The Hindus (103 page)

The best pun in the history of Raj, one that reveals a number of rather serious aspects of colonialism, is attributed to General Sir Charles James Napier.

Napier was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujarat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire. Mountstuart Elphinstone (formerly Governor of Bombay) likened the British in Sind after the defeat in Afghanistan to “A bully who had been kicked in the streets and went home to beat his wife.”
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The British press described this military operation at the time as “infamous,”
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a decade later as “harsh and barbarous” and a “tragedy,” while the
Bombay Times
accused Napier of perpetrating a mass rape of the women of Hyderabad.
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The successful annexation of Sind made Napier’s name “a household word in England. He received £70,000 as his share of the spoils”
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and was knighted. In 1851 he quarreled with Dalhousie (the Governor-General) and left India.

In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title “Foreign Affairs”:

The joke here (well, it’s a British joke) depends upon the translation of the Latin word
peccavi,
which is the first person singular of the past tense, active voice, of the verb
pecco, peccare
(“to sin”), from which are derived our English words “impeccable” (someone who never sins) and “peccadillo” (a small sin). Thus the double meaning is “I have sinned” (that is, “I have committed a moral error”) and “I have Scinde” (that is, “I have gained possession of a place called Scinde”). Got it?

The story caught on. In a play published in 1852, a character named Sir Peter Prolix recites, at a dinner party, the following doggerel:

The story has been told and retold in history books ever since. A 1990 biography of Sir Charles actually entitled
I Have Sind
cites it three times,
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and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
online (2008) says that Napier “is said to have sent a dispatch consisting of one word, ‘Peccavi’ (Latin: ‘I have sinned’—i.e., ‘I have Sind’).”

But all evidence indicates that Sir Charles Napier never dispatched such a message. The passage about Caesar and Napier is not from the
Times
of London but from the comic journal
Punch
(1844, v. 6, 209), whose editors evidently made it up and also represented him as confessing that he had sinned in that his actions had raised such a storm of criticism in England.
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The authors of the
Punch
item may have been inspired by another apocryphal historical anecdote, which was linked with the
peccavi
story as early as 1875 and was in circulation for some time before that; it tells us that someone who had witnessed the defeat of the Spanish Armada announced it with one word: “Cantharides,” the Latin and pharmaceutical name of the allegedly aphrodisiac drug known as the Spanish fly.
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(Another British joke.) So it is not Napier’s text, but it is a British text—a lie but a text—with a history of its own; it is a kind of nineteenth-century urban legend, a myth. Salman Rushdie retold the story in
Shame,
referring to his “looking-glass” Pakistan as “Peccavistan,” though he calls the story apocryphal, bilingual, and fictional.
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The shift from the text of history to the hypertext of journalism is significant; the idea of the sin was initially a writer’s idea, not a general’s. With this in mind, let us unpack the myth a bit more.

Besides the two meanings I’ve mentioned (“I have conquered a part of India” and “I have committed a moral error”), there is a third, which we discover if we heed the good advice of Marshall McLuhan, who taught us that the medium is the message, for the medium in this case is Latin. That third message signifies something like “Let’s say it in Latin, which we Oxbridge types, English upper classes, know, and the natives do not, though they know English, which we taught them.” Stephen Jay Gould, who takes the anecdote as history, remarks: “In an age when all gentlemen studied Latin, and could scarcely rise in government service without a boost from the old boys of similar background in appropriate public schools, Napier never doubted that his superiors . . . would properly translate his message and pun: I have sinned.”
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And when Priscilla Hayter Napier told the story (as history, not myth) she remarked, “Possibly this was when he sent his celebrated message—
‘Peccavi,’
which, in the Latin every educated man had then at his command, means ‘I have sinned.’ ”
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Latin here functions as a code that the bearers of the message will not understand. Yet even
Punch,
which invented the story, glossed it in English, realizing that some of its readers might not have been educated in good schools and therefore might not know Latin.

But it is the second meaning of
peccavi
, the meaning of “sin” as moral error, that is most relevant here.
^kh
Though Sir Charles apparently never said (or wrote)
peccavi,
he seems to have had a sense that he had sinned in Sind. When he was posted there, he wrote: “We have no right to seize Sind, yet we shall do so and a very advantageous piece of rascality it will be.”
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“Rascality” is a rather flip way to refer to the murder of many people defending their own land, but afterward he wrote, speaking of his ambition, “I have conquered Scinde but I have not yet conquered myself.”
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Napier was also surprisingly sensitive to the disintegration of the sepoy-officer relationship after 1813, when the first wave gave way to the second. Years before 1857, he expressed regret that the older type of officers who “wrestled” with their sepoys were being replaced by men who did not know the sepoys’ languages and practices and who readily addressed the latter as “nigger”
^ki
or “suwar” (pig).
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He was also aware of the British complicity in the negative role of caste: “The most important thing which I reckon injurious to the Indian army, is the immense influence given to caste; instead of being discouraged, it has been encouraged in the Bengal army; in the Bombay army it is discouraged; and that army is in better order than the army of Bengal, in which the Brahmins have been leaders in every mutiny.”
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But Napier was also capable of equivocating, as when he wrote of the Sind campaign: “I may be wrong, but I cannot see it, and my conscience will not be troubled. I sleep well while trying to do this, and shall sleep sound when it is done.”
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This last phrase is almost verbatim what Harry Truman said after the bombing of Hiroshima: “I never lost any sleep over my decision.”
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The sense of sin is not usually a part of the discussion of the story of Napier in India, but it may indicate a moment when some of the British felt moral ambivalence about their conquest of India and, perhaps, when we ourselves should feel morally ambivalent about the British. The list of massacres and degradations that I selected for my cavalry charge through the history of the Raj, England’s greatest hits (in the Mafia sense of hits), is what Indian logicians call the first side (
purva paksha
), establishing good reasons to hate the British. I should like now to try to nuance that view a little, to aim for a more balanced hate-love toward them.

The Freudian and post-Freudian Marxist agendas tell us to look for the subtext, the hidden transcript, the censored text; the Marxist and to some extent the Freudian assumption is that this subtext is less respectable, more self-serving, but also more honest, more real than the surface text. In India the British surface text—“We are bringing civilization to these savages”—reveals a subtext: “We are using military power to make England wealthy by robbing India.” But there are more than two layers to any agenda, and we mustn’t assume that it’s self-interest all the way down. The
peccavi
anecdote suggests that beneath the subtext of self-interest may lie at least a slightly nobler self-perception, a place where guilt is registered. And perhaps, beneath that, there may be yet another layer, an admiration of India, a desire to learn from India, perhaps even a genuine, if misguided, desire to give India something in return, still surviving, bloody but unbowed, from the first wave of Orientalists.

If we ask, What did the Hindus get out of the Raj besides poor? the answer, in part, is the mixed blessing of certain social and legal reforms, which reinforced the native reform movements already under way. Most of the giants of the independence movement—Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Dadabhai Naoroji, and others—studied abroad, generally in London.
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But they also got, as they did from the Mughals, the complicated legacy symbolized by horses, now more complex than ever.

Horses were, you will not be surprised to learn, a problem for the British in India. Some horses were bred well in India; in 1860 a Captain Henry Shakespear, who had bred horses in the Deccan for many years, insisted that “no foreign horse that is imported into India . . . can work in the sun, and in all weathers, like the horse bred in the Deccan.”
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But the native Indian forces that opposed the British kept most of the best horses for themselves, and only a small fraction of the worst horses reached the horse fairs in the east, where the British were in control.
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There was therefore, as usual, the problem of importing horses (most of them being shipped in from New South Wales, hence called Walers); shipping such fragile and valuable cargo “in a pitching East Indiaman on a six-month journey halfway round the world” was a costly and risky venture, and British horses became even more scarce, and even more expensive, when so many of them were used in the Napoleonic Wars.
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(They imported dogs too; one Englishman in 1614 ordered from England mastiffs, greyhounds, spaniels, and small dogs, three of each, cautioning the importer that dogs were difficult to transport.
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) Occasionally, exporting, rather than importing, horses also became a problem. Sir Charles Napier was crazy about a half-Arabian horse named Blanco, “perfectly white,” whom he rode, talked to, and talked about for sixteen years. Sparing no expense, Napier had tried to ship the old horse home like a pensioned-off Indian civil servant, to spend his final days out at grass—good pasturage at last. But Blanco died in the Bay of Biscay while being, against the usual current, exported from Portugal to England.
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At the same time, itinerant native horse traders, who were often highway robbers in their spare time (the equine equivalent of used car salesmen), posed an even greater threat as a kind of underground espionage network, a cosmopolitan culture that had its own esoteric language, a mixture of various local dialects combined with a special jargon and an extensive code of hand signs, exchanged during the actual bargaining at the fair, mainly concealed under a handkerchief.
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In recorded British history, horse breeding, spying, and Orientalism combined in the character of William Moorcroft, a famous equine veterinarian. In 1819, the British sent him to Northwest India, as far as Tibet and Afghanistan, on a quixotic search for “suitable cavalry mounts.”
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Moorcroft had seen mares from Kutch that he thought might be right for the army, and he was granted official permission “to proceed towards the North Western parts of Asia, for the purpose of there procuring by commercial intercourse, horses to improve the breed within the British Province or for military use.”
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But he also collected information on military supplies and political and economic conditions obtaining at the borders of the Raj,
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and shortly before his mysterious final disappearance in 1824, he was briefly imprisoned in the Hindu Kush on suspicion of being a spy. Moorcroft had delusions of Orientalism; he told a friend that he would have disguised himself “as a Fakeer” rather than give up his plan, and after he was lost, presumed dead, in August 1825, legends circulated about “a certain Englishman named Moorcroft who introduced himself into Lha-Ssa, under the pretence of being a Cashmerian” or who spoke fluent Persian “and dressed and behaved as a Muslim.” The final piece of Orientalism in his life was posthumous: From 1834 to 1841 his papers were edited not by a military or political historian but by Horace Hayman Wilson, secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford. According to his biographer, Moorcroft was thrilled by the stories he heard “from the north-western horse-traders—swarthy, bearded men like Kipling’s Mahbub Ali.”
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But Kipling created Mahbub Ali—a Muslim horse trader who works secretly for the master spy Colonel Creighton—fifty years after the publication of Moorcroft’s papers, and aspects of the characters of Creighton, Mahbub Ali, and Kim himself may have been inspired by Moorcroft. Kim is the son of a British soldier (a disreputable Irishman named O’Hara, already a marginal figure in the British world, who married an Irish nursemaid), but he masquerades sometimes as a Hindu, sometimes as a Muslim, and Mahbub Ali, a Tibetan lama, and Colonel Creighton all claim him as their son.