The British dominion was saved by the act of fate and not by an act of bravery or British chivalry. People can speculate why Tej Singh walked away from a sure kill. May be he did not want to flog a dead horse or he followed the example set by Maharaja Ranjit Singh. His generals wanted him to go to war with the British when they encroached on his sphere of influence by moving the forces to the eastern bank of the Sutlej River. Ranjit Singh’s logic was that he could drive the British up to Aligarh, 90 miles east of Delhi but not beyond. The supply line was too stretched from Lahore to Aligarh, a distance of 400 miles. Also, the British had set up their forts all over India, at Madras, at Bombay, at Calcutta and they were replenishing and storing ammunition, forces and supplies by sea, bypassing all land based defenses. It was not a hollow supposition; the logic was proved in 1857, when the British had to call for reinforcements not only from all over India but even from their white dominions all over the world. Lesson was clear; India had compromised its sovereignty by letting the British in.
Political Interlude:
The Sikhs fought four more battles at Budhowal, Jagroan, Aliwal and Sobraon after the battle at Ferozeshah. Those battles were fought valiantly by the Sikh army, for the defense of their homeland. For the British, it was a decisive struggle for control of Punjab. At the banks of the Sutlej River, the British losses were heavy, generals of Peninsular fame were cut down, but they kept bringing in supplies and forces, both native and Europeans; Gorkhas from Delhi, Cawnpore, Meerut, Umballa and the Hill stations; H.M.’s Lancers, Foot regiments and Bengal cavalry. The British were shattered during many of those battles. The final battle occurred at Sobraon on 10th February 1848 and the Sikh resistance gave away and the British were able to march up to Lahore. The ultimate aim of the British was reparations, compensation and annexation. In the immediate aftermath of Sobroan, confiscator terms were offered to the Rani ( Ranjit Singh’s widow) and the infant Maharaja and £1.5million was demanded along with the Jalander Doab (area lying between River Beas and Sutlej) and the valley of Kashmir and two million rupees (£ 200,000) annually for the British protection. After the death of Ranjit Singh, his widow Rani Jindan gave birth to an infant son Dhulip Singh. This Rani was the stuff of intrigues and a thorn on the side of the British and the British matched her intrigues. It led to other wars with the Sikhs. The Rani eventually was exiled and the infant son was separated from her and whisked away to England.
Those terms were a very rich prize with huge potential for revenue and man power for future imperial wars. Those terms were concluded in March 1846, but the British could not control or subjugate a very proud race and it lead to second round of wars between the population of Punjab and the British. There was a huge Punjab army still available at Peshawar (gateway to Khyber Pass and Afghanistan), Lahore and Amritsar and supplemented by the masses of Punjab itself.
The Second Punjab War:
The British were after money; additional levies and revenue were imposed and they decided to use the Sikh Durbar for their dirty deeds. The young Maharaja was a virtual prisoner and it was an affront to the Sikh Chiefs. The British over reached themselves. The British were aware of the possible dangers of renewed warfare and they were also fortifying and building up their offensive capability. The British stationed their forces at Peshawar, at Bunnoo and tried to use Sikh chiefs to do their fighting. It did not work. The first indication came when Shere Singh, who was pressed by Sir F. Currie, the British resident at Lahore to collect additional revenue from Mulraj, the present governor of Multan; he crossed over and joined the siege by Mulraj. General Whish and Major Napier, who had been sent to capture Multan, beat the hasty retreat.
That was 1848; two years after the British took siege of the Sikh Durbar at Lahore. In the meantime, Dalhousie had taken over as Governor General, and left for the front on October 10, 1848 to start the real campaign of the Punjab wars and declared that the “Sikhs will have the war with a real vengeance.” Punjab was eventually conquered and annexed in 1849, but at a huge price both at Multan and at Chillianwala. The Punjab army taught the British a thing or two about warfare and about deploying artillery. The Punjab Province had limited resources and they used it effectively to keep the British at bay. The British had to mobilize H.M’s forces and used the resources of the entire Hindustan to beat the Sikhs, who fought single handedly for ten years. The British Commander in Chief Sir Hugh Gough requested troops from Bombay presidency and waited two months till the reinforcements arrived. While Bombay reinforcements engaged forces of Mulraj, Hugh Gouge crossed the river Chenab to engage Shere Singh on December 4, 1848.
Lord Gough himself commanded the attack on Shere Singh’s position across the River Chenab at Ramnugur, but met with tragedy; Lt Col. Havelock and General Cureton and at least fifty, were cut down by the Sikhs. The British hunkered down and waited for over a month for General Whish to come up with reinforcement from Multan. The forces met at Chillianwala from Dec 4 – to Jan 13, 1849 where Lord Gough suffered heavy losses, was defeated and recalled. It is said that Lord Gough lost his nerve, the smell of gun powder was too exciting for him; he ordered the battle when he did not want to; the Sikhs forced the engagement and his forces seemed to have lost confidence in his judgement. The British lost over a hundred officers and thousands of dead and wounded. Their regiments even panicked.
So, the British called for more reinforcements; and the reinforcements came form Scinde, from Multan, and they tried to implement the lessons learned at Chillianwala; use the artillery to support the attack and to minimize casualties. The forces met at Gujarat on Feb 21, 1849. The Sikhs as usual put up a brave fight, but ran out of ammunition and supplies; they did not have any place to go for reinforcements. And finally on March 12 they laid down their arms. The British got a taste of the Indian warfare. The Sikh forces, hardened by centuries of warfare in defense of their homes, gave the British the real fight and extracted the maximum penalty. The British annexed the land of the five rivers on March 30, 1849.
The Sikhs put up the fight for the soul of India and preserved her honor. India paid for this imperial terrorism; the British taxed the ryot (peasant) to pay for this war. No money came form England; whether it was the Sikhs fighting the British or the British fighting the Sikhs, the money came from the Indian treasury. The ten years conflict after the death of Ranjit Singh devastated the economy of Punjab, Bengal and Bombay and treasuries of those states were looted. So also, was the Treasury of Kashmir, and Sind? The British extended their rule up to and beyond the whole of NWFP (North Western Frontier Provinces) and this opened the way for the second Afghan War. The Punjab remained under British occupation for about a hundred years until 1947. Ironically, it was the Punjab, where the forces of independence were marshaled and Britain had to leave the Indian Empire. The Sikh wars were household stories, ninety years later when the British had to ‘escape’ from the colony; people still idolized their valiant Maharaja, Ranjit Singh.
This story will be incomplete without a mention of the Koh-I-Noor diamond which is studded in the British Crown. The Koh-I-Noor diamond was the personal property of the Maharaja Ranjit Singh, which passed on to his widow after his death. How that diamond landed up in the British Crown is typical of the British overweening greed.
Koh-I-Noor Diamond:
Was Koh-I-Noor diamond a spoil of the war? Not really. It was the private property of the family of the Maharaja Ranjit Singh after his death and the infant son Dhulip Singh. The British decided to separate the infant from her mother; she was exiled to another state, and the British took guardianship of the infant Dhulip Singh and whisked him away to England at some stage of his infancy. How did the diamond come in possession of the British is a mystery. It has not been told. Lord Dalhousie who was an employee of the East India Company and the British governor-general presented the diamond to Queen Victoria in 1850. How did Dalhousie come in possession of the diamond have not been told? The British and the Rani did not get along; The British annexed the Punjab Province in 1849 and
the diamond came in possession of the British in 1850; the infant Dhulip Singh was ten years old. One rumored version is that the infant Dhulip Singh gave the diamond to the British as a present. Can infants make legally valid presents? That is for the legal minds to sort out.
Up until this time, the British were after low hanging fruit and they very nearly looted most of the state treasuries and gold and bullion reserves in India and all of that bullion, pearls, diamonds and precious stones landed up in Britain and now decorate their monarchs and their progeny. The gold reserves most likely ended up in their vaults at the Thread Needle Street, Bank of England or elsewhere but they were not done yet. India is a vast subcontinent, about fifteen times the size of Great Britain with vast mineral and mining reserves, tropical plantations and savings in private hands The British went after all that and even the man power of India for expansion of the Imperial Empire which reduced India to a pauper state. No public sector projects were ever implemented throughout the next century and India was reduced to a back water of the Third World. All this is covered in the next chapter appropriately called the Century of Miracles.
CHAPTER SIX:
CENTURY OF MIRACLES
“I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I did not scatter.”
_ Mathew, xxv, 26.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the British East India Company was earning its livelihood by wars, conquests, taking over the treasuries of the conquered princely and provincial states and paid little interest to commerce. Money and militarism went hand in hand. After Plassey, the boundary of the British sphere of influence kept marching to the west, in search of loot, plunder and revenue. That quest was aided and abetted by militarism and the company overgrew its original mercantile role.
India Ripe for
Financial Adventure
In the absence of any regional authority, India became a wide-open field for exploitation and became a tempting target by the British subjects. The exploitive and aggressive energy of the British people was in full display in corralling the pecuniary and financial opportunities in India. After all, they were socially and financially depressed people and the smell of money attracted the predatory talent, which was a cultural trait of the British nation and it increased precipitately after the enactment of the Charter Acts of 1813 & 1833. Indian populace was ill equipped, both culturally and financially, to handle the aggressive Argonauts and there was money, lots of money and those foreign elements were surfeiting on that money and that hunger was fueled by over weaning greed. Morality and fair play had no room in that environment and no one abandoned their greed and love for money. The resulting outcome was tragic for India, which resulted in rural pauperization and decimated that prosperous country to misery and servitude.
In Britain, a clamor started to open up the Indian commerce to all, as the EIC had made enough money. The Indian monopoly of the East India Company therefore became unsustainable and in 1813 it was put to an end. The private traders and free merchants were permitted under special license to trade lawfully. That was the spirit of the time, Zeitgeist. It was further modified by the Charter Act of 1833, which was a cornerstone of the British capitalist economy, a free market predatory economy, but certainly not a fair economy, and acted as the open sesame for the British mercantile enterprise in India. By the Act of 1833, the British East India Company was entirely shorn of the right to trade for its own benefit. It became lawful for any natural –born subject of His Majesty to proceed by sea to the company’s possessions to reside therein, to acquire and hold land or to make profits of such residence without license. The removal of the EIC’s monopoly gave a fillip to the migration of British natural born nationals to India. India thus became ripe for the capitalist’s financial adventure. “Now or never became the motto of those early 19th century Argonauts in search of the riches, which had already made many of their countrymen very rich.
Going to India on sailboats around the Cape of Good Hope was a time consuming and risky business. So, they invented a new way to travel to India via Egypt as for mass travel they did not have enough sea faring vessels. As early as 1834, the EIC started an inefficient steam service from Bombay to Suez on the northern tip of the Red Sea and used the land route and River Nile to travel to Alexandria where they connected with ships leaving for Britain. The various types of ships fitted with paddle wheels and low pressure- boilers were good enough for short voyages in the gulf, as well as in the Mediterranean. Even with transshipment and the land route, they were able to shorten the travel time by many weeks thus allowing the commerce to flourish dramatically.
The next hurdle was money and the British people seeking fortune in India were thrown into a real life challenge, as they could not take any money from home. They had to swindle or trick the local people for their money needs. Britain had no desire to release any money, meaning gold, which was the national wealth. Britain therefore came up with a much more sinister plan to grab the wealth of the natives so that their nationals could do business in India without money. Money to the British people was the blood sport; in pursuit of money, they had the patience of a saint and the cunningness of a thief to expropriate it. To solve the money problem for the migrating population to India, the British Government sought the advice of their Revenue Secretary, Holt Mackenzie, who was appointed to collect the Revenues of India. Holt Mackenzie was of the same mind set as his Imperial bosses in London. It was not hard for him to suggest ways by which paupers and destitute British nationals arriving in India could get rich quickly. His was a very novel advice, all that the arriving British nationals needed was industry and love for money and they could easily become capitalist by force of that character and industry. The Imperial Government also held hearings regarding their concern for releasing any money and was thrilled at the advice given by the Revenue Secretary. He was not sanguine at all about remitting any funds directly; all that the British people in India needed was industry and a certain type of character because the natives had little interest in commercial pursuits. But there was a caveat, the British government would have to protect and support the departing British people. Governments can do anything as long as there is no opposition and in Britain particularly, there was no opposition. The merchant bankers, the executives, the legislature and the judiciary, they were one and all, the same people, they wore different hats at different times and they had a common purpose, to enrich their country.
The government therefore had to enact laws to expropriate the wealth of the natives. Any illegal activity can become legal if a law is passed to sanction the illegal activity. And so the British government did. They made sure that any laws and regulations, which were passed, did not harass the British nationals but impacted only the natives so that their land, money and wealth passed smoothly from the natives to the British. The British government labored hard in enacting those laws so that they appeared just, but a mischief is a mischief, no matter how well it was sugar coated. They even warned their local governors in India that they had to make sure that there was no unease on account of the display of improper distrust and suspicion and the laws enforced in such a way, in such a spirit, that it did not produce the very mischief, which it was trying to prevent. They even warned that to the evil-minded, it would appear evil and provide fodder for the discontented. They warned to make sure that it did not provide the irritation to start the hostilities. Sure indeed the British were schemers to loot the Indian money and they had done their home work.
Money was a much larger theme in the lives of the British people. They mistook the innocence of the natives for stupidity and the British decided that it was a fair game to cheat and steal without regard to morality and whom they hurt in the process. The British were hungrier and much wilder than anyone thought and they looked at the sight of money with bare fangs and pretty soon the natives found themselves in the belly of the beast. One wonders at the chutzpah of those people, it just takes the breadth away.
Quarry for Raw Materials
> Mughal and Princely Treasuries were the low hanging fruit which was picked up with remarkable speed. Then they targeted the cash crops in India and the opportunities for making money were endless. Hitherto, the British had imported Tea from China, cotton from Georgia and Alabama; hemp from Russia and after the influx of British Europeans, India became a quarry for tropical raw materials and the British targeted Tea plantations, cotton plantations, silk industry, indigo, jute, opium and coffee plantations. The British also penetrated into the mines and mineral wealth of India and also took over the banking industry. There was plenty of displaced manpower in the countryside as the newly landless ryot (cultivator), the peasants and the tillers who were rendered land less by the British taxation policies were employed as salaried cultivators by those newly emerging plantations. The British fortune seekers from different trades came pouring in too. The mills in Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Liverpool sent its people in need of tropical raw materials; the British aristocracy who had already benefited from the riches from India and who were in possession of rupees loans from returning expatriates targeted the low hanging fruit, the private savings and the wealth of the natives. The tea, cotton, opium and indigo lobby sent its people to establish new Plantations. The P.O. (Peninsular and Oriental) shipping interests targeted the limitless Burdwan, Raniganj and Jharia coalfields. The Scottish mills in Dundee targeted the jute industry, particularly after the Russian hemp dried up after the Crimean war. The Plantations owners in Mauritius and West Indies targeted the coolie labor in India after the supply of Negro labor dried up, at the end of slavery or it became too expensive to hire the Negro labor. The British nation derived such huge revenues and income from the rampant loot that they called the nineteenth century the century of miracles or call it the century of giddiness and euphoria.
1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope Page 16
