“Remember Cawnpore”

The birth of the cantonment and its fraught relationship with the Indian public

General Wheeler’s entrenchment near Cawnpore photographed in the 1860’s, after the mutiny (Image: Felice Beato and Henry Hering, courtesy the Getty’s Open Content Program)

The cantonment has had a love-hate relationship with the Indian cities they reside in for all of their existence. This has become especially acute over the past two decades as large urban centres like Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata have developed and an urban sprawl has mushroomed around the cantonment — originally intended to be well away from the city centre.

The monsoon had yet to reach India, and the northern plains scorched through the summer of 1857. A crisp drink in the night was the only reprieve, apart from the breeze blowing across the Yamuna. Lieutenant Cox, an East India Company officer stationed in Cawnpore, and no stranger to the bottle, was sufficiently inebriated by 2200hrs as was his wont. He then entered into an argument with his Indian guard and fired shots from his service revolver. Little did Cox know, but these shots changed the course of Indian, and British, history. The guard escaped unhurt and Lieutenant Cox was thrown into jail that night, only to be acquitted by a hastily convened court the next morning. This miscarriage of justice didn’t go down well with the locally stationed 1st, 53rd and 56th Native Infantry battalions and the 2nd Bengal Cavalry. With the winds of mutiny spreading across large swathes of the United…