Nana Sahib

Nana Sahib was refused the pension his adoptive father had been promised, became a leader of the rising of 1857, and vanished. He was born Dhondu Pant and was adopted by the exiled last Peshwa Bajirao II, who lived at Bithur near Kanpur on eight hundred thousand rupees a year from the Company. When Bajirao died in 1851 the Company applied the doctrine of lapse - adopted sons did not inherit - and stopped the pension. Nana Sahib sent an agent, Azimullah Khan, to London to petition, and was refused. In June 1857 the sepoys at Kanpur mutinied and he took command. The British garrison and their families held an entrenchment for three weeks and then accepted terms to leave by river; at the Satichaura Ghat the boats were fired on and most of the men killed. Around two hundred surviving women and children were held at the Bibighar and killed on 15 July as relief approached, the bodies thrown into a well. Whether Nana Sahib ordered it has never been established and was never tried; the reprisals that followed were savage and Kanpur became the byword the British used to justify them. He fled to Nepal in 1859 and was never found. Sightings were reported for forty years. Azimullah Khan had travelled through Constantinople and observed the Crimean War on the way home, and reported that the British army was not invincible. The Bibighar well was covered by a memorial garden from which Indians were excluded until 1947. Tantia Tope, who commanded his forces, was captured and hanged in 1859. Nepalese records suggest he died of fever there, but nothing was ever confirmed.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history