The Legend of the Bahadur Titu Mir January 24, 2012

Bismillaahi`r-Rahmaani`r-Raheem

Alhamduillaah, wa`s-salaatu, wa`s-salaamu ‘alaa rasoolillaah.

The Legend of the Bahadur Titu Mir

Jihaad Against the Brutish Colonials in the Bengal

(Note: Non-Muslim author’s biased terminologies at use throughout the text)

Born in 1782, Titu Mir (Mir Nasir Ali) (rahimahullaah) began life as a small cultivator with an appetite for violence. Forced off the land, he turned to crime and then drifted to Calcutta, where he spent some time as a professional wrestler before taking service with a powerful landowner as a lathial, a ‘big-stick man’ or enforcer. At some point he was found guilty of affray by a British Magistrate and sent to prison. He was, in the words of a British judge, ‘a man of a bad and desperate character’. After his release he went to work as a bodyguard for a minor member of the Mughal royal family in Delhi, and in that capacity accompanied him to Mecca on pilgrimage. There in 1821 or 1822 Titu Mir met a fellow Hindustani who already had a great following: the charismatic Syed Ahmad of Rae Bareli (rahimahullaah)…

… Titu Mir, it will be remembered, was the Bengali ‘enforcer’ who went to Mecca on Hajj at the same time as Syed Ahmad and his band of pilgrims. On his return to Delhi he quit the service of his royal employer and went back to Bengal to preach the message of Wahhabism through the countryside north and east of Calcutta. The name he gave his movement, Deen Muhammad, or the Way of Muhammad, suggests an affinity with Syed Ahmad’s Path of Muhammad (sallallaahu ‘alayhi wa sallam). In Bengal the countryside was largely owned by wealthy landlords whose oppression of the peasantry working their fields was legendary. Titu Mir exploited this discontent by recruiting peasants and weavers to his cause. By the time the news of the death of Syed Ahmad reached Bengal in the late summer of 1831 he gained several thousand adherents, distinguishable from their fellow Muslim and Hindu neighbours by the long beards and plain dress worn by the men, almost complete withdrawal of their women behind the folds of the purdah and the burqa, and their contempt for all forms of religion other than their own. In October 1831 their leader called all the members of his Wahhabi sect together in the village of Narkulbaria and ordered them to prepare it for a long siege. They laid in supplies and built a strong bamboo stockade around the village (famously known as ‘Bansher Kella‘), which now became their constituted Dar ul-Islam.

Two weeks later Titu Mir marched out at the head of a band some five hundred strong armed with clubs and farm implements and attacked a nearby village in the name of Jihad. They killed a Brahmin priest, cut the throats of two cows and dragged them bleeding through a Hindu temple – acts deliberately intended to outrage Hindus. At the same time their leader proclaimed an end to British rule in Bengal, evidently in the expectation that Muslims throughout the countryside would rise up and join him. Over the next few days more attacks on nearby villages were carried out, deliberately intended to terrorise both Muslim and Hindu communities. As the magistrates later noted, everything was done according to a set plan: each morning the rebels marched out in ranks under a military commander to attack and plunder a particular target, and every evening they marched back with their booty.

At first the local district magistrate, a Mr Alexander, failed to grasp the nature of the outrages. Escorted by twenty-two sepoys, and about twice that number of local policeman, he advanced on the rebel village believing that his appearance on the scene would be enough to cause the troublemakers to disperse. Indeed, so convinced of this was Mr Alexander that he ordered his men to load their weapons with the blank cartridges used for ceremonials. To his consternation he found himself faced by a small army between four and six hundred strong drawn up in ranks behind their military commander, one Ghulam Masum, mounted on a horse.

The unhappy Mr Alexander now attempted to parley, but before he could say a word Ghulam Masum gave the order to charge and himself bore down on his brandishing a tulwar. Mr Alexander fled, leaving his sepoys to fire a volley of blanks before being overwhelmed by Titu Mir’s peasant army. Only after a long chase through the countryside did Mr Alexander, bedraggled and frightened, reach safety. Fifteen men were killed and many others either wounded or taken prisoner, but still the Calcutta authorities assumed they were dealing with a minor local dispute. Three days after the massacre a second British Magistrate, a Mr Smith, repeated Mr Alexander’s error, this time approaching the rebel village in the company of a number of local British indigo planters, all of them mounted on elephants – the armoured vehicles of their day and as effective in counter-insurgency as Russian tanks in Afghanistan or US Humvees in Iraq. They had brought with them a large body of armed watchmen, but the closer they drew to the village of Narkulbaria the less enthusiastic these became. ‘One by one,’ notes the official report, ‘the Bengalis dropped behind, and when the party arrived in the large plain in front of the village they found that, with the exception of twenty or thirty up-country burkundazes [watchmen], every native had disappeared. Here they found the insurgents about a thousand strong, drawn up in regular order.’

The magistrate and his party at once turned their elephants and lumbered off, pursued by a howling mob that soon caught up with them and began to cut down the stragglers. A second humiliating chase across the Bengal countryside followed, leaving the insurgents utterly convinced of their leader’s claims that they were under the special protection of God, and safe from the bullets of infidels.

Now at last the Governor-General of Bengal became involved, and no fewer than twelve infantry regiments together with the Governor-General’s own cavalry bodyguard and some horse artillery took to the field. On the evening of 17 November this substantial force marched out from Calcutta with colours flying and drums and fifes playing and, on the following morning, disposed itself for battle before the stockaded village of Narkulbaria. More than ten thousand professional troops found themselves opposed by a peasant army scarcely a tenth of their number, largely armed with farm implements and staves, but paraded as before in well-ordered tanks. By way of a banner, they flew the body of a dead Englishman suspended from a pole.

A text-book frontal assault followed, with the infantry advancing in extended columns and halting to fire volley upon volley into the massed insurgents. Even so, Titu Mir’s men held their ground for almost an hour before the survivors retired into their stockade. The two guns of the horse artillery were then brought into play before the village was stormed at the point of the bayonet. Titu Mir was among the fifty dead. Almost two hundred of his followers were subsequently tried in court. Eleven received life sentences for treason, and 136 earned themselves sentences of imprisonment ranging from two years to seven. Ghulam Masum, Titu Mir’s second-in-command, was hanged. ‘These people’, recorded the presiding magistrate, ‘pretend to a new religion, calling out “Deen Mohummad”, declaring that the Company’s Government is gone. They are headed by fakirs, two or three, and the men who led the attack on us were fine able-bodied fanatics apparently influenced by the decision that they were charmed.’ An enquiry followed and duly reported to the Governor-General that ‘the insurrection was strictly local, arising from causes which had operation in a small extent of country’.

– Extracts from Charles Allen’s ‘God’s Terrorists – The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad‘, ABACUS (2006).