The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  The Company was uncertain whether ‘marauders’ like Amir Khan were independent or being directed by Maratha chiefs. Amir Khan himself ‘sometimes advanced claims in Holkar’s name’ but where he could prudently do so he tried to prevent Holkar from being dragged into conflict with the East India Company. But tension was inevitable and British officers disagreed about the situation they faced. In his History of the Mahrattas, James Grant Duff argued that Amir Khan was an agent of the Holkar state, sent officially by a Maratha sovereign ‘to collect or extort subsistence from the provinces’. Sir John Malcolm believed decentralized violence flourished as Maratha state power died, arising ‘like masses of putrefaction in animal matter, out of the corruption of weak and expiring states’.

  Whatever their disagreements about its causes, officials believed British authority needed to be asserted in order to check the breakdown of political order. The British were anxious about the absence of a stable, defensible border between their own realms and territory beyond their control. The violent fluidity of local politics made them anxious. As the Governor-General who arrived in 1813, the Earl of Moira, argued, the problem was the ‘want of definition in our relations with the powers around us’.26

  Moira was an Irish-born soldier who grew up in the same world as the Wellesley brothers. But in the first years of his tenure in India, British power had helped defeat Napoleon; the empire was newly confident it could also subordinate Indian rulers to British power.27 Moira proposed a twofold strategy to make the British position secure. He argued that there needed to be a massive military operation against ‘predatory’ warlords like Amir Khan. But to create greater definition in the Company’s relations with its neighbours he also proposed the incorporation of the different Maratha houses into a single ‘confederation’ in which the British government would be ‘the principal power’. Moira insisted the five Maratha states promise not to fight each other, and also not to assist the bands of wandering horsemen he believed had caused such chaos. The only way to stop the violence would be for ‘the native states to acknowledge a sort of feudal duty to us’. Moira dressed his scheme up in as much ‘tact’ as he could muster. Not surprisingly, Maratha rulers saw this for what it was, an effort to crush their autonomy, and resisted Moira’s plans.

  The Peshwa Baji Rao II, and the Maratha houses of Bhonsle and Holkar all quickly mobilized for war. During October 1817’s Dassera festival, traditionally the start of the fighting season, Baji Rao II created a massive spectacle of Maratha military power in Pune, sending a large detachment of Maratha cavalry charging towards the British garrison in the town, only wheeling away at the last minute. A month later his soldiers tried to drive the British out of Pune, attacking the residency and cantonment. But the Peshwa was almost bankrupt, as the lords within his dominions refused to pay revenue. With no money to pay his troops, the Peshwa’s army was quickly defeated. The Peshwa’s territory was taken under the direct administration of the East India Company.28

  But the conflict between the Company and these reduced, bankrupt Maratha regimes was not the real fight. That was against western and central India’s dispersed warrior bands led by men like Amir Khan, as well as the more loosely structured groups of armed men called Pindaris. From the beginning of 1817, the Company built the largest army it had ever assembled in India to suppress these ‘predatory powers’, enlisting 110,000 troops, including 20,000 irregular soldiers lent by its Indian allies, and more than 500 guns. It was an army not of conquest but of pacification. The idea was to encircle the Afghans and Pindaris from every direction, squeezing them into an ever-shrinking central area of territory so that they could be eliminated. In fact, the army did very little fighting.

  The army in the north-west was commanded by Sir David Ochterlony, a Massachussets-born army officer who had previously been British Resident at Delhi, and was famous for adapting to the lifestyle of a Mughal courtier. Ochterlony was given the title of Nasir ad-daula, defender of the state, by Emperor Shah Alam II, and gave his own mixed-race daughters Persian names. He was comfortable in Indian dress, and was one of the few East India Company officials to show no desire to retire with a fortune and return to Britain. Ochterlony observed what he imagined to be Indian protocol in dealing with Indian sovereigns. These cultural proclivities probably helped him negotiate with Amir Khan.29

  By the start of the fighting season in 1817, Amir Khan faced a continuous challenge from his own troops, unable to supply them with a decent means of subsistence. More than once he was imprisoned by soldiers who ‘showed a disposition to mutiny for their arrears’. Many of those who did not rebel simply disappeared, faced with no chance of making a living and the looming prospect of Ochterlony’s army. A number of his senior commanders started to defect and Amir Khan worried that ‘his troops would seize him and deliver him up to the English, for many used to talk [so his autobiography tells us], of the great benefits of accommodating with that nation’. Shinde had agreed to the Company’s terms. British armies were on the verge of defeating the Peshwa and Amir Khan’s old allies at Holkar, and Bhonsle. Amir Khan began to negotiate with the Company, sending agents to Delhi to talk. He signing an agreement on 7 November, but waited until the East India Company had forced the Peshwa to submit before agreeing to ratify it.

  Amir Khan finally submitted to British authority in a complicated ritual on 17 December 1817. Each surrounded by 500 troops, Amir Khan and Sir David Ochterlony approached each other mounted on elephants before joining hands. Ochterlony clearly enjoyed the ritual more than Amir Khan, the Afghan warlord shouting ‘chalo, chalo’, ‘get a move on’, midway through the ceremony. That afternoon Amir Khan argued over the details of the agreement, but overnight he decided to submit, telling Ochterlony the next morning that, ‘unlike the infidels’ (the Marathas), he had no intention of signing ‘to answer a present purpose’ only to violate it at a future date. His troops were not so easily disarmed. When Amir Khan urged them to hand over their weapons and live in peace he was so badly ‘beset by the discontented rabble’ that he was forced to a neighbouring lord’s territory and barricaded himself in the fort. Ochterlony only managed to stop a full-scale rebellion by promising to enlist 3,000 of Amir Khan’s best horsemen into the Company’s army.30

  In 1817 Amir Khan converted from being an enemy warlord into the ruler of a loyal ‘native state’. His relationship with the British was governed by a treaty giving him the independent power to manage his own internal affairs, in return for relinquishing his capacity to exercise violence and handing control over foreign relations to the British. From the early nineteenth century until 1947, a third of India was ruled by semi-independent states of this kind, which ranged in size from the Nizam of Hyderabad’s realm of 83,000 square miles in central India, to princes ruling a few fields in Gujarat. Amir Khan’s principality was somewhere in between. From 1817 until his death in 1834, he lived peacefully as the Nawab of Tonk, the only Muslim-ruled princely state in Rajasthan, a position his descendants continued to hold until India’s independence in 1947. Amir Khan himself was prosperous and respected, spending his time ‘administering justice’ and ‘joining in social and instructive discourse with the learned and pious’. On a personal level, Amir Khan’s aim of living as a noble warrior was sublimated into a life of private piety.

  Despite Amir Khan’s personal loyalty, Tonk was a place where arguments which viciously challenged British rule as oppressive and impious could be advanced. The city became a centre of Muslim religious revivalism, and was home to many Muslims who later believed they had a duty to fight against the idolatry of British rule. During the 1857–8 uprising the largest band of Muslim ghazis or martyrs who fought British troops right to the last were from Tonk.31 But all this was far removed from the profile Amir Khan himself liked to project to the British. Visitors found a ‘frank, affable and lively’ man of wit and culture, ‘ready in repartee’ and keen to entertain with stories of his great deeds. When the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, visited in 1832 h
e was handed a manuscript telling the story of the warlord’s own life: Amir Khan was one of the few Indian warriors to write an autobiography. H. T. Prinsep, Bentinck’s secretary and translator, thought the contrast between his deeds as a warlord and his life after as a raconteur made Amir Khan ‘the most finished actor and dissembler in India, and perhaps in the world’.32

  Prinsep’s unease with Amir Khan came from his failure to understand the different kinds of people who took part in the dispersed violence of the early nineteenth century. Amir Khan was often accused of being a Pindari, but there were important differences. For the East India Company, the Pindaris were the most threatening armed force roving central India during the early nineteenth century. They were soldiers on horseback, usually armed with spears. Like Amir Khan’s Afghan troopers, their subsistence came from whatever they could plunder and extort from the villages they passed through. But their connections with Maratha governments were more distant. Unlike the town-dwelling Afghans, Pindari bands were recruited from the fringes of settled society, made up of peasant-warriors from the forests and hills of central India, mobile people who have since been ascribed ‘tribal’ ethnic identity. In the 1800s they had nothing but their short-term membership of fighting bands to bind them together. It is uncertain even where the word ‘Pindari’ came from. Some British commentators claimed it derived from the alcohol these fighters consumed before going into battle. More likely, it comes from pendha, or bundle of straw, suggesting that the Pindaris were recruited from wandering herdsmen.33

  Our second independent chief, Chitu Khan was the most important Pindari leader, but he did not come from these desolate, marginal tracts. He was born in Mewat in the heartland of Hindustan only a day’s gallop south of Delhi. But Chitu built up bands of soldiers who came from marginal places and so was treated with the same disdain as the men he enlisted. The Maratha ruling houses regarded men like Chita as cheap, effective but dangerous allies. Pindaris cost nothing because they lived off the land they raided. They were quick, elusive and resourceful but as likely to turn on their patrons when there was no other source of subsistence. To begin with Maratha rulers tried to keep them at arm’s length, refusing to let Pindari leaders sit with them in public court. Between 1807 and 1811 Chitu was kept under house arrest by the leader of Shinde, Daulat Rao.34

  But as defeat by the East India Company corroded the Maratha capacity to pay for their troops the Pindaris became more closely bound up with the political life of the states that recruited them. Daulat Rao saw them as the only way to enable Shinde to defend itself with force. By 1813 Chitu was given land, a Mughal title and a flag bearing the state’s symbol of the snake. Such public acts of acknowledgement were controversial. When the two men met to plan how to counter the East India Company’s growing supremacy, Yaswant Rao Holkar reproached Daulat Rao for recognizing such barbarous, untrustworthy men. But with little money and limited options, the Maratha princes had no choice but to rely on the Pindaris’ fluid forces of decentralized violence. By 1814, Yaswant Rao himself was recruiting large numbers of Pindaris to protect Holkar’s power.35

  By then there were perhaps 30,000 Pindaris in central India, sometimes fighting for their Maratha employers, otherwise riding and extorting on their own account. From 1812 they seemed to the British to be systematically raiding Company territory, marching as far as Rajahmundry and Masulipatam in the south, Mirzapur to the east and Surat in the west. The Pindaris created panic in the Company’s settlements. When a group of washermen wandered around on donkeys waving broomsticks, pretending to be Pindaris, a wave of fright swept throughout Madras. The Pindaris became the subject of numerous official memoranda, and an inquiry in Parliament. ‘The extirpation’, wrote a Captain Sydenham in 1809, ‘of such a race of men would be not only a measure of policy, but a service to humanity itself.’ Local officials built defences and sent troops to defend passes through which the Pindaris marched to make their ‘depredations’. The Governor-General suggested that, in practice, the Company was already at war with them in 1814. Their ultimate eradication was the main aim of the East India Company’s unprecedented deployment of troops in 1817–18.36

  This, however, was a war of dispersal rather than elimination. ‘No where’, as Sir John Malcolm complained, did the Pindaris ‘present any point of attack’. ‘Their chief strength lay in their being intangible.’ Faced with the slow, heavy British onslaught, most of the Pindaris simply disappeared, returning on horseback to scattered villages and forests, unpacking the small collection of loot when they arrived. Chitu himself briefly attempted to negotiate a settlement with the British and then fled to a tract of forest where thieves and mutinous soldiers found refuge. With support from local lords, Sir John Malcolm chased Chitu into the wild, tracking him ‘like a hunted animal, through the jungles, by the prints of his horse’s hoofs’. Chitu never submitted to the Company. In the end he was killed by a tiger, his body mauled, his head the only part left. It was found and handed to Malcolm by a local landholder.37

  By 1818 Amir Khan and all five of the Maratha ruling houses had finally submitted. Chita was dead, the Pindaris dispersed and the British had occupied most of the lands ruled by the Marathas. The British soldiers and political officers who took part in these operations wrote their actions up quickly, rapidly publishing historical memoirs. First came H. T. Prinsep’s authorized account of Lord Hastings’ proceedings, then the Memoirs of John Malcolm, and the History of the Mahrattas of Grant Duff. These texts told a common story about the British introduction of order to a ‘theatre of anarchy and rule’, as one mid-ranking soldier-author described north and central India during the early nineteenth century. The British were particularly anxious about groups of unattached men whom William Sleeman later described as ‘persons floating loosely upon society’ with no respect or connection to any kind of regular government or social order. Their intention was to use force to reconnect these disordered atoms with the main body of India’s population. With more than a little anxiety Malcolm wrote about the way Pindaris had become ‘concealed’ among the poor of central India’s settled villages ‘by the benefit which is derived from their labour in restoring trade and cultivation’. Another official, Adam White, suggested that by the end of 1818 30,000 men were ‘compelled . . . to begin a career more favourable to the interests of society’. ‘At this proud moment, the British state had risen to a loftier pinnacle of wordly grandeur than it had ever yet attained.’38

  Violence alone could not rebuild central India’s war-torn society. A few thousand Afghan warriors were employed in the army; a few Pindaris were given land and resettled. Others did give up fighting to scratch a living sowing coarse grains like jowar (sorghum), maize or wheat along the Narmada valley or in Awadh, but the Company was not able to create an alternative livelihood for very many. As historian Radhika Singha puts it, ‘those who had swelled the ranks of various mercenary bands in Central India could as well take to the roads to rob travellers’. All British violence had done was to cut the connections between armed bands and political society. The Company’s attempts at ‘pacification’ pushed violence further to the fringes of colonial society. Many Pindaris became bandits and highway robbers, and potential future rebels. In the process they created more fear among the British. No longer afraid of being driven into the sea by massive Indo-French armies, the new British concern was that thieves might strangle them in their beds, or, worse, that disordered elements might join up to became a great insurrectionary army.39

  The continuation of war

  The year 1818 brought the beginning of British supremacy throughout the whole of India, but this was followed by neither domination nor peace. The British imagined they had created an India-wide confederation that subjected the entire subcontinent to their power, and held every insurgent force in check. If we end the story of conquest in that year, 1818 seems to mark the moment when the British turned from war to a very different, peaceful, kind of rule. ‘The principal task’, as historian Eric Stokes wrot
e in 1959, ‘was now to devise an effective and economical administration for the vast areas suddenly annexed to the Company’s territories.’40

  Continuing the story for the next few years forces us to revise Eric Stokes’ argument. Seen from the perspective of 1824 or 1828, 1818 seems to be a brief pause in the oscillation between conquest and resistance that surrounded the Company from its first arrival in India. It was a comma not a full stop, a moment of hiatus rather than the termination of a process. In fact, many of the acts that Stokes described as ‘administration’ look more like the continuation of war.

  The Company’s commanders thought they still operated in a hostile environment. The number of British-commanded (European and Indian) soldiers in India continued to rise after 1818; numbers rose from 195,472 to 244,064 between 1814 and 1818, but increased again by 1826 to 292,162. The Company’s greatest expenditure on the military until the 1857–8 rebellion occured in 1826: £12.8 million out of the Company’s £24.1 million (£1.8 billion in 2016 prices) total expenditure. It also saw the highest ever proportion of revenue spent on the armed forces after the end of the Maratha wars, with 61 per cent being spent on the army compared to only 57 per cent during the year of the mutiny itself.41 ‘Peace’ in British India was a violent enterprise. After the last Maratha war, the submission of Indian leaders to the expansion of British money and violence was reluctant, edgy and conditional. The defeat of the Marathas did not mean conquest.42

  East India Company, revenue and expenditure in India, 1782-1836.

  The year 1824 was particularly dangerous for the British. Amongst other things, it was the year when our third independent chief, the Queen of Kittur, was subjugated to British power. Halfway along the road between Bangalore and Pune, Kittur was a fortified village which acted as the capital of an ‘ancient’ principality. By the turn of the nineteenth century it owed a loose kind of allegiance to the Maratha Peshwa and with that came loyalty to British power. Arthur Wellesley relied on the Desai of Kittur (Desai comes from the Sanskrit word for landlord) as a vital source of rice for the Company’s army. Kittur sent 100 horsemen to capture Pune with the British in 1803, staying loyal to the Company for the next fifteen years.