The Old Man of Jagdishpur

Kunwar Singh crossed the Ganga wounded at nearly eighty, and his brother Amar Singh held Bhojpur for a year after him

Kunwar Singh of Jagdishpur was near eighty and deep in debt when the Danapur sepoys came to him in July 1857 and he took command against Arrah. Nine months later he crossed the Ganga at Sheopur ghat under fire, retook Jagdishpur on 23 April 1858, and died there three days later. His younger brother Amar Singh then kept the Bhojpur countryside in revolt for the better part of a year with no fort, no treasury and no town.

The Crossing at Sheopur Ghat

It is the morning of 22 April 1858, on the south bank of the Ganga near Sheopur ghat, a few miles from Balia. The river here is wide and brown and running fast. On the bank a body of men is pushing boats into the water, loading them, poling them out. Behind them, across the flat fields, a British column under Sir Edward Douglas is coming up fast enough to hear.

In one of the boats sits an old man in his campaign clothes. He is a zamindar of Jagdishpur in Shahabad district, and his name is Kunwar Singh. Nobody wrote down the year he was born. The people who fought beside him, and the officers who chased him, all put him somewhere near eighty.

He has been in the field for nine months. In that time he has marched from Bihar into Rewa, Banda, Kalpi, Kanpur, Lucknow and Azamgarh, and he is now within two days of his own village. He has one river left to cross.

The guns on the bank open on the boats. A bullet hits Kunwar Singh in the arm. What happened next is the most famous thing anyone remembers about him, and it is also the part of the story the records do not settle.

How an Eighty-Year-Old Ended Up Commanding an Army

Kunwar Singh was not a soldier. He was an Ujjainiya Rajput zamindar, the head of a landholding family at Jagdishpur, about forty miles west of Patna. His estate had been shrinking for years under Company revenue demands and court cases. By the 1850s he was deep in debt and his lands were partly under attachment.

He had no military record at all. He had never commanded troops in a battle before the age at which most men have stopped working.

Then on 25 July 1857, the sepoys of the 7th, 8th and 40th Bengal Native Infantry at Danapur, the cantonment outside Patna, broke from their lines. They crossed the Son river and came west to Jagdishpur. They came to Kunwar Singh because they needed a name with standing in the district, and he was the largest one within reach.