Bengalis and sepoys

Sidhu, why are you bathed in blood?

Kanhu, why do you cry Hul, Hul?

For our people we have bathed in blood

For the trader thieves

Have robbed our land.

Santal Rebellion Songs

collected by William Archer

CONTENTS

List of Maps and Illustrations

Note on the Text

Acknowledgements

Prologue: ‘The Skirt of the Hills’—The Santal Country

Maps

Introduction: ‘It Was Not War …’

PART I

BEFORE THE HUL

1. Protagonists and Contexts

PART II

JAPUT (THE MONSOON)

2. San (July)

3. Bhader (August)

PART III

NIRON (AUTUMN)

4. Desae (September)

5. Kartik (October)

PART IV

RABAN (WINTER)

6. Aghan (November) and Pus (December)

PART V

AFTER THE HUL

7. Aftermath and Interpretation

Epilogue: ‘A Little War’

Appendices

1. Appendix 1: Glossary

2. Appendix 2: Fights

3. Appendix 3: People

4. Appendix 4: Places: Concordance

Notes

Bibliography

Index

1. Walter Sherwill’s drawing of a surveyor at work; possibly Sherwill himself, from R.H. Phillimore’s Historical Records of the Survey of India , Vol. III.

2. The Rajmahal Hills seen from the Ganges. Walter Sherwill observed that while all Europeans travelling on the Ganges saw the hills from their steamers, few knew anything about the region or its people: some assumed that the hills were uninhabited. ( Illustrated London News , 6 October 1856)

3. A Santal village, based on a drawing by Walter Sherwill. Visitors commented on their neatness, and how they were invariably laid out in the same way, with a street of huts adjoining a sacred grove of sal trees and a platform at which the Thakur was worshipped. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

4. A moonlit Santal ceremony, based on an engraving by Walter Sherwill, whose affection for the Santals did not prevent him from describing their dancing as ‘lewd’ and ‘absurd’. ( Illustrated London News , 7 June 1851)

5. The tank at Moheshpore (now Mahespur, Jharkhand) in 2020, where elephant-borne sepoys of the 7th Bengal Native Infantry routed a Santal force under the Bhugnadihee brothers, three of whom were wounded in the fight. The tank is one of the few sites of the Hul which can be firmly identified. (Peter Stanley)

6. The 7th Bengal Native Infantry (wearing coatees and dhotis) escorting Santal prisoners to Jungeypore after the march to Burhyte and Moheshpore. The portly officer on the pony may be Walter Birch, drawn by Walter Sherwill. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

7. The country around Burhyte (now Berhet, Jharkhand) in 2020, with the Rajmahal Hills in the distance: the heart of the Hul in 1855 and now the location of a large memorial to the brothers who led it. (Peter Stanley)

8. George Atkinson’s depiction of ‘Our Sporting Sub’, from his Curry and Rice , conveys the self-assurance (not to say arrogance) of young officers of the Bengal Army, suggestive of officers like Lieutenant Tom Toulmin, the only Company officer killed in the Hul.

9. An engraving based on a drawing by Walter Sherwill showing sepoys of the 40th Bengal Native Infantry on a ‘dour’ in Bhaugulpore, with bullock hackeries carrying off Santal loot, elephants bearing the sepoys’ baggage and villages burning in the distance. The engraver gave the surrounding landscape a strangely Scottish look. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

10. Railway surveyors crossing a flooded nullah in the monsoon, an engraving based on a drawing by Walter Sherwill that suggests the difficulties of travelling during Bengal’s rainy season. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

11. An indigo factory, from Colesworthy Grant’s Rural Life in Bengal . Especially in the Hul’s first month, factories like this became both the targets of Santal attacks and bastions of European resistance.

12. The plains between Godda and Bowsee (now Bausi, Bihar), photographed during the ‘cold weather’ of 2019–20. For months in the second half of 1855 large Santal bands and several sepoy regiments skirmished in this country. (Peter Stanley)

13. George Brown’s substantial cutcherry at Bhaugulpore, an imposing classical edifice beside the Ganges, in which he made decisions which for him were disastrous in the monsoon of 1855. It is now the chancelry of Tilka Manji University. (Peter Stanley)

14. ‘Our Magistrate’, from George Atkinson’s Curry and Rice , conveying the commanding demeanour of the Company’s civil officials responsible for the suppression of the Hul. This official is directing labourers building roads of the kind the Company used to impose order on the Santal country in the aftermath of the Hul.

15. Some of the Directors of the East India Company, who ultimately both wielded and benefited from British power in India. These men held and exercised the patronage that appointed all of the civil officials and military officers involved in the suppression of the Hul. ( Illustrated London News , 18 February 1843)

16. East India House, in Leadenhall Street in the City of London, the British headquarters of the East India Company. The Company’s Directors and senior staff were not pleased at the reports of events in Bengal which reached them there from the autumn of 1855. ( Illustrated London News , 18 February 1843)

17. The Marquess of Dalhousie, Governor-General of British India 1849–56. Though formally responsible for the suppression of the Hul, he was convalescent in the Nilgiri Hills throughout it, claiming ‘ I had nothing to do with the whole business’. (Colesworthy Grant, An Anglo-Indian Domestic Sketch )

18. Sir Frederick Halliday, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, whose officials directed the civil side of the suppression of the Hul. Halliday at first dismissed the Hul as a local rising and then resisted calls for the imposition of martial law. (Charles Buckland, Bengal Under the Lieutenant-Governors )

19. Three Santal prisoners under the guard of a chuprassie (right), based on an engraving by Walter Sherwill. These men were likely to suffer months of hardship in crowded and unhealthy makeshift jails. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

20. Railway employees drilling, possibly to serve as ‘bildars’, also depicted by Walter Sherwill. While these men worked for railway construction contractors, the auxiliaries led by Serjeant Gillon would have appeared similarly. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

21. Sepoys, members of a regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, drawn by an engineer officer who plainly admired them. Though depicted in their tight and uncomfortable dress uniforms, from day-to-day sepoys would usually wear sandals, donning their heavy leather shakos as little as possible. ( Illustrated London News , 4 April 1846)

22. Each regiment’s officers and men employed dozens of private and public ‘followers’, including ‘bhisties’ such as this man, who carried water in a goat-skin ‘mussick’. (John Capper, The Three Presidencies of India )

23. A clash between sepoys of the 40th Native Infantry and Santals, probably depicting the fight at Bissohuwa on 1 August, which Sherwill witnessed. He or the engraver gave the Santals a distinctively heroic cast. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

24. An assistant magistrate’s bungalow in Lower Bengal, the focus of the Company’s power locally, depicted by Colesworthy Grant, an itinerant artist who recorded Rural Life in Bengal . Most of the junior civil officials in the ‘disturbed districts’ lived and worked in bungalows like these.

25. The steamer Mirzapore , from Colesworthy Grant’s Rural Life in Bengal . River steamers like this enabled Company forces to move men, supplies and messages swiftly on the navigable rivers Ganges and Bhagirutty on the Hul’s northern and eastern periphery.

26. Elephant transport, from Michael Rafter’s Our Indian Army , a scene suggesting the bustle in a native infantry camp as sepoys, followers, coolies and hangers-on prepared to march. The Company’s forces used hundreds of elephants. Had the Santals attacked the Field Force’s supply columns they could have prolonged their resistance.

27. A ‘sagger’—one of the ramshackle bullock carts that Santals impressed to carry food and plunder—from Capper’s Three Presidencies . Company troops seized hundreds in ‘drives’ in the Hul’s final months. The distinctive roofs of the houses in the background can still be seen in the Santal country.

28. An advertisement in the Calcutta Citizen in 1855 announcing the scheduled services on the East Indian railway between Howrah and Raneegunge, a reminder of the advantage that steam-powered transport gave to Company forces.

29. Sidhu Manji depicted by Walter Sherwill after his capture. Sherwill, or the engraver who prepared the image for publication, gave Sidhu a curiously penitent expression, though his assertive demeanour when interrogated was anything but submissive. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

30. Singra, the alleged murderer of Miss Pell, depicted as a defiant prisoner. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

31. The ‘martello tower’ at Pakur, Jharkhand, today. It is located in a memorial park, now fallen into disrepair, named in honour of Sido and Kanhu. (Peter Stanley)

32. The major memorial to the Hul at Bhagnadihi, Jharkhand, the most extensive of dozens of village memorials to the heroes of the Hul located throughout the Rajmahal Hills. It is practically on the site of the ‘Thackoor’ which sustained the Hul, at the house of the four brothers of Bhugnadihee. (Peter Stanley)

LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

List of Maps

List of Illustrations

1. Walter Sherwill’s drawing of a surveyor at work; possibly Sherwill himself, from R.H. Phillimore’s Historical Records of the Survey of India , Vol. III.

2. The Rajmahal Hills seen from the Ganges. Walter Sherwill observed that while all Europeans travelling on the Ganges saw the hills from their steamers, few knew anything about the region or its people: some assumed that the hills were uninhabited. ( Illustrated London News , 6 October 1856)

3. A Santal village, based on a drawing by Walter Sherwill. Visitors commented on their neatness, and how they were invariably laid out in the same way, with a street of huts adjoining a sacred grove of sal trees and a platform at which the Thakur was worshipped. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

4. A moonlit Santal ceremony, based on an engraving by Walter Sherwill, whose affection for the Santals did not prevent him from describing their dancing as ‘lewd’ and ‘absurd’. (Illustrated London News, 7 June 1851)

5. The tank at Moheshpore (now Mahespur, Jharkhand) in 2020, where elephant-borne sepoys of the 7th Bengal Native Infantry routed a Santal force under the Bhugnadihee brothers, three of whom were wounded in the fight. The tank is one of the few sites of the Hul which can be firmly identified. (Peter Stanley)

6. The 7th Bengal Native Infantry (wearing coatees and dhotis) escorting Santal prisoners to Jungeypore after the march to Burhyte and Moheshpore. The portly officer on the pony may be Walter Birch, drawn by Walter Sherwill. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856

7. The country around Burhyte (now Berhet, Jharkhand) in 2020, with the Rajmahal Hills in the distance: the heart of the Hul in 1855 and now the location of a large memorial to the brothers who led it.

8. George Atkinson’s depiction of ‘Our Sporting Sub’, from his Curry and Rice , conveys the self-assurance (not to say arrogance) of young officers of the Bengal Army, suggestive of officers like Lieutenant Tom Toulmin, the only Company officer killed in the Hul.

9. An engraving based on a drawing by Walter Sherwill showing sepoys of the 40th Bengal Native Infantry on a ‘dour’ in Bhaugulpore, with bullock hackeries carrying off Santal loot, elephants bearing the sepoys’ baggage and villages burning in the distance. The engraver gave the surrounding landscape a strangely Scottish look. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

10. Railway surveyors crossing a flooded nullah in the monsoon, an engraving based on a drawing by Walter Sherwill that suggests the difficulties of travelling during Bengal’s rainy season. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

11. An indigo factory, from Colesworthy Grant’s Rural Life in Bengal . Especially in the Hul’s first month, factories like this became both the targets of Santal attacks and bastions of European resistance.

12. The plains between Godda and Bowsee (now Bausi, Bihar), photographed during the ‘cold weather’ of 2019–20. For months in the second half of 1855 large Santal bands and several sepoy regiments skirmished in this country. (Peter Stanley)

13. George Brown’s substantial cutcherry at Bhaugulpore, an imposing classical edifice beside the Ganges, in which he made decisions which for him were disastrous in the monsoon of 1855. It is now the chancelry of Tilka Manji University. (Peter Stanley)

14. ‘Our Magistrate’, from George Atkinson’s Curry and Rice , conveying the commanding demeanour of the Company’s civil officials responsible for the suppression of the Hul. This official is directing labourers building roads of the kind the Company used to impose order on the Santal country in the aftermath of the Hul.

15. Some of the Directors of the East India Company, who ultimately both wielded and benefited from British power in India. These men held and exercised the patronage that appointed all of the civil officials and military officers involved in the suppression of the Hul. ( Illustrated London News , 18 February 1843)

16. East India House, in Leadenhall Street in the City of London, the British headquarters of the East India Company. The Company’s Directors and senior staff were not pleased at the reports of events in Bengal which reached them there from the autumn of 1855. ( Illustrated London News , 18 February 1843)

17. The Marquess of Dalhousie, Governor-General of British India 1849–56. Though formally responsible for the suppression of the Hul, he was convalescent in the Nilgiri Hills throughout it, claiming ‘ I had nothing to do with the whole business’. (Colesworthy Grant, An Anglo-Indian Domestic Sketch )

18. Sir Frederick Halliday, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, whose officials directed the civil side of the suppression of the Hul. Halliday at first dismissed the Hul as a local rising and then resisted calls for the imposition of martial law. (Charles Buckland, Bengal Under the Lieutenant-Governors )

19. Three Santal prisoners under the guard of a chuprassie (right), based on an engraving by Walter Sherwill. These men were likely to suffer months of hardship in crowded and unhealthy makeshift jails. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

20. Railway employees drilling, possibly to serve as ‘bildars’, also depicted by Walter Sherwill. While these men worked for railway construction contractors, the auxiliaries led by Serjeant Gillon would have appeared similarly. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

21. Sepoys, members of a regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, drawn by an engineer officer who plainly admired them. Though depicted in their tight and uncomfortable dress uniforms, from day-to-day sepoys would usually wear sandals, donning their heavy leather shakos as little as possible. ( Illustrated London News , 4 April 1846)

22. Each regiment’s officers and men employed dozens of private and public ‘followers’, including ‘bhisties’ such as this man, who carried water in a goat-skin ‘mussick’. (John Capper, The Three Presidencies of India )

23. A clash between sepoys of the 40th Native Infantry and Santals, probably depicting the fight at Bissohuwa on 1 August, which Sherwill witnessed. He or the engraver gave the Santals a distinctively heroic cast. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

24. An assistant magistrate’s bungalow in Lower Bengal, the focus of the Company’s power locally, depicted by Colesworthy Grant, an itinerant artist who recorded Rural Life in Bengal . Most of the junior civil officials in the ‘disturbed districts’ lived and worked in bungalows like these.

25. The steamer Mirzapore , from Colesworthy Grant’s Rural Life in Bengal . River steamers like this enabled Company forces to move men, supplies and messages swiftly on the navigable rivers Ganges and Bhagirutty on the Hul’s northern and eastern periphery.

26. Elephant transport, from Michael Rafter’s Our Indian Army , a scene suggesting the bustle in a native infantry camp as sepoys, followers, coolies and hangers-on prepared to march. The Company’s forces used hundreds of elephants. Had the Santals attacked the Field Force’s supply columns they could have prolonged their resistance.

27. A ‘sagger’—one of the ramshackle bullock carts that Santals impressed to carry food and plunder—from Capper’s Three Presidencies . Company troops seized hundreds in ‘drives’ in the Hul’s final months. The distinctive roofs of the houses in the background can still be seen in the Santal country.

28. An advertisement in the Calcutta Citizen in 1855 announcing the scheduled services on the East Indian railway between Howrah and Raneegunge, a reminder of the advantage that steam-powered transport gave to Company forces.

29. Sidhu Manji depicted by Walter Sherwill after his capture. Sherwill, or the engraver who prepared the image for publication, gave Sidhu a curiously penitent expression, though his assertive demeanour when interrogated was anything but submissive. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

30. Singra, the alleged murderer of Miss Pell, depicted as a defiant prisoner. ( Illustrated London News , 28 February 1856)

31. The ‘martello tower’ at Pakur, Jharkhand, today. It is located in a memorial park, now fallen into disrepair, named in honour of Sido and Kanhu. (Peter Stanley)

32. The major memorial to the Hul at Bhagnadihi, Jharkhand, the most extensive of dozens of village memorials to the heroes of the Hul located throughout the Rajmahal Hills. It is practically on the site of the ‘Thackoor’ which sustained the Hul, at the house of the four brothers of Bhugnadihee. (Peter Stanley)

NOTE ON THE TEXT

Several abbreviations are used in footnotes:

All quotations are verbatim, and footnotes refer to full titles in the Bibliography. I have chosen to standardise common words and names rendered in a great variety of ways—manjee, perwannah, etc.—to give a flavour of the records, but Sidhu and Kanhu, rather than Seedoo and Kanoo because the names of Santal are usually rendered thus by Santals today. Place names are those used in contemporary sources rather than modern renderings.

Because the geography of the Santal rebellion, and especially the locations of many villages, will be unfamiliar to virtually all readers, a map folds out from the rear endpapers. Readers are advised to use it to accompany the text as they read.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first thanks are to the Rector of UNSW Canberra, Prof. Michael Frater, and my Head of School, Prof. Shirley Scott, who approved Special Study Program leave in 2019, when much of this book was researched and written in Britain. As ever, I have relied upon the assistance of a great many librarians, archivists and others in institutions, mainly in Australia, India and Britain, and many individuals. I am grateful to: the Ames Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Dr Anshul Avijit, who kindly expanded upon his 2018 doctoral thesis on Santal material culture; Prof. Clare Anderson of Leicester University, for timely advice on transported Santals; the Asiatic Society Library, Kolkata; the Asiatic Society Library, Mumbai; the Australian National University and especially Dr Benjamin Jones, School of History, and participants at a seminar in October 2018; the British Library, India Office manuscripts: Dr Margaret Makepeace, Ms Karen Stapley and Ms Margaret White, and all the staff of its superb Asia and Africa Reading Room; the Connemara Library, Chennai; Durham University Special Collections: Mr Christopher Gilley; Bill and Pauline Edgar of Newport, Fife (in whose garden I wrote the book); Edinburgh University Special Collections: Ms Laura Cooijmans-Keizer; Ms Ngaire Gardner for her generous assistance over Walter Sherwill (her forebear); the Garrison Library, Gibraltar: Dr Jennifer Ballantine Perera and Christopher Tavares; Greenwich University and especially Dr Gavin Rand for making me a visitor in 2019 and Ms Charlotte Sowerby; Jadavpur University, Kolkata: Prof. Kaushik Roy and postgraduate candidates Arka Chowdhury and Priyanjana Gupta, who undertook research in the West Bengal State Archives and elsewhere, Moumita Chowdhury, Sohini Mitra and especially Aryama Ghosh, who saved me from embarrassment by alerting me to Narahari Kaviraj’s work; participants at the Jadavpur University ‘Warfare in South Asia’ conference, January 2020, and especially Dr Geetashree Singh, who suggested useful sources on elephants; Jonny McGinty at JP&L Travel, St Andrews; the National Army Museum, London, and especially Robert Fleming, who arranged for dozens of Hodson index cards to be digitised; the National Library of Australia: Dr Brendan White and Rhys Cardew, who provided maps; the National Library of India, Kolkata, and especially its newspaper reading room; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh: Mr Christopher Fleet and Ms Louise Speller; the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, Perth, and especially Margaret Wilkes, Andrew Cook (formerly the India Office collection’s maps curator) and Michael Cairns; St Andrews University Special Collections, especially Ms Maia Sheridan and, for facilitating my becoming a Visitor at St Andrews, Professors Phillips O’Brien and Hew Strachan; the State Library of New South Wales; the State Library of Victoria; the Library of the United Service Institution of India, New Delhi, and especially Sqn Ldr Rana Chhina; the University of Bombay Library, Mumbai; the University of Madras Library, Chennai; the Academy Library at UNSW Canberra, and especially Michael Lemmer and UNSW travel staff, particularly Karen Monaghan and Luisa Caguicla; West Sussex Record Office: Clare Snoad and Abigail Hartley. I am also grateful to Dr Eileen Chanin, Bob Debus, Dr Ed Duyker, Dr Christopher Kenna and Prof. Soumyen Mukherjee, who generously shared their time and advice, and to Barbara Taylor for creating the maps.

At Hurst, I thank Daisy Leitch, Mei Jayne Yew, Ross Jamieson and Farhaana Arefin for commissioning Ahlawat Gunjan to design the cover, and my anonymous reviewer, whose comments and suggestions I greatly valued, even though I retained references to the controversial Sita Ram’s supposed memoir. Above all, I am grateful to Michael Dwyer for again having confidence in my work.

PROLOGUE

‘THE SKIRT OF THE HILLS’

THE SANTAL COUNTRY

In the cold weather of 1850–51 Santals living around Burhyte may have noticed a visitor in their valley, among the very few Europeans to reach their home in the Rajmahal Hills of Bhaugulpore district, in Bengal. Walter Sherwill, an officer of the East India Company’s Bengal Army, had travelled by elephant through the hills and jungle of Lower Bengal. Leaving the cantonment of Berhampore a fortnight before Christmas, after more than a month of circuitous travelling around the jungle-clad Rajmahal Hills, he entered the broad valley to reach the substantial village, the heart of the Damin-i-koh; in Persian, the ‘skirt of the hills’. Surrounded by neat villages, newly-cleared fields and swathes of virgin jungle, what he called ‘the capital town of the hills’ had grown to perhaps several thousand inhabitants, mostly Santals, but with about fifty families of Bengali merchants (or mahajans). From Burhyte several passes led through the hills—north-west to the district headquarters of Bhaugulpore, north-east to the Ganges port of Rajmahal; south-east towards Pakaur.

Burhyte greatly impressed Sherwill. Standing on one of the low hills surrounding the wide valley, he condescendingly reflected on ‘what can be done with natives, when their natural industry and perseverance are guarded and encouraged by kindness’. In just fifteen years of settlement, Santal migrants, urged on by the Superintendent of the Damin, Mr James Pontet, had turned what had been ‘heavy forest, in which wild elephants and tigers were numerous’, into a region of ‘several hundred substantial Sonthal villages with an abundance of cattle and surrounded by luxuriant crops’. Santals watched Pontet show Sherwill the town’s market, held, at Pontet’s instigation, each Friday. They bought and sold rice, of course, which was newly harvested and threshed when he visited, along with tobacco, sugar, chillies, tamarinds and spice; as well as potatoes, the last being one of James Pontet’s gifts to the Santals. In fact, on the map of the Damin which Sherwill later prepared, Pontet’s bungalow, the bazaar and his potato plot appear beside the place-name of ‘Burhyte’.¹ The goods on offer included mustard seeds, carried away on one of the Damin’s few usable tracks eastward to the river, to be taken to Calcutta, then processed and exported to Britain, where it would add relish to the Englishman’s roast beef.

A few days later, Walter Sherwill climbed up onto a howdah on the back of an elephant, and continued his tour of Bhaugulpore district.² Though a soldier, Walter Sherwill had no military purpose, but served on ‘special duty’, as the Bengal Directory made clear, investigating the region’s geological character. He wore the comfortable ‘mufti’ of a civilian—he had not commanded a file of sepoys for over a decade. The son of a King’s officer, with a ‘classical’ education at Christ’s Hospital School in London, Sherwill had been commissioned into the Bengal Army in 1832 aged sixteen. After fewer than six years of uneventful service in the 66th Native Infantry, Sherwill found his calling as a revenue surveyor. His family had scientific and technical leanings: his grandfather had been a ship’s surgeon with the East India Company, a Fellow of the Royal Academy and had accompanied Joseph Banks on an expedition to Iceland. Sherwill, a first-class surveyor and draughtsman, had spent the next thirteen years travelling about rural Bengal, particularly the districts of Beerbhoom and Bhaugulpore, on which he published detailed ‘Geographical and Statistical Reports’ just before the outbreak of the 1855 rebellion. Besides mapping their mineral wealth, especially coal, he also described their inhabitants’ culture, and particularly that of the Santals, whom he knew well and evidently liked—he called them ‘that interesting race’, and published a long article on them in the transactions of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta.³ Much of what Bengal’s Europeans knew about the Santals and their country in 1855 derived from Sherwill’s work, if they bothered to find out. The tragedy of his career was that the knowledge he gained and the maps he created became crucial to the campaign to suppress the costly rebellion, or ‘Hul’, upon which the Santals embarked in the monsoon of 1855.

In the Santal country the south-west monsoon usually set in between the middle and the end of June when the temperature fell from a maximum of about 98°, to about 89° in July. While less than an inch of rain fell in each month in the cold weather, in June 10 inches of rain fell, in July about 14, in August over 13 and in September 10.⁴ Physically, the Rajmahal Hills dominated the region, a range no more than 2000 feet high, stretching about 70 miles south-westwards from the great bend of the Ganges as it turned from flowing east to south. From other hills several rivers flowed generally north-west to south-east between the valleys of the Ganges in the north and the Damodar in the south: the Bansloi, Brahmini, Mor and Adye rivers, flooding in the monsoon, trickles in summer. Jungle covered much of the land, but increasingly rice paddies were found in clearings around hundreds of tiny villages; by 1855 many of them inhabited by Santals. The heart of the Santal country was the Damin-i-koh, delimited not just on the Company’s revenue maps, but also by a long chain of masonry boundary pillars marking the Damin as a government reserve where Santals had been encouraged to settle—and generate revenue rent on—what had been regarded as waste land.

From the 1810s the Damin had been earmarked as a suitable site for the settlement of migrants from Orissa and Chota Nagpore, mostly Santals. During the 1820s thousands arrived, encouraged by Company officials, notably Pontet, the son of a Calcutta schoolmaster, appointed as superintendent in the mid-1830s, responsible primarily for ensuring that Santal villages met revenue demands. More Santals farmed as tenants of mainly Bengali, mainly Hindu, landlords known as zamindars. Walter Sherwill documented the Santals and the land they occupied and tilled, noting the mahajans’ presence, though none could have realised how within a few years their antagonism would not only bring death and suffering to the Santals, but also create a new relationship between the Santals and their British rulers.

We who were not born Santal can never hope to understand their culture as they do: even Santals today may have difficulty comprehending the lives of their forebears, so different were they from those of the 21st century. Equally, we may be deceived into assuming that because we can read the words of the Hul’s British protagonists, we necessarily or easily understand the Santals. This problem confronts everyone who attempts to fathom the human past or the varieties of culture. Like Walter Sherwill, one of the few contemporary links between India’s rulers and the people who in 1855 rebelled against them, we must make the attempt.

Map 1: Lower Bengal from Calcutta to Monghyr, showing the extent of the Rajmahal Hills, contemporary district boundaries, the approximate boundaries of the Presidency and Dinapore Divisions and the ‘disturbed districts’ proximity to Calcutta.

Map 2: Approximate location of clashes during the Hul, identified in Appendix 3; illustrating how conflict essentially moved from north-eastern Bhaugulpore into central Beerbhoom and then to western Beerbhoom before ending in the purgunnahs of Hendweh and Belputteh in southern Bhaugulpore. Other areas in which conflict occurred are shown by un-numbered ‘flame’ symbols.

Map 3: The Santal country, showing District Names, Headquarter Stations, Cantonments and villages significant in the Hul, the railways and the Grand Trunk Road. The map also shows the boundary of what became the Santal Parganas after 1855 and the approximate extent of the Damin-i-Koh.

INTRODUCTION

‘IT WAS NOT WAR …’

The Santal rebellion has been explained virtually from the moment it began in July 1855. An anonymous article in the Calcutta Review published early in 1856 set the essential narrative of the insurrection within months of its declared end, a narrative which this book seeks to elaborate and challenge. The essential chronicle of the rebellion has been that it erupted as an inchoate response to the exactions of Bengali merchants and saw savage reprisals against the money-lenders and landlords who oppressed the Santals. ‘British’ troops—their identity, numbers or strategy never presented clearly—moved against the Santals, and by unspecified but evidently murderous military operations, suppressed the rebellion amid the imprisonment, punishment and impoverishment of the Santals. At least 10,000 Santals died. In the wake of the rebellion, however, a more responsive system of governance at least moderated the worst of the abuses which had provoked resistance. This book investigates and interrogates that generally accepted narrative. It focuses on the Company’s response militarily to the rebellion, an aspect which previous authors, more expert or interested in the Santal experience, had largely neglected, not least because they did not consult military records.

Memories of the insurrection remained fresh when Sir William Hunter’s 1868 The Annals of Rural Bengal included a chapter on the rising. This, along with the article in the Calcutta Review set the interpretation for decades, reinforced by sections of the Imperial Gazetteer of India, which Hunter edited from 1881.¹ A Bengal civil servant seeking to understand and interpret Indian history, ethnography and society, Hunter began with an ‘ethnical’ survey of Santal life and culture, an approach followed by virtually all later chroniclers of the rising which Santal people called the ‘Hul’; the rising. Just two substantive histories of the Hul exist: Kali Kinkar Datta’s 1940 The Santal Insurrection and Narahari Kaviraj’s Santal Village Community and the Santal Rebellion of 1855, published in 2001. As will become clear, both books were partial, in both being incomplete and in presenting interpretations unjustified by the evidence.

Ethnographic or anthropological understanding is fundamental to comprehending Santal motives, actions and memories. The Santals, with their complex relationship to nature, intricate cosmology, and vivid poetic oral culture, naturally attracted generations of ethnographers, amateur and professional, including missionaries, British officials, academics and later officers of Indian government agencies. They included officials such as Francis Bradley-Birt, author of The Story of an Indian Upland, and William Archer, author of The Hill of Flutes, one of the most evocative of the anthropological accounts of Santal culture, and missionaries such as the Norwegian, Paul Olaf Bodding and the Scot James Macphail. The work of both officials and missionaries demanded an intimacy with Santal language and culture, and all recorded it, affectionately, even lovingly, impelled by fears for the Santals’ welfare amid a largely Hindu population or hopeful of their conversion to Christianity. The events of 1855 often figure in their interpretations of Santal life and belief. Especially popular has been the creation of fictionalised biographies of individuals and families who lived through and were affected by the Hul. It is notable that besides the imaginative reconstructions such as by Macphail, who in 1922 used the fictional characters of Manka and his family to dramatise The Story of the Santal, at least four novels set in the uprising have appeared: in English Robert Carstairs’s Harma’s Village (1937) and Sanjay Bahadur’s 2013 Hul—Cry Rebel!.²

The attention devoted to the Santals by anthropologists of various kinds inevitably created not only a rich body of scholarship on Santal culture, but also produced insights into the place of the Hul in that culture as it changed in response to economic, social and official pressures in the century and more following the uprising. In 1945, for example, the journal Man in India published a long article on the uprising, interpreting it using Santal sources—songs, stories and community memories.³ While offering insights into Santal experience and memory of 1855, however, anthropological works often drew on a conventional and simplistic version of the uprising. Many accounts, for example, quote the familiar words of Major Vincent Jervis of the 56th Bengal Native Infantry—‘it was not war … it was execution’—emphasising the brutality of the rebellion’s suppression, but none give the anecdote any source or context.⁴ Moreover, a popular revolt which occurred 170-odd years ago understandably does not figure coherently in studies of contemporary Santal society. Pradip Chattopadhyay’s Redefining Tribal Identity, a comprehensive and revealing study of Santals in, among other districts, Birbhum, for example, makes just four references to the Hul, though to Chattopadhyay the Hul marked ‘a new dimension of identity assertion’.⁵ A visitor to the Santal country, and especially to the impressive memorial at Bhugnadihee, would understand the Hul’s significance, and be led to see it in heroic, but also simplistic terms. This history provides unprecedented detail, though it also confirms the heroism of the Santals’ doomed rebellion.

What justifies this new history? Simply that although the Santal Hul has been the subject of intermittent interest over the years, from both historians and anthropologists, no one has used the immense documentation available in the military records of the East India Company’s archives in the British Library to attempt to produce a complete account of the rising, its suppression and its effects. This interpretation draws upon the work of earlier scholars but it essentially contributes what none of them have attempted: to understand the events of 1855 from the perspective of the vast and hitherto unexamined military records. It explains, for the first time, what happened when Santals armed with bows and arrows confronted Bengal sepoys armed with muskets and supported by artillery, rockets, river steamers, railway trains and the electric telegraph. This book constitutes the first explicitly cultural-military-political history of the Hul, and places it in a context that no other study has attempted: the history of insurgency and counter-insurgency.

At the outset it is necessary to discuss terminology and sources; crucial matters in seeking to understand the protagonists in this conflict. ‘Nobody