By July 1858, when Alum Bheg was sentenced to be “cannonaded”, the crisis of the “Mutiny” was essentially over. The last fugitives of the 46th brought back as prisoners later that summer, were either branded with a “D” for deserter, following military practice, or deported to the newly established penal settlement on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. As an Indian officer, however, Alum Bheg was selected to be executed at Sialkot “to make an impression” – although it was entirely unclear on whom that impression was to be made. There were no longer any sepoy regiments left to be forced to watch their comrades blown apart, nor any crowds of sullen villagers made to witness the spectacle at the point of the bayonet. Accordingly, Alum Bheg was one of the very last rebels to be blown from a gun during the long aftermath of the “Mutiny” – a gory leftover from an earlier and more anxious time.
July 9, 1858 was the anniversary of the outbreak at Sialkot and Reverend Boyle held a special memorial service in the church. Before sunrise the following morning, Alum Bheg was to be executed.
An eyewitness account was published in the newspapers in India and later also back in Britain:
“On Saturday last, the 10th instant, all the troops in this station assembled on the plain in front of the sepoy lines, lately occupied by the 35th Bengal Native (Light) Infantry. Her Majesty’s 52nd Light Infantry were on the right, next to them stood the regiment of Punjaub Infantry; the next in the line were the Battery of Artillery, which arrived here on the 5th instant. On the left were drawn up the 7th Dragoon Guards. The regiment deployed into line, the 7th Dragoon Guards wheeling up to the right, and HM 52d Light Infantry brought their right shoulders forward, thus forming three sides of a hollow square. The brigadier and his staff arrived on the ground at 4.30 am, and took up a prominent position in the interval of the square; four prisoners – sepoys belonging to the late 46th Bengal Native Infantry, who mutinied 12 months ago – were also marched into the interior of the square under an escort of H.M. 52d. [...] After the proceedings of the court martial had been read in the vernacular language, three guns were moved out to the front, clearing the right flank of the 52d and the left of the 7th Dragoon Guards.”
Contemporary accounts of executions referred to the comrades of the condemned witnessing the spectacle, but Alum Bheg saw no friendly faces in the crowd of spectators as he was marched to the guns at sunrise on July 10, 1858. His entire regiment had been wiped out and the “Hindustani” camp-followers were all gone or deported. By a bizarre coincidence, however, Gordon, along with the Indian convert Scott, happened to be present at Alum Bheg’s execution, as the Reverend later described:
“It is believed that none of the Sialkot mutineers ever reached Delhi. I was occasionally invited by English officers to speak to little squads of them who were captured in the mountains and condemned to be banished, shot, or blown from the cannons’ mouths; but whilst they besought me earnestly to save them from corporeal punishment, yet it was sad to see that they cared not a single word about the salvation of their souls. On one of these occasions particularly, accompanied by Mr. Scott, I was very solemnly and deeply impressed. Two regiments of English soldiers were drawn up front to front, separated by a little space. Between them stood three pieces of artillery loaded with blank cartridges. The three mutineers who were condemned to be executed were then brought out of prison under guard, and conducted down to the open space between the two regiments. Brother Scott walked along with them, and the group stood beside the loaded guns. A solemn and awe-inspiring stillness reigned among the uniformed spectators, whilst Mr. Scott spoke of the only Saviour of sinners to those who were about to enter the eternal world, assuring them that they would be safe if only they would put their trust in Him. But their rejection of the glad tidings was decided – nay, even bitter.”
It never occurred to Gordon that if fears of conversion had originally triggered the outbreak, the words of missionaries were probably the last thing the condemned mutineers wanted to hear during their final moments. Indeed, the presence of missionaries at the execution might have actually confirmed every single suspicion Alum Bheg and the others harboured concerning the essentially Christian nature of British rule.
British accounts often focused on the demeanour of the prisoner about to be put to death, who, much like criminals in Europe, were expected to perform their part in the ritual of the execution. Ideally, a repentant prisoner stoically accepted his judgement and perhaps even addressed the crowd of spectators with a few edifying words of warning. The prisoner was thus expected to verbalise the deterrent logic of his own execution. Facing imminent death, few convicts, however, acted simply according to this script. During the suppression of the uprising in India, some rebels were indeed contrite, but others went to their death defiant and shouting obscenities, while others again were sullenly quiet and seemingly consigned to their fate. According to Cooper, who had ample opportunity to observe sepoys being put to death, “every phase of deportment was manifested by the doomed men when inevitable death forced itself upon them – astonishment, shame, frantic rage, despair, the most stoic calmness, but no sign of contrition...” The eyewitness accounts make no mention of how the three prisoners acted on July 10, 1858, and we can only imagine what Alum Bheg was feelings on this fateful morning.
Alum Bheg was essentially executed as a proxy for Hurmat Khan. Having been swept up by events over which he had no control, he was about to be executed for murders he did not commit.
Through the early morning haze he may have been able to make out the dusty-blue outline of the Himalayas, where he had been in hiding not so long ago. His home in Awadh, however, was thousands of miles away and he was never to see it again.
After Mr Scott withdrew, Alum Bheg’s fetters were knocked off, and his arms and legs were tied to the wheels of the gun, with the mouth of the heavy barrel pressing against his chest. The gun had been loaded with a half-charge of gunpowder and nothing else; with the body strapped to the cannon and the trunk in direct contact with the barrel, the burst of the blank charge alone would be more than sufficient to blow him to pieces. The hoarse yell of the command to “fire” was given, echoing across the plain and across the lines of troops, and the fuses were lit. Seconds later the guns went off with a roar and Alum Bheg was “instantaneously shivered to atoms.” “The body appears to swell and burst – like a shell,” a colonial photographer noted of another similar execution, and “the pieces of flesh and bone are scattered all round and the head goes bounding in front.” As the proceedings were completed, the troops marched back to their respective quarters.
One of the British soldiers who was present at the execution was a Corporal in the 52nd Regiment, who had been stationed with the 46th at Sialkot, and later fought them at Trimmu Ghat. In a letter to his father he described his thoughts of the spectacle he had witnessed:
“On the 10th of this month we [have] blown three from the guns at this station; it is a shocking sight to see, but what is that to the brutal murders which they have committed. I should like to have seen three hundred. Some of our young men who had lately come out from England did not like to see it, but they have not seen how they have brutally cut up our people. The three belonged to the 46th Regt. N.I. which we left in Sealkote...”
The British troops present evidently had mixed reactions to the bloody spectacle but the atrocities indiscriminately ascribed to the rebels were yet again invoked to legitimise British retribution – and also as a coping mechanism to steady those forced to witness the sight of fellow human beings being blown apart. The execution nevertheless prompted the Corporal to reflect on his own mortality:
“Dear Father, I often think it is a great mercy that I am still spared, seeing that so many poor fellows have been taken off to that journey where they will never return. I may say I have seen hundreds taken from my side since I have been out in this country; and strange to say, all the ablest and strongest men are called away first, and many I dare say, not fit to meet their God.”
Having witnessed the execution, Gordon simply observed that “all that remained of the three wretched criminals was three limp, blackened sack-like inanimate objects, lying on the ground some considerable distance in front of the guns.” What he did not mention, perhaps because he did not wait around after the brutal spectacle was over, was the fact that the heads of those executed remained quite intact even after the execution.The heads were thrown up in the air by the blast, but were otherwise the only identifiable body part left.
Before the British troops marched off, one of them, Captain AR Costello of the 7th Dragoon Guards, picked up Alum Bheg’s severed head and carried it away.
It was at this point not yet a skull that could be handled with ease, but a recognisable human head, complete with facial features, hair, skin, flesh, muscle, tongue, teeth, brain matter, and, most likely, blood oozing from the torn neck. As the barren plain outside Sialkot was emptied of troops, all that remained of Alum Bheg’s mangled corpse was removed by low-caste cleaners and disposed of as so much offal. Only his head was missing.
Excerpted with permission from The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life And Death Of A Rebel of 1857, Kim A Wagner, Penguin Random House India.
