From Sepoy to Subedar

James D Lunt ed. From Sepoy to Subedar: Being the Life and Adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, a Native Officer of the Bengal Army Written and Related by Himself, Translated by Sita Ram Pandey and James T Norgate, Calcutta: Baptist mission press, 1911, third edition

vi, 130 pages with illustrations by Frank Wilson; original green cloth binding

8.6 x 5.5 in (21.5 x 13.7 cm) (each)

"Sita Ram Pandey was a sepoy who served in the Bengal Army under East India Company. He came from a village near Rae Bareilly, where his father was a respected man, owning 150 acres of land. As a child he had the opportunity to learn to read and write as an acolyte of the village priest.

He served in the Bengal Army for nearly 50 years, from 1812 to just before 1860. In this period, he is shot at close range by a Maratha (Pindari) soldier, is captured and sold as a slave in Kabul, is blown up from a magazine explosion in which his entire regiment is killed and is captured and nearly lynched by the mutinying sepoys for suggesting that they should not go against the British. He also finds love in a woman he rescues from the Arabs manning the fort at Asirgarh, loses his caste (twice) and has to pay heavy compensation for being taken back into the fold, and as a final tragedy, he finds his son among the captured mutineers at Lucknow, who are to be shot by his own firing squad.

Several times, his family is informed that he has been killed. In 1858, even as an old man, sixty years old, he was fighting in the mutiny, recovering Lucknow from the rebels, under lt Gen J T Norgate. He eventually retired as a subedar - a non-commissioned officer, the highest rank that a sepoy could aspire to. He seems to be very grateful for having been granted a pension.

Sita Ram could read and write in Hindustani and Persian, and was apparently a good raconteur. Presumably, Norgate had heard many of these stories, and encouraged Sita Ram to write up his story after retirement. This is the work that resulted, written by Sita Ram at the age of 66, in 1861. Norgate translated the work with the help of some Hindi speakers and had a small edition published in 1863 (now untraceable), and a second edition was brought out from Lahore in 1873. For some years in the early 1900s, this text, in an Urdu translation, was required reading for British officer trainees." (bookexcerptise, online)

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