Avenging the Black Hole of Calcutta
By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Mughal Empire was in manifest rapid decay. Filling the breach, when it was not filled by anarchy and warlords, were the good offices of the British East India Company, the French at Pondicherry, as well as a variety of Hindu princes and confederacies of Mahrattas in central India, Jats in Rajasthan, and Sikhs in the Punjab. In 1739, Persians invaded India and occupied (and massacred the inhabitants of) Delhi, even stealing the famed peacock throne of the Mughal emperors; and Afghans repeatedly rampaged through northern India.
With dominance in the subcontinent up for grabs, princely states allied with each other or with the British East India Company or the French East India Company (which gained concessions of land for lending troops and officers) in wars of conquest. Sometimes the French and the British fought each other directly with Indian allies. Mahrattas, Afghans, and others hired themselves out as mercenaries; and European officers found themselves in demand as mercenaries for the princely states, which might have artillery and muskets like the Europeans, but could not match their military discipline or leadership (though some of them did try to copy their uniforms). One dramatic instance of European officer prowess came from Captain Eustachius De Lannoy of the Dutch East India Company, who was captured by the maharajah of Travancore after the Battle of Colachel in 1741. The maharajah spared the Dutchman’s life in exchange for the captain’s commitment to train and lead the maharajah’s men in the Dutch way of war, which “the great captain,” as he came to be known, did with notable success, helping the maharajah to expand his holdings in southwest India.
But the most important adventurer in India at this time was a lowly clerk named Robert Clive of the East India Company, soon to spring to renown as “Clive of India” for his military genius and accession to wealth as an Indian nabob. Without formal military training, he took part in the company’s military actions against the French, and proved himself a courageous soldier and capable leader of Indian troops. In 1751, he captured the city of Arcot and then held it, vastly outnumbered, against a fifty-day siege by French-allied Indians. Clive had entered the action as a clerk who doubled as a soldier. He left it as a hero.
He was a hero soon called upon by the Company. In 1756, the young Muslim, anti-British (and not much liked by his Hindu subjects) Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ad-daula, sacked Calcutta; his officers stuffed 146 prisoners—Englishmen, Anglo-Indians, and one woman—into a dark cell fourteen feet wide and eighteen feet long. There was no space to move, for much of the time no water to drink, temperatures soared to over a hundred degrees, air seemed scarce and eventually so too did any chance of surviving. The prisoners were kept in the suffocating heat for ten hours before the nawab could be roused to order their release. By that time, there were only twenty-three survivors, three of whom were held to extract ransom from the East India Company.2
Vengeance was called for, and Clive was asked to deliver it. Calcutta was regained New Year’s Day 1757; next for Clive was toppling the nawab. On 23 June 1757, at the Battle of Plassey, Clive brought 3,000 men, two-thirds of them sepoys, against more than 50,000 troops of the nawab and utterly routed them. Siraj-ad-daula was killed by the new British-approved nawab, and the East India Company had become the kingmakers of Bengal.
A Good Man in India
“Good God! How much depends on the life of one man!”
Major John Carnac on the battlefield heroism of Major Thomas Adams during the conquest of Bengal. Quoted in Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 41
When a successor nawab prepared to attack the British, the Company struck first, and at the Battle of Buxar (22 October 1764) won another smashing victory. The British were outnumbered more than two to one and facing modern artillery manned by European mercenaries. But British audacity, bravery, and intrepidity—and dogged, disciplined infantry—won the day. If Plassey made the East India Company kingmakers, Buxar made Bengal a company province.
An Evolving Empire
By the end of the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), France’s position in India was reduced to a few trading enclaves that existed under British toleration. The real question was whether the East India Company or Parliament should rule India. For what had begun as another free market imperial adventure had become admixed with a sense of British responsibility. The East India Company paid a subvention to support the Royal Navy, but more important was extracting a commitment from the Company to govern according to British principles. Parliament wanted to ensure the Company did not topple native despotisms only to put its own rapacity in their place (the nouveaux riches nabobs were a bad advertisement for the Company); and Parliament did not want the native corruptions of the East to become the acceptable corruptions of Englishmen who served there.
To this end, the India Act of 1784 merged the authority of the East India Company with that of Parliament through a Board of Control. It brought some government regulation and supervision, but the burden on the Company was light. It was, in fact, largely moral. The goal was to ensure that British rule in India was conducted with probity and honor, and with a respect for Indian traditions and civilization, the study of which became an avocation of the more scholarly of the Company’s men.
The Company believed its power rested on its prestige—especially as there were so few Englishmen and so many Indians—and that prestige was secured by military victories that swayed rajahs; the policy was “no retreat,” which in fact became a forward policy of annexation when native rulers misbehaved, and there were plenty of French mercenary officers about to encourage them to misbehave. Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, was fiercely anti-British and did not need much encouragement; he styled himself a Muslim warrior and an ally of Revolutionary France.3 Fittingly, Tipu was given his just deserts by, among other serving officers, Arthur Wellesley—a dab hand at subduing both rebellious Indians and revolutionary and imperial French.
British India grew with the conquest of Nepal (1816), the defeat of the Mahrattas in central India (1818), and peace-keeping operations from Burma to Afghanistan. Aside from keeping native rulers in check, there developed “the Great Game”—the rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia. The British, ever wary of Russian inroads into India, especially through the Khyber Pass, kept up an extraordinary network of spies and soldier sahibs who could pass for natives—and pass sometimes alarming news to the British governor-general.
One consequence of the Company’s “forward” policy—encapsulated by Clive’s admonition that “to stop is dangerous, to recede is ruin”—was that India’s borders kept advancing—north all the way to Kashmir, bordering China; west all the way to Aden where the Arabian Sea meets the Red Sea; south to Ceylon; and east to Burma. One particular sore point was Afghanistan—a potential Russian invasion route. The Afghan emir Dost Muhammad worried the British by dallying with the Russians, and a Russian-Persian attack on western Afghanistan seemed proof of Russia’s aggressive intent. In 1839, British troops invaded the raucous tribal state to punish Dost Muhammad and warn off the armies of the czar.
Conquering Afghanistan and installing a new puppet emir proved easy—another remarkable feat of British arms, and one which did indeed seem to cause the Russian bear to retire. But holding Afghanistan proved a good deal harder. The sullen Afghans refused to support Dost Muhammad’s usurper. Being Afghans, they expressed their displeasure with jezails and knives, ambushes, assassination, and guerrilla war to the point that evacuation became a necessity. Among the assassinated was Sir William Hay Macnaghten, a political agent and de facto governor-general of Kabul—killed while negotiating with Dost Muhammad’s son, Akbar Khan, who in typical Afghan fashion believed that an annoying interlocutor is often best stabbed to death.
Akbar Khan did, however, consent to the peaceful withdrawal of the British army and its camp followers (about 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 civilians) through the Khyber Pass back to India. They were co
mmanded by the fifty-nine-year-old General Sir William Elphinstone, a veteran of Waterloo, whose enduring fame rests not on his role in Bonaparte’s defeat but in leading one of the great epic disasters of the British Empire. Of the 16,000-plus Britons and Indians who entered the Khyber Pass in January 1842 only one, Dr. William Brydon, emerged alive. After promising them safe passage, the Afghans had treated the retiring Britons and Indians as a subject of violent sport, picking them off as they struggled through the frozen pass. The Britons’ last stand was at the Battle of Gandamak (13 January 1842) when about 65 officers and men formed a square in the snow and battled the Afghans to the end, Captain Thomas Souter wrapping himself in the colors.
This, of course, could not be the end. The British stormed into Afghanistan, occupied Kabul, destroyed the villages of those responsible for the massacre, liberated hostages, and then called it a day. Vengeance achieved, the troops marched back to India, and Dost Muhammad returned to his throne. The British had made their point and the Afghans had made theirs. The Duke of Wellington, unperturbed by the Russian threat (Russian numbers, he thought, were no match for British officers), was worried, indeed, by the disaster in the Khyber Pass. “There is not a Moslem heart from Peking to Constantinople which will not vibrate when reflecting on the fact that the European ladies and other females attached to the troops at Kabul were made over to the tender mercies of the Moslem Chief who had with his own hand murdered Sir William Macnaghten.”4
But only a year later another million Muslims were brought under British rule with the conquest of Sind in 1843. In 1849, the Punjab was annexed, and the martial Sikhs filled the ranks of the British Indian army. The conquest of the Punjab was particularly impressive because the Sikhs met the Company’s army not only with a larger force (that was usual; the odds this time were four to one) and with more artillery, but with an army just as well-trained (by Europeans) and well-equipped (by Europeans) as the British, who were led by the redoubtable Sir Hugh Gough, an angular, grey-haired, fearless, blustering, red-cheeked, sixty-six-year-old Anglo-Irishman who led from the front wearing his white “fighting jacket” and believing the only thing necessary to victory was to charge the enemy with the bayonet. This simple tactic did not recommend itself to finer tactical minds, which distrusted the chances of “cold steel” against artillery and musket fire; the British press chalked it up to Gough’s being Irish—but it worked. As Gough himself pointed out, the British army had achieved what Alexander the Great could not: the conquest of India.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the British population in India hovered at about 100,000, compared to more than 250 million Indians. The British believed they ruled in India not only by power—whether military (Britons and Indians were agreed that white officers were the key) or possibly divine providence (God being an Englishman)—but by force of personality. Nothing else could explain how so few could govern so many over so great an expanse. The essentials were British pluck, fortitude, and courage, without which nothing could be done, and British justice, decency, and fair play, which justified the entire endeavor.
The moral side of the British Empire in India developed gradually. The Company was obviously out for profits. Many of its employees were not only free market buccaneers but quite willing to entertain Indian mistresses (or wives), though never to the extent that the French or Portuguese did (the general term for Eurasians was, in fact, “Portuguese”). The first pressures to reform were imposed by governor-generals like Lord Cornwallis and Lord Wellesley who brought the aristocratic cult of the gentleman and made it part and parcel of company practice; then came evangelicalism and, just as important, the arrival of English wives.
Always kept in balance were the conservative’s respect for native traditions and the liberal’s reforming zeal. Conservative and liberal might unite in demanding the abolition of the Hindu practices of widow-burning and killing first-born girls, or the Thugs’ murder cult of Kali, the goddess of death (even when such efforts failed, as they did in trying to overcome Muslim and Hindu traditions allowing the marriage of prepubescent girls to older men). Both could unite, for the most part, even on the idea that India might eventually be largely self-governing after sufficient British tutelage. But there were differences too. The conservatives generally preferred governing through the existing Indian ruling classes—speaking as British lord to Indian noble—with little interference in native affairs; liberals preferred a more aggressive, progressive, rationalist approach. Conservatives upheld Christianity as an integral part of British civilization and superiority, but generally thought it best to let Hindus and Muslims be rather than risk religious war. Evangelicals, needless to say, took a different tack entirely; and evangelicalism was the engine of reforming (and soon secularized) liberalism.
Not on the liberal side of the ledger, but an instrument of reform nevertheless, was the Army; and for all the licentious customs that Evangelicals associated with Indian culture, religion, and art (and that British civil servants associated with the decadent Indian princes they had to keep in line), to be a British officer in India in the latter half of the nineteenth century was essentially to take a religious vow—to one’s regiment rather than the Church, though the regiment offered just as varied a supply of rituals and orders. When it came to marriage, the catechism for officers had long been, in the famous formulation, that subalterns must not marry, captains may marry, majors should marry, and colonels must marry. Certainly after the triumph of Victorian morality at home, a young officer’s life was often, as Francis Yeats-Brown (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer) noted, writing of his experience in early twentieth century India, “as sexless as any monk’s. . . . What is good for the Roman priest is (I suppose) good for the Indian cavalry subaltern, who has work to do (like the priest) which he could scarcely perform if hampered by family ties.”5 There was a bit of philandering in the hill stations, but less than is sometimes supposed.6 The real diversion, or indeed obsession, for officers was sport. It doubled as training for war.
The Great Indian Mutiny
The importance of being British—of being cool in a crisis, courageous, a natural leader of men—became even more pronounced after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, the seismic event in the history of the British Empire in India. It began with a growing suspicion in some Indian regiments that the British were going to attempt the obliteration of caste and a mass conversion to Christianity; for evidence of Britain’s disregard for the beliefs of Hindu and Muslim soldiers one had to look no further than the cartridges for the new Enfield rifle, which were rumored to be greased with cow and pig fat. The Company was quick to ensure that only ungreased cartridges were issued and that they could be greased according to the religious predilections of the greaser, but this did not assuage the sepoys, who distrusted the cartridges, nurtured gripes about pay and pensions, and feared the Army was intent on enrolling lower castes and forcing Hindus to serve overseas where they might lose caste.
The mutiny was not exclusively a military affair. It was joined by disaffected Indian nobles, Indians who distrusted British schools, Indians who resented British interference with their traditions, and the mob that welcomed any excuse to riot and pillage. The revolt was largely confined to north-central India, but it was fearsome nonetheless.
It began with a rumble: a mutinous individual sepoy here, a contumacious regiment there, a series of fires set by arsonists; the British officers responding with quick and effective courts-martial, threats of force, and disbandment of untrustworthy units. But the fuse was really lit in May 1857 when members of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry based in Meerut sprang from prison sepoys who had refused (some tearfully, claiming they were loyal but could not violate their religion) to fire the new cartridges. The cavalrymen rode through the city rousing the people to join the revolt. It was Sunday, and though some British officers had been warned of the impending trouble by loyal sepoys, they had not taken the warnings seriously. British soldiers and civilians, including wives and children, were set
upon and murdered. The mutinous cavalry rode to the eighty-two-year-old Bahadur Shah, the Mughal king of Delhi, whom they proclaimed the rightful ruler of India. He, rather befuddled by opium, accepted. The rapine that had been inflicted on Meerut was now repeated at Delhi, and the mutiny was in full charge: jihad for some, pillage for others. Most communities were divided; it was not a nationalist revolution or a sectarian revolution (except in the sense that it was anti-Christian and anti-British). The rebellion divided both between and within classes, races, and sects. Some of the mutineers wavered before they made their choice and even escorted their British officers and families to safety before throwing their lot in with the rebels.
Standing by the British were the martial Sikhs and Gurkhas (among many others); Indians who benefited from British law and commerce; loyal rajahs (most Indian princes stayed loyal); and Indians who were intimidated both by the Company’s fearsome reputation for battlefield success and by the reinforcements that arrived with bagpipes skirling. The British, however, were still stretched perilously thin. They were besieged at Lucknow and at Cawnpore (where they were lured out by an offer of safe passage and then massacred). The British in turn besieged the mutineers’ capital at Delhi. When British retribution came, it was indeed swift and fierce, fired by the rebels’ treachery and their murders of women and children. British generals Sir James Outram, Sir Henry Havelock, and Sir Colin Campbell (commander in chief of India), among other commanders, cut through the enemy with avenging swords and Enfield rifles, erecting gibbets to hang surviving traitors; they were slowed only by a shortage of troops.
The rebellion was not fully quashed until early 1859, though the outcome was never in doubt from the summer of 1857. Delhi was regained in September, and the purported rightful ruler of India, Bahadur Shah, sent into exile. Lucknow was fully regained in March 1858. The rest was hunting down miscreants who were shot out of hand. The British had, as usual, been outnumbered in every major battle; they had fought disciplined troops they themselves had trained—troops that could match them, or nearly (the Enfield rifle had its advantages), in weaponry. But they had again emerged triumphant—a fact that impressed itself forcibly on the Indians. The soldier sahibs were to be obeyed.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire Page 13