Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE GOGAIRA INSURRECTION, MURREE.

DELHI taken, it was hoped all was safe: but a fresh danger threatened. The Punjab, drained of troops to the

lowest degree to achieve that capture, seemed doomed to fall in the very moment of success. The chord so long strained, and now strained to the utmost, snapped.

Mooltan, being some 200 miles off the line of telegraph, was among the last places in the Punjab to learn what had been passing at Delhi. It was late on the 15th of September before the first vague yet welcome tidings reached, that "the city had been assaulted." The next day the post-office was thronged with officers, eager, impatient for further news-but none came: mid-day passed, evening glided into night, yet no post arrived; the next morning the same. Expectation and anxiety were at their height. What could have occurred to cause the delay? Had the army proved too weak? Had the assault failed? Had the troops been repulsed? Or had the Punjab, after all, risen? When, on the evening of the second day, the delay was accounted for by the intelligence that the Dâk had been stopped and robbed at Gogaira, between Lahore and Mooltan, it was a relief, a positive relief,

THE MOOLTAN DAK STOPPED.

201

to find that, after all, the danger was at their own door, and only a petty rising of some villagers along the main road; still leaving room to hope that all was progressing well at Delhi, and the rest of the Punjab remaining quiet. But each succeeding day brought fuller tidings, and worse; the petty rising of a few villagers grew into the insurrection of a district; the whole country around was in arms!

Before following out the steps which were so promptly and so well taken for the suppression of this outbreak, it is important to examine the causes from which it sprang, and the real amount of danger involved in it.

The country between Lahore and Mooltan, forming the centre of the Baree Doab, is little better than a wilderness. Over its vast arid level-now strewn with fragments of brick and pottery, which carry back the mind to days when those tracts teemed with busy multitudes-broken only by mounds, the sites of once flourishing cities—now straggle small bodies of Jats, whose avowed occupation is that of shepherds, tending herds of cattle, which find pasturage on the scant herbage, or camels that crop the foliage of the stunted brushwood. Of these races some would seem to be descended from the earliest conquerors of the soil, whose Hindoo forefathers perhaps lorded it in the cities over the ruined sites of which they now wander. Such, for instance, are the Lungreals, Khurruls, and Kathias. Others again there are who have clearly immigrated at no very remote period from the surrounding districts; here are

202

THE STATE OF THE BARH.

Bhuttees and Belooches, from Bhutteeana and Scinde. All now, whatever their original creed, are followers of the Prophet, but make any creed at all wholly secondary to their predatory habits. The chiefs of the several clans have generally established themselves in the more fertile tracts which border the rivers, while the mass are scattered over the Barh or central flat.

These tribes had been cattle-stealers and thieves from time immemorial; but being of no political importance, the Sikhs, after two unsuccessful attempts to conquer them, took only the precaution of having armed escorts when passing through the district, and allowed them to remain in almost undisturbed indulgence of their predatory propensities, especially as these rarely extended beyond their own immediate neighbours; thus they were generally left to settle their raids and their thefts, and to fight out their quarrels among themselves. But at the annexation the British Government could not rest content to connive at so lawless and dangerous a state of things, especially in a district commanding a line of road of such commercial importance as that between Lahore and Mooltan, connecting, as it did, the seat of local government, and the wealthiest and most productive portions of the new territory, with the grand outlet for their traffic, the Indus and Bombay. The predatory tastes of these tribes were now checked by laws vigorously enforced, involving punishment and restitution; and under the influence of these stringent measures, the road from Lahore to Mooltan had become as safe as any in Bengal.

THE STATE OF THE BARH.

203

So great a change had thus been effected that many tribes had almost abandoned their hereditary raids, and settled down into peaceful herdsmen ; many of the chiefs had become men of wealth and substance; and the stake they thus had in the country was at this time considered as in some measure a guarantee for their fidelity to Government, and their co-operation in the maintenance of order. But still there were other chiefs, who, with their clans, mourned over the departed days of raids, fretted under the tight-fitting yoke of English rule, dreaming, it may be, in their Mohammedan fanaticism, of a restored Mohammedan supremacy. These tribes had, throughout these troublous times, been regarded with anxiety, and been rigidly watched. However, four months had passed over, and, with the exception of the abortive emeute in the Gogaira Jail in July, all had been quiet. The example of some of the better disposed of the chiefs. near Mooltan, the triumphant disarming of the sepoys there, the constant passage of the reinforcements through the district-these, and the precautionary measures of Government, had helped to keep them under; and it was now hoped that, with Delhi once in our hands, the storm had been weathered.

But influences had been at work which it was impossible for Government, with all its vigilance, to prevent or counteract. The chief of the Khurrul tribe, by name Ahmed Khan, was a traitor at heart; he had been in constant communication with the rebels of Delhi and Hansi, and (as he boasted) with the King of

204

DISTURBING CAUSES IN THE BARH.

Delhi himself. Then the outbreak at Agra had let loose all the convicts of that jail, which, being the central one for the North-west Provinces, swarmed with the most desperate characters of Northern India, having among them a fair proportion from the Mooltan and Gogaira districts. These were no sooner free than they had hastened up to their homes with glowing tales of success, exaggerated accounts of the discomfiture and total extermination of the English below Delhi, and of their hardly-maintained position there. These men were now lurking about their old haunts, or lost in the dense jungles of the Barh, where English power was too much occupied, or too weak, to reach them, sowing broadcast the seeds of disaffection, and appealing to their brethren to rise and put an end (as they said had been done below) to the English rule.* These, and similar appeals from other quarters, were irresistible. The whole clan of Khurruls, with Ahmed Khan at their head, sounded the tocsin of rebellion, and the disaffected from every quarter flocked in to his standard; and now the whole country was in commotion.

On the first tidings of the outbreak reaching Mooltan, on the 17th, Major Hamilton, the Commissioner, despatched some seventy sowars of the 1st Irregular Cavalry, with Captain Fraser, the Deputy-Commis

* The 9th and a wing of the 17th Irregular Cavalry had a few days before passed through Gogaira and the Khurrul district, and it is not unlikely that the disaffected among them had some share in rousing the country by false reports of the state of things at Delhi, and the assurance that the "Badshah" himself was close at hand on a triumphal "progress" through the country.

« ForrigeFortsett »