The Sikhs and Gurkhas of Ventura’s Fauj-I-Khas became the pride of the Lahore army. Visiting British officers were unstinting in their praise of the legion’s French drill. Major Osborne, a British officer, observed that the infantry ‘works in three ranks, and do everything by the beat of the drum, according to the French fashion’. Osborne felt that the brigade could shoot ‘with greater precision and regularity, both volleys and file firing, than any other troops I ever saw’. After the Anglo-Sikh Wars, veterans of the Waterloo campaign observed that the Fauj-I-Khas’s fire was ‘both better aimed and better delivered than that of the Napoleonic infantry’.
Kukhri and kirpan saw action together in Naushera (1823), Dera Ismail Khan, Multan and Peshawar (1837-39), Kulu and Mandi (1841) and during the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845-46).
As an interesting side note, Gurkha fought Gurkha on opposite sides in the first Anglo-Sikh war! The Sikhs forces included the Gurkha Paltan and the British had among their ranks, Gurkhas of the Simrur and Nuseeree batallions.
The Battle of Naushera was prompted by the declaration of jihad by Azim Khan of Kabul, who wanted to liberate Peshawar from the Sikhs. Maharaja Ranjit Singh ordered his army to move north towards Peshawar. The infantry was placed under the command of Kunwar (Prince) Sher Singh, Misr Dewan Chand, a Punjabi general and General Ventura. Hari Singh Nalwa, Akali Phoola Singh, Fateh Singh Ahluwalia, Desa Singh Majithia and Attar Singh Sandhawalia led the cavalry while the artillery was in charge of Mian Ghaus Khan and General Allard. The Fauj-I-Khas was out in full force including the Gurkha Paltan of Balbhadra. It was a rare military campaign in which the old guard, as well as the new European leaders participated.
The advance guard including Kunwar Sher Singh and General Hari Singh Nalwa crossed the Attock river and camped at the Sikh fort of Jehangiria. Azim Khan and his Afghani jihadis soon surrounded the fort; with him were his brothers, Dost Mohammad, Sayyid Akbar Shah and Jabbar Khan, the ex-governor of Kashmir. When Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the rest of the Khalsa force arrived, they found that the Afghans had destroyed the pontoon bridge across the swollen Attock. After some deliberation, the Sikh army plunged into the river, following Ranjit Singh’s lead, losing a lot of equipment and men, but causing consternation in the ranks of the Afghans, who thought the river was unfordable.
Ventura’s new brigade fought valiantly as did the rest of the force under the direction of Akali Phoola Singh and managed to overwhelm the Afghan horde, which included several groups of Ghazis, intent on suicide in the Jihad against the ‘infidels’. Balbhadra Kunwar, fought fearlessly at the head of the Gurkha Paltan, matching the Ghazis in ferocity until he was surrounded by a large horde of Ghazis who emptied their muskets into his body.
Akali Phoola Singh, incensed by the fall of Balbhadra and the injuries that Ventura and Allard took, was further enraged when his horse was shot from under him. He mounted an elephant and jumped back into the fray, only to be riddled with Afghan bullets as he presented an easy target on his new mount. Hari Singh Nalwa and the surviving Akalis of Phoola Singh, aided by the Gurkha Paltan completely routed the Afghans and exacted vengeance for the deaths of Balbhadra Kunwar and Akali Phula Singh.
It was a pyrrhic victory for Ranjit Singh though. While Peshawar was his again and the Afghans, who had been feared for generations had been handed a convincing defeat, the loss of Akali Phoola Singh and Balbhadra Kunwar was a heavy price to pay.
The Gurkha Paltan survived the loss of their valiant commander and continued to be an important component of the Fauj-I-Khas, all the way until the eventual fall of the Sikh Empire to the British.
The unlikely alliance of the kirpan and the kukhri survived too. Sikhs and Gurkhas served as comrades-in-arms in the decades that followed, in the forces of the British Raj, in the forces of the Allies in the World Wars and in the forces of independent India.
The ‘lahure’ is celebrated even today in folklore, song and popular culture; still swirling around him is the romance of the life of a soldier of fortune, the poignancy of being separated from his roots and the angst about his place in the world, which is familiar to every exile.
* * *
* The kirpan is a sword or small dagger, originating from the Indian subcontinent, carried by Sikhs. The kukhri or khukuri is the basic utility knife of the Gurkhas.
FROM WATERLOO TO LAHORE
In February 1834, Robert Montgomery Martin, an Anglo-Irish civil servant who later went on the serve as the Colonial Treasurer of Hong Kong, which was acquired after the First Opium War, published a work titled, History of The British Colonies. In the first volume, Martin, while waxing eloquent on the capabilities of the British Indian Army, offered the following footnote:
An army is now springing up in the N.W. (north-west) of India which the Russian rulers are eagerly ambitious in making the instrument of the annihilation of British dominion in Hindustan. I allude to Runjeet Sing’s force.
At the turn of the century, the Irish adventurer George Thomas, who had set himself up as an independent ruler in modern-day Haryana with headquarters at Hansi, had called the Sikhs ‘the most contemptible troops in Hindostan’. James Skinner, the Anglo-Indian founder of the celebrated Skinner’s Horse had expressed similar opinions about the Sikh army, Dal Khalsa.
Martin, in his book, was also unstinting in his praise for the transformation that Maharaja Ranjit Singh had wrought in his fighting force, mostly in the previous decade or so, aided in no small part by a corps of foreign officers in his employ, who had introduced European discipline and organisation into his army.
Of all the ‘firangees’ or foreigners in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s employ, none was more dear to him than Jean Francois Allard.
None for sure, had lived a life more colourful, a life that seems to be straight out of a romance novel of the British Raj!
Jean Francois Allard was born at Saint Tropez, then a small seaport on the Mediterranean coast of France, on 8 March, 1785. On 6 December, 1803, the eighteen-year-old Allard joined the 23rd Dragoons of the Line, a regiment in the French army and rose to the rank of squadron quartermaster-sergeant. He served in Italy during the years 1804 to 1806, and became the Sergeant-Major of the bodyguard of Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother, who ruled Naples and Sicily. In February of 1807 he became quartermaster of the Neapolitan regiment of light cavalry, and towards the end of the following year was sent to the war in Spain.
Allard was promoted to sub-lieutenant on 15 June, 1809, and then to lieutenant on 10 July, 1810. On 31 July, 1813, he received two sword-cuts in the battle of Aleazar, near Alcala, and a year later was transferred to the 2nd regiment of Dragoons of the Imperial Guard of France. In July 1814 he was again transferred to the 2nd Hussars, and on 28 April, 1815 he was promoted captain in the 7th Hussars. His services had been rewarded with the crosses of the Royal Spanish Order and of the Legion of Honour, and he was appointed aide-de-camp to Marechal Brune, appointed Marshal of the French Empire, by Napoleon.
Allard’s hopes of a brilliant career in the French army were dashed by two significant events: Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the assassination of his mentor, Marechal Brune.
On 6 April, 1814, Napoleon abdicated his throne, following which Allard along with many other French officers was placed on half-pay. A few months later, Napoleon re-emerged from exile in Elba to embark on a new military adventure. As captain of the Cuirassiers (mounted cavalry) Allard rejoined Napoleon to become part of the Hundred Day campaign, which culminated in Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo on 18 June, 1815.
Less than two months after the defeat at Waterloo, Allard suffered a second blow. Marechal Brune, who might have helped revive his fortunes, was murdered by royalists in Avignon on 2 August, 1815. Because of his extreme Bonapartist sympathies, Allard was excluded from the general amnesty that followed Napoleon’s defeat and even his half-pay was rescinded. Allard’s career in the French army was effectively over.
It was time for a fresh start.
Mystery surrounds t
he next five to six years of Allard’s life. Some accounts suggest that he wished to travel to the United States, but his plans changed and he went to Egypt, where he served as an officer for several years, in the company of other Bonapartists. A communication from his friend Jean Baptiste Ventura caused him to leave Egypt and join him in Persia, where they entered the service of Abbas Mirza, the heir–apparent, who was seeking European officers in an attempt to modernise his army. Allard and Ventura were treated with kindness and respect, but they had set out to make their fortunes and their prospects in Persia seemed bleak, particularly after an alliance was struck between the British and the Persians, under which British officers were to undertake the task of modernising the Persian army. After some time in the service of Abbas Mirza they set out further east, to Herat and then Kandahar in Khorasan, modern-day Afghanistan.
Allard and Ventura made their way to Daka, a village at the mouth of the Khyber Pass, where they encountered a most extraordinary traveller.
Kõrösi Csoma Sándor or Alexander Csoma de Kõrös, was born in 1784 in Transylvania, then a province of Hungary (since 1920 it has been part of Romania). As a young man, Csoma, who was extremely bright attended the Bethlenianum College of Nagyenyed to study ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew, French, German, Romanian and Turkish. His journey towards a distinguished academic career was disrupted by the forces of Hungarian nationalism. Hungary was under Austrian control and the nationalist movement was mostly inspired by the uniqueness of the Hungarian language, which was completely distinct from any other European language. A number of theories were debated, all of which had in common a belief that the Hungarians came from somewhere in Asia. The most popular theory was one that proposed that the Hungarians were the descendants of the Uighur people of central Asia. Another theory held that the Scythians—a vaguely defined legendary central Asian people—were the ancestors of the Hungarians.
The nationalistic fervour created great excitement in Csoma’s heart and he decided to visit Central Asia to research the origins of the Hungarian people. In 1820, he set out for Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). Csoma travelled from Constantinople to Tehran, where he found refuge at the British embassy. He spent several months in Tehran studying Persian and in 1821, left Tehran, disguised as an Armenian merchant under the pseudonym Sikandar Beg, to better blend in with the more frequent travellers in the region and travelled on to Bukhara and finally, Kabul.
He stayed in the Afghan capital for two weeks, and then, in the company of some real Armenians, joined another caravan heading through the Khyber Pass where he encountered Allard and Ventura, who were travelling with an extensive entourage of servants and horses towards Lahore.
Allard and Ventura had heard tales of the Sikh empire in Punjab, ruled by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the ‘Lion of Punjab’. Ranjit Singh had lately consolidated his power over much of the former Mughal Empire in northern India, and was known to be seeking to maintain his conquest by engaging European mercenaries to modernise his army. Sensing better prospects under Ranjit Singh, they decided to leave Mirza Abbas’s service and offer their services to him.
Allard and Ventura travelled with Csoma for three months until they reached Shahdra, on the outskirts of Lahore, where the Mughal emperor Jehangir is buried.
The date was 10 March, 1822.
Csoma went on from Lahore to Kashmir, Ladakh and Tibet, where he spent years studying the Tibetan language and Buddhist philosophy. He authored the first-ever Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar book and became the father of Tibetology. He made the fundamental discovery that Tibetan Buddhism originated in the Buddhism of India, and that the corpus of Tibetan literature, contained in two vast encyclopedias, mostly consists of translations from Sanskrit. These translations preserved early Buddhist texts whose Sanskrit originals were, in many cases, lost. In 1933, the Tokyo Buddhist University in Japan declared Alexander Csoma de Kõrös a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being, who postponed his entry into nirvana (enlightenment) in order to help others on their path to enlightenment. A shrine was dedicated to him, with a bronze statue of Csoma sitting in the lotus position, represented in the likeness of a Buddha, with not a trace of his European origins to be seen in his features!
Allard and his friend Ventura, of course, stayed on in Lahore but the road to Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s service was anything but easy!
The book European Adventurers of Northern India by H.L.O. Garrett and C. Gray, written in 1829 provides a colourful account of Allard and Ventura’s arrival in Lahore. An entry in the Lahore Akhbar dated 12 March, 1822 records the arrival of two ‘Feringhees’ (foreigners) at Shah Derrah, ‘one a gentleman’ and the other ‘a Gorah’ or white soldier, along with their servants and retainers.
According to the report, ‘The two gentlemen speak Persian and French or English. They have arrived from Persia via Kabul for pleasure and information and intend to stay in Lahore for two or three months.’
On March 16, ‘Uloor and Wuntoora’ (a corruption of Allard and Ventura) were summoned to Ranjit Singh’s presence, where they presented a ‘nazrana’ or offering of a hundred rupees to the king. Ranjit Singh was curious about the route they had taken to Lahore and even more curious about their profession, inquiring about their ability to manoeuvre an army.
The delicate dance of negotiation had begun. Ranjit Singh asked them if they could take command of his artillery if he wanted to attack Khorasan, to which they replied that they could, but pointed out that the hot season had set in, making a campaign very difficult. Ranjit Singh boasted of the capability of his Sikh Ghorchurs (cavalry men), who could discharge their muskets twenty times in two hours and asked if the Frenchmen were similarly adept on horseback! Allard and Ventura responded that they used the sword and pistol on horseback and that dismounted they could fire three hundred rounds in two hours!
When asked if they wished to stay with him in Lahore, they replied rather coyly that there merely wished to pass the hot season there, after which they would go wherever their ‘nasib’ or fate took them in Hindustan.
The Lahore Akhbar dated 23 April, 1822 recorded that the mating dance was still in progress. After being asked to instruct a battalion in the European manner, Allard and Ventura insisted that they would much rather train fresh recruits. In terms of compensation, they rejected the ten rupees per day offered to them by the Maharaja, insisting that they would accept nothing less than ten gold mohurs (coins) per day, citing their previous salary of fifty gold mohurs per day in Bonaparte’s service! As evidence of their not being desperate for money, they would show their stash of gold coins that they had brought with them from Persia.
In addition to the salary negotiations, there was considerable suspicion in Ranjit Singh’s court that Allard and Ventura were British spies and not Frenchmen at all. The suspicion was put to rest when the Frenchmen wrote a letter to the Maharaja in French, which was sent to Delhi to be authenticated by someone who could read French, as there was nobody in the Lahore Court who was familiar with French.
On the 18th of May, the Lahore Akhbar recorded that the bona fides of ‘Messers. Uloor and Wuntoora’ had been validated and that Ranjit Singh assured them of service, promising to place 500 cavalry under their command to be trained. Four days later, the Akhbar reported that a battalion of Sikhs and Poorbies (easterners) armed with muskets and flints were to be placed under their command, after which the Maharaja inspected the troops as they performed exercises and manoeuvred under the command of the Frenchmen.
The obvious skill of the Frenchmen won them respect and Ranjit Singh rapidly started expanding the size of their command. Ranjit Singh’s Gurkha battalion was placed under their command in 1823. That year, both Allard and Ventura saw their first action in the Battle of Naushera against the Afghans, in the company of other notable generals such as Sardar Hari Singh Nalwa and Akali Phoola Singh. By 1824, the Fauj-I-Khas, or Royal Brigade commanded by the Frenchmen included four battalions of infantry commanded by Ventura and two cavalry regiments under Allard, t
he Rajman (Regiment) Khas Lansia (Lancers) and the Rajman Daragun (Dragoon). In place of the traditional Ghorchurs, who protested against the new drills, fresh recruitments were made. Allard raised another regiment of Dragoons in 1823.50 By 1825, the Fauj-I-Khas (infantry, cavalry and artillery) was 5000-6000 strong.
Their training was based on French pamphlets that Allard had brought with him. All the words of command were in French. The uniform of the Fauj-I-Khas was inspired by the uniform of Napolean’s Grande Armee; the standards of the regiments were the tricolour French flag, inscribed with the motto ‘Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh’. Allard’s Cuirassiers, a ‘turbaned edition’ of the steel-clad horsemen of the Garde Imperiale, were the most noble-looking troops on parade, according to many visiting travellers. The men and horses were well-picked, their accoutrements were of the finest quality and the regularity and the order in which they manoeuvred was superior to the East India Company’s cavalry across the border.
In Martin’s words: ‘The French legion of Cavalry was formed by Monsieur Allard; their uniform is blue with red facings, they are armed with the Polish lances, swords and pistols; their system is that of the French Lancers. The men of these corps are much attached to General Allard, and these troops only require a few European Officers to be nearly on a par with our regular Native Cavalry.’
The Chevalier of Lahore had arrived!
By all accounts, Allard was a man of high character and amiable disposition and all foreign travellers passing through Lahore spoke very highly of him. After the initial jealousy and suspicion that the Punjabi courtiers displayed towards him, his obvious competence and his personality won them over. Maharaja Ranjit Singh developed a strong personal bond with him and had him serve as a political and military adviser as well.
The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia Page 11
