Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  14

  * * *

  Gulzarbagh

  1975

  WHEN I RETURNED to the Ganges Guest House after visiting the European cemetery in Patna, I asked the desk clerk if he knew of any other places thereabouts where an Englishman might have been buried.

  He frowned.

  I had not found the gravestone I was seeking?

  I told him that everyone interred there had died in 1763, long before the man I was looking for was born.

  Not only that, I added, but they had all died in the same month, October.

  That was odd, he said.

  He wondered why that would be.

  There were famines in the old days, but of course not among the English.

  Cholera, perhaps, though that tended not to kill everyone in short order; such epidemics might last years.

  He couldn’t think of any rebellions, either.

  Not that far back.

  The Mutiny was more recent.

  “Eighteen-fifties.”

  I nodded. For once I felt knowledgeable about Indian history. Rasheed, the Pashtun who befriended me at Margalla Pass, had mentioned that John Nicholson was killed at Delhi, leading a charge against the mutineers.

  Well, said the desk clerk, it only stood to reason that there must be another cemetery. Unfortunately, he had no idea where it might be. He suggested that I inquire at the British Council library, located on Bank Road.

  In Gulzarbagh.

  Quite near the cemetery I had just visited.

  There was no concealing my dismay. He gave me a knowing look.

  “You will like it,” he said. “It is air-conditioned.”

  India is full of surprises. The air conditioning at the British Council library in Gulzarbagh turned out to be functional. The tables were filled with neatly dressed Indians poring over recent numbers of The Economist, Nature, and New Scientist. A bulletin board promoted an impressive schedule of English Learning Programmes. Everything was very clean. Slinking up to the help desk in my sweat-stained bush shirt, I felt like an intruder.

  A pleasant young woman in a patterned silk sari welcomed me and listened sympathetically as I recounted my fruitless search of the graveyard by the Catholic church. She said that it was the oldest local Christian cemetery, but by no means the largest. That would be the burial ground at Danapur Cantonment, a few miles to the west. She had not visited it herself, but Danapur had been the second cantonment established by the British in India, after Barrackpore, and she was sure there were hundreds of officers interred there, if not a thousand or more.

  I asked if it was limited to army officers. She said she believed so. I told her what my mother had told me: that Nigel had worked for the government. I hadn’t yet learned that he was actually employed by the East India Company.

  She said that someone who died while in the civil service was likely to be buried in the churchyard where he worshiped. Such a grave could be difficult to find, because most of the churches from that era had lost their congregations when the British left India. There would be a caretaker, but without knowing the location of the church itself . . .

  “He quit his job before he died,” I said. “He probably stopped going to church. He was supposed to have gone native. He lost touch with his family.”

  In that case, she said, there would be no grave to find.

  He would have been cremated. That was the custom, if he had truly gone native and was living among Hindus.

  That he was, I said to myself. At the time of his death, he was living in Nepal, where the king himself was revered as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu.

  To the woman at the library desk I said, “Oh.”

  I said I guessed that Nigel’s family had never thought things through.

  Then I added that I was grateful to be spared the swelter of an outing to Danapur.

  She smiled. She called it a “challenging” time of year. She asked if there was anything else.

  I told her that I couldn’t help wondering about the cemetery that morning. How was it that those fifty-odd Christians had all died at the same time?

  “They were the victims of a massacre,” she said. “Would you like to read about it?”

  She said nothing more as she steered me to the history shelf. I found myself admiring her tact even as I regretted my own gaucherie. I imagined another kind of “Indian” in another part of the world, asked by the descendant of a cavalryman how General Custer and his men had come to meet their maker.

  Then I opened the account of the Patna Massacre. Its perpetrator was a European, a German butcher’s son named Walter Reinhardt, who “dressed in Moghul dress, kept a zenana”—a harem—“and had gone native.” After serving with the East India Company’s army in the 1750s, he attached himself to the cause of Mir Quasim, the nawab of Bengal, and led the assault in Patna that resulted in the deaths of the Englishmen buried together at Gulzarbagh. He then ordered the dismemberment of their bodies, and had the parts thrown in a well.

  India is full of surprises.

  15

  * * *

  A Conquest

  THE ENTRY OF Nigel’s name in Henry Lawrence’s notebook proved to be his ticket out of Patna. In August 1846, after seven hundred miles of dusty travel by stagecoach on the Grand Trunk Road, he arrived at the cantonment of Ambala, just a few days’ journey from the Punjab frontier. The Anglo-Sikh War was over, won by the British in the decisive Battle of Sobraon that February. Henry Lawrence, now appointed resident at Lahore and raised to the rank of colonel, had installed his brother John to serve as commissioner of Trans-Sutlej Jullundur Doab, a territory between the Sutlej and Beas rivers ceded by the Sikhs to British India under the terms of the treaty that ended the fighting. Nigel was one of the Company civilians whom John Lawrence had employed on Henry’s recommendation, to work on the settlement of tax revenues in two of the outlying districts he administered, Kapurthala and Hoshiarpur.

  Under Sikh rule, the revenue system in the Punjab had evolved into a species of organized plunder. The policy in Bannu district, for example, was to allow taxes to fall into arrears for two or three seasons, then send to Lahore for an army to confiscate all the crops and whatever material goods the troops could get their hands on. These exactions, seldom collected without a fight, often led to the destruction of whole villages. Henry, charged by Calcutta with holding “peaceful viceregal authority” over the province and “assisting” the Sikh administration in matters of revenue, decided to make tax reform the linchpin of British efforts to pacify the Punjab without resort to arms. He began by calling a halt to taxing entirely, pending the painstaking process known as “settlement.” To ensure that taxes were collected on the basis of objective criteria, every patch of cultivated land in an area was walked and assessed for its worth, and a rate of land tax “settled” on it. Given the state of the Punjab, Lawrence believed, the rate itself ought to be low:

  “Our assessment should be so light as to require no compulsion in the collection, and we should rather be protectors in the land than tax-masters.”

  The first phase of a district settlement involved securing the cooperation of tribal elders, and most of the army officers seconded by Lawrence to positions as civil administrators enjoyed it. They rode from village to village, seeing the countryside and enjoying the hospitality of clan leaders and village chiefs. It made for a welcome change from paperwork.

  “Office work and confinement within doors is not my speciality,” wrote Harry Lumsden, an officer around Nigel’s age. “I would always rather ride twenty miles than write a note.”

  The routine of assessment, though tedious, was all right, too. Revenue parties were accompanied by small military escorts, and Lawrence’s men valued the companionship of the English officers in command. The Punjab in 1846 was a wild and lonely place compared with the vast ordered grid of cropland it later became with the construction of irrigation canals under British administration. Much of it remained untouched jungle, interrupted by a serpen
tine web of cultivation along the courses of its five great rivers and their tributaries. Crocodiles swarmed their waters; panthers prowled their banks. Crossings—at deep and treacherous fords or by ramshackle ferries—were laborious and time-consuming at the best at times, dangerous at the worst. But the adventure relieved the monotony of the fieldwork itself, and natives warmed quickly to the new regime.

  It was only back at headquarters that the settlement process turned onerous. Documenting rates, assessments, and payments required thousands of entries in cross-referenced ledgers, and native clerks proved slow to get the hang of it. Checking and rechecking their record keeping became the principal occupation of such unlikely overseers as Harry Lumsden, who had first come to Lawrence’s attention when he led a bayonet charge into enemy trenches at the Battle of Sobraon, “killing all the gunners on the spot, and driving the whole line of the Seikh infantry from the right of their entrenchment into the river, where they were shot down like so many ducks.”

  Though Calcutta had promised Henry Lawrence a supply of English clerks to relieve these men of action, they proved slow in arriving. He took matters into his own hands, “borrowing” civilians whom he had encountered on his travels. Though Nigel remained on the books at the Patna Collectorate, he would spend most of the next three years working out of Jullundur, a hundred miles up the Grand Trunk Road from Ambala.

  Newly established as the administrative center of the Trans-Sutlej districts, Jullundur was thought to be the Punjab’s oldest city. Like Patna, it was mentioned in the Mahabharata, and among the ruins in the adjacent countryside along the Beas River were a dozen colossal altars to the gods of the Greek pantheon, erected by Alexander the Great to mark the easternmost extent of his empire. It was on the banks of the Beas—the ancient Hyphasis—that his Macedonian troops mutinied in the monsoon rain in 326 B.C. and refused to go farther, after eight years on the march. And it was in Alexandria on the Hyphasis, founded nearby, that many of them chose to remain, rather than risk the hardships of the return.

  But it was a story out of recent history that captivated Nigel when he called on the political agent at Ambala, a cantonment laid out by the British three years before to replace an installation abandoned during the malaria epidemic of 1841–42. Though actually farther from Sikh territory than the Ludhiana Cantonment, Ambala more closely resembled a frontier outpost. It was raw and relatively unkempt, the pace of life quickened by proximity to Simla, the hill station twenty miles away where Governor General Hardinge had chosen to reside in the war’s aftermath rather than return to Calcutta, just to keep an eye on things. That proved to be a wise decision, because a band of renegade Sikhs at a mountain stronghold had threatened Hardinge’s “policy of peace” almost as soon as he proclaimed it.

  By far the largest fort in the Himalayas, the citadel of Kangra was also one of the oldest in India, first cited in the war records of Alexander. It stood atop a rocky crag at the confluence of two rivers, surrounded on three sides by water. Another steep hill, called Jayanti Mata, rose from a wide, deep valley on the fourth side. Over the centuries, its formidable defenses had repelled all but the greatest of the warriors whose armies swept up from the plain.

  On March 9, 1846, with the mark of the eight-year-old boy king Duleep Singh on the Treaty of Lahore, Kangra had passed with the rest of the Jullundur Doab into the hands of the British. But they had yet to take possession when Henry Lawrence learned, a month later, that the Sikh garrison there was bricking up the gateway. The troops insisted that they would not surrender the fort until Duleep Singh appeared in the flesh and asked them to do so.

  Kangra’s garrison was small, about three hundred men. In strictly military terms, it posed little threat to British interests. The danger lay in the example of defiance. The hill tribes of the district held forts of their own, which, under the terms of the treaty, now belonged to the Government of India. Kangra was a test case for British control of them all. The insurrection, Henry advised his brother John, would have to be put down immediately. John, the civil official immediately responsible, would organize a siege train in Jullundur and advance toward Kangra.

  Henry, for his part, would intercede with the Sikh administration—known colloquially as the Durbar—in Lahore. He warned Prime Minister Lal Singh of grave consequences for the Sikhs of even the slightest delay in surrendering the fortress to the British officer sent to take its command. Lal Singh promised to obtain the surrender, without making any conspicuous effort afterwards to do so. Due to “the evident hesitation of our reluctant allies,” Lawrence counseled Hardinge, his own presence at Kangra was clearly required.

  Once there, he meant to resolve the matter without resort to force. A siege was certain to be prolonged and bloody. “Kangra is a Gibraltar,” he explained. “It is five miles round, and has one accessible point, which is defended by thirteen gates, one within the other.”

  He worried, too, about making martyrs of the defenders, and Hardinge agreed.

  “A gallant resistance by the Sikh garrison,” replied the governor, “is a very undesirable result.”

  Lawrence hoped to reach Kangra by the end of the month. When he was delayed, Lal Singh belatedly dispatched emissaries who were authorized to offer a bribe of twenty-five thousand rupees to the garrison in exchange for their surrender—not to the British, but to their coreligionists, before John Lawrence and the accompanying force under Brigadier Hugh Wheeler arrived on the scene. Though Henry welcomed this strategy to settle the matter without loss of life or face on either side, he refused to assume that the bribe would be accepted, and prepared to depart from Lahore.

  Before he left, he paid a call on the bane of his existence, Rani Jindan Kaur. The queen mother was the daughter of an officer in charge of the royal kennels, and had married Ranjit Singh four years before his death. Henry Lawrence would later describe her as “the only active enemy to our policy,” and though her political activity was his principal grievance, he also took exception to her sexual liaison with Lal Singh and the power and privileges she conferred on her maidservant, a slave girl who was also the mistress of Jindan’s brother. All in all, he thought it a pity that the rani had disregarded the example of several of Ranjit Singh’s older wives, who immolated themselves on his funeral pyre.

  Lawrence wrote of Rani Jindan and her lover only in terms of moral outrage. Another British officer, who was presented at court in Lahore that September, sketched a fuller portrait:

  I was initiated into the mysteries of Grand Durbars and the like, introduced to Lal Singh, the Prime Minister, young Dulip Singh, and a large bundle of clothes, placed on a chair and called the [Rani], out of which, now and then, might be seen a pair of feet and a remarkably pretty little hand. When the bundle was addressed, even in the most flowery Persian, the reply was always in a grinding sort of sound, strongly resembling that produced in the process of grinding coffee. However, the bundle, although she will not show her eyes, evidently has good ones, and shows her taste in the choice of her wazir [prime minister], Lal Singh. I have seldom seen a better looking man than Lal Singh. He is, I should say, about thirty years of age, strongly built, tall and very soldier-like, though as cunning as a fox; talks in a bland, kind tone, which could not hurt a fly, though he would just as soon cut a man’s windpipe as look at him.

  When the rani received Lawrence, she deigned not to show herself at all. She spoke to him from behind a screen in the Palace of Mirrors, inside the great fort. Why was it, she asked, that Lawrence needed to go to Kangra in person? Lal Singh had sent agents to make his wishes known. Was it not fitting for a man in his position to remain aloof in his power and majesty?

  Lawrence replied that British troops had been ordered against the garrison, and as the official agent for foreign relations and agent for the Punjab, he needed to be there when they arrived. He had other reasons, too, left unspoken. His brother John had shown an aptitude for logistics but had no experience managing fighting men, and remained untried at diplomacy and making hard de
cisions. Kangra also presented Henry with an opportunity to visibly assert his supreme authority over the affairs of the province.

  Nearing the fortress on May 2, he noted the terrible condition of the road that led to within gunnery range of its four-foot-thick walls. Bringing up the wheeled carriages of artillery en route from Jullundur would take some doing—and could not be done at all without a leveling operation by thousands of laborers, working full-time for months. Guns borne by elephants, he advised Hardinge, were a proven alternative, “employed in these very parts by Maharajah Ranjit Singh,” who had captured the fort from a local raja in 1809.

  Lawrence’s strategy, inspired by Ranjit Singh’s, depended on intimidating the Kangra garrison into surrender with a show of firepower they could not long withstand. He immediately sent to Lal Singh, asking for as many elephants as he could spare. The following day, after Lawrence learned that the emissaries sent by Lal Singh had yet to approach the garrison with an offer to purchase their cooperation, he shamed them into calling at the fort “to make at least a show of fulfilling their mission.”

  Late that evening, they returned with two men, who were brought into Lawrence’s tent to explain their refusal to accept such a bargain. In the flickering candlelight, they repeated what Lawrence called “the old excuse”: that “Maharajah Ranjit Singh, of blessed memory, had enjoined them never to give up their post, even though many messages should come to order them. When he shewed his own face, it would be time enough for them to open the gates of Kangra.”

  Lawrence replied that Ranjit Singh, had he still been alive, would have journeyed to Kangra to release them from their obligation. The new maharaja, unfortunately, was too young to leave his capital. The garrison ought to have accepted the terms offered by the officers he had sent in his place, but they had not. Their fate was now in his own hands, and the only condition he could offer was to spare their lives if they surrendered.