The Nizam's Daughters

by Mallinson, Allan

  ‘You had better search the well, Mr Templer,’ said the collector as he recovered himself, seeing the troop coming into the village.

  Before it occurred to Hervey why the well should be searched, one of the havildars revealed why. ‘It is full of bodies, sahib,’ he called.

  Hervey, Templer and the native officers doubled over to him, covering their noses as they did so. The well was large, twenty feet across, with a three-foot wall, and it was deep. There were many bodies (perhaps fifty – it was difficult to estimate), and as far as Hervey could tell, peering into its darkness, most – perhaps all – were women. Those uppermost in the tangled mound were naked.

  ‘They were the ones who either had not the time or the courage to jump for themselves,’ said the collector.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Hervey, beginning to sicken at both the sight and the stench.

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ enquired the collector, with a mild challenge in his voice. ‘We roll up our bloody sleeves and get them out!’

  The officers took turns to descend to the bottom of the well, to where the ordure was most nauseous, and tied ropes round each body, the sepoys hauling them to the surface. For over three hours they laboured thus, until the remains of every one of forty-seven women and girls – and eleven infants – were brought into the heat of the mid-morning sun. Meanwhile, the other sepoys had collected the bodies of a dozen men, mostly aged, and had lain them in the shade of the village’s banyan. Now they began building a massive pyre on which they might all be cremated according to the rites of Vishnu.

  ‘The village men would have been in the fields, by the look of things,’ said the collector, ‘and there they will have hid since. We shall not be able to tempt them in for a day or so.’

  Hervey simply nodded.

  The collector lowered his voice, until it had almost a note of despair. ‘This is an especially brutal raid. The women are always susceptible, but they are by no means always defiled, nor the men killed if they offer no resistance.’

  ‘It’s the mutilation and . . . the brutishness, the method of their violation,’ said Hervey, matching his tone.

  The collector nodded grimly. ‘If I were to suppose what happened, I should say that the village was taken wholly by surprise – at about three o’clock yesterday. Some of the women would have screamed, gathered up their last-born and run at once to the well, throwing themselves in within sight of the marauders. This would have excited the worst of them – a freebooting band among freebooters without what passes for the discipline of some of the Pindaree cohorts. Some of the old men would have made a show of protecting the women and been cut down for their trouble. The first blood would have excited the appetite for more, until there was a frenzy of rape and slaughter. You are dealing with a savagery here, Captain Hervey, the like of which you would find hard to imagine even in your battles in Spain. I pray this cohort we surprised is not typical of what we may expect.’

  ‘And how many rupees might the Pindarees have supposed a village such as this would render up?’ asked Hervey incredulously.

  ‘Just so, just so,’ the collector replied, shaking his head again. ‘We are, as a rule, spared these sights in the Company’s territories, and half of me wishes to believe that this incursion was but a misjudgement.However, I fear this and the earlier forays have been somehow to test our strength, and that we shall see more unless we do something. Yet I can’t suppose that anything which is done in a small way shall have any effect. No, it must be something undertaken on a bigger scale – encompassing the whole of the country. I hold the extirpation of the Pindaree menace to be the greatest, and most pressing, necessity of the Company. And yet the Court of Directors in London will have no truck with it.’

  Cornet Templer told off a jemadar’s patrol to follow the Pindaree spoor, then came up and saluted. ‘Do you have any further orders, sir?’

  ‘No, Mr Templer, I think not. How many did we account for in all?’

  ‘Villagers, sir, or Pindarees?’

  ‘The latter.’

  ‘Seventy, not fewer.’

  The collector nodded approvingly, even though a prisoner or two would have been helpful. ‘You showed great address, Mr Templer. I shall commend your conduct this day to Fort St George.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ replied Templer, flatly, for there was too much otherwise to dull any satisfaction with his exertions.

  The jemadar’s patrol left with little expectation of catching any more of the fleeing Pindarees. If they could trace their route of withdrawal from the Circars it would at least indicate something of what freedom of movement they enjoyed in the neighbouring states. Meanwhile, all that the remainder of the troop could do was wait in the hope that some of the ryots would return to the village, and that they would be able to say something which might help in any subsequent encounter. It was a mournful bivouac that night.

  The first hour of daylight the following morning was given over to what Hervey’s regiment called ‘interior economy’. Saddles, bridles and other tackling were laid out with great precision for the scrutiny of Cornet Templer and Subedar Thangraj. And after inspecting every piece of leather they went to the horses with the farrier-naik. Hervey walked with the collector through the lines of country-breds, recalling as if yesterday the condition of his own regiment in Spain after a similar march.

  ‘What do you think of them, Captain Hervey?’ asked Somervile.

  Hervey replied that he found them very much better than he had been led to believe, that they compared very favourably indeed with the remounts they were receiving towards the end of the campaign in the Peninsula.

  ‘The Company of late has been much exercised by the need of good horses. Left to itself, India breeds indifferent mounts, though there are a dozen or so native breeds. Seven or eight years ago – before my time here – the directors engaged a distinguished London veterinarian – a Mr Moorcroft. Do you know the name?’

  Hervey said he had some notion of it.

  ‘It was he who began the reform of the Company’s stud department. And great work he has done, too. But much buying is still, perforce, in the hands of regimental purchasing officers.’

  ‘Then I perceive that the Madras Cavalry’s purchasing officer has an affinity for Arabs.’

  ‘You would be right,’ replied the collector, smiling. ‘Mr Blacker has bought many hundreds of pure Kehilans, and is most adept at putting them to native mares.’

  ‘You are very evidently an apostle of the breed,’ Hervey smiled back, conscious of the energy of the little horse the collector rode, though he had not yet become accustomed to its curious lines.

  ‘Yes, indeed I am. See how full-chested those troopers are, how broad across the loins, and how round-sided and deep-barrelled they are. You will not see one horse in ten in England as short-limbed yet with such qualities. That chest is what gives the Kehilan his endurance. You would scarcely ever be able to exhaust him, unless unreasonably. And he can live on air if needs be. The only inconvenience I perceive is that the entire needs considerably more bleeding than does an English stallion, and in this country he is more prone to miasmic fevers. You will see the farrier bleed as many this morning as he finds in need of a new shoe.’

  Hervey expressed himself surprised at the number of entires generally. ‘I’m afraid we find them altogether too untractable. We cannot pick and choose our remounts whilst on campaign, and they must stand side by side with the mares.’

  The collector understood. ‘But there is none so brave as a stallion. I would not wish to surrender such an advantage were I a military man.’

  Hervey smiled. He had to acknowledge the point. Though, as he explained, when considering the normal method of operation of European cavalry – in squadrons, knee-to-knee – some concession had to be made to the need for tractability.

  ‘But if you are pleased by what you see with our native regular cavalry, Captain Hervey,’ the collector added, ‘then you should see our silladar regiments.’


  Hervey paused while he searched his mind for the meaning of the Urdu. ‘I do not know this word,’ he concluded.

  ‘A Maratha corruption of the pure Persian silahadar,’ said the collector quite unaffectedly, for he had studied both languages. ‘It means simply a soldier bearing arms, or wearing armour. In this case it refers most approximately to British yeomanry, except that they are more or less permanently embodied – and, I hazard, a great deal more effective. Each man provides his own horse and all necessities, except firearm and ammunition. And for his services he receives thirty rupees a month. We shall soon have one such regiment on the Madras establishment – one of Colonel Skinner’s Horse. They are at present in the north of the Circars where the first Pindaree band struck earlier this year. You would, I believe, approve of them!’

  Hervey was intent on learning more. What, for instance, impelled a sowar to hazard his horse if this were the means of his livelihood? But Cornet Templer reported that the troop was ready to resume, and the collector was keen for the off. The jemadar’s patrol had already sent word that the marauders were a halfday’s forced march ahead of them and had crossed into the Rajah of Chintal’s territory. They would remain on the border to watch for a day and then rejoin. Hervey asked if Chintal was where they would take refuge, but the collector thought not. They would plunder the place and pass through with as much impunity as they had here, for the rajah’s forces were meagre and ineffectual. But Somervile wished nevertheless for a reconnaissance along a fair length of the border to be sure there was no doubling back, and so he asked to be left with an escort to conclude his business with the village – a business which, Hervey soon learned, was impelled by humanity rather than any actuarial concern of the Company’s – and pressed Templer to make a good show along the border en route for home.

  Templer was about to leave, and Hervey and Locke with him, when there came another of what Somervile called India’s infinite curiosities. A solitary trail of dust, not very high, first revealed the presence on the road from the east. One by one the soldiers of the patrol turned to watch, until all were fixed on the little bullock cart as it made its slow way towards them. Two of the thinnest-looking oxen Hervey had seen, yoked side by side and standing no higher at the shoulder than Jessye as a yearling, plodded patiently before the hackery, their cream-coloured tails swaying with the movement of their quarters but otherwise still, not yet needed for relief from the plague of flies that would beset them in an hour or so. And in the cart itself sat a shrivelled little figure, sun-hatted, smiling. Without any apparent urging, the oxen made for the shade of a banyan at the edge of the village, and there they stopped. The little man took off his hat and bowed his head.

  Hervey looked quizzically at the collector.

  ‘The priest,’ explained Somervile.

  ‘Ah,’ said Hervey. ‘I had imagined someone more . . .’

  ‘The Catholic priest, I mean.’

  ‘Catholic priest? I had not imagined—’

  ‘Well, do not suppose the roots are as deep as St Thomas would have wished. In these villages it is but a superficial creed – to the unread ryots merely an intelligible alternative to unintelligible Hindoo. The Virgin Mary is to them but a beneficent goddess, and the transition from Krishna to Christ is one which offers no material difficulty to their limited faculties.’

  It seemed a harsh judgement, but it was said with kindness. ‘Where does he come from?’

  ‘Who knows?’ shrugged Somervile. ‘The cart is his travelling residence, but beyond that . . . Rajahmundry perhaps? But priests were ministering here before the French came. And he will go on ministering and hoping for the best until he dies. And then a few sticks with rags tied to them will decorate his grave, and he will rank as a departed fakir or yogi.’

  The collector seemed full of admiration. Hervey would never have thought it.

  ‘Oh, mistake me not, sir. I do not hold with any faith, but I cannot but be moved by the devotion of these bullock-cart priests – and the constancy of their flock by return. There are easier things to be in India than a native Christian.’

  The noise was like that which the greenhead recruit makes when, wagered by the sweats that he cannot get a clear note from a bugle, he blows hard with full lungs and open lips in a terrible, straining distress-call. Except that no human lungs could blow so long and so loud.

  ‘Elephant, sahib,’ said Subedar Thangraj, seeing Hervey’s astonished look. ‘Elephant very angry, very not-content.’

  Hervey had somehow supposed elephants to be entirely mute. There had been no reason to suppose otherwise. The stuffed specimen in Mr Bullock’s Museum of Natural and Artificial Curiosities, at No. 22 Piccadilly, had engaged him a full quarter of an hour when he had visited with d’Arcey Jessope two years before, but had, naturally, revealed nothing of its stentorian powers. And those living beasts that tramped, with the greatest docility, along the thoroughfares of Madras and Guntoor had likewise made not a sound. He now supposed they must bellow like cattle, and was suspicious at first of the subedar’s assurance that the noise came, indeed, trumpet-like from the animal’s trunk. Johnson had once assured him that an elephant was able to prospect for precious stones in the ground, and Lieutenant Locke now insisted, even more improbably, that elephants were able to throw stones with great accuracy at a mark.

  The Sukri river, explained Templer, was the border between the princely state of Chintal and the Northern Circars, and there was held to be common title to its waters. Thus it was not evident whence the distressed elephant, thrashing knee-deep at the edge of the river with its attendants, had come.

  ‘Elephant fussunded, sahib,’ concluded Subedar Thangraj.

  Hervey looked at Templer, to whom the problem did not seem novel. ‘Mud or quicksand it will be,’ said the cornet. ‘The great beast will have sunk and struggled, and now he will be well and truly stuck.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ asked Hervey, assuming they must do something.

  ‘I’ve seen a gaur caught this way. I fear there’s nothing we can do that is not already being done,’ he replied, indicating the ropes on which the attendants were pulling as the elephant continued its trumpeting as loud as before, and its two companions on the far bank added to the uproar.

  ‘Save me, O God: for the waters are come in, even unto my soul.’

  Cornet Templer looked at him strangely.

  ‘Psalm Sixty-nine,’ explained Hervey, with something between a smile and a grimace. ‘ “I stick fast in the deep mire, where no ground is: I am come into deep waters, so that the floods run over me.” ’

  ‘And does the psalmist have any notion of how the elephant may be delivered from the mire, sir?’ asked Templer, smiling too.

  Hervey racked his brain for the rest of the psalm – one of the longer ones. ‘ “As for me, when I am poor and in heaviness: thy help, O God, shall lift me up.” ’

  ‘Then we had better go and do God’s work down there, sir,’ laughed Templer. ‘Subedar sahib – shoulders to it!’

  The attendants had cut grass and branches from the few trees thereabouts, and had thrown them for the elephant to tread on. But it had been no use. They even tore planks from a ferry moored nearby and put them in reach of his trunk, but he seized each one and angrily threw it aside.

  ‘Elephant will tear off his mahout to step on, sahib, if he has need,’ said the subedar; ‘it is most strange he will not take planks. Better for stay clear, sahib.’

  The attendants – a dozen or more – were now hitching the ropes to the two other elephants in a last bid to haul out the stricken animal.

  ‘That will cut through to the bone, surely,’ said Hervey, seeing them only manage to secure a line round one leg. He sprang from the saddle, unable to remain a spectator any longer – even if he had no other ideas.

  Templer and the subedar dismounted too. ‘I think we could wedge some of those planks under his belly to prevent his sinking any further,’ said the cornet.

  Subedar Thangra
j barked orders to the attendants and the patrol. He had advised they kept their distance, but now that his cornet had decided on this course of action he would direct the operation with all the vigour the sahibs would expect. Meanwhile, Templer and Hervey removed their boots and jackets to cross the quicksand.

  The attendants spoke a dialect unintelligible even to the subedar, but several understood Hervey’s Urdu and in a few minutes, with the help of half a dozen sepoys, they succeeded in getting up a platform around the beast, with wedging planks angled under its great bulk. By now, however, the elephant had sunk so deep that all but a part of his back and head were under the sand. He could no longer struggle, only wave his trunk in the air and trumpet feebly – though the clamour of the attendants and the calls of the other two elephants were as strong as before.

  ‘Sahib, elephant will soon go under quicksand. Better for we shoot him now and take him from his misery,’ said the subedar.

  When Templer put this to the attendants they howled in protest and waved their hands about in horror. It was only then that Hervey, who had been standing on the platform for some minutes, dismayed that he could not think of any solution to the worsening problem, thought that he might have an answer. ‘Great heavens!’ he exclaimed, as it occurred to him. ‘Templer, do you remember your Ovid?’

  Cornet Templer was taken aback.

  ‘Come, man: how did Hercules cleanse the Augean stables?’

  Templer thought a moment. ‘He diverted the river through them. But what—’

  Hervey did not let him finish. ‘See, there’s a bend in the river yonder,’ he said, pointing upstream; ‘we can cut a channel and let in water. It should loosen the quicksand and we might then be able to get him out – that, or it will be over quickly for the wretched beast.’