In the manner of most preludes to annexation, the Memoranda drew attention to the ‘tyrannical principles’ by which Sindh was governed. The moral case for invasion was established with details of the bigotry and ‘debauchery’ of the Sindhian rulers. Among Sindh’s crimes, the Memoranda noted that ‘much of the fertile and cultivatable ground’ along the river had been deliberately left barren as hunting ground for the Talpur rulers. A ‘mild and beneficial rule’, this document slyly concluded, would be the best thing for the people.
The Memoranda outlined the ease with which an attack could be launched. In practical terms, the ‘only Fortifications of Sinde worthy notice are Hydrabad and Omerkote’. Politically, all that was needed was a quick dose of ‘divide and rule’: ‘the disjointed texture of the Sindian Force and Government…would afford us ample means of coercing any refractory chiefs, and of converting many into grateful allies.’ The purpose of this speculative endeavour was to secure the Indus, navigation of which was crucial ‘in case of such an event occurring of vital consequence to the defence of the country’. The event in question was the feared invasion of British India by Russia.
The latter half of the Memoranda addressed this apparently pressing problem. The soldier-experts differed as to its gravity but they all concurred that controlling the Indus was key to British India’s security. Sir John Malcolm admitted that ‘Russia has entertained, and still entertains, designs of invading India.’ But he believed that the Russian Treasury could not sustain an invasion on such a scale, through such sparsely populated, inhospitable terrain. Sir John McDonald was more alarmist. He advised sending spies to acquire ‘an accurate knowledge of the nature and resource of the territories, immediately west of the Indus; the fords, the ferries, and Military features of that great boundary of our Empire’. So the Company urged itself onwards with the phantasmagoria of ‘30,000 Russians’ creeping through the Hindu Kush towards India.
The immediate result of the Memoranda was that an enthusiastic young officer, Alexander Burnes, was sent to navigate the Sindhian and Sikh courses of the river. Given the ‘jealousy’ of the Talpur rulers, the true purpose of the trip–to survey the river’s width, depth and suitability for navigation, and to examine the defences of the Sindh forts along its banks–was concealed. A ruse was found. Ostensibly, Burnes was to use the river as a means of taking five dray horses to Maharaja Ranjit Singh one thousand kilometres upstream in Lahore. (These are ‘Horses of the Gigantic Breed, which is peculiar to England’, Burnes boasted in a letter to the Sikh ruler.) Under cover of this Trojan present, he would explore the river, and augment Britain’s knowledge of it, which at the moment was so ‘vague and unsatisfactory’.
From the beginning of his journey, young Burnes was fired with zeal for his mission. Adroitly, he negotiated with the various Talpur rulers, who, guessing (correctly) that ‘we were the precursors of an army’, at first refused to allow him to travel by river to Lahore. For three months they placed him under boat arrest in the Delta, denying him fresh water. The Talpur at nearby Thatta answered Burnes’s pleas with letters in which ‘he magnified the difficulties of navigating the Indus, and arrayed its rocks, quicksands, whirlpools, and shallows, in every communication; asserting that the voyage to Lahore had never been performed in the memory of man’. Burnes must have known this was a lie; but he took the exaggerations seriously, henceforth considering himself an Indus pioneer. He also used this time to explore and map the winding Indus Delta. Eventually, when he could brook no more delay, he travelled overland to Thatta to meet the ruler in person and persuade him to give in.
It is probable that the Talpurs’ change of heart was due to the thorough search which their soldiers made of Burnes’s luggage as he waited in the Delta. They were looking for arms–there were none. To their cost, they failed to appreciate the significance of the modern ‘surveying instruments’ which Burnes was carrying with him.
Now that he was no longer considered a threat, Burnes was given special treatment. He had travelled through the Delta in a flat-bottomed skiff, but from Thatta onwards he was lent the Talpurs’ state barge. He floated upstream, dining on goat stew prepared by the royal chefs, and innocently admiring the splendid countryside–soon to be part of Britain. It was only at night, under cover of darkness, that he unpacked his instruments, and carefully noted, calculated, measured. In his ensuing ‘Memoir on the Indus and Punjab Rivers’, Burnes proclaimed the river perfect for trade and ripe for annexation:
The British Govt. may without difficulty command the navigation of the Indus…the insulated fortress of Bukkur is alone an important position–by securing that…the British would command the whole navigation into a most fertile country.
Naturally, the Company bosses were delighted. The following year–using the threat of conquest by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the Punjab–they coerced the Talpur rulers into signing new treaties providing ‘for that portion of the Indus which flows through Sinde being thrown open to all merchants and traders’. There would be two more treaties, in 1834 and 1838, each more favourable to British interests than the last. As early as 1837, Burnes was able to write: ‘The haughty Lords of SINDE have been indeed humbled…we have at last…secured our influence on the Indus.’
Buoyed by his success, Burnes had in the meantime persuaded his superiors to support him in a still more ambitious journey. He left India in 1832 and travelled across the Indus into Central Asia, disguised as an Armenian merchant. It was an adventurous sequel, and on his return to England in 1834, Burnes wrote up his two expeditions as a three-volume work, Travels into Bokhara. Burnes had a popular touch, and his Indus exploits, in particular, caught the imagination of Britain.
A central theme was the parallel between Burnes’s own exploits and those of his namesake, Alexander the Great. Burnes began with the frankly inaccurate claim that he was ‘the first European of modern times who had navigated the Indus’. He went on to assert coyly that in Lahore, ‘we were daily informed that we were the “second Alexander”, the “Sikunder sanee”, for having achieved so dangerous a voyage.’ Above all, he emphasized the latent power and potential of his Indus mission:
As we ascended the river, the inhabitants came for miles around to see us. A Syud stood on the water’s edge, and gazed with astonishment. He turned to his companion, as we passed, and in the hearing of one of our party, said, ‘Alas! Sinde is now gone, since the English have seen the river, which is the road to its conquest.’
In London, Burnes and his journey became the talk of the town. He was feted in every salon; nicknamed ‘Indus Burnes’ in the press, and granted an audience with the King at Brighton. The French and English Geographical Societies awarded him medals, the Asiatic Society of Paris applauding the ‘luminous line’ he had drawn ‘across the obscurest region of Asia’. The media were equally enthusiastic: ‘The Indus; with the Ganges, folds as it were in an embrace our mighty empire of British India,’ trilled the Monthly Review; ‘The ancient ALEXANDER descended the Indus and its tributaries from Lahore to the ocean, the modern ALEXANDER ascended,’ purred the Spectator. The book was a huge success for its publisher, John Murray, selling out immediately. It was reprinted in 1835 and 1839, and over the next twenty years was translated into German, Italian, French and Spanish.
Underlying the romance and adventure of Burnes’s book was an economic proposition: that the Indus should be ‘opened’ for trade and navigation. Burnes had done his reading on this subject, and he was particularly inspired by William Robertson’s History of America, which established, in a general sense, the commercial and prospecting possibilities available to clever European pioneers in a ‘virgin’ land. The steamships used in North American freshwater navigation were an inspiration to East India Company officers, and the Indus led a fertile existence in their imaginations as an Indian Mississippi or Hudson.
Between them, Malcolm’s Memoranda and Burnes’s Travels held out the tantalizing promise of the Indus to a Company greedy for territorial aggrandizement. As Bu
rnes hinted, the Indus was a catch in itself, but it was also the high road to greater glory. Indeed, Burnes’s splendidly assured prose, and the deceptively simple westward trajectory that his book recommended, must be held partly responsible for the first of Britain’s disastrous forays into Afghanistan.
After the raptures which greeted the publication of Burnes’s Travels, it was not long before Auckland, the Governor General, promoted him as the Company’s Political Agent in Kabul. During his second residence in Kabul, Burnes became obsessed with the notion that the arrival of ‘Vilkivitsch’, a Russian agent, presaged a Russian-Afghan invasion of India. But the letters he sent to Calcutta urging the government to conciliate Dost Muhammad, King of Kabul, were ignored by Auckland, who instead sanctioned an invasion of Afghanistan.
Auckland gave his reasons: the Afghans, he proclaimed, were plotting to extend ‘Persian influence and authority to the banks of, and even beyond, the Indus’. Of course, this hypothetical intrigue was simply the mirror-image of Auckland’s own designs. The force which left India in the autumn of 1838 was named after a land the British did not even yet own. The Bombay and Bengal armies were rechristened the ‘Army of the Indus’.
When the soldiers began their westward march–thus breaking the Talpurs’ ban on the transfer of military personnel and stores across the Indus in the 1834 Treaty–Burnes’s words were on everybody’s lips. Most of the officers had read Travels into Bokhara, and his images buoyed them through the deserts of Sindh, across the ‘noble’ Indus, and into the Bolan pass. Here the rations ran out, ‘Belochees’ with rifles began picking off soldiers and camels, and as one officer put it, Burnes had duped them with his ‘flowery imagination’.
The landscape of Baluchistan–its dry, sandy valleys and high barren hills–was unfamiliar to the British. Hundreds of soldiers died from starvation. When they eventually reached the ‘bleak’ and ‘barren’ country of Afghanistan–so far removed from the ‘fairy land’ which they had been led by Burnes to expect–and stormed the towns of Ghazni and Kabul, they were shocked by the cold and unfriendly reception they received from the local population. The soldiers had been led by their officers to expect rapturous, thankful crowds; the virgins of Kabul, they thought, would strew their way with flowers. Instead, as memoir after British memoir attests, the Afghans appeared ungrateful–even angry–at the efforts the British had gone to in deposing their ruler. By 1840, the Army of the Indus was thoroughly disillusioned.
Back home in England, however, the invasion was applauded as a triumph for the new imperial Victorianism. Alexander the Great, wrote one commentator, merely ‘meditated the invasion of India…but the conquest of that country was destined for a nation almost unknown in the days of Alexander’. The new queen, Victoria, knighted Burnes, and the other key players, for services to her empire. The Houses of Commons and Lords gave votes of thanks to the Army of the Indus, and Sir John Hobhouse delivered a patriotic speech in which he extolled the army’s ‘bold and brilliant achievement’ of bringing ‘civilization’ to the ‘banks of the Indus’–for the first time since the ‘great Alexander’ marched his army down the river.
The euphoria, however, was short-lived. In November 1841, the ousted Afghans retaliated. The first victim of the coup was the young hero Burnes himself. As the ‘Khans of Caboul’ wrote in a letter to their allies:
stirring like Lions, we carried by Storm the house of Sickender Burnes…the Brave Warriors having rushed right & left from their ambush, slew Sikender Burnes with various other Feringees of Consideration…putting them utterly to the sword, & consigning them to perdition.
So much for British understanding of the Afghans. The army fled in confusion. Of the 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers who left Kabul in January 1842, only one man reached safety in Jalalabad. A handful of officers and their wives were taken hostage. Everybody else was killed–by Afghan snipers, by starvation, or by the cold.
As news of the disaster trickled into London and Calcutta, attitudes to Auckland’s Afghan venture shifted. The Court of Directors of the East India Company, it now emerged, had always been ‘strongly opposed to the war’ and the ‘inexpediency of interfering with the states beyond the Indus’. Sir Henry Fane, commander-in-chief of the army until 1838, had apparently resigned out of distaste for the ‘injustice’ of the Afghan expedition. He was said to have warned in 1837: ‘Every advance you make beyond the Sutlej to the westward…adds to your military weakness…Make yourselves complete sovereigns of all within your own boundaries. But let alone the Far West.’
The government, forced to defend the army’s action in the House of Commons, needed a scapegoat. They chose the late lamented Burnes. In speeches to the House, Lord Palmerston and Sir John Hobhouse now hinted at Burnes’s misjudgement and folly. In the official parliamentary ‘Blue Book’, Burnes’s reports and letters were edited to suggest that he had urged–rather than opposed–the fatal invasion. Charles Napier, the future conqueror of Sindh, joined the chorus: ‘the chief cause of our disasters is this–When a smart lad can speak Hindostanee and Persian, he is made a political agent, and supposed to be a statesman and a general.’
But even this rearguard action could not relieve the sense of British disgrace. The new Governor General, Ellenborough, badly misread the public mood when, in 1842, he sent a second force to sack Kabul and Ghazni. In an overt incitement to anti-Muslim feeling, he wrote an open letter to the ‘People of India’ in which he depicted the war as historical retaliation for the invasion of Hindu India by an eleventh-century Afghan, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. The army was proud of having despoiled the Sultan’s tomb, Ellenborough declared, for now ‘The insult of eight hundred years is at last avenged.’ Ellenborough even ordered that the sandalwood gates of the Somnath temple in Gujarat, taken to Afghanistan as a victory trophy in 1025 by the Sultan–‘so long the memorial of your humiliation’–should be returned to India.
In Britain, this was seen for what it was–a cynical attempt to stir up religious passions and justify a brutal Afghan invasion. In India, few Hindus took much notice at the time, though it became an emotive issue much later, around the time of Partition. (Later still, it was discovered that the gates were not Gujarati at all, but Egyptian.)
Having proved the power of British arms, Ellenborough then ordered the army back to India. He issued another proclamation explaining that the government was ‘Content with the limits Nature appears to have assigned to its empire’. Nature’s limits now apparently included ‘The rivers of the Punjab and the Indus’. Having dealt with the Afghans, Ellenborough was moving on to the Sindhis.
Sir Charles Napier–a sixty-year-old General who had never been to India but wanted to make some money before retirement–was contracted to wage the war. Napier arrived in Sindh in the autumn of 1842. He sailed up the Indus by steamer, reading Burnes’s book, and writing silly, threatening letters to the Talpurs as a prelude to battle:
but as there are two sides of your river, so there are two sides of Your Highness’ arguments. Now the Governor-General has occupied both sides of Your Highness’ river because he has considered both sides of Your Highness’ arguments.
Napier waited impatiently on the Indus for the Talpurs, whom he portrayed as villainous immigrant despots–they came from neighbouring Baluchistan–to be tricked into betraying the trading terms of their treaty. At last, in February and March 1843, he fought two decisive battles. The Talpurs were preparing for a family wedding, and their army was disorganized, so the British won easily by bombarding the riverside forts from armed steamships (a dry run of Britain’s colonization of Africa by gunboat). Napier arrested the Talpurs, confiscated their country, and packed them off down the river on a pension. The loot from the fort in Sindh’s capital, Hyderabad, came to a million sterling.
The conquest of Sindh received almost universal condemnation in India and England. The Indian newspapers savaged the invasion; in England, Punch displayed its disapproval with the Latin pun Peccavi (I have sinned/Sindh). The Sec
ret Committee of the East India Company called for an investigation. In 1844, unconvinced by Ellenborough’s defence, the Committee had him recalled to England. As for the army, if in 1841 it had retreated to the Indus with its tail between its legs and its military reputation in tatters, by 1843, public approbation had rarely been so low.
It would take the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 to reignite support in Britain for Company policy. Concomitantly, the critical ‘loyalty’ displayed in 1857 by Sindh, the newly-annexed Punjab, and the recently ‘pacified’ Afghan powers, did much to rehabilitate the reputation of the trans-Indus provinces in the popular British imagination. Now nobody could deny that conquering Sindh–as Charles Napier famously said–was ‘a useful piece of rascality’.
One of the most damning indictments of the Kabul interlude had come from Charles Masson, a British army deserter turned explorer and spy, who in 1842 published a character assassination of Burnes. Masson asserted that Sir Alexander had misread the Afghans and the Russians; hinted that he was unduly fond of local ‘black-eyed damsels’ and poured scorn on the ‘primarily commercial’ goals of Burnes’s second journey up the Indus. Playing on British complexes about being known as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ by Oriental princes, Masson jeered that the Afghans had wholly disparaged Britain’s eagerness to sign trade treaties. In fact, the picture was more depressing than even Masson imagined.
Seven years before, in 1835, having signed a trade treaty with the Talpurs, the British grandly ‘opened the river’. But while local tradesmen had long used the river as a trade route, the British had difficulty in persuading Indian merchants to do so. Thus in 1836, four Company employees–Carless, Leech, Wood and Heddle–were despatched to test Burnes’s earlier assertions. These men, mostly engineers by profession, showed that navigating the Indus was far more problematic than had hitherto been expected. As a comparison of maps made in 1817 and 1837 showed, the Indus was highly unstable, subject to frequent flooding and changes of course, especially at its mouth. The first sixty miles of river from the sea were deemed unsuitable for ‘boats drawing more than four feet of water’. Merchants had long since ‘abandoned the Indus and they now use the camel to transport their wares’.
Empires of the Indus Page 6