Over the course of twenty-five or thirty years, he began, the Waziris had taken advantage of divisions within the Bannuchis to invade their fertile valley and possess themselves little by little of extensive tracts of land. This occurred at a time of “no law” in Bannu, during which the Bannuchis themselves respected no man’s rights, and acted on the principle that land belonged to whoever was strong enough to seize it. “They cannot complain if you followed their example,” he declared, to warm approval. “Foreigners are always expected to adopt the customs of the country.”
That time, however, was past. Maharaja Duleep Singh had determined to occupy Bannu, and the laws of his kingdom had come into force. Whoever held land in Bannu would have to pay taxes. No favor would be shown to any tribe, great or small, strong or weak. The Waziris, so argued Sawan Khan, had never paid revenue to any king, an argument that held good in their own country, which was still independent.
“If you do not like laws, and paying revenue,” said Edwardes, “you are quite at liberty to give up your lands to the Bunnoochees, from whom you took them, and return to those happy hills where there is no revenue to give and no corn to eat.”
He concluded by assuring the Waziris that he would either make them pay revenue like the Bannuchis or expel them from Bannu. He did not believe that they were fools enough “to forsake in a day the lands which you have been thirty years in conquering, or forego the whole of your rich harvests rather than pay a part.” But the choice was theirs:
“Think over these things deliberately, and then give me a decisive answer, Yes or No.”
After taking their leave from Edwardes, the Waziris met through the night, during which his spies provided updates on the stormy deliberations. Words at all times “ran very high,” and Sawan Khan was accused of selling himself and his tribe to the East India Company. Some called for a local jihad against the infidel Sikhs and their British allies, but most considered the Bannuchis unreliable allies in a holy war. The tension finally broke at midday on December 17, when the chiefs and elders “sternly” returned to make “an unconditional surrender.”
Edwardes wasted no time in producing a copy of his ultimatum and securing signatures from the bemused, illiterate Waziris. Work began the following day on a fortress, located on a plot of high ground overlooking the Bannu bazaar and called Duleepghar, after Duleep Singh. The next order of business was a legal code, promulgated on December 21. In criminal matters, the tenets of Pashtunwali were implicitly rejected. When a murder or a robbery was committed near a village, its inhabitants were held responsible for either producing the culprit or assisting in his apprehension. Suttee, infanticide, and slave dealing were henceforth regarded as crimes, subject to severe penalties. The system of begdree—forced labor—was no longer allowed, and “[n]either may either Hindoo or Muhommudan buy girls any longer by the pound; nor those sacred races who cannot degrade themselves by giving their daughters in marriage to meaner men, be permitted any more to strangle them.”
On January 4, when the walls of the fort’s inner citadel reached “such a height as to form a complete and almost impregnable intrenched position,” Edwardes decided it was time to commence with the leveling of Bannu’s four hundred forts, which he judged “the only really hazardous part of our enterprise.” How to go about it was the question. Henry Lawrence had recommended that they be razed by the occupying troops. But Edwardes felt that their destruction should be carried out by the Bannuchis themselves. Their irritable tempers, he reasoned, were sure to be inflamed by the intrusion of Sikh soldiers into their villages and among their women. After sitting up “hour after hour” that night, trying to decide what to do, he drafted the proclamation that would make him a legend.
Now that just laws were in force, he wrote, it was no longer necessary that each village should be a fort. Every man’s hut was a castle, because no one dared enter it to injure him.
“You are hereby ordered, therefore, to throw down to the ground the walls of every fort and enclosed village within the boundaries of Bunnoo; and I hold the Mullicks [chiefs] responsible for the carrying out of this order within fifteen days.
“At the end of fifteen days I will move against the first fort I see standing, considering the inhabitants as enemies.”
For the first few days after the proclamation was posted, all of Bannu thought Edwardes was joking. Unease followed as his “serious manner” convinced the inhabitants he was in earnest, and everyone waited for their neighbor to make the first move. Reluctance began to ebb after Edwardes sent parties out to report back to him on where demolition work was proceeding and where it was not. As Edwardes followed up with personal inspections, Bannuchis and Waziris alike took up the task with increasing enthusiasm, and local chiefs rushed out to greet him with offerings of fat sheep. By the end of the month, the only fort standing in Bannu bore the name of Duleep Singh.
It was a triumph without parallel in the lawless lands beyond the Indus. In less than three months, without recourse to shot or shell, a lackluster junior officer had succeeded in a conquest “that the fanatic Sikh nation had vainly attempted, with fire and sword, for five-and-twenty years.” In his preface to A Year on the Punjab Frontier, Edwardes explained that his feat had been accomplished “simply,” by means of a balancing act:
“For fear of a Sikh Balancing army, two warlike and independent Mohammedan tribes levelled to the ground, at my bidding, the four hundred forts which constituted the strength of their country, and, for fear of those same Mohammedan tribes, the same Sikh army, at my bidding, constructed a fortress for the Crown, which completed the subjugation of the valley.”
But there was more to it than that. The likes of Sawan Khan would never have persuaded their proud, unruly tribesmen to do Edwardes’ bidding had they not recognized in him a new type of Englishman—as wily in his own way as they were in theirs, but for all that a man who respected them as men and admired their code of honor even as he hewed to the course set by his own. He was, in short, someone they could trust.
The same could be said for the impression made that winter by Lawrence’s other lieutenants. “What days those were!” one of them later remembered. “How Henry Lawrence would send us off to great distances; Edwardes to Bannu, Nicholson to Peshawar, Abbott to Hazara, Lumsden somewhere else . . . giving us a tract of country as big as half of England, and giving us no more helpful directions than these: ‘Settle the country, make the people happy; and take care there are no rows!’”
With minimal armed support, each relied on his personal influence to turn the local tide of anarchy and violence. The tranquility prevailing throughout the Trans-Indus districts by mid-January 1847 was so profound that Henry Lawrence’s brother George brought his wife and children out to live with him in Peshawar, and Henry himself temporarily vacated his post in Lahore to take his first home leave in fifteen years.
17
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Bankipore
1975
AFTER I READ about the history of the Patna Massacre at the British Council library in Gulzarbagh, I took my leave by thanking the woman at the help desk. She said it was her pleasure, and asked how long I would be stopping in Patna.
Not long, I said. I expected to be leaving for Kathmandu with my companion the following day. I told her that we had been studying Nepal at our college in the United States and were anxious to get there and see what it was like.
“It is cooler!” she said.
Then she said there was a nearby landmark with a connection to Nepal, an enormous granary built by the British almost two hundred years earlier. There was a fine view from the top, and at one time it was possible to see as far as the Himalayas. When the maharaja of Nepal was told this when he passed through Patna in the 1850s, he insisted on paying a visit. The maharaja, who was called Jang Bahadur, was on his way to England and wanted a last glimpse of his homeland. The difficulty was that the steep staircase that spiraled up the granary could not be negotiated by bearers with a palanquin, and it was
beneath Jang Bahadur’s status to climb the stairs on foot. To general amazement, he and his brother rode their horses to the top, which had never been done before.
Or since, as far as she knew.
The granary, known as the Golghar, was really quite famous, she said, one of the principal historical attractions in Bihar state. It was less than a five-minute walk.
“Shaded walk,” she added.
She said that if Nigel had been stationed in Patna, he would have lived in the vicinity of the landmark himself, since the neighborhood surrounding it had originally been developed as an enclave for the British, who called it Bankipore.
“What is now the Gandhi Maidan was their polo field.”
Following Bank Street to the entrance of the park surrounding the Golghar, it pleased me to imagine Nigel playing polo. It was nice to think about his life instead of his death. But not for long. Because it was impossible, outdoors in Patna in the Hot Weather, not to think about the climate. And now that I was acquainted with it, my mother’s theory that the Nepalese might have shipped Nigel’s body back to British territory for burial seemed ludicrous. There weren’t any refrigerator cars in those days.
I walked on, conscious for the first time in India of following in Nigel’s actual footsteps, beneath the very trees that would have shaded him as he went about his business. Years would pass before I read the letter that recounted his ascent of the Golghar; it was missing from the sheaf of correspondence that my mother had given me before I went East. But among those fragmentary pages were several written at his bungalow in Bankipore, and there I was. Such of the vintage bungalows that still stood were hidden, set well back from the pavement behind walls and dense hedges, but the grid of roads intersecting at right angles gave the game away. Unlike the rest of Patna, this district was planned.
And yet.
So, too, was the Golghar, gleaming whitely. It resembled the upper half of a colossal Easter egg, ornamented by the sweeping spirals of its staircases. A plaque at the base dating to the colonial era identified the structure as the world’s largest silo, “part of a general Plan” ordered by East India Company officials in Calcutta “for the perpetual prevention of Famine in these Provinces.”
Without mentioning that the grain meant to be stored there was reserved for consumption by the Company army.
Without mentioning that the granary was never filled in any case, since its inwardly opening doors would have blocked access to the grain if it had been.
Of these omissions, as of Nigel’s visit to the Golghar in 1844, I only learned much later. I trudged up the narrow stairway, looked out over the treetops and rooftops to the Ganges on the one hand and the old city on the other, and tried to put myself in Nigel’s place there.
I could not, and it was more than just the heat and humidity and absence of conditioned air. I still had only vague ideas about the role of the British in India, and most of what I thought I knew came from a novel, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. It was the sole work of fiction assigned as required reading in the college class I took to prepare me for a year in Nepal. The story was set in a civil station called Chandrapore. The English in Chandrapore despised India and Indians. They conceived of themselves as bearers of the white man’s burden, in service—albeit grudgingly—to a higher calling. That calling, principally, was justice, yet what Forster chronicled was their deliberate injustice, visited cruelly and relentlessly upon a native falsely accused of criminally assaulting an Englishwoman.
They were horrible people, those English in Chandrapore. And though they were fictional, it seemed to me that Forster’s depiction rang terribly true, of a certain type at a given place in time. But even if the time and place were right for Nigel, the type was all wrong.
From reading his letters, I knew he wasn’t like that. He was too sensitive, too idealistic, too conscious of imposture as a pukka sahib.
And maybe that was it.
Maybe Nigel himself couldn’t occupy his place there, not finally.
Maybe the motivation for his exile was identical to that of Forster’s innocent native, who forsook his home and profession even after his accuser recanted and he was freed:
“His impulse to escape from the English was sound. They had frightened him permanently, and there are only two reactions against fright: to kick and scream on committees, or to retreat to a remote jungle, where the sahib seldom comes.”
Of Chandrapore, too, there was something I only learned later, long after I stood atop the Golghar and looked down upon Bankipore.
The civil station of Chandrapore was fictional, but Forster based it on a real place, and that place was Bankipore.
18
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A War
WHEN HENRY LAWRENCE went on leave at the beginning of 1847, he left his duties as resident in the hands of his brother John. He instructed his subordinates to hew strictly to his proven policy of “indirect rule” and insisted upon finesse rather than force as the solution to any problems that might arise.
One locus of potential trouble was Multan, a city-state on the western edge of the Punjab, two hundred miles south of Lahore. The Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh had captured Multan from the Afghan Durrani Empire in 1818. To rule it, he appointed a Hindu governor, Sawan Mal. In return for a hefty tribute, paid annually to Lahore, first Sawan and then his son Mulraj were given a free hand. The problem, from the standpoint of the Lahore Durbar in 1848, was that Mulraj had seized the occasion of Ranjit Singh’s death, nine years before, as a pretext for withholding tribute.
Before Henry’s departure, he had dispatched an emissary, charged with pressing Mulraj to pay the arrears. All John needed to do in his absence was to think of himself as a carpet dealer in the bazaar, with Mulraj his prospective customer. There would be haggling and bluff calling and indignant professions of wounded pride, but ultimately Lahore would get some of what it wanted without forcing Multan into a public loss of face. That would be the most dangerous outcome in that part of the world and one to be avoided even at the cost of getting rather (but not incontestably) the worst of the bargain.
The Durbar, after all, was not without fault in the matter. The Sikhs had ignored their accounts receivable for almost a decade. The role, then, of the British, having taken charge of Sikh foreign policy with the Treaty of Lahore, was to mediate, not dictate.
When John heard back from Multan in March, he received the expected parry to his brother’s opening thrust. Ignoring the demand for payment, Mulraj informed Lawrence that he wished to resign as governor; his son would take his place. It was clearly a gambit to confuse the issue, one that John doubted he was meant to take at face value. A healthy man in the prime of life ruling a city of several hundred thousand people as he saw fit was an unlikely candidate for retirement.
By that time, however, John Lawrence had himself been forcibly retired from acting on Henry’s behalf. Back in England, the incoming Whig prime minister had nominated Lord Dalhousie to replace Conservative appointee Henry Hardinge as governor general. The change of the party in power at home heralded a return to expansionist policies abroad, which Dalhousie strongly favored. He was also a staunch advocate of centralized authority who distrusted the freewheeling Lawrence brothers. After learning from Dalhousie that he was being replaced as acting resident by Frederick Currie, a bureaucrat from Calcutta, John Lawrence was obliged to ask Mulraj to postpone his decision, pending Currie’s arrival.
Currie, who knew nothing of the Punjab, swept into Lahore determined to enforce the imperial discipline of Government House. He abandoned the open-door policy for natives established by the Lawrences, who made a point of hearing out anyone who called on them with a grievance or a question.
“With you we contest and badger and dispute,” one Sikh noble told John Lawrence before he left to resume his duties at Jullundur. “You are one of our own. But what can we do with Currie sahib?”
Mulraj found himself asking the same question in Multan. Currie accepted his resignation
without further ado and ignored his request that his son succeed him. Instead he appointed Khan Singh, a Sikh from the Durbar. Without consulting Mulraj, Currie also decided to disband some of the local troops in Multan and replace them with new regiments from Lahore. William Hodson, one of Lawrence’s “Young Men” who had expected to take up the post of political agent at Multan, lost out to the far less experienced Patrick Vans Agnew, probably because Currie suspected that Hodson was cut from the same unorthodox cloth as Henry Lawrence.
Currie also named Lieutenant William Anderson, a young infantry officer, as British military commander there. Rather than join Khan Singh on the march to Multan—and get to know the seven hundred troops of the Sikh army who escorted him—Vans Agnew and Anderson sailed down the Ravi River. Oblivious to Currie’s high-handedness in dealing with Mulraj, they had a comfortable, pleasant voyage; in a letter to a friend, Anderson exulted in what a “lucky fellow” he was.
Both men’s luck ran out on April 19, the day after their rendezvous with the military force. Following a tour of Multan’s fort, the Englishmen were attacked with spears and swords by Multani troops as they crossed the bridge over its moat. Khan Singh saved their lives by rallying the party’s mounted escort, which carried the wounded men to the sanctuary of a prayer pavilion outside the city walls. But it soon emerged that even the Sikh troops under Khan Singh could not be relied upon. All but a few disappeared that night, abandoning the Englishmen to their fate. On the morning of the 20th, a mob rushed in. Vans Agnew died first, beheaded by blows from a saber as he sat comforting Anderson, who was then hacked to pieces in the bed where he lay. The following day, Mulraj presented Khan Singh with a blood-drenched cotton sack and contemptuously bade him return to Lahore with “the head of the youth he had brought down to govern at Mooltan.”
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