by Jan Morris
These were experimental days of empire. Just as Napier had established a new kind of Government in Sind, so an ad hoc administrative machine was devised for the Punjab. It too was personal, autocratic, military, but it was a much more earnest instrument of dominance; in the Punjab the Empire moved a stage further towards providential duty, the destiny of race, and the other lofty abstractions of late Victorian imperialism. At the head of the Government was a board of three members, and this absolute tribune made its principles of Government absolutely clear. Justice, for instance, would be ‘plainly dealt out to a simple people’, avoiding all technicality, circumlocution, and obscurity, with accessible courts of law in which every man might plead his own cause, and be confronted face to face with his opponents. Bureaucracy would be kept stylishly in check: ‘with good Officers rules are almost superfluous, with bad Officers they are almost ineffective.’ There would naturally be, the board publicly admitted, some enmity against such ‘powerful and humane’ conquerors, but the mass of people would advance in material prosperity and moral elevation. Promptness, accessibility, brevity and kindliness were the best engines of government, and the board set itself out to be ‘considerate and kind, not expecting too much from ignorant people’, and ‘to make no change, unless certain of decided improvement’.
A commission of some 80 young Company men imposed these disciplines upon the mixed Sikh, Muslim and Hindu population of the Punjab. Some were soldiers, seconded to political jobs, some were civilians. They formed an ideological shock-force, dedicated, energetic, cohesive, progressive, which fell upon the conquered country like a reforming cadre, examining all its institutions, assessing all its possibilities, and impressing the personality of the Empire upon every last peasant in every corner of the land. They codified the law. They reconstituted the coinage. They ended banditry. They built roads and canals. In four years they established a complete new system of Government to control every facet of public life in a country the size of France. The men of the Punjab School, we are told, worked ten to fourteen hours a day. They had no leave unless they were sick, and they prided themselves upon their membership of a corps d’élite, whose new order of Government would be its own memorial.
But the style of the whole operation, its air of Puritan complacency and superiority, was set by two brothers: John and Henry Lawrence, the dominant members of the board. They often quarrelled, and they differed greatly in character, but they were both men of instinctive power. They were like prophets, inspired by divine messages to acts of profound generosity or uninhibited ferocity: or perhaps like Wagnerian figures of fable, for they were burning people, romantics of an almost fanatic kind, full of zeal, certainty and purpose. Emily Eden might have thought them slightly preposterous, and Charles Napier, who became commander-in-chief of the armies in the Punjab, predictably detested them both.
5
The Lawrences were the sixth and eighth sons of an Anglo-Irish soldier. A third brother, George, was one of the staff officers who escaped when Macnaghten was murdered at Kabul: he was deputy commissioner of Peshawar under his brothers’ authority, became a general and wrote a book that set a fashion in Anglo-Indian titles—Forty-Three Years in India.1 The Lawrence boys had followed their father around the world, school to school, station to station—Henry was born in cantonment in Ceylon, John in barracks in Yorkshire—and had enjoyed a mixed but broadening upbringing. ‘I was flogged once every day of my life at school,’ John Lawrence said, ‘except one—and then I was flogged twice.’ One went to the East India Company’s civilian college at Haileybury, the other to its military academy at Addiscombe, and they sailed for India in the 1820s—at a time when the British political mission there was scarcely conceived, let alone defined, and a young man might feel, like William Hickey before him, that he was embarking upon a career with no higher purpose than pleasure and good money.
Not the Lawrences. Both were intensely religious young men, Bible-readers, workers. They were High Victorians before their time, and took their life and labours seriously—Henry, almost as soon as he arrived in India, joined a coterie of like-minded officers who prayed and meditated communally at a house cryptically called Fairy Hall, Dum Dum. Step by step they rose, the one in the military service of the Company, the other in the political. Henry, when stationed in Nepal, married a clergyman’s daughter—the first white woman ever seen in Katmandu—and after serving in the first Burma War, the Afghan war, and the war against the Sikhs, became Resident in Lahore, John married a parson’s daughter too, and steadily ascended the hierarchy of the civil service, by way of Paniput and Gurgaon, Etawah and Kurnaul, to be Collector of Delhi. So the two brothers, their temperamental differences wider now but their capacity for passionate purpose still equal, were united again upon the Board of Administration of the newly annexed Punjab. Henry was the President, John the administrative genius. They differed incessantly, chiefly on the technical details of Government, sometimes simply on issues of outlook or priority. Once they were actually estranged. But their partnership was formidable, and was to set its mark upon the Punjab for a century to come.
In the Punjab they reached their prime. Henry was the weaker, softer, more irritating, more cultivated of the two. He was also perhaps the more priggish, and one senses in him a certain Fairy Hall quality of ingratiation. He was a marvellous looking man, like a great sage—‘Sir Henry looked to Heaven and stroked his beard’, wrote an Indian commentator of him, ‘and then he knew what to do’. There is one picture of him which shows him immersed in the contemplation of a family portrait, sitting very upright in his chair, and gazing with a disturbing intensity at the picture: his high cheek-bones, his big nose, the lined and sunken aspect of his face, give him an ascetic, almost Arab look. In another painting he is seen sitting cross-legged before the throne of the ruler of Udaipur. He wears a little peaked hat like a railwayman’s cap, and is seated in an attitude of almost jejune respect before the immensely condescending and far more magnificently whiskered prince: but even so, surrounded as he is by jewelled, feathered, turbaned and sword-girt magnificos of the court, it is Lawrence’s rigid and fibred figure that catches the eye, and makes one realize at a glance who is the real power at that Durbar.
Henry had little time for niggling matters of cost or method. His was the big picture. ‘Settle the country,’ he used to instruct his subordinates simply, ‘make the people happy, and take care there are no rows.’ He had a taste for the company of Indian princes—cross-legged at the Rajah’s feet was an apposite pose—but he had an imperious temper, too, unfortunately tinged with moodiness. Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General, found him more and more tiresome as the years passed, but those who worked more closely with him, and who were able to balance the grandeur against the irritations, are said to have loved him greatly. He had a warm heart and a tongue more reckless than malicious. He was usually ready to apologize. His scale was grand, and when he died the four British soldiers who were his pall-bearers kissed the forehead of his corpse, one by one, in respectful farewell.
John Lawrence grew into something different—a brusquer, angrier, more inflexible and formidable man, earthier of values and bolder of action. When Henry left the Punjab in 1853 he handed over the Presidency to John, and said in a parting letter: ‘If you preserve the peace of the country and make the people happy, high and low, I shall have no regrets that I vacated the field for you…. I think we are doubly bound to treat them kindly because they are dawn’. John’s immediate reply was harsher. ‘I will give every man a fair hearing, and will endeavour to give every man his due. More than this no one should expect.’ There is nothing gentle to John Lawrence’s face. It is almost brutal in its strength and dignity—heavy-jawed and thick-necked, with frowning eyes and a high forehead, a military moustache, a sober hair-cut and an unlaughing, incorruptible mouth. He looks like one of those over-informed progressives whose inflexible convictions wither the small talk at frivolous dinnerparties. It is a modern style of face, and John Lawrence was a
n early imperial technocrat. He was logical, ruthless and efficient. He thought in terms of cost and effect, not worrying too much about cause, and he worked to an unremitting rhythm, night and day, even phrasing his public proclamations in thumping antiphony, half Old Testament, half steam-hammer.
Only the rashest Indians crossed swords with this vehement Cromwellian, but he made many enemies among his own people. ‘More like a navvy than a gentleman’, wrote one fastidious colleague, and many more resented his addictions to living rough, ostentatiously working all hours and ‘getting the best out of people’. He was an early exponent of the team spirit, reactions to which have formed a dividing line among educated Englishmen ever since. John Lawrence called himself ‘an old bullock for work’, once claiming that he had not had a day’s rest for nearly sixteen years, and by the expression of such attitudes, another colleague wrote, ‘he effectually prevented anyone from being comfortable’. He was excellent at money-matters, and skilfully transformed the financial situation of the Punjab: but it was money in the principle, or in the account book, that concerned him, and he never coveted it for himself, or responded to the allure of eastern fortunes. After the Sikh wars the Koh-i-Noor, seized by Ranjit Singh from poor Shah Shuja, was seized in turn by the East India Company, and was given to John Lawrence for safe keeping, wrapped up in a small box. By his own account he popped it into a waistcoat pocket and forgot all about it, and when Queen Victoria happened to inquire about it six weeks later, had to ask his servant if he had come across it. The servant did recall finding ‘a bit of glass’ in one of his suits, and so it was sent to England on the paddle-frigate Medusa, guarded by soldiers in an iron casket, to be added to the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.1
John Lawrence was later to become an archetypical mid-Victorian hero. He grew paunchy in his later years, and developed heavy dewlaps, but the British public made him a semi-deity, and erected statues in his honour—‘it will seem almost blasphemy,’ wrote one of his less adulatory subordinates, ‘to say a word against him’. The Punjab School of Imperial Government, of which he was the real creator, was the pride of the Indian Empire for generations to come: he himself lived to become the Queen’s Viceroy in India, and died in 1879 a peer of the realm, the Either of 10 children and a director of the North British Insurance Company.
6
The young men of the Punjab were often inspired for life by the examples of the Lawrences. Personal government was their creed, and they were always on the move among their peasantry, accessible to all, presiding over improvised courts of law, living on chapattis or rice and talking always in the vernacular. Many of them were early practitioners of that imperial ideal, muscular Christianity, which was given its impetus by Dr Arnold and his co-educators of the public schools, and given its name by Disraeli. They believed that they were personally performing God’s will, like prefects acting for the headmaster, as they disciplined sluggish villagers, or punctured the self-esteem of headmen: Herbert Edwardes, aged 30, felt inspired to translate the feeling into a comprehensive new legal code for the ribesmen of the Bannu valley—he wrote it in Persian, and in eighteen clauses it dealt conclusively with most varieties of human dispute, infanticide to land claims.
In temperament the Punjab men widely varied. At one end of the emotional scale let us consider John Nicholson, who was to become a fable in his lifetime. Even more strikingly than John Lawrence, Nicholson was a modernist. He established his ascendancy over people, whether Indian or European, by the blaze of a fervour that seemed the very latest thing. He was only 35 when he died, as the youngest general in the British service, yet his epitaphs were those of a great national figure. ‘I have never seen anyone like him,’ recalled Field-Marshal Lord Roberts in Forty-One Years in India‚ ‘he was the beau-ideal of a soldier and a gentleman.’ ‘I never saw another like him,’ said Herbert Edwardes, ‘and never expect to do so.’ ‘The idol of all soldiers’, thought Field-Marshal Lord Gough. ‘His name cowed whole provinces’, said Lord Dalhousie the Governor-General. ‘The memory of his deeds,’ said John Lawrence, ‘will never perish so long as British rule endures.’ He was compared on his death-bed to ‘a noble oak riven by a thunderbolt’, and a contemporary Indian is supposed to have said of him that ‘you could hear the ring of his horse’s hoofs from Attock to the Khyber’.
All this in his thirties, at a time when the British services, military or civilian, were not short of striking characters. Nicholson was yet another Anglo-Irishman. His father, a lapsed Quaker who practised as a physician in Dublin, died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his mother, who apparently remembered him with glazed awe. At three, she said, she observed him laying about him with a knotted handkerchief at some invisible enemy—‘trying to get a blow at the Devil’, the infant explained, ‘for he wants me to be bad’. This unnerving piety guided him through life, and lost him many friends: for he was given to tracts and sanctimonious aphorisms, and one of his earliest achievements was to reform the moral tone of the English community in Kashmir, where scandalous things went on beside the lakes—his successors there, we are told, ‘found the moral atmosphere much purified’.
But he was a fighter. ‘You may rely on this, my Lord,’ Dalhousie was told one day, ‘that if ever there is a desperate deed to be done in India, John Nicholson is the man to do it.’ Part of his fascination was purely physical. He was a big man, 6' 2", heavily built, with large dark-grey eyes, a full mouth, and an expression of contemplative assurance. People thought he looked like a bigger Disraeli, and there was something Jewish to the style of his face. In other ways he seems to us the very model of the conventional Victorian hero—manly, as the word was, but sensitive, noble, firm: ‘grand and simple’, Roberts called him. Even now, when tastes have changed and Victorian preferences often seem sickly or even comic, one can see between the lines of the lithographs how compelling his presence must have been. He looks utterly sure. You might not confide in him your innermost secret, especially if you were planning a holiday in Kashmir, but you would certainly trust him with your life.1
Like so many of his contemporaries, Nicholson first saw action in the Afghan War; he spent some months as a prisoner of the Afghans, and on his way bade to India after his release discovered the body of his own younger brother, Alexander, naked and mutilated in the Khyber. He made a name for himself in the Sikh wars, and so came as one of the Lawrences’ protégés to the Punjab. There, among the fierce untameable Sikhs, he established so absolute an ascendancy in his own district that people actually deified him. He had first acquired a myth of sanctity after the battle of Gujerat in 1849, when entirely on his own responsibility he had released all the Sikh prisoners, telling them to go home quietly. This mercy in victory so impressed them that they believed him to be more than human (and certainly it was not how they would have behaved themselves). A brotherhood calling itself the Nikkulseynites declared him to be a reincarnation of Brahma, and fakirs dedicated themselves to his honour, and had themselves flogged in reverent penance. When he died two holy men killed themselves, and the cult of the Nikkulseynites long survived him, and was intermittently re-discovered by historians and anthropologists until the end of the century.
Yet he treated Indians tyrannically, submitting his conduct to no arbitration but his own—or God’s, which was the same thing in practice. In Bannu, when a potentate spat contemptuously at his feet, Nicholson made him lick up the spittle, and then had him kicked out of the camp. Elsewhere he had the beard shaved off an imam who ventured to scowl at him. He flogged miscreants without compunction, and publicly displayed the corpses of convicted criminals. ‘There is not a man in the hills,’ one Punjabi chief is alleged to have testified, ‘who does not shiver in his pyjamas when he hears Nicholson’s name mentioned.’
Still, an essential quality of the Victorian hero was tenderness, a feminine sensibility to set off the courage and command, and this too Nicholson assiduously displayed. Though he believed in rough and instant justice, was a terrible tiger-h
unter and a famous guerilla leader, still he possessed a sentimental streak, and indulged himself frequently in protracted misunderstandings and reconciliations. He was a hero-worshipper, like so many of his time, and though he was an incoherent writer and an almost inaudible speaker, his friendships were urgent. Later analyists would say they were unconsciously homosexual, but they doubtless sprang from just the same earnestness and desire for fulfilment that made him so dedicated a man of action.
We shall see later how he died: for another extreme of temperament let us turn from him to one of his closest friends in the Punjab. William Hodson was the most dashing and ruthless of all the Punjabi men, and his name was to enter the vocabulary of arms. In spirit a survivor from the old days of the East India freebooters, Hodson was a soldier through and through, but unlike most of his colleagues, he was bred to the humanities. He was the son of a canon of Lichfield, was at Rugby under Arnold, took a degree at Cambridge and was a man of wide reading. He loved Shakespeare, and this was natural, for he was Hotspur brought to life. He enjoyed war for war’s sake, fought it with superb panache, and was one of the greatest British leaders of irregular troops. He was a blue-eyed, blond English gentleman, and like many another, he was flawed—as though the type were too perfect, the ensemble too balanced to be true. He was the sort of man who is commonly called fearless, a quality that so often masks some inner atrophy, and in his unquenchable hunger for physical conflict one senses an uncertainty of spirit. We are told that in battle, heedlessly slashing with his sabre or galloping pell-mell towards the enemy lines, his face was habitually wreathed in smiles: in a sword-fight he laughed out loud, and sometimes encouraged his opponent like a fencing-master–‘Come along now, make me sweat for it! You call yourself a swordsman? Try again, try again!’