In the early autumn of 1870, the secretary of state for India came into possession of a perplexing, month-old letter. Its author, Calcutta-based journalist James Wilson, claimed that the capital city of Allahabad in the North-Western Provinces was “now in incipient mutiny” because of Viceroy Mayo's pigheaded policies. Native informants reported that their communities readily “expect[ed] a storm,” while the disdainful European public had taken to referring to Mayo as an “overgrown lad” and a “booby.” Wilson, who noted his past efforts to “stay the mad career of the government,” estimated that a mere quarter of the local population would support the colonial administration if polled. Given the opportunity, he, too, would likely “vote against them,” though he acknowledged the need “for Englishmen to stick together in the event of active disturbance.”Footnote 1
On the face of it, this revelation of a perceived mortal threat was hardly extraordinary. Supposedly fanatical plots in North India and conflagrations along the turbulent North-West Frontier regularly perplexed British officials following the Uprising of 1857. The customary palliative for this distemper was counterinsurgent action, a system of reprisals that sanctioned extrajudicial violence in the interest of “discouraging future resistance.”Footnote 2 Diverging from the copious literature on these sanguinary encounters, I recover another type of panic, one that arose from a suspicion that colonial governance had fatefully veered off course and created a combustible situation. In the summer of 1870, rumors of unrest were circulating throughout the North-Western Provinces and troubling the residents of Roorkee; by late August, the European inhabitants of Allahabad had begun to anticipate an armed rising by the native infantry. A mass panic ensued and radiated throughout the region. The central authorities responded by dismissing the grievances of their own compatriots and policing the colonial information order with extra vigor.
In this article, I account for the conditions that produced the Allahabad panic and explicate why the event continued to preoccupy high-ranking administrators long after the immediate alarm subsided. One might reasonably presume that colonial observers attributed the anticipated mutiny to Muslim subterfuge. After all, the turmoil coincided with the state trials of suspected Wahhabi dissidents belonging to the Tariqa-yi Muhammadiyya who had been charged with conspiracy and treason.Footnote 3 Adherents of the deceased jihadist Sayyid Ahmed, they had allegedly developed an insidious network linking cells in North Indian cities with a central stronghold at Sitana in present-day Swat. During the Uprising, colonial agents determined that these so-called fanatics had transmitted “rancorous and seditious letters” from Patna to troops on the Afghan border; previously, they had attempted to “tamper” with the 4th Native Infantry regiment when it was stationed at Rawalpindi.Footnote 4 But despite these ongoing bouts of anticolonial insurgency, district officials and Anglo-Indian civilians in the North-Western Provinces generally did not attribute discontent within the ranks to the efflorescence of Islamic revivalism. Rather, I suggest that they heeded baseless rumors of an impending mutiny in 1870 because they were convinced that income-tax legislation had produced widespread disaffection. They further suspected that the government was inviting an outbreak of violence by reducing military expenditure and pruning the size of its army, which had ballooned as a result of the Uprising. The convergence of these multiple sites of vulnerability produced the ideal conditions for a panic.
This cognitive investment in the threat of a native insurrection was symptomatic of a more systemic ailment that recent scholarship has overlooked: burgeoning distrust between the government of India in Calcutta, the local authorities, and the European civilian population.Footnote 5 It is certainly valid to argue, as Robert Peckham and other scholars have done, that colonial observers associated panics with cultural primitivism and noted their ubiquity among “Oriental” populations.Footnote 6 French officials in Algeria also attributed the production of false news to women or Muslims who were supposedly prone to irrational thought; they regarded this phenomenon as an anachronistic “repetition of ageless anxieties” that granted insight into the population's collective unconscious.Footnote 7 Throughout the Allahabad debacle, however, government agents contended with a breakdown in public order among their fellow Europeans and regarded their agitation as an internal security concern. In this instance, leading administrators were not able simply to “stamp out disturbances at the first sign of their appearance,” as they were wont to do elsewhere.Footnote 8 Indeed, they soon realized that they could not even sufficiently monitor the new telegraph system that was enabling the spread of false news, as it was dubbed at the time. The Allahabad panic therefore attained notoriety in part because it exposed the colonial state's tenuous control over emergent communicative infrastructures.
Analyzing responses to the nonexistent conspiracy in Allahabad helps to clarify further the extent to which colonial statecraft was handicapped by self-doubt and internal dissension. Historians such as Jon Wilson have observed that British officials were unable (and often unwilling) to forge affective relations with their Indian subjects; this estrangement resulted in a “pervasive anxiety” over the stability of colonial rule.Footnote 9 Supposedly magnanimous ventures such as the compilation of new law codes were in fact utilitarian ploys to affirm the state's power while reducing its dependence on Indian subordinates. Aloof and deracinated administrators relied on their own interpretations of recent history to decode the behavior of the colonized. Many subscribed to what Kim Wagner terms the “mutiny motif,” a “master-narrative of Indian unrest” that “provided the mainspring for colonial anxieties in British India.”Footnote 10 As Britons’ “understanding of local movements and politics was overdetermined by the trauma of 1857,” the mutiny motif “exaggerated the threat posed by Wahabis and Kukas or made a Russian invasion accompanied by a general rising seem plausible.”Footnote 11 In 1894, mysterious daubs of mud on trees in Bihar were likened to the chapatis (baked breads) that had circulated throughout North India in early 1857 and supposedly mobilized combatants. Wary of history repeating, army officers and civil servants butted heads over whether the mud daubs were evidence of a looming plot or simply an “inconspicuous religious practice.”Footnote 12
Undoubtedly, the legacy of the Uprising cast a long shadow in 1870s Allahabad, as the defection of the Sixth Native Infantry in the spring of 1857 had caught the British in the city completely unawares. Though Allahabad was a key strategic point linking Calcutta with Punjab and beyond, its European military presence had significantly diminished during Governor-General Dalhousie's tenure (1848–1856). Once the first sparks of rebellion broke out at Meerut, Allahabad's civilian residents wrote to the newspapers pleading for additional support. An American missionary later recalled that several panics occurred over a three-week period; European women and children periodically took shelter in the fort, as they feared the revolt would soon spread from Benares.Footnote 13 Yet Colonel Simpson, the commander of the native infantry, denied that there was any discontent among his soldiers, who had recently volunteered to march against the mutineers in Delhi. On the afternoon of 5 June 1857, Simpson summoned his men, conveyed a warm message of thanks from the governor-general for their service, and organized a cordial dinner at the mess. Some hours later, members of the Sixth Native Infantry had killed seventeen British officers at that meal.Footnote 14 Left for dead, the teenaged Arthur Cheek managed to crawl to a ravine but was recaptured days later by a Muslim zamindar (landowner). Offered the choice of conversion or certain death, Cheek chose the latter and was consequently lionized as a Christian martyr in the metropolitan press.Footnote 15
Even though these events were not specifically referenced prior to the panic of 1870, the Uprising was never far out of mind. In late June, an officer at the Allahabad Fort received an anonymous letter instructing him to “prepare for another 1857.”Footnote 16 Around the same time, Commissioner F. O. Mayne called for an additional influx of troops. “Knowing what a blackguard place Allahabad city is, and how full it is of bad characters who cordially hate us, and are only too ready to join in another 1857,” he did not “think it fair to place temptation in their way.”Footnote 17 Europeans in the North-Western Provinces, then, were fully aware that localized unrest could spiral into a full-blown disturbance reminiscent of the Uprising. However, the explanatory device of the mutiny motif does not necessarily clarify why this community gave credence to unsubstantiated rumors of widespread plotting in the first place.
In what follows, I complicate the argument that the British in India suffered from a chronic, insidious anxiety that triggered erratic bouts of violence.Footnote 18 Foregrounding polarizing tensions within the European community, I assert that rumors of discontent could only catalyze panics at specific sites under specific conditions. Historians are largely able to reconstruct the circumstances of the Allahabad panic because officials and civilians were themselves eager to conduct an etiological study of the event. Following an actual mutiny, these parties might have focused their energies on distinguishing Indians’ “personal acts of revenge” from anticolonial “collective political acts.”Footnote 19 But because the Allahabad panic did not result in any actual bloodshed, they instead scrutinized the policy decisions that had incited outrage and produced a feeling of vulnerability.
In disentangling the roots of the Allahabad panic, I recall Ranajit Guha's valuable distinction between fear and anxiety.Footnote 20 The nature of colonial anxiety was both nebulous and ephemeral. It could be spawned by a sense of isolation from Indian society and an inability to “find [one's] bearings in a colonial environment,” or it could reflect discomfiture with the scripted roles that British agents found themselves obliged to play.Footnote 21 Fear, in contrast, was generated by a definite expectation of harm emanating from a specific source.Footnote 22 In regard to the Allahabad panic, the colonial archive is replete with cascading articulations of fear that were recorded before the event, as it unfolded, and throughout the following year. While the denizens of the city anticipated immediate bodily harm, provincial officials and civilian commentators expressed a more existential concern that the overly interventionist government was needlessly stoking Indians’ disaffection. Meanwhile, the viceroy and his confrères were perturbed by the prospect of unwanted scrutiny and struggled to staunch criticism of their policies. The opening of direct telegraph lines in 1870 had brought India and Britain into unprecedented contact in a manner that was both revolutionary and potentially destabilizing.
To be sure, this was hardly the first time in the mid-nineteenth century that a non-official European community clashed with a colonial administration. Across the empire, settlers were committed to retaining their racial privileges and “restoring the rights of freeborn Englishmen.”Footnote 23 They castigated those acting in the role of “Protectors of Aborigines” for their misplaced sentimentalism, denounced emergency gagging acts that stifled freedom of expression, and stymied official inquiries into planters’ abuses.Footnote 24 In India, these tensions were particularly acute. Prior to the Charter Act of 1833, the East India Company had put up various roadblocks to settlement and even deported British critics who called attention to its more despotic practices.Footnote 25 Company officials also feared that lower-class colonists would undermine colonial prestige by “indulging in every kind of low dissipation, disgusting to the Natives and fatal to themselves.”Footnote 26 In 1858, the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement reiterated these concerns over pauperism in the colonies and advocated for the limited immigration of respectable European capitalists and philanthropists.Footnote 27 Representatives of the non-official sector in turn claimed that the government feared the advent of an intermediary power that would challenge its exclusiveness and expose its serial oppression of its Indian subjects.
The question of the European settlers’ race-based legal rights and privileges was a particularly vexatious one.Footnote 28 In 1883, the Anglo-Indian Defence Association and the colonial press launched a fusillade against the Ilbert Bill, which threatened to grant certain Indian judicial officers jurisdiction over criminal cases involving Europeans in the rural hinterland. Well-heeled British women even boycotted Government House social functions in protest.Footnote 29 For Partha Chatterjee, these moments of friction evidenced a racially coded “rule of colonial difference” in which the Europeans’ demands for favored status impeded bureaucratic rationalization and delegitimized the expression of native public opinion.Footnote 30
The Allahabad panic, however, offers a counterpoint to Chatterjee's influential paradigm. In 1870, the settler press joined Indians in their strident denunciations of the income tax and even amplified native voices. Lower-level civil servants also broke with the central government and condemned both the tax and the military's ill-preparedness in private correspondence and anonymous newspaper columns. The higher authorities in London and Calcutta were understandably alarmed by this apparent unification of belligerent interests. A granular analysis of the Allahabad imbroglio and its antecedents thereby reveals how panics were born out of mounting fractiousness, skepticism, and frustration within British colonial society.
Seeing the Signs
In the early summer of 1870, the region of the North-Western Provinces was already a hotbed of unsettling rumors and innuendos. On 2 July, Yacub Khan, a Roorkee resident and converted Christian, testified before a magistrate that he had encountered a band of students from the engineering college who intimated that they were participating in a plot to kill every European and Christian in the vicinity.Footnote 31 Revelations of this sort were not necessarily unheard of. Yacub himself reported that a fat Deobandi faqir who resided near a tomb in front of the hospital routinely preached about an impending massacre.Footnote 32 Nevertheless, on this occasion Yacub attempted to hail a police officer, and when assistance was not forthcoming, he pursued the students himself. Officials noted some inconsistencies in his account and questioned the youths’ motivation in revealing their scheme to an intended victim. But the damage to public morale was already done, as Yacub's wife had recounted to the women of the station the harrowing details of her husband's ordeal.
The day after Yacub delivered his testimony, a Captain C. E. Orman notified District Commissioner M. Court of associated intrigues. It was likely that the students in question attended a weekly meeting of Muslims that occurred in a garden every Sunday evening. Orman also wanted to keep tabs on the Deobandi faqir. His subsequent consultations with a local constable revealed that the individual was known as “musth,” a term usually applied to frenzied elephants that could also describe a “fanatic in religion.”Footnote 33 It appears that Orman was prone to overreaction, as he visited the Roorkee bazaar in disguise to determine if the butchers were intending to rise.Footnote 34 Commissioner Court, in contrast, was rather more circumspect: even if Yacub's story was true, there was “nothing to fear from gabbers.”Footnote 35 And if Court were to suddenly cancel his engagements in Allahabad and return to investigate, it would surely alarm the European residents in that city.
Once reports of Orman's sleuthing began to circulate, the rumor mill went into overdrive. At the end of July, Awadh Commissioner E. G. Jenkinson attempted to debunk and certify various pieces of gossip for the benefit of his superior, Lieutenant-Governor William Muir.Footnote 36 The notion that the European troops in Roorkee were attending church with loaded rifles was palpably false, Jenkinson maintained, but reports that a contingent of Indian sappers had been roused in the night for roll call and ordered out on parade were regrettably accurate. Onlookers misconstrued the abrupt commands—which nearly led to a collision with the 103rd regiment—as a sign that the officers intended to disarm these troops. Jenkinson also referred to an Ashuf Ali, a cross-dressing dancer from Rampore whom he described as a suspicious-looking character.Footnote 37 Having deluged Muir with this intelligence, Jenkinson assured his superior that his previous quiescence should not be taken to mean that he “was in any way careless” and not “alive to what was going on.” He had chosen to report these occurrences because the anticipation of a general disturbance had “a much deeper origin than the mere idle talking of the few Mahomedan students.”Footnote 38
While Commissioner Court confidently concluded that the Roorkee business was all “clouds without rain,” a feeling of unease continued to linger throughout the region. By the end of August, the city of Allahabad was embroiled in a full-scale panic. On 25 August, Mrs. Paxton, the wife of a local tradesman, notified ranking army officer Major-General Vaughan that she had overheard her attendant and chowkidar (guard) speaking of a ghastly plot. The nearly seven-hundred-strong Fourth Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry was conspiring to rise that evening in league with the jail keepers. These rebels intended to murder Mr. Paxton and abduct a young woman who had been staying at their residence; Mrs. Paxton noted that she was too old to be of much appeal. Around three o'clock in the morning, she heard that the revolt had been postponed until the following night. Paxton's tale was not the only indication that something was afoot. A Lady Cunningham also reported that three Indians had cruelly insulted her in passing while she was sitting on her verandah. Additionally, a native servant had been approached in the bazaar and advised to encourage his master to leave Allahabad if he happened to be a “good sahib.”Footnote 39
Despite the lack of any corroborating evidence for these claims, Vaughan hurriedly instructed the officers in his field battery to make promenades through the town and sent for two additional regiments from Cawnpore (located 200 kilometers northwest of Allahabad).Footnote 40 These commands were somewhat misinterpreted. The artillery officers took it upon themselves to load their wagons with munitions, set up a rendezvous outside the station for the women and children, and order their men to sleep in their clothes.Footnote 41 Residents of the civilian enclave of Cannington became agitated and gathered together for protection in their houses or vacated the station altogether. A number of Eurasian families fled to Calcutta. The railway telegraph operators, meanwhile, contributed to this fracas by spreading the alarm up and down the line. Vaughan himself was affected by the civilians’ “open, undisguised fright” and even floated the idea of disarming the city's two hundred Indian policemen.Footnote 42 Shortly thereafter, District Magistrate J. C. Robertson entered the fray and drew up a circular entreating Europeans to return to their homes. Fleeing in the dead of night, he explained, “does not tend to heighten us in the eyes of the natives, and it also tends to put into their minds the idea that we have some reason to fear them.”Footnote 43
After the turmoil subsided in early September, leading officials did not commend Vaughan and Robertson for their perspicacity. Rather, as Muir concluded, the whole story of a mutiny “was evidently worthless trash and should have been put simply aside as such.” Even Robertson's circular, which assured residents of the soldiers’ extra vigilance, was “ill judged” and “quite an exception to his ordinary good sense and management.” Muir hoped that the “military authorities always were on the alert,” as it was “the essence of their constitution so to be.” Even after Robertson squarely placed the blame on the artillery for its overhasty mobilization, Muir remained convinced that the two men had conferred about Mrs. Paxton's tale and directed the course of events.Footnote 44 By mid-September, Robertson was clearly frustrated with this scapegoating and told his superiors as much. He had it on good authority from an esteemed Indian solider that the people were widely disaffected and might be inclined to rise at a slight provocation. Had the government properly acted upon similar reports of strange doings in 1856, the calamitous Uprising may well have been avoided. Robertson's dressing-down had further corroborated his impression that he was “no favourite in certain quarters” and prompted him to request a transfer at the earliest availability.Footnote 45
As accusations flew, Vaughan and Robertson found an ally in Robert Napier, the commander-in-chief of the Indian Army. Critics like Muir, Napier mused, “would not have been so scornful had they been subjected like the people at Allahabad to these growing rumours for the last month.” The fault for the panic lay not with Vaughan but with the civil servants who “tumbled to pieces in one night” and “had to fly to the Fort for fear of their own peons and police.”Footnote 46 News of the disturbance also reached Viceroy Mayo in Calcutta, who recognized the difficulty in which officers on the spot were placed. While the “feeling of fear” could increase if no action was taken, a reassuring show of force might inadvertently convince the public that an imaginary threat was tangible. Still, Mayo recognized that the brouhaha in Allahabad was beyond the pale. If colonial agents “without a shadow of reason” based their actions on “vague rumours and station gossip,” authorities could hardly be surprised “that foolish women and timid clerks [were] frightened” and that news of the native army's mutinous state was appearing in the public press.Footnote 47
Normalizing Fanaticism
Ordinarily, the dissemination of rumors and the outbreak of a panic might prompt the colonial state to stage investigations against itinerant or allegedly criminal communities and pursue extrajudicial modes of repression. In the 1830s, colonial authorities’ “discovery” of thuggee—a covert system of hereditary, ritualistic criminality—led to the formation of a special policing department in the non-regulation territories of Sagar and Narbada.Footnote 48 Sixty years later during the mud-daubing panic, the superintendent of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department instructed his subordinate inspectors general to systematically gather information on the suspected sadhus, or Hindu mendicants. Only after the matter came to the attention of the House of Commons did the government of India tone down its talk of an endemic conspiracy.Footnote 49
The Allahabad panic, in contrast, failed to provoke a similar knee-jerk reaction, as the state was already keeping tabs on supposed Wahhabis in the North-Western Provinces. From the mid-1860s to the early 1870s, officials investigated financial transactions to uncover any connections linking Muslims in north Indian cities with fanatical cells on the Indo-Afghan frontier. In July 1870, two Muslims were apprehended in Muzaffarnagar and searched for incriminating papers. The first suspect, Syud-ud-din, had been shipwrecked en route from Medina; having lost much of his personal property, he drafted a circular asking for financial aid from sympathetic Indians. Described as a fast-keeping, pious Muslim, Syud-ud-din admitted to possessing two copies of a tract entitled “Dusht-nama,” which agents translated as the “Word of Reproof.” Apparently, he had received the first copy in Aligarh and the second from the zamindars of Dadon, whose extended family members were known to have Wahhabist sympathies. Composed of “sermons for repentance” and promises of certain fulfillments, this tract and others like it were harmless enough. If anything, they were a boon to officials, as “they shewed who the pretended prophets were.”Footnote 50 Not knowing exactly what to do with the indigent Syud-ud-din, Commissioner Court suggested that he be escorted to Bombay and from there returned to Medina. The other suspect at Muzaffarnagar, an unknown Arab, had been found with the names of several Muslims sewn into his hat. He provided little information when questioned, though he identified one name as that of a Wahhabi contractor in Meerut who held many government bonds and liberally distributed alms to the poor.
Beyond this rudimentary surveillance, it was unclear how the British could preemptively frustrate the fanatics’ anticolonial designs. Magistrates were not often able to prevent mullahs from publicly preaching, as they did not directly “inculcate treason, but only those doctrines which necessarily lead their adopters into treason.”Footnote 51 The Jubbulpore Chronicle—incidentally, the only Anglo-Indian newspaper I have located that explicitly associated the rumored mutiny in Allahabad with fanatical intrigues—reported a similar permissiveness in the lead-up to the panic. Members of the Fourth Native Infantry were supposedly “caught stealing away from their lines at night to hold converse with the Wahabees at the Chowk, a thing they have been in the habit of doing for months.”Footnote 52 Assuming this intelligence was accurate, the colonial state's refusal to intervene or even mention these liaisons in official correspondence is quite remarkable.
Although many colonial agents presumed that the fanatics were prone to jihadist declarations, the connection between pious revivalism and political revolution remained ambiguous. Observing a distinction between these two phenomena, a number of officials in the North-Western Provinces differentiated “High Church” Wahhabis from “Low Church” conspirators. The first group, Court noted, sincerely believed “that the time for the restitution of the Mahometan faith and power is drawing near” and were “anxious to reform practices antagonistic to the principles of their religion and all that.”Footnote 53 Muir, too, recognized that the term “Wahhabi” was a large one, including both the “purely religious (or Protestant) sect, as well as the political fanatics.”Footnote 54 Donning an orientalist cap, he argued in scholarly writings that adherence to the doctrines of the early schools of Islamic law rendered social change impossible and inhibited freedom of judgment in Muslim societies.Footnote 55 In his mind, the Wahhabis somewhat combatted this stasis by rejecting saint-worship and advocating for personal engagement with the hadith.Footnote 56
Rather than sensationalizing fanatical violence and inflating the threat of Wahhabism, officials in the North-Western Provinces normalized Muslims’ anticolonial resentment as a quotidian fact of life. In 1870, Court repeated the maxim that “Mahomedans regard us as usurpers of their power, and would gladly see us knocked on the head.” As a rule, they looked forward to the extermination of Christians “just as much as we believe in the second coming of our Lord, and the establishment of His Kingdom.”Footnote 57 Major-General Colin Troup, a former commander of the Meerut division, was of a similar mind. The British, he advised, ought not “be surprised at the Mahomedans hating us, as it is part and parcel of their creed to do so.”Footnote 58 To alert authorities of a vague, unsubstantiated plot, as Court had considered doing following the Roorkee divulgences, would only bring unnecessary public attention to a commonplace and irresolvable issue. For Muir, it was simply a “condition of our tenure here” that the British would be “always exposed to the machination of evil disposed persons.” Whether from “fanaticism or from personal lapses,” Muslims would strain the doctrine of jihad to suit their purposes. While Allahabad's Muslims were arguably a known entity, the same could not be said for the civilians who lost their heads and fled their homes in the dead of night. Incensed by their comportment, Muir called upon the government to actively discourage “any disposition to panic on the part of the Europeans.”Footnote 59
Assisting in this project, George William Allen's Pioneer newspaper encouraged its readers to avoid the “tendency to boil over with excitement, and to run about shouting whenever an alarm is sounded.”Footnote 60 The lowbrow Anglo-Indian papers rarely helped matters, as their habit of giving coverage to every minor event resulted in “sensational articles about fearful conspiracies in India and dismal prophecies of political catastrophe.”Footnote 61 The Pioneer, however, was confident that the English in India were a hardy bunch; they had not endured a century of “hard fighting and perilous complications” only to be “frightened at last by such a sputter as this Wahabee business.” If the government was concerned with stymying “unreasonable fanaticism among well-to-do Mussulmans,” it need only encourage them to invest in public loans to the state!Footnote 62
With these reassurances, the Pioneer was attempting to assert its journalistic integrity and distinguish itself from competing papers that it accused of alarmism. Earlier in August 1870, its writers had picked a fight with the Calcutta-based Englishman over an article that questioned the security of India's port cities from maritime attack. The Pioneer was quick to note that such speculation was superfluous. The government of India was “at war with no one,” and “hostile fleets do not spring into being at a mere stamp of the foot.”Footnote 63 It was unfortunate that the article's author, who complained of the state's unpreparedness with “the unreasoning petulance of a tetchy child,” should have “pandered to the spirit of panic which always, on the slightest provocation, pervades Calcutta.”Footnote 64 The Englishman did not take kindly to this bashing and accused the Pioneer of being a government rag that merely published “the mercenary effusions of one or two hack writers.” Calcutta's civilians were not unsettled by fears of a looming invasion, but rather were convinced that the hapless administration would “take the worst possible steps” if any such scenario were to arise.Footnote 65
When the Englishman took notice of the Allahabad panic several weeks later, the Pioneer once more chastised its rival for its poor standards. On the one hand, it was “scarcely to be expected that the small fry of the Press should have abstained from sensational paragraphs about the late uneasiness in this station.” After receiving torrents of inscrutable telegrams on the subject of warfare in continental Europe, it would have been a “congenial relief to the feebler provincial journals” to “find themselves amidst the more intelligible excitement of old ladies threatened by their chowkeedars.” Such rumors naturally appealed to the “children of the fourth estate” who helmed the lesser papers, but they acquired a sheen of realism when they appeared in the venerable Englishman. The Pioneer therefore insisted that “no guns have ever been placed on the Jumna Bridge, and that no attack on the Jail was ever threatened or expected.”Footnote 66 Yet the paper's equanimity in this instance was rather ironic. Prior to the panic, its own writers had stirred the pot by denouncing the Indian government's taxation polices and harping on the administration's insufficient regard for Allahabad's security.
The Allahabad Panic: A Diagnosis
In browsing the columns of an Anglo-Indian paper, it becomes clear that India's colonizers were acutely aware of their mental fragility. The tendency to panic, which the Pioneer described as a “helpless yielding up of oneself to terror, when no real or immediate dangers exist,” was in fact a “national failing.” Before the passage of the Volunteer Act in 1863, invasion panics in the metropole had been “as certain in their visits as measles or influenza.” Britons, the Pioneer reckoned, were driven to a state of panic by a sense of their own impotence; given a gun, some ammunition, and the chance of a “fair fight,” these debilitating fits of apoplexy would be resolved.Footnote 67 But while panics certainly fed on feelings of helplessness, they could only be triggered by specific catalysts. When rumors of native disaffection began to circulate throughout the North-Western Provinces, officials and civilians paid heed because they were already convinced that controversial enactments had put the state in mortal danger. Specifically, the colonial regime had invited discord by passing the highly unpopular Indian Income Tax Act of 1869 and pursuing military retrenchment to shore up a deficit of £2,500,000.Footnote 68 The railways further exacerbated this alarmism by conveying rumors of the impending mutiny to distant stations.
In the aftermath of the Uprising, colonial authorities had anticipated a backlash to unprecedented direct taxation and cautioned against it on the grounds of political pragmatism.Footnote 69 An earlier income tax designed by the finance member of the Viceroy's Council in 1860 perplexed other policy makers who denounced it as an undue burden on low-income earners.Footnote 70 Although the 1869 tax, which followed swiftly on the heels of license and certificate taxes, only applied to incomes over 500 rupees, poor Indians still feared that landholders would squeeze their tenants to recoup their losses. The measure also riled European civilians in Calcutta, who believed it had been instituted in “the most arbitrary manner, without giving the public time to consider it.”Footnote 71 Other critics reportedly took issue with the intrusive nature of the tax and the potential misconduct of the lower-class Indians tasked with its collection.
The administration made matters worse by doubling the tax later that year after one council member discovered a discrepancy in the accounts.Footnote 72 This harried rejiggering unleashed a “hurricane of unpopularity” upon the government and produced a “dread feeling of expectancy” in northern India.Footnote 73 It also negatively colored Indian perceptions of subsequent colonial initiatives; many interpreted the 1872 census as a prelude to further taxation. The lieutenant-governor of Bengal even admitted that this enumeration was “ill-timed,” as the recent “increase of imperial and local taxation had unsettled men's minds.”Footnote 74
Even before Yacub Khan had his fateful encounter with the students on the Roorkee bridge, officials were commenting on a palpable ill feeling in native circles. Commissioner Court reported in early June that “the income tax . . . caused a good deal of disaffection” that “shewed itself most amongst the Mahomedan population and in the major towns.”Footnote 75 He doubted, however, that these Muslims would attempt any kind of violent protest without external support. In the aftermath of the Roorkee alarm, anonymous civil servants protesting the tax in the Pioneer confirmed “that a sentiment of dislike and disloyalty [was] fast increasing among the people of these provinces,” one evidenced by the Indians’ “insolence of bearing and scarcely disguised threats of aggression.”Footnote 76 Writing directly to Muir, Commissioner Jenkinson pulled no punches in his paternalistic excoriation of the tax. “Judicious management,” he posited, might have soldered “the breach [that] was made between us and the natives, during the mutiny.” Instead, the income tax signaled the administration's desire to “keep the whole machine at high pressure; to treat the people as grown up civilised men, instead of as children in leading strings.” This “monstrous and disgusting tax” only served to demoralize “both the officers who assess it, and the people who are assessed.”Footnote 77 Jenkinson seems to have subscribed to what Christopher Herbert terms the “myth of betrayed interracial homosocial love.”Footnote 78 It was disheartening for any district officer who “has the good and the prosperity of the people at heart, to see the people growing further away from him every day.”Footnote 79 Once the Allahabad panic erupted, colonial agents stationed outside the region speculated that it was most likely caused by “a city riot occasioned by income Tax oppression” rather than “a native army arrangement.”Footnote 80 Such disturbances could break out anywhere, although they typically manifested as some sort of strike.Footnote 81
Certain senior officials were keen to avoid additional legislative provocations. Home Secretary E. C. Bayley intervened in September after receiving word that the largely European municipality of Allahabad was contemplating a tax on bodies burnt on the banks of the Ganges and Jumna rivers.Footnote 82 The following spring, Muir advised the Financial Department that he had “never witnessed anything approaching the popular discontent created by the Income-tax during the last two years.”Footnote 83 While on tour, he was “on many occasions surrounded by petitioners clamorous against their assessment to this tax”; the complaints he received “revealed an amount of discontent, deep and widespread, to an extent hitherto unknown.”Footnote 84 He therefore advised Mayo to expand his recent “local finance” initiative, which reduced the central administration's overspending by allocating set annual grants to the provincial governments that they could disburse or save.Footnote 85 Advocating for the establishment of additional local-level councils, Muir deemed it essential that “independent native gentlemen” were “seen and felt to be debating on questions affecting their own people.”Footnote 86
While Muir was concerned with appeasing the native population, Anglo-Indian civilians in the presidency towns were denouncing the administration's fiscal policies as a violation of the public trust. The secretary of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce echoed a common criticism in August 1870 when he questioned the necessity of the impost amid abundant rains and high opium sales. The measure had given “rise to widespread feelings of irritation and distrust” that it was “most desirable to modify and subdue.”Footnote 87 The Times of India also noted the impolicy of the income-tax increase, linking it with the high-handed suspension of habeas corpus in the unfolding Great Wahhabi case (which it considered to be equally ill-advised).Footnote 88 In isolating the causes of the Allahabad panic, the paper further insisted that the tax did not fall solely upon the upper classes. Its collection would continue to result in “toothless ryots shut up in prison, cottagers reduced to hopeless beggary, whole districts made miserable, and the dumb mofussil filled with unrest and discontent.”Footnote 89
Downplaying the seriousness of fanatical plotting in the days following the 1870 panic, the Pioneer alleged that the government of India's priorities were misplaced. The “Mayo-Temple levy on artisans and the struggling middle class trouble[d] the land ten times more than would a score of real Mussulman plots.” Restarting the Wahhabi witch hunt and trials at this precarious moment would only “produce the very temper in which brooding disaffection has its origin.” Undoubtedly the viceroy's advisors were competent administrators, but “with such a big Wahabee bee in their bonnets . . . common sense cannot be heard amidst its buzzing.”Footnote 90 The Pioneer's skeptical dismissal of this “portentous conspiracy” was hardly exceptional.Footnote 91 Prominent metropolitan commentators such as Frederick Chesson, the secretary of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, likewise did “not attach much importance to Wahabee conspiracies or Mahomedan intrigues.” The only real danger to British supremacy “proceed[ed] from an entirely different source,” namely mass discontent occasioned by the income tax.Footnote 92
By early October, reports of the Allahabad panic had reached the India Office in London through the exertions of James Wilson, a former soldier and editor of Calcutta's Indian Daily News. Since the imposition of the income tax, he had been hearing “rumours of disaffection” and observing “cases of oppression sufficiently numerous to warrant rebellion.”Footnote 93 Unsettled by the combustible atmosphere in the city, he drafted a pamphlet in June 1870 informing Parliament of the colonial government's various missteps. But just as this tract arrived in London, the Franco-Prussian War broke out and distracted politicians from Indian issues. On 3 September, Wilson again tried his hand at whistleblowing and alerted Lord Salisbury, the former secretary of state for India, of Allahabad's mutinous atmosphere. While he personally blamed the income tax for this unrest, he noted the alternative explanations that were in circulation. Some onlookers attributed the troops’ apparent petulance to a military registration order that classified their second wives as prostitutes and would have subjected them to the Contagious Diseases Act.Footnote 94 Other wagging tongues alluded to a recent parade during which a soldier had thrown his “dress” at his commanding officer and was executed for insubordination. The government, meanwhile, had failed to keep its European subjects apprised of the worsening situation. The limited news issuing from Simla, the administration's summer capital, was “that Lord Mayo will only come down in time to be at the ‘Sonepore Races’ and that there is talk of having some balls shortly.” Meanwhile, Wilson continued to receive word that formerly loyal Indians who had “eaten the salt” of the East India Company were now cursing the tax-hungry administration.
Based on this evidence, Wilson concluded that there was a “complete antagonism between the government and the people,” as the modernizing state had resolved “to do in a decade what could only be well done in a century in India.”Footnote 95 His transmission to Salisbury soon came to the attention of the current secretary of state, the Duke of Argyll, who believed that the “violence of its language” sufficiently captured “the high excitement of men's minds.” Although Argyll doubted that the income tax put the sepoys themselves under any financial duress, he was nevertheless concerned that Anglo-Indian and native journalists had formed a united front against it. As “the whole press of the country” was “perpetually treating the government with contempt,” such censure “must act more or less on all who read it and on the army amongst them.” Reflecting on the hubbub in Allahabad, Argyll was convinced that there “must be some foundation for the rumours so widely prevalent of disaffection and openness for insurrection.”Footnote 96
Mayo generally preferred to ignore the complaints of Europeans who came to India “to get as much money out of the Blacks as they can and desire to go home as soon as possible.” But their resistance to his cost-cutting measures forced him to go on the defensive. He admitted that “scientific taxation [was] unsuited to India” but found it “absurd to say that the tax is in any district likely to provoke resistance or to cause . . . any political result.”Footnote 97 Lecturing his own council, Mayo repudiated all the “ridiculous accusations that had been made” in the Calcutta press as to “cooking the accounts.” If such libelous charges had been brought against a public company, “those who made them would have rendered themselves liable to the penalties of the law.”Footnote 98
Indeed, Mayo had for some time been nursing suspicions that the Anglo-Indian papers and the non-official community were colluding against the government. Earlier that spring, his private secretary, O. T. Burne, had even developed a scheme to divide the colonial press into classes and selectively convey factual intelligence to preferred outlets.Footnote 99 Mayo therefore assured Argyll that Wilson's account was a “tissue of falsehoods from the beginning to the end.”Footnote 100 Calling the editor's reputation into question, the viceroy identified him as “one of those pushing self-educated class of men who only keep themselves in notice by violent attacks on authority, and by opening his columns to paid advocacy.” Like many journalists who lived among the irascible civilians in Calcutta, Wilson was inclined to represent their views as his own. Leading Indians had assured Mayo that the influence of the European press on the native population “may be put down as nil.” Still, he insisted that Salisbury ought to have informed Wilson “that the man who in India propagates such malicious lies is doing the work of traitors and rebels.”Footnote 101
Wilson, however, was not the only whistleblower damaging the colonial government's reputation in the metropole. On 4 October 1870, a former editor of one of India's “leading gazettes” wrote to the London Evening Standard to complain of the chilling effects of bureaucratic despotism. Although the recent panic suggested that something was rotten in Allahabad, colonial authorities continued to assure the India Office of the country's tranquility and strong-armed any so-called interlopers in the non-official community who dared to assert otherwise. These tensions would only abate if the acts of misgovernment that antagonized Indians were “thoroughly ventilated through the London free press.”Footnote 102 Fearing this additional scrutiny—which the new telegraph line would surely enable—Mayo was also disturbed by the prospective appointment of a parliamentary select committee on East India finance that would investigate his administration's spending. Endorsed by the “scurrilous portion of the European press,” this scheme would only result in “British Peers and Privy Councilors wandering about the Country holding courts of enquiry into the conduct of men who have done no wrong.”Footnote 103
While Mayo was contending with blowback from Anglo-Indians and parliamentarians over his tax policy, he was also at loggerheads with Robert Napier. For some time, the colonial state had been trying to trim its military budget, which had risen to an all-time high during the Uprising. Between 1859 and 1863, the number of Indian troops was reduced by about ninety thousand, while British ranks were thinned by thirty thousand.Footnote 104 At the same time, new policies that favored European recruitment in branches like the artillery proved costly. Mayo therefore opted to downsize the largely idle Madras Army and slash expenditure on barracks construction and commissariat charges.Footnote 105 Much to his annoyance, Napier seemed to think it “his duty to resist every proposal by which waste of money can be avoided.”Footnote 106 The fact that the commander-in-chief had convinced the Duke of Argyll of the perils of retrenchment further ruffled Mayo's feathers and led him to reassert his dominance over the military in financial matters. Yet officials and officers on the provincial level were firmly on Napier's side. In late June 1870, Commissioner Mayne had presciently declared that it was “very unwise of govt to leave [Allahabad] without European troops.”Footnote 107 After the panic took hold of the British population, Robertson confirmed that the near-absence of soldiers in close proximity to the civil station had contributed to the alarm.Footnote 108
This spatial difficulty was not the only cause for concern. To reassure the public, General Vaughan relocated a number of troops stationed at Allahabad Fort to new barracks closer to Cannington. However, he was soon forced to withdraw his request for reinforcements from Cawnpore upon discovering that these buildings were nearly uninhabitable.Footnote 109 Despite their palatial scale, roof leakages, sanitary drainage issues, and unmediated sun penetration contributed to a high rate of cholera and fever among the domiciled officers.Footnote 110 Newly assigned to Allahabad, Vaughan may have been unaware of the Pioneer's reporting on the shoddy workmanship at the barracks and the paper's ongoing efforts to “root out an ulcer which is eating deep into the resources of the State.”Footnote 111 The superintending engineer had actually observed these issues earlier in the year but, like many agents of the cash-strapped Public Works Department, had implemented austerity measures in accordance with the government of India's perceived wishes. In this case, the higher-ups concluded that he “rather over-did it.”Footnote 112
Even if the European troops had obtained access to decent housing, the question of whether Allahabad's civilians could count on their military prowess was another matter altogether. Readers of the Pioneer would have been acquainted with the recent court-martial of Private Henry Ormshaw of the First Battalion at Cawnpore on charges of insubordination and personal violence. His subsequent sentencing to seven years’ penal servitude was somewhat reduced because of his youth.Footnote 113 But this incident was not an isolated one.Footnote 114 As the dust from the panic settled in early September, Mayo was receiving a series of hysterical memos from Napier detailing the sorry state of the European soldiery. Complaining about the stalled construction of a new military prison, he notified Mayo of more than 293 cases of insubordination in 1869 alone. Napier believed this high number was indicative of a scheme among the troops to gain release from an inhospitable climate and the “discipline which they find irksome.” His understanding was that any wrongdoing that warranted less than two years’ imprisonment under the Queen's Regulations automatically resulted in the offender's transportation to Britain. Soldiers had therefore taken to committing all manner of crimes as penal servitude at home was “the very thing they want[ed].”Footnote 115 Such chicanery contributed to an intolerable culture of violence within the European ranks. In August, a Private John Watson had been ordered to confinement after his commanding sergeant heard him using insubordinate language. Watson, in response, butted the sergeant on the head with his rifle and attempted to stab him; he was thereafter sentenced to penal servitude for life. Napier also recounted occasions on which medical staff had “been wantonly struck when in the humane performance of their duty.” To deter this behavior, he recommended a revival of flogging and even capital punishment, if need be.Footnote 116
The ill feeling created by the income tax levies and the sorry state of the army contributed to an atmosphere of dread in which baseless rumors could take on a life of their own. This context partially explains the rapidity with which the alarm in Allahabad spread, but structural factors also enabled the panic to evolve into a matter of transregional significance. On 30 August, the clerk of public works and the railway stationmaster in the city of Satna (approximately 180 kilometers southeast of Allahabad) anxiously wrote to C. R. Coles, a political assistant in the Central India Agency. The Satna Locomotive Department, they reported, had received a message from Allahabad advising the rail guards to immediately apply for weapons in anticipation of a potential disturbance.Footnote 117 Previously unaware of this danger, Coles now sought intelligence from railway employees working various lines. One respondent affirmed that the Allahabad artillery had been armed for three days while the European women and children sought protection in the local hospital. While this was admittedly hearsay, he had himself “seen an official notice to the effect that the Railway volunteer corps should come get their arms and ammunition.”Footnote 118 Another worker on the 136th rail line corroborated this account, adding that he had witnessed the unusual sight of Europeans congregating on each end of the Jumna Railway Bridge, which led him to believe that “there must be some truth in the rumours prevalent in Allahabad.”Footnote 119 A driver on the Jubbulpore Line of the East India Railway had also observed a wholesale exodus of Europeans from the city in recent days. By his understanding, a “Native Regiment had been disarmed and one of the sepoys was to be shot this morning.”Footnote 120
Coles took the initiative and transmitted these reports to Calcutta, noting that the panic was being kept alive by the drivers’ loose tongues and their passengers’ imaginations. He then proceeded to Allahabad to confirm Robertson's telegraphic insistence that “the panic here is utterly groundless.”Footnote 121 Upon his arrival, it was clear that “much alarm existed,” as his own brother-in-law was sleeping with a loaded revolver under his pillow and other weapons at hand. Coles convinced Robertson to accompany him to the rail station and conciliate the Anglo-Indian populace, but the civilians remained skeptical. If reports of an uprising were fallacious, why were military patrols deployed, artillery units mustered, and European troops ordered from Cawnpore? Coles himself could scarcely “account for old women's tales influencing as it has done the entire mercantile community of Allahabad.” Still, he sent for his family to prove that such fears were groundless.Footnote 122 Robertson, meanwhile, wrote to the district traffic commissioner of the East India Railway pleading for his assistance in allaying the panic. Echoing his controversial circular, he fumed at the “spectacle of families running about the station at night” and found the danger of vacating homes to be most objectionable.Footnote 123
Telegraphs and the Scourge of False News
While the panic died down after the first week of September, it remained a topic of sustained official discussion well into November. This episode enjoyed such disproportionate attention because it revealed the central government's inability to control its informational infrastructure and hold its own European subjects to account. A telegraphic network linking the presidency towns had been completed in 1855; a decade later, a landline constructed through Ottoman territory connected India with Britain. Reuters deployed its first agent to Bombay the following year.Footnote 124 Even with a six-day lag time and recurrent interruptions in service, a popular demand for coverage of European conflicts steadily grew in India. In 1870, the opening of a London to Calcutta landline by the Siemens-backed Indo-European Telegraph Company and the separate laying of underwater cables between Bombay and Falmouth by John Pender's various firms dramatically reduced transmission times.Footnote 125 These were momentous achievements. Connected directly to India in June via the latter line, President Ulysses S. Grant joined Mayo in his “wish for a lasting union between the Eastern and Western hemispheres.”Footnote 126
As “events replaced descriptions, and bulletins replaced diaries,”Footnote 127 some traditional press outlets began to associate telegrams “with superficiality, sensationalism, and even inaccuracy.”Footnote 128 Amelia Bonea has perceptively noted that battlefield updates received during the Austro-Prussian War were far from objective, as rival camps in Vienna and Berlin used the telegraph as a propaganda tool.Footnote 129 Some months into the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), the London correspondent for the Pioneer took France's journalists to task for contributing to the “most completely organised system of false news and fraudulent despatches ever imposed . . . since the world began.”Footnote 130 The Englishman similarly pleaded with the government to bypass Reuters and provide its own authenticated telegrams to the colonial press on the state of the war. It also urged the administration to vigorously punish every transmission of a “wilful falsehood,” thereby discouraging the disaffected native press from circulating untruths.Footnote 131 Verifiable information was especially desired in Calcutta, as French and German residents there were branding each other as aggressors and undermining the European community's “social serenity.”Footnote 132
Colonial officials were somewhat cognizant of the potential security risks posed by this unprecedented global interconnectivity and the resultant annihilation of time and space.Footnote 133 Muir, for instance, advised the Calcutta authorities to be “specially careful,” as the telegraphic speculation that Russia had allied with Prussia was sure to “produce any amount of distorted rumours.” It was therefore necessary that the “tone of the Native press . . . be carefully watched on this point.”Footnote 134 He was not necessarily being overcautious. In September, a contributor to one Indian newspaper observed that the Allahabad disquiet had “transpired at a time when there was a great war between France and Prussia during which the Emperor Napoleon was forced to surrender himself to the enemy.” It therefore was likely that “rumours of this had come from those quarters and this caused a groundless panic among the people.”Footnote 135
The immediate panic in Allahabad dissipated rather quickly. On 2 September, Robertson observed that the European population was “considerably ashamed of themselves, as well they may be.”Footnote 136 The following day, however, an alarming telegraphic notification conveyed by the submarine cable appeared in the London Times, the Spectator, and the Scotsman: “A vague panic exists among Europeans and Bengalese in Allahabad. The 4th Native Infantry is the cause of apprehension. General Vaughan has brought more English troops from Cawnpore, and the magistrate has issued a circular reassuring the residents. The panic is believed to be unfounded, but there are many bad characters in Allahabad.”Footnote 137 The Spectator was puzzled by this intelligence, as the British did not typically “move troops in India against bad characters or move without clear necessity.” It was also unclear how “Allahabad, the key of Northern India, the city which commands both the Ganges and the Jumna,” could be left undermanned.Footnote 138 The apparent threat was compounded when two more telegraph messages appeared in the Times days later. According to the first, which was transmitted through Reuters via the Indo-European line, “numerous reliable advices state that a general feeling of insecurity prevails in Allahabad. The Government is taking precautionary measures, and has also ordered a detachment of the 14th Regiment to proceed thither.” Sent by way of the submarine cable, the second reported “that the 4th Native Infantry, at Allahabad, have laid down their arms, on account of a comrade having been shot for insubordination after his trial by court-martial.”Footnote 139
Encountering this “echo of the original rumour” in the home papers perplexed Anglo-Indian news writers who assumed that the matter had been laid to rest. The Pioneer regretted that the Times had needlessly alarmed metropolitan readers whose family members were based in Allahabad.Footnote 140 The Times of India was similarly distressed and called upon Lord Mayo to “dissipate vague and ill-founded uneasiness by a frank statement of the proximate causes of the disaffection at Allahabad.”Footnote 141 By late October, the government had yet to issue any formal explanation. The most reassuring response actually came from Napier, who made a point of selecting the 4th Native Infantry as his escort during his tour of Assam.Footnote 142 Despite the Pioneer's insistence that the panic was groundless and hardly worthy of attention, editorials concerning the event appeared in its columns into the winter months.Footnote 143 Its writers were keen to controvert testimonies from Allahabad residents who continued “against reason and proof, to persist in believing that the 4th Native Infantry were disaffected, and that a horde of mutineers was on the other side of the Jumna.” These rumormongers, the Pioneer reasoned, fabricated bogeymen because they were eager “to escape the shame of having been scared without cause.”Footnote 144
While Allahabad's civilians relitigated the causes of the panic, Mayo was contending with the state's apparent loss of control over its own telegraph system. Earlier administrations had implemented a range of safeguards aimed at curbing the dissemination of sensitive information through these new channels. Section 11 of the 1854 Telegraph Act imposed fines and prison sentences upon employees who leaked governmental intelligence; a subsequent act penalized attempts to bribe telegraph office staff.Footnote 145 When the “Bengal Europeans” belonging to the East India Company's defunct regiments began to mutiny in the spring of 1859, the government banned the public use of the telegraph altogether to deter sympathetic protests in distant stations.Footnote 146 Given the existence of a standing order “forbidding telegraph signalers to receive alarming messages regarding public affairs,” Mayo was distraught that news of the panic had spread so quickly, and on 13 September, he requested copies of the telegrams received in London and any particulars regarding their senders or place of origin.Footnote 147 The following month, his administration initiated its own investigation through the Public Works Department.
This department soon discovered that Dr. George Smith, the Calcutta correspondent for the Times, was behind the first transmission dispatched via Reuters on 2 September.Footnote 148 Much to the government's likely chagrin, an elaboration on this telegram appeared in the paper one month later. In that piece, Smith reported that “the income-tax and the prospect of a local house-tax have caused great dissatisfaction”; meanwhile, the “fraudulent construction of the new barracks” had led to the contraction of the British force at Allahabad, which prompted “alarmists to write to the newspapers on the subject.”Footnote 149 In another missive, penned in mid-October, the indefatigable Smith once more demanded a formal inquiry into the “native insubordination and European panic” in the city.Footnote 150
Yet the government could not identify the origin of the most incendiary telegram that mentioned an outright mutiny, as it had been sent via the railway telegraph line. While the telegraph, according to an 1869 memo, was “emphatically a State institution” under the monopolistic control of the Indian Telegraph Department, the privately owned railways had slowly but surely been gaining concessions over the past fifteen years.Footnote 151 The original 1854 legislation had granted these companies revocable licenses to build their own telegraph lines under stringent conditions. The rail signalers could not convey messages between stations if there was already a government-owned line in operation.Footnote 152 Additionally, the companies were barred from setting up telegraph offices beyond the route of their rails, lest they compete with the government's own network. By the early 1860s, recurrent bottlenecks proved that the government monopoly could not handle the quantity of messages being sent. The telegraph department therefore lifted all restraints on communications between rail stations and even allowed certain companies to set up a second wire along the government's existing lines.Footnote 153
In 1868, D. G. Robinson, the director general of the Indian Telegraph Department, began to warn Calcutta that this laissez-faire approach to telecommunications was creating all kinds of financial and security issues. As the construction of railway telegraphs accelerated, his department had failed to keep pace. Robinson's scanty budget could not provide for new lines to the cotton districts, nor could it cover the recently approved military lines. Unable to expand, Robinson's operation was losing customers and hemorrhaging money. In Allahabad alone, the telegraph station racked up about 22,000 rupees in annual expenditures but only 7,800 rupees in revenue.Footnote 154
The rise of the railways’ telegraphic network also threatened to undercut the state's control over its guarded information order. At present, Robinson observed, “there was nothing in the organization of Indian Telegraphs . . . to prevent the dissemination of false or treasonable intelligence, or to prevent the timid native signalers or clerks to betray secret messages, whether Government or commercial, whenever a European gentleman chose to walk into a Railway Office.”Footnote 155 The revelation that the railway telegraphs had conveyed news of the Allahabad panic must have given him some professional satisfaction, as he had been mocked as a worrywart throughout the previous year. In late October, he reminded the secretary of the Public Works Department that he had “several times brought to notice how useless it is to forbid the Government employees to forward alarming improper telegrams, while the employees of the private companies are free to do so.”Footnote 156 A few weeks later, O. T. Burne received confirmation that there was “no penalty in the Penal Code for false news” and that the intentionality of such an offence could hardly be proven in a court of law.Footnote 157
Conclusion
The learning curve from the Allahabad panic was a steep one. Events in 1872 again exposed the disjuncture between the responses of local officers and the expectations of Calcutta authorities in times of perceived crisis. Punjab officials had identified a new threat in the Kukas, or Namdhari Sikhs, who had made great strides since 1867 in converting police and soldiers. While members of this sect claimed to pursue a peaceful agenda, some colonial agents presumed that the Namdharis, “under the disguise of religion,” were intending to punish Muslim cow killers and had become “capable of organizing a united opposition against the Government.”Footnote 158 In January, the proverbial levee burst when a group of Namdharis attacked Muslims in the princely state of Malerkotla. Deputy Commissioner J. L. Cowan reacted with haste and executed forty-nine insurgents without due process in apparent contravention of his superior's orders. In this instance, the viceroy would not tolerate the arbitrary suspension of the rule of law and removed him from service. Critics in the metropolitan and Anglo-Indian presses subsequently colored Cowan's response as that of “a panicked officer who appeared ‘to have lost his head.’”Footnote 159 In a familiar refrain, one editorial also faulted the government for having failed to sufficiently inquire into the hundred-thousand-strong Kuka movement, thus allowing fears of an imminent rising to take root.Footnote 160
There are numerous ways to interpret Cowan's overreaction coming so soon on the heels of the Allahabad affair. We may invoke Wagner's mutiny motif or else heed Mark Condos's conclusion that officials “frequently believed they were weaker and more exposed than they actually were.”Footnote 161 But while Cowan's perception of a clear and present danger led him to swiftly suppress the apparent threat, the latent fear that produced the uneasiness in Roorkee and Allahabad was of a different sort altogether. It was based on self-reflection and the consequent realization that the administration had invited tumult through its ham-fisted policies. Aside from whispers on the night wind, there were no tangible indicators of malevolent designs comparable to the chapatis or mud daubs. There was simply a pervasive state of dread. The Allahabad panic, moreover, largely preoccupied policy makers for months on end because it exposed the state's faltering authority over both European civilians and the dissenting corners of lower officialdom.
Unlike the provincial agents who had made their peace with Muslims’ unyielding hostility, Mayo by some accounts was entertaining a more bullish approach. Since his arrival, rumors had been circulating that he was “anxious to render his administration distinguished” and had determined to “put down Wahabeeism in India as he had put down Fenianism in Ireland.”Footnote 162 The truth of the matter may be more complicated, as Mayo was actually encouraging his prosecutors in the Wahhabi trials to speedily wrap up their proceedings by Christmas of 1870.Footnote 163 In any event, the viceroy's murder at the hands of a suspected fanatic in 1872 effectively reignited an anti-Wahhabi panic and produced an eager readership for W. W. Hunter's sensationalist Indian Musalmans.Footnote 164 Later that year, Mayo's old nemesis, the free-speaking James Wilson, produced another pamphlet refuting popular explanations for the assassination. It was not the result of a spontaneous frenzy, nor was it the work of a “fraternity of hated,” as the Times suggested. Rather, Wilson attributed such violence to “general disaffection on the ground of oppression.” Instead of depoliticizing the event, Parliament and the wider British public ought to have viewed it as a symptom of the insidious disease that was irresponsible governance. To suggest otherwise would be a “wicked attempt at delusion.”Footnote 165
One may wonder whether the Allahabad panic was a unique spectacle that induced an uncharacteristic amount of hand-wringing and angst. But even if the event and its repercussions appear exceptional, any broad commentary on colonial behavioral patterns must depend upon on the data culled from contextualized analyses of discrete episodes. As demonstrated above, British understandings of fanaticism could significantly differ between regions. Compared to officials in the North-Western Provinces, the Britons policing the unsettled North-West Frontier were perhaps more inclined to conceptualize the fanatic as “an existentially threatening class of criminal” that “needed to be completely destroyed.”Footnote 166 A study of the Allahabad panic's etiology and transmission further illuminates the internal stresses that estranged the European civilian community and provincial agents from disconnected policy makers in Calcutta and Britain. As trust eroded and confidence in administrative competence diminished, rumors of anticolonial intrigue became ever more credible. I also foreground the role of technology in keeping the panic artificially alive, which led bureaucrats to look upon the intra-imperial telegraph as a potential vehicle of misinformation and subversion.Footnote 167 Rather than attributing the eruption of panics to some nebulous form of colonial anxiety, historians may more productively address the fissures that fractured the British community in India and allowed particular fears to fester.
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