The Dark Defile
Authors: Diana Preston
CONTENTS
To my husband, Michael
The consequence of crossing the Indus once to settle a government in Afghanistan will be a perennial march into that country.
—THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON, CONQUEROR OF NAPOLEON AND FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER, 1838
In the summer heat of 1839 British forces marched, flags flying, into Kabul to replace Afghanistan’s capable ruler, Dost Mohammed, with another, Shah Shuja, less able and less popular with his subjects but politically more acceptable in British eyes. Two years later, against their expectations, the British army was still mired in Afghanistan. At that time a no-nonsense major experienced an apparition while a senior officer was inspecting his regiment—the Forty-fourth Foot—and recorded it in his diary: “The colours of the regiment are very ragged and when they passed in review I was suddenly startled by what I took to be a large funeral procession. What put such a thing into my head I know not, as I was thinking of very different subjects.”
Britain had sent an army into Afghanistan to protect its position in India, its most important overseas possession. Britain’s involvement in the subcontinent was of long-standing. On the last day of 1600 Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to “the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading in the East Indies.” This became the Honourable East India Company, whose stated purpose was to win a share of the trade with the East—not only India but also China and what is now known as Indonesia—hitherto dominated by the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch. In 1608 Captain William Hawkins of the East India Company arrived on the west coast of India. The Portuguese merchants, established there for nearly a century, were determined to exclude rivals and attempted to waylay and murder Hawkins. However, in April 1609, he reached Agra, capital of the Mogul emperor Jahangir, who then ruled most of India and whose fabulous wealth—exemplified by rubies and emeralds the size of duck eggs—excited cupidity and admiration in equal measure throughout Europe.
Learning of Hawkins’s arrival, Jahangir summoned him. Discovering that he spoke Turkish—“which he himself well understood”—the emperor, who was very curious about the wider world, enjoyed learning about the West from Hawkins. The Englishman was soon in high favor, and Jahangir even found him a wife. Such marks of distinction further worried “the Jesuits and Portugals,” who, Hawkins claimed, “slept not, but by all means sought my overthrow.” Nevertheless, Jahangir granted his request for trading rights for the company, which he permitted to establish a trading station at the port of Surat on the west coast. Other settlements followed—at Madras (Chennai)
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and Calcutta (Kolkata) on the east coast and Bombay (Mumbai) on the west coast. Out in the Indian Ocean, the English navy safeguarded the company’s merchant ships, impressing the Moguls by its ability both to defeat the fleets of European trading rivals and to fight off the increasingly powerful bands of pirates who preyed on ships carrying pilgrims across the Arabian Sea on the hajj to Mecca.
The company gradually prospered through a tripartite trade, bringing Indian products, including opium, to China and importing Chinese goods—in particular tea, not then grown in India, and silk, along with raw Indian cotton—to Britain. In time the British faced a new European rival in India—the French, who in 1664 had formed the French East India Company and who, from their base at Pondicherry, south of Madras, had ambitions to challenge Britain’s growing commercial dominance. By the early eighteenth century the disintegration of the once all-powerful and centralized Mogul empire saw the British and French trading companies competing for allies among the Indian rulers striving to fill the vacuum left by the Mogul collapse. Although their purpose was avowedly commercial, the companies gradually began to control territory either directly or through vassal rulers. Writing in 1842 of this earlier period, Josiah Harlan, an American adventurer in India and Afghanistan, accurately observed that the British, ever ready to avail themselves of India’s internal divisions, “stimulated the naïve chiefs, as the princes of India strove for independence against each other; and carrying out the maxim ‘divide et impera’ [divide and rule] they became the umpires of conflicting governments.”
Political developments at home also affected the trading companies. In the middle of the eighteenth century, France and Britain fought each other in the War of the Austrian Succession and then in the Seven Years’ War, with extensions of those conflicts in India as well as North America, making them perhaps the first world wars. In the early days, the East India Company had shipped modest numbers of soldiers from Britain to protect its property. Recognizing this was no longer sufficient, the company began recruiting soldiers in India, known as
sepoys
(from the Persian word for soldier,
sipahi)
, and founded its own army. By the nineteenth century, with a quarter of a million men, the company’s armies would be second in size among European-led forces only to those of Russia. Under the inspired generalship of Robert Clive and culminating in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, company forces crushed French ambitions, enabling the company to bring huge tracts of India, including Bengal, under its sway. The 1763 Treaty of Paris, which concluded the Seven Years’ War, confirmed British supremacy in India as well as in North America. The Great Mogul had once dictated who was allowed to trade in India and on what terms; now the British would do so. Of the other European powers, only the French and the Portuguese retained toeholds in India.
The view in British ruling political circles, however, was that the company had become too important, too good a potential source of revenue to be allowed to remain independent. Company imports had risen more than threefold between the early 1700s and the 1770s. In 1773 the Regulating Act restrained the activities of senior company officials—the buccaneering, flamboyant
nabobs
who had unscrupulously amassed almost unimaginable personal fortunes through what an official report condemned as “the abandoned lust for universal wealth” in which “every spark and sentiment of public spirit was lost and extinguished.” Then, in 1784, the India Act effectively subordinated the company to the British government, placing it under the newly created Board of Control; of the six men on the board, at least two had to be ministers of the British Crown.
The board’s task was to monitor and, as the name implied, if necessary control the activities of the company’s Court of Directors, which in turn transmitted orders to its officials in India through its Secret Committee. However, the time required for communication—dispatches took at least ten weeks to pass between England and India—was an obstacle to effective decision making from London. Senior officials in India were thus left with a great deal of autonomy, and the company’s fortunes depended heavily on their individual abilities and characters.
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The most senior British official in India was the governor-general, appointed under the terms of the 1784 act by the London government. He was based in Calcutta and was also head of the Bengal presidency. The other two presidencies—in Bombay and Madras—were subordinate to him. Each presidency maintained its own army with “native regiments,” as they were known, of Indian sepoys commanded by British officers and some wholly European regiments. They were supplemented by a much smaller number of regiments of the British army posted to India for tours of duty—“Queen’s regiments.”
If Clive’s victories had set the company upon an imperial path, the military triumphs of the future Duke of Wellington—on behalf of his brother Lord Wellesley, governor-general in India from 1798 to 1805—over the great Tipu Sultan,
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ruler of the southern kingdom of Mysore, and over the once powerful Marathas of central India, completed that journey. Although the British never had any intention to settle in India, as they, the Spaniards and Portuguese had in the Americas, and although there were never more than fifty thousand Britons in the subcontinent of over 90 million people, by the early nineteenth century the company’s writ covered, directly or indirectly, almost two thirds of the subcontinent with a civil and military bureaucracy to match.
In barely more than two centuries India had become pivotal to Britain’s aggressive pursuit of commerce, which, rather than a desire for territory, was the genesis of its growing empire. Additionally, the loss of the American colonies had enhanced India’s status as both a totem and a projection of Britain’s power and prestige, leading the radical politician Edmund Burke to describe the company’s rule in India as “a delegation of the whole power and sovereignty of this kingdom sent into the East.” Emblematic of the importance of commerce and of India to the British is that, having captured many colonies from their European rivals during the Napoleonic wars by dint of their command of the sea, at the end of the conflict they returned most of them. Those they retained protected their maritime mastery and routes to India, including the Cape Colony—the basis of South Africa—seized from the Dutch, and Mauritius and the Seychelles, taken from France.
Well safeguarded as India was by sea, the British became increasingly concerned that it was vulnerable to land invasion. By the early nineteenth century the East India Company had a two-thousand-mile-long northern frontier to defend, stretching from Bengal in the east to the line of the Sutlej River, a tributary of the Indus, in the northwest. To the company’s Court of Directors and Britain’s politicians, some parts of that border appeared more vulnerable than others. To the north and northeast, an inward-looking and isolationist China was no threat, while Nepal, although independent, had in 1815 signed a treaty of friendship with Britain and Nepal’s Gurkha soldiers had become an important element of the East India Company’s army.
However, to the northwest the situation looked potentially more threatening. Immediately beyond the northwestern borders of British India were the two largest Indian territories not yet bound to Britain—the Punjab and Sind—and beyond them, Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan, and beyond them Russia. Of all these, the British perceived the Russians as the greatest threat to India, either directly or through incitement of other of the states to act against the British presence.
OF THE AUTOCRATS who at this time ruled much of continental Europe, Czar Nicholas I of Russia was the greatest and the most inflexible. Under his absolute and rigid rule, Russia remained a feudal society, half of its peasantry owned as serfs by their landlords. The Decembrist Rising at the time of his accession in 1825 had frightened Nicholas, already a man of a military cast of mind who throughout his life slept on a regulation military bed, into a reactionary conservatism. His fellow ruler Queen Victoria summed Nicholas up in the mid-1840s: “He is stern and severe—with fixed principles of duty which nothing on earth will make him change; very clever I do not think him, and his mind is an uncivilised one; his education has been neglected, politics and military concerns are the only things he takes great interest in; the arts and all softer occupations he is insensible to, but he is sincere, I am certain, sincere even in his most despotic acts, from a sense that it is the only way to govern.”