Sher Ali, or Shere Ali, an Afridi pathan serving sentence in the Kala-Paani (Andamans), assassinated the Viceroy of India Lord Mayo on 8 February 1872 with a kitchen knife. This was the only successful attempt at the life of a British Viceroy in India, though Indian revolutionaries attempted to assassinate most of them between 1870 and 1947. Nadeem Omar Tarar rightly points out, “Unlike other assassins of the British officers of the Raj who were transformed by the politics of independence into martyrs, Sher Ali lost out on national glory despite his fatal success in striking at the heart of the British Empire. Never hailed as a hero by Indian nationalists, Sher Ali remains a common criminal in the annals of British Indian history.”
But, the question remains why do people, including several historians, feel uncomfortable in accepting Sher Ali as one of India’s leading freedom fighters, who according to his own admission ‘had killed the greatest Sahib in India’?
The answer lies in the court of inquiry’s report produced by the British at that time. Though there was several pieces of evidence which proved that Sher Ali was part of a larger nationalist, or anti-colonial, struggle, the British government avoided accepting that. James Wilson, editor of the Daily News at the time of the assassination, believed that the British government did not want people in England to know how oppressive their rule in India was and the Indians could again rise in revolt like 1857.
Wilson declared, “The anxiety of the Government in England and the press to impress it upon the public that these assassinations “have no political significance” is a piece of blind folly, or a wicked attempt at delusion.”
This must be noted that almost four months prior, on 20 September 1871, the Chief Justice Paxton Norman was assassinated outside the High Court in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Almost every high official in the government believed that both the assassinations were carried out by Tehreek-i-Mujahideen, a movement led by Islamic scholars centred in Patna and several other cities which the British erroneously called Wahabis.
Major General Owen Tudor Burne, who was the private secretary to the Viceroy at the time of hi assassination, met Queen Victoria after Mayo’s killing and briefed her about the event. The Queen asked Burne, “What is your opinion of the motive of the assassin?” To which Burne replied, “But my firm belief is that the deed was instigated from outside. I can never believe that the murderer, Shere Ali, was up to within a fortnight of the Viceroy’s arrival at Port Blair a quiet well-behaved man, meriting reward and promotion, and that he then without apparent reason became a wild beast, meditating the base murder of a Viceroy who had never harmed him, and who alone might and could give him the freedom he longed to obtain. The murderer was quite intelligent enough to know that Lord Mayo had nothing to do with his transportation, and that if he was tired of his lot his chances of Paradise were, according to his belief, as good if he killed an overseer as a Viceroy, so long as he was an Englishman. I believe, ma’am, that the man was instigated by influential Wahabees at Calcutta, who, encouraged by Chief Justice Norman’s murder, aspired to seize a favourable opportunity of getting rid of a Viceroy who had equally with Mr. Norman been their greatest opponent.”
Wilson believed that Mayo’s taxation policies, attitude towards peasantry and handling of famine in Bengal had created disaffection among the Indians. He wrote, “It has seemed to me to be needful to show how intense and widespread has been the disaffection in India under the administration of Lord Mayo. And especially is it desirable that this fact should be known, because of the persistent efforts to ignore it…. To my mind it is almost impossible to separate the two as cause and effect. I take the first great primary fact to be established, that there has been serious disaffection in India towards the administration of Lord Mayo, and that there has been ample cause shown to account for it.”
The Daily News printed a story connecting Tehreek-i-Mujahideen, Norman’s murder and assassination of Mayo. The report said, “From inquiries made among the convicts of Hope Town, with whom, of course, the assassin Sher Ali used to congregate, it appears that he is a brother of the Mussulman, Abdoola, the murderer of Mr. Justice Norman. Sher Ali, moreover, has himself, since the dreadful occurrence of the 8th, admitted , when directly questioned on the point, that he is Abdoola’s brother. Whether in returning this answer he meant to say that Abdoola was a blood relation, or to convey the idea that he belonged to the same caste and country as himself, is not clear. But there is a little incident mentioned by the convicts at Hope Town which goes to lend credence to the former view. It appears that as soon as the news reached Port Blair that Abdoola had been hung, and his body burned within the Calcutta Jail, this man, Sher Ali, was observed to be deeply affected, so much so, indeed, as to be moved to tears. Subsequently, on hearing that His Excellency the Viceroy intended to pay the settlement a visit , Sher Ali expressed his intention of giving a feast to a number of his fellow-convicts, observing , as a reason for doing so, that an important event was about to take place.”
Lord Mayo was assassinated by Sher Ali on 8 February 1872 when he was coming down from Mount Harriet after witnessing the sunset. Newspapers reported the event as, “The murderer is a ticket-of-leave man, a Mahomedan from the borders of Afghanistan, called Shere Ali; the only reason given by him was that God ordered him to kill the enemy of his country. On being sentenced to death he appeared quite triumphant.”
Sher Ali was sentenced to death by hanging and was eventually hanged on 11 March 1872. He never disclosed any ally and told the investigators that God was his only ally. Though it was established that he received letters from Patna and had knowledge of Abdullah, Norman’s assassin. The official report stated, “He gloried greatly in the deed, saying that he had heard of Abdulla having killed Justice Norman — that that was a great deed, but that his was much greater than anything ever done before, as he had killed the greatest Sahib in India…. He hoped his name would be glorified in his country for the deed which he had done, and that a monument would be raised to his memory by his fellow-countrymen.”
Officials present later wrote that Sher Ali calmly walked down the gallows with pride in having killed the Viceroy. He was not disturbed at all.
The country, against his hope, did never honour Sher Ali with any memorial. Rather, Indian historians kept parroting the narratives of the British where the killing was termed as a personal grudge.
(The views are personal of the author)
