Raj
Page 9
British prestige soared every time the Company’s army beat a native one. If, for some reason, British forces were overcome or forced to retire, Britain’s standing was diminished throughout India. Reverses suffered at the hands of Haidar Ali during the 1780–84 Mysore war severely tarnished the Company’s reputation.4 The final overthrow of his son, Tipu Sultan, in 1799 obliterated at a stroke ‘the spirit of insubordination and contempt’ which the Marquess Wellesley imagined to be abroad among Muslims.5 The capture of Delhi and the subsequent victory at Laswari convinced Man Singh, the Maharaja of Jodhpur, to shift his allegiance away from the Maratha prince, Daulat Rao Scindia, and towards the Company.6 A loss of face in one region might encourage defiance in another. In July 1815, as British forces were plunging into Nepal, the Marquess Hastings told the War Office that more was at stake than teaching the Gurkhas a lesson in civility: ‘To be foiled by the Gurkhas, or to make a discreditable accomodation with them, would have led to incalculable mischief.’7 Even a temporary tactical withdrawal of a small garrison could have dangerous repercussions. ‘Any diminution of our forces in Gujarat will diminish our local influence,’ a nervous commissioner predicted in 1803.8
No chance was ever missed to deliver a condign blow. When a Jat raja ignored his treaty responsibilities by turning his stronghold into a sanctuary for brigands, his misconduct provided what one officer called a ‘fair excuse’ for war. It was a comparatively minor affair in which a small force ‘soon convinced him out of the eloquent mouths of cannons and mortars (how wondrously convincing they are!) of the error of his ways’.9 The rhetoric of gunfire was not always effective the first time. In May 1800, Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington and Marquess Wellesley’s younger brother) who was later known for his humanity on the battlefield, ordered the commander of a punitive column in Malabar to burn Mapilla villages and carry off property and livestock. By these measures, he argued: ‘The confidence of our Native Troops will be increased and that of their opponents diminished.’ The Mapillas proved a stubborn lot; eighteen months later Wellesley was still urging further applications of ‘Terror’ to bring them to their senses.10
Hammering the Company’s enemies made good strategic sense if one imagined, as did most Governor-Generals and senior officers, that British paramountcy was precarious. The Company’s situation and its inherent perils were summed up by the Governor-General, Lord Hardinge, in 1844:
In India no man can say what a month may produce in a country of 120 millions of inhabitants governed by an army which is officered by aliens, whilst the mass of the force under these foreign officers consents to co-erce their own countrymen, merely for the sake of pay and pension – mesmerised as it were by a handful of officers exhibiting in the working of the system the greatest phenomenon that the world ever witnessed.11
In these circumstances, there was no alternative to taking the offensive immediately and with the maximum force at the faintest hint of unrest or defiance. The long arm of the Raj could reach anywhere and its enemies could expect no respite. Extreme hawkishness had its risks. The Company could never be strong everywhere, for its forces were always scattered and outnumbered by those of its potential enemies. Furthermore, the cost of more or less continual military exertion was stretching the Company’s resources to breaking point. This was one of the reasons why, in May 1803, Viscount Castlereagh, the president of the Board of Control, advised the Marquess Wellesley against further offensives. The minister was also nervous about the balance of forces in India. There were 18,000 white soldiers there, of whom at least one in ten was an invalid of some sort, and roughly three times that number of sepoys with which to control a population then reckoned to be about fifty million.12 Besides, Britain was preparing to resist Bonaparte’s invasion army and no reinforcements were available.
The Marquess already had the bit between the teeth, and when Castlereagh’s letter reached Calcutta, operations against the Marathas were already in full swing. They did not proceed as Wellesley would have wished: after a series of stunning successes, the campaign in northern India ran out of steam. He had finally overreached himself and the court of directors were jittery about the £6.5 million loan hurriedly raised by London markets to pay for the new war. Bankruptcy threatened and Wellesley was recalled in 1805. He faced a clumsy attempt at impeachment in the Commons, in which he was charged with, among other things: breaking treaties, squandering his employer’s wealth, exercising power despotically, and setting up his own statue in Calcutta after consigning that of Lord Cornwallis to a cellar. If this was true, it had been a symbolic gesture, for Cornwallis had avoided expansionist policies. Aged sixty-seven, he returned to India as Wellesley’s replacement. He died there towards the end of 1805 and was succeeded by Sir George Barlow and the Earl of Minto, who followed to the letter pacific and non-interventionist policies dictated in London.
II
The Marquess had been able to justify his stepping up the pace of conquest on the grounds that India was a war zone in the global conflict between Britain and France. Robert Clive had predicted that the French would seek to reverse the verdict of 1763 and try to regain their former power in India in coalition with anti-British princes. His prophecy was fulfilled by the alliance between Haidar Ali and France in 1780, and for the next four years the Company had some narrow scrapes. It was saved in this and in later conflicts by British domination of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, which severely limited the assistance the French could send to their Indian partners. Even so, there were some tricky moments. The Royal Navy’s control of home waters and the North Atlantic was uncertain for much of 1797, and the French gained a temporary superiority in the western Mediterranean the following year. Victory at Trafalgar in October 1805 brought lasting security and removed for ever the possibility of French seaborne intervention in India. In any case, the odds against this had been considerably lengthened by the occupation of the Cape in 1795 and Mauritius in 1809. Henceforward, the Indian Ocean was a British lake.
From the standpoint of Calcutta, it was not the ambitions of the Paris government, but the activities of several hundred Frenchmen in India which attracted the most concern. Professional soldiers, they had been hired in the 1770s to train the armies of Mysore, Hyderabad and the Maratha polity to fight with muskets and cannon in the European fashion. Modernising the fighting techniques of the Company’s potential foes had been accompanied by hurried rearmament programmes. Indian gunsmiths and iron and steel founders began fabricating European-style weaponry to provide firepower for the new armies. While Indian steel matched British in quality, output was limited and gun-making was undertaken on a small scale.13
The techniques being developed during Britain’s industrial revolution guaranteed that the Company’s army would have a steady supply of flintlock muskets and cannon, the two weapons which now dominated the Indian battlefield. Perhaps in acknowledgement of this, Tipu Sultan sent agents to Paris in 1791 with orders for artillery, muskets and ammunition, which were to be supplied by Dutch arms dealers.14 Details of their shopping list were discovered by Admiralty Intelligence. This information confirmed what was well known from other sources: Tipu was bent on a new trial of strength with the Company which, if he triumphed, would restore the boundaries and fortunes of Mysore.
Tipu had declared himself the tiger prince, a ferocious champion of Islam and the state which his warrior father had seized in 1767. His son kept a menagerie of tigers in his palace at Seringapatam and he surrounded himself with images of that beast. Snarling gold tigers adorned his personal weapons and, in premature celebration of future victories, Tipu had a mechanical tiger fabricated. This massive, brightly painted creature stands astride its prey, a cowering Company officer, complete with tall black hat. The animal roars and the man screams; sounds created by a contraption of clockwork and bellows inside the tiger. This device was among the spoils of war taken when Seringapatam fell, and eventually found its way to the Company’s cabinet of curiosities, housed in Leadenhall Street. Tod
ay, Tipu’s tiger is displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum and is still capable of making a sound, if somewhat feebly. Sadly, Tipu’s real tigers were all shot, for the Company’s army could provide no food for them.
The tiger sultan’s vanity was balanced by political shrewdness. The restoration of Mysore could only be accomplished through an alliance with France and injections of French help through Mauritius. Tipu went to considerable lengths to cultivate the revolutionary régime in Paris and its offshoot in the Indian Ocean: he wore a cap of liberty when he met French representatives, called himself ‘Citizen Tipu’ and expressed sympathy for the ideals of Robespierre. Elsewhere in India, French mercenary officers elected their generals, hoisted tricolours and voiced what the Marquess Wellesley called ‘the most virulent and notorious principles of Jacobinism’. One alarmist intelligence report claimed that Hyderabad’s French officers were planning a revolution, which would overthrow the nizam and establish the Rights of Man in southern India.
These developments frightened the Marquess Wellesley. But they were also a godsend, for they gave him an excuse to invade Mysore and deal once and for all with a persistent and dangerous adversary. Wellesley had carefully read the intelligence summaries from southern India during his voyage from Cape Town to Calcutta and, on his arrival early in 1798, he set in motion policies designed to destroy both Tipu and the Hyderabad mercenaries. As the year unfolded, preparations for war took on a new urgency when news of Napoleon’s intended invasion of Egypt reached Calcutta.
On hearing of his destination, Dundas, the president of the Board of Control and secretary for war, had imagined that Bonaparte might use Egypt as a springboard for an overland offensive against Indian’s western frontier. Geographers and travellers were invited to offer opinions and they argued that he could easily attack through Persia or Afghanistan with the connivance and possibly active help of their rulers. Then and later, those who ought to have known better were united in their opinion that large European armies, complete with pack animals, would move swiftly and comfortably across waterless deserts and over mountains in extremes of heat and cold. Having marched thousands of miles to the borders of India, the armies of the French Republic would be welcomed by Tipu and the anti-British princes.
The great ‘scare’ of 1798 came to nothing. Nelson shattered the French Mediterranean fleet at Abukir bay on 1 August, leaving Bonaparte’s army stranded in Egypt. He soon abandoned it and returned to France, where he made himself its dictator. The French officers in Hyderabad and their sepoys had been neutralised by a bloodless coup. Mysore was overrun and Tipu died during the storming of Seringapatam. Shortly after, an Indian contingent was sent to help eliminate the detritus of the French army in Egypt.
The importance of the events of 1798–99 was not in what happened, but what was feared might happen. They offered a blueprint for the possible overthrow of the Raj by a coalition of internal and external forces which it lacked the manpower to withstand. The message was clear: so long as independent and well-armed hostile native states remained in existence, there would be allies for any invader. The Maratha leaders were known to have been following events in Egypt and Europe with great interest. Nonetheless, the War Office imagined that with Tipu dead and Napoleon back in Paris, Calcutta no longer had anyone to fear. In 1802 the Marquess Wellesley was asked to send home surplus troops.15
This was the last thing he intended, for his mind was on his next target, the Marathas. It is easy to define the Maratha polity in terms of geography and almost impossible to define it politically, or at least in terms which would have been comprehensible to the Marquess and his staff. The Marathas dominated a broad swathe of land which stretched from the Sutlej in the north across the Deccan to the frontiers of Hyderabad and Mysore. There was no political, legal or fiscal uniformity within this vast region, which was why the government in Calcutta tended to think of it as a ragbag of conflicting anarchies. Kinship held one key to political power and, by the end of the eighteenth century, five Maratha dynasties had come to enjoy considerable power with the polity: the peshwas of Poona; the Scindias of Gwalior; the Holkars of Indore; the Bhonsles of Nagpur and the Gaikwars of Baroda. There was no head of the Maratha polity, but the peshwa enjoyed a special prestige, which Calcutta mistakenly took to be a form of political overlordship.
Factional struggles and disputed successions intermittently disturbed the Maratha polity. Their prevalence compelled each dynasty to retain large armies, mostly irregular light horsemen, which had recently been stiffened by battalions of Indian infantrymen, drilled and commanded by European and American mercenaries. All Maratha princes faced perpetual insolvency and so their armies were in a permanent state of deliquescence, with unpaid cavalrymen living off the peasantry. Despite a ramshackle military system, the Maratha princes could put enormous armies into the field in an emergency. Intelligence based upon residents’ reports estimated that Daulat Rao Scindia could muster 16,000 well-trained infantrymen commanded by a Frenchman, General Pierre Perron, as well as swarms of irregular horse. Perron aroused deep suspicions in Calcutta; from his days in Hyderabad he had a reputation as an extreme republican, and there were well-founded suspicions that he might reestablish a new focus for French power in India by taking full control of the tax districts allocated him by Scindia for the upkeep of his troops. During the brief Anglo-French peace between 1802 and 1803, Perron made approaches to Bonaparte and a shipload of French recruits for Scindia’s army turned up at Calcutta, only to be sent packing by Wellesley. This incident and Perron’s intrigues made it easy for the Governor-General to resurrect the French bogey when it came to justifying the Maratha war in London.
A welcome chance to meddle in Maratha affairs was presented in 1802, when the peshwa, bedevilled by debts and enemies, threw himself at the Company’s feet after his eviction from his capital, Poona (Pune). Baji Rao returned, escorted by an army commanded by Arthur Wellesley (now a major-general) the following year. The price of his restoration was an unequal treaty which transformed him into a Company stooge, guarded by sepoys and under the thumb of a resident. In return, he ceded territory and allocated revenues to pay the wages of his new guardians. The Company now had the means to splinter the Maratha polity and secure control over the fragments. Scindia and Raghuji Bhonsle of Nagpur were the first targets, and by the middle of 1803 they had been temporarily isolated by a brilliant exercise in diplomatic chicanery. A dozen years later, on the eve of Waterloo, the Prussian general Von Gneisenau warned a colleague that Arthur Wellesley had been schooled in the arts of duplicity in India to the point where he could ‘outwit the Nabobs themselves’, and was not, therefore, to be trusted.
War broke out towards the end of the south-west monsoon and at the onset of the cool season in 1803. There were two simultaneous offensives by a total of 60,000 men; the smaller in the Deccan under Major-General Wellesley and the larger in the north, under General Sir Gerard (later Viscount) Lake. His was the crucial theatre, for Wellesley had ordered him to deliver lightning attacks which would successively eliminate Perron’s force, seize Agra and Delhi and drive a wedge between Scindia’s territories and the Sikh state of the Punjab to the north. Both cities were taken. Maratha forces were beaten in a series of hard-fought battles on the southern front (Assaye and Argaum [Argaon]) and in the north (Aligarh, Delhi and Laswari). To everyone’s relief, the European-trained battalions were overcome without much difficulty, thanks in large part to the desertion of most of their white officers, who chose not to hazard their lives in what was clearly a lost cause. Among them was James Skinner, the son of a Scottish officer and Rajput lady, who offered his sword to the Company and soon distinguished himself as a commander of irregular Indian cavalry.
The defeated Scindia relinquished all his territory north of the Jumma, including Agra, Delhi and Gujarat, while Bhonsle handed over Orissa and other lands to the east of Nagpur. Various small Jat, Ruhela and Rajput states, which had previously been within Scindia’s orbit, passed into the Company’
s. Next, Wellesley launched the all but exhausted Company’s northern army against the hitherto neutral Jaswant Rao Holkar. It came unstuck, as did the Governor-General, who was called home. The bruised and truncated Maratha polity was given a twelve-year breathing space.
Treaties dictated at bayonet point had left the Maratha princes in a sort of political limbo. Power passed to the Company’s residents who, backed by sepoys, were the masters of the state, dictating policy and supervising all aspects of everyday government. Friction was inevitable, especially in Poona where a sulky Baji Rao resented his humiliating dependency. Resistance flared up, more or less spontaneously, in Poona and Nagpur during the autumn and winter of 1817.
This was good news for the Marquess Hastings. He was a phlegmatic, well-meaning soldier in his mid-sixties who had first seen action against the Americans at Bunker Hill. As Governor-General he shared Wellesley’s vision of British India as a spreading sea of civilisation which would eventually cover the whole sub-continent for the benefit of all its peoples. He dedicated himself to the promotion of the ‘happiness of the vast population of this country’, a goal which included the extension of civil peace to areas which had hitherto lacked it.16 Hastings’s aspirations ran against the grain of his instructions, which were to continue the peaceful policies of his immediate predecessors and steer clear of any entanglements with the independent princes. His expansionist inclinations were stiffened by the advice of Wellesley’s old acolytes, Malcolm, Montstuart Elphinstone and Charles Metcalfe, all of whom had kept alive the Marquess’s aggressive spirit. They persuaded Hastings that it was both foolhardy and impractical to quarantine British India from its jealous and unruly neighbours. Above all, the Company could not afford to allow wounded tigers (i.e. the Marathas) to remain at large. Proof of this assertion was provided by the incursions into British territory of marauding bands of Pindari horsemen during 1815 and 1816.