Flood of Fire

by Amitav Ghosh

  What did it mean, Zhong Lou-si asked, that the planning was being done in Yindu – India. Would the troops be British or Indian?

  If past experience was a guide, I told him, it was likely that the force would include both English and Indian troops: this was the pattern the British had followed in all their recent overseas wars, in Burma, Java and Malaya.

  This did not come as a surprise to Zhong Lou-si. He told me that as long back as the reign of the Jiajing Emperor, the British had brought shiploads of Indian sepoys – xubo bing he called them – to Macau. But Beijing had reacted strongly and the troops hadn’t landed. That had happened thirty years ago. Ten years later, in the second year of the present Daoguang Emperor’s reign, the British had come back with another contingent of Indian sepoys. This time they had briefly occupied Macau, before being forced to leave.

  Then Zhong Lou-si said something that startled me: he said that at the time Chinese officials had concluded that the sepoys were slaves and the British did not trust them to fight; that was why they had left Macau without putting up much resistance.

  But sepoys are not slaves! I protested. Like British soldiers, they are paid.

  Are they paid the same wage as red-haired English troops?

  No, I had to acknowledge. They are paid much less. About half.

  Are they treated the same way? Do the Indian and British troops eat together and live together?

  No, I said. They live apart and are treated differently.

  And do the Indians rise to positions of command? Are there Indian officers?

  No, I said. Positions of command are held only by the British.

  A silence fell while Zhong Lou-si meditatively sipped his tea. Then he looked up at me and said: So the Indians fight for less pay, knowing that they will never advance to positions of influence? Is this right?

  None of this could be denied. Jauh haih lo, I said: what you are saying is right.

  But why do they fight then?

  I did not know how to answer: how does one explain something that one doesn’t understand oneself?

  Something that no one understands? All I could say was: They fight because it’s their job. Because that is how they earn money.

  So they are from poor families then?

  They are from farming families, I said. They come from certain places in the interior of the country. But they are not poor – many are from families of high rank and many of them own land.

  This deepened Zhong Lou-si’s puzzlement: Why do they risk their lives then, if not from necessity?

  Look, I said, it is hard to explain, but it is because many of them are from clans – I could think of no word for ‘caste’ – that have always made their living by fighting. They give their loyalty to a leader and they fight for him. At one time their leaders were Indian kings, but some years ago it was the British who became the major power. Since then sepoys have been fighting for them just as they did for rajas and nawabs. For them there is no great difference.

  But when they fight for the British, do they always do it sincerely, with their hearts in it?

  Again I had to stop to think.

  It is a hard question to answer, I said. The sepoys are good soldiers and they have helped the British conquer much of India. But at times they have also rebelled, especially when going abroad. I remember that about fifteen years ago there was a big mutiny, in Barrackpore, when a sepoy battalion was ordered to go to Burma. In general the sepoys from Bengal Presidency do not like to fight abroad. That is why the British often use sepoys from Madras for foreign campaigns.

  Zhong Lou-si nodded thoughtfully, stroking his white beard. He thanked me for my help and said he hoped we would meet again soon.

  Between Kesri and his sister Deeti there was a gap of eight years. Five other children had been born to their parents in between: two had survived and three had died. Yet, even though Kesri and Deeti were the furthest apart in age, they were more like each other than any of their other siblings.

  One thing they shared was the colour of their eyes, which was a light shade of grey. For Deeti this had been something of a handicap, for there were many credulous people in their village who believed that light-eyed women were endowed with uncanny powers. The feature did not have the same consequences for Kesri as it did for Deeti – in a boy, light eyes were considered merely unusual, not a disturbing oddity – but it still created a bond between them and Kesri was always quick to jump to Deeti’s defence when she was taunted by other children.

  Another thing they had in common was that they both grew up believing that kismat was their enemy. For Deeti this was because her astrological chart showed her to have been born under the influence of an unlucky alignment of the heavens. Kesri had a different reason: it was because he happened to be his father’s oldest son.

  In most families to be the first-born son was considered a blessing – and if Kesri had been a different kind of person he too might have considered himself lucky to belong to a family that followed the custom of keeping the oldest boy at home, to tend the family’s fields. But Kesri was not one to be content forever in a village like Nayanpur, always running behind a plough and shouting at the oxen. From his earliest childhood he had loved to listen to the tales of his uncles, his father, his gurujis, his grandfather and all the other men of the village who had gone a-soldiering when they were true jawans – fighters in the prime of their youth. He never had any ambition other than to do what they had done: go off to serve as a sepoy in one part or another of Hindustan or the Deccan.

  Since theirs was a land-tilling family, all the boys were taught to fight from an early age. The times were such that bands of dacoits and armed men were always on the prowl: even to go out to the fields meant carrying shields and swords as well as ploughs and scythes; how could you farm your land if you could not defend it?

  Kesri and his brothers had started to wrestle when they were very young. Not far from their village, there was a famous akhara – a gymnasium for the practice of various disciplines, of body and spirit. This one was attached to an ashram run by Naga sadhus, an order of ascetics who wore no clothing other than ash and were known as much for their valour in combat as for their practice of austerities. Distinctions of birth were a matter of indifference to Naga sadhus and it was, in any case, a hallowed tradition of akharas that differences of caste and sect were not recognized within their precincts: everyone who came there bathed, ate and wrestled together no matter what their circumstances in the world beyond.

  This aspect of the akhara did not appeal to Kesri’s father, who was a great stickler in matters of caste; Kesri on the other hand found it deeply congenial and did not in the least mind having to take a purificatory bath when he came home. He liked the camaraderie of the akhara as much as he enjoyed the physical challenges; being sturdy in build and active by temperament he particularly relished the rigorous regime of exercises. He enjoyed wielding weights like naals and gadas and unlike the other boys he never looked for excuses to get out of ‘ploughing the wrestling ring’, an exercise in which one boy sat on a wooden beam while another pulled him around the floor by means of a harness attached to his forehead.

  But it was combat itself that Kesri most enjoyed: all his senses grew sharper when his wits and his body were under pressure; he was able to keep a cool head in situations where other boys tended to panic. Left to himself he would have spent most of his time learning manoeuvres like the dhobi’s throw and the strangle pin; it irked him sometimes that the sadhus placed as much emphasis on the control of the breath, bowels and bodily emissions as they did on the mechanical skills of wrestling, but he accepted their demands as the necessary price of his training. Every morning he would dutifully study the serpent that crept out of him, and whenever he found it to be dull in colour or less than properly ‘coiled and ready to strike’ he would report the matter to his trainers and change his diet according to their prescriptions.

  With such a will did Kesri apply himself that by the time he was
ten he was recognized to be one of the akhara’s best wrestlers, by age and size. Soon his regimen of training was expanded to include the use of weapons – mainly the lath, a heavy cudgel-like staff, but also the talwar, or curved sword. Musketry he was introduced to at home, by his father, who would occasionally instruct all his sons in the handling of his matchlock.

  In the use of weaponry, as in the wrestling ring, Kesri proved to be so adept that even before he turned fifteen – the age at which boys began to be recruited as jawans – he was one of the most feared fighters in the village. But in his father’s eyes this was just another reason why he needed to remain at home: their land would be safer with him than with any of his brothers.

  Kesri’s younger brother was called Bhim. He did not lack for brawn, but he was a slow-witted youth, incapable of knowing his own mind. He did his father’s bidding without question.

  Their father, Ram Singh, had been a soldier himself and was a stubborn and quick-fisted man. To talk back to him was to invite a hiding with a lath. This did not deter Kesri from speaking his mind, and he received many a beating for his defiance. Eventually he came to realize that arguing with his father was a waste of time: Ram Singh was the kind of old soldier who digs in deeper in the face of opposition. Kesri understood that if he was ever to join an army he would have to go against his father and do it on his own. But how? No respectable recruiter would take him without his family’s consent – without that they would have no surety for his conduct. Nor, without his family’s help, would he be able to afford the equipment that a recruit was expected to bring, far less a horse. As for the other options – joining a band of fighting mendicants, for example, or some kind of gang – even tilling the land seemed preferable to those.

  So Kesri had no choice but to hold his tongue when military men stopped by to ask Ram Singh about his boys. He would chew on his gall in silence while his father explained that he’d be glad to talk about the prospects of his second son, Bhim – but where it concerned his oldest boy there was nothing to talk about: his future had already been decided. Kesri would be staying at home to till the land.

  To add to Kesri’s misery, it was at about this time that offers of marriage began to pour in for the sister who was closest to him in age. It seemed that she too would soon be leaving home. It was as if new horizons of possibility were opening up for everyone but himself.

  Since Deeti spent a good deal of time in the fields with Kesri she was the only person in the family who understood his state of mind. The other girls were kept indoors as much as possible, to protect their complexions, but Deeti’s chances of a good marriage were slight in any case because of her ill-aligned stars, so it was decided that she needed to know how to work the land. She was no taller than Kesri’s knee when he began to teach her how to handle a nukha – the eight-bladed instrument that was used to nick ripe poppy bulbs. They would walk along the rows of denuded flowers, each with a nukha in their hands, scoring the tumescent sacs to bleed them of their sap. When the heady odour of the oozing opium-gum made them drowsy they would sit together in the shade of a tree.

  Even though Deeti was much younger than Kesri they were able to talk to each other as to no one else. Deeti’s capacities of empathy and understanding were so far in advance of her age that there were times when Kesri would wonder whether she had indeed been gifted with powers beyond the ordinary. Sometimes, when he despaired of leaving Nayanpur, it was she – a tiny putli of a girl – who reassured him. She knew that he brooded about the horizons that were opening up before his brother and sister, and she often said to him: Wu saare baat na socho. Don’t think of all that. Turn your mind to other things.

  But to ignore what was happening was plainly impossible. Their home had never before attracted so many strangers; never had they experienced the excitement of being sought out and courted in this way. Often, at the end of the day’s work, when they headed back to their mud-walled home, they would find their father talking to recruiters, in the shade of the mango tree out front; or they would learn that their mother was in the inner courtyard, deep in discussion with marital go-betweens.

  Ram Singh was as well-informed about military matters as their mother was about the marriage market. He had spent many years in the army of the kingdom of Berar and was acquainted with a good number of the professional recruiters who roamed the villages of their region looking for promising young men. This stretch of the Gangetic plain had always provided the armies of northern India with the bulk of their soldiery. Since many of these jawans were from families like their own, they had relatives in at least a dozen armies. Ram Singh had tended to these connections carefully and long before anyone came to inquire about his sons, he knew exactly the kind of recruiter he wanted to talk to. He also knew which recruiters he would ignore – and it made no difference whether they were relatives or not.

  One of the first recruiters to seek them out was an agent of the Darbhanga Raj, a zamindari with which they had a family connection. Being a relative he was given a polite hearing but no sooner was he gone than his offer was summarily dismissed.

  The Darbhanga Raj is just a petty zamindari nowadays, said Ram Singh. It’s not like it used to be in my father’s time. They are vassals of the white sahibs; to work for them would be even worse than joining the English Company’s army.

  This was a matter on which Ram Singh had strong opinions. Their district had been seized by the East India Company a long time ago, but in the beginning the annexation had made little difference and things had gone on much as usual. But with the passage of time the Company had begun to interfere in matters that previous rulers had never meddled with – like crops and harvests for example. In recent years the Company’s opium factory in Ghazipur had started to send out hundreds of agents – arkatis and sadar mattus – to press loans on farmers, so that they would plant poppies in the autumn. They said these loans were meant to cover the costs of the crop and they always promised that there would be handsome profits after the harvest. But when the time came the opium factory often changed its prices, depending on how good the crop had been that year. Since growers were not allowed to sell to anyone but the factory, they often ended up making a loss and getting deeper into debt. Ram Singh knew of several men who had been ruined in this way.

  Of late the Company had even tried to interfere in the job market, taking steps to discourage men from joining any army but their own. For Ram Singh, as for many others, this was even more objectionable than meddling with their crops. That anyone should assert an exclusive claim to their service was an astonishing idea: few things were as important to them as their right to work for whoever offered the best terms. It was not uncommon for brothers and cousins to take jobs in different armies: if they happened to meet in battle, it was assumed that each man would do his duty and fight loyally for his leader, having ‘eaten his salt’. This was how things had been in Ram Singh’s time and his father’s before him; and so far as he was concerned it was yet another reason why he did not want his sons to join the Company’s paltans.

  Ram Singh was well-acquainted with the Company’s army, having fought against it at the Battle of Assaye. The Berar forces had entered that battlefield in alliance with the army of Gwalior, and they had come painfully close to giving the British the greatest defeat they had ever suffered. Ram Singh never ceased to relive that battle, and he often said that the British victory was due solely to the cunning of their general, Arthur Wellesley, who had succeeded in sowing treachery in the opposing ranks, through bribery and deceit.

  If there was one thing that Ram Singh was sure of it was that the East India Company’s army was no place for any of his sons. In the English way of fighting, he liked to say, there was nothing to stir the blood, nothing heroic. No Company soldier ever stepped forward to offer single combat; none of their jawans sought glory by breaking from their ranks and taking the enemy unawares. Their way of fighting was like that of an army of ants, always lined up shoulder to shoulder, each man sheltering be
hind another, every soldier doing exactly the same thing at the same time, everyone making the same, drilled movements. There was something ant-like even about their appearance, with all of them in identical livery, no one daring to identify himself with his own insignia or his own unmistakable turban. As for the caravans that followed them, they were shabby and nondescript affairs, at least in comparison with the vast baggage-trains that accompanied the armies of Gwalior, Jaipur and Indore, with all their dancing girls and bazars.

  What was the point of a soldiering life if it offered no pleasure or colour? Why would a man throw himself into a battle if he did not know that at the end of the fighting he would be able to take his ease amongst the camp-followers, seeking out his favourite girls, and being plied with rich food and heady drink? Better be a cowherd, pasturing livestock, than live like that. There was no honour in it, no izzat: it was contrary to the ways of their caste, and against the customs of Hindustan.

  It dismayed Ram Singh that many Indian kingdoms and principalities had begun to imitate the English armies. But fortunately there still remained a few that were wedded to the old ways of war – Awadh, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Jhansi for instance. And then there was the Mughal army, which still remained a powerful draw: such was its centuries-old prestige that even now, when the old empire’s territory was shrinking fast, a man who served in its legions could be sure of commanding the respect of his village.

  For all these armies, the region around Nayanpur was a proven and preferred recruiting ground so Ram Singh knew that his son Bhim would not lack for options. And sure enough other recruiters soon began to arrive at their door. Some were professional ‘gatherers’ of jawans – jamadars and dafadars – with links to several kingdoms and principalities. The jamadars were usually senior men and some were known to Ram Singh from his own soldiering days. When they came to visit, charpoys would be placed under the shade of the mango tree outside and hookahs, food and water would be sent for.