South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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Azimullah Khan—A Reappraisal of One of the

Major Figures of the Revolt of 1857

Francis Jarman

To cite this article: Francis Jarman (2008) Azimullah Khan—A Reappraisal of One of the Major
Figures of the Revolt of 1857, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31:3, 419-449, DOI:
10.1080/00856400802441912

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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
n.s., Vol.XXXI, no.3, December 2008

Azimullah Khan—A Reappraisal of One of the

Major Figures of the Revolt of 1857

Francis Jarman

University of Hildesheim, Germany

Abstract
The surviving documentation on Azimullah Khan is unreliable and fragmen-
tary, but a survey suggests that his importance as a leader in the revolt of 1857
may have been exaggerated. His true distinction was as a consultant to the
Nana Sahib. A unique personal letter from Azimullah, dating from the years
that he spent in England and published here for the first time, reveals him at
work behind the scenes on his master’s behalf.

Introduction
Most of the major opponents of the British in the revolt of 1857 acquired
caricature identities from their enemies: the Nana Sahib as a Victorian stage
villain, Azimullah Khan as a slimy traitor, the Rani of Jhansi as a cut-price
Joan of Arc. In these identities, they were made to serve as wicked or pathetic
exemplars of the Colonial Other, and as touchstones for British courage and
fortitude. Yet some Indian and Pakistani commentators have, if anything, gone
to the other extreme in their assessment of figures like Azimullah. Indian
revolutionary V.D. Savarkar wrote, c.1909: ‘Among the keen intellects and
grand minds that first conceived the idea of the War of Independance [sic],
Azimullah must be given a prominent place’.1 Writing in the centenary year of

I would like to express my gratitude for encouragement or practical help to Julian Browning, John Byford at
the British Library, Prof. Dietmar Rothermund (University of Heidelberg), Prof. Herward Sieberg
(University of Hildesheim), and Annelen von Wittich, Ramona Burgdorf and Doris Hein at the
Hildesheim University Library.
1
‘An Indian Nationalist’ [Vinayak Damodar Savarkar], The Indian War of Independence of 1857 (London:
Unnamed publisher, c.1909), p.28. This book was originally authored by ‘An Indian Nationalist’, who was
subsequently found to be Savarkar.

ISSN 0085-6401 print; 1479-0270 online/08/030419-31 Ó 2008 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080/00856400802441912
420 SOUTH ASIA

the revolt, 1987, Syed Lutfullah attempted to make Azimullah into an iconic
figure of the struggle for Pakistani nationhood, while in his introduction to
Lutfullah’s book (‘A Word from the Publisher’), Tariq Bin Yusufi describes
Azimullah as ‘the Master brain who created consciousness among the Muslims
and lead [sic] them to the battle field to restore their last [lost?] grandure [sic]
from the jaws of the great colonial power’ and as ‘a great personality behind the
war of independence of 1857 which has left everlasting imprints on the history
[sic]—in the shape of PAKISTAN’.2

Proving such assertions is difficult, given how very little is known about
Azimullah. The Companion to the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857 comments that ‘little
direct evidence but a great deal of wishful conjecture is marshalled in defence of
[Lutfullah’s] argument’.3 Andrew Ward, author of the only comprehensive
modern study (1996) of the events at Cawnpore, has conceded: ‘Reliable
information on the background of Azimullah Khan is scarce’, noting that
Lutfullah had little to work on other than ‘scraps’, and the ‘brief and dismissive
accounts’ left by nineteenth-century Western commentators. In his own
account, Ward attempts ‘to produce at least a silhouette of Azimullah by
filling in some of the space around him’, though he is severely hampered, he
claims, by the hostility of almost all nineteenth-century British accounts of
Azimullah and by the ‘dearth of primary material from the Indian side of the
equation’. Moreover, ‘what little survives from Indian sources comes through a
British filter’. This applies even to the direct testimony of Indian witnesses, for
example in the matter of the final massacre in the House of the Women.4
According to G.W. Forrest, who edited the documents for publication in 1904:

There are, it is true, the depositions of sixty-three witnesses, natives

and half-castes, taken under the directions of Colonel Williams,
Commissioner of Police in the North-Western Provinces, but they
are the depositions of men who had, or thought they had, the rope

2
Tariq Bin Yusufi, ‘A Word from the Publisher’, in Syed Lutfullah, Azimullah Khan Yusufzai: The Man
Behind the War of Independence 1857 (Karachi: Mohamedali Educational Society, 2nd ed., 1970), p.6.
3
P.J.O. Taylor (ed.), A Companion to the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996),
p.390. ‘Cawnpore’ (not ‘Kanpur’) was the standardised English spelling of the city’s name—although
Mukherjee is correct to point out that it almost immediately acquired ‘a different value-added meaning’ and
‘was no longer just the name of a town’ but ‘imbued with a special significance’. See Rudrangshu Mukherjee,
Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacres (New Delhi: Penguin, rpr. 2007), p.123. It is precisely those
events that created the ‘special significance’ of Cawnpore that are the object of study here, and it should be
possible to revisit them without feeling constrained by an imperialist discursive straitjacket.
4
Andrew Ward, Our Bones are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (New
York: Henry Holt, 1996), pp.680–1 endnote 485, p.555, p.xvi.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 421

round their neck. Their evidence is full of discrepancies, and must

be treated with extreme caution.5

It is not helpful either that several of the major commentators on the events of
1857 were themselves controversial figures, disliked and mistrusted by their
contemporaries. Martin Gubbins was ‘a most difficult man to deal with . . . he is
inconsistent and unreliable, and his judgement is clearly flawed . . . . Much of
what he says can be traced to prejudice, rumour or spite’.6 And Nanak Chand
was described by the Cawnpore collector G.E. Lance, a few years after the
revolt, as ‘a common informer’ who ‘disgusted everyone that has had anything
to do with him’.7 The accounts by ‘eye-witness’ British survivors must also be
treated with caution. How much did they actually see? Taking the two best-
known survivors, Mowbray Thomson and Jonah Shepherd, Thompson fled
from the Satichaura Ghat massacre,8 and Shepherd was imprisoned by the
mutineers for much of the period of time described in his Personal Narrative.9
Like the men in Rumi’s fable of the elephant in the dark, who clutch at
different parts of the beast and consequently perceive it in very different ways,
their proximity to the events in Cawnpore is not in itself a guarantee of accuracy.

The Pakistani academic A.B.A. Haleem has asserted: ‘Our children [in
Pakistan] are still being fed on a distorted version of the story and are made
to look upon it through coloured foreign glasses’—though he expresses the
hope that ‘spade work by way of collection and sifting of material, which lies
scattered in a number of public and private libraries’, will be done so that ‘the
true facts’ may be ‘brought to light and presented in the proper perspective’.10
It is very doubtful, however, whether, with respect to Azimullah, there is much
material of this sort still waiting to be discovered. Perhaps there is a faint
chance that the portrait of him known to have been painted by Lucie Duff
Gordon’s friend Henry Phillips while Azimullah was in England11 may one day
be found in some Home Counties attic; but Azimullah probably took it back to
India with him.12

5
G.W. Forrest, The Indian Mutiny, Reviewed and Illustrated from Original Documents (New Delhi: Srishti,
[1904] rpr. 2003), Vol.I, pp.478–9.
6
Taylor, A Companion to the ‘Indian Mutiny’, p.143.
7
Ibid., p.241.
8
Mowbray Thomson, The Story of Cawnpore (Brighton, Sussex: Donovan, 1995).
9
William Jonah Shepherd, A Personal Narrative of the Outbreak and Massacre at Cawnpore, during the Sepoy
Revolt of 1857 (Lucknow: London Printing Press, rev. 2nd ed., 1879).
10
Lt.-Col. Prof. A.B.A. Haleem, ‘Foreword’, in Lutfullah, Azimullah Khan Yusufzai, p.11.
11
Katherine Frank, A Passage to Egypt: The Life of Lucie Duff Gordon (Boston & New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1994), p.180.
12
Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.585, endnote 299.
422 SOUTH ASIA

That said, a signed personal letter of Azimullah’s, the first known example of
its kind, has recently come to light lying hidden in a nineteenth-century
autograph collection. It is published here (in the Appendix to this essay) for
the first time. Written in a British context, and to please a British addressee—
the translator Sarah Austin (1793–1867), whose daughter Lucie Duff Gordon
had befriended Azimullah soon after his arrival in England—it is hardly the
authentic ‘subaltern voice’; but it invites us to re-examine what we think we
know about Azimullah, and to take a closer look at the career of this
remarkable man.

Azimullah’s Early Years

As a small boy, Azimullah Khan (1830?–1859?), possibly the son of a Pathan,
was rescued with his widowed mother from starvation when famine struck in
the 1830s13 by a missionary in Cawnpore who belonged to the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.14 He served in the missionary’s
household, eventually as a kitmutgar, or waiter, and received a modest
‘subsistence’ of Rs3 a month. When off-duty, Azimullah attended classes at the
Free School, eventually achieving fluency in English and French, and possibly
even learning some German.15

After about 10 years, Azimullah was hired as a moonshee, or secretary, by

Brigadier John Scott. The starving waif had grown up into an impressive-
looking young man: ‘. . . Complexion: Yellow; Stature and personal appear-
ance: Tall and well-made; Form of nose: Flat; Remarks: Speaks with drawling
accent’.16 At the Scotts’, Azimullah was spoiled, learning to play Mozart on
their piano, and being encouraged to recite Shakespeare in Urdu.17 However,
after being set up by Scott in May 1850 with another officer, Brigadier

13
For the great famine of 1837–38, see for instance Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of
India (London: Duckworth, 1989), pp.494–5, and Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, pp.21–2.
14
The Story of the Cawnpore Mission (Westminster: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts, 1909), p.47. The relevant chapters of this book (I–II) are by Rev. J.R. Hill.
15
According to a deposition by Wazir Khan, ‘. . . he spoke French fluently’. See S.A.A. Rizvi and M.L.
Bhargava (eds), Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh: Source Material (Lucknow: Govt. of Uttar Pradesh
Information Dept., 1957–61), Vol.II, p.149. In R. Montgomery Martin, The Indian Empire (Delhi: Mayur
Publications, [1858–61] rpr. 1983), Vol.II, p.250, it is stated that ‘Azim Oollah was fluent in [English]; and
could speak, it is said, some French and German’, although Martin gives no source for this information about
Azimullah’s knowledge of German, which may possibly be no more than a loose deduction based on the
latter’s well-known friendship with the Germanophone Lucie Duff Gordon.
16
Comments on Azimullah’s appearance are in Martin, The Indian Empire, Vol.II, Appendix VII, after p.700.
17
Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.25, drawing on the unpublished diary of a visitor to the Scotts’ in
January 1850.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 423

Ashburnham, the young moonshee ‘misbehaved himself and was turned out
under an accusation of bribery and corruption’.18

The details of Azimullah’s early life vary from account to account: Which
famine year was it? What was the name of the missionary? Was it a church
school or a government school? In general, the different versions of what
occurred in Cawnpore hardly agree on anything.

It is known, though, that Azimullah soon found other employment. Having

attracted the attention of the Nana Sahib at nearby Bithur, he became the
latter’s adviser and secretary—perhaps ‘the Nana’s most confidential Officer’.19
He may have made his acquaintance while in the service of Brigadier Scott, or
even coached the Nana and his brothers in English. But it is unlikely that his
job at Bithur was that merely of an English tutor, since that role in the Nana’s
household appears to have been usurped by a certain Mr. Todd, ‘the only
Englishman resident there’.20

The Journey to England

By virtue of his language skills and because, as a Muslim, he would be able to
travel overseas without endangering his caste, Azimullah was an obvious choice
to lead a delegation from Bithur to London to plead for the Nana Sahib to be
granted the same government pension his adoptive father, the Peshwa Baji Rao
II (r. 1796–1818, {1851), had received. Also in the party was the young
Rohilkhand nobleman Mohammed Ali Khan, who had spent three months in
England in 1850 while in the service of the ruler of Nepal.

Azimullah’s letter to Sarah Austin reveals that upon arriving in London he

took lodgings at 12 Upper George Street, between New Oxford St., Regent St.
and New Bond St., close to Hanover Square. Today, the heavily-renovated
building contains offices.

Different dates for his stay have been proposed, but Azimullah was probably in
England from late 1853 until June 1855. Shepherd has him being sent to
England in 1855,21 and Thomson claims that he ‘reached London in the season
of 1854’,22 but according to Frank he first appeared at the Duff Gordons’ in
18
Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.14.
19
Rizvi and Bhargava (eds), Freedom Struggle, Vol.II, p.149, deposition of Wazir Khan.
20
Thomson, Story of Cawnpore, pp.50–1.
21
Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.14.
22
Thomson, Story of Cawnpore, p.54.
424 SOUTH ASIA

Esher early in January 1854 ‘in the dead of winter’.23 Since the first references
to Azimullah by Lucie Duff Gordon are dated 4 January 1854, he can hardly
have arrived in England much later than mid December 1853.24

Lady Lucie Duff Gordon (1821–69) was an important figure in London literary
and intellectual society. Her husband, Sir Alexander Duff Gordon (1811–72),
was a civil servant but also a court usher and the cousin of the then prime
minister, the Earl of Aberdeen. Azimullah’s introduction to them probably
came about through the philosopher John Stuart Mill, an official at the East
India Company’s headquarters, who had been a childhood friend of Lucie’s.
Azimullah stayed with the Duff Gordons at their home Belvedere House (the
‘Gordon Arms’) in Esher. Through them, he had access to a dazzling social
circle that included the greatest literary figures of the day—Dickens,
Thackeray, Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, Carlyle—as well as political
magnates like Lord Lansdowne.25 He may also have been presented at court.
The Nana Sahib later boasted that he possessed a handwritten letter from
Queen Victoria, brought to him by an eilchee (ambassador) whom he had sent
to London26—Azimullah, presumably.

Lucie’s mother, Sarah Austin, lived with her husband John Austin (1790–
1859) in Weybridge, not far from Esher, in a large rambling house called
Nutfield Cottage. The suggestion has been made that the translator Sarah and
the legal philosopher John, a cerebral but humourless couple, served as
models for Dorothea and Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.27
Azimullah, gifted in languages, was keen to meet influential people who
might be of assistance in the cause of furthering the claims of the Nana Sahib,
but the dour Sarah and her dourer husband would scarcely have been high on
Azimullah’s list of social targets, despite the allure of the ‘good things and
sweet oranges’ mentioned in the letter. Nor was Sarah Austin a likely
romantic target for the young gallant—she was two-and-a-half times his age,
23
Frank, Passage to Egypt, p.179.
24
Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.581, endnote 193.
25
Ward writes: ‘Through Lady Duff Gordon Azimullah would be introduced to many of the great writers
and thinkers who passed through her salon’. See Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.43. Saul David asserts: ‘It
was [at Lucie Duff Gordon’s salon] that Azimullah was introduced to, among others, Dickens, Tennyson,
Thackeray, Carlyle and Macaulay’. See Saul David, The Indian Mutiny 1857 (Harmondsworth: Penguin
[2002] rpr. 2003), p.49. However, neither author provides evidence that any such meetings with great writers
occurred.
26
See Rizvi and Bhargava (eds), Freedom Struggle, Vol.IV, p.776, for letter of the Nana Sahib dated 25 April
1859.
27
For the comparison with Dorothea and Casaubon, see Nadya Haider, ‘Sarah Austin: A Biography’,
Women’s Legal History Biography Project (Robert Crown Library, Stanford Law School), 3 May 2000, p.3
[http://womenslegalhistory.stanford.edu/papers/AustinS-Haider2000.pdf, accessed 10 Apr. 2007].
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 425

had a noticeable moustache,28 and had already suffered a heart attack (in
1852),29 to which her obesity had probably contributed. However, with her
wide circle of contacts, Sarah was potentially very useful as a conduit or
stepping stone to people of influence.

In his letter Azimullah thanks Sarah Austin for interceding for him with a
certain ‘Lady Ellesmere’, whose initial invitation he had been unable to take up
(perhaps because of the illness mentioned two sentences later); a second
invitation was subsequently sent. Lady Ellesmere lived not far away from the
Austins and the Duff Gordons at Hatchford Manor at Cobham in Surrey. Born
Harriet Catherine Greville in 1800, she was the granddaughter and great-
granddaughter of two prime ministers and the niece of Lord William Bentinck,
governor-general of India from 1828–35. In 1822 she married Lord Francis
Leveson-Gower (1800–57), second son of the Duke of Sutherland, who rose to
become Earl of Ellesmere, an MP, President of the Royal Asiatic Society,
President of the Royal Geographical Society, and a founder trustee of the
National Portrait Gallery, to which he donated the famous Chandos portrait of
Shakespeare. Like Sarah Austin and Lucie Duff Gordon, both the Ellesmeres
were known as writers and translators. Her interests were religious, whereas he
translated widely from French and German.30

Lord Ellesmere too seems to have been acquainted with Sarah Austin. In a
letter to her French correspondent the politician Guizot in January 1855 (i.e., at
a time when Azimullah may have been staying under the Duff Gordon’s roof in
nearby Esher), Sarah Austin noted: ‘Lord Ellesmere was here yesterday’31—
and, given their common interest in translating German, they may well have
been good friends. A man of wealth and political influence, a respected
authority on Asia and, very conveniently, the friend of a friend, Ellesmere was a
blue riband target for Azimullah in his campaign of lobbying in the cause of the
Nana Sahib.

Yet despite all this, Azimullah failed to achieve the political purpose of his
journey. John Lang describes how he was told by the Nana Sahib that the
Board of Control and the Privy Council had both been bribed by the East India
Company to ignore the Nana’s claim, his ‘positive proof [being] a letter from
a villainous agent in England’ (Azimullah, one may assume) who had
28
Frank, Passage to Egypt, p.56.
29
Ibid., p.169.
30
G.C. Boase, ‘Egerton, Francis, first Earl of Ellesmere 1800–1857’, Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press [1888] CD edition, 1996).
31
Janet Ross, Three Generations of Englishwomen (London: John Murray, 1888), Vol.II, p.23.
426 SOUTH ASIA

recommended investing £30,000 to ‘bribe over the head of the Company’.32

Thus nothing came of the political machinations.

On the other hand, Azimullah was a great social success. ‘Passing himself off as
an Indian prince, and being thoroughly furnished with ways and means, and
having withal a most presentable contour, he obtained admission to
distinguished society’.33 Lang, offered the chance of an introduction to ‘the
Prince’, retorted: ‘Prince indeed!—he has changed my plate fifty times in
India’.34 Possibly his surname, Khan, contributed to the confusion about his
status.

Azimullah and the Ladies

Lucie Duff Gordon was among numerous English ladies who, according to
Trevelyan, ‘voted him charming’. But her relationship with Azimullah was,
nonetheless, more motherly than amorous. In a letter to C.J. Bayley, she wrote:
‘He calls me his European Mother as the civillest thing he can say!’35 Mostly,
she and her ‘Musselman friend’ just talked. But their discussions were intense
and went on for hours and hours, night after night:

you wd be amused at the incessant questioning that goes on—I

have gone through such a course of political economy & all social
sciences day after day & had to get so many books for my pupil to
devour that I feel growing quite solemn & pedantic. [Azimullah]
who came over with a strong dislike to the English has become an
enthusiastic Englishman & will go home with very reforming
notions to his own people.36

Other women though took a decidedly romantic interest in the young man. In
part the source of this attractiveness was his reputed status as an Oriental
prince. A few robes and jewels were often enough to conjure up associations
with the riches of India and the glamour of the exotic East, standard topics in
the literature of the time, as readers of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and

32
John Lang, Wanderings in India: And Other Sketches of Life in Hindustan (London: Routledge, Warne, and
Routledge, 1859), p.118.
33
Thomson, Story of Cawnpore, pp.54–5.
34
H.G. Keene, A Servant of ‘John Company’, Being the Recollections of an Indian Official (London/Calcutta:
W. Thacker & Co./Thacker, Spink & Co., 1897), p.162 footnote.
35
Gordon Waterfield, Lucie Duff Gordon in England, South Africa and Egypt (New York: Dutton, 1937),
p.137.
36
Quoted in Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, pp.43–4.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 427

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair well knew.37 Likewise, the ‘gorgeous princes of a

brown complexion’38 were a fashionable subject for portraiture in mid-
Victorian Britain. Winterhalter’s portrait of Maharaja Dalip Singh, for
example, was painted for Queen Victoria in 1854,39 the very year in which
Azimullah was conquering London society. The fashion for Eastern men in
English society also had a sexual element. Not only were they assumed to be
obsessed with luring white beauties (like Mozart’s heroines) into their
seraglios,40 they were also reputed to be passionate lovers. As I have written
elsewhere, Western women in the private recesses of their minds now and again
allowed themselves to dream of an exotic Other who was ‘more romantic, more
sensitive, more sexually adept, better hung, or simply more interesting than the
men they grew up with’.41

Azimullah was able to tap into these various Orientalist associations. But he
also had the advantage of being thoroughly attractive as an individual. J.W.
Kaye described him as ‘a gay, smiling, voluptuous sort of person’.42 Savarkar
later wrote:

His face was noble, his speech sweet and silvery . . . . There used to
be a crowd, in those days, in the parks of London and on the beach
at Brighton, to see this jewelled Indian ‘Raja’. Some English
women of respectable families were so much infatuated with him
that, even after his return to India, they would send him letters
couched in the most affectionate terms.43

Indeed, several of these letters came to light when Cawnpore was retaken.
Young Lieutenant Frederick Roberts wrote to his sister Harriet in England:

While searching over the Nana’s Palaces at Bithur the other day,
we found heaps of letters directed to that fiend ‘Azimula Khan’ by

37
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p.82; and William Thackeray, Vanity
Fair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p.58.
38
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p.32.
39
Winterhalter’s painting of Dalip Singh is reproduced in C.A. Bayly (ed.), The Raj: India and the British
1600–1947 (London: NPG, 1990), p.181.
40
Mozart’s heroines Konstanze and Blonde appear in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782); see also Sir
Walter Scott, The Surgeon’s Daughter (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1829).
41
Francis Jarman, ‘White Skin, Dark Skin, Power, Dream’, in Francis Jarman, White Skin, Dark Skin,
Power, Dream: Collected Essays on Literature and Culture (Holicong, PA: Borgo Press, 2005), p.27.
42
John William Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857–1858 (London: W.H. Allen, 7th ed., 1875),
Vol.I, p.109.
43
Savarkar, War of Independence, pp.28–9.
428 SOUTH ASIA

ladies in England, some from Lady—, ending ‘your affect. Mother’.

Others from a young girl at Brighton named—, written in the most
lovable manner. Such rubbish I never read, partly in French, which
this scoundrel seems to have understood; how English ladies can be
so infatuated. Miss— was going to marry Azimula, and I have no
doubt would like to still, altho’ he was the chief instigator in the
Cawnpore massacres. You would not believe them if I sent home
the letters. Next Mail, and if I have time I’ll copy one or two out,
just to give you an idea of a native rascal’s correspondence.44

And some of these letters, relating to Azimullah’s relationship with a ‘Miss A’,
who addressed him as ‘Mon cher Goody’, went on to achieve a wide
circulation.45 Is this the same lady reported to have been saved by her friends
from becoming an ‘item’ in Azimullah’s ‘harem’?46 The evidence is murky.
However in a memoir published forty years after his letter to his sister, Roberts
asserts that Azimullah ‘became engaged to a young English girl, who agreed to
follow him to India’.47 And according to Lutfullah, a ‘fiancée’ followed
Azimullah back to India, where she initially put up with the governor-general,
Lord Canning, in Calcutta.48

At any rate it is certain that news of the ‘incriminating’ letters reached England
well before any of the letters themselves did; and barely two years later, in 1859,
Thomson wrote, expecting at least some of his readers to understand: ‘I can
easily imagine that the bare mention of [Azimullah’s] name will have power
sufficient to cause some trepidation and alarm to a few of my fair readers; but I
will betray no confidences’. Yet the remarks that immediately follow were
clearly addressed to Lucie Duff Gordon:

Read on, my lady, no names shall be divulged, only should some

unpleasant recollections of our hero’s fascination be called to
mind, let them serve as a warning against the too confiding
disposition which once betrayed you into a hasty admiration of
this swarthy adventurer.49
44
Fred. Roberts [Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar], Letters Written During the Indian Mutiny (1923)
(Countess Roberts, ed.) (New Delhi: Lal, 1979), pp.120–1.
45
P.J.O. Taylor, A Star Shall Fall: India 1857 (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1993), pp.59–60.
46
Thomson, Story of Cawnpore, p.55.
47
Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, Forty-One Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-in-
Chief (London: Macmillan, 1898), p.238.
48
Lutfullah, Azimullah Khan Yusufzai, p.55. See also Anand Swarup Misra, Nana Saheb Peshwa and the Fight
for Freedom (Lucknow: Government of Uttar Pradesh Information Department, 1961), p.557.
49
Thomson, Story of Cawnpore, pp.53–4.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 429

In his ‘Notes on Cawnpore’ in an 1875 handbook for tourists, H.G. Keene

mentions that he saw Azimullah’s papers at Bithur, and claims that he ‘had
actually been attempting to tempt distinguished ladies who had entertained him
in London to visit his master in India’.50 In December 1856 the Nana Sahib had
indeed written to Azimullah, asking for the addresses of Lucie and another
lady, so that he could write to them.51 And in another letter, accompanying
expensive gifts, he thanked her for her kindness to his agent, hoping that she
would not fail ‘to command [his] services in this country’.52 Not too much need
be read into such polite expressions of courtesy, though, and it seems excessive
to describe Azimullah, as Saul David does, as a ‘royal studmaster’ to the
Nana.53

In 1912 the novelist Mabel Mary Agnes Chan Toon published a little book
entitled Love Letters of an English Peeress to an Indian Prince,54 presumably the
volume Love Letters that Azimullah’s biographer Lutfullah mentions but was
unable to obtain.55 The Companion declares: ‘It does not take long for the
reader . . . to come to the conclusion that these are the letters written to
Azimullah which were discovered by Lieutenant Frederick Sleigh Roberts at
Bithur in December 1857’.56 But this is not a tenable thesis. The letters cited by
Mrs. Toon are addressed not to Azimullah but to the Nana Sahib—who is not
known ever to have been in Britain or indeed to have been able to read or write
English.57 Likewise, the ‘sister’ referred to in the correspondence cannot have
been Lucie Duff Gordon’s, since Lucie was an only child. Clearly Love Letters
50
H.G. Keene, A Hand-Book for Visitors to Lucknow; with Preliminary Notes on Allahabad and Cawnpore
(Calcutta/Bombay/London: Thacker, Spink & Co./Thacker, Vining & Co./W. Thacker & Co. [1875], New
Delhi & Madras: Asian Educational Services, rpr., 2000), p.42. Ward in Our Bones are Scattered (p.45) quotes
an almost identical passage from a related publication, Keene’s Handbook for Visitors: Allahabad, Cawnpore
and Lucknow (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 2nd rev. ed., 1896, in the series Thacker’s Handbooks of
Hindustan); however the latter was published 21 years after the the original Hand-Book.
51
British Library, India Office Select Materials, MSS Eur B147, a letter in English—presumably drafted by
Mr. Todd—and signed by the Nana Sahib.
52
Quoted in Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.585, endnote 299; unfortunately no source is given.
53
David, The Indian Mutiny 1857, p.49.
54
Mrs. M. Chan Toon, Love Letters of an English Peeress to an Indian Prince (London: Digby, Long & Co.,
n.d. [1912?]).
55
Lutfullah, Azimullah Khan Yusufzai, pp.15, 55.
56
Taylor, A Companion to the ‘Indian Mutiny’, p.80.
57
G.W. Forrest (ed.), Selections from the Letters, Despatches and other State Papers preserved in the Military
Department of the Government of India, 1857–1858 (Calcutta: Military Department Press, 1902), Vol.II, p.151.
See however the following from the Calcutta newspaper The Friend of India (3 Sept. 1857): ‘. . . Nana Sahib, a
man who prided himself upon his nearness to western civilisation, who could speak English, who had
acquired a smattering of English Literature, and could reason about the rights of man, and representative
institutions . . . . He spoke two or three languages, was intelligent and shrewd . . . .’ Quoted in Rizvi and
Bhargava (eds), Freedom Struggle, Vol.IV, pp.700–1. However this is more likely a fair description of
Azimullah, with whom the writer was probably confusing the Nana.
430 SOUTH ASIA

was just slightly risqué romantic fiction. Nevertheless its appearance—more

than half a century after the revolt—shows that time had allowed the villains of
the piece to be romanticised to an almost grotesque extent.

Return to India
After the failure of his mission, and having spent over £50,000 of the Nana
Sahib’s money, Azimullah returned to India.58 According to some accounts, he
left England in a bitter frame of mind:

Our friend [a gentleman who had dined with Azimullah and found
him to be a ‘well-bred, agreeable person, of good intelligence about
English matters’], on lately revisiting the house [in George Street],
learned from its proprietor that the polite Azimullah, before
departing from England, shewed symptoms of a moody and soured
feeling, and let fall several hints to the effect that England would
yet regret the manner in which it had used his master.59

An English officer, Captain E.M. Martineau, who travelled with Azimullah

between Suez and Aden, commented similarly on the ‘tone of bitterness’ with
which he referred to the British annexation of Nagpur.60 And the journalist
William Howard Russell recounted that Azimullah turned down, ‘with a kind
of sneer’, his invitation to dinner on the grounds of being ‘a good
Mahomedan’—only to repudiate that claim a moment later: ‘I am not such a
fool as to believe in these foolish things. I am of no religion’.61

Azimullah’s companion Mohammed Ali Khan, later captured and executed,

reportedly told his life-story to his captor William Forbes-Mitchell the night
before his death. He narrated how Azimullah had seen the ‘assault and defeat
of the English [at Sebastopol] on the 18th of June [1855]’, had, in
Constantinople, met with ‘real or pretended Russian agents, who made large
promises of material support if Azeemoolla could stir up a rebellion in India’,
and had—with Mohammed Ali Khan—‘formed the resolution of attempting to
58
William Forbes-Mitchell, Reminiscences of The Great Mutiny (Delhi: Discovery [1893] rpr.1989), p.186.
59
‘Nana Sahib’, in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, conducted by William and
Robert Chambers, No.222 (Apr. 1858), p.224.
60
Pratul Chandra Gupta, Nana Sahib and the Rising at Cawnpore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963),
p.27.
61
William Howard Russell, My Diary in India in the Year 1858–9 (London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge,
1860), Vol.I, pp.165–7. It was to Russell that Azimullah supposedly made his notorious comment that, if
women were not restrained (as they were in the East), ‘like moths in candlelight, they will fly and get burned’
(p.166).
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 431

overthrow the [English East India] Company’s Government’.62 Among the

letters afterwards found at Bithur two indeed were addressed to Omar Pasha, a
Croatian convert to Islam and commander of Turkish troops in the Crimea.63
Was this just a passing fit of pique, brought on by his failure to move the British
government, or the start of a more insidious transformation in Azimullah’s
political outlook?

Perhaps Azimullah—having seen the soft underbelly of Britain—now seriously

entertained the possibility of bringing down British India; maybe he was simply
looking for a dramatic, promising scenario that he could offer the Nana Sahib
as recompense for his expensive two-year trip to Europe. Or could it be that the
approaches and hints made to Azimullah by various people who resented
British power in India pushed him opportunistically in the direction of revolt?
Keene says that Azimullah responded to a request from Omar Pasha in 1856
for ‘information as to the condition of India’ by telling him that he and the
Queen of Oudh ‘were engaged in raising the country, and that (please God) the
next news would be the expulsion of the infidels’.64 This would be telling
evidence—if true.

On balance, though, it is unlikely that Azimullah was ever part of an

international conspiracy against the British Empire. Although attempts were
made by agents of the Nana Sahib to elicit help, notably from the Emperor
Napoleon III, these overtures were made between August and October 1857
(i.e. after the re-capture of Cawnpore by the British, and when the Nana was
already on the run).65

The Instigation of the Revolt of 1857

Much the same may be said about the subsequent clandestine activities of
Azimullah Khan and the Nana Sahib: Azimullah may have used his overland
journey back to Bithur as a kind of ‘tour of inspection to feel the temper of the
Mahratta, Rajpoot, & Seik [sic] Chiefs’66 but he could hardly have avoided
stopping at some of these courts and would have invited accusations of
discourtesy if he had tried doing so. He did bring a printing press from
Europe,67 but it was others who put it to seditious purposes. During the spring

62
Forbes-Mitchell, Reminiscences of The Great Mutiny, p.186.
63
Roberts, Forty-One Years in India, p.239.
64
Keene, A Servant of ‘John Company’, p.163.
65
Gupta, Nana Sahib and the Rising at Cawnpore, pp.157–9.
66
Capt. E.M. Martineau to Sir John Kaye, 20 October 1864, quoted in David, The Indian Mutiny 1857, p.51.
67
Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.67; and Taylor, A Star Shall Fall, p.57.
432 SOUTH ASIA

of 1857 Nana Sahib and his agent did visit Kalpi, Delhi and possibly ‘the
military stations . . . along the main trunk-road . . . as far as Umballah’.68
Certainly they went to Lucknow.69 However, it is doubtful whether the slow-
moving Nana really made visits to all the military stations, and even if he did,
that, in itself, proves nothing.

So was Azimullah indeed organising a full-scale rebellion? Or was he merely

putting on a show to placate the Nana Sahib? Did he go to the Crimea out of
curiosity, or in order to assess the fighting capacity of the British Army, as
Russell for one suspected?

Now, is it not curious enough that he should have felt such an

interest to see, with his own eyes, how matters were going in the
Crimea? It would not be strange in a European to evince such
curiosity; but in an Asiatic, of the non-military caste, it certainly
is.70

As it was, his reports stressing the weakness of the British forces in the Crimean
War may well have harmed the Company government’s status among some of
the Indian princes. Thomson believed that the revolt ‘had its origin in the
diffusion of such statements at Delhi, Lucknow, and other teeming cities in
India’, and described Azimullah as ‘subtle, intriguing, politic, unscrupulous,
and bloodthirsty, sleek and wary as a tiger . . . the presiding genius in the assault
on Cawnpore’.71 Just before the storm broke in Cawnpore, Azimullah
presciently suggested to a British acquaintance that the mud entrenchment
that the British were building there should be called the Fort of Despair. ‘‘‘No,
no’’ answered the Englishman, ‘‘we will call it the Fort of Victory’’’. Azimullah
apparently received this observation ‘with an air of incredulous assent’.72 None
of this, however, quite turns him into the central organiser of events across the
whole of India, the grand puppet-master of conspiracy.

Among the evidence for a ‘midway’ interpretation of Azimullah’s role is

Mohammed Ali Khan’s response when asked by Forbes-Mitchell whether he
was at Cawnpore when the rebellion began:

68
Russell, My Diary in India, Vol.I, p.168.
69
Martin Richard Gubbins, An Account of the Mutinies in Oudh, and of the Siege of the Lucknow Residency,
etc. (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), pp.30–1.
70
Russell, My Diary in India, Vol.I, p.167.
71
Thomson, Story of Cawnpore, p.56.
72
G.O. Trevelyan, Cawnpore (London & New York: Macmillan, new ed., 1886), p.77.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 433

No, thank God! I was in my home in Rohilcund. . . . I knew that the

storm was about to burst, and had gone to place my wife and
children in safety, and I was in my village when I heard the news of
the mutinies at Meerut and Bareilly. I immediately hastened to join
the Bareilly brigade.73

This scarcely sounds like the behaviour of someone who, on his own admission,
had resolved, with Azimullah, to set about destroying British rule in India.
Forbes-Mitchell’s account is highly anecdotal and was published almost forty
years after the events. On the other hand, the very unlikelihood of some of the
details offered by Forbes-Mitchell lends some credence to the story.

Gubbins downplays the leading role of Muslims in the early stages of the revolt:

The fact is undeniable that mutiny did show itself first among the
Hindoos, and though the Mahomedans joined the conspiracy, they
were not the first to begin it. Moreover, were it true that a
conspiracy of the Mahomedans was at the bottom of this mutiny,
there would assuredly have been more evidence of combination
and of design.74

Echoing this position, Kaye is convinced that the Nana Sahib played a major
role in fomenting the uprising, and quotes as evidence the ‘concurrent
testimony of witnesses examined in parts of the country widely distant from
each other’, in particular the words of a ‘Native emissary detained and
examined in Mysore’, a certain Sitaram Bawa, who recounted that the Nana
had sent off letters to a great number of princes and chiefs in different parts of
India.75 But this conspiratorial vigour on the part of the Nana seems
unconvincing, given what almost everyone has had to say about the
temperament of the man, who was, in Kaye’s own words, ‘good natured,
perhaps somewhat dull, and manifestly not of that kind of humanity of which
conspirators are made’.76 Sitaram Bawa himself viewed the Nana as ‘always a
worthless fellow’, but felt he ‘could never have ordered the massacre of the
women and children’.77

73
Forbes-Mitchell, Reminiscences of The Great Mutiny, p.188.
74
Gubbins, An Account of the Mutinies in Oudh, p.50.
75
Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, Vol.I, p.579 footnote, p.645.
76
Ibid., p.576.
77
Rizvi and Bhargava (eds), Freedom Struggle, Vol.I, p.375, cross-examination of Sitaram Bawa.
434 SOUTH ASIA

That the idea of a conspiracy gained currency is scarcely surprising, given

the climate of fear and paranoia that gripped the world of Anglo-India in
the second half of 1857. But historians have generally been sceptical: an
effective Muslim conspiracy, for example, would have alienated many
Hindus. Recently, though, a new version of the conspiracy idea has surfaced
in the context of Western discursive narratives of Islam. Padamsee, for
example, suggests

that Muslim ‘conspiracy’ in 1857 be regarded principally as a crisis

in the configuration of [Anglo-Indian] paramountcy . . . . Anglo-
Indians came to require a constant clarification of Indian Muslim
separateness and unity as a means of forestalling an engagement
with the ambivalence, and instabilities, contained in their own self-
projection as the secular, neutral and discontinuous arbiter of
[Indian] society.78

But these hermeneutic exercises rather beg the question of what happened, and
who was responsible. Whatever the British may have believed was going on,
there certainly was plotting and agitation, and there were massacres. Padamsee
pays comparatively little attention to individual Muslim figures and fails to
mention Azimullah Khan at all.

The Beginning of the Revolt in Cawnpore

Another argument against Azimullah and the Nana Sahib as the great
instigators of 1857 is connected with the circumstances in which the uprising in
Cawnpore began. Despite his dissatisfaction with the British, and perhaps some
grumbling and even scheming with anyone who seemed sympathetic, the Nana
is not likely to have been enthusiastic about taking the jump into open
rebellion—in this sense, his position was not so dissimilar to that of the king of
Delhi, Bahadur Shah, the ‘last of the Moghuls’. Significantly, Goordeen, the
agent for Baji Rao’s widows,

heard from the immediate attendants of the Nana . . . that the

cavalry and infantry had joined the Nana’s party and that the
latter were only keeping up appearances; and that they followed
this policy, i.e., if the soldiery ran away, then the Nana’s party
would receive credit, and the way for recovering his pension would

78
Alex Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse (Houndmills, Hants.:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp.197, 198.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 435

be proved; while on the other hand, if the soldiery were victorious,

and the British rule extinguished, they would get possession of the
country.79

(Alternatively, each of these powerful forces constituted a potentially deadly

danger to the Nana Sahib, were he to put a foot wrong.)

When, on 5 June, Cawnpore erupted, the mutineers, relinquishing the

opportunities that the city provided for looting and destruction, were
determined to move on quickly towards Delhi, just as their compatriots at
Meerut had done four weeks earlier. They offered the Nana a choice between ‘a
kingdom’ if he joined their enterprise and death if he sided with the British. He
told them, ‘What have I to do with the British? I am altogether yours’, and
assented to their request that he should lead them to Delhi.80 But after the
mutineers had already set off along the Grand Trunk Road, ‘[the Nana] and his
creatures went to their camp [at Kullianpore], and by his representations,
promises, and actual disbursements, induced them to go back and assault
Wheeler in his feeble entrenchments’.81

If the Nana Sahib had indeed been playing a waiting or double game, this is the
point at which the ambiguity ceased. Supposedly it was Azimullah—acting
either alone, or in concert with the Nana Sahib’s brother Bala Rao—who was
behind this unprecedentedly energetic sally on the Nana’s part. Presenting
himself as an expert on the subject of British resources in India, Azimullah
persuaded his master not to go to Delhi with the mutineers as he had
promised,82 arguing that he would have little influence at the court of the
newly-reinstated Moghul emperor. ‘At the imperial city they would be
overshadowed by the Moghul Court and lose their individual power and
influence. It would be far wiser for the Nana to seize Cawnpore and extend his
power to the sea’.83 Such a grand undertaking would of course require him to
deal first with the British garrison of Cawnpore.

79
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cclxxxviii, narrative of Nanukchund. Soon afterwards, the
unfortunate agent, who had made life difficult for the Nana on various occasions, was blown from a cannon
on his orders, and his family was also put to death. Ibid., p.ccv, deposition of Appajee Luchman, and p.ccviii,
deposition of Appa Shastree. (The anachronistic spellings of witnesses’ names used by Forrest have been
retained in the footnotes but not in the text.)
80
Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.20; and Trevelyan, Cawnpore, p.97.
81
Russell, My Diary in India, Vol.I, p.168.
82
Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.21.
83
Forrest, Indian Mutiny, Vol.I, p.421.
436 SOUTH ASIA

‘This eloquence [of Azimullah’s] fired the Maharaja’.84 Yet, persuasive as his
arguments may have been, they hardly explain why the Muslim courtier
neglected to seize a huge opportunity for himself to cut a dash on a much
grander stage than that of Bithur. Unless Azimullah truly believed that this
proposed military strategy had the best chance of success, the reason is most
likely to be that the parvenu knew his limitations: understood that he was
merely a person of regional influence. If Azimullah had had any prospect of a
glorious career in Moghul Delhi, he would hardly have argued for staying in
Bithur, where he ran the risk of being sidelined by the leaders of the sepoys,
who were mostly Hindus, and by the Nana’s Hindu relatives.

The Siege of the Entrenchment

It is reported that on 7 June Azimullah was named by the Nana Sahib as Collector
of Cawnpore.85 On 8 June he was present when a green Muslim standard (jhunda)
was raised in the bazaar in an attempt to persuade the Muslim population of
Cawnpore to join the mutineers. In the words of the Nunne Nawab, a wealthy
Muslim nobleman from Lucknow who was living in Cawnpore,

proclamations [were] tom-tomed through the bazars, inviting

all the Mahomedans to join in the insurrection; disobedience to
be met with death. Uzeemoolah is said to have first proposed
the raising of the Jhunda, and he induced the following leading
men to join under the same, viz. [G.W.F.: Names omitted in
original.]86

But there was apparently some resistance from important figures in the Muslim
community:

I heard that [the flag] was raised by Azeemoollah Khan, who took
Moulvie Salamut Oollah with him. The Moulvie in vain attempted
to resist. He also took all the residents of the city, and said ‘if you
don’t come I will blow you from the mouth of cannon’;. . . The
Nana and Azeemoollah ordered the people to attack the
entrenchments. Moulvie Salamut Oollah and the people said,
‘you first attack them, then we will’.87

84
Trevelyan, Cawnpore, p.100.
85
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cccii, narrative of Nanukchund.
86
Ibid., p.xi, diary of the Nunna Nawab, italics added.
87
Ibid., p.clxxxiv, deposition of Azeezun, prostitute.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 437

Another account has the Moulvie playing for time, saying that it was ‘an ill-
omened day to attack his foes’,88 while Nanak Chand reports that the
‘respectable Mahomedans of the city’ hid in their houses to avoid being called
up.89

Ehmud Ali Khan, vakeel, however, armed with a sword, is going

about in company with Baba Bhut [the Nana’s brother]. Sowars
went down and surrounded the house of the Principal Sudder
Ameen and made him a prisoner. Azeemoollah also came down.
The Principal Sudder Ameen prayed much to be excused, but they
forcibly brought him away. In like manner, they carried off
Moulvie Sulamut-oollah [sic] in a palanquin.90

The overall impression conveyed by these accounts is that Azimullah was not
among the militant leaders of the Muslim community in Cawnpore, but simply
‘the Nana’s man’. Nanak Chand noted (on 10 June) that he believed his life to
be in danger because ‘orders had already been given to seize all the amlah
[Indian officials] of the kutcheree [court]’. But this command did not come from
Azimullah; ‘it was issued to Azeemoollah’.91 The only powers that Azimullah
possessed were those that the Nana granted him.

On 11 June a large number of British civilian fugitives from Fatehgarh were

massacred after an inconclusive debate between the Nana and some of his
courtiers, including Azimullah. Ward comments that ‘Azimullah must have
recognised that the only way to sever irreparably Nana’s ties with his former
houseguests and billiard partners was to annihilate these contemptibly
ragged captives’.92 Other sources though assign the responsibility for the
decision to murder the prisoners variously to the Nana,93 to the Nana’s
brother Bala Rao,94 and to Bala, Teeka Singh and the troopers of the
2nd Cavalry.95 Only Shepherd, in his ‘brief account’ dated 27 August 1857,
seems also to implicate Azimullah.96

88
Ibid., p.clxxxiii, deposition of Luchman Pershad.
89
Ibid., pp.ccxcix-ccc, narrative of Nanukchund.
90
Ibid., pp.ccxcix-ccc, narrative of Nanukchund, italics added.
91
Ibid., p.cccvi, narrative of Nanukchund.
92
Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.226.
93
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.clxvi, deposition of Hulas Sing.
94
Trevelyan, Cawnpore, p.266. See also Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.ccxx, deposition of Futteh
Sing, p.ccxxx, deposition of Golab Sing, and p.ccxxxiii, deposition of Bukkee Singh.
95
Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.38.
96
Shepherd in Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.II, p.139.
438 SOUTH ASIA

On 15 June, ‘Uzeemoollah Khan issued ordinary orders in the Kotwalee [the

police station, where a number of supposedly pro-British ‘‘babus’’ were being
held], and openly used ill language towards the British’.97 A day later, he made
a speech to an assembly of Cawnpore’s leading citizens, telling them that the
British would be unable to send reinforcements—he had ‘been at all their little
villages, and [knew] it for a fact’—and that the foreigners should be annihilated
‘root and branch, from the face of all India’.98 At around this time too he was
evidently appointed to try criminal cases in Cawnpore.99

On 19 June Azimullah took part in a military conference, which failed to agree

on the question of whether the besieged British forces should be lured out of
their entrenchment by a stratagem.100 In the event, the entrenchment was
visited by a native water-carrier, bringing ‘news’ about British relief efforts. He
was actually a spy, perhaps sent by Azimullah.101 On 25 June a note in
Azimullah’s handwriting requiring the surrender of the entrenchment was
delivered to the British. Soon afterwards, along with the military commander
Jwala Prasad and one or two others, Azimullah visited the site in person and
attempted to negotiate in English.102 A witness, Kalka Prasad, later told the
British that, after the return of the emissaries, he had ‘overheard Jwalla
Pershad, Azimoollah, Shah Ali, Ahmed Ali, Vakil, and another thanah
jemadar [police captain], whose name I do not recollect, talking amongst
themselves, saying this was a good opportunity for getting rid of the
Europeans’.103 Curiously, Ward has Azimullah telling Jwala and Shah Ali
that he (Azimullah) ‘has arranged a good opportunity etc.’, and gives Kalka
Prasad as his source,104 but this is not what Kalka had told the British. Indeed,
when asked by the British interrogator to say who was foremost in the
consultations with the Nana, Kalka named Jwala Prasad and several others,
but not Azimullah.105 We may conclude that at some point there was a
consultation, either before or after the visit to the entrenchment, at which it was
agreed that the British should be lured out and massacred when they reached

97
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.xiv, diary of the Nunna Nawab.
98
Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.42.
99
Forrest, Indian Mutiny, Vol.I, p.443.
100
Ibid., p.444, though which way Azimullah voted is not indicated—according to Nanak Chand, who gives
June 20 as the date of the conference, most of those present—including Azimullah—were in favour of the
stratagem, but ‘the Nana did not consent to this’. See Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cccxxi,
narrative of Nanukchund.
101
Trevelyan, Cawnpore, p.187.
102
Trevelyan, Cawnpore, pp.200–6; and Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.71.
103
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cxlv, deposition of Kalka Pershad.
104
Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.344 and p.647, endnote 342.
105
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cxlv, deposition of Kalka Pershad.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 439

the river.106 Again, Ward ascribes these orders to Azimullah, giving Shepherd
as a source, but Shepherd’s text does not specify who issued them.107 Possibly,
Azimullah may have been one of the ‘hostages’ who spent the night of 26–27
June in the entrenchment.108

At any rate, on 27 June Azimullah watched the evacuation that turned into the
first of the Cawnpore massacres.109 According to some accounts, the signal to
begin it was given by Bala Rao, the Nana’s younger brother, and Azimullah;110
although Kaye has Tatya Tope giving the order to begin the killing.111
Similarly, the order to fire the boats that were to carry the English to safety may
have been given by Jwala Prasad112 or by Jwala on Bala’s instructions,113 or by
Jwala and Azimullah.114 As for the Nana Sahib, despite his absence from the
scene, despite accounts that he was distressed at the thought of breaking his
word to the British that they would not be harmed if they came out, and despite
his belated order to spare the women and children, his complicity is put beyond
doubt by his letter instructing the 17th Native Infantry to take up position on
the far bank of the river ‘and make a place to kill and destroy [the English] on
that side of the river, and having obtained a victory come here’.115 Yet the
killing of British evacuees such as Colonel Ewart and his wife, and the eleven
wounded Britons who had had to be left behind in the entrenchment, began
long before the British column reached the river,116 suggesting either (1) that

106
Forrest, Indian Mutiny, Vol.I, p.453, places the consultation on the 25th and the visit to the entrenchment
the following day, the order also favoured by Trevelyan (Cawnpore, pp.204–5); but Shepherd (A Personal
Narrative, p.74) places the consultation on the evening of the 26th, i.e. after the visit. The former seems a
more plausible order for the events, in that it offers more scope for Jwala Prasad—who spent the night of 26–
27 June as a hostage in the entrenchment—to be a participant in the consultation. Kalka Prasad also has
Azimullah returning from the entrenchment on the 25th, at ‘about 4 p.m.’, but his testimony suggests that the
consultation may have taken place immediately afterwards.
107
Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.344 and p.647, endnote 343; Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.74.
108
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.xvi, diary of the Nunna Nawab.
109
Forrest, Indian Mutiny, Vol.I, pp.457-8; and Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, Vol.II, p.340.
110
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.ccxxiii. deposition of Futteh Sing, and p.ccxxxvii, deposition of
Goordial; and Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.76.
111
Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, Vol.II, pp.340–1 footnote. See also Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III,
App., p.ccxliv, deposition of Lochun, pp.ccl-i, deposition of Narain Kachee, and p.ccliii, deposition of
Nundeedeen Aheer.
112
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.ccxxiii, deposition of Futteh Sing, p.ccxxxvii, deposition of
Goordial, and p.ccl, deposition of Narain Kachee.
113
Ibid., p.cccxxiv, narrative of Nanukchund.
114
Ibid., p.ccxlii, deposition of Lochun.
115
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.II, p.157. See also, on p.155, the text of a telegram from Brig.-Gen. Neill,
dated 25 July 1857, mentioning the discovery of the letter; and Vol.III, App., p.cxx, deposition of Khoda Bux.
116
Trevelyan, Cawnpore, pp.225–6, drawing on Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cxli, deposition of
Ajoodea Pershad; and Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.74, although Gupta has questioned the plausibility
of Ayodhya’s account of the killing of the Ewarts (Nana Sahib and the Rising at Cawnpore, pp.107–8).
440 SOUTH ASIA

the Nana Sahib had no real control over the mutineers, and that his and
Azimullah’s guarantees were therefore worthless, or (2) that the mutineers
knew a massacre was planned and jumped the gun.

Afterwards, the Nana Sahib ‘extolled much Uzeemoollah Khan and

Jowalapersaud [Jwala Prasad], Ressaldar, saying that it was to their wisdom
that so easy a conquest was owing’.117 The surviving women and children were
meanwhile incarcerated in the Savada House, where the sepoys were forbidden
to speak to them, apparently on Azimullah’s orders;118 later they were moved
to the Bibighar, or House of the Women.

The Events of July 1857

On 1 July Azimullah was granted the revenue of the Ganges Canal on the
occasion of the Nana Sahib’s enthronement as Peshwa.119 But these pompous
proceedings masked a growing anxiety among the Cawnpore leadership. On the
8th, Nanak Chand noted, ‘The rebels are in great alarm. Baba Bhut, Jwala
Pershad [Prasad] and Azeemoollah are doing their best to get ready the
magazine, carriage, and supplies’.120 Azimullah seems to have interceded with
the Nana around this time to commute death sentences imposed on some loyal
sepoys,121 and opened talks with several high-ranking British captives.122
Meanwhile, though, the net continued to close and on 15 July the Nana Sahib’s
forces suffered a stunning military defeat at the hands of a British relief force.

Following this reversal, a final conference of the Nana’s staff was held in Nur
Mahomed’s Hotel. There Teeka Singh raised the question of the prisoners, and
offered two arguments for summarily killing them. Firstly, they might later
testify against the leading figures among the rebels, and secondly, the
approaching British troops were advancing ‘solely for the purpose of releasing
their compatriots, and would not risk another battle for the satisfaction of
burying them’.123 While Trevelyan ascribes this second argument to
Teeka Singh, and Shepherd to ‘a few troopers’,124 Thomson assigns it to

117
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.xvii, diary of the Nunna Nawab.
118
Ibid., p.cxiv, depositions of Gobind Singh, Sheik Elahee Buksh, and Ghouse Mohomed.
119
Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.101.
120
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., pp.cccxxxi–ii, narrative of Nanukchund.
121
Ibid., p.cxv, depositions of Gobind Singh, Sheik Elahee Buksh, and Ghouse Mohomed.
122
Ibid., p.ccxxviii, re-examination of Futteh Sing.
123
Trevelyan, Cawnpore, pp.307–8.
124
Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.116.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 441

Azimullah—‘if [the women and children] were killed, the British forces would
retire, and leave India’.125

It seems unlikely that the mutineer who knew the British best of all could
genuinely have believed such an implausible argument (although Azimullah
might simply have been trying to impress more gullible minds), however, a
passing reference by Trevelyan to ‘the season marked out by Azimoolah for a
jail delivery such as the world had seldom witnessed’ suggests that he, too,
regarded Azimullah as the main culprit in the matter of the massacre of the
women and children.126 So did Nanak Chand, who wrote in his diary that the
murders were ‘at the instigation of the zemindars then present, with
concurrence of Kalindur Gir . . . Shah Ally and Azeemoollah’. On the other
hand, according to a sepoy named Ghouse Mohomed, Azimullah sought advice
from ‘Moulvie Sulamutoollah’—the Muslim jurist who had been unhappy
about the raising of the green flag of jihad—on the question of what to do with
the women and children, ‘and he [Azimullah or the Moulvie?] decided against
the massacre; but the Nana would not listen to reason’.127 It is pretty certain
however that the final order for the murders was issued by the Nana or Bala:
‘No third party had power to give orders without their permission’.128

Azimullah appears to have observed the execution of the last male British
prisoners,129 but there is no evidence to suggest that he was present during the
killing of the women and children. Was he, however, one of the authors of this
notorious event? Despite Thomson’s assertion that all accounts agree that
Azimullah was the prime instigator of the final massacre,130 the crime seems
uncharacteristic of him—a man given to smoothness and subtlety. Besides,
Azimullah knew the British far better than any of the other leaders of the
revolt, and surely must have understood the consequences that would ensue.
The slightly different account given by Forbes-Mitchell also deserves
consideration: according to him, Mohammed Ali Khan believed that
Azimullah had supported the proposal for the massacre for the sole purpose
of entangling the Nana Sahib in the insurrection ‘irretrievably’131 (an argument
also applicable in the earlier case of the massacre of the Fatehgarh fugitives),

125
Thomson, Story of Cawnpore, p.213.
126
Trevelyan, Cawnpore, p.282.
127
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cccxxxvi, narrative of Nanukchund; p.cxvi, deposition of Ghouse
Mohomed.
128
Ibid., p.clxvi, deposition of Hulas Sing.
129
Trevelyan, Cawnpore, pp.308–10.
130
Thomson, Story of Cawnpore, p.213.
131
Forbes-Mitchell, Reminiscences of The Great Mutiny, p.191.
442 SOUTH ASIA

and that the prime instigator was a woman from the zenana, a former slave-girl
with an unaccountable hatred for the British: ‘What I tell you is true: the
murder of the European women and children at Cawnpore was a woman’s
crime, for there is no fiend equal to a female fiend’.132

If Azimullah had anything to do with the final massacre, his motives were
probably tactical rather than vengeful. Maybe he was bent on the physical
elimination of the British in India.133 However, Ward’s claim that Azimullah
always argued against showing mercy towards British prisoners is based on a
misreading of Shepherd.134 Azimullah may have been heartless and
arrogant, but he was no sadist despite what Ward calls his ‘genocidal loathing’
for the British.135 This view is supported by a vivid incident involving the
British prisoner Amy Horne (Mrs. Amelia Bennett) recorded in a footnote in
Forrest but overlooked in almost all modern accounts of the events in
Cawnpore:

One of the two women who survived the Cawnpore massacre told
me that when she was brought before Azemoolah he said to her,
‘Why are you crying? The Moghul Emperor has taken Delhi and
driven the English from Northern India; when we take Cawnpore
and Lucknow we will march to Calcutta and be masters of
Southern India, and your husband [G.W.F.: the sowar who
captured her], who has now been made a Colonel, will then be a
great man and you a great woman’.136

132
Trevelyan, Cawnpore, p.310–11; Taylor, A Companion to the ‘Indian Mutiny’, pp.156–8; and Forrest,
Indian Mutiny, Vol.I, p.478 footnote. The captured women may perhaps have been sending pleas for help to
General Havelock, and his receipt of any such letters would certainly have motivated him to rush even faster
towards Cawnpore. See Savarkar, War of Independence, p.251; Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.117; and
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cxxxv, deposition of Lalla Bhudree Nath. Alternatively, the letters
may have been forgeries, perhaps even from the hand of Azimullah, designed to seal the fate of the prisoners.
See Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.406. A similar trick was played at Farrukhabad. See Taylor, A Star
Shall Fall, pp.139–40.
133
Shepherd, A Personal Narrative, p.42.
134
Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.343 and p.647, endnote 337; but see also Shepherd, A Personal
Narrative, p.93: ‘On every occasion, when a request . . . was made . . . to spare a child or man . . . the
Mahomedans would get around and repeat a Persian verse etc’.
135
Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, p.23. The source given for Azimullah’s ‘genocidal loathing’ (ibid., p.576,
endnote 100) is the somewhat inelegant assertion by Shepherd (A Personal Narrative, p.14) that Azimullah
had ‘returned to India breathing revenge in his heart’.
136
Forrest, Indian Mutiny, Vol.I, p.421 footnote. The story is discussed only by Mukherjee, who rejects it (to
my mind somewhat glibly) on the assumption that ‘[Amy’s] memory had played tricks with her’ (Spectre of
Violence, pp.87–8).
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 443

Pompous perhaps, but not cruel, and in this respect Azimullah represents a
striking contrast to his master. Almost the last act of the defeated Nana Sahib
before he left Bithur

was the murder of the only captive in his hands. This was a
woman, named Carter, who had been taken prisoner, and who had
survived the pangs and perils of childbirth in the Nana’s Palace.
The widows of the deceased ex-Peishwah had treated her with
kindness: but when the Nana fled from Bithoor he ordered the
woman and her infant to be put to death, and the guard faithfully
obeyed him.137

We have already seen how the Nana Sahib dealt with a particular beˆte noire of
his, Goordeen, the agent of Baji Rao’s widows, and on a number of occasions
he expressed pleasure upon hearing of British deaths. ‘The European [prisoner]
has been sent to hell, thus adding to my satisfaction’,138 he wrote on 9 July.
Was the letter the Nana Sahib wrote to Queen Victoria in 1859, in which he
denied any responsibility for either of the massacres and claimed that he had
‘joined the rebels from helplessness’ and ‘committed no murder’, just a pathetic
attempt to save himself from the gallows, or was it the sincere but delusional
product of a broken mind (the letter was written when he was fleeing from his
British pursuers, possibly ill and confused, and in desperate fear for his life)?139

Azimullah’s ultimate fate remains obscure. After the massacre in the House of
the Women, aside from some glimpses of him on the run with the Nana Sahib
in the uneasy company of the Begum Hazrat Mahal of Oudh and the Mughal
prince Firoz Shah, who seem not to have approved of their companions,140 very
little more is recorded about him. Probably Azimullah died in the inhospitable
Nepalese Terai sometime in September or October 1859, not long after the
Nana and his brothers Bala Rao and Baba Bhutt.141 But it is said that he had a
son who converted to Christianity and became a respected member of the
Cawnpore mission community, ‘a good man’.142 And of course Azimullah’s

137
Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, Vol.II, pp.390–1 footnote; Trevelyan, Cawnpore, pp.320–1; and
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., pp.ccv–ix, ccxii, depositions of Appajee Luchman, Appa Shastree and
Nana Ubbhunkeer.
138
Rizvi and Bhargava (eds), Freedom Struggle, Vol.IV, p.609 (letter to Kalka Prasad). See also Gupta, Nana
Sahib and the Rising at Cawnpore, pp.129–30.
139
Rizvi and Bhargava (eds), Freedom Struggle, Vol.IV, p.772, Ishtiharnamah of the Nana Sahib.
140
Martin, Indian Empire, Vol.II, p.497.
141
K. Narain, ‘Cawnpore: The Fate of the Leaders of the Rebellion’, in P.J.O. Taylor, A Companion to the
‘Indian Mutiny’, p.77.
142
Story of the Cawnpore Mission, p.49.
444 SOUTH ASIA

name endured, entering Victorian mythology as one of its blackest villains. Like
the Nana Sahib, he was ‘of course beyond the pale of mercy’.143

Conclusion
In his 1859 account, Cawnpore Magistrate J.W. Sherer dismissed the Nana
Sahib as ‘a man of no capacity and of debauched tastes’, but conceded that
Azimullah was ‘undoubtedly talented’,144 an assessment echoed by the modern
biographer of the Nana Sahib, Pratul Chandra Gupta: ‘Azimullah was no
doubt a man of considerable ability’.145 Those talents, however, were clearly
restricted in their range. Good in negotiations and consultations, where much
could be achieved by eloquence and flattery, Azimullah was not at his best in
more directly military situations (as in the episode of the negotiations with the
British in the entrenchment, where he was probably intimidated by Jwala
Prasad). He may have been held back by the knowledge that he had no true
‘constituency’ among the mutineers, other than by virtue of his closeness to the
Nana. He had no inherited title or military credentials, and he could scarcely
hope to supplant the Nunne Nawab as the ‘top Muslim’ in Cawnpore—the
Nunne was a nobleman, had money and the loyalty of Muslim troopers, and
may have been in the running to take over in Cawnpore after the ‘final victory’
and the Nana Sahib’s triumphant relocation (as Peshwa) to Poona.146

In the letter reproduced below, we see Azimullah doing what he did best—
talking, networking, and operating behind the scenes. Arguably, his greatest
moment came on 5 June 1857, the day that he persuaded the Nana to lure the
mutineers back from Kullianpore on the road to Delhi. By this act alone, he
made his mark on the history of British India. Whether Azimullah was a major
player in the events of 1857 remains, however, doubtful. Neither a prince nor a
general, able to advise but not to command, he may have experienced a
growing feeling of dissatisfaction during the forty-odd days in which his master
lorded it over Cawnpore. Azimullah might well have been driven by hatred and
lust for revenge, as Ward and others have suggested, but a case could also be
made for a slightly different interpretation: that his energetic spite was fuelled
by frustrated vanity and wounded amour-propre. Azimullah seems to have
enjoyed taking his revenge more in the form of ‘putting the British in their

143
Martin, Indian Empire, Vol.II, p.497.
144
Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., pp.xxii, account by J.W. Sherer, dated 13 Jan. 1859.
145
Gupta, Nana Sahib and the Rising at Cawnpore, p.25.
146
‘It is also well known that the Nana had promised to make over Cawnpoor to the Nawab should the
defeat of the Europeans be accomplished’. See Forrest (ed.), Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cxlvii, deposition of
Lalla Shunker Dass; see also ibid., p.clxxxix, deposition of Moonshee Zuhooree.
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 445

place’—there are sufficient references to him bossing people about and making
himself important—than by actually inflicting pain on them and making them
suffer—a type of behaviour he was widely accused of but for which we have no
solid evidence.147

If the contentions advanced in this essay are accepted, Azimullah made a

significant contribution to the 1857 revolt, at least in Cawnpore. But he was
never a ‘national’ leader, despite what some Indian and Pakistani admirers have
recently suggested. He was an interesting, gifted man caught up, briefly, in one
of the great events of his time.

Azimullah’s story serves as a reminder that the events of 1857 were initiated by
people, acting sometimes in ways that could scarcely have been predicted, and
for complex, sometimes very individual reasons, and not because they were
Talukdars, Vakils, Muslims, or members of any particular group. Azimullah is
a good example of such a person. His biography is strange and uncertain. He
was a Muslim who served a Hindu; a chief advisor who was not always listened
to; a ‘villainous’ rebel who admired British metropolitan culture. If, in the eyes
of the British, Azimullah was a monster, then—with his missionary upbringing,
fluency in English and passion for Mozart—he was surely a monster of their
own making. As Caliban says, ‘You taught me language; and my profit on’t/Is,
I know how to curse’.148

147
Though others—on both sides—relished the cruelties. See, for instance, the description of Sultana Oula
‘seated in a tent, and from behind the screen . . . enjoying the sight of the European ladies and gentlemen being
put to death’ (Forrest, Selections, Vol.III, App., p.cccix, narrative of Nanukchund), or the gleeful
descriptions by British officers of the beating, humiliation and hanging of Indian prisoners.
148
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (ed. Frank Kermode) (London: Methuen, 6th rev. Arden ed., 1964),
Act I Scene II, ll.365–6.
446 SOUTH ASIA
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 447

Appendix

A Newly-Discovered Letter Written by Azimullah Khan

The text of the letter is as follows:

(First page) (Second page)

12 U[pper] George Street second invitation to avail

Hanover Square myself of which I shall consider
London myself highly honoured.

Dear Madam As regards your seeing me again

I do assure you no
language is sufficient to convey to
you my sense of gratitude for the
many kind expressions contained
in your notes to me and as well
as for the acts corresponding them.
Really I was at a loss to know
how I could have explained
for the extreme civility of Lady
Ellesmere[.] I am very thankful
to you indeed for explaining
the cause of my inability—much
more thankful am I for the
(Pencilled note: ‘Lady Duff
Gordons mother Sar[ah] Austin’)
I must not hesitate to tell you
that I am afraid you will
find me oftener at Weybridge
to eat away your good things
and sweet oranges than you
think probable.
I am unwell at present but the
moment I have recovered I will
do myself the honor [sic] of leaving
my cards at Her Ladyship’s.
Believe me
dear Madam
Your [sic] most respectfully
Azimullah

The Provenance of the Letter

The letter was part of the Pencarrow Autograph Collection from Pencarrow
House near Bodmin, Cornwall, formed mostly by Mary Ford (1816–1910) in
the years after the deaths of her brother, the radical politician Sir William
Molesworth, in 1855, and her husband, the traveller Richard Ford, in 1858.
The collection included a previously unknown Beethoven string quartet
movement as well as items connected with Lord Nelson, Dickens, Darwin,
Verdi, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, and other historical figures, and was
448 SOUTH ASIA
 AZIMULLAH KHAN 449

auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1999. The present letter was in one of the large mixed
lots (probably lot 74, which contained about six hundred autograph letters
signed by politicians and other public figures). It is undated, and no addressee is
named, but a pencilled comment identifies the recipient as Lucie Duff Gordon’s
mother, Sarah Austin. The commentator’s handwriting is identical with that of
several background notes that accompanied the letter, one of them dated
‘July 21 1900’, and is therefore likely to be that of Mary Ford or someone
assisting her.