by Ed Douglas
Bhimsen’s hatred of the British perhaps blinded him to the level of support he might actually get from beyond his own borders in Nepal’s struggle with the East India Company. The Gorkhali regime, both before and after war with the British, sought common cause with other enemies of the Company, particularly the Maratha confederacy and the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh, whose military capability was on a par with that of Gorkha. Although the Sikhs had routed the Gorkha army at Kangra, both sides could see advantages in joining forces against the British. But as things worked out, Ranjit’s interest was half-hearted and the war would be lost before he could act. Even more important was the attitude of the Qing, whose air of invincibility had been dented following the so-called White Lotus rebellion, a guerilla insurgency against crippling tax rates. This had cost the life of the Manchu general Fuk’anggan, who had led the invasion of Nepal. The rebellion was overcome but the regime was struggling with deepening corruption and periods of famine. Despite this, when the Chinese insisted that Nepal’s five-yearly embassy visit Beijing, Gorkha’s envoys took the opportunity to press for China’s support. They were advised to live in harmony. Even so, the possibility that the Qing would intervene in the event of an overwhelming defeat of Gorkha was perhaps the most potent brake on the Earl of Moira’s ambitions.
The old warrior Ochterlony was convinced that the most immediate threat to the British in India was from the Gorkhali army, in particular his adversary Amar Singh Thapa. In 1813, Amar Singh’s troops occupied four villages on the plains of Hindur, the small kingdom that Amar Singh had taken in 1805 during his drive west. The British believed these villages came under their protection, under the terms of a proclamation made in 1809. The governor general wrote to Girvan Yuddha, the Gorkhali king, demanding his troops withdraw. The reply, essentially coming from Bhimsen Thapa, was a history lesson: ‘As the Honourable Company have by the grace of God established their dominion in Hindoostan by the power of the sword, so have I by the same means acquired possession of the hills together with the lowlands dependent on the territories of former Rajahs.’ Even so, ‘in consideration of friendship’, he issued orders to Amar Singh to withdraw.
Ochterlony had already begun gathering intelligence for a possible campaign in the west, so when Amar Singh, having withdrawn his soldiers from the plains, asked to meet him, he took the opportunity to ‘skirt along the hills, or as near as the roads will admit’, travelling east from the Sutlej river. Their meeting at Kalka was amicable but Amar Singh was still fixated on the fort at Kangra, believing that since the British would have to fight the Sikhs, they should join forces with Gorkha. Kangra was of no concern to the Company, Ochterlony told him. He made careful notes on Gorkhali fortifications, which he admired for their strength and ingenuity, and a map of his journey. He also drew on reports from other officers to produce a shrewd overview of Gorkhali troops in their western provinces, particularly their equipment and ethnic background, observations he reported to the governor general’s office. This intelligence would stand him in good stead.
Provocation for war came not in the west, where Ochterlony would command a column, but in the east, where negotiations over the status of Butwal were breaking down. This was land that Bhimsen Thapa’s father had acquired when he took Palpa, so the Gorkhalis had been collecting rents there for five years when a proxy for the Company, arguing that the land had belonged to the nawab of Oudh and was consequently his, attempted to seize the villages, killing a Gorkhali official. A commission was set up to look into the entire border issue, but before it convened, the Gorkhalis took more villages, bringing the total to twenty-two. The British commissioner, Captain Paris Bradshaw, issued an ultimatum, demanding the Gorkhalis withdrew.
Girvan Yuddha sought advice from his ministers and generals on the right course of action. Given what the governor general was proposing – establishing Company authority on the terai – the king posed a simple, rhetorical question: ‘How then is my Raj to exist?’ In that question lay the most persuasive explanation for Gorkha defiance. The economics hadn’t changed. Nepal paid her soldiers through land, specifically through rents, known as jagir. Those who performed long service to the king might be rewarded with a piece of land in perpetuity, a kind of pension called birta. The regime had to grow to meet these commitments. Nepal couldn’t afford to be pushed back from its most profitable gains, cultivated land on the terai, where there was also plenty of virgin jungle available to those with the necessary capital to clear it. To do so would fatally undermine the new nation’s economic model. Gorkha leaders hoped that the virulent form of malaria known as aul that plagued the terai and had decimated the Kinloch expedition would stop the British. They ignored Paris Bradshaw’s ultimatum.
The consequences of war against the British were obvious to the king’s ministers. The myriad kingdoms across the southern Himalaya that the Gorkhalis had knitted into an empire could splinter again. Such petty states would be at the mercy of the great power to the south, precisely the outcome Prithvi Narayan Shah had feared. The British had the same idea, courting the various local chiefs the Gorkhas had ousted across the Himalaya. David Ochterlony believed these displaced and disgruntled rulers, ‘ingrates’ he judged them, weren’t worth the bother; some local populations were no happier to see their old raja’s return than they were the arrival of the Gorkhas. In the east, the chogyal, or king, of Sikkim offered support to the British in their fight against Gorkha but, as a British official put it, ‘in so doing the most earnest and impressive entreaties were made that they might not be deceived, as the most inevitable destruction would attend them if they were’, These stirrings of rebellion added to a growing anxiety among Gorkhali commanders. Amar Singh Thapa and the Gorkhali governor of Kumaon, Brahma Shah, no friend to each other, put their names to a letter warning of disaster. Both had spent years stamping Gorkhali control on the western provinces and knew how fragile the situation was.
The English, seeing their opportunity, have put themselves into an attitude of offence, and the conflict, if war now be undertaken, will be desperate. They will not rest satisfied without establishing their own power and authority, and will unite with the Hill Rajas, whom we have dispossessed. We have hitherto but hunted deer. If we engage in this war, we must prepare to fight tigers.
Amar Singh betrayed no hint of this concern in a letter he wrote to Ochterlony in the summer of 1814, warning the British that
the troops of the Goorkhas, resembling the waves of the ocean, whose chief employments are war and hostilities, will make the necessary preparations to prevent the usurpation of any one place.
Ultimately, both sides misread each other’s ‘red lines’. The British failed to understand how a border dispute might be judged an existential threat in Kathmandu and that any consequent war would be prosecuted wholeheartedly. They also misjudged the resilience and courage of the Gorkhali army. Public opinion in India held that the war would be short and that the raja of Nepal would quickly capitulate. The Earl of Moira entertained the idea this might happen before any shots were fired. Bhimsen Thapa, meanwhile, did not believe that the East India Company would mount a serious attack on Nepal. His mistake was failing to appreciate how the diplomatic twists and turns and bellicose posturing his government employed in its border dispute had stoked the Earl of Moira’s own existential fears for the British in India: commercial prudence aside, the governor general could not be seen to vacillate.
The confidence of British officers was inversely proportional to their experience of Gorkhali military capabilities. The governor general was a bluff old soldier who planned thoroughly, but he didn’t know mountains, concluding blithely that ‘the difficulties of mountain warfare were greater on the defensive side’. He anticipated ‘a brilliant and rapid termination of the war’, conceding only that it needed to be ‘rapid’ because any failure would encourage the Sikhs and Marathas to exploit British vulnerability. Ochterlony had experience of Gorkhali troops and had personally met Amar Singh Thapa in 1813. His first vi
ew of the army had also been dismissive, ‘ill-armed and undisciplined barbarians who effect [sic] a wretched imitation of the dress, accoutrements and constitution of a British native battalion’. The closer war came, however, the more he balanced his opinion. Like the general he was about to fight, Ochterlony was becoming increasingly sceptical about his prospects. True, ‘Goorkha power must be completely overthrown to avoid a constant source of trouble and expense,’ but, as he wrote to his friend Charles Metcalfe, the young and capable colonial administrator who had taken over as resident in Delhi:
To set off with the idea of overthrowing a long-established Government, and for such an unprofitable purpose, appears to me the most Quixotic and the most impolitic measure we have ever attempted – setting aside all the physical difficulties.
‘Quixotic’ and at times embarrassing: despite Amar Singh’s respect for the Honourable Company’s soldiery, there would shortly be moments of bloody incompetence.
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The Company’s army, the largest the British had put into the field in India thus far, was in the overall command of an officer of the regular British army rather than a Bengal Infantry man. This in itself created tension among the East India Company’s own officers, demoralised from years of neglect. In the eighteenth century the Company’s army had been the wonder of the colonial world but was now in urgent need of reform. Then there was the officer himself. Robert Rollo Gillespie, like Ochterlony recently promoted to major general, was the epitome of the imperialist adventurer. A hard-drinking gambler, a womaniser who in his youth fought duels, Gillespie was regularly in trouble with authority and always leading the attack. He was famous for his immediate and decisive response to the mutiny of sepoys at Vellore in 1806, the first significant uprising against British command by indigenous troops. The speed and aggression Gillespie had shown in coming to the aid of his fellow countrymen had made him a national hero.
Yet Gillespie’s glory days were now in the past. As preparations were laid for war in the cooler post-monsoon season of 1814, Gillespie was facing another personal crisis, accused of corruption in his previous posting in Java by the founder of Singapore, Stamford Raffles. Worse, he had suffered head injuries fighting the Dutch and French at Fort Cornelis in Java three years before; the historian John Pemble thought it likely that when he took command against the Gorkhas he was not in his right mind. The diarist Lady Nugent, who spoke regularly with Gillespie when he arrived in India shortly before the Nepal war, believed his ‘natural impetuosity and his extraordinary vanity and love of fame had led him into false ideas and errors that would embitter his future life’. His future life was not long. Gillespie’s rage and impatience when besieging Gorkha troops inside the strategic fort of Nalapani at Khalanga prompted one of his famous charges, and he was shot through the heart by a sniper on 31 October. One witness wrote: ‘General Gillespie was shot dead in the act of huzzaing to the men, waving his hat in his left hand and sword in his right hand; and yet not a man would follow him nor advance with them.’ It was the first significant action of the war and the campaign’s commanding officer was already dead. Many of the officers who served him were relieved. The Gorkhali troops were proving a brave and resolute enemy. Gillespie’s body was preserved in spirits and transported to Calcutta for burial, where the joke was that he had been ‘a pickle when alive, and a preserve when dead’. In Britain, predictably, he was hailed as a glorious hero.
The Nalapani fort held out for another month, a few hundred Gorkhalis facing thousands of better-equipped troops, benefitting from the determined leadership of Balbhadra Kunwar, Bhimsen Thapa’s nephew, who consequently remains a national hero for at least some in Nepal. Courage and tactical nous were the Gorkhali advantages: disharmony and poor leadership the failings of the British. Both sides had over the course of the previous half-century been aggressively expansionist; both were defending hard-won colonial interests. Balbhadra’s father, like so many of the wider Thapa clan, had been a colonial governor serving in various postings in the west and far west of Nepal’s provinces.
The consequence was, as ever, a pitiful destruction of human life. Although stoutly defended, Nalapani was small and of mediocre construction: it left its occupants cruelly exposed. When the British captain Henry Sherwood stepped inside its ruins, he bore witness to a pathetic scene: ‘Those who could in any way move had attempted to get out: but others were calling for water, and our officers were assisting, as well as they could, by pouring water out to them.’ The fort’s water supply had been cut, which ultimately had forced its abandonment; Balbhadra had escaped along with as many of his men as could still walk. ‘Some of the poor creatures had lain there for three days with their limbs broken,’ Sherwood continued. ‘I shall never forget one young woman with a broken leg, lying among the dead.’ He saw an injured Gorkha soldier ‘making figures in the bloody dust with his fingers’, out of his mind from a head-wound.
The most affecting sight was two little girls, one about four years old, the other about one. Their father and mother had both been killed. They were both taken care of, but the elder screaming very much, fearing she should be separated from the younger. . . . This day I saw the horrors of war; and indeed, horrible it is.
The Earl of Moira’s plan for the war split Nepal into two, west and east of the Kali Gandaki, the deep river gorge roughly in the middle of the country. The army was deployed in four columns, two in either theatre. The larger of the two forces in the east was assigned the capture of the fort at Makwanpur, seizing the road to Kathmandu, a killer blow. A smaller force to its left would leave Gorakhpur for the disputed frontier lands of Butwal, drawing Gorkha opposition away from the main column and if the situation allowed capturing Tansen, the capital of the formerly independent state of Palpa, whose governor had been Bhimsen Thapa’s father. He had died in the days leading up to the war and it was his grandson, Bhimsen Thapa’s nephew, Ujir Singh Thapa, who led the Gorkhali defence in this sector. Facing him was Major General John Wood, whose vacillation and uncertainty before a fortification called Jitgadhi sent him back to Gorakhpur under pressure from a jubilant enemy force. When Wood asked that the bodies of the British dead be returned, Ujir Singh told him: ‘Any attempt to commit unjust aggression on this powerful state will be severely punished by its gallant army.’ It was a similar story for the main eastern force: hesitation, delay and a clumsy intervention by the Earl of Moira, who replaced his original commander, the hesitant Major General Bennet Marley, with someone even less incisive.
Of the four columns advancing on Nepal, it was that of the older and less favoured David Ochterlony, operating in the furthest west of the Gorkhali kingdom that coped best with the tactical demands of mountain warfare. His force, almost entirely native infantry and cavalry with some European artillery, was boosted with Sikh troops from rajas under the Company’s protection, impressive men but unused to disciplined fighting. Given considerable discretion, Ochterlony chose to equip his force with heavy artillery even though the Earl of Moira had envisaged a fast-moving campaign with mobility as the key. Ochterlony was more patient, deciding that the enemy’s reliance on forts justified his slow progress with heavy guns. So it proved. He used elephants to bring his artillery to where it could threaten the first fort at Nalagarh, and the garrison promptly surrendered. Trees were felled and roads cleared to bring these guns to the next objective, Ramgarh, where Amar Singh Thapa waited with the best of his army, behind stockades and well dug in. His troops proved far better and more resilient soldiers than the sepoys Ochterlony commanded. Ochterlony’s masterstroke was to trick Amar Singh into moving his position, from Ramgarh, where he was largely impregnable, to Malaun, where the Gorkhali general had quartered his wife and young son – and his wealth too. As a consequence, the British took both locations, with almost no casualties.
Amar Singh was brave, but a poor tactician. After the death of Gillespie and the fall of Nalapani, he had told his son Ranjor Singh, commander of the Gorkhali troops in that sector, to withdr
aw from the superbly fortified town of Nahan in favour of a tiny fortress at Jaithak. The decision baffled Henry Sherwood, who wrote how the Gorkhas ‘at one moment defend themselves well, not only with bravery but with judgement; and at another, neglect the commonest means of defence’. Nevertheless, taking Jaithak proved beyond Gillespie’s successor, Gabriel Martindell. An attempt to storm it cost the British hundreds of casualties in one day, one of the dead being William Makepeace Thackeray’s uncle Thomas, shot in the chest as he tried to withdraw with his men, having formed a square to delay the counter-attacking Nepalis. Only seven men in his command made it back alive. After that reverse, Martindell was poleaxed with indecision.
Two peripheral campaigns proved far more successful. In the east the British cooperated with the raja of Sikkim to push back the Gorkhas beyond the Mechi river. In the west a hastily concocted force under the command of William Gardner, many of them irregulars, including hundreds of mercenary Pathans from Afghanistan, managed to wrest the small town of Almora from the Gorkhali governor of Kumaon, Brahma Shah. This followed the death of his brother Hasti Dal, a revered and talismanic general, overhauled while trying to secure the Gorkhali lines of communication to the west. (One of the most effective reforms the Gorkhalis had instituted in their new empire was their official hulak postal system that kept Kathmandu apprised of events.) The Gorkhali forces, just like the British, also had to resupply their forces and the fall of Almora effectively cut Nepal off from Garhwal, where Ochterlony was fighting Amar Singh Thapa. A series of surrenders followed, and the dynamic shifted from which side would win to which faction in Kathmandu would emerge in control of a much-reduced Gorkha Empire. Brahma Shah told the British he wanted power returned to more aristocratic hands, dismissing the Thapa clan as Khas upstarts. Yet despite his personal responsibility in this calamity, Bhimsen Thapa would hold on to power.