by Ed Douglas
It was generally supposed that he had been selected on account of the necessity of sending some person able, from similar circumstances of mental and bodily conformation, to cope with so subtle an adversary.
In doing so he burnished his reputation as a sharp-witted politician who could put himself in the mind of his indigenous adversaries.
Ochterlony’s appointment also brought him into contact with the expanding Gorkhali regime. In the aftermath of the Qing victory at Rasuwagadhi in 1792 and the expulsion of the Knox mission from Kathmandu, Bhimsen Thapa renewed Gorkha’s westward expansion by sending the king’s army into Garhwal under the command of a distant cousin, an old warhorse called Amar Singh Thapa. To give thanks for his victories, Amar Singh built a temple for pilgrims at the holy mountain village of Gangotri. Yet the excesses of the Gorkhali occupation were notorious. The imposition of heavy taxes, demands for forced labour and violent abuses, including rape, in Gorkha’s western provinces led to large-scale depopulation of the middle hills, despite exhortations of restraint from Kathmandu. Kumaon, which had been conquered many years before Garhwal, suffered longer; the British would use such behaviour to stir up resentment before their war with Nepal.
Four years later, Amar Singh’s troops were still moving west beyond the Yamuna river towards the Sutlej and the borders of Ranjit Singh’s Sikh Empire, gradually sweeping up the thirty or so tiny kingdoms and principalities crammed into a habitable area not much bigger than the English Lake District. Almost every valley in this rugged terrain had its own Rajput lineage: royal debris swept uphill centuries before on the rising tide of Muslim expansion. In theory their princes paid tribute to the Mughal court; in reality many of these mountain fiefdoms weren’t worth the bother. To the Mughal emperors, these mountains were most useful as the source of their ice, brought down in the hot summer months, first by river and then on the backs of porters. However, Amar Singh Thapa’s religious mentor and astrologer, Shiva Dat Rai, happened to come from one of these mini-kingdoms, a place called Bilaspur. (The late eighteenth-century traveller George Forster, the first Briton to traverse Central Asia, described Bilaspur as existing ‘in a state of deep confusion and filth’.) Shiva Dat Rai now persuaded Amar Singh Thapa to attack Bilaspur’s bitter enemies in neighbouring Hindur to the south. With that accomplished, Shiva Dat Rai urged the general to restore territories Bilaspur had lost on the west bank of the Sutlej and defeat the enterprising raja, Sansar Chand, who had taken them. This action brought the Gorkhali general Amar Singh Thapa to the foot of the most famous stronghold in the Himalaya: Kangra.
Forts were a key feature of control in the Himalaya, at the heart of local kingdoms and principalities from Bhutan in the east to Ladakh in the west, and Kangra was among the most significant. The Mughals had kept a garrison there long after their power had faded elsewhere in the Himalaya. Now they were finally gone. If Bilaspur was a fossil of forgotten glories, the kingdom of Kangra was different: a larger, reinvigorated federation of smaller states occupying much of the modern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. By the time of its confrontation with Amar Singh Thapa, Kangra had become a vibrant and cultured kingdom under its raja Sansar Chand, who had reclaimed his patrimony from the fading Mughals. With Kangra back in his family’s control, Sansar Chand set about restoring the fortunes of his dynasty. Having done so, he was able to indulge his passion for the arts, establishing ateliers in his kingdom and commissioning a new palace at Sujanpur. Kangra was the crucible for what became known as the Pahari school, one of the great flowerings of Himalayan art. Yet in seizing territory from Bilaspur in 1805, Sansar Chand sowed the seeds of his own destruction.
To start with, things went well for Sansar Chand. He sent troops across the Sutlej to harry Amar Singh Thapa on his flank and stir up trouble among the mini-states the Gorkhali general had so recently conquered. Having dealt with that problem, Amar Singh’s attack on Kangra itself spluttered to a halt. Rumours swirled in Kathmandu that Amar Singh was being dilatory in the siege; had he taken a bribe from Sansar Chand to allow supplies through? Bhimsen Thapa sent his brother Nain Singh to finish the job but he died during the assault. Bhimsen then decided to negotiate, and since Sansar Chand was a Rajput, sent two aristocrats to reach a settlement: Rudravir Shah and Dalbhanjan Pande, cousin to the recently executed Damodar. Amar Singh, a Khas hill-man, took the arrival of the aristocratic Rudravir and Dalbhanjan as a snub, so when they agreed to leave Kangra in return for an indemnity, Amar Singh accused the pair of taking a bribe themselves, poisoning their reputation at court. The siege of Kangra was renewed.
Both sides now courted the influence of Ranjit Singh and the Sikh Empire, where Ochterlony was establishing relations on behalf of the British. Local hill-states, like Chamba and Turagarh, fed up with the rapacious nature of Gorkhali armies, began to withhold supplies from Amar Singh’s troops, who became weakened from disease and hunger. Ranjit Singh finally intervened, driving the Gorkha army back across the Sutlej, but he took Kangra for himself. Sansar Chand would die a pensioner of the Sikhs, shorn of his kingdom; the Sutlej would remain the far western extent of the Gorkhali state.
Having ground to a halt at the Sutlej, conflict now flared up once more between the East India Company and the Gorkhas, but this time it wasn’t trade that tipped the Company into attacking Nepal. Following the dismal results of their missions to Kathmandu, those of Kirkpatrick in 1793 and Knox in 1804, the British had been losing interest in Himalayan trade, which had anyway dried up in the east and in the west was jealously guarded by Ranjit Singh, who now controlled the Kashmiri wool trade. Rather, the issue that triggered war involved tax revenues: specifically revenues from twenty-two villages in the Butwal region north of the city of Gorakhpur, now in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and close to modern Nepal’s southern border. The Gorkhas saw these as belonging to Palpa, which was now governed by Bhimsen Thapa’s father. The Company regarded them as part of Awadh – then known as Oudh – which the British now controlled.
In arguing with the Gorkhalis about these villages, the British were caught between two ways of seeing themselves: as a commercial company, doing whatever was necessary to protect its balance sheet, in which case the figures at stake did not justify expensive conflict; or else as a government, with an obligation to protect the state’s integrity, in which case the revenues ought to be protected as a matter of principle. But while the Company’s governors at Calcutta might have fretted over the commercial opinion of the Court of Directors in London and whether conflict was actually worthwhile, Bhimsen Thapa in Kathmandu saw the British simply as acquisitive empire-builders, not unlike himself: the British would concede only if a greater prize could be offered. To his general Amar Singh Thapa, obsessing over his defeat by Ranjit Singh, it made perfect sense to approach the Company not as antagonists but as potential allies, joining forces to throw the Sikhs out of Kangra fort. The Gorkha regime clearly and presciently assumed that since the British would end up fighting the Sikhs anyway they might as well get on with it. In the hope of bringing the British on side, Amar Singh handed back villages on the plains south of Hindur that he had grabbed from the British not long before. In 1808, and newly appointed agent for British relations with Ranjit Singh, Ochterlony found all this baffling: on the one hand being in conflict with the Ghorkas, on the other being courted by them. It was, he complained, ‘very difficult to assign motives for the actions of men who seem hardly to possess the faculty of reason’.
If the Company was caught between two ways of seeing itself, then it also had two views of the world it administered, one Indian, the other European, a dichotomy that can be reduced to one word: maps. In the early nineteenth century the southern fringe of the Himalaya was a confusing place. The notion of spatial ownership, of chunks of land defined on maps of great accuracy, was still new in Britain but almost wholly foreign in India. Land ownership in the jungles and clearings of the terai was especially hazy, since this strip of territory, perhaps no more than thirty kilometres wide, had often
acted as a buffer zone between rulers from the plains and from the hills. To the Nepalis, borders meant mountain ridges and river courses, not lines on a sheet of paper. Pre-colonial records were extensive, thanks to Mughal bureaucracy, but rather than define specific areas, these records documented territory in terms of lists of villages, with divisions and subdivisions, strips of information like DNA, which over time, also like DNA, mutated under the pressure of local politics and corrupt officials. The result was that patches of land could belong to a parent tax authority that was not contiguous and located many kilometres away. Colonial officials were often bamboozled by these taxation records, which came with no correlate maps and were riddled with inconsistencies and forgeries.
The Mughals had done things their way, and for a while the Company had adopted their practices, adding to the mountain of Mughal tax records. Yet in Europe accurate maps were transforming the very idea of land ownership, and would shortly do the same in India. From the British perspective, the tax revenues of these villages didn’t mean much; increasingly, the issue was the need for a definitive border. The Company viewed the most logical place for that border as the line of hills that marked the beginning of the Himalaya. Bhimsen Thapa understood that if Gorkha capitulated in the dispute with the British over the twenty-two villages at Butwal, then in due course the Gorkhali regime could lose much of its territory along the Terai, the most productive land it held with which to pay its troops and maintain the regime. It was the very definition of an existential threat.
When Francis Rawdon-Hastings, then the Earl of Moira, arrived in India in October 1813 as the new governor general, he was determined to resolve this border dispute with Nepal one way or another. When negotiations fizzled out, he prepared a plan of attack, one that would return Ochterlony, now in his late fifties, to the battlefield. The campaign promised to be expensive but since the villages in question were, so far as Moira was concerned, part of Oudh, now Awadh, he had no compunction in getting Oudh’s nominal ruler to pay for it. The Court of Directors in London signed their assent in February 1814, in plenty of time for the autumn fighting season. At the end of May, Gorkhali troops attacked a police post in Butwal, killing eighteen Company men, their chief officer tied to a tree and shot full of arrows. The Earl of Moira had his excuse for war.
*
By the time the British attacked, Bimsen Thapa had been the leading political figure in Nepal for almost a decade. Tall and spare, Bhimsen had refined features that hinted at Rajput blood, but his family’s hillbilly status provoked sneers from those more confident of their breeding. Perhaps because of this, Bhimsen proved a ruthless political operator. In 1806, the year Amar Singh first attacked Kangra, Bhimsen had persuaded the king Rana Bahadur to marry Bhimsen’s niece, Tripura Sundari Devi, daughter of his younger brother Nain Singh. Such blatant manoeuvring enraged Rana Bahadur’s half-brother, Sher Bahadur. In an argument at court, he drew his sword and cut the king down. Rana Bahadur’s bodyguard, Bal Singh Kunwar, Nain Singh’s son-in-law, immediately drew his own sword and took revenge on Sher Bahadur: this was the prompt for the bloodletting dubbed the Bhandarkal massacre. It was typical of Bhimsen to use this slaughter as an opportunity, rounding up scores of enemies at court and having them executed for their role in this ‘plot’, their places taken by members of his own clan. Rana Bahadur’s senior queen and his many concubines were forced to commit sati, self-immolating on funeral pyres, their screams drowned out by martial drums.
Tripura Sundari, so quickly married and widowed, was made regent to the new king, her stepson Girvan Yuddha Bikram, cementing the Thapa clan’s total control of the monarchy. Tripura was herself only twelve years old but she would grow up to be a powerful woman in her own right. The book on women in Nepali politics has yet to be written, but Tripura’s story deserves reassessment: the birth of Nepali literature, in recent decades a vibrant and distinctive voice, is often attributed to Bhanubhakta Acharya, a later nineteenth-century poet who translated the Ramayana, but Tripura Sundari also has a claim. Her personal artistic achievement was a translation of a section of the Mahabharata into Nepali, or Gorkhali as it was then known, in which the Raja Dharma, the ‘path of a king’, elucidates the duty and conduct for a warrior-caste ruler who had grabbed the reins of power and was feeling insecure about his social status. The unexpected death of her stepson Girvan soon after he achieved his majority meant she later had another spell as regent, until her own death from cholera in 1832, aged just thirty-eight. For as long as she lived, the nature of palace politics made Tripura an important ally for Bhimsen: it’s no coincidence that his power began to ebb after her premature death.
*
As a ruthless and savvy operator who dominated this period, historians have sometimes assumed Bhimsen was overbearing, that the other bharadar, or nobles, shrank before him. Bhimsen could certainly be brutal, necessarily so given the context in which he sometimes operated. But his great skill was reading people, understanding the hopes and fears of those he relied upon for his position: the various brittle strands of the Shah dynasty, some of them teetering on madness; the other nobles, who were often agitating for his removal; and the army, which dominated the Gorkhali project and had to be kept on side. Bhimsen Thapa had no grand vision for Nepal beyond his own clan’s political survival, but keeping the army focussed and happy implied a rolling programme of expansion: more soldiers meant more land with which to pay them and if that antagonised the British, then so be it. As tension with the British mounted in the spring of 1814, he reassured the teenage king Girvan by drawing to his attention a famous instance of successful resistance against the East India Company by the Maratha in 1805.
The small fort at Bhurtpoor [Bharatpur] was the work of man, yet the English, being worsted before it, desisted from the attempt to conquer it; our hills and fastnesses are formed by the hand of God, and are impregnable. I therefore recommend the prosecution of hostilities. We can make peace afterwards on such terms as may suit our convenience.
In calling for resistance against the British, Bhimsen also pointed to the Gorkhali ‘victory’ over the Chinese, conveniently forgetting how close Nepal had come to a catastrophe only avoided because the Chinese were so far from home. The British were next door: more easily resupplied and reinforced. His attitude seems improbably cavalier for someone with such a reputation for political nous. So how did Bhimsen miscalculate so badly? The view of the first British resident of Kathmandu, William Knox, was that Bhimsen Thapa ‘attributed to fear’ the emollient approach the British had taken with his master Rana Bahadur. The way the British conducted themselves was alien to Bhimsen; for their part British diplomats in the early 1800s were exasperated at the difference in the way their Gorkhali colleagues behaved with them, in contrast to the deference they showed Qing officials, who had no trouble getting Nepal’s cooperation. Nepali ambassadors, or vakil, had a clearer understanding of Chinese intentions from their regular diplomatic missions to pay tribute: hierarchies were clearly signalled in Chinese diplomatic etiquette. They found British manners more opaque and harder to interpret.
Bhimsen had seen the British at first hand when he served as bodyguard during Rana Bahadur’s period of exile in Benares and regarded them as duplicitous. He had looked on with disgust as the East India Company kept the king dangling with a pension and the promise of support, no more than a useful bargaining chip that they exploited to increase their influence and get access for Knox’s trade mission to Kathmandu. Once installed as resident, and under the terms of the 1801 treaty signed at Danapur, Knox demanded reimbursement for the huge debts Rana Bahadur had run up while in exile. Bhimsen noted the difference between the Company’s image of itself as a model of European progress and moral Christian authority, and its underhanded cynicism: subsidising the exiled king as he subverted his own family’s power before demanding its money back once this was accomplished. Bhimsen knew his country had been played and hated the British for it, a loathing that would burn deep for decades.
&nbs
p; Bhimsen had also taken careful note of the Company’s military capability so when he seized power in 1806 to become Nepal’s first mukhtiyar, or chief minister, he instituted a series of reforms to the Gorkhali military, introducing several organisational features he’d admired in the Bengal army. Even before that, Nepal’s best troops had adopted uniforms in imitation of the Company’s men: red jackets and white cross belts. They were drilled just as the Bengal army was, using English words of command. (This was why the Qing had suspected British involvement in the Gorkhali invasion of Tibet.) French mercenaries had earlier been hired to build up the Gorkhali artillery, casting guns and manufacturing gunpowder. Bhimsen Thapa continued this use of foreign military advisers; he hired British deserters to help train his troops and manufacture muskets. One of them, a man called Byrnes, was still a colonel of artillery in 1814 when war broke out with the East India Company. These British advisers even taught their Gorkhali students some English marching tunes, which they played on their fifes going into battle, much to the astonishment of their British opponents. They learned too from the Chinese, who in 1792 had used lightweight one-pounder artillery pieces made of leather that could be carried on the shoulder of one man: practical in the mountains, even if they burst after a few rounds.
The identity of those Gorkhali troops was also significant, having important implications for the future of the British in India and beyond. Officers were Khas Chhetris but ordinary soldiers were mostly Magars, along with some Gurungs, from Tibeto-Burmese ethnic backgrounds. They were superb soldiers: muscular, agreeable and without the religious observances that complicated more orthodox Hindu units. By contrast, most of their opponents in the Company’s Bengal army were high-caste men from Awadh. Having grown up in the mountains, the Gorkhali troops had that rugged self-reliance so typical of mountain people, remaining cheerful despite the worst provocations of hunger and exhaustion. These were the men identified in the British imagination as ‘Gurkhas’, misreading what was in effect a political classification for an ethnic one. When the war between them was over, Ochterlony would offer incentives to prise some of these troops into his own service, and when he took Amar Singh’s surrender in 1815, they signed an agreement that any troops in the service of Nepal who wished to join the British forces should be free to do so. This was the starting point for the famous Gurkha regiments that helped shape the British Empire. Some of those recruited by the British were indeed Gorkhali, Magars and Gurungs from regular Nepali regiments, but most were in fact irregular auxiliaries the Gorkhali army recruited in Garhwal and Kumaon to make up numbers.