The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (19 page)

BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

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His blood upâand expecting the emirs to strikeâhe struck first at the Battle of Meanee; or, actually, the first thing he struck was the head of a native beating a camel (cruelty to animals, of course, being something that no Englishman can tolerate). With that hand throbbing with pain (and holding his horse's reins), his other gripping his father's sword, the sixty-year-old general led his men into battle outnumbered ten to one, and brought them charging to victory in fierce hand-to-hand combat; a battalion (almost entirely Irish) of the 22nd Regiment cheered him during the action and after, which became one of his proudest memories. Having defeated more than 22,000 Baluchis at Meanee (17 February 1843), a month later he smashed another 26,000 at the Battle of Hyderabad (24 March 1843) and sealed his conquest, immortalized by
Punch
with the caption “
Peccavi
” (Latin for “I have sinned”), which is what much liberal opinion in England believed Napier had done. Everything Napier did was steeped in political controversy, but his conquest of Sind, which was duly annexed, was undeniably a first-class bit of soldiering.

The Napier Way

“The great receipt for quieting a country is a good thrashing first and great kindness afterwards: the wildest chaps are thus tamed.”

General Sir Charles Napier, quoted in Lieutenant-General Sir William Napier,
The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, G.C.B.
(John Murray, 1857), vol. III, p. 34

Even better, having shattered the power of the emirs (who had dreamt of parading Napier in chains), he was given Sind to govern: “Now I shall work at Sind as in Cephalonia, to do good, to create, to improve, to end destruction and raise up order.”
¹⁰Napier's justice was not impartial; he made it a rule always to favor the poor. His sharp sense of irony and mordant
humor usually saved him from platitudes, but not always. Sometimes his liberalism got the better of him, as in this peroration:

People think, and justly sometimes, that to execute the law is the great thing; they fancy this to be
justice
. Cast away details, good man, and take what the people call justice, not what the laws call justice, and execute that. Both legal and popular justice have their evils, but assuredly the people's justice is a thousand times nearer to God's justice. Justice must go with the people, not against the people; that is the way to govern nations, and not by square and compass.
¹¹

Which is all very well and good, but Napier, the champion of the people's justice, later exclaimedâafter a countryman killed Napier's dog and a jury of the countryman's peers refused to convict himâ“Trial by jury is a farce!”
¹²So much for the people's justice.

What really suited Napier was not the people's justice, but Napier's justice executed on the people's behalf. Indeed, he often dreamt of unlimited power and what he would do with it, as a potentate of the East or dictator of Ireland, in which he would both champion freedom of the pressâand hang editors who opposed him! But Napier's justice could also be glorious, as when he abolished suttee, the Hindu tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Imposing the British Christian value on womenârather higher than the 200-rupee price he believed was the going rate for a woman in Sindâwasn't easy: “There is only one crime I cannot put downâwife killing! They think to kill a cat or a dog is wrong, but I have hanged at least six for killing women: on the slightest quarrel she is chopped to pieces.... I will hang 200 unless they stop.”
¹³In part to make sure they did stop, his government was in essence a military government, staffed with fellow officers, because Napier distrusted old India hands among the civil
servantsâhe thought them sleek careerists gone native. But he couldn't buck them entirely because he was himself employed by the British East India Company, the de facto ruler of much of India. It was a relationship doomed to fail, not only given Napier's inevitable impatience with restraint and superiors, but because of his utter contempt for men driven by profit rather than the martial virtues and the Napier vision of justice.

Napier credited his success in pacifying Sind to six factors: he put down crime; he showed the people who had fought against him that he respected their military prowess (a very British imperial notion this, that the best fighters against you are the ones you respect and want at your side); those who surrendered had their property restored to them (sometimes with interest); the poor were given justice; the emirs' flunkeys were retained, though strictly supervised; and British power was made manifest so that it was clear that any rebellion would be instantly quashed.

The recipe was good, but his years governing Sind were not nearly so satisfying as those spent in Cephalonia (Napier once said that he “would rather have finished the roads in Cephalonia than have fought Austerlitz or Waterloo”
¹⁴) and were tinged with disappointment (missing the First Sikh War), frustration with the East India Company bureaucracy, and tragedy (a cholera epidemic among whose victims was his nephew). In 1847, dogged by his old wounds and new disabilities and his wife's ill health, he resigned and returned to England (after a recuperative period in the South of France).

Multiculturalism, Napier-Style

Napier to Brahmin priests protesting his ban on widow-burning: “This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to our national customs.”

Quoted in Byron Farwell,
Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory
(W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), pp. 93â94

He wasn't home long. When news of the Battle of Chillianwala (13 January 1849 in the Second Sikh War) reached England as either a narrow, costly victory or an embarrassing setback, there was a clamor for a new commander to succeed General Sir Hugh Gough. The Duke of Wellington, against the fervent opposition of the East India Company, recommended Napier, telling him finally, “If you don't go, I must.”
¹⁵Napier went. But by the time he arrived, gallant old Sir Hugh (himself sixty-nine years old) had recovered matters and pounded the Sikhs into submission and the Punjab was annexed to Britain (as Napier thought should have been done at the end of the First Sikh War). The Sikhs then became among the best and most loyal troops the British had.

Napier, having missed the action, nevertheless arrived as commander in chief for India. Inevitably, having first struck up a liking for the governor-general Lord Dalhousie, he chafed under his supervision, and resigned his command in 1850. Napier died in England in 1853. He provided his own best epitaph towards the end of his service in India, when he dreamt of returning home, writing that he would look at his “father's sword, and think of the day he gave it into my young hands, and of the motto on a Spanish blade he had, âDraw me not without cause; put me not up without honour.' I have not drawn his sword without cause, nor put it up without honour.”
¹⁶Indeed notâand while Napier's justice might have been idiosyncratic and rough and ready, to his mind it was the administration of such justice that vindicated the British Empire and that made him, in good conscience, its military servant.

Part IV

INDIA

Chapter 11

THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN

T
he British East India Company (or John Company, in its popular moniker), was the sort of company you'd like to work forâit had its own army, its own navy, its own Anglican church, its own courts, its own ambassadors and civil service, and it governed a fifth of the world's population. It was a curiosity and a wonder, as was recognized even at the time by such observers as Thomas Babington Macaulay, member of Parliament, man of letters, and one of the most important figures in the shaping of British India. He had it precisely right when he addressed the House of Commons in 1833:

It is strange, very strange, that a joint-stock society of traders . . . should be intrusted with the sovereignty of a larger population, the disposal of a larger clear revenue, the command of a larger army, than are under the direct management of the Executive Government of the United Kingdom. But what constitution can we give to our Indian Empire which shall not be strange.... That Empire is itself the strangest of all political anomalies. That a handful of adventurers from an island in the Atlantic should have subjugated a vast country divided from the place of their birth by half the globe; a country which at no very distant period was merely the subject of fable to the nations of Europe; a country never before violated by the most renowned of Western conquerors; a country which Trajan never entered; a country lying beyond the point where the phalanx of Alexander refused to proceed; that we should govern a territory ten thousand miles from us, a territory larger and more populous than France, Spain, Italy, and Germany put together, a territory, the present clear revenue of which exceeds the present clear revenue of any state in the world, France excepted; a territory inhabited by men differing from us in race, colour, language, manners, morals, religion; these are prodigies to which the world has seen nothing similar. Reason is confounded. We interrogate the past in vain. General rules are useless where the whole is one vast exception. The Company is an anomaly; but it is part of a system where every thing is anomaly. It is the strangest of all governments; but it is designed for the strangest of all empires.
¹

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