“If we
succeed in sweeping them all away, or absorbing them, we shall be at the mercy
of our native army, and they will see it; and accidents may possibly occur to
unite them, or a great portion of them, in some desperate act…the best
provision against it seems to me to be the maintenance of native rulers, whose
confidence and affection can be engaged, and administrations improved under
judicious management” - Major-general Sir William Henry Sleeman to Lord
Dalhousie from Jhansi, 24th September, 1848
Sleeman’s
eerie prediction was to come true less than a decade later when dissatisfaction
exploded into open rebellion. While Governor General Dalhousie’s Doctrine of
Lapse had been used by the company to gobble up states where the king lacked a
biological son, such as Satara in 1848, Jhansi in 1853 and Nagpur in 1854,
“Awadh was an acquisition on a far different scale”, writes William Dalrymple,
“and was practiced on a ‘faithful and unresisting ally’ without even the
nominal justification of the absence of a recognized heir”. The annexation of
Awadh or Oudh happened purely because the King, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, had run
into vast debts with the Company, and seemed unable to, or disinterested in
paying them. With this annexation, centuries of established tradition, when it
came to land, revenue collection, and even governance, was trampled under the
Englishman’s boot. It is no coincidence that the largest number of recruits in
the Bengal Army, which rebelled against its masters in 1857, was from the Awadh
area. The igniting spark for the mutiny was supplied by the infamous Enfield
rifle and its greased cartridges, which Hindu and Muslim sepoys feared
contained the fat of cows and pigs. While in Meerut and Cawnpore (Kanpur), the
massacre of Europeans was near total, Lucknow, the capital of Awadh, presents a
different picture. Here, thanks to the foresight and preparation of Sir Henry
Lawrence, 1700 Europeans were able to hold out for 87 days, against
overwhelming odds. The place where they chose to make their stand was a compound
of roughly 33 acres, containing a number of buildings inhabited by Company
servants, European traders, and their families. Chief among the buildings was
that of the British “Resident”, Chief Commissioner Sir Henry Lawrence, and the
compound thus came to be known as “The Residency”.
