01Eight days in July
The regiments at Danapur rose on 25 July 1857, crossed the Son and joined Kunwar Singh of Jagdishpur, then eighty years old. On 27 July they entered Arrah, freed the jail and took the treasury. The Europeans of the station, about sixteen men, with some fifty Sikh police, shut themselves in a two-storey house built by the railway engineer Richard Vicars Boyle, which he had prepared for a siege. The besiegers mined, fired and tried to smoke them out. A relief column sent from Danapur under Captain Dunbar was ambushed at night on 29–30 July and cut up. On 2 August Major Vincent Eyre, with guns, beat Kunwar Singh’s force at Bibiganj, and the house was relieved on 3 August.
02Kunwar Singh’s country
Eyre went on to take Jagdishpur on 12 August, but Kunwar Singh slipped away and fought for nine more months, from Rewa and Banda to Azamgarh, before returning to die at Jagdishpur in April 1858. The Bhojpuri country around Arrah has never forgotten him; songs about him are still sung at Holi. The town itself is old; in its centre stands the Aranya Devi temple, from which local tradition draws the name Ara. Veer Kunwar Singh University at Arrah carries his name.
The life of this place
- 27 July 1857The Danapur sepoys and Kunwar Singh’s men enter Arrah and besiege the Arrah House.
- 29–30 July 1857Dunbar’s relief column is ambushed and destroyed near the town.
- 3 August 1857Vincent Eyre relieves the house after the fight at Bibiganj.
