The strategic situation at the beginning of 1842 was summed up by Major Henry Havelock, then with the 13th Regiment inside Jalalabad. ‘Our only friends on this side of the Sutlej,’ he wrote, ‘are our own and General Pollock’s bayonets.’ Jalalabad, Qalat, Kandahar and Ghazni, which was later retaken by the Afghans, ‘stand like isolated rocks in the midst of an ocean covered with foam, while against and around them the breakers dash down in wild fury’.57 But Havelock was undismayed; he was a lionhearted, God-fearing Baptist who was certain that Divine Providence would favour British arms. Recovery was remarkably swift and helped by the fact that, having partly expelled the intruders, the Afghans began to quarrel among themselves. Much was owed to two good generals, Sir George Pollock, who took charge in the Khyber Pass in the spring, and the acerbic but thorough Nott, who held his position at Kandahar and inflicted defeats on tribes in adjacent districts.
There was a change in political direction. After gentle nudging from London, Auckland had resigned in October, and was replaced by the more martial Lord Ellenborough, who had attempted to persuade the Prime Minister to appoint him Captain as well as Governor-General. On his arrival in Calcutta in March 1842, Ellenborough allowed his bodyguard to exercise their mounts in flower gardens which had been laid out by his predecessor’s sister, Emily Eden. She was horrified, but the generals in Afghanistan were pleased to have a Governor-General who was happy to let them transform an evacuation into operations designed to punish the Afghans. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1842, Nott’s and Pollock’s columns fanned out, engaged Afghan forces, destroyed villages, drove off or slaughtered stock, burned crops and storehouses, and hustled tribesmen and their families into the hills to perish. The severest chastisement fell on the inhabitants of those areas in which the refugees from Kabul had been massacred. The fortress and town of Ghazni were razed to the ground and, during the brief reoccupation of Kabul, its bazaar was demolished. Hostages taken during the Kabul débâcle were rescued or, in some cases, handed back, and 300 captured sepoys enslaved in Ghazni were liberated.
The systematic rampage of what was called the Army of Retribution may have done something to refurbish Britain’s reputation as a great power in Asia. To judge by what they wrote of their activities, it satisfied an understandable need for revenge among the soldiers. When their satisfying work had been done, they retired across the Indus. The post-war political settlement restored the status quo: Dost Muhammad returned to Kabul as amir (Shah Shuja had been assassinated in April 1842) and Afghanistan was left to its own devices. The Russian threat had receded; there had been a scare in the spring of 1840 with news that a Russian army was on its way to Khiva, but it failed to reach its objective. For the time being the Russians were prepared to leave Khiva alone. They were having a grim time in the Caucasus during 1841 and 1842, if Yeames’s intelligence reports from Odessa were anything to go by. The next ten years saw an Anglo-Russian rapprochement during which both nations forgot about what might become of the empty wastes beyond the Oxus.
The Afghan fiasco had serious repercussions. The humiliations inflicted on the army severely damaged Britain’s reputation for invincibility in India and beyond. A Baluchi amir may have voiced the thoughts of many when he gloated over ‘the English having been turned out of Afghanistan and eaten dirt’.58 The British official who reported this outburst could only explain it as the consequence of the speaker’s intoxication with bhang (hemp). But even the sober recognised that damage had been done to Britain’s standing everywhere in Asia. The point was made, rather melodramatically, by Wellington:
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 . . . It is impossible that that fact should not produce a moral effect injurious to British Influence and Power throughout the whole extent of Asia.59
The ladies had, in fact, been decently treated, although, like many other captives, they had found Afghan food not to their taste. The Duke was also concerned as to where India’s north-western frontier was to be drawn, and whether it should include the Sind and Punjab. The Sindian amirs were restless in the wake of the Afghan disaster, and the Punjab’s strong man, Ranjit Singh, had died in the summer of 1839. Within three years the subsequent power struggle had propelled the province into anarchy. Inevitably, the hawks in Calcutta demanded intervention and war, but ministers in London, chastened by the recent misadventures in Afghanistan, were disinclined to listen.
3
The cast of a Die: The
Sind and the Sikhs,
1843 – 49
I
‘We were thrashed out of Afghanistan,’ observed the Radical MP John Roebuck in February 1844 during the Commons debate on the annexation of the Sind. He was defending the man responsible, General Sir Charles Napier, and like so many MPs on the left, Roebuck never pulled his punches. Every Indian conquest had been an ‘injustice’, but what he called ‘inevitable fate’ had dictated that the Sind would be taken over. Roebuck understood the true nature of British expansion better than most of his colleagues, who had been regretting its baleful influence on the national moral character. British India would continue to grow despite all the hand-wringing in Westminster, and he confidently predicted that, ‘you will possess the Punjab in less than two years in spite of yourselves’. Members scoffed in disbelief, for after the Afghan fiasco the government had announced an end to military adventures on India’s frontiers.1 Within eighteen months British forces were preparing to fight the Sikhs.
The conquest of the Sind had been one of the first fruits of Lord Ellenborough’s governor-generalship. Whereas his predecessor, Auckland, had been a pacific man driven to make war by circumstances beyond his control, Ellenborough was an instinctive hawk under orders to avoid aggression at all costs. He refused to go against the grain of his nature. He warmly encouraged the punitive campaign in Afghanistan in 1842 and, when it was over, sent home a jubilant despatch. Its bombastic tone was mocked by the new satirical journal Punch, which, on hearing of his recall in 1844, had him lament in the manner of Othello:
Farewell, the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue.2
Ellenborough had waged two big wars, both in 1843, one against Gwalior and the other against the Sind, states which had hitherto been within the Company’s orbit. The first had been forced upon him by a disputed succession in which the rights of the ten-year-old Raja of Gwalior were in danger of being overridden by a clique of anti-British courtiers. There were fears the row might rekindle Maratha resistance, and intelligence reports suggested that the dissidents were secretly soliciting support from other princely states. Calcutta was alarmed by these developments, which were further evidence that the recent humiliations in Kabul and the Khyber Pass had reduced British prestige throughout India. Ellenborough reached for the traditional prescription: at the end of 1843 two powerful armies converged on the city of Gwalior.
The Company’s standing was restored by two simultaneous battles at Panniar (near Narwar) and Maharajapur on 29 December. Sir Harry Smith, the newly arrived adjutant-general, was astonished by the bravery of the Maratha gunners at Maharajapur, which he took to be the result of a generation of British training. He and many others were gratified by the steadiness and grit of the two British regiments involved, the 39th and 40th, who advanced through ‘grape like hail’ to storm the enemy’s batteries.3 The battle was also watched from the backs of elephants by Lady Gough, the wife of the commander-in-chief, Sir Hugh Gough, and Lady Smith, for whom such spectacles were familiar. When she was twelve, her future husband had rescued her from the bloody saturnalia which followed the taking of Badajoz in 1812, and thereafter she had followed him and the army across Spain.
Unlike Gwalior, a princely state previously under the Company’s thumb, the Sind still enjoyed a
degree of independence. It was an inaccessible region of 50,000 square miles on India’s vulnerable north-western frontier and straddled the lower Indus, the river earmarked as a future highway for British commerce. The Sind’s million or so inhabitants were predominantly Muslims and were ruled by amirs from the Baluchi Talpur clan, whose government was well liked. The area was said to have been relatively peaceful and free from crime, although the stock-rustling and blood feuds which were the main preoccupations of the Baluchi majority were not regarded as criminal by the Sindians.4 As relations between the amirs and the British deteriorated, the latter vilified them as wanton despots whose judgement and wits were permanently blurred by an addiction to bhang and opium. As so often in the past, the extension of British rule was portrayed as the replacement of bad government by good. Moreover, and this was useful in whipping up support for the Sind war among humanitarians at home, the amirs tolerated domestic slavery.
In 1843 the Sind was in a precarious political limbo. For the past sixty years it had been slowly penetrated by the Company, first in the name of trade and then in that of strategy. By and large Anglo-Sindian relations had been cordial, largely because the amirs saw the Company’s friendship as a bulwark against the claims of their nominal overlord, the Amir of Afghanistan. Matters took a turn for the worse at the end of 1838, when the Company had demanded and obtained passage through the Sind for the Army of the Indus and tribute from the amirs for Shah Shuja. Baluchis living close to the extended British lines of communication regarded the war as a godsend and, following their instincts, raided supply convoys and attacked isolated detachments. By the beginning of 1842, British political agents and troops, often locally-recruited irregular cavalry, were engaged in a small-scale war against the marauders. At the same time, Sindian independence was being eroded by the British seizure of Karachi (a useful base close to the mouth of the Indus) and the establishment of a network of political residents and small garrisons in towns along the route from Sukkur to Quetta.
Once British forces had returned from Afghanistan, the Sind faced two futures. The first was a continuation of the status quo, with the province as a loosely controlled British protectorate in which the amirs upheld Britain’s interests in return for their limited independence. The alternative was annexation. This course was favoured by Ellenborough, who believed that the security of a vital frontier zone could no longer be entrusted to resentful princes who might prove political weathercocks and many of whose subjects were openly hostile. Advocates of annexation were backed by sheaves of intelligence reports, many of them based on hearsay, which indicated that the amirs were fomenting disaffection in readiness for a general uprising to avenge Britain’s recent intrusions. It went without saying that their truculence was a direct consequence of events in Afghanistan.
The man instructed to forestall the imagined insurrection and settle the problems of the Sind was Major-General Sir Charles Napier, a sixty-year-old veteran of the Peninsular war. He was an eccentric choice for a Tory government and Governor-General, for he was a former Radical MP who had once denounced the East India Company’s administrators as leeches sucking the lifeblood of Indians. His features and bearing were those of some early Christian ascetic as conceived by a Renaissance artist; a callotype photograph of 1850 shows a lean, upright man with a commanding brow, aquiline nose and a straggling white beard flowing to his waist. Napier lived up to his appearance, for he saw himself as an instrument of God and constantly sought Divine guidance. On arriving in Karachi on 3 September 1842, he noted that it was the day which had been so decisive in the career of another soldier of the Lord, Oliver Cromwell. The coincidence added to his inner turmoil and he admonished himself in his journal: ‘Charles! Charles Napier! Take heed of your ambition for military glory; you had scotched that snake, but this high command will, unless you are careful, give it all its vigour again. Get thee behind me Satan!’5 Napier’s other gospel had been set down by his former commander, Wellington, who insisted that in India a general should never retire in the face of the natives.
A servant of God who never flinched was ideally suited to fulfil Ellenborough’s wishes. From the start, Napier was determined to have his way, and he quickly convinced himself that the Sindian amirs were a pack of degenerate tyrants whose word could never be trusted. Nor could his political officers, a breed which he blamed for what had occurred in Afghanistan, where ‘the chief cause of our disasters was, that when a smart lad could speak Hindustani and Persian he was deemed a statesman, and a general, and was made a political agent’.6 Napier soon developed a dislike for one ‘smart lad’, the highly capable and opinionated Major James Outram, an Aberdonian who had served as a political officer in the Sind since 1839. Basing his judgements on experience and a special insight into the amirs’ minds, Outram contested his superior’s assumption that they were secretly preparing for war. Rather, he claimed, they were being driven into resistance by the minatory and unyielding diplomacy of Napier, who was bent on fighting, come what may. There was much truth in this. On one occasion, Napier bluntly warned the amir Ali Murad of Khairpur: ‘Woe attend those who conspire against the powerful arms of the Company. Behold the fate of Tipu Sultan and the Peshwa, and the Emperor of China [the first Opium War had just ended].’7
The purpose behind this hectoring was a political settlement by which Britain would assume complete paramountcy over the Sind. Various towns, including Karachi and Sukkur, were to be surrendered; all local duties on cargoes passing up and down the Indus were to be abolished; and the Company was to be given the right to settle differences between the amirs. As a token of this new sovereignty, Rustum Khan, an amir of suspect loyalty, was ordered to cede some of his territories to the ruler of Bahawalpur, who had been actively helpful during the Afghan war. Ellenborough imagined that this exercise in coercion would discourage future princely backsliding, but in Britain it looked like a gross infringement of the universal rights of property.8
Throughout the winter of 1842–43, Napier brushed aside the amirs’ efforts towards conciliation and compromise as procrastination. He hoped to flush them out, as it were, before April and the onset of the hot season, during which his British forces would be at a severe disadvantage. At the end of January, with time running out and without a formal declaration of war, Napier forced the issue. He led an army 3,000-strong, supported by two steamers, towards Hyderabad where the amirs had been mustering their followers for some weeks.
Napier was taking a gamble, even though he may have been confident of Divine assistance. If his intelligence reports were anything to go by, there were between 20,000 and 60,000 Baluchis in arms. Everything hung on the performance of his artillery and his one British regiment, the 22nd, which, like so many regiments at the time, consisted mostly of Irishmen. To keep them fit and preserve their stamina, Napier had 300 placed on camels during the cross-country march. Progress was slow, for the region adjacent to the Indus was criss-crossed by dried-up irrigation canals with raised banks through which sappers had to cut passages to allow the artillery to pass. Early on the morning of 18 February, scouting parties from the Sind Irregular Horse discovered the amirs’ army in defensive positions close to Miani, seventeen miles south of Hyderabad. Weak in artillery, the bulk of the Sindian army, sword and matchlockmen, was concealed in the bed of the Fuleli river, a tributary of the Indus. A perfunctory reconnaissance revealed that there were 11,000, about half the actual total.
There was no time for a detailed examination of the Sindian dispositions. Napier wanted to strike quickly and hard, and so he drew up his infantry in three sections which advanced in echelon with the 22nd in the lead. The battle opened with an unequal artillery duel, with the Sindian gunners firing high and their opponents answering with grape at close range, which overwhelmed Baluchi matchlockmen on the flank of the main army. As the Anglo-Indian force approached the raised bank of the Fuleli, it was met by matchlock fire and then an onrush by impatient Baluchis armed with swords and bucklers. There followed a scrimmage i
n which the 22nd handled their bayonets more adroitly than the sepoys, who were driven back. The 12th Bengal NI all but broke before the Baluchi tulwars, but were rallied by an officer and two havildars (sergeants), who led a counter-attack. Napier himself rode over to steady the 25th Bombay NI, which had retreated in an ‘alarming manner’.9 The Baluchi onslaught was stemmed and they were pushed back at bayonet point into the river bed. Now was the moment for the Company troops to use their terrible firepower. Volley after volley of close-range musketry poured down into the Baluchis as they crowded into the river bed, and cannon were brought up to enfilade them with grape shot. Trapped, they fought back with ‘determined valour’ but it was useless; hundreds were killed, some burned to death as their robes were set alight by matchlock fuses. When they finally broke, the Baluchis retired walking in what some onlookers considered a defiant manner. It had been a classic Indian battle, won by a mixture of offensive audacity, superior weaponry and disciplined firepower. British losses were 39 dead and 231 wounded. As at Plassey and so many subsequent battles, nobody bothered to count the enemy casualties, which were estimated to be about 2,000.
The battle of Miani made the Sind a British province. Napier entered Hyderabad, summarily deposed and exiled the defeated amirs, and declared their lands to be under British administration. Two amirs, Sher Muhammad and Muhammad Ali, kept resistance alive for a few months, but were eventually run to earth in a brief campaign which cost the 28th Regiment thirty-nine dead, all the victims of sunstroke.10 Napier had been right to strike when he did for it was soon clear that British troops would never withstand the hot Sindian summer, when temperatures regularly rose to over 120 degrees.
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