Hardinge’s Punjabi state was a brittle structure which collapsed during the early summer of 1848. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry Lawrence, the first resident and power behind the throne in Lahore, thought the Punjabis were ‘patient and submissive, if not contented and happy’ with their new government.38 This was not a recipe for future tranquillity, although Lawrence and his assistants in the countryside felt sure that, in time, the Sikh, Hindu and Muslim populations would develop an affection for a régime which was just and respected their customs and creeds. The new order was proclaimed by Lieutenant Herbert Edwardes to the tribesmen of Bannu: ‘You shall have the best laws that an enlightened people can frame for you; but they will be administered by a Sikh Governor. He cannot oppress you, for the English will be over him. You shall be justly ruled, but you shall be free no more.’39 In this context, freedom meant the liberty to pursue blood feuds, rustle stock and expel tax-collectors, none of which the frontiersmen felt inclined to abandon. Nonetheless, they were impressed by the force of personality of the new government’s 27-year-old representative, who combined the patience and wisdom of Solomon with the warrior vigour of a Joshua.
There were losers under the new system. They gathered around Mul Raj, the former governor of Multan, an administrator with a reputation for justice and honesty, who emerged, probably reluctantly, as the leader of a revolt against British domination.40 The uprising began at the end of April 1848, when two British officials were assassinated by mutinous soldiers from the Multan garrison. Within the next few months, Mul Raj attracted a variety of discontented souls all of whom had suffered in various ways under the new régime. There were members of Ranjit Singh’s extended family, including the Maharani Jandin; thousands of discharged and unpaid Khalsa soldiers; and zamindars and officials who had been sacked or who had had their powers and incomes curbed by the British. Soon after the outbreak, Edward Cust sent out spies to discover the reactions to it in his district. He discovered that many Sikh zamindars, having lost so much that they had held dear (i.e. their power), believed they had nothing to lose in an attempt to regain it.41 The same was no doubt true of the Ruhela horsemen dimissed by James Abbott for being ‘too rapacious’, or the ex-Khalsa men who objected to the loss of the freedom to steal food, firewood and fodder from villagers.42 There were also plenty for whom any breakdown of civil order was a chance for easy pickings. Edwardes came across Baluchis and Pathans ‘who, at all times prefer military service to agriculture’ taking up arms and joining both sides. Among his own government levies were 3,000 Pathans who were glad to take fifteen rupees a week and a possibility of plunder. ‘War is their trade and also their pastime,’ he observed, but was worried whether he could restrain them once the fighting had started.43 Not all war profiteers wielded swords. On the fringes of the Company’s army were enterprising Indian traders who exchanged loot for the cash which soldiers needed to buy drink.44
Losers outnumbered winners in the war. For most, perhaps the majority of Punjabis, the insurrection was a catastrophe, made worse by a recent drought and the prospect of a famine. The best that these people could do was to avoid trouble. In the hinterland of Multan, Edwardes found the ryots continued to pay their taxes but needed ‘the assurance that they are paying to the strongest side’.45
During the first three months of the revolt there was no way of knowing which was the stronger side. The events in Multan at the end of April had taken the government by surprise, and for some time intelligence as to Mul Raj’s motives and support was fragmentary. Containment measures were quickly taken, largely thanks to the initiative of junior officers like Edwardes who, in his own words, ‘rushed in where Generals feared to tread’. Uncertain of the loyalty of many of his Sikhs, he hurried south from the foothills of the North-West Frontier with as many men as he could muster. He joined an improvised army of irregulars and a contingent from the loyal Raja of Bahawalpur which assembled in the vicinity in May and June under Colonel Cortlandt. Dashingly led, this force of about 5,000 established a blockade around the city and fought a sequence of successful actions which temporarily contained the revolt. The arrival of a 7,000-strong Anglo-Sikh division and a train of heavy artillery under Brigadier William Whish in August made it possible to besiege the city. Within a few weeks the defection of the Sikh contingent under Sher Singh compelled the British to withdraw. This signal humiliation persuaded many Punjabis who had hitherto maintained a wait-and-see neutrality to throw in their lot with the rebels.
Those officers who had done their utmost to act swiftly were dismayed. They had been left in the lurch by a high command which appeared to have forgotten that, in India, military success was the child of decisive action. James Abbott spoke for them all when he complained:
Delay, when a fearful and instant retribution is everywhere expected, will be attributed to timidity. We hold our position in the Punjab wholly by force of opinion, by the general belief in our superior courage and resources. Our Empire in India has the same foundation, and one or both may pass away if we evince any symptoms of hesitancy.46
Implicit in what Abbott and others said was the contrast between the quick thinking of the men on the spot in the Punjab and the Olympian indifference of their masters in Calcutta.
The excuse for this apparent paralysis at the top was simple and unanswerable, given that a commander’s duty is always, whenever possible, to preserve the lives of his men. Sending an army into the Punjab during the summer would have been disastrous in terms of losses of British troops from heat exhaustion. Experience, particularly in the arid region of the Sind, showed that sunstroke was as deadly, probably more so, than enemy fire. At best a none-too-healthy creature, the British soldier could not campaign in temperatures of over 100 degrees. Recalling a march across the sandy plain north of Delhi in March 1848, Private Charles Ryder of the 32nd described men fainting from lack of water, others with swollen tongues bursting from mouths and his own collapse with sunstroke and fever. ‘I felt very bad. It was a sickly kind of feeling. There the men lay, groaning in the greatest of agony. The doctors and apothecaries were all a bustle, bleeding the men as they lay upon the sand.’ One soldier shot himself.47 Dehydration and attendant disorders cost Ryder’s regiment 14 dead and 175 sick. Knowledge of occurrences like this made even such aggressive spirits as Gough and Napier pause. Moreover, as events unfolded during July and August, it appeared that local forces were gaining the upper hand, having confined the uprising to the environs of Multan.
Once it became clear that this was not the case and the insurrection was fanning outwards, the new Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, took the necessary action. With characteristic vigour, he told his senior commanders: ‘Unwarned by precedent, uninfluenced by example, the Sikh nation has called for war; and on my word, sirs, war they shall have and with a vengeance!’ Preparations for what was to be a massive punitive expedition were in hand during September and October as two armies assembled. The smaller, including a Bombay contingent, was destined to reopen the siege of Multan, and the larger concentrated at Firozpur for an advance to the second centre of the revolt, the area north of Lahore. Once again, the Sikh commanders had chosen static warfare: Mul Raj stayed inside the walls of Multan and Sher Singh’s field army was sitting tight in positions on the northern and southern banks of the Chenab near Gujrat.
Both commanders appealed to religious and racial emotions: Muslims were urged to rally behind the anti-British jihad, and Sikhs to fight for their faith, Dalip Singh and independence. This was the message on leaflets which circulated among Edwardes’s Pathan troops, but, much to his relief, they spurned them as the outpourings of ‘sugs’ (dogs) and ‘kaffirs’ (unbelievers).48 Others were persuaded: there was a trickle of deserters, including Gurkhas, to Multan during the siege.49
The encirclement of Multan was completed by the end of December. Its outer wall was breached on 4 January 1849 and British and Indian troopers fought their way through the streets. As in the last war, no quarter was asked or given as the battle
resolved itself into hundreds of individual combats. One, between an Irish corporal and a Sikh swordsman, was watched by Private Ryder. ‘They closed upon each other, and grappled each other by the throat; when the corporal gave him the foot and threw him upon the floor.’ He then cut off his head with his own sword.50 Mul Raj had withdrawn with 3,000 men into the inner fortress, which was stormed on 22 January. Pandemonium followed as soldiers rushed about looting and killing anyone who resisted, whatever their sex or age. ‘All the houses were ransacked, and what could not be carried off was completely destroyed. Temples were broken into, and the brass idols and Korans carried away and sold . . . All our men, European and native, looked for precious metals. They took the rings and chains from every dead man, as well as the living.’51 Ryder got some idols, a dagger, a carpet and a breastplate. Officers surpassed their men in the free-for-all. ‘I was as good a plunderer as the rest,’ Captain Alexander Grant told his family a week later, adding that the prize agents had already secured loot worth 2.5 million rupees and were about to begin digging for buried treasure.52
The fall of Multan released men for the campaign in eastern Punjab, which was languishing. Gough was again in command and his arrival at Firozpur in December had chilled some hearts, for memories of the last war were still fresh. The disrespectful called him ‘Sir Huge Gouk’. Richard Baird Smith, an engineer officer, prophesied that ‘our success will be gained by the blood of the officers and men and will owe nought to the genius of the Chief’.53 The unburied skeletons of men killed at Mudki and around Firozpur were a further, sombre reminder of what had occurred three years ago.54 In London, the prospect of Gough’s generalship also called alarm; his appointment was criticised in The Times, where his lack of tactical finesse was attributed to his Irishness.55 The government decided to replace him with Napier, but the order reached Calcutta after the war had ended.
The new year saw a slow advance of Gough’s 14,000-strong army across the Sutlej towards the main Sikh concentration beyond Lahore. Gough was, as ever, keen to get to grips with the enemy and engage them in the bull-at-a-gate manner which his men and their opponents had come to expect. The chance came on the afternoon of 13 January 1849, when he ordered an attack on Sher Singh’s extended defensive position in dense bush between Chillianwala and the River Jhelum. Again, British troops advanced headlong into heavy artillery fire and suffered accordingly. The 24th Regiment survived the cannon fire and stormed a battery but were thrown back by intense musketry, losing over half their strength. The remnants of the regiment fled, some men running for two miles, and two adjacent sepoy battalions followed suit. ‘How could they stand if the Europeans could not?’ asked Sita Ram. Another stunned onlooker, Baird Smith, afterwards told his wife: ‘The flight of a Queen’s Regiment in India is a sad affair at any time, but it is especially so in a war like this one when our Europeans are our main support.’56
Elsewhere, the assailants had mixed fortunes. The 61st captured a battery after two supporting sepoy regiments had fallen back; the 29th gained its objective at a cost of nearly a third of its numbers; and the 3rd Light Dragoons got badly mangled as a result of muddled orders. Behind the lines there was chaos. Treating the wounded of the 29th, Surgeon Stewart was suddenly overwhelmed when a horse artillery battery careered into a struggling mass of retreating infantry, dragoons, lancers and riderless horses.57 As darkness fell, the battle had become a stalemate.
The Sikhs had been severely shaken, and their commander, Sher Singh, remembering how the Khalsa had been destroyed in the earlier war of attrition, made overtures for negotiations. They were rejected (rebels could only offer unconditional surrender) and he slowly drew his forces away northwards to new positions near Gujrat. Gough did not pursue. Chillianwala had been a draw in which he had suffered over 2,300 casualties, over a quarter of his force, and he dared not risk another such encounter.
Gough reopened his offensive during the second week of February. The odds were now firmly in his favour: additional forces from Multan had increased his army to 23,000 and he had, in what turned out to be his last battle, decided to follow the textbook rather than instinct. The result was a brilliant tour de force in which artillery, cavalry and infantry were coordinated in a scientific manner. First, light artillery and skirmishers moved quickly forward to engage the Sikh lines which were drawn up in open country south of Gujrat. A two-hour artillery duel severely damaged the Sikh batteries and enabled the infantry assault to be pressed home without the customary heavy losses. Fractured in many places by the infantry, the Sikh line collapsed and the remnants of the Khalsa fled. Their retreat was turned into a helter-skelter rout by close cavalry pursuit.
In the weeks that followed, those who had survived Gujrat were ordered to lay down their arms. During one act of surrender, Brigadier-General Colin Campbell was struck by the pathos and dignity of one old warrior who put down his musket, placed his hands together in a salute, and cried out, ‘Aj Ranjit Singh mar gaya’ (Today Ranjit Singh is dead).58 The ritual of the Khalsa’s final capitulation was chosen as the image for the obverse of the medal given to all who had fought in the second Sikh War; it showed Sikhs laying down their weapons before a mounted British general in a cocked hat with lines of infantry in the background.
The Punjab was formerly annexed by Dalhousie in March 1849. Even before the campaign was under way, he had decided to bring the province under direct administration and extend British India to its natural frontier, the Indus. The second Sikh War ended the process of piecemeal conquest which Clive had begun; Britain now possessed the whole of India. In a triumphal mood and looking back over nearly ninety years of wars, Gough told his soldiers: ‘That which Alexander attempted, the British army have accomplished.’59
4
Robust Bodies and
Obstinate Minds: An
Anatomy of Conquest
I
How had an army which never numbered more than a quarter of a million been able to conquer and subdue 150 million in less than 100 years? Just as there was no master plan for India’s conquest, there was no single explanation for how it had been achieved. Some answered the question in terms of Divinely impelled forces of historical destiny. There was certainly something miraculous about the apparent willingness of the Indians to accept the verdict of a handful of battles and submit to rule by a tiny, alien minority. ‘If each black man took up a handful of sand and by united effort cast it upon the white-faced intruders, we should be buried alive,’ wrote Hardinge.1 But no such act of concerted determination occurred. Indians, it was argued, largely by civilian officials, ultimately knew what was good for them, and after initial resistance, had quickly settled down to enjoy the blessings of a mild and humane government.
This was a part of the truth; a small part, according to the army. In 1829, a junior officer of the Bengal army expressed what was both a justification for his profession and a reminder of the realities of power: ‘Orators, we know, love to call British India, the “Empire of opinion”; but it is the EMPIRE OF SEPOYS: and woe to its rulers, when they shall venture to neglect this main spring, this too critical secret of its mechanism.’2 The same message was delivered in 1853 by Gough to a Commons select committee:
India is a very peculiar country; you do not know the hour when some outbreak may take place: and we all know that the people of India have their heads up like leeches looking for anything that may occur.3
Each statement takes it for granted that, were it not for the ever-present threat of force, a precarious Raj would eventually be toppled by its subjects. Moreover, as Gough indicated, this state of affairs had not been changed by the recent spectacular victories in the Sind and the Punjab. Indians still needed to fear the army which had conquered them.
Whatever its future might be, there was no question that the army had created the Indian empire. Between 1791 and 1849 British forces had successively defeated the three most powerful and resilient Mughal successor states: Mysore, the Maratha polity and the Punjab. All resisted tenacio
usly and each required two hard-fought campaigns before it was finally overcome. Victory had never come easily. The British were always outnumbered, possessed no overwhelming technical advantages, and white soldiers succumbed to unfamiliar distempers and extremes of heat and cold. There were, however, compensations which proved decisive. The Company had abundant cash which was transformed into wages, weaponry, victuals and transport, and an officer corps which somehow managed to draw the best out of their soldiers in an emergency. Leadership, combined with steadiness and stubbornness among the rank and file, gave British forces an edge in every battle.
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