In 2009 I discovered that the British Museum held a bird arrow acquired by a British army officer during the Rumpa Rebellion, a tribal uprising in India in 1879-81 that was countered by a force from the Madras army - Indian troops with British officers - eventually numbering more than 2,500 men. Among the officers involved was my great-great grandfather, Lieutenant Walter Andrew Gale, Royal Engineers, and at the time I was carrying out research in the India Office Records of the British Library in order to tell the story of this little-known expedition – a project that eventually bore fruit in my novel The Tiger Warrior and also resulted in several accounts on this website linked below. The arrow is one of very few artefacts associated with the rebellion and I paid the museum to have it professionally photographed. This photo is one of almost two million released by the museum in 2020 for free download under a Creative Commons license, and I am very pleased to be able to show it here.
The museum register for the arrow reads as follows:
'India. S.E. Bamboo arrow, nocked, with six black feathers bound with bark fibre and a thick roughly cylindrical piece of bamboo fitted to the upper end instead of a point. "Bird arrow. Trophy taken from the natives in the late Rumpah rebellion. Presented by Lieut. A.C. Macdonnell R.E.". The Rumpahs inhabit the lower reaches of the Godavery & Kistna Rivers. Purchased, Christy Fund. 4th November 1896. [United Services Institute].'
‘Rumpah’ was more commonly rendered ‘Rumpa’ at the time, though since then it has usually been spelled Rampa. It refers to a remote jungle tract around the upper reaches of the Godavari River in southern India. The local inhabitants, referred to in the register as ‘Rumpahs’, were Hill Reddi people who lived a largely hunter-gatherer lifestyle with limited slash-and-burn agriculture. The spark for the rebellion was a tax on toddy – the alcoholic palm drink – but set against a backdrop of increasingly oppressive rule by the local feudal chief and the corruption of the native police. The scale of the rebellion, the military measures taken against it and the outcome for the tribal people are discussed in my earlier blogs here.
Journal of the United Services Institution XXV (1882), xxxi.
Lieutenant Alfred Creagh Macdonnell commanded one of two companies of the Madras Sappers and Miners sent to Rumpa as part of the field force; the other British officer in the company was Lieutenant Gale, aged 23 at the outset of the rebellion and the most junior officer in the Madras Sappers at the time. Further research revealed that the arrow had originally been part of a collection donated by Macdonnell to the museum of the Royal United Services Institution in London in 1882, the year after the last troops had been withdrawn. The Journal of the Institution for that year records the following acquisitions:
‘Two Matchlocks, two Swords and a Scabbard, two Bamboo Arrows, a Bird Arrow, a Shield, four Arrow Heads; trophies taken from the natives in the late Rumpah Rebellion. Lieut. A.C. Macdonnell, R.E.’
The Madras Military Proceedings, the main source for the military history of the rebellion, gives some hints as to how these items might have been acquired. In a despatch from the field force commander on 27 October 1879, he described how
‘Lieutenant Gale, R.E., with a party of Sappers, examined several villages and discovered many matchlocks. They are no use to them, as they never attempt to protect themselves, but could be taken by the rebels when they visit them or be used against us by the villagers …’
On 15 January 1880, after an attack that killed six rebels, the troops confiscated ‘one percussion gun, seven matchlocks and a dagger’. A month later after another rebel was shot the troops recovered ‘two police carbines, one matchlock, a sword and some bows and arrows’, and on another occasion a rebel wounded a policeman with an arrow before cutting his own throat rather than be captured. The arrow in the British Museum could not have been used for these purposes, being an arrow with a flat end for stunning and bringing down birds, but is nevertheless of great interest for revealing the skills of the tribal people in hunting with the bow.
It is possible that the arrow was acquired in 1896 by the British Museum as more appropriate to their ethnographic collections than those of the Royal United Services Institution Museum, and that the other more warlike items remained in the RUSI Museum until it closed in 1965. The whereabouts of these items is unknown, with many of the objects being disbursed among museums and private collections. Certainly during the lifetimes of Macdonnell and Gale they would have been readily accessible, with both men working later in their careers at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham and able to visit London and see some of the few reminders of the rebellion and their role in suppressing it – a campaign overshadowed by the Afghan War in those years but arduous for the troops involved, with a virulent form of malaria exacting a large toll, the jungle presenting a formidable challenge for those charged with policing it and the hope that their efforts might result in a better administration for the tribal people in which the grievances that had led to the uprising could be addressed.
Click here for my three other blogs on the 1879-81 Rumpa Rebellion, including quotes from my novel The Tiger Warrior.