The indus saga, p.30
The Indus Saga, page 30
With the death of Ranjit Singh, the prospects of taking the Punjab had again become real. The British now trained their guns upon it and the Punjab front became live and active.
The First Sikh War (1845) was a clash of peers, though the British emerged with an advantage and dictated the setting up of a ‘sponsored state’ under the ‘supervision’ of Sir Henry Lawrence as Political Agent. The Khalsa was resentful and only the charisma of Lawrence held the arrangement intact. It fell apart in 1848 when he proceeded on leave.
The Second Sikh War (1848-49), encompassing several battles, ended in the rout of the brave Sikh army and the annexation of the Punjab. Yet the defeat of the valiant Khalsa would not have been possible without internal treachery. Gulab Singh, who was rewarded with Kashmir, acted the Mir Jaffar of the Sikhs. But even he could not have persuaded the fearless Khalsa of Ranjit to lay down arms without a fight. It was secretly agreed, therefore, that while the Sikh army was actually engaged in battle with the British troops, it would, at that critical hour, be abandoned with conspicuous exhibition by its own generals. The result of the ensuing Battle of Sobraon was thus a foregone conclusion. Cunningham observed that ‘under such circumstances of discreet policy and shameless treason was the Battle of Sobraon fought’. The Battle of Chailianwala turned out to be a battle of nerves and wits, and the Battle of Gujrat was the last stand. The Punjab was taken by General (later Lord) Gough on 21 February 1849.
The Punjab was the last great battleground of the subcontinent. The Sikh resistance was the last attempt on the part of any indigenous power to resist the inexorable march of industrial imperialism across the vast subcontinent until the War of Independence of 1857. The Punjab had ‘offered the English the fiercest resistance they had yet encountered from Indian soldiers.’26 The fall of the Punjab was the result of Britain’s advances in the fields of industrial production, communications, military strategy, weapons and the intelligent use of modern cartography. The planning of campaigns with the help of contoured maps was not known to India. For the British, the Fane-Garden maps were invaluable and perhaps of critical significance.
Not of the least importance was the ethical aspect. Capitalism had brought with it its own values. The end justified the means. How shocking was this concept to the code of ethics to which the hardy Rajputs, Jats and the Baloch adhered? Battles were meant to be decided in the open field, not by treacherous intrigue. The machinations of the British at Plassey, Seringapatam and Sobraon, the inspired desertions by Jaffar, Sadiq and Gulab Singh were repugnant even to the decadant feudal code. They served the objectives of the emerging bourgeois culture. Markets had to be won at all cost. The end justified the means.27
The British won their battles before the fighting. This was a dreadful prospect which neither Sirajuddaula nor Tipu could have imagined and which the Sikhs were unable to avert. Thus were the Punjab battles lost as had been the battles of Plassey, Seringapatam and Miani.
VI. The exporter becomes an importer
Daleep Singh, born in 1838 to Rani Jindan, was formally recognized as the Raja in 1846, but the Punjab was henceforth to be a ‘subsidiary state’, a status which proved a stepping-stone to formal annexation in 1849. Punjab, the granary of the subcontinent was now under the Union Jack as its most productive region. ‘The revenue surplus derived from the conquest and pacification of the Punjab was so substantial that, even from its first year, the total cost of the two army corps needed to control that turbulent region, in addition to all expenses of civil government, could be paid from it, and still leave a permanent surplus of fifty lacs [5 million rupees] per annum. In addition, British irrigation technology was applied to the Punjab’s fertile soil and soon augmented the region’s yield so greatly that the directors of Leadenhall Street assured Dalhousie of their warmest support.’28
Henceforth, Manchester would not be short of raw cotton and Britain was now to take another giant leap forward. With the consolidation of the Empire, and with the maturing of the Industrial Revolution in England, the expropriation of the raw produce of the subcontinent was still the most profitable activity; ‘but once the Industrial Revolution had been achieved in England with the aid of plunder of India, the new task became to find adequate outlets for the flood of manufactured goods. This necessitated a revolution in the economic system, from the principles of mercantile capitalism to the principles of free-trade capitalism. And this in turn involved a corresponding complete change in the methods of the colonial system.’29
The demands of the new English classes and the dominance of the manufacturing industry over simple commerce required a complete structural change in England’s relationship with the subcontinent, comprising Indus and India. The colonies had to be transformed from exporters of cotton goods to importers of cotton manufactures. The monopolistic trading of the East India Company had to be discarded. Instead, state-sponsored free export of manufactures from England would be facilitated. To some extent, legislation had already enhanced the role of the state in the affairs of the Company. Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773 had provided for the Governor-General, his Council and a Supreme Court. Pitt’s India Act of 1784 had provided for the Secretary of State for India and a Board of Control in London. The monopoly of the Company was ended in 1813.30 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Company had itself become anachronistic. It was time then for the Queen to take the reins of the Raj into her own hands.
The British government would be persuaded to invest the Queen with direct control of the subcontinent only by the great convulsions that shook the empire in 1857.
VII. The subsidiary system
A word about the ‘subsidiary states’ system. This was a pernicious method of expanding British dominion and was typically British. Depending upon how you defined a ‘state’, there were between 300 to 600 princely states in India, varying in size literally from village kingdoms to large nation-states with a population of about eighty million. Many a decadent feudal ruled over these states and their inhabitants. There was little merit in the system and the hegemonic British made full capital out of the intrinsic weakness of the princes.
The concept of subsidiary states initially involved the introduction of a British resident or agent at the head of a substantial force into a friendly Indian state, ostensibly to advise the local raja or nawab and to secure for him continued sovereign authority. Having gained this first advantageous foothold, all manner of pretexts were devised to swing an effective palace coup d’etat and to annex the state. Combinations of intrigue, bribery, promise and savagery precipitated events which the ruler was incapable of tackling with his own depleted resources and energies. At an opportune time, the sovereign was accused of misgovernment of his state or repression of his subjects. Britain then ‘reluctantly’ intervened in the interest of both; else the state merely ‘lapsed’ to the British Empire upon failure of a direct descendant of the ruler.
The exponents of the Raj, gripped by a contemporary nostalgia for it, exult unabashedly in Dalhousie’s ‘benevolent policies’ which, according to Spear, were ‘capped by his most spectacular measures, the annexation of the Indian States.’31 The moral justification was readily improvised: ‘Dalhousie considered British rule so superior to Indian that the more territory directly administered by the British the better it would be for the Indian people.’32 There is no attempt to veil this, even when most of the instances of misgovernment can be attributed directly to the machinations of the British Residents themselves.
Under the subsidiary system, power was in the hands of the British government. Often, even the ministers were imposed upon the ruler by the British Resident. Not infrequently, they were themselves British officials. The subsidiary states could not normally employ British subjects without the permission of the imperial government. The rulers had to act on the advice of the Resident in all important matters. Since the selection and appointment of governesses for the grooming of young princes was certainly considered important, even governesses were often supplied by the Raj. In the words of James Morris, ‘Moulded by nannies, tutors, advisers, the example of visiting officials and perhaps the schooling of Eton and Oxford, many of the princes became quasi-Englishmen themselves - English aristocrats buffed to an oriental polish.’33 The Oxford-educated prince, in turn, was all the more dependent upon the ‘advice and counsel’ of the imperial Resident. The ruler of the subsidiary state thus had a constricted role. Yet the entire responsibility for good governance and efficient administration was placed upon the ruler. The Residents ‘had the harlot’s privilege of having power without responsibility.’34
Henry Lawrence, the British Resident in Lahore and the architect of the ‘Punjab system’35 of administration, noted, (after the first Sikh War), that the system was conducive only to bad government. Having observed firsthand the functioning of the system, he wrote: ‘If there was a device for ensuring mal-government, it is that of the native ruler and minister both relying upon foreign bayonets and directed by a British Resident.’36 Thirty years before him, Sir Thomas Munro had been no less critical when he had remarked: ‘Wherever the subsidiary system is introduced, unless the reigning prince be a man of great abilities, the country will soon bear the marks of it in decaying villages and decreasing population.’36 By the frequent employment of this system and the unprincipled reliance upon the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’, Dalhousie alone annexed eight states, including that still prestigious Muslim state of Awadh (1856).
By the time the last and most important war between the two systems (an agrarian and feudal India versus an industrial and imperial Britain) broke out, Britain already had the vast subcontinent almost entirely under its flag. The last imperial descendant of Babar and Akbar, the last in the line of the House of Taimur, Abu Ghazi Zafar Sirajuddin Muhammad Bahadur Shah II, reduced to a feeble pensionary, retained a merely titular sovereignty and little more than a palace backyard for his kingdom.
This is when the War of Independence or the Uprising - which the British call ‘The Mutiny’ - broke out in 1857.
1. Aijazuddin, Lahore, 13.
2. Chapter 13, section IV, and chapter 15, section III.
3. Misl was originally applied to a unit of the Sikh army, but later also came to designate separate sub-groups of the Sikh nation.
4. Mason, A Matter of Honour, 228.
5. C. Grey, European Adventurers of Northern India: 1785-1849, (1st ed. 1929) 29.
6. Ibid., 83.
7. For an interesting account of the visit, see Michael Edwardes, Playing the Great Game, (1975) 21 ff.
8. Burnes, A Visit to the Court of Sinde, 121.
9. Ibid., 75.
10. Ibid., 131.
11. James Morris, Pax Britannica: The Climax of the Empire (1979) 359.
12. Wolpert, New History, 224.
13. Ibid., 224.
14. Spear, History of India, II, 104 (Emphasis added.)
15. Passes.
16. Mason, 228.
17. Burnes, A Visit to the Court of Scinde, 74. How aptly these words may apply to some of our rulers in contemporary times!
18. Ibid., 114.
19. Gankovsky, 119-20.
20. Wolpert, New History, 218.
21. Ali, Sindh Observed, 131.
22. For accounts of the battle of Miani, see chapter 20, section V. The battle of Dubba, near Hyderabad, was merely the final, less significant act of the formalization of the English victory in Sindh.
23. See Awan, 59-61.
24. Who gave his name to the town of Jacobabad.
25. Who is remembered in a Karachi landmark, the Mereweather Tower.
26. Grey, European Adventurers, 17.
27. How abhorrent was Shivaji’s disposal of the Bijapur general, Afzal Khan, who had been lured into a fatal embrace with steel claws in 1659? Feudal India had considered it treacherous. And even though Shivaji had Rajasthan, he was considered a brigand by many of his feudal contemporaries. His cult was revived in the late nineteenth century with the development of the Hindu bourgeoisie: those early Indian industrialists who considered feudal values old-fashioned.
28. Wolpert, New History, 226.
29. Dutt, India Today, 112.
30. Ibid., 99.
31. Spear, History of India,141.
32. Ibid..
33. Morris, 272.
34. Nehru, Discovery, 329.
35. A system in which the local English administrator had greater autonomy, settling lands upon the cultivator rather than on tribal chiefs, opening up the interior with roads, railways and rural market towns, collecting revenue, acquiring and allotting land, and meting out a rough and ready justice. See Spear, History of India, 138-9.
35. Nehru, Discovery, 328.
36. Ibid., 329.
22
1857
I. 9 May 1857
For a decade after the annexation of the Punjab, the pride of the British army had been the Bengal regiments. Most of the men and non-commissioned officers were drawn from the areas of the present-day Uttar Pradesh of India. They served the British, but retained a notional allegiance to the titular king of Awadh and the pensionary emperor of India.
King Wajid Ali was deposed in 1856, again in violation of a treaty that had subsisted for more than half a century. Troops were moved from Kanpur to Lucknow. Most of them were his ‘subjects’. But the king disappointed even his adversaries. Not a shot was fired. Wajid Ali appeared in mourning robes to place his imperial turban in the hands of Sir James Outram, the Chief Commisioner. He pleaded like a tearful supplicant for his ‘rights and privileges’. When these were denied, he quietly left for Calcutta to plead his case before the Governor-General. Disappointed, he left for London, never to be reinstated. Even the Awadh soldier serving the Company had expected more from his ‘King’. But whatever he may have thought of him, ‘the annexation of Awadh undermined the Bengal Army’s faith in the Raj that it served.’1
There was soon another irritant. In the same year, Lord Canning,2 promulgated the General Service Enlistment Act. This made possible the posting of the Company’s soldiers anywhere, even far beyond the confines of their own home provinces. There had already been a financial set-back to the sepoys of the Bengal Army whose domicile was Awadh and the present-day Uttar Pradesh. They had fought with the British to subjugate the Punjabis. As long as the Punjab was outside the Company’s territories, they had been entitled to extra pay. On the annexation of the Punjab, the auditor general held back the extra emoluments. It was difficult for the sepoys to comprehend this as a prize for their loyalty to the Company and the victories that they had secured for it. Already, disaffection was afoot.
‘There is a most mysterious affair going on through the whole of India at present,’ an Englishman had written home in March 1857. ‘No one seems to know the meaning of it . . . It is not known where it originated, by whom or for what purpose, whether it is supposed to be connected with any religious ceremony or whether it has to do with some secret society. The Indian papers are full of surmises as to what it means . . . It is called the “chupatty movement”.’3 Any man receiving a chupatty4 was expected to send more out to other people. It was an unending relay. It was a reaffirmation of the solidarity of the disaffected individuals. The one who received a chupatty, and those to whom he sent other chupatties, were supposed to be of the same mind. By one estimate, these were being distributed ‘over a distance of between 160 and 200 miles in a single night.’5
The loyalty of the sepoys was already under strain when the issue of the new breach-loading Enfield rifles and their lubricated cartridges broke out. It was believed by the largely Hindu and Muslim sepoys that the cartridges had been greased with cow and pig fat. By the motions of the prescribed drill, the soldiers were required to bite the ends off with their teeth. Soldiers of both communities, Hindus and Muslims, were outraged at the prospect.
On 9 May 1857,85 sepoys of the 3rd Light Cavalry, the 11th and 20th Native Infantry, the first battalion of the 60th Rifles, the 6th Dragoon Guards, a troop of horse artillery, a company of foot artillery, and a light field battery, stationed at Meerut, both Muslims and Hindus, who had refused to handle the cartridges, were disarmed and humiliated as an example for the others. They were stripped of their uniforms and their shoes. Each one had his ankles shackled. The humiliation was unbearable for all the other sepoys present. The next day, they all ‘mutineed’. The prisoners were freed by the sepoy regiments, and most of the Englishmen and their families in the Meerut cantonment were put to death. The ‘insurgents’ then headed for Delhi.
The Delhi sepoy regiments rose and occupied the cantonment. The feeble Bahadur Shah II was ‘restored’ as ‘Emperor’ of India. It was not until 20 September, after storming Delhi from the Kashmiri Gate, that the British won back the city. The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, was arrested from the tomb of his great predecessor, Humayun, outside Delhi. Confined to prison, he was displayed to European visitors and was tried on charges, inter alia, of’not regarding his allegiance as a British subject, and having allowed himself to be proclaimed as the reigning king and sovereign of India.’ In 1859, he was sentenced to transportation to Rangoon, where he spent his days composing poetry till he died at the age of eighty-seven:
KITNA HAI BADNAZEEB ZAFAR DAFN KAY LIYAY
DO GAZ ZAMEEN BHI NA MILLI KOO-AY YAAR MAIN
How unfortunate is Zafar: when it came to his burial
He did not obtain even two yards of space in the land of his beloved.
II. A compliment returned
British dominance through the war of 1857 implied the destruction of a centuries-old static agrarian lifestyle. Success in commerce and industry, instead of the feudal criteria of descent or family heritage, determined social status under the new system. Demonstrable competence in an entire spectrum of new jobs, particularly concerned with supporting Britain’s expropriationary policies, gradually became more significant than inherited legacies. For the first time in almost three thousand years, the fabric of society and the edifice of caste was in actual jeopardy.
