The Blood Never Dried by Newsinger John

Author:Newsinger, John [Newsinger, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: The Blood Never Dried: A People&#8217, s History of the British Empire
Publisher: Bookmarks
Published: 2013-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Cut all the roads and railways. The roads were cut where they were carried over embankments several feet high, trees felled across them, masonry bridges demolished, pontoons of the pontoon bridge on the main road sunk; railways lines torn up, 40 foot spans of the bridges removed and dropped into the rivers, the delicate and at that time irreplaceable electrical signalling apparatus at all stations destroyed; telephone and telegraph wires everywhere cut, rolled up and carried off home… Police stations and government offices in outlying places were occupied.51

In Jamshedpur the police themselves went on strike and 33 of them were arrested by British troops. On a number of occasions crowds stormed the jails, at Ara releasing 700 prisoners, and at Hajipur 1,000. At Bhagalpur Central jail prisoners rioted and police were called in to restore order: 28 prisoners were killed and over 80 injured. Protesters hijacked trains and, as an outraged Lines complained, indulged “in ticketless travel en masse”. Thousands of students were involved in the movement. At Benares Hindu University students took over the campus and proclaimed it liberated territory until British troops moved in on 19 August.52

At Madhuban the district magistrate, R H Niblett, was confronted by a crowd of 5,000 protesters accompanied by two elephants. They were only armed with spears, lathis and stones, however, and his policemen drove them off, killing 30 people according to the official estimate and unofficially perhaps as many as 300. The viceroy complimented him on his report of the episode, which read “like a tale of 1857”.53 Elsewhere the rebels were more successful. The government’s own figures show that in the course of the revolt 208 police outposts together with 957 government buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. There were 332 railway stations destroyed or severely damaged, the track was cut 411 times and there were 66 derailments. The rebels destroyed or damaged 945 post offices and there were over 12,000 incidents of damage to the telegraph system.54 Moreover, in a number of areas revolutionary governments were established, most notably in Contai, Tamluk, Ballin and Satara.55

This was a massive popular uprising, centred in Bihar and the eastern United Provinces, but with outbreaks in many other places as well. The British deployed over 30,000 troops to crush it. One district magistrate, N B Bonarjee, wrote of districts having “to be reconquered” and of what were “almost pitched battles taking place”.56 The confrontations were terribly one-sided, however, with rebel crowds without firearms battling against heavily armed troops supported where necessary by air attack. Resistance was broken by shootings, beatings, mass arrest, house burnings and collective fines. The Contai district, for example, was subjected to a reign of terror with 12,000 arrests, 956 houses burned down and hundreds of incidents of rape by police and troops. Niblett, the “hero” of Madhuban, was subsequently removed as a magistrate for objecting to the conduct of troops and police in his area. “To my dismay,” he noted, “reprisals were the order of the day.” He complained of

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