Raj

by Lawrence, James

  All artillery was still muzzle-loading and at long ranges fired only round shot, although after 1800 some progress was being made with fused, explosive shells (fired from howitzers) and shrapnel which exploded in mid-air. By and large this was not a period of innovation, although Indian artillerymen experimented with muskets mounted side by side on a frame and fired one after another. As well as this primitive machine-gun, there were war rockets fired in quick succession. ‘Showers’ of these missiles were fired by the Marathas during fighting around Poona at the end of 1817, but appear to have had no effect.99 Drawings of them in use suggest that they were a variation of the familiar firework-type rocket with a warhead. The British equivalent was the Congreve rocket, a wayward projectile with a fiery tail and an explosive warhead. They were used to considerable effect at Sobraon, where they stampeded Sikh horsemen, but those sent from the Firozpur magazine during the siege of Multan all proved duds.100

  In the broad terms of military technology the period which witnessed the British conquest of India was one of comparative stagnation. Unlike British forces in Africa or on the North-West Frontier during the last quarter of the century, the Company’s army did not benefit from the scientific and technical innovations which were slowly gathering pace in Europe. The Industrial Revolution may have provided the Company with mass-produced weaponry, but it was not markedly superior to that of its enemies. It was only after India had been subdued that the balance of power shifted decisively: in 1851 British troops were equipped with the Minié rifle, which was accurate up to a thousand yards; in 1857 Company gunners were being armed with Colt revolvers, and in 1860 an Anglo-Indian army in China used long-range, shell-firing Armstrong cannon.101

  The logistics of the Company’s army were always superior to its opponents, although human competence being what it was, there were breakdowns in supply during every campaign. The worst example was in 1805, during the first siege of Bharatpur, when there were not enough heavy guns to knock down the walls, forcing Lake to use his men as human battering rams with horrendous results. The strength of the Company’s logistics was a ready and ample supply of money. It could always pay its suppliers and labourers in cash drawn from the land revenues from the territories under its control and, as it did, albeit unwillingly, during the 1803–05 Maratha war, raise capital on the London money markets on the security of future income from taxation.

  Money was the lubricant of war and without it campaigns ground to a halt. The brave and high-spirited Beema Baee, the twenty-year-old daughter of Jaswant Rao Holkar, rode with lance and tulwar at the head of 2,500 men during the 1817–18 Maratha war. She told a British officer that she was fighting to defend her country and recover her property, but was forced to throw in the sponge because she ran out of money. She and her remaining 200 followers were immediately given 200 rupees a day.102 War and diplomacy went hand in hand when the Company drew up peace treaties with princes whose military efforts had brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. An Indian ruler might retain what passed for independence, but his future ability to wage war was curtailed by the loss of revenues. During a dearth during the Mysore campaign of 1790–92, Tipu’s commissaries took their grain and rice to the Company’s lines, where they were paid in hard cash rather than credit notes.103 His own soldiers must have gone hungry, or else fended for themselves. The lure of ready money attracted the professional military victuallers, the brinjaris, to Cornwallis’s camp rather than Tipu’s. With over 50,000 transport bullocks and access to the grain and rice dealers of Karnataka, the brinjaris supplied most of the army’s rations.104

  Silver rupees purchased the draft bullocks vital for an army’s logistics. A six-pounder gun required 35 bullocks to pull it and a further 105 for fodder. A 24-pounder siege cannon and its eight tumbrils of powder and shot were drawn by 155 bullocks with 620 carrying fodder.105 The wherewithal for horse and rider meant that there were six bullocks for every cavalryman and, in an age when officers required huge tents, their mistresses, servants and every form of creature comfort, their baggage allowance was at least six bullocks.106 Wastage was enormous: over 14,000 bullocks died during the 1790–92 Mysore war and probably greater numbers of pack camels perished during the 1838–39 invasion of Afghanistan. Camels were restricted to operations in northern India and were attractive to the budget-conscious military authorities because they cost only three rupees a month to feed. It was estimated that four camels could carry the load of one elephant which, while it was more durable and versatile, was far more expensive to maintain. Beasts purchased during the 1848–49 Sikh war cost 515 rupees each, and the cost of their feed was 35 rupees a month.107 What mattered of course was that in an emergency the Company’s representatives could buy as many elephants or anything else that was needed to sustain an army in the field.

  The administrative machinery which oversaw the Company army’s wartime logistics existed on an ad hoc basis, save when it came to auditing accounts. There was no permanent general staff of specialist officers, and the daily business of supplies and victualling were usually handled at a regimental level. There were hints that military contractors and purveyors made fortunes through fraud, but somehow the system worked. For this reason and the instinctive conservatism of the military high command, it was allowed to continue.

  The absence of an Indian central intelligence agency was even more remarkable, given the perpetual nervousness about security. Both the military and also the civilian authorities preferred an idiosyncratic system which always managed to deliver what was needed at the right time. In the broadest sense, every Briton abroad in India was a spy, expected to use his eyes and ears and record what he had seen and heard. Surveys of newly-annexed districts give copious details of resources which might be useful in wartime, and roads were judged according to their ability to withstand the passage of artillery and military transport. The same applied to Indian fortifications, which were sketched and measured. Even so, armies sometimes had to march blindly, relying on cavalry patrols to discover the way ahead. At Assaye, the position of the ford by which his army crossed a river was discovered by Wellesley, who rightly guessed that it would be beside a spot where a few houses were visible. It was an intrepid sepoy volunteer, Ramdin Missir, who tested the depth of the fords across the Chenab and spied out the Sikh position on the other bank in December 1848. He was promoted to naik (corporal), a somewhat niggardly reward for a dangerous mission.108

  Every British resident at an Indian court ran his own espionage system. It comprised a network of native spies, informers and ‘writers’ who compiled newsletters based upon local gossip and their own observation. In 1816–17 Montstuart Elphinstone in Poona employed a ‘broker’ who collected and collated intelligence from a variety of sources. Disguised agents were sent into Maratha territory to track down Trimbakji Danglia, the focus of anti-British influence in the peshwa’s court, after he fled Poona. He was found and kept under surveillance by these spies and various writers.109 There were also eavesdroppers like the ex-servant of the Gaikwar (literally ‘keeper of the cow’) of Baroda, who exposed details of his master’s covert anti-British activities to the assistant resident in 1812.110 Intelligence of this kind, provided by agents in a prince’s confidence, led to the resident at Nagpur being forewarned of the raja’s duplicity in November 1817.111

  The Baroda informer seems to have been a disgruntled courtier who had been slighted in some way. An Indian court was an open society in which jealousies and tittle-tattle abounded, and princes lived a greater part of their lives under public scrutiny. State secrets were, therefore, if not common knowledge, easily procureable. Field intelligence reports compiled during the summer of 1805 reveal that Company agents had penetrated the inner councils of Jaswant Rao Holkar and the rajas of Bharatpur and Jaipur. There were accounts of conversations between princes, the numbers of soldiers they were mustering, their financial difficulties and secret correspondence.112 Some of this information came from spies who appear to have been based permanently in the Mar
atha camps and some from hircarras. Hircarras were professional, freelance secret servicemen, often equipped either with fast horses or camels, who entered the enemy’s camp, mingled with the crowds there and snooped around. Wellesley employed them in the Deccan in 1803–04, with Montstuart Elphinstone as his translator. Those who provided verifiable and useful intelligence were well paid, those who concocted tales were whipped. Hircarras faced other dangers; those taken around Deeg in 1804 were mutilated by the Marathas.113

  Some officers showed a flair for intelligence work. Major Henry Broadfoot learned the trade of spymaster during the Afghan campaign, when he was attached to Sale’s brigade based in Jalalabad. ‘Through a native channel’ he was the first to hear of Macnaghten’s murder, but was inclined to treat the story as preposterous until it was confirmed by a more reliable spy from Kabul, whom he identified as a commissary servant. Another informer was an Afghan soldier in Shah Shuja’s army whose brother was Broadfoot’s jemadar.114 Given the distances involved and the season of the year, front-line intelligence was circulated with astonishing speed. It took just over six weeks for details of events in Kabul between 9 and 21 November 1841 to reach the Governor of Bombay, who immediately forwarded them to London.115

  The willingness of hundreds of Indians to collaborate with the British was of immeasurable value to men like Broadfoot. Spying was not considered a disreputable occupation; a Rajasthan villager gave his occupation as ‘police spy’ for a tax return of 1817.116 The fickleness of his countrymen when it came to providing intelligence for cash was appreciated by Baji Rao, the fugitive Maratha peshwa, at the end of 1817. Pursued by a British column, he asked village headmen for the best route to follow and, when they told him, took a different path. He knew that these men, all his former subjects, would, when asked, point the British in the direction they believed he had taken.117

  In defeat, Baji Rao had at last understood the mystery of why the British were conquering India. They could always rely on the active collaboration of thousands of Indians who, for a variety of reasons, were willing to co-operate with those whom seemed destined to become their new masters. And yet, as these new rulers were all too aware, this support was conditional on the knowledge that the Company’s army was unbeatable. For both Hindus and Muslims, this success in war was interpreted as a mark of some Divine favour, just as it did for those Christians who considered that British paramountcy in India was an expression of God’s Providence. Whether or not divinely assisted, the victories won between 1784 and 1856 decided the future of India for the next hundred years, and for that reason alone were among the most outstanding achievements of any army at any time. Gough was right when he congratulated his men for having triumphed where Alexander had failed, but he would have been among the first to admit that there had been some close-run things.

  PART THREE

  THE RAJ

  CONSOLIDATED:

  1784 – 1856

  1

  European Gentlemen:

  India ’s New Ruling

  Class

  I

  Charles Lord Cornwallis was in every way a model Governor-General. He was an upright, well-intentioned soldier whose interior life had been touched by the ideals of contemporary Evangelical Christianity. These had taught him that the service of God was also the service of mankind, and good done in India could bring personal redemption as well as happiness to others. His successors, Minto, Hastings, Lord William Bentinck, Auckland, Hardinge and the Earl of Dalhousie were all, in different ways, inspired by the same creed. High-principled aristocrats from Britain’s political élite, they were, in a sense, on loan to India, where they set the moral and social tone of the administration.

  They saw themselves not as India’s conquerors but as its emancipators. In one celebrated public gesture, Cornwallis was able to reveal to the world the new spirit which animated him and would, in time, regenerate India. After his victory at Seringapatam in 1792, he took into his custody Tipu Sultan’s ten- and eight-year-old sons, welcoming them with a grace and tenderness which moved onlookers. He ‘received the boys as if they had been his sons’ in a scene which would soon become stamped on the British consciousness. Cornwallis had invited Robert Home, an artist, to accompany him during the Mysore war and make sketches for future publication. Home’s most ambitious work showed the surrender of the boys and was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1797. The public imagination was stirred by a painting which appealed to the current taste for the exotic – there were several elephants – and to Romantic sentiment.1 The picture was also an allegory; the weak, helpless and bewildered were being brought under the strong, paternal arm of a government which promised its subjects peace, justice and enlightenment. The same symbolism appears on a massive canvas commissioned by Lord Combermere after his capture of Bharatpur in 1826. The mounted general extends an open hand of friendship and protection to downcast women, children and elderly men as his staff look on benevolently.2 This was not entirely artistic licence, for a group of well-dressed women had in fact been rescued from marauders by a party of British cavalrymen soon after the fortress had fallen.3

  The noble theme of deliverance was taken up by the Marquess Wellesley when he declared in 1800 that the British governed ‘the most opulent, flourishing part of India, in which property, life, civil order and liberty are more secure, and the people enjoy a larger proportion of good government than any other country in this quarter of the globe’.4 This state of affairs could only be sustained through the exertions of men who were honest, fairminded and dedicated. These virtues were the ingredients of what the Indian administrator Charles Metcalfe once called ‘the characteristic excellence of British humanity’, a quality which, he was sure, commanded respect and emulation among Indians.5 Nonetheless, nobody expected that ruling India was merely an exercise in lofty altruism. The Marquess Wellesley, who laid the foundations of the new administration, insisted that officials should be allowed ‘the means of acquiring a competent fortune’ with which they could return home.6 He had in mind money saved from generous salaries and allowances, rather than the profits of corruption.

  As Governor-General he did all he could to stamp out old habits, but they died hard and slowly. In 1795, Thomas Munro told his father that it was common for collectors to collude with Indian tax farmers and pocket revenues.7 This explains why, in 1800, Alexander Read confided to a friend that ‘a man is certain to make a fortune’ when he is appointed a collector. But he was not immune from the new idealism, for he added as an afterthought that the post ‘is of all others the most satisfying to a humane mind – to think that you have it in your power constantly to make a multitude of people happy by an attention to their complaints’.8 William Brodie, who had entered the Company’s service as a magistrate in 1795, clung to the old ways. He accepted various presents from suitors, including a diamond ring and an elephant, and was investigated by his superiors, who suspected graft. Brodie defended himself clumsily, alleging first that the elephant had been borrowed for a hunting trip and then, giving the lie to this, claimed that other officials took similar favours. He was sacked in 1809 with a tart reminder that receiving gifts ‘however customary, it is not, we believe, usual, and is not requisite or proper’.9 Indians thought otherwise and it took time for them to understand the nature of their new rulers. In 1846, James Abbott was given 280 rupees and some food by a Sikh official on the look-out for a favour. Having given the normal fee to the munshi (interpreter) who had delivered the bribe, Abbott forwarded the residue to the government coffers in Lahore.10

  The imposition of integrity had been one of Wellesley’s principal objectives. During his first year as Governor-General he had cast his eye over the officials in Bengal and been appalled. ‘Sloth, indolence, low debauchery and vulgarity’ prevailed everywhere, because of a general relaxation of standards and willingness to embrace native habits. The guilty men were, in theory at least, men from gentlemanly backgrounds, for even the lowliest Company official or officer needed £300–£400
in cash to pay for his passage, kit and setting up a household. What the Marquess had uncovered were lapsed gentlemen. Their undoing was the consequence of the Company’s insistence that each new recruit spent some time as a writer, undertaking what Wellesley called the ‘menial, laborious, unwholesome and unprofitable duty of a mere copying clerk’.11 Trade and government did not mix, and when they did, the result was a community of the ‘ignorant, rude, familiar and stupid’, whom the Marquess treated with disdain.12

  Wellesley was a man on the move and the direction was upwards. He saw his governor-generalship as a springboard for an illustrious career in British politics. He was an Anglo-Irish peer, and therefore very touchy on all matters of rank and deference, for his kind were below the English and Scottish nobility in precedence. This may explain his exaggerated aloofness and passionate, old guard Toryism, whose principles guided his reorganisation of India’s government. Like Britain, it could only be administered properly if authority were concentrated in the hands of gentlemen like himself, who were born to rule. ‘I wish India to be ruled from the palace not a counting house, with the ideas of a Prince, not those of a retail dealer in muslins and indigo,’ he once wrote. At the same time as pushing back the frontiers of British India, Wellesley threw himself into the reform of its government.