by John Keay
When in 1843 the second maharaja since Ranjit’s death was assassinated, a veritable bloodbath ensued. It was no secret that the British were tempted to intervene, and it is quite probable that they were already actively fomenting the chaos. Certainly the massing of thirty-two thousand troops, with boats, along the Satlej frontier, allegedly to prevent the trouble spreading to the British ‘Cis-Satlej’ states, was highly provocative. With the Sikh army a law unto itself and the contenders for the throne competing for outside support, including that of the British, the mere proximity of this force was enough to ensure its involvement. The inevitable collision took place when in late 1845 word came that another British army was approaching from the east. To forestall it, the Sikh army crossed the Satlej.
The First Sikh War began with two ferocious battles in the vicinity of Ferozepur. From the jaws of defeat, the British edged towards a costly victory which, greatly assisted by the treacherous conduct of Sikh courtier-commanders at odds with their own army, was consummated at Aliwal and Sobraon in early 1846. In the latter battle Sikh losses were believed to total ten thousand and British 2400. A conclusive but expensive bid for Lahore itself was then ruled out as the British opted for the usual peace package consisting of an indemnity, partial annexation, a reduction in the Sikh army and other assorted safeguards.
The annexations included another tranche of the Panjab, which advanced the British frontier from the Satlej river to the Beas. Additionally, in lieu of part of the indemnity, Kashmir with all the hill country between the Beas and the Indus was ceded to the British. Though retaining suzerainty over this vast tract, the British then sold it on to Gulab Singh, the Dogra Raja of Jammu who had been one of Ranjit’s feudatories. Having distanced himself from his nominal overlords in Lahore during the recent troubles and acted as intermediary in the peace negotiations, Gulab Singh now finally transferred from Sikh to British vassalage.
Thus was formed the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which would descend through Gulab Singh’s successors as maharajas until 1947. The sale, for three-quarters of a million pounds, of an entire Indian state was criticised, particularly when its strategic importance at the apex of British India became more apparent. But the anomaly of a Hindu from the Panjab ruling a predominantly Muslim Himalayan kingdom was barely noted. Muslims ruled predominantly Hindu populations in Awadh, Hyderabad and elsewhere. There was no reason to assume that a Hindu ruling Muslims had explosive potential. Nor would it for nearly a century, during which time Kashmir enjoyed a peace and prosperity which had seldom been its lot under either Sikh or Afghan rule.
Rather as Cornwallis’s triumph over Tipu in the Third Mysore War had proved to be but a prelude to Wellesley’s ‘tiger-shoot’ in the Fourth, so the First Sikh War was quickly followed by the more conclusive Second. The circumstances were, however, very different. After the First Sikh War, some British troops, a British Resident and a very active staff had been left in the Panjab to uphold and direct the Regency Council operating in the name of the new Maharaja Dhalip Singh, another minor. Only thus, it was argued, could the Sikh court and Council hope to hold its own against still restless elements in the Sikh army, not to mention the even more disgruntled troops who had been laid off as per the treaty.
In the event the British presence proved sufficiently interventionist to provoke alarm but insufficiently supported to contain it. In 1848 the maharaja’s garrison in the southern city of Multan mutinied and killed two Englishmen who happened to be there at the time. The speedy despatch of more British troops would no doubt have taken care of this situation; but in 1848 India had a new governor-general. This was Lord Dalhousie, a modernising and imperious workaholic who made no secret of his conviction that India’s best interests would be served by the extension of British rule wherever opportunity offered. The Multan affair was just such an opportunity. Quickly quashed it would simply entrench the existing regime but, ignored, it would spread to the rest of the Panjab. In the meantime sufficient troops could be mobilised along the Sikh frontier for the full-scale invasion that would assuredly become necessary. Annexation would then follow as a matter of course.
And so it did. Within four months the mutiny had spread through much of the Panjab; the mutineers were calling in Afghan assistance; and the plight of the British staff and troops already in the Panjab was perilous enough to awaken fears of another Kabul. Once again from Ferozepur a large British army crossed the Satlaj, then the Ravi and the Chenab. In early 1849 a major engagement at Chillianwala on the Jhelum was hailed by the Sikhs as a victory. Although the British pretended otherwise, they had lost three thousand men in a battle which now superseded Polilur as the worst defeat suffered by the Company’s forces in the Indian subcontinent. Amends were made a month later at the battle of Gujrat. British victory led to the surrender of the Sikh army and, with almost indecent haste, to the arrival of Dalhousie’s envoy with the instrument of annexation. ‘On 29 March 1849, Maharaja Dhalip Singh held his court for the last time in his life to sign the document of annexation in Roman letters and to become a pensioner of the British. The “majestic fabric” raised by Maharaja Ranjit Singh was a thing of the past.’11
Amongst the terms of this Treaty of Lahore was one to the effect that ‘the gem called the Koh-i-noor which was taken from Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk by Maharaja Ranjit Singh shall be surrendered by the Maharaja of Lahore to the Queen of England.’ Mislaid by John Lawrence, a member of the triumvirate of British officials who now took over the administration of the Panjab, but rediscovered by his valet, the diamond was entrusted to Dalhousie, who personally conveyed it from Lahore to Bombay. ‘It was sewn and double sewn into a belt secured round my waist, one end of the belt fastened to a chain round my neck. It never left me day or night …’12 An unamused Queen Victoria took delivery at Buckingham Palace in 1850.
REFORM AND REACTION
Ahalyabhai Holkar, the ‘philosopher-queen’ of Malwa, had evidently been an acute observer of the wider political scene. In a letter to the peshwa in 1772 she had warned against association with the British, and likened their embrace to a bear-hug:
Other beasts, like tigers, can be killed by might or contrivance, but to kill a bear it is very difficult. It will die only if you kill it straight in the face. Or else, once caught in its powerful hold, the bear will kill its prey by tickling. Such is the way of the English. And in view of this, it is difficult to triumph over them.13
Other foes made their intentions clear by denunciations of one’s family or religion, and by ravaging the countryside and plundering the towns. The British, generally so restrained in their language and so disciplined in the field, were very different. They could make hostility look like friendship and conquest like a favour. It was difficult to rally support against such tactics.
Ahalyabhai’s ‘other beasts’ would no doubt have included Afghans and Muslims in general. Muslim conquerors had been more open in their intentions than the British. In the context of Islam’s triumphalism, dislodging infidels and demolishing shrines of idolatry were divinely-ordained activities. And if, for reasons of policy or compassion, these duties were neglected, Muslim historians could be relied on to invent them. Such things were expected of an Islamic ruler and were therefore conventions of Muslim history-writing.
The British, on the other hand, had been wont to disclaim aggression. Of religious zeal and dynastic ambition they had seemed refreshingly free. Indeed their respect for the traditions of Hindu and Muslim was laudable, and their regard for existing institutions of sovereignty positively gratifying. ‘Tickled’ into clientage, Indian rulers sustained a devastating loss of authority yet might also gain an increment in prestige. From the somewhat chaotic nomenclature of Indian potentates the British began distilling a competitive hierarchy of princely titles and perquisites. ‘Rais’ and ‘rajas’ were gratified to find their rank receiving official recognition way beyond its local parameters; some rajas, like the main Maratha and rajput lineages, became ‘maharajas’. Amongst Muslims, an Indo-A
fghan family was officially recognised as Nawabs – or more often Begums (lady nawabs) – of Bhopal, while the most notorious of the Pindari leaders was ‘settled’ as the Nawab of Tonk. In Mysore the young Wodeyar had been allowed to take as his regnant name that of ‘Krishna-deva-raya III’, thereby securing a cherished linkage with the first Krishna-deva-raya who from Vijayanagar had proudly ruled most of the peninsula.
Although sound political calculations underpinned such indulgence, it was not cynical. Company men had often displayed a genuine regard for India’s institutions and were intrigued by what they could learn of their antiquity. Inquisitive minds and acquisitive habits had not unnaturally turned from trade-goods and revenue to other gainful pursuits like the mastery of India’s languages and literature, the reconstruction of its history, the mapping of its geography, and the classification of its flora and fauna. Formidable dedication and a real sense of wonder made these ‘Orientalist’ researches more than just satisfying exercises in the intellectual appropriation of India. Informants, mostly brahmans and Jains, were flattered by the foreigners’ interest and patronage; and from the ‘discoveries’ of people like Sir William Jones and James Prinsep, a wider class of educated Indians would imbibe a new awareness of their particularity and new pride in their past. Nehru would be one of several nationalists to concede ‘to Jones and to many other European scholars … a deep debt of gratitude’.14 Not the least of Warren Hastings’ achievements had been the foundation in 1784 of the Bengal Asiatic Society which, under the presidency of Jones, became a veritable clearing-house for intellectual data about India. Hastings, like Jones, was intrigued by India’s antiquity and impressed by what he knew of its sacred literature and its legal codes. He hoped that, armed with such information, his fellow-countrymen might govern India in accordance with its own customs and so win the approbation of the governed.
Such idealism outlasted Hastings’ era and influenced a generation of turn-of-the-century scholar-administrators. Men like Colin Mackenzie and Thomas Munro in the south, John Malcolm in central India, Mountstuart Elphinstone and his assistant James Grant Duff in Maharashtra, and James Tod in Rajasthan combined senior political or military office with outstanding contributions to the history and geography of their particular areas. As is the way, their scholarship sometimes slipped into active championship of the peoples and dynasts whom they studied, and their histories naturally made a strong case for British intervention. In fact the supposed acquiescence of all but a few Indians in their own conquest became as much a convention of early British history-writing as had the wholesale slaughter of Indians by Islamic conquerors in the chronicles of Muslim writers.
Thus Malcolm, from his experience of central India in the 1820s, insisted on ‘the general opinion of the natives of our comparative superiority in good faith, wisdom and strength, to their own rulers’. True or false, this assumption had, in the case of Malcolm and others, something of a self-fulfilling effect. When challenged by a new and less cosy orthodoxy, he spelled out the beau ideal on which the good opinion of Indians rested.
This important impression will be improved by the consideration we show to their habits, institutions and religions – by the moderation, temper and kindness, with which we conduct ourselves towards them; and [it will be] injured by every act which offends their belief or superstition, that shows disregard or neglect of individuals or communities, or evinces our having, with the arrogance of conquerors, forgotten those maxims by which this great empire has been established, and by which alone it can be preserved.15
Thomas Munro, more familiar with the realities of British rule in the long-settled districts around Madras, demurred from such self-satisfied paternalism. It was true that other foreign conquerors had treated Indians with greater violence and cruelty, ‘but none has treated them with so much scorn as we, none has stigmatised the whole people as unworthy of trust, as incapable of honesty, and as fit to be employed only where we cannot do without them’. Justice and government should be dispensed ‘through the natives themselves’ for, as he told the Company’s directors:
Your rule is alien and it can never be popular. You have much to give your subjects but you cannot look for more than passive gratitude … Work through, not in spite of, native systems and native ways with a prejudice in their favour rather than against them; and when in the fulness of time your subjects can frame and maintain a worthy Government for themselves, get out and take the glory of the achievement and the sense of having done your duty as the chief reward for your exertions.16
Whether patronising or pessimistic, such early-nineteenth-century attitudes had, however, become anathema by mid-century. A sea-change had come over British perceptions of responsible government. ‘The general opinion of the natives’ was no longer worthy of mention. The chance of any ‘prejudice in their favour’ had faded forever. And the ‘Orientalist’ ideal of a government conforming to Indian traditions, already tarnished by the rapacious nabobs, had been obliterated by a compound of cold utilitarian logic, cloying Christian ideology, and molten free-trade evangelism.
The free-trade lobby insisted that India’s economy be opened to British investment and enterprise, and thus challenged the monopoly of eastern trade on which the East India Company had been founded. Subject to increasing supervision by the British government from the late 1770s and to direct management by a government Board of Control from 1785, the Company had already lost its political independence and much of its patronage. Its commercial assets were now stripped in the name of free trade. Backed by manufacturing interests in Britain anxious to obtain access to India’s markets, and by British business houses in Asia keen to compete in the out-and-back carrying trade and exploit Indian production, the government made the periodic renewals of the Company’s royal charter contingent on the surrender of its commercial privileges. In a wasting process not unlike that experienced by Mysore or the Maratha states, the Company was thus forced to make concessions in 1793, to surrender its monopoly of trade with India in 1813, and its monopoly of the even more valuable trade with China in 1833.
Stripped of its commercial assets, the Company’s surviving function was mainly as a political front and a military scapegoat. London’s ignorance and India’s distance might commend the Company’s continuance, but so did the fiction of its being less accountable than a government department; ‘Company mismanagement’, after all, sounded a lot less damaging than ‘official maladministration’. Even, therefore, as its armies streamed triumphantly across the subcontinent, the Honourable Company’s power and direction had drained away. The Afghan, Sind and Sikh campaigns were either prompted by the British government or provoked by its appointees. The Company acquiesced because it had, in effect, been nationalised. Like the Nawabs of Awadh living their extravagant pageant under British ‘protection’ at Lucknow, or like the ex-peshwa on his pension at Kanpur, or the Mughal himself rattling about the airless chambers of his Delhi fort, the Honourable Company had become just another of India’s waxwork despots, dripping beneath the trappings of a defunct sovereignty.
Amongst other conditions of the Company’s charter renewal in 1813 had been its reluctantly-given agreement to allow Christian missions to operate in India. The danger of Hindus and Muslims perceiving British rule as a threat to their religions had long been appreciated. But with the evangelical Clapham Sect in London making converts of a governor-general (Sir John Shore) and a leading Company director, as well as exercising a powerful influence in Westminster, the pressure from missionary enterprises became irresistible. William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery champion who was also a member of the Clapham Sect, declared missionary access to India to be ‘that greatest of all causes, for I really place it before Abolition [of the slave trade]’.17 It was so very important, he told the House of Commons in 1813, because ‘our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent [while] theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.’ Echoing the Muslim horror of idolatry, he declared the Hindu deities ‘absolute monsters of lust, injustice,
wickedness and cruelty’, a sentiment with which James Mill, author of The History of British India (published in 1820), readily agreed. Since Hinduism was ‘the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind’, Hindus were indeed ‘the most enslaved portion of the human race’.18 Emancipating them from this ‘grand abomination’ was as much the sacred duty of every Christian as emancipating Africans from slavery.
With Lord William Bentinck, an Evangelical sympathiser, as governor-general (1828–35) a start was made on India’s ‘reformation’ with legislation to outlaw practices like widow-burning (sati, suttee) and ritualised highway killing (thagi, thuggee). Neither was particularly common, nor were they in any sense central or peculiar to Hindu orthodoxy. The effect of legislating against them, whilst it probably saved some lives, was principally to stigmatise Hinduism as indeed abominable to Christian consciences. Although Indian converts to Christianity were few and although Indians were shielded from the worst tirades of Evangelicalism, its assertive new ideology gained a degree of acceptance amongst the British in India. Their rule itself became increasingly imbued with a sense of divine mission, their earlier toleration and even support of Indian religions evaporated, their conviction of Christianity’s moral superiority grew, and their solicitude for the taboos of their subjects was eroded by carelessness and ignorance. When an ambitious army chaplain or a well-meaning subaltern favoured the sepoys under his command with a homily on ‘Christian values’, they might once have indulged him. Now, apprised of a rumoured conversion or smarting under a caste affront, they fidgeted with apprehension.