by Ed Douglas
How different this from the spirit which actuated the old men of Indian renown, whom smaller men should take as guides! The desire to converse with the Sepoys would alone have induced me to study their language.
Napier frequently clashed with the governor general Dalhousie, a man half his age. (‘Events are rising on the horizon which require the hand of a giant,’ he wrote in 1850, ‘and a pigmy only is present.’) Dalhousie had misgivings about Napier’s proposal that the Gurkhas be integrated into the Bengal army:
I would not have the corps all Goorkhas first because I don’t think it expedient to have these corps all foreigners and second because our own hill subjects are as good soldiers and have a claim on us to be employed.
Dalhousie would remain sceptical about those Gurkhas recruited from inside Nepal, though they were only a fraction of their total. In fact, the Gurkha battalions, far from being specifically Nepali, were both ethnically and nationally complex, something British military officers and civil servants often failed to grasp.
Despite his misgivings, Dalhousie did accede to Napier’s demands that Gurkha battalions be brought into the regular Bengal Army and paid properly. Towards the end of his term in office he also came to see that Napier’s advice to Parliament was right: an increase in Gurkha troops was essential to the security of India. But at the time, Napier’s warnings went unheeded; it would be decades after the Indian rebellion before the British were allowed to recruit from within Nepal.
*
When the rebellion began in 1857, an ageing former diplomat living at the new hill station of Darjeeling added a sardonic footnote to an essay he had written a quarter of a century ago: ‘On the Origin and Classification of the Military Tribes of Nepal’. Brian Houghton Hodgson, formerly British resident at Kathmandu, had left the Company’s service more than thirteen years earlier but there was no one in Calcutta with remotely his understanding of Nepal, and none had pressed so consistently as he had for the expansion of Gurkha regiments. ‘Since this paper was written,’ he added,
the value and availability to us of the Gorkhali soldier tribes have been well tested, and it is infinitely to be regretted that the opinions of Sir H[enry] Fane, Sir C[harles] Napier and of Sir H[enry] Lawrence, as to the high expediency of recruiting from this source were not acted on long ago.
For the past decade, Hodgson had lived on and off at Brianstone, his bungalow at 2,300 metres looking north to the glittering immensity of Kangchenjunga. Soon after he arrived in 1846 the peak had been mistakenly judged the highest on earth and when the mornings were clear he could watch the rising sun touch its summit like a flame. In April 1848, the young botanist Joseph Hooker arrived at Brianstone for what became a prolonged stay of many months. The view of Kangchenjunga entranced him.
From its vast shoulders the perpetually snowed range I scrutinised east and west for about seventy miles, without the smallest break of the snowline. It is a wonderful panorama, startling in its effect when first revealed by the rising mists on a cloudless morning.
Looking out at this sweeping prospect, Hodgson attempted to process the vast amount of knowledge he had acquired during nearly a quarter of a century spent in Kathmandu. ‘My subjects are Ethnology and Zoology and Education,’ he wrote to his devoted sister Fanny, ‘– all ample fields and yet enough untrodden to render intelligent truthful labours permanently valuable.’ The events of 1857 were an unexpected interruption to this secluded life of scholarship: the discarded threads of Hodgson’s diplomatic career had suddenly reconnected.
A year before the rebellion began in Meerut, Hodgson had received a request from the prime minister of Nepal, the charismatic Jang Bahadur, whose brutal rise to power had ended years of internal strife in the Nepali court and made the king his puppet. Hodgson had left Kathmandu by then, but the two men had once known each other quite well. Hodgson saw in Jang something of his great-uncle, the prime minister Bhimsen Thapa, whose fall from power Hodgson had witnessed. But he shared also the widespread distrust of officials in Calcutta for Jang, who had, more or less, slaughtered his way to the top. Jang now wanted Hodgson to keep an eye on his future son-in-law Gajraj Singh Thapa, from one of Nepal’s grandest families, who was coming to Darjeeling to brush up his English, fast becoming the lingua franca of the subcontinent. Then in his mid twenties, Gajraj was so taken with tea and Darjeeling’s tea plantations that he introduced the first plantations to Nepal.
Gajraj had been in Darjeeling, staying with Hodgson, for a year when the rebellion began. As he had done in the Sikh wars, Jang Bahadur now offered assistance to Calcutta, putting the whole of Nepal’s military at the disposal of the British. For the governor general Lord Canning, the offer was a mixed blessing. If the situation deteriorated further, then the large Gorkhali army might switch sides. The situation deteriorated anyway, with brutal massacres of European women and children at Cawnpore and the ferocious siege of Lucknow. Jang might have taken offence at how Calcutta dragged its heels, but he was above all an opportunist and asked Hodgson to use his influence in his favour. Jang needed a friend of Nepal to reassure Canning he was genuine in his offer of support.
To press Jang’s case, in October 1857 Hodgson and his wife Anne went to Calcutta, staying with an old friend, Sir John Colville, chief justice of Bengal. Colville made an introduction to the governor general, whose father Hodgson had met while at the colonial boarding school, Haileybury, the East India Company’s training college. ‘I could not but be sensible that I had been out of the coach for years,’ Hodgson wrote afterwards. ‘Moreover that I was liable to be ignored as an avowed friend of the Nepalese, who were then looked upon with much suspicion and dislike.’ Lord Canning’s wife Charlotte was a favourite of Queen Victoria and a brilliant watercolourist and botanist. She had been to the Kangra valley and painted the famous hill-fort there, so knew the Himalaya. Yet when introduced to Anne Hodgson, she simply swatted away the idea of help from Nepal: ‘you praise these Gorkhas like your husband, but I can assure you they are looked on here as being little better than the rebels.’ Despite the cool reception, over games of billiards Hodgson talked to Canning about Jang, about his motivation and what he might expect in return for Nepal’s help. No one understood Jang’s perspective better. Hodgson impressed on Canning that much had happened since the Treaty of Sagauli forty years earlier, events Hodgson had witnessed for himself. Hodgson wasn’t simply a retired civil servant offering a relevant and informative briefing. This was a compelling human story with at its heart two very different men: a scholar and a tyrant each learning about the other’s world.
Had Hodgson’s father, also called Brian, been luckier in business, the fate of his son might have been different. What he did offer were the genes of Methuselah – father and son would live into their nineties – and a passion for hunting. His house, Lower Beech in the Cheshire parish of Prestbury, was full of dogs; one of Hodgson’s earliest memories was his father dressed in a scarlet hunt coat standing with his grandfather, who kept the Old Hall hotel at Buxton, freshly returned bloody-handed from a cockfight. But investments in his cousin’s Macclesfield bank and an Irish copper mine failed; the family was ruined. Only the support of relatives allowed some semblance of respectability. The Hodgsons left Prestbury for more modest lodgings, first in Macclesfield, then Congleton. Brian started at the grammar school in Macclesfield, where he excelled at cricket and scuffled with boys from the local borough school.
Hodgson’s beautiful and charming mother Catherine, matched with an affable but ineffectual husband, did what any woman in her position would: she started networking. Friendship with the Earl of Clarendon secured a government post for Brian senior as warden of a Martello tower in Clacton on the Essex coast, and while his father looked out for Napoleon, Brian junior went to school in Surrey. James Pattison, a former silk manufacturer and a neighbour in Congleton, was also a director of the East India Company, and as such had the right to nominate one civil service candidate each year, a privilege that provoked ferocious lobbying
and corruption. James Mill, who published his gigantic History of India in 1817, quipped that Britain’s empire was ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for Britain’s upper classes’, but in truth to enter the Company as a ‘writer’ or secretary was to join one of the best-paid commercial entities in the world, like climbing aboard Goldman Sachs, though with a far higher risk of not reaching retirement: the fatality rate among civil servants in India was twice that of those who remained in Britain. Still, Pattison must have liked Catherine and her oldest son, for he bestowed his nomination on Brian. He was less generous to the children who worked in his silk mill.
With Pattison’s nomination, Brian Hodgson started at Haileybury a year early, aged fifteen. He was installed in the house of the college’s academic star, Thomas Malthus. Here some of the most influential intellectuals and politicians of the early nineteenth century gathered to discuss issues of the day. Hodgson’s patron James Pattison, soon to be chairman of the East India Company, visited his young protégé, bringing with him his close friend George Canning, then president of the Board of Control, later prime minister. Canning gave the young Hodgson a seminar on Indian colonial history and ‘a brilliant sketch of the career possible for an Indian civilian’. Hodgson was being offered the keys to the kingdom; his family were looking to him to rescue them from debt: he must not fail.
Hodgson excelled at Haileybury, coming top of his year and winning prizes for Bengali, a distinction that put him in the front rank when, aged seventeen, he embarked for Calcutta and his civil service training at Fort William College. The climate almost immediately killed him. Born in the soft, temperate drizzle of the Cheshire plain, the sweltering heat and prodigious rains of the monsoon quickly took their toll. His health broke and never wholly recovered, despite his longevity. His doctor told him: ‘Here is your choice – six feet underground, resign the service, or get a hill-appointment.’ The advice put Hodgson in a bitter quandary. He had dedicated himself to releasing his family from debt, but there were few opportunities he might survive. In 1819, Darjeeling, a future hub of tea production, remained a forested hill. Simla was still an obscure Himalayan village. There were only two postings available in the mountains: in Kumaon, recently wrested from the Gorkhali kingdom of Nepal, and in the capital of Nepal itself, the residency at Kathmandu. These posts were in the control of the Bengal Civil Service’s Foreign and Political Department and were highly prized, their award resting ultimately with the governor general.
Ordinarily, such a post would be out of the question for someone so young and untried but Hodgson’s connections in Calcutta rescued him. An aunt was a friend of Lady Elizabeth D’Oyly, wife of Sir Charles D’Oyly, artist and Company man, who held the most entertaining and glamorous salon in Calcutta. Hodgson was hardly a partygoer. His nickname at the Tent Club, dedicated to hunting wildlife, was the ‘young philosopher’. Yet he was welcome at D’Oyly’s, where the expressed aim was the exclusion of bores, and if he was quieter than some of his fellows, he enjoyed the conversation and company of women, another hint of his mother’s influence. So it was, with a word from Eliza D’Oyly to her cousin Flora, wife of the governor general, the Marquess of Hastings, Hodgson secured the post of assistant to George William Traill, commissioner of Kumaon. In August 1819, Hodgson graduated top of his year, debating publicly at graduation ceremony in both Persian and Bengali. Next day his appointment was made official; he was on his way to the Himalaya.
His new boss George Traill, commissioner of Garhwal and Kumaon, was a no-nonsense frontiersman who would spend twenty-one years roaming the mountains, visiting each inhabited place to catalogue the region’s wealth and resources. Kumaon had suffered for generations from a sequence of invasions, first from Afghan Muslims who terrorised local farmers and moaned about the cold, then from the Gorkhali army. They oppressed Kumaon with such cruelty that it passed into proverb and legend; half of Kumaon’s farms had been abandoned. Traill lifted many of the Gorkhali taxes and came up with a more equitable system. The report he eventually produced from these investigations became a model for administrators elsewhere in India. The governor general might have ruled in Calcutta, but Traill was king of the Kumaon. It was under Traill that Hodgson served his apprenticeship, following his master throughout the winter of 1819 and the first part of 1820, climbing over endless mountain ridges to every remote village where they discussed, with no need of interpreters, everyday problems with the headman. Traill made a point of learning about every aspect of Kumaon life, a habit Hodgson would adopt as his own.
In October 1820, when Hodgson was transferred to Kathmandu as assistant to the resident, the notion he would spend the rest of his career there would have appalled him. The posting was simply another rung on the ladder. Having learned from George Traill, he now had
another man to form myself upon, a man with all the simplicity and more than the courtesy of Traill – a man who was the perfection of good sense and good temper; who liking the Nepalese and understanding them, was doing wonders in reconciling a Court of Chinese proclivities to the offensive novelty of responsible international dealing.
This was Edward Gardner, who had taken up his post in the summer of 1816. As we saw earlier, his mission was straightforward: to do as little as possible as politely as possible. Nepal must be calm and China reassured that its western marches were safe from the East India Company. He spent much of his time gardening.
Hodgson had few professional duties to occupy him, beyond acting as Gardner’s secretary. He was limited by decree from straying more than half a day’s walk from the residency. There was plenty of time to learn Gorkhali, the Khas language now known as Nepali, and Newari, the language of the Kathmandu valley, to go with his Bengali and Persian. Yet ambition gnawed away at him. Hodgson appealed to friends in Calcutta and within two years of his arrival Brian Hodgson was gone, promoted to deputy secretary in the Foreign and Political Department. This was preferment, marking Hodgson as destined for great things, perhaps a seat on the Company’s council or government of an Indian province. But once back in the broiling heat of Calcutta, his health collapsed again. Going back to the hills might save Hodgson, but his old job in Kathmandu was taken. He was saved by that rare phenomenon, a powerful but kindly man. William Butterworth Bayley was a senior and trusted figure in the Calcutta secretariat and knew everyone. When Hodgson appealed to him, Bayley sent him back to Kathmandu as the residency’s postmaster, a job invented just for Hodgson in order to save his health. ‘Go back to Nepal and master the subject in all its phases,’ Bayley told him. ‘In the present times you can learn little there. But we have had one fierce struggle with Nepal and we shall have another yet.’ Mastering Nepal ‘in all its phases’ would be his life’s work.
Hodgson was sustained in Kathmandu by letters from home and his deepening interest in study. He had a long and intense correspondence with his sister Fanny, a detailed and at times moving insight into his isolated life. He poured out his frustrations and hopes to her. Fanny found herself the recipient of despatches from the most exotic posting in the subcontinent. Like his father before him, Hodgson was a keen shot and with his sport came a growing interest in the Kathmandu valley’s natural history. He began to make an in-depth study of its birds and animals, its flowers and agriculture.
I have three native artists always employed in drawing from nature [he told Fanny]. I possess a live tiger, a wild sheep, a wild goat, four bears, three civets, and three score of our beautiful pheasants. A rare menagerie! And my drawings now amount to two thousands.
He worked hard in the residency garden too, planting oats and potatoes and at the cottage given to the resident up in the hills above the city, he made a little corner of England. ‘The sward is emerald,’ he told Fanny, ‘and the familiar tokens it displays in its daisies fern, thistle, and colewort, are dear to the exile.’ He showed the same enthusiasm for his developing interest in Buddhism. Hodgson’s collection of Sanskrit texts was unprecedented for a European. Those he sent the scholar Eugène Burno
uf in Paris helped launch the academic study of Buddhism in the West. His deep knowledge and appreciation of Buddhist doctrines earned him the friendship of Tibetan lamas as well as the court in Kathmandu. Part of his growing influence with Nepal’s rulers stemmed from this cultural sympathy. He gave up alcohol and meat, partly to protect his weak liver. ‘I live,’ he told his sister, ‘like a Brahman.’
For his masters in Calcutta Hodgson made a detailed study of the organisation of the Nepali military – and the possibility of adding to the Company’s Gurkha battalions. In the process, Hodgson judged that the Company’s strengthening grip on northern India, far from pacifying Nepal’s appetite for war, had only sharpened it. British annexation had damaged Nepal’s economic model and left the elite thirsting for military action and the loot that came with it. Prithvi Narayan had created a hereditary ruling class whose organising principle was military service. ‘Soldiers have been and are heads of the law and finance at Kathmandu, and administrators of the interior. Soldiers have been and are everything.’ Bhimsen Thapa kept those soldiers in a state of habitual aggression.
In my humble opinion, [Hodgson told Calcutta, the Gurkhas] are by far the best soldiers in India, and if they are made participators of our renown in arms, I conceive that their gallant spirit and unadulterated military habits might be relied on for fidelity.
Gurkha loyalty, Hodgson added, would be assured by receipt of a regular pay cheque. By absorbing Nepal’s reserve troops, around ten thousand in number, the British could give the elite in Kathmandu the cash it needed and dilute Nepal’s military frustration. The idea was sound but when he wrote this, in the early 1830s, India was at peace. The governor general Lord William Bentinck and the secretariat in Calcutta thanked Hodgson politely for his report and ignored it.