The Anarchy

by William Dalrymple

  After expending all the remaining gunpowder, Baillie tried to surrender and tied his handkerchief to his sword which he held aloft. He and his deputy, David Baird, both ordered their men to ground their arms; but straggling fire from some of his sepoys who had not heard the order meant that the Mysore cavalry disregarded the surrender and refused to give quarter. Instead the horsemen rode in and began to cut down the disarmed and defenceless troops; ‘a most shocking massacre ensued … It was in vain to ask for the quarter they offered readily enough, but cut you down the moment you laid down your arms.’118

  According to a lieutenant in the 73rd Highland Regiment, ‘The last and most awful struggle was marked by the clashing of arms and shields, the snorting and kicking of horses, the snapping of spears, the glistening of bloody swords, oaths and imprecations; concluded with the groans and cries of mutilated men, wounded horses tumbling to the ground amid dying soldiers, the hideous roaring of elephants as they trampled about and wielded their dreadful chains amongst both friends and foes.’

  Such as were saved from immediate death were so crowded together that it was only with difficulty they could stand; several were in a state of suffocation, while others from the weight of the dead bodies that had fallen upon them were fixed to the spot and therefore at the mercy of the enemy … Some were trampled under the feet of elephants, camels and horses, and those who were stripped of their clothing lay exposed to the scorching sun, without water and died a lingering and miserable death, becoming the prey to ravenous wild animals.119

  Out of eighty-six officers, thirty-six were killed, thirty-four were wounded and taken prisoner; only sixteen captured were unwounded. Baillie received a back and head wound, in addition to losing a leg. Baird received two sabre cuts on the head, a bullet in the thigh and a pike wound in the arm. His ADC and young cousin, James Dalrymple, received a severe back wound and ‘two cuts in my head’.* Around 200 prisoners were taken. Most of the rest of the force of 3,800 was annihilated.120

  The Mysore troops then began to strip the dead and dying, and looted what they could from the corpses. ‘They began by pulling the buttons of my coat which they took for silver,’ wrote the wounded John Baillie. ‘They then tore the knee buckles out of my breeches & the coat off my back. One of them putting the butt end of his firelock to the back of my neck pinned me to the ground with it whilst another tried to pull off my boots.’

  He got off one with difficulty and enraged I suppose at not being able to pull off the other, he gave me a cut on my right thigh that laid it open to the bone. Shortly after another fellow, passing by, wantonly thrust his sword into my other thigh … After they were gone, one of Haidar’s sepoys perceiving that I still lived, raised me up, placed me against a tree and gave me some water to drink.

  I lay there by an artillery man with his head shot off, with my face to the ground. By this time my wounds began to grow stiff, so that I was unable to move from the position I was in, or to defend myself from the swarms of flies which, getting into my wounds, seemed determined to suck the little blood that was left in me. I was covered with them from head to foot. It was a species of torture to the mind as well as to the body, keeping me continually in mind of my own helplessness.

  When I was beginning to give up all hopes of assistance, two Frenchmen looking out for those that were still alive, appeared in the avenue. I leaned upon one and was carried into their camp at 8 o’clock at night to the tent of the French surgeon. He had no other instruments than a knife, a pair of scissors and an iron spatula, and no other medicines than a large pot of ointment full of dirt and of the colour and consistence of hair oil; but they gave us half a bottle of arrack per day to wash our wounds which, though small the quantity amongst so many, was of infinite service to us. Our wounds were become very offensive: one officer who had received a bad cut across his ear had 26 maggots taken out of it by pouring a little arrack into it.121

  Eventually, Baillie was brought before Haidar strapped to a gun carriage and made to sit at his feet in a semicircle with the other survivors, as the Sultan rewarded his officers in proportion to the number of heads or corpses of European soldiers they produced. ‘Some had been dragged to his camp, so mangled and besmeared with blood and dust that they were unrecognisable; some had dropped speechless on the road and had been refused any water by their guards.’

  Prisoners were beaten with their guards’ rifles. Others were relieved from their excruciating tortures, which they endured by a succession of fainting fits, until, by total insensibility they finally eluded the persecution of their guards. The dismal fate of those around me, the dead bodies and distorted faces of the dying made me feel that I was also going to die shortly. As darkness came on, the horrors came with it: the groans of the dying, the ravages and howling of the jackals, coupled with the distant thunder and torrential rain.122

  The tables were being turned. It was now Company troops who learned what it meant to be defeated, to be taken prisoner, to be mistreated. Munro, whose failure to rescue Baillie had been a major factor in the disaster, and who on his return to Madras with what was left of his panic-stricken army, was jeered and hooted at in the streets, called the Battle of Pollilur ‘the severest blow that the English ever suffered in India’.123

  Worse was to follow. There were so many Company amputees that there were not enough Indian medical orderlies to bear them away from the front lines. Surgeon Thomas Davis wrote, ‘I have been as sparing of Limbs as possible’, but was compelled to remove many of them for lack of adequate medical supplies.124 Of the 7,000 prisoners Tipu captured in the course of the next few months of warfare against the Company, around 300 were forcibly circumcised, forcibly converted to Islam and given Muslim names and clothes. By the end of the year, one in five of all the British soldiers in India were held prisoner by Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam. Even more humiliatingly, several British regimental drummer boys were made to wear dresses – ghagra cholis – and entertain the court in the manner of nautch (dancing) girls.125

  At the end of ten years’ captivity, one of these prisoners, James Scurry, found that he had forgotten how to sit in a chair or use a knife and fork; his English was ‘broken and confused, having lost all its vernacular idiom’, his skin had darkened to the ‘swarthy complexion of Negroes’ and he found he actively disliked wearing European clothes.126

  This was the ultimate colonial nightmare, and in its most unpalatable form: the captive preferring the ways of his captors, the coloniser colonised.

  Two days after Pollilur, a special vessel was sent off from Madras to Calcutta to tell Fort William of the disaster. The news arrived on 20 September. When Warren Hastings heard of the catastrophe, he realised immediately what the defeat meant: ‘Our armies,’ he wrote to London, ‘which have been so long formed to habits of conquest, will not easily recover from the impression of the dreadful reverse, nor be brought to act with their former confidence under unsuccessful commanders.’127 Lord Macartney wrote home in a similar vein from Madras: ‘The Indians have less Terror of our Arms; we less Contempt for their opposition. Our future Advantages therefore are not to be calculated by past exploits.’128

  The Company – now more than £10 million* in debt and unable to pay its own salaries – was now faced by a combination of all the strongest powers in India, supported by the French.129 Privately Hastings imagined himself ‘on board a great leaky vessel, driving towards a Lee Shore with Shipwreck not to be avoided, except by a miracle’.130

  Few would disagree. Never had the Company’s position in India seemed so shaky. One early analysis of the defeat expressed surprise that the different Indian rivals of the Company did not take more advantage of the crucial opportunity Pollilur presented: ‘Had the French sent timely assistance to the enemy,’ he wrote, ‘as there was every reason to expect, and had the Mahratta states, instead of remaining quiet spectators … joined their confederate forces and acted with unanimity, there could not have been a doubt but the British must have been disp
ossessed of almost every settlement on the Peninsula. Had Haidar pursued his success after the defeat of Baillie considering the shattered and dispirited state of the rest of the army, there could scarcely have been a hope of it not falling, together with Fort St George, almost a defenceless prey into the hands of the enemy.’131 Fortunately for the Company, Haidar was determined to preserve his forces. He avoided any further decisive engagements and focused on harassing Company supply lines by launching hit-and-run raids with his cavalry. The Company kept its toehold in the south only by the lack of confidence and initiative shown by its adversaries, and the quick supply of reinforcements from Calcutta. Over the months to come, with a mixture of imaginatively wide-ranging military action and deft diplomacy, Hastings managed to break both the Triple Alliance and the unity of the Maratha Confederacy when, on 17 May 1782, he signed the Treaty of Salbai, a separate peace with the Maratha commandor Mahadji Scindia, who then became a British ally. For the Company’s enemies it was a major missed opportunity. In 1780, one last small push could have expelled the Company for good. Never again would such an opportunity present itself, and the failure to take further immediate offensive action was something that the durbars of both Pune and Mysore would later both bitterly come to regret.

  Elsewhere in the world, 1780 saw the British suffering other major reverses – and these were indeed followed through to their logical conclusion. In America, the Patriots had turned on the King, partly as a result of government’s attempts to sell the stockpiles of East India Company tea, onto which was slapped British taxes: the Boston Tea Party, which opened the American War of Independence by dumping 90,000 pounds of EIC tea, worth £9,659 (over £1 million today), in Boston harbour, was in part provoked by fears that the Company might now be let loose on the thirteen colonies, much as it had been in Bengal.

  One Patriot writer, John Dickinson, feared that the EIC, having plundered India, was now ‘casting their eyes on America as a new theatre whereon to exercise their talents of rapine, oppression and cruelty …’132 Dickinson described the tea as ‘accursed Trash’, and compared the prospect of oppression by the corrupt East India Company in America to being ‘devoured by Rats’. This ‘almost bankrupt Company’, he said, having been occupied in ‘corrupting their Country’, and wreaking ‘the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions and Monopolies’ in Bengal, now wished to do the same in America. ‘But thank GOD, we are not Sea Poys, nor Marattas.’ The American watchmen on their rounds, he said, should be instructed to ‘call out every night, past Twelve o’Clock, “Beware of the East India Company.”’133

  After a horrendous war, the Patriots managed to see off the government troops sent to impose the tea tax. Even as Haidar was pursuing a terrified Munro back to Madras, British forces in America were already on their way to the final defeat by Washington at Yorktown, and the subsequent final surrender of British forces in America in October the following year. There was a growing sensation that everywhere the British Empire was in the process of falling apart. In Parliament, a year later, one MP noted that ‘in Europe we have lost Minorca, in America 13 provinces, and the two Pensacolas; in the West Indies, Tobago; and some settlements in Africa’.134 ‘The British Empire,’ wrote Edmund Burke, ‘is tottering to its foundation.’135

  Soon Parliament was publishing a six-volume report into these failures. ‘The British purchase on India,’ one senior Company military officer told Parliament, ‘is more imaginary than real, to hold that vast territory in subjection with such a disparity of numbers. I fear the Indians will soon find out that we are but men like themselves.’136

  Horace Walpole, as usual, put it more succinctly: ‘India and America’, he wrote, ‘are alike escaping.’137

  * £390,000 today.

  * £65 today.

  * £2,310 million today.

  * The modern equivalences of these sums are: 1,000 rupees = £13,000; £60,000 = over £6 million.

  * Nearly £58 million today.

  * The modern equivalences of these sums are: £747,195 = £78,455,475; £1.5 million = £157 million; £1 million = £100 million; £3 million = £300 million.

  * £400,000 = £42 million; £300,000 = £31 million; £200,000 = £21 million; £1.6 million = £168 million; £9 million = £945 million; £5 million = £525 million; £1 million = £105 million.

  ** £577 million today.

  * £147 million today.

  ** £210 million today.

  * Over £93 million today.

  * £147 million today.

  * Captain James Stewart was among those killed on 4 January 1779 near Karle, when he shinned up a tree to see where the Maratha army was and was promptly shot dead by a Maratha marksman.Two hundred years later Ishtur Phakda, as he is now known around Karle, has become a local Tantric deity, to whom the local police – among others – offer weekly blood sacrifice. The shrine to his head, which at some point seems to have become detatched from his body, is in the local police station, just beyond the cells. If the station chief ignores him, according to the officer on duty, Ishtur Phakda ‘gives him a good slap’. With many thanks to the great historian of the Marathas, Uday S. Kulkarni, who not only told me this story, but took me on a prolonged search for the obelisk marking the spot of his death, a second shrine – covered in goat’s blood – where his body lies, and the third to his head in the local Wadgaon police lockup.

  * The building still stands in Alipore, a few minutes’ walk from the Taj Bengal Hotel, and now houses the National Library of India.

  * When Sir David Baird’s Scottish mother heard that her son had been captured by Tipu, and that the prisoners had been led away handcuffed two by two, she remarked, ‘I pity the man who was chained to oor Davie.’ Quoted by Denys Forrest in Tiger of Mysore: The Life and Death of Tipu Sultan, London, 1970, p. 48. A letter of James Dalrymple to his father, Sir William Dalrymple, smuggled out of the prison of Seringapatam, survives in the India Office. According to a note written by James’s Anglo-Indian grandson, G. Wemyss Dalrymple, ‘The paper was rolled up, and put into a quill, then passed into the person of a native, and so brought into the prison. With the same quill, he wrote the letter, the ink was solid Indian ink, and was also in the quill, and the letter was brought out of the prison, by the same native in the same manner.’ BL, OIOC, Eur Mss, E 330.

  * £1,000 million today.

  7

  The Desolation of Delhi

  On the morning of 12 April 1771, to a deafening fanfare of long-necked trumpets and the steady roll of camel-borne nagara drums, Shah Alam mounted his richly caparisoned elephant and set off through the vaulted sandstone gateway of the fort of Allahabad.

  After an exile of more than twelve years, the Emperor was heading home. It was not going to be an easy journey. Shah Alam’s route would take him through provinces which had long thrown off Mughal authority and there was every reason to fear that his enemies could attempt to capture, co-opt or even assassinate him. Moreover, his ultimate destination, the burned-out Mughal capital of Delhi, was further being reduced to ruins by rival Afghan and Maratha armies.

  But the Emperor was not coming unprepared: following him were 16,000 of his newly raised troops and followers. A Mughal painting survives, showing the line of march: a long column of troops snakes in wide, serpentine meanders along the banks of the Yamuna, through a fertile landscape. At the front of the procession are the musicians. Then follow the macemen and the bearers of Mughal insignia – the imperial umbrellas, the golden mahi maratib fish standard, the face of a rayed sun and a Hand of Fatima, all raised on gilt staffs from which trail red silken streamers. Then comes the Emperor himself, high on his elephant and hedged around by a bodyguard armed with a thicket of spears.

  The imperial princes are next, carried on a line of elephants with saffron headcloths, each embroidered with the Emperor’s insignia. They are followed by the many women of the imperial harem in their covered carriages; then the heavy siege guns, dragged by foursomes of elephants. Behind, the main body of the army stre
tches off as far as the eye can see. The different cohorts of troops are divided into distinct battalions of sepoy infantry, cavalry, artillery and the camel corps with their swivel guns, each led by an elephant-mounted officer sitting high in a domed howdah. The expedition processes along the banks of the river, escorted by gilded royal barges, and heads on through woods and meadows, past islands dotted with temples and small towns whose skylines are punctuated with minarets.1

  The moment was recorded, for it marked what was recognised, even at the time, as a crucial turning point in the politics of eighteenth-century India. Shah Alam had now finally given up on the Company ever honouring its many promises to give him an army, or even just an armed escort, to help him reconquer his capital. If the Company would not help him then he would have to look for new allies – and this, by default, meant his ancestral enemies, the Marathas. But whatever the dangers, the Emperor was determined to gamble everything in the hope of regaining his rightful place on the Peacock Throne of his ancestors.2

  When they belatedly learned of the Emperor’s plans, successive anxious Company officials in Calcutta wrote to Shah Alam that they ‘could not in any way countenance His Majesty’s impolitic enterprise’, and that they did not ‘think the present period opportune for so great and hazardous an undertaking, when disturbances are rife throughout the Empire’.3 ‘His Majesty should know that he has set himself a formidable task. If he regards the Marathas as friends he is greatly mistaken, since they are notoriously fickle and untrustworthy.’ ‘They will take pleasure in His Majesty’s distress and the object of their intended loyalty is only to get you into their clutches in order to use your name to reach their own ends.’4