by Ed Douglas
A colonial community sprang up whose allegiance can be read in the names of the gimcrack houses they occupied: Richmond Villa, Woodbine Cottage, The Briars and Annandale View. In a letter to his wife Emily, the architect Edwin Lutyens caught Simla’s surreal appearance: ‘If one was told that monkeys had built it, one could only say, “What wonderful monkeys – they must be shot in case they do it again.”’ It was a world of amateur dramatics and archery on the lawn, but most of all Simla was gossip. ‘Nowhere possibly in the world,’ wrote a correspondent for the Pioneer newspaper later in the century, ‘are the passions of human nature laid so open for dissection as they are in remote hill stations on the slopes of the eternal abodes of snow.’ Servants of empire enjoyed lifestyles they couldn’t possibly afford at home and their hours of leisure freed them to talk. Yet despite this liberation from domestic cares, they found that in Simla ‘discontent breeds, and jealousy and scandal dominate. The smallness of society, eddying round in such a tiny backwater, makes for stagnation.’
In the late 1830s, just as the town hit its stride, a teenage bride born in Sligo on the west coast of Ireland arrived in Simla. Her beauty, enriched with a splash of Spanish genes, prompted lots of ‘jealousy and scandal’. For now she was still Eliza James. Her stepfather, Simla’s deputy adjutant general, had sent Eliza home to his relatives in Scotland to have the wild streak educated out of her. It didn’t work. She eloped to India at fifteen with ‘a sort of smart-looking man with bright waistcoats and bright teeth,’ according to Emily Eden, the witty sister of the governor general Lord Auckland. He was twice her age but still an impoverished subaltern. ‘[Eliza] is very pretty,’ Emily Eden thought,
and a good little thing, but they are very poor, and she is very young and lively, and if she falls into bad hands, she would soon laugh herself into foolish scrapes. At present the wife and husband are very fond of each other, but a girl who marries at fifteen hardly knows what she likes.
When the couple returned to Calcutta, Eliza’s ‘bright waistcoat’ abandoned her. On the boat back to Europe, once again on her own, she changed her name to Lola Montez, a self-styled Spanish dancer who would one day count Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria among her lovers, as well as Jang Bahadur Rana, prime minister of Nepal.
The self-absorption of colonial life was no less pervasive among the men in Simla. The Irish journalist William Howard Russell, whose war reporting of the Crimea had made him famous, toured India in 1858 at the end of the rebellion and spent several weeks in the town, leaving an unflattering snapshot of the moments before dinner at the Simla Club:
Servants are hurrying in to wait on the sahibs, who have come to dinner from distant bungalows. The clatter of plates and dishes proclaim that dinner is nearly ready. The British officers and civilians, in every style of Anglo-Indian costume, are propping up the walls of the sitting-room, waiting for the signal to fall on. The little party in the corner have come down from the card-room, and it is whispered that old Major Stager has won 700 rupees from young Cornet Griffin, since tiff[in]; but Griffin can never pay unless he gets his Delhi prize-money soon; and that little Shuffle, the Major’s partner, who does not look twenty yet, but who is well known as a cool hand, has extracted nearly twice as much from that elderly civilian, who has come up with a liver and full purse from the plains. The others are the soldierless officers of ex-sepoy regiments, Queen’s officers, civilians, doctors, invalids, unemployed brigadiers, convalescents from wounds or illness in the plains; and their talk is of sporting, balls, promotions, exchanges, Europe, and a little politics, re-chaufféd from the last Overland Mail; but as a general rule, all serious questions are tabooed, and it is almost amusing to observe the excessive esprit de corps which is one of the excellences as [well as] one of the defects of the English character, and which now breaks up the officers of the Queen’s, of the Company’s service, and of the civil departments into separate knots.
Russell saw the anxieties of men whose prospects had been turned upside down by the rebellion and the far-reaching reforms it provoked as the East India Company was wound up and the Crown took control. At its remove from the plains, Simla was full of people taking stock, assessing their careers, calibrating their prestige, as well as recreating the social patterns of British life in the Himalaya. The place itself, which had its own rich, complex and indigenous story, was to its new occupiers simply raw material to be acquired and improved, an appropriation reflected in the toponyms the British gave to Simla and the mountains around it: Lord Bentinck’s Nose, a hill on the town’s north-west horizon that was said to resemble that of the governor general who did the land deal that secured the town for the British in the 1830s; Boileauganj, for the soldier and engineer John Theophilus Boileau, who designed and in 1844 laid the cornerstone of Christ Church, finally consecrated in 1857, bringing Anglicanism to the Himalaya just in time for the greatest existential crisis the British had faced in India for a century.
For the most part, from Meerut to Madras, British officials faced rebellion with courage and determination. The judge at Fatehpur, Robert Tucker, who had erected stone pillars near his bungalow inscribed with the Ten Commandments in Hindi and Urdu, died on the roof of his courthouse, bible in one hand and pistol in the other, having killed a dozen of his assailants. His gravestone read: ‘fell at the post of duty 1857, looking unto Jesus’. This was not the story in Simla. Gossip had given the town a brittle temper. On 14 and 15 May, with the commander-in-chief now on his way to Ambala, rumours swirled that at the nearby barracks of Jutogh, the Nasiri battalion of Gurkhas (not one of the Gurkha battalions formed during the war with Nepal but a newer unit) was in a state of mutiny. Rumour had it that the troops had refused General Anson’s order to march in support of his move on Delhi. The wife of the army’s advocate general Colonel Keith Young wrote to her sister that people believed the Gurkhas
would attack Simla and loot it instead. Our Commissioner (Lord William Hay) and others said it was merely report, and that the regiment was staunch; however, some of the Goorkhas were seen in the bazaar laughing and talking about the Delhi business, and when an Englishman passed he was hissed at. Another report had spread that they intended to go down as ordered, but would join either Europeans or Natives, whichever was strongest.
Even rumours of a Gurkha mutiny were enough to terrorise Simla’s European population. The bank had been designated a safe gathering point under the command of Major General Nicholas Penny, a reportedly experienced officer, but dozens of families were diverted on their way there for fear the Gurkhas had already reached the bazaar. Especially vulnerable were families living in Chhota Simla, an outlying district easily cut off from the security of the town centre. A woman called Emma Young described how she scrambled down into a ravine, or khud, near her house, fearing the Gurkhas had already occupied the bazaar. Later, when she arrived at the bank, she found a hundred armed European men and two artillery pieces, enough to stave off an attack.
But General Penny was quite incapable of maintaining order, and was evidently in the greatest possible fright himself. He allowed many to get intoxicated; and, if the Gurkhas had chosen to come, they could easily have murdered us all. It was a most disgraceful scene and made one ashamed of one’s countrymen.
Her opinion was shared by Mrs Keith Young: ‘some of the gentlemen, we hear, have behaved so badly, showing shocking cowardice – men who, one would have thought, would have braved anything. People are never known until they are tried.’
That evening, Simla’s deputy commissioner Lord William Hay, later the Marquess of Tweeddale, wearily returned from Jutogh, having sought and been given reassurances from the Gurkhas that they would not mutiny, to share the good news with those occupying the bank, some of whom then melted away to their homes. He had seen enough, though, to know it might still go the other way and suggested that the town’s women should leave. Colonel Keith Young returned to his house the following morning. ‘All quiet. Two sepoys came to the house soon after I got there: very civil
, and declared they never intended to alarm any of the “sahib logue” [literally “master race”, meaning Europeans]. The scoundrels!’ Despite the good humour, he and his wife still quit Simla to sleep at the hilltop palace of the rana, or prince of Keonthal, a state that remained loyal to the British, at the nearby village of Junga. (The rana was promoted to raja for ‘good service during the mutiny.’ His people may not have seen it that way.) Meanwhile, talk of a massacre at Simla had spread to the plains, and on 17 May Young was writing to a friend reassuring him all was well:
I write a line to tell you that there is not a word of truth in the reported ‘Simla massacre’. F. [his wife] and I and the dear ‘babies’ are as well as you could wish, enjoying ourselves at this place, some sixteen miles from Simla. We came out here this morning – ‘fled’, you may say – for fear of the mutineering Nusseree [sic] Battalion at Jutogh rising against us and resorting to deeds of violence.
When the British finally returned to their homes, they were exactly as they left them.
*
During the war in 1814 with the Gorkhalis, the British general Sir David Ochterlony had made an offer to disaffected troops in the Gorkhali army to swap allegiance. Initially, that offer brought a few hundred to the British side. The first ‘Gurkha’ battalion was raised from these men and was called the Nasiri, commonly translated as ‘friends’, but more accurately meaning ‘helpers’: a Mughal term that Ochterlony meant as a mark of deep respect for their useful service. Later, when the fighting in the west was done at the end of the first campaign, some 4,700 troops from Gorkha’s western army surrendered to the British. Ochterlony judged that recruiting these men would be preferable to turning them loose to join the other armed bands predating on northern India.
Four battalions were formed and from the start their relationship with their British officers was unusually close, a stark contrast to regiments of the line. Their presence helped stabilise the region after the turmoil of invasion and war and stimulated the local economy. Yet these new battalions were not local irregulars. Around 1,500 were Gorkhalis, as Prithvi Narayan Shah would have judged them: Chhetris, Magars and Gurungs from the heartland of the Gorkha project. The officers and many of the non-commissioned officers would have come from this group. The rest, however, were from regions the Gorkhas had conquered: Kumaon, Garhwal and districts still within Kathmandu’s control, including Palpa and Jumla.
Calcutta cautiously welcomed this new source of irregular troops that was cheaper and potentially more reliable than the Bengal Army’s core of Brahmins and Rajputs from Bihar and Oudh. A trickle of new recruits, often with links to serving soldiers, continued to arrive from Nepal, despite Kathmandu’s determined prohibition on recruitment. Most, however, came from outside Nepal, from the Himalayan hill-states west of the Mahakali river. One battalion, the Kumaon, was stationed near here, to guard against military incursion from Nepal. A second Nasiri battalion was raised and with the Simur these three were tasked with protecting the hills of the Sutlej region from the growing threat of invasion from Ranjit Singh and his Sikh Empire. Ranjit, meanwhile, was also recruiting Gurkhas, as he modernised his army. Some of these men came from within Nepal, but he also tried to tempt those serving the British, whose rates of pay were lower.
Today, after the immense bravery and sacrifice of the Gurkhas in the service of the British through two world wars, it might seem surprising that their intentions and loyalties seemed so opaque to the frightened residents of Simla. But at that time there was a gulf of understanding between the broad mass of colonial servants and those who understood the Himalayan regions the troops called home: British officers who commanded the Gurkhas and the handful of diplomats and political officers from the Foreign and Political Department with deep experience of the region. The ‘Simla panic’ became part of the rebellion’s narrative. When the journalist William Russell described his stay there, he wrote:
Simla was full of women, and men more timid than the women were, and many bad characters were in the bazaar ready for plunder and outrage if the troops broke out. A revolt on the very border of Punjab might have roused the Sikhs beyond [Sir John] Lawrence’s control, and then, indeed history would have had to philosophise over the fall of our empire in India.
A few Gurkhas did rebel. When British troops left the hills for Delhi, a detachment of the Nasiri battalion stationed at nearby Kasauli, under the command of a subedar or warrant officer called Bhim Singh, found itself in possession of the garrison’s treasure chest, which they promptly broke open to help themselves to arrears in pay. Then they marched towards Simla, coming across General Anson’s baggage train, which they destroyed, and a few Englishmen and women, whom they robbed. Anson sent a captain called David Briggs back to talk them round. Briggs was a sensible choice for such a fraught mission. He had been employed for several years supervising construction of the Hindustan–Tibet road, a white elephant dreamed up by the governor general Lord Dalhousie to re-energise Himalayan trade in the aftermath of the Anglo-Sikh wars. Construction relied on corvée labour provided by local chiefs and was bitterly resented. A colleague of Briggs told the House of Commons in 1857 that local people ‘detest every one and every thing connected with the road’. The Gorkha occupation of the Sutlej hills had been disastrous, but there was little more affection for the British. Even so, in the course of his work, Briggs had formed strong bonds in the region and these he exploited in cutting a deal with the disaffected Gurkhas. Almost all were pardoned and properly paid, although the Nasiri battalion was disbanded in 1858 soon after the rebellion was suppressed.
Despite this pocket of disaffection, the Gurkhas proved themselves not just bravely capable but also astonishingly loyal to their employers. The Nasiri battalion at Simla was exceptional: it was still quite new, recruited to replace the earlier, more famous battalion of the same name that had been promoted to become a regiment of the line. These established Gurkha regiments would prove wholly trustworthy.
On 14 May, news of the rebellion reached Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalaya between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, where Major Charles Reid commanded the Simur battalion. Within four hours, his Gurkhas, almost five hundred strong, were marching towards Meerut, where the rebellion had first erupted, their pockets crammed with ammunition and two elephants following behind with more. Along the way they were alternately harried and tempted by rebels, but they never wavered. When Reid learned of the uprising against General Sir Archibald Wilson at Delhi, he pointed his troops there instead, marching forty-three kilometres in one night. As the Gurkhas finally reached Wilson’s force, the men of the 60th Rifles opened fire, thinking them the enemy, but cheered when they discovered they were Gurkhas.
Senior officers still had their doubts, as they did about all native troops, and these native reinforcements were stationed near the artillery, which was given orders to open fire if the Gurkhas offered any trouble, although General Wilson himself judged them ‘true as steel’. Major Reid he trusted absolutely, unlike some of his other officers. The cheerfulness of the Gurkhas endeared them to the ordinary ranks; the riflemen of the 60th and the Himalayan sepoys were soon calling each other brother. ‘They shared their grog,’ Reid wrote, ‘and smoked their pipes together.’ They also carried each other’s wounded from the battlefield. More than half the Simur became casualties before Delhi was recaptured in September 1857 but they still ignored the appeals of the rebels to swap sides. Soon the Gurkhas carried the same bounty on their heads as the British did. Their courage was relentless. Reid told a story about finding a wounded Gurkha boy sheltering behind a rock and holding a rifle. The boy explained the rifle was his father’s. He had been loading it for him at a forward picket when his father had been killed. After that he had helped an English soldier from the 60th, and then carried him from the battlefield after he was injured. The boy had then returned to fight himself, before being wounded in both legs. ‘But I am not much hurt.’ He was fourteen years old. Reid enlisted him on the spot and had him
carried to hospital. After Delhi Reid requested and got permission for the Gurkhas to call themselves riflemen rather than sepoys.
Even before 1857, the Gurkhas had their champions, especially after the Anglo-Sikh wars, when the British discovered just how well they could fight. In 1852, before a select committee of the House of Lords in London, Sir Charles Napier, who as commander-in-chief had promoted the original Nasiri battalion, described them as
very fine soldiers; if we had 30,000 of them in addition to 30,000 of our own Europeans, we should have a force in India that could do what we liked; we should no longer hold India by opinion, but by actual force.
Asked if it would not be better to raise Sikh regiments, Napier replied: ‘Yes, but you do not know the Sikhs are true. . . . the Sikhs may be good soldiers but the Goorkahs [sic] are as good, and are devoted to us.’ The source of that devotion was complex although money was unquestionably at its heart. Napier himself said that ‘those people are starving in the hills’, and recalled their yell of joy when he told them he had negotiated an increase in pay.
Their wider allegiances seemed less predictable, especially in Calcutta. Northern India had been awash with guns for hire in the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries and many British officials saw Gurkhas as just another group of mercenaries who would readily change masters if things went badly. Nepal itself remained hostile forty years on from the Treaty of Sagauli. The logic of these arguments was capped with arrogance: Christian moral superiority among the elite and among younger officers a swelling abscess of casual racism. Napier for one regretted this growing distance between sepoys and officers, who no longer saw advantage in learning Hindustani when it was social connection that won promotion.