by Anita Anand
Qualifications in hand, emotions mastered, Michael O’Dwyer now felt ready for India.
The intense Indian humidity that greeted Michael O’Dwyer in the winter of 1885 could not have contrasted more with the chill he had left behind. When the ship dropped anchor in the port of Karachi, Michael was forced to navigate his way, marshalling trunks and cases, through a sprawling quayside of bawling dock-workers, hawkers and hard-palmed lascars, the Indian sailors who crewed Raj ships. There was barely enough time to take it all in before he had to get the train north. Michael’s orders would take him to the capital of Punjab, the city of Lahore. His posting put him right in the heart of John Lawrence country.
Though Lawrence had died in 1879, everywhere Michael looked he could feel his presence. The impressive Lawrence Hall, conspicuously white inside and out, held concerts exclusively for European audiences. Lawrence Gardens stretched out before him, where dark-skinned ayahs wheeled pink-cheeked charges, the children of the Raj. While it did not bear his name, Lahore railway station, Michael’s link to the rest of the world, was John Lawrence’s greatest legacy.
Work for the grand, red-brick terminus began two years after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. To inaugurate the enterprise, Lawrence had broken earth with a silver shovel engraved with the Latin motto ‘tam bello quam pace’ – ‘better peace than war’. His railway station was ready for both.
With its pretty turrets, Lahore station looked like a fairy-tale castle, but it was more of a fortress. Great steel doors slid across the ends of train sheds and over platforms, turning the station into a massive makeshift bunker for the British should there be a repeat of the violence of 1857. Attractive round bastions were cannonproof. Narrow, decorative slits in the walls were specifically designed to accommodate ‘Maxims’, the world’s first recoil-operated machine guns. Lawrence had wanted those who came after him to feel safe.
The Indian Mutiny of 1857 had shaped Britain’s attitude towards her Indian natives. In the years that preceded it, the country had been battered by British economic exploitation. In pursuit of profit, the East India Company had squeezed both the land and the people who lived on it unsparingly. The peasant class, forming the majority of India’s population, found itself either starved off ancestral lands or reduced to the status of indentured labour, thanks to a system of punitive taxation. Farmers that continued to work the land were forbidden from growing edible crops. Instead, they were forced by their new foreign overlords to produce cotton and indigo, vital for Britain’s lucrative and growing textile industry.
On an individual level, working men could no longer feed their families. In a wider context, self-sufficiency in rural India was all but destroyed. The poor now had to buy their food and clothing at inflated prices. Many were forced to take loans secured against their property to pay for goods and were later crushed by astronomical interest on their repayments. It was a perfect recipe for poverty, hunger and despair, yet the British kept taking.
William Bentinck, the governor-general of India in 1834, admitted: ‘The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’
Soon after, famine swept through British-controlled territories, killing almost a million people. In July 1840, news of unprecedented hardship reached London and a select committee of MPs convened to examine the conduct of British traders in India. When called to give evidence, Thomas Cope, a successful silk merchant from Macclesfield, did not deny that his Indian workers were starving. Instead, he insisted that it did not matter: ‘I certainly pity the East Indian labourer, but at the same time I have a greater feeling for my family than for the East Indian labourer’s family. I think it is wrong to sacrifice the comforts of my family for the sake of the East Indian labourer because his condition happens to be worse than mine.’14
In addition to the suffering of the poorest, the British policy of territorial annexation had led to the displacement of a large number of rulers and chiefs. They too began to organise against the British. The spark that lit the tinder came when sepoys, the Indian soldiers serving under the British, were told to use a new type of rifle where cartridges greased with animal fat would have to be bitten before pouring the gunpowder into the gun. Muslims were forbidden pork; Hindus and Sikhs were forbidden beef. Rumours spread that both were being used to provide the fat.
Sepoys first mutinied in Barrackpore near Calcutta. Their rebellion quickly spread to Meerut in the north and spilled over into Delhi, the capital of the former Mughal Empire. Sepoys in Lucknow, Bareilly, Kanpur, Jhansi, Central India and Bundelkhand joined the uprising, overthrowing and killing British officers.
Not since the loss of the American colonies a century before had Britain felt such a threat to its national interests. If India was to slip her bonds, economic collapse at home would follow.
By the middle of June, the whole of northern India was in open revolt. Rebels rampaged across the region and a minority committed unspeakable atrocities against British civilians. Kanpur, or Cawnpore as it was then known, saw some of the worst of the bloodlust, culminating in the massacre of 204 British women and children on 27 June 1857. The slaughter at the Bibighar had a devastating effect on the relieving British forces. Expecting to find the female hostages alive, they instead found floors ‘ankle deep’ in blood, and rooms littered with bonnets, children’s shoes and hair, matted in gore.
Retribution was swift and ruthless. The British government poured men and logistics into the region. Sepoys were rounded up and, whether they had taken part in the uprising or not, were summarily executed. By his own account, Frederick Cooper, the deputy commissioner of Amritsar, shot to death no less than 237 captured sepoys at the end of July 1857. A further forty-five suffocated in cells as they awaited the firing squad.
Within four months, the British had executed around 100,000 sepoys, most of whom had played no part in any atrocity. The manner of their killing exemplified the vengeance that drove the British. Sepoys were tied to the mouths of cannons and blasted to pieces for sport. Their brother soldiers were forced to stand in the splattered blood and tissue, reinforcing the British message: This is how we deal with defiance.
Thousands more were hanged from makeshift gallows in trees. On occasion, their still-breathing bodies were used for bayonet practice to improve morale among British troops. The sweeping brutality, which included the slaughters of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, became known in India as ‘The Devil’s Wind’.
There is an old Punjabi saying, ‘Jinaay Lahore nahi veak’aya oou jum’aya eei nahi’, which loosely translates as: ‘If you haven’t seen Lahore, you ain’t seen nothing.’ Lahoris are rightly proud of their city. The Mughals were first to lavish attention on it during a reign that lasted more than two centuries. Emperor Akbar (1542–1605) created the city’s mighty fort, a 20-hectare walled enclosure filled with mirrors, mosaics and marble. It was dotted with beautiful palaces, harems and gardens. Akbar’s architectural taste married Hindu and Muslim traditions, melding intricate Persian calligraphy, precise Arabic geometry and ostentatious Hindu-temple flourishes. The Shalimar Gardens, with their 400 fountains and pools of tranquillity, were mankind’s attempt to mirror the gardens of paradise.
The Sikhs had left their own aesthetic too, including the samadhi or mausoleum to Lahore’s Sikh maharajah Ranjit Singh. Its great golden dome catches the light of the rising and setting sun.
Young Michael noticed none of this. Lahore was disappointing, and his first impressions were far from good: ‘There was a pervading sense of dust and disorder, relics of the rough Sikh dominion.’15
The presence of ‘the brilliant Kipling family’ was Lahore’s saving grace, providing much-needed relief from the overwhelming foreignness: ‘I think it was in 1886 that Mr and Mrs Lockwood-Kipling, with their son (Rudyard) and daughter, combined to bring out a Christmas Annual which was full of humour and sparkle. Rudyard Kipling at the age of twenty was already mounting the ladder of fame.’16
Michael, somewhat blind to the accomplishments of Indians, would always seek out and admire his own kind.
Michael O’Dwyer’s first assignment was something of a sink-or-swim experience. He found himself despatched to the rural areas of Punjab for a ‘winter tour’ armed with only a canvas tent, some utensils and a few boxes of stationery.
A munshi, an Indian secretary, and an orderly were his only staff. Neither spoke a word of English and Michael knew only a handful of words in Hindi, Urdu or Punjabi. Despite the obvious language barrier, Michael was expected to render British justice to the natives. He felt eminently qualified, even if he could not yet understand a word they said.
British mastery over the natives was both necessary and inevitable according to Michael, with his unassailable belief in the superiority of his race: ‘The Indian of whatever class and way of thinking, even the rabid anti-British agitator . . . prefer[s] that his case should be decided by a British official rather than by one of his own people.’17
For Michael, life was at its best when the Indians knew their place.
Though Michael O’Dwyer talked of the intrinsic and incorruptible justice of the British Raj, he himself could be almost callously capricious. On one occasion, while he was posted to the district of Shahpur, Michael was called upon to judge a grisly killing:
The case came before me in 1889 . . . in which a young Awan, jealous of his young wife who was a local beauty, in a moment of passion cut off her nose with a razor so that she might not be able to attract other men again. Having done the cruel deed he ran away in fright and the poor girl died of shock. Husband gave himself up soon after, admitting his guilt, expressing his penitence, and explaining that evil tongues had made bad blood between him and his dead wife, who had really been quite innocent.18
Michael showed the man an inexplicable level of leniency that even outraged the white memsahibs back at the club. He saved the Awan from hanging, transporting him instead to the Andaman Islands.
Some six years later, while serving in Gujranwala, another Punjabi district, a curious, beaming man approached him: ‘When I asked who he was, he looked disappointed and said, “Don’t you remember whom you were so kind to? You only gave me seven years when I expected to be hanged for killing my wife.’ ”19
The Awan killer, let off early for good behaviour, had brought gifts of gratitude. These included seashells upon which he had engraved Michael’s name, and a dried-out Andaman shark’s tail. Michael accepted these tokens with delight, and the story became one of his entertaining anecdotes. The ‘true north’ on his moral compass was far from constant. Where in Shahpur he had shown mercy, elsewhere in Punjab he would show none.
Michael moved steadily from post to post and up the ICS ladder. Just when his ascent seemed unstoppable, at the end of 1895 something happened to temporarily wrong-foot him. Michael took sudden leave from India and decided to use an unusually long furlough to travel around Europe. His grand tour lasted a year and a half, and took him to Egypt, Greece, Turkey and Russia. Wherever he went he sought out enclaves of British expats: ‘One feels drawn to one’s own folk in a foreign country.’20
Moscow was particularly convivial, because it was here that Michael met a slender, dark-haired young woman from the Channel Islands. She, like him, had travelled to Russia in the hope of learning the language.
Eunice Bond, or Una as she preferred, would become the centre of Michael’s world. Their courtship was short and intense, and the pair married just weeks after they met. Throughout their long marriage, Michael would rarely talk about his wife in public, but when writing his memoirs many years later would describe her as ‘the source of all my subsequent happiness’.21 With Una at his side, Michael O’Dwyer felt ready to tackle India again. They left England in December 1895 and arrived in Lahore just before Christmas.
CHAPTER 3
BIRTH OF THE UPHEAVAL
December was a busy time for the servants in British India. Overseas deliveries, quite mystifying to the brown fingers that unwrapped them, had been coming in for weeks. Swaddled in distinctive department-store paper, these included great wheels of pungent Stilton, brightly boxed sweets and mysterious cured meats. Realising how much it meant to their sahibs, Indians referred to Christmas Day as ‘Burra Din’ – ‘The Big Day’, and those in domestic service did all they could to make their masters feel special: ‘All the natives know and respect the sahib’s Burra Din. The mali (gardener) wreathes your gate posts with scarlet poinsettia and yellow marigold, and all the servants don their cleanest and best attire, salaaming to the sahib and mém, hoping to receive a “burra din ka baksheesh”, i.e. a Christmas present.’1
Temperatures tipped 30 degrees Centigrade, yet turkeys and potatoes roasted in kitchens all over the Raj. Fruit puddings sat in puddles of flaming brandy, while the sahibs and memsahibs sat in puddles of perspiration, laughing, eating and singing carols. It was every bit as traditional as Christmas ‘back home’.
On Boxing Day, cantonments fell into whispers as masters and mistresses of the house nursed heads and bellies. Servants took advantage of lulls and leftovers with quiet gatherings of their own. Boxing Day was a time of sated tranquillity for the Raj. To the rest of ‘native’ India, it meant nothing at all.
Some 130 miles south of Lahore, in the mohalla (neighbourhood) of Pilbad in Sunam,2 the smells and sounds of normal Indian life were augmented on 26 December 18993 by the cries of a woman. They got steadily more regular and urgent. Narain Kaur was in labour. She was about to give birth to her second child, and while Tehal Singh, her husband, waited anxiously for news, soothing his two-year-old son, he might have been forgiven for uttering a silent prayer: ‘Let the child be healthy and let him be a boy.’ Boys were breadwinners; they took care of their families; they lit their parents’ funeral pyres. Boys were also much cheaper to bring up than girls.
Daughters ate and drank in their fathers’ houses, only to be married off as soon as they became useful. They needed dowries for good matches. Sweets were distributed on the birth of sons. Daughters came with commiserations.
When the faint mewling of his son finally reached his ears, Tehal Singh might have allowed himself a moment of relief, but nothing more. He could barely feed his existing family, let alone this new mouth. His little one was blissfully unaware that his tiny wriggling body was saddled with an invisible burden from the moment he arrived in the world. Like his parents, he was ‘Kamboj’, one of the lowest castes in India.
The suffocating and hierarchical caste system predates written history, and according to ancient Hinduism, a cycle of karmic reincarnation governs its strict rules. If a person is good and decent in this life, they can come back as a high-caste member of society in the next. Those who prove exemplary gain moksha, a release into a higher spiritual plane. Those found wanting are reborn in the lower castes. Those who are abhorrent return as animals. A dogged belief in karmic justice meant there was little pity for those who needed it the most.
Low- and high-caste families lived parallel lives when Tehal Singh’s youngest son was born. They were often forbidden from drinking at the same wells or worshipping at the same temples. Low-caste children did not play with high-caste youngsters. Intermarriage could be punished by brutal violence or even death.
As Narain Kaur held her baby in her arms, she must have known how hard his life would be. She had little more to offer the infant than the bravest name she could think of. Sher Singh was perhaps an attempt at double indemnity. Both ‘Sher’ and ‘Singh’ mean ‘the Lion’. A big title for such a tiny boy.
Two years earlier, his mother had attempted the same nominative determinism for her elder son, naming him Sadhu, or ‘the sage’ – one who is close to moksha. Any optimism in their naming was outweighed by the boys’ crushing reality; the mortality rate among low-caste babies was high. They were the first to suffer from hunger when the harvests failed and the first to die when disease rampaged through the country. The future for Sher Singh and his brother look
ed bleak.
Defying statistical probability, the children survived. However, their mother would not be so lucky. Though the exact date is unknown, Narain Kaur died when her boys were only about three and five years of age.4 The cause of death is unrecorded, but given the time and place where she lived it is likely that she was swept up in one of the waves of pandemic washing over the subcontinent. In 1896, bubonic plague, originating in China, entered the ports of India on ships belonging to the British Empire. In the heat and the sprawl of densely packed cities, it spread swiftly and without mercy. In just a couple of years the disease took the north and west of India firmly in its grip and stubbornly refused to let go.
It is estimated that during the next three decades some ten million people would die of plague in India.5 To add to the misery of this medieval disease, the early 1900s saw cholera spread through Punjab too, a waterborne disease that hit the stagnant, poverty-stricken areas hardest. At the turn of the century, one in ten deaths in India was blamed on cholera alone.6 With its canals and open sewers, in Sher Singh’s hometown of Sunam the stench of death was never far away.
Tehal Singh did his best to raise his children alone. Their home, a single, windowless room made of tiny kiln-fired mud bricks, stood near an almost barren tract of land.7 Tehal grew what few vegetables he could coax out of the ground and took them to sell in nearby villages. The income barely kept his family from starvation, so he was forced to look for other work. Many low-caste men were already working for the British as labourers carving out Punjab’s canal system. The hours were long, and the work dirty and backbreaking. It was hardly a place to drag two small children, but Tehal had few options.
The Nilowal canal lay less than 5 miles south of Sunam, and the canal overseer was a man called Baba Dhanna Singh.8 He was a religious man, well respected, as demonstrated by the honorific people used to address him: ‘Baba’ or ‘father’.
