When I talk about Henry Lawrence and Jeremiah Brasyer, the first thought that comes to most people’s minds is, “Those firangis, how can you have anything good to say about them, especially now when we’ve finally thrown them out?” But listen to the story and then decide for yourself what you think of these two British men.

It was July 2, 1857, two months into the Bengal Army uprising, two months of upended lives in a sweltering colony where natives and colonisers alike found their certainties crumbling. For the first time in over one hundred years, the British officers and civil servants who had assumed colonial rule to be their right and duty were afraid of what was going to happen to them.

They were ridiculously outnumbered as civilians, of course, but the Bengal Army was also over seventy per cent non-European. Over the years, as the British sought cushier roles, Indians stepped up to fill the ranks, drawn by secure pay and dashing uniforms, eventually gaining enough leverage to dictate terms around religious preferences. Even after such concessions, however, the Indians rebelled. Why would they not? Wouldn’t you rebel if the army you served selflessly for generations – yes, three generations – forbade Indians from being promoted to officer ranks, while insisting on rifle cartridges greased with animal fat, knowing full well that the high-caste Hindus who constituted much of the Bengal Army would rather die of starvation than let animal flesh touch their lips?

You see, the new Enfield rifles that arrived from England carried with them a promise of faster loading and deadlier aim. But they also carried within their paper cartridges a poison more potent than gunpowder. To load the weapon, a soldier had to bite through paper sealed with grease – grease rendered, the whispers said, from beef tallow. How could the high-caste Hindus not see this as deliberate desecration, when their British officers demanded they defile themselves with every shot, that they tear with their own teeth through the fat of the very creature they held most holy?

So now, here they were, with hundreds of British families butchered during church service in Meerut, their pretty muslin dresses and smart linen suits soaked in blood, the blood of their children mingled with their own. Old English ladies were slaughtered in the street as they walked to the market to buy fresh flowers. Whole English enclaves were besieged in Kanpur and methodically killed, group by group. British women, young and old, were cowering in their homes, feverishly filling pages in their diaries, hoping somehow to survive. At first, still surrounded by their Indian servants, they hunkered down in their own homes. Later, when the servants were all gone, they sought shelter together in one house, taking turns keeping guard, their men huddled in another close by, formulating a plan, or at least playing at formulating one.

The situation was dire and yet everyone believed it was a hiccup, a skirmish, a minor bump in the road. The British were in a state of disbelief – not at the fact that the soldiers had rebelled, but at how organised they were, how relentless and how ruthless. The very discipline they had drilled into their sepoys was now being turned against them with devastating precision. Moreover, the British failed to understand the rebellion’s true character. It was not a unified insurrection but a series of local uprisings, each one blooming in the very places where the Bengal Army had concentrated its native troops, where British authority pressed most heavily upon Indian soil. Each location had a local leader, each one charismatic and driven, often with a personal vendetta against the British.

The symbolic leader of the movement was the blind Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Symbolic because the Mughals had once wielded immense power and, while often intolerant, had also managed to win hearts. But Zafar, whose empire had been shredded by the British a very long while ago and who sat in his diminished quarters day after day writing poetry, was least interested in a revolution. Mughal rule had ended. The British were taking the country over piece by piece. There was a sense of despair and helplessness – at least as far as the blind king was concerned.

I do not know how much I want to do

I do not know how much I am talking aboutI do not know where I’m going from

This is the most important thing in the world.They want to learn how to do so

do you want me to do thisHow much is the luckiest “zafar” for fun

do not even know how much I am going to do

Zafar was not leading anything. He was incapable, and he wasn’t interested. It is said that when the British first attacked Delhi, the seat of the Mughals, Zafar could not get up and run until his shoes were brought to him by a servant. It was the local leaders who each led atrocities against the British in singular, very exclusive ways. In Allahabad, they hung all the senior officers from trees while their wives, mostly older women, sat in chairs with their hands tied behind their backs, surrounded by groups of young men leering and whistling at the spectacle. In Meerut, they simply opened fire in a church filled with people attending Sunday service, in pale print dresses and summer hats, all dead, including the priest, shot while still in his pulpit. In Kanpur, in a particularly gruesome episode, a subordinate of the leader butchered an estimated two hundred women and children with a sword. So hard did he swing, and with so many blows, that the hilt broke and he had to come out for another.

When Henry Lawrence was shot in his office at the Lucknow Residency, his official home as Resident of Awadh, it was not a stray bullet. It was a deliberate shot, targeting a man who had always championed the native, built infrastructure, and supported self-rule. The rebel army, formerly the well-trained Bengal Army, had watched his movements, tracked the proportion of time he stood by the window versus sat at his desk.

They had waited.

Then they had taken their shot.

And when he fell, he lay right where he was, slowly bleeding to death, no medical intervention possible, no chance of moving him to safety.

A crowd of men and women formed, anxious to see their peerless leader, hoping that he would survive the gunshot wound to lead them out of siege, misery, and the shortages that presaged their almost certain death. They wanted him to find a way back into normalcy right there in Lucknow, for no one really wanted to return to England. They had left England to find their fortunes while recreating England down to the last rose bush, building English gardens adorning equally English homes, set up in beautiful encampments like the Residency in Lucknow.

They had not expected this.

No one had expected this except Henry Lawrence, who had issued warning after warning that the British were courting disaster. They had populated their Bengal army primarily with Brahmins and Kshatriyas, the two highest Hindu castes from central and eastern India, only to treat these elite soldiers like servants while keeping as far away from them as possible. Revolt was inevitable. And revolt the soldiers did.

It was a weak voice that rose up from the battered body on the floor. “Tell the others to stock up for a siege…to secure themselves…to not go out into battle…they will lose,” said the dying man. The bullet had shattered his thigh, and he was bleeding out slowly. There was nothing left to do but to let him die right where he had fallen, amid the papers that chronicled his preparations – the grain stockpiled in bathtubs throughout the Residency, the water tanks filled to the brim and carefully rationed, all according to his orders.

The Sikh soldiers that Lawrence had befriended and supported couldn’t reach him. The Ferozepur Regiment, along with other reinforcements, had been held up outside Kanpur due to cholera and constant rebel skirmishes. Lawrence died almost a day and a half after he was shot, on July 4, 1857.

Excerpted with permission from For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died, Priya Hajela, Speaking Tiger Books.

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