Independence Day 2023: ‘There is no link between Lord Mayo’s assassination and the Criminal Tribes Act’

Sher Ali Afridi. Photo shared by @MuslimSpaces on Twitter

It is India’s 76th Independence Day. As we celebrate our hard-won freedom from British colonialism, let us also pause to reflect on a chapter of Indian history that few today are aware of as it is largely missing from mainstream public memory and consciousness.

This is the assassination of Richard Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayo, a British statesman and prominent member of the British Conservative Party who served as Chief Secretary for Ireland (1852, 1858-9, 1866-8) and Viceroy of India (1869-72).

Mayo, after whom, Mayo College in Ajmer is named, remains the only British Indian Viceroy to be assassinated. His assassination had several far reaching implications. It led to the creation of the first intelligence bureau in colonial India. It also led to the birth of Continental cuisine in the country. 

Just a year before the assassination on February 8, 1872, the colonial government had passed a law that was to have implications for thousands of Indians: The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. The law declared that certain Indian groups were habituated to a life of crime and should be punished severely. The stigma created by the law lingers to this day.

Could Sher Ali Afridi, the Pashtun from the restive Northwest Frontier Province of British India, who killed Mayo have been motivated in part by the passage of this Act? Who was Afridi? Why did he do what he did?  

To answer these questions, Down To Earth spoke with Neelam Francis, author of Viper Prison Break: The untold story of a daring escape from Kala Pani. Francis, who has also taught in the Andamans where the assassination took place, shed light on the personality of Afridi. Edited excerpts:

Rajat Ghai (RG): Lord Mayo’s assassination came on the heels of a number of other such political murders of high-ranking British officials. Can you describe the political climate of British India in the year 1872?

 

Neelam Francis (NF): The attacks on prominent British officials, most prominent of which was the attack on Justice John Paxton Norman on the steps of Calcutta Town Hall on September 20, 1871 were sureshot indications of the high level of resentment against British rule in India post-1857.

The political climate of India was simmering with hate against the British for the way they were annexing native states and introducing new laws to strengthen their rule.

Some rules affected the religious freedom of some groups and sects. The Wahhabi movement was seen as a threat to British rule and their plans for expansion of the Empire. Many prominent Wahhabi leaders were sent on sentences of transportation for life to the penal colony of Andamans during the Ambala trials of 1864.

Justice Norman was known to have passed harsh sentences against Wahhabis and sent them to the Andamans. It is believed that Mohammed Abdullah, who killed Justice Norman, was a Wahhabi sympathiser. 

Assassination was seen as a way of striking a blow against the Empire. Lord Mayo, who was Viceroy at that time, was deeply upset by the murder and is believed to have remarked the there is no way one could stop a determined assassin.

RG: Sher Ali Afridi had fought on behalf of the British on mainland British India in 1857. He had, by all accounts, no ill-will against them. Why, then, did he decide to assassinate Lord Mayo?

NF: There is no proof that Sher Ali fought on behalf of the British during the Great Uprising of 1857. He was an Afridi tribesman hailing from Jamrud. He was described as working as an orderly for Colonel Pollock who was a British officer posted in Peshawar.

While on leave in his native place he killed a man who dishonoured his sister, which was the right thing to do according to the Pashtun moral code, the Pashtunwali.

However, when he returned to join duty he was arrested and charged with murder according to British law. He was sentenced to death which was later commuted to transportation for life and sent to Andamans.

He felt he was unjustly sentenced for doing what his tribal justice demanded. In spite of that, he was known to be a mild, soft-spoken person of affable nature because of which he earned a ticket-of-leave and lived at Hope Town working as a barber.

It is possible that he was indoctrinated during this period with Wahhabi ideals and decided to kill Lord Mayo. The news of the murder of Justice Norman must have been public knowledge in Port Blair and when the news of the visit of Lord Mayo was announced, Sher Ali must have decided to do what Abdullah had done in Calcutta a few months earlier.

During interrogation after the murder of Lord Mayo, Sher Ali is believed to have said he had no personal enmity with Lord Mayo and he killed him because God told him to do so.

RG: There are claims that Sher Ali Afridi was part of a Jihadist plot and that he was influenced by Wahhabism. Is there any truth in these claims?

NF: Sher Ali was surely influenced by the Wahhabis in Port Blair at that time but I wouldn’t call it a Jihadist plot. Sher Ali grew up in the Pashtun areas bordering Afghanistan in the years after the First Afghan War.

The Afghans had massacred the British Army during the earlier part of the war. When the ‘Army of Retribution’ was sent to take revenge for that and to consolidate British influence in Afghanistan, terrible atrocities were committed on the Afghan people by the British Indian army.

Most of the men, including children above the age of 14 were slaughtered. Those memories were still fresh in the minds of the people. Moreover the terrible punishments and lack of freedom in a penal colony which was a far cry from the mountains where he lived could have easily turned Sher Ali into an assassin.

Several murders of jail officials to invite the death sentence which quickly ended a life of continuous torture happened in Port Blair in those times. Death on the gallows was considered a welcome liberation from a life of penal servitude.

RG: The year before Lord Mayo’s assassination by Afridi, the Criminal Tribes Act had been passed by the British Indian government which had huge implications and the legacy of which continues to this day. Do you see any connections between these two?

NF: The Criminal Tribes Act was mainly used against some tribes who were accused of pursuing crimes like robbery, dacoity, counterfeiting, etc, as hereditary professions.  

I don’t see any connection between the Criminal Tribes Act and the assassination of Lord Mayo. The transportation of some ‘criminal tribes’ like the Bhattus and Bhantus to the Andamans started much later, around 1920.

Sher Ali was an Afridi, a Pashtun tribesman for whom ‘honour’ was most important. They were never branded as a ‘criminal tribe’ by the British.

RG: How should we in present-day India view Afridi? Was he a freedom fighter, a ‘jihadist’ or just a Pashtun out to avenge an injustice meted out to him?

NF: In my view, Sher Ali was a simple Afridi tribesman who felt wronged by the harsh sentence of transportation imposed on him for doing what his tribal justice demanded of him.

Added to that was the teachings of the Wahhabis living in close proximity in the penal colony of Port Blair and the inspiration from the murder of Justice Norman by Abdullah whom he considered as a ‘kinsman’ in a figurative sense.

He may not be called a ‘freedom fighter’ or a ‘jihadist’ but certainly a ‘martyr,’ for he knew that he would be hanged for his actions and he died fearlessly on the gallows.

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