Conolly’s excursions confirmed what his superiors in Calcutta had long feared: that it was perfectly feasible for a Russian army to invade India, either following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great through Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass, or else by way of Persia, using Herat, Kandahar and Quetta as staging posts.5 Like other players of the Great Game, Conolly published an account of his travels which alerted British readers to the possibility that the lands he had traversed might soon become a battlefield between Britain and Russia. He was not an alarmist and in a calm analysis of the situation pointed out that, while it was wise to undertake preventative measures, Russia’s advance across Asia was bound to be slow and ponderous. Besides, any army undertaking a central Asian campaign would face immense logistical problems and stiff resistance from the Muslim states in its path.6
Possession of a recondite knowledge of the geography and politics of Central Asia gave players in the Great Game an excessive influence over policy-making. One figure, Alexander Burnes, stood out from the rest. His promotion had been swift and spectacular and owed much to his fluency in Persian, Arabic and Hindustani, an engaging personality and a flair for the sort of flattery which eastern princes adored. On their first meeting, he addressed the Shah of Persia as: ‘Centre of the universe, what sight has equalled that which I now behold, the light of your Majesty’s countenance, O attraction of the world!’7
This arcane skill qualified Burnes for his first mission in 1831, which was to convey six dapple grey drayhorses, a gift from William IV, to Ranjit Singh, the Maharaja of Lahore. Using this gesture of princely goodwill as a cover, Burnes made a careful survey of the Indus and undertook some economic espionage to discover markets for British goods in the Punjab. Burnes regarded the Indus as more than a conduit for Lancashire cottons and Bradford cloth; as he sailed up the river to Lahore, he immediately recognised it as the path for future British conquest. He delivered his horses (one died during the journey and the rest perished later from pampering and unfamilar fodder) and returned to Simla, where he captivated Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General, with tales of his experiences.
Next, and at his own suggestion, Burnes was sent on an ambitious intelligence-gathering tour. It took him to Kabul, over the Hindu Kush to Bukhara and from there, via the Caspian and Persia, back to India. On his return in 1833 he published a three-decker version of his peregrinations, which became an instant best-seller. It provided readers with a vivid picture of a hitherto unknown region, its colourful races, their customs and religions. Like other early-Victorian travel literature it would certainly have prompted the reaction ‘how unlike our own dear country’, with descriptions of sadistic tyrants, slavery and tribal feuds. News of Burnes’s wanderings reached St Petersburg, where he was accused of acting as an agent of sedition, and fomenting unrest among, and running guns to, the trans-Caspian tribes.8
Burnes saw himself as a leading actor in an epic historical drama which would shortly be played out in Central Asia:
England and Russia will divide Asia between them, and the two empires will enlarge like circles in the water till they are lost in nothing; and future generations will search for both of us in these regions, as we now seek for the remains of Alexander and his Greeks.9
Alexander the Great had a special place in the consciousness of everyone engaged in the Great Game. His physical presence, largely imaginary, seemed everywhere in the disputed regions. Burnes encountered a Muslim tribe who had incorporated Alexander into their theology as a prophet of Allah.10 His colleague, John Wood, met a warrior clan living in the upper reaches of the Oxus who assured him they were descendants of Alexander and his Greeks.11 These two myths were perhaps the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. Staff officers well-versed in the Classics pointed out what they took to be Alexander’s camp sites to their comrades during the march to Kabul in 1839.12
What was real in the minds of men like Burnes was the spirit of Alexander, above all his indomitable willpower and indifference to the obstacles of nature and climate. Where he had gone, others might follow, and so even the most fanciful scheme for an invasion of India deserved serious attention.
II
Contemporaries had regarded Napoleon as a second Alexander. His descent on Egypt in 1798 had started speculation about an invasion of India. It was revived in 1807 when he had discussed a Franco-Russian overland expedition to India with Czar Alexander I during the Tilsit negotiations. Nothing seemed beyond Bonaparte’s reach, for his recent victories in Europe had proved him a ‘genius’ in the mould of Alexander the Great. It was, therefore, confidently expected that in four months he could assemble an army of 60,000 at Astrakhan and bring it through Persia to the Indian frontier.13 Faced with such a superhuman adversary, Indian commanders pleaded with the War Office for reinforcements. In 1810 the commander-in-chief at Madras reckoned his troops could beat any native army, but he was less sanguine about how the sepoys would fare against experienced white soldiers when the moment came to repel ‘the long threatened Invasion of our Eastern provinces by the combined French and Russian Force’.14 The phantom of invasion disappeared for the time being in 1812, when Napoleon attacked Russia and for the moment all misgivings about the safety of India’s frontiers were suppressed.
These anxieties surfaced again in the late 1820s in a new and more intense form. The Russo-Persian war of 1827–28 and the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–29 revealed that Russia was set upon a new course of expansion in Asia. These conflicts also demonstrated the vulnerability of the two, dilapidated Islamic empires, the Persian and the Ottoman, which stood between Russia and India. Neither could be expected to serve as an obstacle for a modern, European army, although no one was at all clear as to how such an army, with all its baggage train and pack animals, would survive the march across deserts and mountains. Colonel George de Lacy Evans, a veteran of the Peninsular war, the battles of New Orleans and Waterloo and a radical MP, believed that the Russians were up to such a feat of stamina and logistical organisation. In his pamphlet On the Practicability of an Invasion of British India (1829) he outlined a hypothetical plan of campaign in which a Russian invasion force thrust east from the Caspian, occupied Khiva and used it as a springboard for an army of 30,000 which would cross the Oxus, take Kabul and enter the Khyber Pass. Quoting examples of forced marches during the Napoleonic wars, De Lacy Evans predicted that the Russians would need three months to travel from the bases in the Caspian to the Oxus. Local opposition would be either neutralised or swept aside, as it had been by Alexander the Great.15
The very appearance of this army even on the shores of the Caspian, let alone in the Khyber Pass, would be a signal for widespread unrest throughout India. De Lacy Evans had struck a raw nerve, for the Indian government had always been fearful that masses of Indians would turn against the British the moment they were distracted by an external threat. This assumed that the Raj principally rested on force and that Indian goodwill was so brittle that it would snap in a crisis. Britain’s swift takeover of the sub-continent had been made possible largely by the willingness of substantial numbers of Indians to follow the path of self-preservation and, for that matter, advancement, and throw in their lot with the conquerors. If another European power followed suit, then Indians might very well reconsider their loyalties. And they would be free to do so, for the Russian threat would draw the bulk of the Indian army towards the North-West Frontier.
There was some substance in De Lacy Evans’s reasoning. In 1815 it was imagined that the Marathas would have welcomed the Russians.16 The Marquess Hastings had believed that all Indians were indifferent as to who ruled them, and were completely without any sense of patriotism, whatever this might have meant for an occupied people.17 There was residual Muslim resentment which, according to Hastings, might easily be transformed into a militant movement to restore Mughal power.18
If the worst came to the worst, a white man’s Raj would be defended by white soldiers. The point was bluntly made by a senior of
ficer after a serious mutiny by units of the Madras army at Vellore in 1806: ‘It is true we can only hold our Indian Empire by our European Force, but to save that European Native Troops are absolutely and indispensably necessary.’19 The Indians understood this, too: not long after the Vellore mutiny a junior Indian officer warned his superiors that no amount of white troops could save the Raj ‘when all the Natives shall entertain hostile designs’ against it.20
In April 1836 there were just over 17,000 British troops in India, of whom over a thousand were utterly unfit for duty and another 1,400 were invalids, most the victims of venereal diseases or chronic alcoholism. Looking over these figures, the Governor-General, Lord Auckland, commented that the Raj would face an unprecedented danger ‘if ever the 80 millions of natives by whom they are surrounded should be out of humour or if ever we should have a more formidable enemy [i.e. Russia] to cope with’.21 The Duke of Wellington, by now a venerated elder statesman, was more level-headed, and his opinion counted for something, for he had seen British and Indian troops in action. He wrote in 1834:
I believe that if ever we are to come to blows with the Russians in India we must rely on our sepoys, as we have in all our wars there with Europeans as well as native powers. These with our superior knowledge of the art of war in that country and superior equipment, founded upon our knowledge of the resources of the seat of war, the character of the natives and other circumstances, will give us advantages which will more than counter balance the supposed inferiority of our troops.22
The sepoys themselves shared the Duke’s faith in their courage. During the autumn of 1838, when preparations were in hand for the invasion of Afghanistan, veterans of Lake’s campaigns against the Marathas boasted that they had beaten Scindia’s Frenchmen and that they would do the same to the Russians if they met them.23
There were two views of how the Great Game might develop. De Lacy Evans predicted the bolt from the blue, while men like Conolly and Burnes saw the slow build-up to a collision some time in the distant future. The immediate remedy was to create a cordon sanitaire which would block the possible approaches to India. A diplomatic offensive was needed which would bring Persia, the Sind, the Punjab and the Afghan states of Herat, Kandahar and Kabul within Britain’s orbit. Simultaneously, and here men like Burnes, Conolly and Abbott were vital, the Indian government had to extend feelers towards the states of central Asia, persuading them that Britain was their friend. Most importantly, the Company would have to get itself accepted as a sort of honest broker, settling the disputes which frequently flared up between these states. Somehow their territorial ambitions would have to be curbed or balanced, for if they were not, Russia would be quick to step in as a patron and source of military assistance.
Relations with the Sind presented few problems. Its amirs were nominally Afghan subjects and they had inclined towards the Company whenever the rulers of Afghanistan showed any sign of re-asserting their sovereignty. By 1830, they were, to all intents and purposes, the Company’s allies. The Punjab, under Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of Lahore, was an island of stability and a formidable power with its European-trained and equipped army, the Khalsa. But the ‘Lion of Lahore’, who had held absolute power since 1799, was ageing and his vigour was impaired by a stroke in 1836 and an addiction to brandy and opium. Burnes believed that on his death the Sikh state would dissolve into anarchy. In the meantime, relations with the Punjab were cordial and here, as in the Sind, were being strengthened by growing economic dependency.
One of the first consequences of De Lacy Evans’s scaremongering had been a stepping-up of British commercial activity throughout the region. Lord Ellenborough had been shaken by De Lacy Evans’s conclusions, but believed that Russia might be frustrated through an economic offensive which would extend across the Himalayas into central Asia. To this end, he had encouraged Burnes and Conolly to examine the prospects for trade in the area in the hope that Brummagem metalware would soon swamp the bazaars of Bukhara. Free trade was Britain’s new economic orthodoxy and its prophets declared that its spread across the globe would lead to universal peace. Lord Auckland believed this would be the case on India’s frontiers. In 1836, he predicted that paddle steamers puffing up the Indus with cargoes of British goods would transform the outlook of those who lived on its banks. In future, they would ‘look . . . more to our merchants than our soldiers’.24
Indo-Persian relations were more complex and fraught with danger since Russia, like Britain, was anxious to assume the role of the shah’s protector. Bonaparte had tried, but had been thwarted by an Anglo-Persian treaty signed in 1809, in which the shah pledged to bar the passage of any army bent on invading India in return for an annual subvention of £150,000. During the next twenty years, Persia suffered a series of encroachments on its northern territories, but Czar Nicholas I was unwilling to press his military advantages further. In typical Romanov fashion he allowed dogma to override commonsense, refusing to annex Azerbaijan on the grounds that it was the shah’s private property. His local commanders had advised him to take it as a buffer against incursions of Shi’ite fanatics from Persia who were helping Caucasian guerrillas.25 From the 1820s, the Russian army in the region had its hands full dealing with tribal resistance, and the imperial military budget would not stretch to large-scale campaigns of conquest. What the Czar wanted was a biddable shah who would bring Persia within Russia’s sphere of influence.
Extending the hand of friendship to the shah during the 1830s caused panic in Calcutta and London, where Russian diplomatic moves were interpreted as the first stage of the long-expected thrust towards India. It was not; rather, Russia’s intrigues in Tehran and later Kabul were a crude and, as it turned it out, clumsy exercise in what would later be called ‘destabilisation’. The crisis which unfolded between the end of 1835 and the summer of 1838 revolved round the efforts of Count Ivan Simonich to persuade Shah Muhammad to add Herat, and possibly Kandahar, to his empire. This attempt to engineer a Persian–Afghan war could not have come at a worse time for the Indian government, which was endeavouring to prevent a war between Dost Muhammad, the Amir of Kabul, and Ranjit Singh for possession of Peshawar. Here, too, Russia was fishing in troubled waters. At the very end of 1837, Captain Vitkievitch, a young Cossack officer from the staff of the Governor of Orenburg, arrived in Kabul with messages of goodwill from the Czar to Dost Muhammad. He was also anxious to make contact with Ranjit Singh, who refused to admit him to the Punjab, and with Afghan tribal chiefs. Russia was applying the diplomatic leverage which could easily prise apart the states which formed India’s buffer zone and set them at each other’s throats.
At first, the British and Indian governments tried to shore it up diplomatically through a series of missions to Tehran and Kabul. The first failed; in the spring of 1838 Shah Muhammad laid siege to Herat with the encouragement of Simonich and the assistance of a Polish officer and a battalion of Russian deserters. They did not, as expected, tip the balance and were badly mauled during an attempt to storm the city’s walls on 24 June. From that moment, the shah knew that he could not take Herat, although operations dragged on for several months, adding to the tension in Calcutta.26
In the face of British protests, St Petersburg disowned Simonich, claiming that he was acting off his own bat. This puzzled the British and Indian governments, who assumed, not unreasonably, that an autocrat’s servants did exactly what they were told. If this was so, then Russia was at best testing the waters or, at worst, provoking a confrontation in Persia which could easily lead to war. ‘If we go on at this rate,’ Filipp Brunov, the Russian ambassador in London, told Sir Cam Hobhouse, the president of the Board of Control, ‘the Cossack and the Sepoy will soon meet on the banks of the Oxus.’ ‘Very probably,’ Hobhouse replied, ‘but however much I regret the collision, I should have no fear of the result.’27
To a large extent, British and Indian reactions to the events leading up to the Herat crisis had been coloured by the outpourings of men like De Lacy Evans, whose warnin
gs now seemed like prophecies. There was also a powerful strain of Russophobia in British political life, then and for the next eighty or so years. Russia represented the reverse image of Britain: its rulers were tyrants and its masses of serfs automata, who obeyed their masters unthinkingly, which was why it remained a hopelessly backward power. In 1841 a British visitor to Russia contrasted the ‘free and sturdy’ British with their ‘wealth, intelligence and individual enterprise’ with that ‘great mass of organised and mechanised humanity’ who were the Russians.28 Another tourist wrote of the Russians as ‘one machine’.29 An Indian official predicted in 1838 that if Russia overran India, a ‘benevolent’ imperialism would be supplanted by an oppressive one which would reduce all Indians to serfs.30 Despite the ignorance and abjectness of its people and the purblind obscurantism of their Czar, Russia was a country to be feared greatly. Nicholas I commanded 729,000 serf soldiers and tens of thousands of Cossacks, with which, in the words of the soldier and historian Sir William Napier, he could threaten ‘freedom and happiness and civilization’.31
Russophobia united politicians of all complexions. Those on the left reviled the Czar as the enemy of liberalism and destroyer of liberty in Poland. Right-wingers distrusted him as a devious schemer intent on undermining Britain’s position in the Middle East and India. It was, therefore, not difficult for any government to gain public backing for a tough, even combative line against Russia.
Prevailing anxieties about the likelihood of a Russian invasion of India had grossly exaggerated the importance and mischief-making capacity of the Czar’s two representatives in Kabul and Herat. The hawks in India were impatient with shilly-shallying and wanted action. All that was needed was for the British to ‘stretch forth our arm of power and crush incipient aggression in the place where it is being mustered’ insisted Major-General William Nott.32 In London, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, agreed, but hoped to avoid a direct collision with Russia. Rather, what was required was a forceful demonstration of British power on India’s frontiers which would convince the local inhabitants and the Russians that Britain would not shrink from defending what it considered to be its vital interests in the area.
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