Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  They promised to return by noon the next day with an answer. But the messenger sent to fetch them was greeted by a gunshot, followed by cries that the garrison “would listen to no terms.” To dramatize their resolve, riflemen began a campaign of sporadic sniper fire, aimed in the direction of Lawrence’s camp.

  There was nothing to do but wait for the guns—of a size, he knew, as yet unseen in those parts—and the elephants. The latter began arriving around the middle of May, accompanied by a notable of the Durbar who proposed that the garrison be allowed to leave with their luggage and arms. Lawrence refused, explaining in a letter to Hardinge that he could not permit men “who have been gratuitously firing on us for twenty days, to retire with the honours of war.”

  When the garrison itself made the same request, to march out bearing arms, Lawrence stood firm. On May 19, with the artillery a week away, he delivered an ultimatum. Heavy guns were nearing Kangra, he warned, and when the batteries were opened, “you need expect no mercy but you will be treated as Rebels and as Robbers.”

  His recalcitrance alarmed the governor and his staff in Simla. Hardinge worried that Lawrence was sabotaging the prospect of a negotiated settlement. This he deemed more important than ever, after receiving high praise from Prime Minister Robert Peel in the aftermath of the Sikh war. Peel judged Hardinge’s policy of restraint “ten times more gratifying to the public mind” than the annexation of the Punjab would have been, and his colleagues in government were just as enthusiastic:

  “They consider that [annexation] would have been a source of weakness and not of strength, that it would have extended our frontier at the greatest distance from our resources and on the weakest points.”

  And there was more to it than that. Even as Peel wrote, Britain was preparing for war with the United States over the Oregon Country, in the drainage of the Columbia River. The Americans, despite the dubious nature of their claim to territory north of the river’s mouth, at the forty-sixth parallel, wanted the boundary fixed at 54°40'. The British government, much against the wishes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, had offered to split the difference, proposing the forty-ninth parallel as the dividing line. The American president, James Polk, who had campaigned for office with the slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!,” rejected the compromise. But Peel believed—rightly, as it turned out—that the news out of the Punjab might make Polk think twice:

  These are Indian considerations; but there are higher considerations still nearer home, affecting still more vital interests, that are decisive in favour of your policy. There is not a country in Europe or America that does not do us justice, that does not admire the signal proof of bravery and military skill ten times the more, because it was called forth in a righteous cause and because it has been followed by dignified forbearance and moderation in the hour of strength. I believe that what has taken place on the banks of the Sutlej will have its influence on the banks of the Oregon; that there is not an American who will not feel that if England follows the example you have set of moderation and justice in her negotiations, and is compelled to vindicate her rights or her honour by an appeal to arms, she will also follow on the St. Lawrence or the Hudson the example of disciplined valour and heroic devotion.

  With Hardinge basking in official favor for hewing to a course of “forbearance and moderation,” he felt abashed by Lawrence’s talk of merciless treatment for “Rebels” and “Robbers.” He could live with the damage to his own reputation if the Sikhs refused to back down. But the consequent injury to larger British interests might prove grievous—even catastrophic if it soured the last hope of keeping the peace in North America. Was it worth the risk?

  Lawrence stubbornly defended his tactics. By May 27 the big guns were only one hill away from Kangra. That evening, a deputation was summoned from the fort to meet with Lawrence and his brother John, who had arrived in advance of the guns. Both repeated the demand for unconditional surrender, and engaged the Sikh elders in discussion that lasted long into the night. When they finally prepared to leave, John invited them to remain in camp to watch the guns ascend the hill of Jayanti Mata at dawn. Such a feat they considered inconceivable, he wrote afterwards, but for all their skepticism they agreed to stay:

  “At four a.m. they were awakened by vociferous cheering. They started from their rough beds and rushed out, believing that it was a sally from the garrison. They were soon deceived; for a few moments later, there appeared a couple of large elephants slowly and majestically pulling an eighteen-pounder, tandem fashion, with a third pushing behind. In this manner, gun after gun would make its way along the narrow pathway, and by the help of hundreds of sepoys, safely rounded the sharp corners which seemed to make further progress impossible.”

  The Sikhs watched until the last gun reached the plateau, saying nothing. Less than an hour after their return to the fort, a white flag fluttered from its ramparts. “The garrison defiled out man by man, and throwing down their arms, quietly took their way to the plains,” wrote John. “Thus passed what might have developed into a very serious affair.”

  Henry Lawrence, like Ranjit Singh before him, had achieved the bloodless conquest of India’s Gibraltar.

  16

  * * *

  A Peace

  AFTER REPORTING TO LAHORE, where Henry Lawrence had established his headquarters at a disused Mughal tomb in the suburbs, Nigel backtracked out of Jullundur to Hoshiarpur district, seventy-five miles to the northeast. As he set to work sorting out the tax assessments in the fall of 1846, he was conscious of playing a supporting role in a larger drama. Henry Lawrence had charged his brother John with winning over natives who were skeptical about the latest in a long line of outsiders who came from somewhere far away and insisted they were there to help. Officially, the Trans-Sutlej districts were wanted as a “buffer zone,” an equilateral triangle of real estate some seventy-five miles to a side, its apex aimed like the point of an arrow toward the mountain passes leading into Kashmir. But Lawrence also saw the region as a potential showpiece of British good works for the benefit of an audience beyond its boundaries. No less than with the spectacle of the enormous guns borne by elephants to the mountain citadel of Kangra, he wanted word of the new government’s integrity to spread throughout the Punjab.

  “The conditions of daily living will be as rustic as any I have known,” wrote Nigel in a letter to his parents. “But I relish the opportunity to bring timely relief to Natives who have long been afflicted with Robbers in the guise of Revenue Officers.”

  As he expected, his accommodations at Hoshiarpur were on the rough side, in a house where the racket of rats inside the walls subsided only in the small hours of morning. But it was situated on a quiet lane lined with jacaranda trees, and he delighted in the prospect of the forested Siwalik Hills nearby. The local household fuel was aromatic pinewood, a welcome change from the dried cow patties burned elsewhere in India.

  Above all, Hoshiarpur was “reliably safe,” despite its recent status as enemy territory. The closest hostilities during the war were a hundred miles away. Two or three thousand Company troops were stationed nearby at Jullundur, fulfilling Henry Lawrence’s vision of the Punjab’s future: a sovereign Sikh kingdom, “fenced in and fortified by British bayonets.” The Sikhs moreover were now allies, not enemies, having proven themselves under British officers on a military expedition sent by Lawrence to install a Hindu ruler in predominantly Muslim Kashmir. (A success at the time, it proved to be the worst decision Lawrence ever made, and led to religious conflict that persists today, with nuclear weapons replacing matchlocks in the arsenals of the aggrieved.)

  So there was really nothing much for an Englishman to worry about in Hoshiarpur, apart from malaria and snakebite and the constancy of house servants in matters of hygiene. From some of the perennial banes of colonial existence there was no escaping, anywhere in India. But the difficulties that Nigel feared might impede his work there—anti-British feeling, principally, and resistance to change—had so far failed
to show themselves when he wrote home after a few months in his new position. Most of the people were Hindus or Muslims who cared too little for the Sikh administration to regret its departure. Instead of resenting the Englishmen who had taken charge, many seemed to welcome them. Cultivators were surprised and delighted by the promise of lower taxes. Once the British proved themselves as good as their word, the initial battle for the hearts and minds of the populace would be won.

  For the first time in years—perhaps for the first time ever—Nigel believed in what he was doing. He wrote with evident pride of his own part in “gaining the favour of the inhabitants through fulfilling their desire for fair treatment,” and lauded Lawrence for his wisdom:

  “I am sure that he is the man to keep the peace, if the peace is to be kept.”

  On the other side of the Punjab, however, were the wilder Trans-Indus districts where the lieutenants who came to be known as “Henry Lawrence’s Young Men” had a tougher challenge. There, between the Indus River and the mountains of Afghanistan, such officers as Harry Lumsden, John Nicholson, James Abbott, and Herbert Edwardes were obliged to reckon with warriors, not farmers. Their daunting brief was to apply Lawrence’s humanitarian principles to Muslim tribes who were accustomed to governing themselves by Pashtunwali, an unwritten social code dating back to pre-Islamic times.

  Most of its precepts were directly tied to notions of honor. The law of tureh, or bravery, required Pashtuns to defend their property, families, and women against all incursions. The law of sabat, or loyalty, insisted upon unconditional loyalty to friends, family, and tribe members. By the law of nanawati the Pashtun was expected to shelter and protect anyone who sought asylum under his roof, even one of his enemies and even at the sacrifice of his own life and property. Less onerous hospitality—food and accommodation—could be demanded under the law of melmastia by any traveler who appeared at his house and demanded it, with no expectation of favor or remuneration.

  Paramount above all was the law of badal, which could be translated with equal accuracy as either “justice” or “revenge.” The concepts, under Pashtunwali, were identical. Even a taunt was regarded as an insult that could be redressed only by bloodshed. Nor was there a statute of limitations. Badal applied to the wrongs of the past as well as of the present. If the original wrongdoer was dead—even a thousand years dead—his descendants might still be held to account for his misdeeds.

  In consequence, the Trans-Indus country was a land of unending violence fueled by ancient vendettas. In 1849–50, the first year in which statistics were kept at Peshawar, murders or crimes accompanied by murder occurred at a rate of one per day. On public roads, as on private property, fear reigned supreme.

  “The men, although wearing arms as regularly as others do clothes, seldom or never move beyond the limits of their own lands except disguised as beggars or priests,” noted Henry Bellew, a surgeon who served under Harry Lumsden. “Feuds are settled and truces patched up but they break out afresh at the smallest provocation.”

  The situation faced by Herbert Edwardes, charged by Lawrence in March 1847 with “starting fair on an era of law and order” in Bannu, was typical. The country itself—an oval basin irrigated by two rivers and bounded on three sides by mountains—was the picture of an Eastern Arcadia, a “smiling vale,” fecund and lovely. In Bannu, wrote Edwardes in his memoir A Year on the Punjab Frontier, in 1848–49, crops never failed:

  The rudest and idlest agriculture is overpaid with corn, sugar, turmeric, and almost all the Indian grains in abundance. In spring it is a vegetable emerald; and in winter its many-coloured harvests look as if Ceres had stumbled against the great Salt Range, and spilt half her cornucopia in this favoured vale. As if to make the landscape perfect, a graceful variety of the shee-shum tree, whose boughs droop like the willow, is found here, and here alone; while along streams, and round the villages, the thick mulberry, festooned with the wild vine, throws a fragrant shade, beneath which well-fed Sayuds [holy men] look exquisitely happy, sleeping midway through their beads. Roses, too, without which Englishmen have learnt from the East to think no scenery complete, abound in the upper parts, at the close of spring.

  Alas, the promise of this land of plenty was betrayed by the malevolence of its inhabitants:

  “Altogether, nature has so smiled on Bunnoo, that the stranger thinks it a paradise; and when he turns to the people, wonders how such spirits of evil ever found admittance.”

  There were the Bannuchi peasants, riven with faction and addicted to assassination. There were the sayuds and other “religious mendicants,” who held mortgages on two-thirds of the land, “sucking the blood of the superstitious people.” There were “the mean Hindu traders, enduring a life of degradation, that they may cheat their Muhommudan employers.” Finally there were the Waziris, the only group in which Edwardes discerned qualities to admire, “half pastoral, half agricultural, wholly without law, but neither destitute of honour or virtue.” By far the most feared of the Pashtun tribes, the Waziris lived in the mountains surrounding Bannu and descended to the plain every winter to graze their livestock and plunder the Bannuchis.

  Such was the land; such were its holders. And there was one more thing: before departing for Bannu, Edwardes sent a native spy ahead to draw up a rough map. “He returned with a sheet of paper completely covered over with little squares and lozenges, and a name written in each, with no space between,” recalled Edwardes afterwards.

  “Why, Nizamooddeen,” I said, “what is this?”

  “That,” he replied triumphantly, “why that’s Bunnoo!”

  “And what are all these squares?”

  “Oh! those are the forts.”

  At the lowest estimate, they numbered no fewer than four hundred. It was, he noted sardonically, “a pleasing prospect” for one entrusted with the district’s subjugation.

  Edwardes arrived in Bannu on March 15, accompanied by a force of five hundred Sikh troops. He was twenty-nine years old, a clergyman’s son with a strong evangelical bent. He believed that his ultimate mission in India was nothing short of divine. He had never commanded troops in the field, or distinguished himself in any way during his career in India as a field officer with the 1st Bengal Fusiliers, a European regiment manned mostly by Irishmen. He had come to the attention of both Henry Lawrence and General Hugh Gough, commander in chief of the British forces in India, as the anonymous author of a series of essays devoted to the military and political questions of the day that appeared in the Delhi Gazette in 1845.

  Both men agreed with Edwardes’ assessment of the mistakes made in prosecuting the Afghan War. Gough, upon ascertaining the writer’s identity, invited him to join the general staff. Shortly after Edwardes arrived in Delhi, the Sikhs crossed the Sutlej. Edwardes, like most of Gough’s aides, was wounded by gunfire in the war’s opening engagement. He went on to become Henry Lawrence’s personal assistant in Lahore.

  With no reputation as a fighting man, Edwardes endeavored on the march to Bannu to secure his fame as a just one. En route from Lahore, he took a hard line against misbehavior by the Sikh troops under his command, who were accustomed to treating such expeditions as ongoing opportunities for plunder. With great ceremony, one of the worst offenders was publicly flogged; Edwardes then assembled the officers and said that the lives of their men depended on the maintenance of discipline, and he would “never overlook” further breaches of it. If the Sikhs refrained from plunder, the force would be received “as friends.” If not, he warned, the “fanatic Bunnoochees” would resort to their “old system” of night attacks, “rushing in on the horror-stricken sentries with juzail [cutlass] and knife, and running amuck among the sleepless Sikh soldiery in the lines.”

  Afterwards, noted Edwardes with satisfaction, the “news of the anti-plunder regulations in our camp, spread through the country.” The Bannuchis “flocked into our camp, and bought and sold with our soldiers, and sat and talked in our assemblies, as friends instead of enemies.”

 
That “the small end of the wedge of civilized intercourse had at last been introduced,” Edwardes wrote in his report to Henry Lawrence, was the “one great object gained” by a six-week expedition that was otherwise a failure. The fractious populace of Bannu refused to pay their taxes or, indeed, any heed at all to the wishes of Lahore. In November, Edwardes returned with instructions from Lawrence to subdue them “by a peaceful and just treaty; and reduce the nominal revenue, which was never paid, to a moderate tribute in acknowledgement of sovereignty.”

  After summoning the Bannuchi and Waziri chiefs and elders to a public council at his camp beside the Kurram River, Edwardes moved first to win over the Bannuchis. He meant, he said, to collect the arrears of revenue, build a fort, establish a Sikh garrison, and put their fertile land under a tax collector, “like any part of the Punjab kingdom.” If they assisted him, ten percent of the Bannuchis’ assessments would be divided each year among their chiefs assembled there. “If you do not,” he warned, “I shall depose you and confiscate your estates.”

  The majority saw the advantages of coming under the protection of the new regime, and readily agreed. But the Waziris, offered the same terms, proved recalcitrant. Their leader, Sawan Khan, informed Edwardes that Waziris did not pay taxes as a matter of principle.

  Without their acquiescence, Edwardes knew, his mission was doomed. The Waziris—who could muster an army of at least fifty thousand men in the vicinity and perhaps three times that many from their tribal territories as a whole—held the balance of power not only in Bannu but across the entire Trans-Indus region. With “peace or war depending on the issue,” he drew a deep breath and proceeded to lecture them in Persian, which was translated into Pashto by an interpreter.