by Jan Morris
So when, in December, 1841, the Republic proposed to expel several thousand unwanted blacks into Pondoland to the north, without so much as consulting the King of the Pondos, the Empire intervened again. The Natalians, Sir George Napier warned, were still British subjects whether they liked it or not: and in May, 1842, after a long march overland from the Umgazi River, the forces of the British Army arrived in Durban once more—red-coated, gold-frogged, with a troop of cavalry, and a couple of guns, and wives, and babies, and hundreds of servants, and a gleam of bayonets and a beat of drums, and all the swank, polish and conviction of superiority that the Boers most detested in the British style of life.
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The British baulking of the Voortrekkers, so languidly but implacably arranged by the distant power of Empire, made the Afrikaner in his heart an enemy for ever. The memory of the Great Trek, its symbols and its sacrifices, Moordspruit the river of death, Weenen the place of weeping, became the central myth of the Afrikaner people, around which they would in future generations preserve their identity and consolidate their attitudes: Blood River, the Church of the Vow, Dingaan’s Kraal, even the image of the trek-wagon itself, these would be the tokens of their self-esteem, and of their tribal identity—for in many ways the trekker Boers were an African tribe, speaking the same language, of land, cattle, bondage, revenge and primitive divinity, as the Zulus or the Basuto themselves.
They tried once more to preserve their Republic of Natal, for the Boers promptly besieged the troops in Fort Victoria, and nearly starved them out. But once again they were thwarted. A young English settler, Dick King, broke the siege lines at night, and riding non-stop for three days and nights clean across the wild Transkei, alerted the imperial command at Grahamstown. On June 25 the three-masted frigate Southampton arrived in Durban Bay, and the Republic was doomed. Within a few years Natal was among the most absolutely British of British colonies, officially defined as ‘a centre whence the blessings of civilization and Christianity may be diffused’, and the most visionary and unyielding of the Boers, packing their guns and Bibles, had trekked still farther into the interior—over the high Drakensberg, across the Vaal, deep into the territory of the Matabele, to establish high on that bitter plateau the Republic of the Transvaal—so for away this time, in country so sparse and unenticing, so innocent of advantages, that even the imperial instincts of the British, it seemed, would not again disturb the lekker lewe of the burghers.
1 Whose generic names I use anachronistically, for convenience. In fact ‘Afrikaner’ was not much used until the last decades of the century, when it acquired political overtones, while ‘Boer’ in the 1830s was spelt with a small ‘b’ and meant simply ‘farmer’.
1 The Caledon mineral bath is still there, with the ruined remains of a hotel and one splendid old rubber-tree that must have shaded many an Anglo-Indian in its time.
1 As did the Egyptians a century later—‘red-necked blimps of the Brutish Empire’.
1 Thaba Nchu is some forty miles east of Bloemfontein. The main trekker route roughly followed the present Cape Town to Johannesburg road, crossing the Orange River at Norvalspont. If I seem to treat the Great Trek too romantically, it is perhaps because I cherish, often despite my better judgement, an old admiration for the country Boer, whose dauntless qualities I covet and whose biltong I have shared with grateful pleasure.
2 And bears a distinct resemblance, in manner as in intention, to Ian Smith’s Declaration of Rhodesian Independence, 1965.
1 Whether Rex was really royal, or whether as cynics claimed he sprang from the well-known Rex family of Whitechapel, nobody knows to this day. Modern Knysna romantics believe him to have been the son of George’s Quaker mistress Hannah Lightfoot, and fancy they detect Hanoverian profiles in the village even now: but his tombstone in the Melkhout Kraal woods says simply: In memory of George Rex Esquire, Proprietor and Founder of Knysna, Died 3rd April, 1839.
1 Where he died of starvation in 1851, the last survivor of a private mission of seven Englishmen landed on Picton Island, off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, to convert the hostile natives to Christianity.
1 It still stands, and contains in its powder magazine, now a chapel, a Pantheon of Natal’s worthies—every one, as it happens, British.
1 The church, though it was neglected for nearly a century and was once used as a tea-room, is now restored as the Church of the Vow, while in 1952 Dingaan’s Day, December 16, was re-named the Day of the Covenant. Hardline Afrikaners still resent the participation of English-speaking South Africans in this national festival, and in 1972 Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of the Zulus awkwardly complicated the issue by suggesting that perhaps some Zulus might be invited too.
CHAPTER FOUR
Roots into their Soil
ON the dirt road west of Mirzapur on the Ganges, perhaps 700 miles from Calcutta, there stood the temple of the goddess Kali at Bindhachal. It was a tumultuous and exotic shrine, especially at the end of the rainy season, when supplicants came from all over India to propitiate the goddess. The air was aromatic then with incense and blossom, dust swirled about the temple walls, the tracks were crowded with bullock-carts, wandering cows, beggars and barefoot pilgrims. Night and day goats were sacrificed, their blood spilling down the temple steps, and sometimes one heard the shrieks of devotees, tranced in ecstasy or bloody themselves with flagellation, invoking the blessings of the divinity—Kali the terrible, Kali the blood-goddess, consort of Shiva the destroyer, naked, black and furious, with her sword, her noose, and her bludgeon stuck all about with human skulls—Kali the dark one, with the protruding tongue and the bloodshot eyes, haunter of the burning ground, in whose heart death and terror festered.
This was the holy place of the Thugs, the hereditary fraternity of stranglers, who had for hundreds of years terrorized the travellers of India. Their secret society had branches and adherents from the Indus to Bengal, and they had their own hierarchy, rituals and traditions, and believed that when they strangled strangers on the road, they were strangling in Kali’s cause—for Kali herself, when she had strangled the demon Rukt Bij-dana in the dawn of the world, had created two men from the sweat of her brow, and ordered them to strangle, and their posterity after them, all men who were not their kindred.
Thuggee enjoyed the secret protection of rajas and rich men, Muslim as well as Hindu, besides the terrified complicity of the peasantry. It was an ancient secret of India—the mutilated corpse at the bottom of the well, the silent stranger at the door, the unexplained subsidy, the whisper at the cross-roads. At Bindhachal was the priesthood of the cult. There, once a year, the stranglers went to pay their dues to the priests of Kali, and to receive their sacred instructions in return: where they should operate in the following year, what fees they should bring back to the shrine, what rituals they were to perform, if they were to enjoy the protection of the goddess—for if they neglected their obligations, homeless spirits they must become, to linger without hope in the empyrean.
To the British rulers in India, Thuggee had always seemed less than wholesome. ‘To pull down Kali’s temple at Bundachal and hang her priests would no doubt be the wish of every honest Christian’, wrote a contributor to the Calcutta Literary Gazette in 1830. But it was the East India Company’s traditional policy not to interfere with Indian religious customs. A blind eye was turned, and the rumours and legends of Thuggee inspired in the sahibs and their wives little more than a chill frisson, until in the 1830s the evangelical impulse reached the Indian Empire too, and moved the British not merely to conquer, exploit or consort with their subjects there, but actually to reform them.
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The gentlemen of the East India Company had not originally intended to govern India, but merely to make money there. This they very effectively did throughout the eighteenth-century, ten years’ service with John Company often sufficing to set a man up for life in the Shires, see him through a convalescent retirement at Caledon, or even lay the foundations of a Sezincote. Over the course of
generations merchant venturing led to military conquest. ‘A very old friend of my father’s,’ wrote William Hickey the diarist, who went to India as a company cadet in 1769, ‘presented me with a beautiful cut-and-thrust steel sword, desiring me to cut off a dozen rich fellows’ heads with it, and so return a nabob myself to England.’ The first forts and factories made way for palaces and barrack blocks—the Company developed from a trading agency to a Government—the British presence moved inland from the ports to establish an ascendancy over the princes and maharajahs of the interior.
At first the Company, even with its new responsibilities, remained a swashbuckling, showy, amoral kind of service. It bred eccentrics and flamboyants, like old Sir David Ochterlony, for example, British Resident at the Court of the King of Delhi, who used to travel about the country in a carriage and four, huddled in furs, shawls and wraps of gold brocade, and attended by platoons of spearmen, troops of horsemen and, so legend said, thirteen wives each on her own elephant. There were few Englishwomen in India then, the sea passage being so long and dangerous, and the climate so dreadful, so that Englishmen were closer to Indian life than their successors were to be—often with Indian mistresses, generally with Indian friends, and cherishing little sense of racial or religious superiority.1 They did not wish to change the sub-continent—it would have seemed a preposterous ambition. They treated the native princes with respect and occasional affection, tolerated the religions of the country (they actually administered several thousand Hindu temples), and did their plundering, fighting and trading in a spirit of uncensorious give-and-take. They were for the most part natural conservatives. Often they were men of aesthetic sensibilities too, and responded sensually to all the gaudy seductions of the land.
Their style was urbane. They drank tremendously and lived luxuriously. Prints of the period show the Governor-General bowling through his capital, Calcutta, in a high-wheeled gilded barouche, with foot-grooms running beside and behind, a stately coachman high on his seat, and a dashing escort of cavalrymen kicking up the dust behind. The Bengalis pause to see him pass, with their water-jugs upon their heads, or their burdens laid upon the unpaved street. An ox-wagon awaits his passing. An Indian sentry presents arms. High overhead the kites soar, and perched along the balustrade of Government House, meditatively upon the lion and sphinxes of its triumphal entrance, the adjutant cranes stand statuesque against the sun. An impression of pagan but cultivated ease is given by such a scene. The Governor-General, though clearly immensely grand, does not seem cut off from his subjects: the relationship looks organic, like that between peasants and gentry in contemporary England, each side knowing each others’ faults, and making allowances.
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But just as in England social relationships began to shift, so in India too, as the new century advanced, the nature of the British Raj changed. In 1813 the Company’s trade monopoly with India was abolished, and for the first time English public opinion began to have some direct effect upon British administration in India. ‘John Company’ was no longer self-sufficient and all-powerful: the British Government held a watching brief, the Crown appointed a Governor-General, and Parliament at Westminster was the ultimate authority of the Raj.
Now the vocabulary of the evangelicals, so familiar already in Africa and the Caribbean, found its way into Anglo-Indian commentaries too. We read of natives awaiting redemption, of Christianity’s guiding beacon, of providential guidance and the Supreme Disposer. The Indian territories were allotted by providence to Great Britain, wrote Charles Grant, the evangelical chairman of the Company’s Court of Directors, ‘not merely that we might draw an annual profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, vice and misery, the light and benign influence of the truth, the blessings of well-regulated society, the improvements and comforts of active industry….’ James Stephen wrote of the ‘barbarous and obscene rites of Hindoo superstition’, and Wilberforce declared the Christian mission in India to be the greatest of all causes. ‘Let us endeavour to strike our roots into their soil,’ he wrote, ‘by the gradual introduction and establishment of our own principles and opinions; of our laws, institutions and manners; above all, as the source of every other improvement, of our religion, and consequently of our morals.’
Our own principles and opinions. Now it became axiomatic that things English were superior to things Indian Britons no longer habitually went out to India in their teens, fresh and receptive: nowadays they generally went in their twenties, and they saw things differently. The old Indian ruling class, which had once worked or fought in equality with the British, was reduced in their eyes to comical or despicable ineptitude, or at most to glittering impotence (for the English always loved a prince, even a heathen one). The eighteenth-century sahibs had respected the Moghul culture, and viewed its decline with a reverent melancholy: their successors mocked and caricatured it—the last of the Moghul Emperors, Bahadur Shah, was left to rot within the walls of the Red Fort at Delhi like a quaint souvenir of the past.
With the first steamers from England there arrived, too, a new generation of Englishwomen, no longer a worldly, amused and tolerant few, but ladies of a more earnest kind, determined to keep their menfolk healthy and orthodox in mind as in flesh. Now a man could spend a family lifetime in India, with municipal responsibilities perhaps, and a prominent customary position in the evening parade through the Maidan. Now there arose a respectable Anglo-Indian community of administrators, merchants and planters, living with their families in genteel circumstances, and decorously attending church on Sundays. The Company had hitherto forbidden the entrance of Christian missionaries to India: now, ‘by Government order, the ban was lifted, and godly apostles swarmed through the Indian possessions. Bishop Heber himself, the author of From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, assumed the Anglican see of Calcutta, with archdeaconries throughout British India (and one in New South Wales).
The more enlightened the British in India became, the more dreadful India looked. Its ignorance! Its savagery! Its hideous customs of widow-burning, infanticide, religious extortion! Its ludicrous learning and its nonsensical laws! It seemed that God’s mysterious ways had denied the Indians, perfectly intelligent though many of them were, the benefits of any true civilization of their own. The old habits of easy-going complicity, suitable enough to a commercial concern, no longer seemed proper to the British of the Raj. Was it not horrible to consider that in Calcutta, only thirty years before, the British had celebrated the Treaty of Amiens by parading with military bands to the temple of Kali herself? Or that in Ceylon, even at the end of the 1830s, they were still shamelessly appropriating to themselves the revenues of the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy? Now, thanks to the illumination of the reformed religion, the way was clearer: India must be Anglicized.
The historian Macaulay, who spent some years in India, argued that this could best be achieved by higher education in the English manner, and in the English language, for ‘the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which 300 years ago was extant in all the languages of the earth put together’. Others went further, and in their new-found sense of mission, diligently tried to alter the nature of Indian life. The immense structure of Indian society, which was based upon dizzy complications of caste, religion and land-ownership, was beyond their powers. Nor did they try to abolish the main body of Indian custom, social or legal, which was inextricably enmeshed in Hindu and Muslim belief They did, however, boldly set out to stifle the most offensive of native customs, however ancient, popular or divinely rooted. They forbade human sacrifice and infanticide. They put down suttee, the practice of burning widows, and henceforth, in their treaties with independent princes, insisted on its abolition as a condition of their protection—though the custom was so fundamental to the Hindu moral order that its very name meant, in the Sanskrit, chaste or virtuous.1 And in a model campaign of evangelical imperialism, combining high moral fervour with advanced organization
al skill, they turned their attention to that abomination of Bindhachal, the secret society of stranglers.
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Their agent of wrath was Captain William Sleeman, who had gone to India in 1809 as a cadet in the Company’s Bengal Army. He was a soldier’s son, and a figure of Cromwellian integrity—auburn-haired, blue-eyed, with a stubby farmer’s face and a fine high forehead. He spoke Arabic, Persian and Urdu, he excelled at the tougher sports, he did not smoke and hardly drank, he read the rationalist philosophers like Locke and Hobbes, and he stayed generally aloof from the womanizing and high jinks that characterized the lives of most young Company officers. In his thirties, Sleeman was seconded to the civil administration, and it was as a magistrate and district officer in central India that he first became interested in the ghastly mystery of the Thugs. Patiently and methodically he learnt all he could about the sect, and so horrified was he by his discoveries that by the 1820s it had become his prime purpose in life to destroy Thuggee, in the practice as in the principle—not merely to prevent its murders and punish its practitioners, but to discredit its tenets too.
