Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  It was an approach, to be sure, that had lately been strained to the breaking point on the western frontier of British India. Less than a month had passed since forty thousand Sikhs crossed into Company territory on December 11, 1845. Trained by French and Italian generals, they constituted the only rival military power that remained on the subcontinent to challenge the British. Their kingdom of the Punjab, up to three hundred miles across, lay between the Sutlej and the Indus, rising from dusty alluvial plains to the forested hills and mountains of Kashmir. It was a rich and populous country, but its ongoing state, six years after the death of Ranjit Singh, the “Lion of the Punjab,” was one of anarchy.

  Enthroned in Lahore was a boy king with a conniving queen mother, in league with a treacherous prime minister and at odds with a large, turbulent army, run by committees addicted to intrigue. Some senior officers played at kingmaking; others talked treason with the British. Following the demise of her elderly husband, Rani Jindan Kaur schemed to protect the birthright of her son Duleep, whose legitimacy as Ranjit Singh’s heir was doubted by most of the population and, more worryingly, by powerful factions in the army. A foreign war, she decided, would best relieve the pressure.

  A case could certainly be made for a preemptive assault on the British. The number of Company troops on the Sutlej frontier had shot up from twenty-five hundred men in 1838 to fourteen thousand in 1845. Most were added by Lord Ellenborough. After the annexations of Sindh and Gwalior to the south and east, his assurances to the Sikh administration of peaceful intentions were naturally received with skepticism.

  “We have no right to seize Sind,” said Charles Napier, the general sent to quell the insurrection there, “yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful and humane piece of rascality it will be.”

  Suspicion only increased when word reached Lahore that Henry Hardinge, Ellenborough’s brother-in-law and successor as governor general, was en route with his staff to the frontier outpost of Ferozepore, less than fifty miles from the Sikh capital. Unlike Ellenborough, Hardinge was a professional soldier—he had lost a hand while serving under Wellington in the Waterloo campaign—and thus a plausible commander in chief of an invasion force.

  The rani, in concert with her prime minister and lover Lal Singh, had persuaded the army that it was better to seize the initiative and invade first. Even as Nigel sat talking with H—— in the dak bungalow, Henry Hardinge was reeling at Ferozepore from a pair of battles that had either killed or severely wounded a thousand troops and all but two officers of the general staff. At the second, one of the hardest-fought in the history of British arms, only the mysterious failure of Sikh reinforcements to attack the weakened Company army prevented its annihilation. Told on the battlefield that the Sikhs were withdrawing, Hardinge replied, “Another such victory and we are undone!”

  Ignorant of the present crisis, Nigel saw the subjugation of the Sikhs as a foregone conclusion. The momentum that unrolled the carpet of colonial control across the entire Punjab Plain was regarded by the Company rank and file as an unstoppable force of history, the British equivalent of the American doctrine proclaimed in a New York newspaper on December 27, 1845, a day or two before he left Patna for Ghazipur: “the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent.”

  But what happened next?

  Would they readily accept “the superior wisdom of the Capital”?

  Or would they want to talk about it?

  And if Calcutta refused to talk about it, what then?

  If you couldn’t trade with people until you got to know them, how then might you rule them, through one-size-fits-all decisions made a thousand miles away?

  The difficulty seemed plain enough to Nigel in the mellow circle of lamplight in the homely lodge on the road to Ghazipur. But in his letter home, he supposed rather forlornly that everyone at Government House would dismiss it as claptrap and nonsense. The idea that the fate of the empire depended on paying close attention to the welfare and wishes of its inhabitants was as out of date as a tricorn hat. He doubted that anyone of importance had espoused such a policy in India for at least fifty years.

  In this, he was about to discover, he was very much mistaken.

  13

  * * *

  A Christian Soldier

  SOON AFTER MAJOR Henry Montgomery Lawrence rode into Ghazipur on January 10, 1846, Nigel joined the civilians who gathered round him at the home of the local collector. Some would dine out for years on the story of their evening in the presence of a legend. Lawrence is regarded today as one of the heroes of empire. An island in the Indian Ocean and a town in New Zealand are named after him, as are the prestigious Lawrence Schools in Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and the Punjab, which he founded for the education of the children of European soldiers serving in India. But when Nigel first met him at Ghazipur, his star burned no brighter than a score of others in the colonial firmament. Lawrence drew a crowd not because of who he was, but because of where he came from. He had served since 1843 as British resident in the mountain kingdom of Nepal, homeland of the Gurkhas, the stalwart soldiers now famed for their mercenary service in conflicts all around the world. With thousands of those reputedly ferocious fighters in worrying proximity to Ghazipur, just a few days’ march from Nepalese territory, everyone wanted to know if they would take their cue from the Sikhs and cross the border.

  Lawrence, a thirty-nine-year-old cavalry officer who had made a name for himself in forcing the Khyber Pass with the Army of Retribution, told his listeners that he saw the Gurkhas as a formidable defensive force in their own country, but insignificant invaders. “The danger of the Ghorka troops he thought much exaggerated by people in the plains,” Nigel wrote in a reassuring letter to his parents, adding that in any case he would shortly return to Patna, where the garrison was “large and very staunch.”

  About the likelihood of a Gurkha offensive, however, Lawrence held his tongue. A letter written a few days earlier by his wife and posted from Segowlee, on the Nepalese frontier, revealed his concern about “disaffection to a large extent” among certain regiments of Company troops, with “presents” known to be reaching Nepal from the mutinous units. But he probably saw no point in alarming the small clutch of civil servants based in Ghazipur.

  He surprised them nonetheless with his views on the future of the Punjab. Once the Sikhs were subdued, he said, they would not be punished. Annexation of their territory, contrary to expectations of the Company rank and file, was not on the cards.

  “He maintained, to some astonishment, that such a course was unnecessary and unwise,” wrote Nigel afterwards. “He thought it better to re-order the Sikh government and emplace a resident in Lahore, under whose guidance the energies of the people might be turned towards improvement of their welfare, rather than provoking hostilities whose certain outcome would be their further suffering, and greater ruin.”

  Lawrence was en route to the camp outside Ferozepore where Governor General Henry Hardinge was reorganizing his command in the aftermath of the Pyrrhic victory over the Sikhs, which had killed most of his officers. Among the fallen was Major George Broadfoot, political agent for the Punjab, and Hardinge had summoned Lawrence to take his place. Three years before, to Lawrence’s consternation, he had been passed over for the same position by Hardinge’s predecessor, Lord Ellenborough. Though his qualifications and his valor as an officer were beyond dispute, Lawrence’s conduct as civil administrator of Ferozepore district had raised eyebrows in Calcutta. Upon taking office, he had immediately challenged the status quo. High-handedness might have served in the past, he informed his subordinates, but it had got to stop:

  “More mischief has been done through the overbearing demeanour, the rude language, the haughty bearing, of many of the functionaries of India towards the natives than from almost any other cause.”

  Lawrence, who was born in Ceylon and had lived among Indians for most of his life, likewise wasted no time in deploring application of t
he term “niggers” to natives; his refusal to tolerate its use in his presence would cause bemusement in high places for the rest of his life. But his greatest quarrel concerned the very nature of the revenue officer’s work in India. “At least nine tenths of his time,” Lawrence wrote, ought to be given over not to the collection of taxes but to “measures which may raise the status and add to the happiness of the people.”

  Such a pronouncement could only antagonize Ellenborough, who had never factored “the happiness of the people” into the equation of governance at all. He not only vetoed Lawrence’s promotion but overlooked him in distributing military honors for the Afghan War. Though his service entitled him to the distinction of Companion of the Bath, Lawrence failed to receive it, adding insult to his sense of injury. Ellenborough regretfully wrote to inform him that the matter was out of his hands. But he offered what he called “ample proof” of his estimation for Lawrence with a new appointment, as British resident at the court of Nepal.

  The position was well salaried. It carried with it plenipotentiary powers. But it required no great inductive leap for Lawrence to recognize the position for what it really was. The public work of the resident there, wrote his biographer, consisted of “studiously doing nothing.” He was ordered by Ellenborough to “abstain absolutely” from any interference in the kingdom’s internal affairs. The Kathmandu residency was exile, pure and simple.

  Just three Europeans—the resident, a surgeon, and an officer commanding their escort—were permitted entry to the kingdom. In the beginning, at least, Lawrence would be deprived even of the company of his wife. Nepal, he was warned, was “a country where no white-faced woman had ever been seen.” Its rulers, moreover, were thought to believe that “the introduction of a foreign woman would be the downfall of their empire.” When Honoria Lawrence’s husband departed for Nepal, she remained behind in Lucknow with their five-year-old son, “awaiting the ultimate decision with no little trepidation.”

  She was devout but down-to-earth, a cousin of Henry’s from Ulster. He had courted her for nine years—mostly via correspondence—before pressing his suit at the age of thirty-one. On the eve of their wedding, she solemnly promised his sister Letitia that she would make it her mission to look after his soul. Wherever Henry went, she meant to follow.

  And so she did. Her grand-niece Maud Diver wrote that Honoria and her children—she would bear four, of whom two sons and one daughter survived—became “camp equipment, jolted in bullock carts and on the backs of camels, exposed to dust, sun, heat, cholera and malaria, moving always from tent to bungalow and back again, gypsies without a home, hearth beneath the stars.” Conditions improved when they settled into a fixed abode after Henry’s posting to Ferozepore, but not by much. There they lived in two “little pigeon holes” in a crumbling mud-and-brick fort, itself the only pukka building on a forbidding plain that Mrs. Lawrence described as “a wilderness of cacti, prickly scrub, sandy hillocks and the bleached bones of camels and bullocks.”

  She was a remarkable woman, independent of spirit and far less mindful of her exalted status as a memsahib than her contemporaries. (Most of whom, she privately maintained, were better off keeping to the larger civil stations; the Indian countryside was no place for “a lady who has nerves, a lady who shrinks from driving over rough and smooth, or riding through a jungle.”) Though “not beautiful in the ordinary acceptance of the term,” wrote one of her husband’s assistants, “a harmony, fervour, and intelligence breathed in her expression.”

  Accustomed to circumstances that no gentlewoman of the day was expected to endure, Honoria left it to functionaries in Calcutta to fret over the difficulties that awaited her if the Nepalese authorities chose to let down their guard. She felt certain that their “fears and misgivings” were exaggerated. None of them, after all, had firsthand knowledge of the country or its customs. If anything, she supposed that the leisurely pace of life in Kathmandu would prove something of a tonic, especially for her hardworking husband, who still suffered from the effects of cerebral malaria contracted during his service as an artillery officer in Burma. When he wrote that there would be no objection to her coming, she rejoiced in the onset of a heaven-sent holiday:

  “How delightfully snug we shall be! How much we shall read, and write, and talk, and think!” she responded from Lucknow. Soon enough, her husband confided in a letter to a friend that Honoria was right. What he still called his “exile” was turning out to be a blessing in disguise, so much of one that he would choose it over the job denied him by Lord Ellenborough.

  Nonetheless, he hastened to add, it was “not unpleasant to think that some people fancy I ought to have got charge of the Sikh duties.” Nor did his contentment prevent him from working diligently to reinforce their opinions. He had long harbored literary aspirations, and he soon learned of the founding of a review devoted entirely to Indian subjects by John William Kaye, a brother officer in the Bengal Artillery. Its target audience was the emerging English-educated Bengali middle class; its purpose, defined by Kaye in the Editor’s Statement, “simply to bring together such useful information, and propagate such sound opinions, relating to Indian affairs, as will, it is hoped, conduce, in some small measure, directly or indirectly, to the amelioration of the condition of the people.”

  Kaye himself called the Calcutta Review “a bold and seemingly a hopeless experiment,” one that he expected would “last out a few numbers and then die.” But it proved a success, one that he later credited “in no small measure” to the contributions of Henry Lawrence. “It was precisely the organ,” wrote Kaye, “for which he had long been wishing as a vehicle for the expression of his thoughts.”

  Lawrence promised to contribute to every number. His wife served as his editor. He never wrote well, but buried in the turgid prose of his lengthy papers on such topics as “The Sikhs and Their Country,” “Military Defence of our Indian Empire,” and “History of the Punjab” were cogent insights and provocative parallels:

  “The same causes operated for our first success in both India and Afghanistan; and the errors by which we lost the latter may any day deprive us of the former.”

  Gravest of all those errors, Lawrence argued, was the “Forward Policy,” which called for further expansion of British India to its “natural boundaries” to prevent Russia’s dominance of Western Asia from spreading to the subcontinent.

  In truth, he wrote, the chief danger to British rule was from within, not without. The enemy who could not reach them with his bayonets could touch them more fatally by rousing the distrust of their subjects. Earning and keeping the trust of the native population required treating them as partners, not subordinates. Their well-being ought to be the principal objective of the Government of India.

  His views naturally found favor with the Bengali intelligentsia, whose support made the Calcutta Review a going concern. After Ellenborough returned to England, they also caught the attention of his successor at Government House. Henry Hardinge opposed any further annexation of territory, which he believed could not be held by force of arms without dangerously weakening the British position elsewhere in India. In this he saw eye to eye with Lawrence; after reading his articles, he concluded that no one in India was as wise and well informed about the Sikhs of the Punjab, who constituted the biggest threat to his policy of peace. The death of Broadfoot—whose arrogance is cited by many as a factor in the Sikhs’ decision to go to war—probably hastened a change that Hardinge had already decided on.

  Lawrence told his listeners at Ghazipur that his articles made a detailed case for repudiating the Forward Policy and forgoing annexation of the Punjab, based on his own experience and observations while serving there. But he neglected to specify where they were published, and as he prepared to retire for the night, Nigel asked him.

  Their brief conversation set Nigel on the path he would follow for the rest of his career. Lawrence questioned him about his education, saying that there was no better preparation than Haileybury for
meeting the challenges that the British now faced in administering India. Both Henry and his older brother George were Addiscombe men, graduates of the Company’s military academy who began their service as cadets in the Bengal Army. Their younger brother John had intended to follow their example, but was sent against his wishes to Haileybury and, like Nigel, came East as a “Writer.”

  It was John, Henry said presciently of the future 1st Baron Lawrence and viceroy of India, who was best positioned to achieve great things in India. Soldiering was a noble occupation, and a necessary one, but henceforth progress would depend on curbing its role in the arrangement of affairs between the races:

  “He said that the object of Government is peace, and must be so at all times, for does not Scripture tell us that its makers are blessed? He means to show in the Punjaub that peace may be achieved by earning the respect of Natives through words and deeds instead of arms, and indeed by acknowledging all that is respectable and good in the Natives themselves. He is soft-spoken and seems at times almost shy, but there is an Irish fire burning deep within, and after he said his good-byes the room seemed a little colder in his absence—a most remarkable man.”

  Before Lawrence left, he asked Nigel how his Persian was. Nigel replied that he had just missed out on a degree in honor at the College of Fort William, and Henry recorded his name in a small notebook that he carried in his pocket.