Napier was outraged by accusations levelled that he had started the war out of a bloodlust. Such sensations were antithetical to his entire military career. He denied too that he had acted out of self-serving glory or even just for prize money. To his journal he cried out:
It is hard … for an honest man serving his country in the midst of dangers and trials, physical and moral, and acting from the honourable feeling of doing his duty … to be exposed to the insolence, the falsehoods of men like Lord Howick [a parliamentary critic] … To give him personal chastisement would give me pleasure, such as one feels at cutting a village cur dog with a whip, but I forgive all of them. After anger, contempt succeeds. I never feel angry in my heart against anyone – beyond wishing to break their bones with a broomstick!
The best way, he felt, of disproving his critics was to show just how he would rule Sindh, now that he had it.
For, criticism and objections notwithstanding, Napier was made both governor and military commander of the newly annexed Sindh. Now he had a chance to demonstrate the moral case for intervention. ‘My object now,’ its new master proclaimed, ‘is to … make roads, buildings, open streets, to secure justice. O! how I long to begin thus to live, and to rest after the horrid carnage of these battles!’ Soon it became clear that Sindh was no Cephalonia. Shortly after peace was restored and in punishing 132-degree heat, thirty-two Europeans, including Napier himself, were struck down by sunstroke within minutes. Three hours later, all bar him were dead. Sindh was not to be an easy country to rule.
Napier might have been excused for wishing to return to Britain. His health was battered yet he remained, reckoning that his status as ‘conqueror’ would save native face and allow them to accept reforms from him they would bridle at from his civil successors. Ellenborough, however, was recalled, an act without precedent in British Indian policy and illustrative of how divisive Indian policy had become. He was replaced by his brother-in-law Henry Hardinge, who was sufficiently enamoured of Napier to name his favourite horse Miani. Even Hardinge, though he arrived a partisan of Napier and remained an admirer, began to question the general’s temperament. He wondered if Napier’s now marked eccentricity aided good government, and he began to despair of the poisonous coverage of affairs on the subcontinent, both in the Indian press and at home.
Still, Napier persevered. He retained what worked in Sindhi law and custom but ardently reformed that which he found wanting. He sought to enforce murder as a capital crime, in other words as something which could not be ‘bought out of’, as was customary in Indian justice. The ‘honour killing’ of women too was to be recognised as murder and the statutes against it reinforced. Troops were forbidden from plundering; abusive landlords were, without too much hidebound procedural squeamishness, dealt with severely; infanticide was outlawed; and slaves were emancipated, with their owners uncompensated, unlike in the rest of the Empire. Suttee was prohibited and in a final picturesque flourish, Indian peacocks were solemnly protected by law, just as English swans were at home. Napier remarked:
This burning of widows is your custom, prepare the funeral pyre. But my nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to our national customs!
This was Napier’s imperialism, moral, liberal, just and implacable. This was the good that not merely could be done with power but the good which must be done, in order to justify possessing that power.
Napier’s quest was to pull Sindh out of the feudalism he saw as being responsible for the starvation and squalor which was visible to every British official. Specifically, his plan was to encourage local notables to reject their previous role as armed chieftains and embrace a new role as improving resident landlords. Here Napier’s relative lack of local expertise told, with negative consequences for his policy of moral intervention. He confirmed the rights and privileges of the jagirdars, that class immediately below the more princely amirs. His decision, however, was based on a degree of ignorance, for these jagirdars were not as he supposed them to be. They were not as greater gentry on the European model but were military holders of feudal land rights whose privileges flowed from a medieval past. Moreover, their bailiwicks were temporary appointments. They were not districts they were born into, or knew and loved, and this in turn meant they were not necessarily predisposed to invest in them for the long term. Worst of all, when bearing in mind Napier’s views of the absentee landlord class in Ireland, the jagirdars habitually were not even resident in the vast estates the British in effect had given to them. Perhaps the closest parallel is the Russian oligarchs who happened to be well-placed bureaucrats at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and who in consequence reaped vast private rewards from public property.
For this was the key thing to understand about the land bestowed by Napier. It was effectively freehold public property given away to a landlord class he had himself created. Worst of all, in building this new social order, the problems of which bedevil Pakistan to this day, Napier inadvertently also created a disaster. He caused the formation of a landless peasantry on the Irish pattern where previously there had been a caste of peasant-proprietors who may not have been wealthy and who sometimes were desperately poor but who were at least secure in their land tenure. This situation underscores the brutal and inescapable fact that in Sindh Napier was out of his depth.
In addition, Napier’s rule also suffered owing to the fact that, palpably over-worked though he was, he also chronically under-delegated. The precepts of rational administration had not caught up with his private office. One of his earliest and most distinguished successors in Sindh, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, took a dim view of the quality of Napier’s civil administration. In Frere’s expert judgement, Napier’s governance had lacked uniformity and coordination. Yet honest government did have its own rewards. Starvation retreated in Sindh, the province recording its first grain surplus, and exports to Britain duly got underway. As the new administration bedded down, there was a general atmosphere of peace, for Napier was as keen as ever to avoid civilian casualties.
In 1848, Napier resigned his post on grounds of ill health and retired, or so he thought, to England. Travelling home in the leisurely fashion befitting an honoured British official, Napier saw first-hand in Europe some of the events of the revolutionary year of 1848. It was almost as if the activities in this Year of Revolutions had been got up specifically to please him, so suitable were they for this viewing. ‘Great events,’ as he remarked approvingly, ‘have been succeeding each other like flashes of lightning. Tyranny has got such a shake as has taught our Rulers in this world that the people they have misgoverned will bear these things no longer. I am delighted at this tolerably broad hint.’
But India had not yet finished with Charles Napier. He had barely returned to England when events on the subcontinent demanded his immediate return. The Second Anglo-Sikh War was looming, with at stake the very thing that Sindh had been occupied to secure, not the opium trade but the route to the strategically vital Punjab region. With the Indian military establishment reckoned entirely inadequate to the task, The Times began a vigorous public campaign to have Napier returned to India to sort everything out. A public clamour grew and now the politicians joined in. Supposedly when asked for three names for the job, the aged Wellington replied: ‘Sir Charles Napier. Sir Charles Napier. Sir Charles Napier.’ Old, aged and in constant pain, Napier resisted the clamour, until eventually Wellington told him that if he didn’t go, he, the seventy-nine-year-old Iron Duke, would have to go instead.
Napier had Wellington’s not insubstantial support but there was much institutional resistance by Old India hands to the notion of Napier returning to the subcontinent. In London, for example, the Court of Directors (of the East India Company) manoeuvred to keep the new Commander-in-Chief off the Supreme Council of India but fate intervened to calm Napi
er’s role in India, for even before his return the war against the Sikhs had been won. Turning up at Calcutta in 1849 in time for the victory service, Napier was on hand to see the Punjab annexed, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond given to Queen Victoria in recognition of a great victory, ready for its display at the Great Exhibition two years later.
Napier would happily have returned immediately to England but as the Marquess of Dalhousie, newly appointed as Governor-General, was keen to have him stay on to cast a reforming eye on British India, Napier set about instituting reforms in the Army. Officers were obliged to learn native languages and pass tests to show that they had done so but Napier was undone by politicking above his head. He discovered that, with Dalhousie’s consent and encouragement, the rule of the Punjab was rapidly becoming despotic. Isolated rebellions were dealt with harshly, with homes burned and crops destroyed. Public opinion was turning against the British occupation.
The relationship between Dalhousie and Napier soured and eventually, as would happen so often between Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief in India, the two men became irretrievably estranged. They cut one another socially, briefed against one another in the avid British and Indian press and constantly sought to undermine the other in their respective spheres of authority. Reluctantly Wellington took the side of Dalhousie and Napier resigned. Napier would, perhaps, have the last laugh in this specific context but a bitter laugh. Dalhousie’s mismanagement of Indian affairs is widely seen as having led to the calamity of the Mutiny against the rule of the East India Company in 1857.
Thus Charles Napier left the India he had wished to serve in the interests of the poor and against those of the strong. Almost a decade previously, he had been unambiguous about precisely who these ‘strong’ were, and they were us:
[A] more base and cruel tyranny never wielded the power of a great nation. Our object in conquering India, the object of all our cruelties, was money – lucre … Every shilling [has] been picked out of blood, wiped, and put into the murderers’ pockets; but, wipe and wash the money as you will, the ‘damned spot’ will not ‘out’.
These were not the sentiments of the generality of men who became Commander-in-Chief, India, during the time of British rule.
*
There is something emblematic about the fact of Napier’s birth in Whitehall, the standard term today for the heart of government in Britain. It seems that he stands as the heroic model for what good, benevolent government ought to try to do, which is simply to be honest, systematic and well intentioned. His work on Cephalonia stands as a noble testament to this attitude, in that he saw weaknesses and he intervened decisively to replace them with strengths. The result is that his legacy on the island endures to this day both in built form and in a collective Anglophile memory in this place far from Britain. Napier’s policies on this island, indeed, can be taken as an example of what today is called ‘soft power’ at its most precise and effective.
In Sindh, however, the limits of this form of power can be seen, for it paid little heed to the intricacies and differences of Indian culture, thus disproving the theory that one size can fit all. It is, after all, the greatest irony of Napier’s professional life that while he saw the evils of inadequate land laws in Ireland, he actually created an inadequate land legislation in India, with enduring consequences. Napier’s intentions were always good, he was brave and fair. He opposed evil practices such as suttee. He deserves his place in the pantheon of heroes but that does not mean everything he tried succeeded. If that were the standard there would be no heroes.
Sleeman: Moral Purpose
Thuggee did not exist. It never existed.
No: it was merely the product of lurid Victorian sensationalism. It was a classic product of what we must call an ‘Orientalist’ mindset, by which is meant a wilfully disdainful and ignorant Western attitude towards all things Eastern. These Orientalists were capable of all kinds of wickedness in the form of tales, stories and accounts. Their intent being to criticise and patronise Eastern civilisations, to diminish them in the eyes of Western readers and consumers and in so doing to justify Western predation, exploitation, settlement and theft of land and assets. Hence, Thuggee was a concept that had to be dreamed up because Indian civilisation had to be labelled as violent, murderous and beyond the pale. If any country urgently required civilising, that country was India.
Enter the Thugs, the stranglers of India.
Thus runs the prevailing academic approach to the phenomenon of Thuggee and its untold thousands of victims. This contemporary approach, indeed, bears remarkable comparison to the attitude of complacency and collusion towards Thuggee, towards the act of Thuggery, which predominated among the civil servants who ran British-administered India in the first half of the nineteenth century. Why lift a finger, or a pen, to combat the actions of murderers and villains, when one could instead avert one’s eye, and rationalise them out of existence? It was so much easier to pretend that the phenomenon did not really exist or, if it did exist, that it was someone else’s problem.
In the end, as we shall see, these stranglers were defeated both by pen and by difficult and laborious work in the field. The individual who took up this great burden, who worked both pen and muscle, was the British soldier and administrator William Sleeman (8 August 1788–10 February 1856). His long residency in India afforded him the deep insights necessary to understand the complexities of culture and society on the subcontinent. It also enabled him to look clearly and frankly at the weaknesses of his adopted home. This chapter aims to tell a story of graft, endurance and honesty, to show how the moral integrity and everyday administrative zeal of one Victorian helped to lift a curse from Indian society.
This is a story of redemption.
*
William Sleeman was almost a prototype Victorian in that the greater part of his mission was accomplished before Victoria came to the throne but his success exemplified that great, if unsung, Victorian virtue of sound, strong administration. Indeed, he was a classic administrator. Such a phrase does not make the blood course with excitement in the veins and this is not the story of a colourful Flashman character, his life filled to the brim with wine, women and song. It is not even the story of the sort of passionate evangelism which was such a strong current in the Victorian era. Rather, Sleeman simply did his job, which was, as he understood it, to see justice being done in the interest of those who had been placed in his care. If this attitude had not necessarily prevailed prior to his arrival on the scene, so be it. He would set certain policies and structures and frameworks in place. Moreover, they would remain in place long after he had departed the scene. The tasks he accomplished would stay accomplished. This is the very idea of being a good Victorian.
If one aspect of Sleeman’s philosophy can be regarded as placing him apart from so many of his peers, it was that he, in common with his Indian contemporary Charles Napier, did not regard life in India as being cheap. He valued all life equally. This clear, uncomplicated attitude provided him with necessary ballast when a challenge otherwise beyond comprehension came hurtling in his direction. It meant that he was simply not willing to accept the status quo, if that status quo cried out to be altered. Life could not be permitted to trundle along in the same manner if it might be changed. In this, Sleeman was something of an example of a key Victorian characteristic. He did not understand and would not tolerate fatalism.
How fortunate, how providential, that such a man was on hand in the subcontinent to take a look at India in the round and to identify precisely those aspects of its life and character that must change, that must be swept away. For who would tolerate the phenomenon of Thuggee, when it might be exterminated? What man of morality could put up with such a cult, when the means existed to remove it from the face of India for ever?
*
The Sleemans were an old Cornish family whose gentility varied according to the teller of the tale. William was the fifth of eight children, seven boys and a girl, of Philip and Mary Sleeman of Stra
tton, a village on the north Cornish coast. Philip Sleeman was an excise inspector. His forebears had been deeply involved in the smuggling trade that had always prospered along this rocky and isolated stretch of coastline and his generation of aspiring Sleemans was, as can be well imagined, in continual reaction to their rather less respectable ancestors.
Sorrow and financial want soon descended upon the family. In 1799, when William was eleven, his brother Lewis was lost at sea. Three years later, Philip Sleeman died, thus depriving the family of an income that had been steady albeit slender. William now had to grow up fast and to assume that sense of responsibility and duty, so Victorian, that would mark his character for the rest of his life. He had in particular to renounce the dream he had nursed since childhood, of becoming an officer in the regular Army. In those days before professionalisation, officers purchased a commission. It would be decades before Gladstone’s first administration reformed this particular aspect of military life. Clearly, after Philip Sleeman’s death, the funds to effect such a purchase were entirely beyond the means of the family.
The other option, for the Sleemans as for so many British families in this era, was for William to look to India for his livelihood and specifically to throw his lot in with the East India Company. The appeal of such a move was obvious. The Company ran British India on behalf of the British government, a position it would maintain until its power was removed in the aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny, when the government imposed a form of direct rule on the subcontinent. Ruler and governor of this vast territory, the Company required a standing army, in fact three standing armies, and appointment to one of these armies meant a salary, in a part of the world where there were potentially fortunes to be made. Sleeman’s specific interest was in one of the several hundred Army cadetships on offer each year. Open entry and exams for these were still another half-century away and the Sleemans, though they were far from being a powerful family, did retain enough influence to have William gazetted an ensign in the army of the Bengal Presidency. In March 1809, William Sleeman sailed for India, arriving six months later. He never saw England again.
The Victorians Page 11