Sikunder Burnes

by Craig Murray

  James’ application docket includes a copy of the Company’s passage regulations. The cadets had an important choice – a Captain’s Table passage at £110 or a Third Mate’s Mess passage at £70. This would make a large difference to status on ship, and on arrival. Probably the Burnes had to go for the cheaper option. The regulations stress that it was forbidden for cadets to purchase any further privileges from the Captain. Baggage allowances were the same for all and strictly enforced. These were tight considering cadets were starting a completely new life: one chest, of which the maximum depth and width was twenty inches, two smaller trunks, a box of books and a hat-box.

  The start of the voyage was rendered unpleasant by sea-sickness among the passengers, horrid in cramped conditions, and hangovers among the sailors, inebriated on departure, an accepted feature of seafaring life. Thereafter there was reading, chess and amateur theatricals, but also boisterous deck games, plus fishing, and harpooning sharks. Albatrosses were caught with baited lines, and happily eaten, contrary to myth. Cadets were entertained by the sailors with stories of sightings of the Flying Dutchman and other yarns. The antics of the cadets would wear on the nerves of older passengers. The ship’s master included bed and board in what he charged; generally the food was very bad and the wine execrable.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Griffin in India

  The Sarah reached Bombay on 31 October 1821.1 After the stultifying ship, the crowds, bustle, sights and smells of Bombay crammed in upon them. Alexander felt a moment of comfort as the Sarah eased through the apparent chaos of masts to its berth; they passed a vessel from Montrose’s neighbouring port of Arbroath. Suddenly, home did not seem quite so far away.2

  Sporting the ‘round hat to land in on arrival’ specified, cadets were amazed by the jostling crowds of people trying to sell, or to be taken on as servants; and by the filth, the flies and the heat.

  On 9 November Alex was posted to the 1st Battalion of the 3rd regiment of Native Infantry (NI). Four days later James was posted to the artillery at Malunga as assistant surgeon. On 18 November Ensign Alexander Burnes appeared on parade for the first time.

  That careful letter of introduction from Admiral Fleming to his brother Mountstuart Elphinstone, now Governor of Bombay, paid dividends:

  The Governor […] invited us to the most splendid fête I have ever beheld […] and was extremely affable and polite, which, among a party of a hundred, and the most part general and great men, was a great deal […] [a] grand public ball was given to Sir John Malcolm, on his leaving India […] I had the honour of receiving an invitation; but where it came from I know not. It was, if anything, grander than Mr Elphinstone’s, and held in a house […] about the size of the old Council House at Montrose, illuminated with lamps from top to bottom.3

  Alex wrote home that he found his fellow officers pleasant and gentlemanly. But, ‘How dearly should I like to see little Cecelia or Charley trudging in to my canvas abode. But ah! That is far beyond probability. However, I may yet see Charley in India, for he seems a boy made for it.’44

  On 30 April 1822 Alex wrote home again, expressing his hope that his regiment would go to China to take part in a war that appeared imminent. Otherwise he would volunteer to go on attachment, ‘for if a man does not push on he will never see service, and, of course, will never be an officer worth anything. And what will the old maids of Montrose do for want of tea?’ War was delayed, but it shows Alex was both active and ambitious.

  Local languages were a key requirement for employment outside a garrison camp. Alexander studied assiduously, and instructed his servants not to speak English with him. In May 1822 he passed his interpreter’s examination in Hindustani. He had taken on the added burden of learning Persian, which he found ‘one of the most delightful languages that can be conceived’. By September he was enthusing over his love for Persian poetry.

  That same month, Alex was posted to the 2nd Battalion, 11th NI, which was immediately ordered to Pune. There he greatly enjoyed the mountain scenery and the leisure pursuits of garrison life – he reported excitedly that he had an excellent horse and had killed his first hog with a spear during a three-day hunt. But he also commented on another aspect of local British society, ‘which is very pleasant for India there being no less than 17 ladies in the cantonments almost all of which I have visited you may be astonished but I am turning a gay character.’5

  The wife of his CO, Major Brooks, attracted officers like bees round the honeypot: ‘Mrs Brooks is a great rider on horseback and […] is a beautiful woman. She is rather young being only 27 and never goes out in the evening but she is attended by some of us, I have seen a troop of 12 Officers with her […]’ There is a hint of something racy about Alex’s calls on the British wives of Pune. Sexual morality in the early 1820s was loose throughout all classes, and certainly in British India.

  The tone at Pune had been set by the Resident and Commissioner Mountstuart Elphinstone, before he left in 1820 to become Governor of Bombay. He was the fourth son of Lord Elphinstone, an ancient Scottish title. His uncle had been a director of the EIC, and another uncle Admiral of the Company’s navy. He never married, and carried on sexual liaisons with British and Indian women with the relish of a true Georgian, ranging from prostitutes to wellborn ladies. Unsurprisingly, he occasionally contracted venereal diseases, which he treated with ointments of sulphur and mercury.6

  One of Elphinstone’s late Victorian biographers uses the lightest of disguise on his adventures in Pune:

  Bombay was near enough to bring a constant succession of visitors, among whom we hear of several ladies […] He delighted in taking them on little tours through the Deccan, to visit old ruins or romantic scenery.7

  Chief among these ruins were the nearby Ellora caves, with their sexually explicit sculptures. While British girls were supposed to be virgins on marriage, a great many were not. After marriage, fidelity in married women, particularly after they had produced the first male child,8 was considered less important than it was to become. There was also little distinction in behaviour in the 1820s between the middle class and the aristocracy. Middle-class morality was not yet a dominant concept.

  Emily Eden writes of the visit of the Governor-General’s camp to Kurnaul, where she explains there were a great many ‘single’ British women whose husbands were away with the army:

  I never saw anything so happy as the aides de camp were at Kurnaul; flirting with at least six young ladies at once […] there were dinners, balls, plays etc., and they always contrived to get a late supper somewhere, so as to keep it up till four in the morning. I dare say after four months of marching, during which time they have scarcely seen a lady, that it must be great fun to come back to the dancing and flirtation […]’9

  This open flirtation with married women is retailed as healthy fun by Emily Eden, who well knew that these supper assignations lasting until 4am were not all innocent. It was often hinted that officers’ wives in India were not all they should be:

  The military ladies […] are almost always quite young […] showily dressed, with a great many ornaments, and chatter incessantly […] While they are alone with me after dinner, they talk about […] the disadvantages of scandal, ‘the Officers’ and ‘the Regiment’, and when the gentlemen come into the drawing-room, they inevitably flirt with them most furiously.10

  The majority of British sexual relationships in India were between British men and Indian women. William Dalrymple states ‘up to the nineteenth century, but perhaps especially during the period 1770 to 1830, there was wholesale interracial sexual exploration’.11 As Lord Wellesley, a Governor-General who kept a number of Indian concubines and enjoyed sex with British community wives wrote: ‘I assure you that this climate excites one sexually most terribly.’

  Even as late as 1838 local mistresses could still be invited to a formal ball in Delhi in the presence of the Governor-General and his sisters: ‘English-women did not look pretty at the ball […] and it did not tell well for the be
auty of Delhi that the painted ladies of one regiment […] were much the prettiest people there, and were besieged with partners.’12 In 1810, writing the East India Vade Mecum, the standard background reading published by the East India Company for cadets, Captain Thomas Williamson took it for granted that officers would have local sexual companions. The main question was how many:

  When more than two ladies are retained by the same gentleman, the whole generally become perfectly passive, […] appearing to associate with tolerable cordiality … I have known various instances of two ladies being conjointly domesticated; and one, of an elderly military character, who solaced himself with not less than SIXTEEN, of all sorts and sizes.13

  We learn from Williamson that local concubines of British officers expected two or three female attendants, perfume and jewellery. Ninety per cent were Muslim, they were good housekeepers, prone to jealousy, useful walking dictionaries, and total costs were about Rs40 per month. This was a small fraction of the cost of keeping a European wife. We do not know if Burnes kept a local partner, but he probably did.

  Pune had been the capital of the Mahratta Confederacy which dominated much of India in the late eighteenth century and effectively ended the reign of the Mughal Emperors.14 The Mahrattas had been the fiercest military opponents of British expansion in India, subdued only five years previously after forty years of bloody resistance. Indeed on 5 November 1817 Baji Rao, the Peshwa of Pune, an unwilling British puppet, made a last bid for independence, attacking the Residency with an army of 18,000 Mahratta horse and 8,000 infantry, mostly officered by European mercenaries.

  At the battle of Kirki, four miles from Pune, Mountstuart Elphinstone had taken effective military control (he had been military secretary to Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington). General Sir John Malcolm with a strong force then tracked down the Peshwa, who was packed off to Kanpur on an annual pension of Rs8 lakhs. Pune was formally annexed in 1818 and was now British territory. These events were still fresh as young Alexander Burnes arrived. Alex himself used to ride the battlefield of Kirki and imagine the cavalry charges.15

  Mountstuart Elphinstone described in 1819 the widespread hatred the British usually preferred to under-report:

  The desmukhs and other zamindars, the patels and other village authorities, who lose power by our care to prevent exactions … The whole of the soldiery and all connected with them – all who lived entirely by service, all who joined service and cultivation, all who had a brother in employment who is now thrown back on the family, and all who had horses and were otherwise maintained by the existence of an army – detest us and our regular battalions, and are joined by their neighbours from sympathy and national feeling.16

  Elphinstone’s spies uncovered a plot headed by the priestly caste of Pune to massacre the British residents and seize the forts. He had all alleged plotters blown from guns without process. This increased the ‘national feeling’.

  On Christmas Day 1822 Alex was appointed as interpreter to the First Extra Battalion at Surat. This was his third regiment in an army career of just two years. But within a further year there was a fourth; at both Pune and Surat he had been on good terms with a Colonel Campbell, who offered him the position of Adjutant of the 21st Bombay NI. This was a promotion with an allowance of Rs600 a month. Campbell had been diffident in offering as he thought Alexander was looking for political rather than regimental duties, but Burnes declared: ‘No man in his sound senses would refuse a situation of fifty or sixty guineas a month.’ He was banking monthly savings of Rs53. At Surat he took on a servant, Ghulam Ali, who proved exceedingly loyal. Alex now wrote to his father urging him to send his brother Charlie out to a cadetship, as he could pay all expenses. But the family were unable to obtain a nomination. On 16 October 1823 Burnes was proud to remit £50 to his father in Scotland.

  Four days later, gambling at cards, Burnes was horrified to find himself down six months’ salary. Gambling debt was a routine scrape into which most cadets fell through boredom. Lord Valentia warned, ‘There are a few steady and practised gamblers, who encourage every species of play among the young servants of the Company, and make a considerable profit by their imprudence […]’17

  Burnes was able to recover the money by the end of the evening, but he was shaken and does not appear to have had further gambling habits. Alex genuinely enjoyed the companionship of the mess. But he realised he was not entirely suited to regimental life. He confided to his diary:

  I am different from all around me. I dislike all gymnastic and athletic exercises. I like argument much – a jolly party only now and then; much study, and very partial to history, but dislike novels extremely, even Scott […] I ought not to have been a soldier, though I glory in the profession, for I am too fond of pen and ink.

  All his reading and thinking, particularly on scientific topics, combined with exposure to Islamic thought and culture, led Alexander to reject the narrow form of Christianity in which he had been brought up. He recorded:

  I have of late been deeply pondering in my own mind the strange opinions I begin to imbibe about religion […] Would to God my mind were truly settled on this important subject! Could I be convinced fully of it, I would not believe in a future state: but it is an improbable thing to believe God has made man gifted with his own reason, after his own image, and yet to perish … I lead a happy life […] but I entertain different ideas of religion, and am afraid they will end in my having no religion at all.18

  Like many in British India, Burnes was to attempt to reconcile his spiritual sense with rationalism and the claims of comparative religion through Freemasonry.

  Alexander was next appointed interpreter to the Sudder Adawlut, or Civil Court of Appeal, in Bombay, where he assisted the British judges in determining disputes in accordance with local legal practice, and could enjoy the much wider society of Bombay, where James was now posted. James was elected a member of the Bombay Literary Society on 26 June 1823.19

  * * *

  In Vilnius, Jan Prosper Witkiewicz had led a rather more privileged life than Alexander Burnes. He was a member of the old aristocracy, whose ancestors had ridden with Jan Sobieski and stemmed the tide of Muslim conquest before the gates of Vienna. He was just one year younger than Burnes, but after Alex had already been in India for three years was still in school in Krozach.

  The Polish/Lithuanian state had been one of the great powers of Europe, but the political dysfunction of its institutions had led to it being devoured by neighbouring states. Napoleon had given a boost to Polish nationalism by reuniting the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and benefiting from its military potential. But Poland had died with his empire, and again been partitioned, the Russians claiming the greatest share. Polish nationalism survived; its growth coincided with the Romantic movement and struggle for re-emergence of political liberalism, which were to impart to Polish nationalism its distinctive character.

  Six young noblemen of Witkiewicz’s school formed a secret society to promote independence, the ‘Black Brothers’. Being sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, the figures of authority they knew were their schoolteachers, so they sent them anonymous letters supporting independence. They wrote anti-Russian graffiti on the walls. In November 1823 the boys were arrested and interrogated, roughly. They were tried by the Russian authorities in Vilnius as revolutionaries. On 6 February 1824 three were sentenced to death and three were sentenced to be knouted – often fatal.

  The Russian Viceroy in Poland, Grand Duke Pavlovich, commuted their sentences to transportation. All were stripped of nobility and treated as peasants. Four, including Witkiewicz, were sent straight to Orenburg, the most remote Russian outpost, and there enlisted as common soldiers. The two oldest were to complete ten years of hard labour in Siberia before suffering the same fate.20

  * * *

  Britain was again extending its borders in India. Unrest in Cutch, the maritime state on its north-west frontier, led to Company invasion. The 21st Bombay NI was among the first British forces ordere
d in, and Burnes went along as interpreter. In April 1825 the 21st were involved in fighting and Burnes found himself working closely with the British Resident, Captain Walter. He was regarded as having distinguished himself.21

  The Cutch field force reunited James and Alexander. James had been at the convalescent hospital in the hills of Severndrug, then Malligaum and the 5th Madras NI – where his three predecessors had died of cholera. Having stemmed the epidemic through sanitation, he was viewed as having expertise in cholera, and appointed to Bombay to try to check its ravages amongst the 18th Bombay NI. He was then made Superintendent of a new Bombay Cholera Institute, and then appointed Surgeon to the British Residence in Bhuj, Cutch. This was a promotion and a key frontier post. James obtained this promotion through a competitive examination in local languages.

  In April 1825 the Assistant to the Resident in Bhuj wrote to the government of Bombay that an army of 6,000 had gathered in Sind ready to sweep down on the small British garrison. He also believed that fifty assassins had been despatched to Bhuj in various disguises, while another army was preparing to fall on Luckput, and Ali Murad Talpur of Sind was urging his fellow Amirs that the time was right to raise their vast army and annex Cutch.

  The letter also gives harrowing detail of the effects of the wars on the local population: