Pindari temerity was evidence of the ineptitude and malevolence of the Maratha princes. According to the treaties they had unwillingly signed, it was their duty to restrain these freelances whom they occasionally hired, but could rarely afford to pay. The result was that the Pindaris roamed the Deccan, plundering as they went. There were at least 20,000 of these parasites and, once they began causing havoc in British-ruled districts, Hastings was determined to destroy them. His reports of Pindari atrocities provoked the ‘warmest indignation’ of members of the Board of Control and persuaded them to approve a punitive war in the Deccan. With a massive policing operation as cover, Hastings was now free to extinguish what remained of Maratha power by deposing Baji Rao and Appa Sahib of Nagpur. He foresaw few difficulties in a war which he called ‘a temporary evil, with little hazard’.17
Save in its scale, the final Maratha war was a rerun of its predecessor. Hastings assembled 91,000 regulars and 24,000 Indian irregulars, the largest army the Company had ever fielded, for a series of synchronised offensives on several fronts. One detachment found itself retracing the steps taken by Arthur Wellesley’s force fourteen years before and came across Hindu and Muslim holy men praying for the dead on the battlefield of Assaye. As in the earlier war, the fighting was confined to the cool dry season and lasted from October 1817 to March 1818. There were no hitches, for the Maratha generals chose to fight Hastings on his own terms in open battle rather than wage a partisan war against the British columns and their vulnerable supply lines. Maratha armies were beaten in engagements at Kirki, Poona, Sitalbi, Nagpur and Mahidpur. As Hastings had predicted, many Marathas and Pindaris defected, lured into the Company’s army by the prospect of higher wages, paid regularly.18 A new pattern of war was emerging: the Company divided, conquered and then recruited. Defeated Gurkhas exchanged brigandage for Company service after 1816 and proved first-rate soldiers. So did the Sikhs who enlisted during the 1850s.
III
Hastings had made the last Maratha war acceptable to his superiors in London by the argument that it was necessary for security. Security had many meanings within the Indian context. In its broadest sense it represented protection of the lives, property and trade of the Company’s subjects. Expansionists defined it in terms of a universal stability which, once it had been imposed, would transform the whole of India for the better. Progress was impossible without peace, and peace could only be obtained through war. This equation is what Malcolm had in mind when he said that the evils of war were more than compensated for by ‘the liberality of our government’. In what was the official history of the 1817–18 Maratha war, Lieutenant-Colonel Valentine Blacker claimed that the extermination of ‘useless’ Pindaris would prepare the way for the ‘blessings of peace and industry’ in the Deccan.19
The 1814–16 Nepal war was also portrayed in this light; it was the last resort of a patient government which could find no other way to tame a wild race who preyed on their neighbours. After the war the Gurkhas’ former victims lived in peace and prospered. By 1824, the annexed districts in the Himalayan foothills had become a new Arcadia, according to a report of the local commissioner, Lieutenant Murray:
These petty principalities are enjoying the full measure of British protection and are in a state of the most profound tranquility. Murder is seldom committed and robbery unknown, and several Rajas are content and their subjects receiving all the blessings of a mild and happy rule. The cultivation has improved in a fourfold degree, and the mountains are clad in stepped verdure to the base.20
Attached to this lyrical testimonial to British rule was the inevitable estimate of the local land-tax yields. Nonetheless, there is no reason to imagine that these people wanted a return to the old order, any more than the Deccan peasantry would have welcomed a return of the Pindaris.
For the public at home, waging war for humane ends was a noble enterprise. This was how Indian wars were represented when Parliament formally congratulated a victorious army and its commanders. Votes of thanks for the Nepal and Burma wars included fulsome tributes to the stamina and gallantry of the troops and, as several speakers noted, were delivered in a bipartisan spirit. Whigs and Tories agreed that the greatest reward a fighting man could seek was the praise of his countrymen, expressed by their representatives in Parliament. At the same time, custom dictated that soldiers were given prize money, collected from the spoils taken during a campaign and officially distributed according to a fixed scale. In 1827 Sir Charles Watkins Wynn, the president of the Board of Control, expressing the nation’s gratitude to the army in Burma, drew MPs’ attention to the final advance on Ava. The heart of every man was ‘glowing in the expectation of pecuniary advantages that soldiers gain from the forcible possession of an enemy’s city’, but the prize eluded them. Their commander, Sir Archibald Campbell, halted the advance and negotiated and accepted the city’s surrender. He had stood to gain the most, but, according to Wynn, ‘he had a higher duty than satisfying the personal interest of his soldiers and his own’.21 The values of public service had triumphed over private gain, as of course they should. Nonetheless, £1 million taken from the compensation paid for the King of Ava was shared among the troops.
The largest beneficiaries from the prize system in India were senior commanders, often the same men who had backed aggressive policies. This fact could have cast doubt on their integrity, which was why Cornwallis refused the £47,000 due to him as the commander-in-chief for the 1790–92 Mysore war. Likewise, the Marquess Wellesley rejected £100,000 offered him after the fall of Seringapatam.22 Others were not so scrupulous: Viscount Lake received £38,000 from the capture of Agra alone and Hastings, who combined the posts of commander-in-chief and Governor-General but did not take the salary of the former, was given gifts totalling £260,000 by the directors.23 Little wars also yielded valuable dividends. The reduction of the Raja of Kittur’s stronghold in 1824 produced over £100,000 in prize money of which £12,000 was pocketed by the local commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Deacon, much to the irritation of his brother officers, for he had spent only three days in the siege lines, directing operations from a palanquin.24 Six weeks of bush fighting against the Raja of Coorg during the spring of 1834 brought in £29,000, of which the commander, Brigadier-General Patrick Lindsey, was allocated over £9,000.25
It was not always easy to discern the line between public service and private advantage. Consider Major Alexander Walker, a humane and fair-minded warrior proconsul. In January 1806 he persuaded the Bombay government to approve a small expedition to the restless Kattiwah district to show the flag and punish bandits. He asked for command and his request was allowed, no doubt on the grounds of his character and previous experience of the region. As commander, he exercised his right to license the liquor, tobacco, ganja (cannabis resin) and opium sellers who were attached to the mobile bazaar which accompanied the troops. He received 760 rupees (£76) a month for these licences, as well as the normal additional allowances for active service.26 Even without prize money, waging war in India was a profitable business.
This was appreciated by everyone involved. In 1813, Lady Hood expected Montstuart Elphinstone, then a rising star in administration, to accumulate at least £20,000 before his retirement. He was less optimistic and imagined that he might return home with about £4,000, a sum which did not include his 1803–05 Maratha war prize money, which had yet to be distributed.27 His friend John Malcolm had been far luckier. In 1797, his energy and talents secured him the post of secretary to the commander-in-chief with an annual income of just over £4,000, as much as a general would receive in Britain. Within nine years he had sufficient capital to send £400 annually to his family and, he calculated, to provide him an annual income of £1,500 on his retirement. When he returned to England in 1822 he used his investments to lease an estate in Hertfordshire for £450 a year.28 Malcolm’s rewards were obtained legally and openly and it would be unfair to compare them with the fortunes corruptly acquired by the nabobs of the Clive and Hastings era.
There were objections galore to the overall goal of British supremacy in India. While not questioning the necessity of the 1798 Mysore war, Dundas was full of gloom about its costs which, he rightly feared, would add to the Company’s already large burden of debts.29 Castlereagh had similar misgivings about the 1803–05 Maratha war, and had vainly tried to restrain the Marquess Wellesley. When news of the outbreak of the war reached Britain, the Whig opposition was indignant and looking for a scapegoat. In a series of debates during the spring of 1804, the Marquess was accused of having flouted the 1784 Act by declaring war on the Marathas without the permission of Parliament and having squandered the Company’s revenues.30 By 1806 the Company’s debts stood at £28.5 million, of which two-thirds had been run up by the Marquess’s wars. Bankruptcy had been staved off by getting Parliament’s approval for the adoption of the government’s method of raising cash in an emergency: an appeal to the London money markets. As a result of issuing new stock, the East India Company acquired its own version of the National Debt. Nevertheless, the Company had no trouble in getting the capital it needed. It was still a flourishing concern, for, as Wellesley’s defenders pointed out, additional territories equalled increased revenues. Their government also required more soldiers and administrators, a fact which tended to be overlooked.
The Marquess may well have overreached himself and behaved with little regard for the exact letter of the law, but his countrymen’s disapproval was tempered by the knowledge that the Indian empire was a national asset in terms of prestige and economic potential. The loss of America in 1783 had heightened public interest in India, which was reflected in the abundance of prints which appeared during 1799 and 1800 showing scenes from the recent war in Mysore. Possession of a growing empire in India was a source of patriotic pride, especially in the post-Waterloo years when national self-confidence was soaring. There was also a feeling that India, in common with other parts of the empire, contributed substantially to overall national prosperity. In 1836, William IV observed: ‘Now this is a fine country, but it is nothing without its colonial possessions, especially India.’31
Sensing the mood of the times, the Marquess Wellesley augmented his family’s achievement of arms with a motto of a line from the Aeneid: ‘Super Indos protenit Imperium’ (He extended the Empire over the Indians).32 On his death in 1842, one obituarist praised his exertions in India, where he had attempted to ‘assume a natural authority which would suffer no rival from the mountains to the sea’.33 By this date, the Company had acquired paramountcy across the entire sub-continent south of the Sutlej, was encroaching on Burma, and was well on the way to gaining sovereignty over its north-western neighbours, the Sind and the Punjab.
What was astonishing was that this ascendancy was achieved within forty years by a handful of men of determination and foresight with at best lukewarm support from the government in Britain and downright hostility from the directors. To a large extent, the wars of Wellesley and Hastings accelerated a process that had been first set in motion by Clive in Bengal. Pausing or turning back would have been disastrous, for the conquered would have rounded on their adversaries. ‘As long as there remains in the country any high-minded independence’, Thomas Munro told Lord Hastings in 1817, there would be resistance of some kind. He added, prophetically, ‘I have a better opinion of the natives of India than to think that this spirit will ever be completely extinguished.’34 For the time being there would be tranquillity in India. In 1829, Lord Ellenborough, the president of the Board of Control, considered the era of conquest was over and one of peace was about to begin. Everything still depended on the native army and he wondered how it and its British officers would take to a long period of what was virtual unemployment.35 The high-blooded and venturesome did not have to kick their heels for long; there were still plenty of wars to be fought as the minds of India’s strategists turned from internal consolidation to the establishment of strong frontiers.
2
The Cossack and the
Sepoy: Misadventures
of an Asian Power,
1826 – 42
I
A scendancy in India had made Britain an Asian power without equal. This point was made, with a degree of diplomatically justified hyperbole, by Captain James Abbott in a series of conversations with the Khan of Khiva in the spring of 1840. Asked whether Russia was a greater nation than Britain, Abbott answered, ‘By no means. England is first in extent of dominions, number of population and wealth.’ It was so rich a country that: ‘The house of a labourer in England is far more comfortable than the palace of a nobleman in Persia or Herat.’ This may not have surprised the khan, who had already heard how an Englishman needed only look at a hill to know whether it contained gold; a national reputation for seizing the economic main chance had clearly run ahead of Abbott.
He had risked his life on a perilous journey from India to a state which had hitherto been virtually inaccessible to Europeans in order to convince its ruler that Britain, a nation whose empire rested on ‘justice and good faith’, was the natural ally of all central Asia’s Muslims in their struggle against Russia. And what an ally; questioned about the cannon possessed by Britain, Abbott let his eloquence and his imagination run wild:
The number is too great to be reckoned, and therefore no account is kept of them. The seas are covered with the ships of England, each bearing from twenty to one hundred and twenty guns of the largest size. Her forts are full of cannon, and thousands lie in every magazine. The very posts in our streets [i.e. bollards] are often made of guns which, in Persia and Afghanistan, would be considered excellent. We have more guns than any other nation in the world.
British artillerymen were matchless, being able to fire seven rounds a minute. The khan was unimpressed, remarking that a Persian ambassador had once told him that Russian gunners could manage a dozen shots a minute. ‘We count not the number of shots fired, but the number that take effect,’ Abbott sharply retorted.1
In another audience, Abbott outlined the Indian government’s attitude to its Asian neighbours. It wanted only peace and the right to trade freely with them, and it never wavered in its pursuit of justice. To this end, it had recently sent an army to Kabul to restore to power its rightful ruler, Shah Shuja. It was also, and this request was made by Abbott on several occasions, anxious that the khan released his Russian slaves. This was as much a political as a humanitarian gesture, for a Russian army was known to be on its way towards Khiva to liberate the slaves by force, and Abbott had been instructed to deflect it by achieving its purpose through persuasion. He made little headway. Muslims in central Asia were genuinely perplexed by European protests against slavery, particularly those of Russia whose serfs and soldiers were treated little better than slaves.2 As it was, the Russian force was overcome by a combination of the climate and slipshod logistics. Abbott left Khiva in May and proceeded eastwards to a Russian outpost on the shores of the Caspian, and from there to St Petersburg, where he presented Czar Nicholas I with a letter of friendship from the khan.
It is not known what the khan learned from Abbott about the outside world and Britain’s place in it. That mixture of fable, hearsay and rumour which passed for political knowledge in Asia probably rated Britain very highly during 1840. Details of its occupation of Afghanistan had filtered through to Odessa by the summer of 1841 when James Yeames, the British consul, reported that Russian officers were gloomily contrasting their army’s misfortunes in the Caucasus with ‘the brilliant success achieved by British arms in Asia’.3
Yeames was a consummate intelligence gatherer who gained the confidence of several Russian officers who grumbled to him about the incompetence of their superiors and reverses suffered at the hands of tribal guerrillas. The Russians were not bothered with field security, and happily gave Yeames details of the units involved in the campaigns and their deployment. All this information was relayed to the Foreign Office. Over two years spent listening to first-hand accounts of skirmishes on Chechen m
ountain-sides left Yeames, if not his masters, convinced that Russian endeavours in the Caucasus and Central Asia were doomed to failure. There was not, he concluded, ‘sufficient genius’ in Russia to carry out the grandiose empire-building schemes dreamed up in St Petersburg, or even the small campaigns of aggrandisement waged by various generals commanding frontier districts.4 Events were proving him right, but his message was not one which London or Calcutta wanted to hear.
For the past twenty years a handful of ministers, proconsuls, generals and intelligence specialists had been wracking their brains to devise policies and strategies to counter a Russian march across Asia which would end with an invasion of India. For nearly everyone involved, it was not a question of would the Russians come, but when and how.
Before a plan for the defence of India could be framed, it was necessary to discover something about the lands which separated the two great Asian powers. Since the early 1800s individual explorers, usually young army officers with strong nerves, a taste for high adventure and a skill in native languages, had made their way into a previously impenetrable region. They drew maps and prepared exhaustive reports of what they had seen, whom they had met and what they had heard. Not all returned, for the natives were hostile to infidel intruders. James Abbott was one of this succession of spies, and his own and his comrades’ exploits in the Himalayas, Persia and Central Asia became known as the Great Game. The phrase was an invention of Captain Arthur Conolly, who was murdered in 1842 by the Khan of Bukhara after a short career during which, among other things, he had wandered across the Caucasus, watched the Russians do battle with the Circassians and, in the company of Muslim holy men, visited Kandahar.
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