The Fugitives of Lalitpur and the Raja of Shahgarh

We had left Captain Gordon and the other fugitives of Lalitpur as well-treated prisoners in the fort at Maraura. On 15 June, they were sent off to Banpur, and their first visitor the next day was the disgraced minister of the Raja, one Muhammad Ali, who had from the first opposed his leader’s rebellious schemes. Through his contrivances, they were moved, on 17 June, to Tehri where they took up residence in the house of the Prem Narayana, once tutor to the young Raja and stayed until 2 July. The Tehri authorities treated them well but were not keen on extending their visit – on the 2nd the party started out with a strong guard to Shahgarh with the promise of being escorted to Sagar, but the soldiers deserted and they were left with only the two Madras servants of Captain Gordon who had accompanied them from Lalitpur and now formed the entirity of their guard. After three days, they arrived in Shahgarh where, on 7 July, they were apprised of the mutiny at Sagar, thus forcing them to stay under the protection of the Raja of Shahgarh, Bahkt Bali Shah.
Rebels from Sagar started to arrive in Shahgarh on the 10th and the Raja of Banpur accompanied them – it was not the best situation for Captain Gordon nor for the Shahgarh Raja who quickly moved the party out of his fort; first to a garden house some distance away and then had them moved about from village to village until the mutineers left. It was but the start of a rather long and winding journey.
The Raja of Shahgarh, in the meantime, had invaded Sagar territory himself, and although he continued to profess his loyalty to Gordon, he was also keeping up intense correspondence with the Banpur Raja. On 18 July, after firing a salute for the erroneous news of the fall of Delhi, he marched the Europeans out of Shahgarh and put them on the road to Sagar, not as friends but as his prisoners.
Unfortunately, the Raja of Shahgarh met in open battle with the British forces who were on their march into Central India – at Benaika, he was defeated, lost a gun and was severely wounded. He quickly sent for Gordon who was now living in a cowshed in Papit, and explained his troops had fired on the British by mistake, quite against his orders. If Gordon (who had already signed a paper handing Lalitpur over to the Raja of Banpur) would agree to give him the Garhakota District, he would ally himself at once to the British cause. If not, the Shahgarh Raja would openly join the rebellion. Gordon, to save what he could of this rather difficult situation which could cost him not only his head but that of the other fugitives, agreed. The Raja once again promised to send them to Sagar, but their journey terminated at Papit and the inevitable cowshed until 29 July.
That day saw them marched off to a jungle fort at Baretta from where they were informed there was no chance of them reaching Sagar as the country was much too unsettled and thus impossible to traverse. Captain Gordon and his party would have to twiddle thumbs, badly fed and poorly treated until their release. On the 12th of September, they left Baretta and finally reached Sagar on the 14th, the Raja having been induced to set them free by his obvious alarm at the advance of the British – Colonel Millar’s Nagpore Moveable Column was in full force.
We have already seen that Raja Mardan Singh of Banpur from the first had made his intentions clear – he was not going to ally himself with the British, and as such, he fought a valiant fight. There is no denying he was a fine leader and, in his intentions to free his country of foreign rule, a noble man. He would fight to the end, joining the Rani of Jhansi at her final battle with Hugh Rose. He would suffer the indignity of capture, sent until his death into exile in Mathura, his territories lost and parcelled off mostly to Scindia. Bahkt Bali Shah helped Tatya Tope during his later attack on Charkhari and would be invited by Nana Sahib to join him in Gwalior during Scindia’s brief absence. He was captured by the British on his way to Gwalior in September 1858 and sent, as a prisoner to far-flung Lahore. He died in 1873 in Vrindavan. Like that of Banpur, his territory was seized and after the mutiny was over, split up, never to unite again. The end of the mutiny also brought to a close any chance of re-establishing a traditional economy in Central India – they were firmly in the grasp of the imperial economy and by the official aims of “progress and development” could be realised.

We are not yet finished with Central India and the journey continues.

^{Sources:
Baker, David. “Colonial Beginnings and the Indian Response: The Revolt of 1857-58 in Madhya Pradesh.” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (1991): 511–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/312615.
Delhi Gazette, Former Editor of, comp. The Indian Mutiny to the Fall of Delhi. London: G. Routledge & Co., 1857.
Intelligence Branch, comp. The Revolt in Central India 1857-58. Simla: Government Monotype Press, 1908.
Kaye, John William, and G. B. Malleson. Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58. Edited by G. B. Malleson. Vol. V. London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1907.
Lowe, Thomas. Central India during the Rebellion of 1857 and 1858. London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1860.}

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