The Woman in the Pipal Tree

Sikandar Bagh, 16 November 1857: the marksman in the pipal tree that a Highlander's memoir records and tradition names

On 16 November 1857 the 93rd Highlanders stormed the Sikandar Bagh in Lucknow and kept losing men under a pipal tree in the inner court. When the marksman was shot down it was a woman, in a firing post prepared before the attack, with a loaded cavalry pistol still in her belt. Sergeant William Forbes-Mitchell wrote the scene down and never learned her name; Awadh tradition and the Pasi community of the region name her Uda Devi. This lesson keeps the memoir and the tradition clearly apart, and shows why both are worth having.

The Tree in the Inner Court

It is the afternoon of Monday, 16 November 1857, inside a walled garden in Lucknow called the Sikandar Bagh. The fighting here has almost stopped. In the centre of the inner court stands a large pipal tree with a very bushy top. Around its foot someone has set a row of clay jars filled with cool water.

The men of the 93rd Highlanders are dying of thirst. They have been biting open paper cartridges all morning, and the gunpowder has left their mouths burning. They come to the tree for the shade and the water. Some of them do not get up again.

Captain Dawson notices the bodies. There are men of the 93rd and men of the 53rd lying together in that one patch of ground, more than anywhere else in the court. He examines the wounds one by one. Every single man has been shot from above.

Dawson steps out from under the branches and calls to a soldier of his company to look up into the top of the tree. The soldier raises his rifle and scans the leaves. Then he says, "I see him, sir."

He fires. A body falls out of the pipal tree.

What the Highlander Wrote Down

Everything above comes from one book. William Forbes-Mitchell was a sergeant of the 93rd Highlanders who was inside the Sikandar Bagh that day. Thirty years later he published Reminiscences of the Great Mutiny, and his account of the tree is the only eyewitness record we have of what happened under it.

Here is what he says about the body that fell:

"and down fell a body dressed in a tight-fitting red jacket and tight-fitting rose-coloured silk trousers; and the breast of the jacket bursting open with the fall, showed that the wearer was a woman."