The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  These officers’ conduct could be justified by the fact that they needed to know the languages of those they commanded, and a concubine could also serve as a schoolmistress. The sepoy army was, even in the era of reform, the chief prop of the British raj, as many of its officers were quick to point out. In 1837, one dismissed as nonsense any suggestion that the empire was one ‘of opinion’, that is, resting on native goodwill, rather than armed force.16

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  The era of tentative internal reform inside India was also one in which the Company consolidated and extended its authority. In 1818 the Mahrathas had been forced to submit, and in 1824 a part of the independent kingdom of Burma was annexed after a short war. By the 1830s attention was turning towards India’s northern borders, the powerful Sikh state of the Punjab, and the possibility of a Russian invasion. The question was whether the Indian frontier should lie on the Indus or be pushed forward into the Himalayan foothills, where the passes from Afghanistan debouched.

  It was generally agreed in Calcutta that India’s safety required a cordon sanitaire which encompassed Afghanistan. An attempt in 1838 to transform that country into an Indian dependency ended in catastrophe three years later, when the Kabul garrison was evicted and all but wiped out during a harrowing winter retreat down the Khyber Pass. It was a humiliating reverse which tarnished British prestige. The Governor-General, Lord Ellenborough, ordered General Sir George Pollock to restore its lustre through a series of raids deep into Afghan territory where villages, crops and livestock were destroyed.

  The Afghan débâcle provided a pressing reason for the government to flex its muscles against the Baluchi amirs of Sind and the Sikhs. The latter were the most menacing, since they possessed the Khalsa, a well-disciplined and equipped modern army trained by imported European specialists, which astonished those who encountered it. General Sir Harry Smith reckoned the rapidity of fire and accuracy of the Sikh gunners equal to those of their French counterparts during the Peninsular War.17 Another officer, present during the siege of Multan in 1848–9, paid the Sikh infantry the highest compliment possible by saying that they charged into battle ‘like Britons’.18

  The taming of the Baluchi tribesmen and the emasculation of Sikh power required three hard-fought campaigns: one against the Sind in 1843, and two against the Sikhs in 1845–6 and 1848–9. All were undertaken by commanders brimming with a self-confidence and an offensive spirit as strong as those of their eighteenth-century predecessors. ‘Never give way to barbarians’ was the motto of General Sir Charles Napier when his 2,400-strong army was faced with 35,000 Baluchis at the battle of Meanee. He placed his men behind barricades of straw bales and kneeling baggage camels, and put his faith in the Irishmen of his only British regiment, the 22nd. They were ‘strong of body, high-blooded, fierce, impetuous soldiers’ who, as he expected, terrified their adversaries with volleys of musketry and bayonet charges.19 Beaten, the amirs submitted and Napier sent his famous punning message to Calcutta, ‘Peccavi’ (I have sinned).

  The victory at Meanee confirmed the by now unshakeable belief that British power in India rested on the stamina and courage of the British soldier. Both qualities were tested to extremes during operations against the

  Sikhs, largely because of the bungling of the commander-in-chief, Lord Gough. He was, according to Sir Harry Smith, ‘a very stupid and obstinate old man’, addicted to head-on charges with what he called, in his Irish brogue, ‘could steel’. Smith feared that his men were not up to rushing the cannon’s mouth since soldiers, like imported dogs and horses, ‘deteriorate from John Bulls after a long residence in the ennervating plains of this relaxing climate’.20

  His fears were well-grounded; after a victory at Aliwal, British troops had to pull back from the Punjab because of the hot season. Nevertheless self-assurance was at a high pitch during the second Sikh campaign; on the eve of the battle of Chillianwala in January 1849 an officer overheard British soldiers discussing the approaching fight ‘in a tone of vaunting superiority’.21 During the contemporary skirmishes in the siege-lines at Multan, Herbert Edwardes was struck by the ferocity of the British soldier in hand-to-hand combat. ‘How like the deadly conflict of the lion and the tiger in a forest den was the grapple of the pale English soldier with the swarthy Sikh.’

  The British soldiers in the Punjab owed some of their strength to the fact that they had been carried some of the distance to the battlefield, in some cases in barges pulled by shallow-draft paddlesteamers. The Indus squadron of steamers, employed in the Sind and Punjab campaigns, was a token of the quickness of the Company to utilise the new technology of the Industrial Revolution. A steamer had been used during the 1824 Burma War to great practical and psychological effect:

  The inhabitants observing the smoke, and hearing the noise, which they had never seen before, fancied we were bringing some infernal engine to destroy them, and ran in all directions towards the plains, carrying with them such light things as they valued.22

  Puzzlement, alarm and dismay were common reactions of many Indians to the many less obvious changes to their lives being introduced by a determined and energetic government. A few tried to avert the new order. Early in 1832, a frightening conspiracy to massacre Europeans had been discovered at Bangalore. The ringleaders had exploited fears that the government was preparing for the mass conversion of Muslims to Christianity. Jolted by this unpleasant reminder of the fragility of British power, the local authorities turned the punishment of the chief culprits into a sombre public display of retribution. Four condemned men, all sepoys, were escorted to the place of execution by military bands playing the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul and were tied to cannon barrels and blown to pieces. According to the superintendent of police, this spectacle ‘struck much terror into all Classes, Civil and Military’, and he felt certain that it would be a long time before further signs of resistance manifested themselves.23

  This incident was quickly dismissed as an example of the waywardness of the native character and the particular naïveté of Muslims, who readily swallowed any rumour, however preposterous. The method of execution, traditional in India, also dramatically illustrated the internal contradictions of a ‘despotism’ which simultaneously boasted its humanity and enlightenment.

  By this time, the spread of Western enlightenment was becoming one of the chief purposes of the government. It was a task for which it was not well-fitted. There was no uniform administration throughout the subcontinent: in the old Company presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay and their dependencies authority was exercised by district judges and collectors, while in other regions, native princes ruled under the guidance of British residents. A considerable part of administrative energy was consumed by the collection of land revenue from the rural peasantry. At the lowest level this was undertaken by local proprietors, the zamindars and taluqdars. Their powers had been confirmed and enhanced during the late eighteenth century when the government wanted to enlist the support of men of substance and influence. Reformers, including Mill, questioned this system, comparing the tax-collectors to leeches. But there was no alternative; in the fiscal year 1856–7, the Indian government’s income was approximately £30 million, of which £16.7 million came from land revenues and nearly £7 million from salt and opium monopolies.

  The raj therefore rested on the ability of its servants to extract the small surpluses made by peasant farmers, who at best lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Their cash provided the wherewithal for schemes designed to transform and regenerate their country. Land taxes funded the schools, and the metalled roads which from 1836 onwards radiated out from and connected the large centres of commerce and administration. Twenty years later, the government’s investment programme included a railway network 3,000 miles in length and linking Calcutta with Delhi, Delhi with Peshawar, and Bombay with Nagpur. By the beginning of 1857 nearly three hundred miles of track had been laid and, in advance of the railway gangs, engineers had criss-crossed the country with 4,000 miles
of telegraph lines.

  Roads, railways and telegraph wires symbolised the irreversible march of progress, probably more than the schools, colleges and teaching hospitals which were springing up in provincial capitals. For Indians who tried to fathom their meaning, these novelties were a source of unease. As the tempo of change quickened and the results began to affect new areas of everyday life, the old, persistent fear of forced conversion became stronger. When, in January 1857, a mob burned down the new telegraph office at Barrackpore, it did so because the building symbolised change imposed from above by an alien power.

  During the winter of 1856–7 two new twists were given to the familiar tale of impending conversion. There was one widely credited report that the cartridges for the new Enfield rifle were greased with a blend of pork and beef fat, and another which alleged that the powdered bones of pigs and cows had been surreptitiously added to ration flour issued to the sepoys of the Bengal army. Both rumours were false, but what mattered was that they gave substance to hitherto vague fears that Christianity was about to be imposed.

  Muslims and high-caste Hindus of the Bengal army were particularly susceptible to misgivings. Their elevated self-esteem had been eroded by new military regulations designed to promote efficiency, and they were perturbed by the new policy of recruitment of the ‘traditional’ warrior races of the Sind and Punjab. Sepoys born in Oude, where soldiering had long been regarded as an honourable occupation for Brahmins, for whom no other source of dignified labour existed, had an additional grievance. In 1853 the province had been peremptorily annexed by the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, who had ridden roughshod over Indian customary law by ignoring the rights of the nawab’s adopted heir, Nana Sahib. This offered further proof that the government would stop at nothing to get its way.

  These undercurrents of apprehension and anger broke surface at Meerut in the last week of May 1857 after sepoys had been publicly humiliated and punished for refusing to touch the by now infamous cartridges. One cavalry and three infantry regiments spontaneously rebelled, ransacked the European cantonment and murdered several officers and their families. The insurgents fled to Delhi, seized the city and proclaimed the aged Badahur Shah, a descendant of the Mughals, Emperor of India. Then the mutineers paused to await the reactions of their countrymen and their rulers.

  The raj had been challenged by its own soldiers with a suddenness which left everyone momentarily dazed. Prestige was at stake and the classic British response would have been a counter-attack, whatever the risks. But no hammer-blow struck Delhi until the second week of June, when a scratch force of 4,000 men, hastily assembled in the Punjab, arrived outside the city walls and began a blockade. Elsewhere administrators and generals decided to sit tight and, like the first mutineers, wait on events. Their pusillanimity was later condemned, but there was little else they could have done given the vast local disparity in numbers between British and Indian troops. In all there were 45,000 white and 232,000 Indian soldiers dispersed across the subcontinent. Of the 23,000 British and 136,000 Indians in Bengal and northern India, nearly all the British were concentrated in the newly annexed Punjab. There were only four white battalions scattered across the potentially disaffected districts, and no local commander was willing to relinquish his only insurance against a sepoy mutiny to attack Delhi.

  So, at Agra, Cawnpore (Kanpur) and Lucknow the British withdrew behind makeshift defences, having wherever possible disarmed any sepoys whose loyalty looked shaky. The spirit of insurrection slowly spread out from Delhi, and by early July there had been uprisings in Aligahr, Benares, Jhansi, Gwalior and Indore. Sepoys attacked and murdered their officers and their wives and children, and they were joined by civilians who had in various ways been losers as a result of recent government changes. The dispossessed, like Nana Sahib and the Rani of Jhansi, were augmented by peasants whose marginal lands were overtaxed, soldiers from the disbanded army of Oude, Muslim holy men, and petty criminals and bandits for whom any collapse of authority was a chance to make a profit. One group, the Gujars, a caste of pastoral nomads living in the neighbourhood of Meerut and Delhi, stole from both sides.24 Everywhere there prevailed a feeling that the raj, like the defenders of the three cities, was at bay.

  It took roughly six weeks for British authority to dissolve throughout the upper Ganges and in the northern areas of central India. Then the Mutiny appeared to lose direction and run out of steam. This was probably inevitable since from the beginning it had lacked both overall leadership and a sense of purpose. Those who revolted were united only in what they hated and, for this reason, converged on the three beleaguered outposts of Agra, Cawnpore and Lucknow. These cities acted like magnets and embroiled the greater number of the rebels in prolonged sieges. At the same time, a large body of mutineers allowed itself to be trapped inside Delhi by a smaller British army. The insurgents’ advantages of surprise and numbers were therefore thrown away. There were two possible explanations for this inertia, the first the fact that perhaps the majority of rebels wanted loot, of which the greatest quantities lay within the cities, and the other was the nature of their movement. It was essentially a jacquerie, whose supporters were hitting back randomly against the figures and symbols of an authority they believed was changing their lives for the worse. They possessed no ideology, beyond Muslim appeals for an anti-British jihad, and from what is known had no alternative system of government for the districts they had temporarily liberated.

  Attempts to enlist allies among magnates outside the immediate area of the outbreak made little headway since they were reluctant to declare themselves until they knew which way the war would go. This depended on the outcome of the sieges. These in turn consumed men who might have been better employed in guerrilla operations against the enemy’s extended and fragile lines of communication to Calcutta. These were left alone and the British were given a breathing space in which to improvise armies and transport them and their supplies to the front in Oude.

  From the end of July British troops began to pour into India. The government had asked for 39,000 from Britain, but these were not expected until the end of the year. In the meantime there were reinforcements from Burma, Mauritius and the China Expeditionary Force, which was diverted to Calcutta. The nature of the revolt made it obvious that white soldiers would restore a white man’s raj, but there was invaluable assistance from Ghurkas and Sikhs, of whom there were 23,000 in arms by the end of the revolt.

  Manpower shortages and innumerable transport hitches made life difficult for the commanders of field armies during the first counter-offensives in June, July and August. It was the hot season and when bullock carts, palanquins, river-boats and elephants were unavailable, men marched. Lieutenant George Barker of the 78th Highlanders, attached to General Sir Henry Havelock’s column between Allahad and Cawnpore, estimated that more men died from sunstroke than mutineers’ fire. Casualties from all causes, but mainly heat exhaustion and dysentery, were exceptionally high during the siege of Delhi, where in four weeks the 52nd Light Infantry were reduced from 600 to 242.

  Only a superhuman will kept men in the field during these and later phases of the campaign. This was fuelled by a universal desire to take revenge on an inhuman foe who had murdered women and children. Worst of all was the mass murder of civilians in Cawnpore, after they had been promised safe conduct by Nana Sahib at the end of June. Prisoners and anyone suspected of sympathising with or assisting the rebels were executed randomly, and at Cawnpore all those implicated in the massacre were defiled or stripped of their caste before being hanged. In the eyes of their captors the rebels were less than wild beasts and many eyewitness accounts of operations used hunting metaphors to describe the fighting. A gunner officer approvingly recorded the actions of a colleague who, on the march near Bareilly, suspected some mutineers of taking refuge in a field of corn. ‘Forming his line precisely as he would have beaten a field of turnips for game, a scene commences which baffles all description: pea fowl, partridges, and Pandie [mutineer
s] rose together: the latter giving the best sport.’25

  Through ruthlessness and iron stamina the British were getting the upper hand by early autumn. The turning point was the capture of Delhi on 19 September, a psychological blow which 30,000 or more rebels had anticipated when they deserted the city in the four weeks before the final assault. Further south, Havelock and General Sir James Outram cut their way through to Cawnpore and relieved Lucknow, but were trapped there by superior numbers of the mutineers. In October, the siege of Agra was raised by a column from Delhi and a month later the garrison and civilian population of Lucknow was evacuated. The war of containment was ending, and as the new year approached preparations were in hand for the campaign of pacification under the new commander-in-chief, General Sir Colin Campbell, a grizzled Glaswegian veteran who had first seen action as a fifteen-year-old ensign in Portugal in 1808.

  1858 saw the crushing of almost all the remaining resistance. Campbell with 20,000 men advanced on Lucknow, which was retaken in March, and smaller-scale subsidiary operations pacified the outlying centres of the revolt, Rohilkhand, Gwalior and Jhansi, whose Amazonian rani was killed in a cavalry skirmish.

  Participants in the war had no doubt as to why the raj had triumphed. One evening during the campaign in Oude, Garnet Wolseley, then a junior officer, had watched some Sikhs exercising with clubs and had been impressed by their physiques and dexterity. He turned to the strongest British soldier in his company and asked if he could match them. ‘No sir,’ was the reply. ‘But I’ll fight any three of those fellows.’ Remembering the episode over forty years later, Wolseley concluded, ‘It is that belief in the superior pluck and fighting qualities of our race that won us India and still enables us to hold it. Had our men no such confidence in themselves we should never have relieved Lucknow nor retaken Delhi.’26 And yet, as his anecdote suggests, there were plenty of Indians willing to stand by the raj.