Tantia Tope

Tantia Tope was the best field commander the rebels had in 1857, kept an army in motion for eighteen months after the cause was lost, and was hanged in front of a crowd. He was born Ramachandra Panduranga near Nashik, the son of a household official of the exiled Peshwa Bajirao II, and grew up at Bithur alongside Nana Sahib. When the sepoys rose in 1857 he took command of Nana Sahib's forces at Kanpur, was driven out by Havelock, and then did the thing that distinguishes him: rather than defend a city, he moved. He raised troops from disbanded units, took Gwalior with Rani Lakshmibai in June 1858 after the main rising had already collapsed elsewhere, lost it within three weeks, and then led a pursuit across central India that occupied several British columns for nearly a year - crossing and recrossing the Narmada, never holding ground, always recruiting. British officers who fought him wrote about his marches with something close to admiration. He was betrayed in his sleep in April 1859 by a Rajput chief he had trusted, tried by a military court, and hanged at Shivpuri. He denied nothing at the trial and said he had obeyed his master. A persistent Indian tradition holds that another man was hanged in his place. At Kanpur he commanded the force that fought Havelock at Bithur and Maharajpur, and after Gwalior fell he crossed the Chambal, the Narmada and the Betwa in a campaign that covered well over a thousand miles. Rao Sahib and Firoz Shah rode with him for parts of it. His captor was Man Singh of Narwar, who had made terms with the British. The trial lasted a day. Indian nationalist writers from the 1880s onward made him a central figure, and Savarkar s history of 1857 devoted a chapter to him.

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