Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  These were the men, then, whom the East India Company would shortly rely upon to uphold and reinforce what Richard Wellesley called “the stability of the British power in India.” (Most of them, that is; one in five, on failing to pass their final exams, were instead offered an officer’s commission in the less demanding Company cavalry.)

  Men who would never be tolerated at the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge—at least not the blackest of the black sheep, known as the “Company’s bad bargains.” But at Haileybury they were treated with studied leniency, “for the obvious reason,” wrote Monier Williams, “that every official in the College felt anxious to avoid ruining the prospects of the sons or relatives or nominees of the Court of Directors and Court of Proprietors.”

  Men who ended their studies as they began them, still relying upon “perusal of such stories as ‘Hajji Baba’ or ‘Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp’” for their ideas about the East.

  Men who were advised in valedictory addresses that they would probably be sent to some remote province to function like a light set on a hill, so that “millions will watch your conduct and take their ideas of Christianity from your actions and words.”

  They were neither Britain’s best nor Britain’s brightest. But they were all of them meant for a kind of greatness, if only by association. Even as Nigel and his classmates crammed for the three-day exam that admitted them to the college, Queen Victoria—newly crowned and just out of her teens herself—took her first decisive step as sovereign and declared formally to the Privy Council her intention of marrying her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. A reformer and innovator, Albert opposed slavery and child labor, championed free trade, education, and the improvement of working conditions, and had a particular interest in the application of science and technology to manufacturing. Their wedding, in February 1840, ushered in an era of accelerated change founded on industrial prowess and relentless imperial expansion, reaching its zenith in the only empire in history on which the sun never set. India, under Victoria, was transformed from a colonial possession into the driver of British destiny. It was up to the men from Haileybury to rise to the occasion.

  Nigel’s surviving correspondence mentions Haileybury only once, in passing. We have no way of knowing whether he ran with the “steady” men or the “noisy” ones. He seems, at any rate, to have acquired greater fluency in Persian than some of his classmates. Even if he amounted to one of the “bad bargains,” though, it did not necessarily signify once he went East. There, noted Monier Williams approvingly, “these idle and stupid men” often proved themselves “men of great courage and pluck.” Indeed, they sometimes provided better service than “their more intellectual fellows.” No less a notable than John Lawrence, the Old Haileyburian (and future viceroy) under whom Nigel would serve as a tax assessor, went so far as to express his preference for weak-brained men, “provided they have a strong physique and a firm seat in the saddle.”

  Good bargains or bad, they all started on an equal footing once they got to India. None of them—not Nigel, not Monier Williams, the late-night readers no more than the late-night screamers and fighters—had the slightest idea what they were getting into.

  3

  * * *

  Margalla Pass

  1975

  I PREPARED FOR MY own trip East by studying the language and culture of Nepal for twelve weeks at The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. My main instructor was Willi Unsoeld, one of the first Americans to climb Mount Everest and the assistant director of the Peace Corps in Nepal for much of the 1960s. He often turned over the classroom to his daughter, Devi, who at twenty-one was only a year older than me. But she had grown up in Kathmandu and had returned several times on her own via the overland route from Europe. It was a journey she recommended as the ideal introduction to Asia, one that cost a fraction of the airfare from the United States—the “Overland Guide to Nepal,” in The Last Whole Earth Catalog, assured travelers that a budget of no more than $100 would finance a trip from Luxembourg to Kathmandu, meals and lodging included. It sounded pretty good to me and several of my classmates, and in May 1975 I joined two of them on a charter flight to Germany.

  It was a decision we began to second-guess somewhere in Anatolia, around three thousand miles short of our destination. Neither Devi Unsoeld nor The Last Whole Earth Catalog had seen fit to address the downside of living on greasy mutton rice for the better part of six weeks and sharing third-class trains and cantankerous old school buses with chickens and goats and children with fever. We persevered because we had to, but not, ultimately, together; when we rendezvoused in Iran with another group of students from the Nepal program, we discovered that we weren’t the only ones whose camaraderie had eroded into conflict, and we each continued on with different companions. Mine was a woman from the San Francisco Bay area who coped with close-quarters tension by steering the conversation to pop culture trivia. It was a strategy, she confessed in Kabul, that had its drawbacks. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get the theme song from The Patty Duke Show out of her head.

  Maybe it would take a change of scenery to change the channel.

  It changed decisively a few days later, when the black licorice whip of asphalt unwinding ahead of the bus abruptly tunneled into the iron cagework of the fortified bridge at Attock. Far below, the full-throated torrent of the Indus churned wide and deep with snowmelt from the roof of the world.

  India, at last.

  Geographically, anyway. Partition had carved Pakistan out of this corner of the subcontinent in 1947. In those parts, there was no escaping history. Upstream lay Ohind, where the Macedonians under Alexander crossed into India on their bridge of boats. On the far side loomed the turrets and battlements of Attock Fort, built under instructions from the Emperor Akbar in 1583 and wrested by the Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh from the Sadozai Kingdom of Kabul in 1813. At the brink of the gorge rose the 40th Pathans War Memorial, a giant stone monolith in the shape of a .303 rifle cartridge, erected by a Punjab regiment raised by the British in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny.

  A frill of pleated tawny cliffs shimmered beyond the arch of the crenelated guardhouse that spanned the end of the bridge. The driver stopped and tried to bum a cigarette from one of the sentries. The sun beat down, and the sentry stayed put in the narrow band of shade cast by the catwalk above. If the driver wanted it, he could come and get it. The other sentry sat napping in a folding wooden chair with the barrel of his automatic nestled in the frayed canvas upper of a rubber-soled boot. A plaque affixed to a vertical girder beside him read:

  WESTWOOD BAILLIE AND CO—ENGINEERS & CONTRACTORS—LONDON—ENGLAND—1880

  I sat directly behind the driver. When he returned with his cigarette, he told me that the bridge had purposefully been built narrow, to slow an invading army.

  “Russian army,” he said.

  It was the first I had heard of Russian designs on India. (Rudyard Kipling’s Kim was on my reading list, but I had yet to crack my copy.) Moscow seemed as far away as Timbuktu. But it was closer, after all, than London, and the British in India had expected the Russians for much of the nineteenth century. No army in the world was larger than the East India Company’s mercenary force of 250,000 men—except Russia’s. No empire in Asia had grown as fast as Britain’s—except Russia’s. By the time the British signed a treaty with Ranjit Singh that extended their influence northward to the line of the Indus, the Russians were probing southward to the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva. Between the empires lay the wild mountain kingdom of Afghanistan, its tribes and clans perpetually at one another’s throats, an unnerving realm of fratricide, patricide, and regicide, with eight changes of royal dynasty in less than fifty years. Both powers overestimated its susceptibility to foreign influence, but only the British played what came to be known as the Great Game with the reckless abandon of a compulsive gambler.

  The bus was still painted yellow. In make and model and probably year, it was identi
cal to the bus that picked me up across the street from my house in a small town in the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s and delivered me to elementary school. But there were two modifications for service in Pakistan. The first was a chain-link partition across the width of the bus that divided the interior into two compartments. The second was a working rear door that replaced the emergency exit. Male passengers older than toddlers rode in front, females in back. Before we boarded in Peshawar, I had asked my classmate if she supposed that baby girls ever traveled in the arms of their fathers.

  She gave me a look. We weren’t in Afghanistan anymore, but the men around us seemed the same—ethnically Pashtun—and it was hard to tell the difference. In that country, the only thing a man ever carried in public was a rifle.

  Or, sometimes, a rose. They carried red, long-stemmed roses and presented them to one another in the streets of Herat and Kandahar. There was no need to segregate the buses there. The only women out and about in Afghanistan were foreigners.

  Half an hour past Attock, the driver turned off the pavement and announced a rest stop. The women stayed on the bus. The men smoked and stretched their legs. No one paid any attention to the granite obelisk that towered over us from a rocky knoll. It was the same vintage as the war memorial beside the Indus, but even taller and more commanding. I walked over to the stone steps that led up to an iron-bound door set into the base. I could make out a plaque beside the door. But it was a long, steep climb in blazing heat, and I stayed where I was.

  One of the passengers joined me and introduced himself as a student at the Khyber College of Dentistry at the University of Peshawar. I’ll call him Rasheed. He bent down and picked one of the wildflowers that grew on the slope beside the steps. Each of its five yellow petals was freckled with a spot of chocolate brown. These, he said, were the marks of the fingers and thumb of Muhammad.

  “It is called the Prophet’s Flower,” he said, and handed it to me.

  “You are Pashtun?” I asked, rhyming the word with “cotton.”

  “Pakh-toon.”

  He smiled as he corrected me, showing strong white teeth that must have been the envy of his classmates. A dentist with a smile like that would never need to advertise.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Was this monument a tribute to his people, like the one at Attock? I asked.

  He looked surprised.

  “It is for Nicholson.”

  He spoke as if nothing more needed to be said, no more than Napoleon required a gloss at the Arc de Triomphe, or Lenin at Red Square.

  “I’m American,” I apologized.

  Ahh.

  Well, then.

  Nicholson was a lawman, he said. Something like the sheriffs of the American West, around the same time. Except the British weren’t settling the country themselves—they didn’t want to live there. But they wanted peace on their borders. It was anarchy back then, every man for himself, the weak at the mercy of the strong, bandits everywhere. Anyone could see that peace depended on more civilized conditions for the native people. Laws and courts, punishment for crimes, things like that.

  But the British knew they couldn’t force it, not there on the North-West Frontier. No army was big enough to force it. So they decided to lead by example. They sent men like Nicholson to the lawless places. It was up to Nicholson to win the trust of the native chiefs. Then his job was to convince them to change their ways. And thereabouts, the only way to do that was to show that he was a better man than they were.

  Which he had done quite famously at that very spot, soon after the Sikhs made war on the British by killing two of Nicholson’s colleagues who were posted farther down the Indus. Nicholson knew it would be months before British troops reached the Punjab, so he called on hundreds of tribesmen from the adjacent hill country to join him in driving the Sikhs from a guard tower where the monument now stood, controlling the road through Margalla Pass. It was a drystone tower, built without mortar, and lacked a door. The only way to reach the top was by a ladder that the defenders pulled up behind them. There were only a few Sikhs inside, and Nicholson believed that a show of force by so many would make them surrender.

  It was a gamble, though, one that depended on the staunchness of irregular native troops. And Nicholson lost. He thought that if he led the charge up the hill to the base of the tower, it would shame his men into following. The men, for their part, reasoned that if Nicholson was in front, he had no way of knowing who had stayed behind. Out of all those hundreds, only a handful of chiefs followed Nicholson. It was not until he reached the tower, under heavy matchlock fire by the Sikhs, that he realized they were on their own. They pressed themselves flat against the walls to dodge the bullets, but then the Sikhs changed tactics and hurled down heavy stones. Two of the chiefs died with their heads smashed open. Nicholson was badly hit. Finally they ran for their lives.

  Reinforcements for the Sikhs were on the way. There was no time for angry words. Nicholson could barely stand. They helped him onto his horse, surrounded him in case he fell, and galloped away.

  Rasheed gazed up at the monument, dark eyes shining. There were stairs inside, he told me. He had always wanted to climb them. On a clear day, one might see as far as Swat from the opening near the top. Or so it was said. Someone some years back had barred the door, saying there were bats.

  Such caution in such a place! What were bats to Nicholson?

  He sounded very brave, I said. But weren’t structures like that usually raised to commemorate victories?

  Rasheed stood silent for a long moment, perplexed.

  Victories?

  The British won the war, of course, and annexed the Punjab. It was theirs until Independence, then divided at Partition between India and Pakistan.

  The monument was for Nicholson.

  Not for what happened then and there.

  It was afterwards that mattered.

  As far as he knew, Margalla Pass was the last time natives failed to follow Nicholson into battle.

  “There were many other incidents,” he said. “He became a legend, you see. And here, I think, was the beginning of that.”

  And there, it seems to me forty years later, was the beginning of this. Standing there at Margalla Pass, I knew little about the British Empire, except that it was gone. But I took it for granted that its passing prompted unalloyed delight in the hearts and minds of its former subjects and their offspring. Whatever benefits they might enjoy from its material legacy—railways, irrigation schemes, the reconstruction and extension of the ancient Grand Trunk Road on which the school bus bobbed and weaved—were scant reward for all those years under the colonial thumb. I supposed that the British in that part of the world were miscreants to a man, all down the generations—in varying degrees, to be sure, but as monolithic in their essence as the obelisk looming overhead. They were the bad guys. Yet there beside me was a twentieth-century Pashtun implying the opposite, at least for a given man at a given time in given situations, someone my own age, someone educated, cheering on the cowboy instead of the Indian.

  Until then I had given little thought to Nigel Halleck’s life in India. Sure, before I left the States, I had promised my mother that I would look for his grave. But I knew next to nothing about him, or what sort of work he had done for what I assumed was the British government. Still, if there were good apples among the bad in those days, I rather hoped that he was one of them. And I soon found reason to think that Nigel might have been—at least by association.

  Lahore was like most of the obligatory stops on the overland route to Nepal—a destination gained, only to be escaped as quickly as possible. It was too hot to move. Sightseeing was out of the question, so my classmate and I holed up in our two-rupee hotel room and watched geckos hunt cockroaches on the scarred and pitted stucco walls. Reaching for a clasp envelope to fan myself, I remembered its contents: photocopied pages from Nigel’s letters home to England. In one of them, I dimly recalled, there was mention of Lahore, and I decided to see what
my forebear had to say about the place. It wasn’t long before I came across the first NICHOLSON, underlined twice in the margin in a bolder, darker hand than Nigel’s. The second was in the Lahore letter, and there were half a dozen more in others, datelined Ambala and Bannu and Jullundur and Ludhiana, all annotating passages that referred to the officer—lieutenant in some, captain in others—by name. One of Nigel’s relatives had taken pains to highlight his connection with a figure of importance, surely the Nicholson of the monument at Margalla Pass.

  The Nicholson passages themselves were long on Victorian adjectives—noble, virtuous, strong, and true—but short on basic information. They revealed little about who Nicholson was or what he did. Nigel knew him and seemed to have worked with him, in more than one place, over the course of at least three years. It was clear that he thought the world of him. When I showed them to my companion, she called Nigel “besotted.”

  She said they sounded like love letters.

  4

  * * *

  A Passage

  December 1841

  THE SUN WAS UP. Muddy waves slapped the steamer’s hull. The river was wide as the Thames at Gravesend. The paddle wheel groaned against the crosscurrents of its confluence with the Bay of Bengal. The river, according to the Hand Book for India and Egypt that Nigel had purchased at Wm. H. Allen and Co. in London on the day he swore his covenant with the East India Company five months before, led to Calcutta.

  It was supposed to be the Hooghly. But the native deckhands who had come aboard in Madras called it Ganga. They leaned over the gunwales, hands cupped to catch the splashing water. They drank and drank again. They wet their hair and washed their ears and eyes and nostrils.