‘Hervey, a most fitting service. Capital, capital.’
Somervile had detached himself from the distaff side and advanced on him with a singularly hale expression.
‘Rather a crush, I’m afraid,’ said Hervey a little flatly. ‘We ought perhaps to have taken the cathedral.’
‘No, no; St Mary’s was the place for it. No doubt. How is Kezia?’
‘A little better today, thank you. Milne is sanguine, though, I believe. A heat languor, that’s all. The past months, very tiring.’
‘Quite.’ Somervile cleared his throat. His old friend sounded not entirely convinced, but that was by the bye; there was business to be about. ‘I had several communications from Fort William this morning. The Ranee has signed the subsidiary treaty and agreed to reparations. All very satisfactory. I think you can expect a vote of £10,000 from the Company, as before.’
Hervey nodded. It would make no difference to him personally. As was the custom – at least until Bhurtpore, when for some reason Lord Combermere chose to keep his portion of the prize money – he’d given his share of the Coorg vote to the relief fund, and as he’d said to Suneyla would do so again. But it was as well that Fort William was content, for had things gone ill with his decision to march without their leave, then it would have been cashiering, not prize money. (He’d yet no idea that Somervile had told Lord Bentinck that if they didn’t treat with the Ranee as an ally, he himself would resign and take his case to London.)
‘She gave Georgiana a very handsome necklace of rubies, and me a ring for Kezia.’
‘And asked for you to command the subsidiary force.’
‘I didn’t judge it meet even to consider the offer – even had the governor-general approved.’
‘I’m excessively pleased. It wouldn’t have served, though very agreeable for a while, no doubt. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” Or the tigress her stripes?’
Hervey smiled. ‘At least my commander-in-chief would have been several hundred miles distant. I fear I’ll have too much time for sport now that Sir Robert’s returned.’
‘Then what I’m about to propose may be agreeable to you.’
Hervey looked wary. Somervile was never happier than when plotting some scheme or other, and a little sport hadn’t been an altogether unattractive prospect. ‘How so?’
‘Hervey, in five days’ time I leave for Agra.’
‘Yes, of course. I know it.’
‘I shall be governor of what the Company has been pleased to call the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, but which are now raised to the status of a presidency.’
‘Yes, yes; I know that perfectly well. I trust you’ll have joy of it. I certainly wish you so. You asked me for an aide-de-camp, indeed, and I’ve given you one. ’
Somervile was now smiling broadly. ‘Hervey, I have just – by this day’s hircarrah – had it given into my power to appoint a commander-in-chief. I choose you. It shall be in the rank of “major-general in India”. I know that doesn’t enter on the home gradation list, but it’s a matter of time, only, before London adds your name. Meanwhile you would have all the pay and appurtenances of the rank, and the responsibility. And, indeed, you’d retain command of the Sixth, for I have it in my power to arrange too for their transfer to Agra. I didn’t consult you in the matter for I wasn’t in a position to. Now, what say you to it?’
Hervey could say nothing. He could think of no reason to decline, not least if the regiment was to move anyway. Except for Kezia.
Somervile sensed his concern. ‘I know Agra to be the best of places, and the heat less unrelenting than here.’
Hervey knew likewise, but … ‘I believe I must ask Milne’s opinion first.’
‘And what shall the surgeon say?’
Hervey sighed. He knew he ought to be overjoyed. ‘What saith the Preacher indeed?’
Somervile was about to make reply when St Alban’s words of command came clear across the maidan and the band struck up Young May Moon, the regiment’s quick march.
Hervey’s stomach tightened – the sight and the sound. And now the promise: major-general in India, brevet colonel, and yet for a little longer to remain lieutenant-colonel of the Sixth. What more could he reasonably desire? For who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?
He watched as they marched off, till the band changed to Lillibulero, another of the dragoons’ favourites, and then turned to his old friend.
‘Somervile, I’m excessively obliged to you. With your leave, then, I shall tell the regiment this day.’
HISTORICAL AFTERNOTE
The suppression of thuggee, along with that of suttee and female infanticide, stands as a monument to the humanity and capability of the Company’s officials. ‘Thuggee’ Sleeman, as he became known, eventually took charge of the Department for the Suppression of Thuggee and Dacoity, in 1839, and with the help of various legal acts of the government of India expanded its operations, including efforts at rehabilitation. During these years, some four thousand ‘thugs’ were arrested, of whom half were convicted and hanged or transported for life. One of them, by the name of Bahram, confessed to having strangled over 900.
By the 1870s thuggee had been effectively eradicated, though the department remained in existence until 1904, when it was replaced by the Central Criminal Investigation Department. The suppression acts were replaced by the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, by which ethnic or social groups defined as ‘addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences’ were systematically registered by the government, with restrictions on their movements. The act was repealed in 1949 after Indian independence, de-stigmatizing some two and a half million people. However, there was such an upsurge in the criminal activity thitherto draconically suppressed that in 1953 the Habitual Offenders Act was passed, effectively re-stigmatizing the ‘criminal tribes’. It is safe to say that the issue is still unresolved today.
For those who would read more on thuggee, there are Sleeman’s own books, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, the first volume in particular. Philip Meadows Taylor’s 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug, based on actual confession, provides much grisly detail, some of which is no doubt true. Sir Francis Tuker’s The Yellow Scarf (1961) is a lively, robust and imaginative account of thuggee and its suppression. John Masters’s The Deceivers (1952), like all his India novels, is gripping. Mike Dash’s Thug (2005) is the most up-to-date and scholarly account.
And yet there are claims that thuggee was merely a case of ‘Orientalism’ – the way of seeing something that exaggerates and ultimately distorts the difference of (in this case) India as compared with the West, the native culture implicitly uncivilized and at times dangerous. In other words, colonial imaginings. Further, there are claims that Sleeman himself exaggerated – indeed, invented – the phenomenon of thuggee simply to advance his own career.
I do not think this can stand. There were others engaged in the suppression of thuggee earlier and independently, notably Thomas Perry at Ettawah and William Borthwick at Indore. Besides, there was printed reference to ‘thugs’ as early as the fourteenth century. What is without doubt is that Sleeman got the bit between his teeth, and the governor-general – Bentinck – was pleased to give him his head, for reports from the Company’s officials were becoming alarming.
In fact there has of late been a rather virulent bout of anti-colonialism among some historians, who paint a picture of rampant rapacity on the part of the Company – to the point of suggesting, if only implicitly, that India would have been better off if the British had never gone there. But better for whom? The transfer of wealth from a corrupt and sometimes cruel Indian to a corrupt and sometimes arrogant Englishman was no doubt a sin, but not one – it seems to me – that a poor ryot would have thought a very great one, especially when weighing it in the scales with the Company’s pax; indeed, the Pax Britannica.
For the pax was a noble venture – of that I’m certain – if at times losing
its way a little, and occasionally woefully. And the men who brought it, though not all of them worthy, were on the whole remarkably selfless and lacking in venality. They would of course have thought themselves superior to those in their charge – racially superior, not just by religion and education – but most would have given their lives for them, and frequently did. Philip Mason describes this magnificently in The Men Who Ruled India (written under the pseudonym ‘Philip Woodruff’), especially the first volume, The Founders (1954), and in his study of the Indian Army, A Matter of Honour (1974). After Balliol, Mason served with the Indian Civil Service for twenty years until Independence. He is neither sentimental nor condescending, nor blind to corruption and misgovernment. He writes that ‘in the end a man must be judged not by his worst so much as by his best, and in the end not even by his best but by what he aimed at. And so English rule in India is to be judged by the conscious will of England expressed in Parliament and by the aims of a good district officer, not by the nasty little atavistic impulses that came wriggling up from the subconscious when an official at the Treasury scored a departmental triumph over the India Office, or when a merchant fixed something over an opulent lunch.’
‘Thuggee Sleeman’ was later Resident at Gwalior, and then at Lucknow until just before the Mutiny. In 1856, aged sixty-eight, a major-general and knighted, he died at sea on passage home. He had served continuously in India for forty-seven years. The village of Sleemanabad in what is now Madhya Pradesh is named after him. Today, when many colonial-era place-names have been and are being changed – most notably, in the case of Hervey’s story, Chennai for Madras – the fact that Sleemanabad remains must say something for the respect in which some at least of ‘The Men Who Ruled India’ are still held.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bantam Press
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Copyright © Allan Mallinson 2020
Cover illustration by Robert Papp
Allan Mallinson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Endpapers: St Mary’s Church, Fort St George, Madras. Drawn and engraved by J. W. Gantz, Vepery, 1841. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images.
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The Tigress of Mysore Page 33
