The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (20 page)

This strangest of all empires is what most people now think of when they think of the British Empire—they think of the British Raj, the jewel in the crown, pig-sticking and curry, Kipling and the Great Game, railroads and vast white palaces, tea and polo, sunburnt majors and sundowners on the verandah. It was all that and more. Bliss was it in that dawn to be
alive, but to be a Briton in India—if you survived the tropical diseases, the mutiny, the Thugs, and the rebellious tribesmen—was very heaven. And it all started with a merchant company granted a royal charter in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth. The East India Company sought trade throughout East Asia, particularly the Spice Islands, and competed (and fought) against rival merchant powers, including the Portuguese and the Dutch; later, the French and even the Danes and the Swedes (in the eighteenth century) were involved.

India was ruled (for the most part) by the Islamic Mughal Empire whose emperors—Turko-Mongol by blood, Persian by culture, governing a largely Hindu people—granted British merchants trading rights and the right to establish outposts on the Indian subcontinent. The British were not the first to have such footholds: Portugal had been on the subcontinent for a century and the Dutch for a few years before the British. Over the course of the seventeenth century British outposts came to include Surat, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. It was England's jolly King Charles II who gave the East India Company a new charter that set it on its unique course, granting it virtually unlimited powers to trade, govern, and expand its Indian holdings. Seventy years later, long after the crown had shifted from the Stuarts to the House of Hanover, an unlikely hero took full advantage of what King Charles had ordained.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Mughal Empire was in manifest rapid decay. Filling the breach, when it was not filled by anarchy
and warlords, were the good offices of the British East India Company, the French at Pondicherry, as well as a variety of Hindu princes and confederacies of Mahrattas in central India, Jats in Rajasthan, and Sikhs in the Punjab. In 1739, Persians invaded India and occupied (and massacred the inhabitants of) Delhi, even stealing the famed peacock throne of the Mughal emperors; and Afghans repeatedly rampaged through northern India.

With dominance in the subcontinent up for grabs, princely states allied with each other or with the British East India Company or the French East India Company (which gained concessions of land for lending troops and officers) in wars of conquest. Sometimes the French and the British fought each other directly with Indian allies. Mahrattas, Afghans, and others hired themselves out as mercenaries; and European officers found themselves in demand as mercenaries for the princely states, which might have artillery and muskets like the Europeans, but could not match their military discipline or leadership (though some of them did try to copy their uniforms). One dramatic instance of European officer prowess came from Captain Eustachius De Lannoy of the Dutch East India Company, who was captured by the maharajah of Travancore after the Battle of Colachel in 1741. The maharajah spared the Dutchman's life in exchange for the captain's commitment to train and lead the maharajah's men in the Dutch way of war, which “the great captain,” as he came to be known, did with notable success, helping the maharajah to expand his holdings in southwest India.

But the most important adventurer in India at this time was a lowly clerk named Robert Clive of the East India Company, soon to spring to renown as “Clive of India” for his military genius and accession to wealth as an Indian nabob. Without formal military training, he took part in the company's military actions against the French, and proved himself a courageous
soldier and capable leader of Indian troops. In 1751, he captured the city of Arcot and then held it, vastly outnumbered, against a fifty-day siege by French-allied Indians. Clive had entered the action as a clerk who doubled as a soldier. He left it as a hero.

He was a hero soon called upon by the Company. In 1756, the young Muslim, anti-British (and not much liked by his Hindu subjects) Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ad-daula, sacked Calcutta; his officers stuffed 146 prisoners—Englishmen, Anglo-Indians, and one woman—into a dark cell fourteen feet wide and eighteen feet long. There was no space to move, for much of the time no water to drink, temperatures soared to over a hundred degrees, air seemed scarce and eventually so too did any chance of surviving. The prisoners were kept in the suffocating heat for ten hours before the nawab could be roused to order their release. By that time, there were only twenty-three survivors, three of whom were held to extract ransom from the East India Company.
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Vengeance was called for, and Clive was asked to deliver it. Calcutta was regained New Year's Day 1757; next for Clive was toppling the nawab. On 23 June 1757, at the Battle of Plassey, Clive brought 3,000 men, two-thirds of them sepoys, against more than 50,000 troops of the nawab and utterly routed them. Siraj-ad-daula was killed by the new British-approved nawab, and the East India Company had become the kingmakers of Bengal.

When a successor nawab prepared to attack the British, the Company struck first, and at the Battle of Buxar (22 October 1764) won another smashing victory. The British were outnumbered more than two to one and facing
modern artillery manned by European mercenaries. But British audacity, bravery, and intrepidity—and dogged, disciplined infantry—won the day. If Plassey made the East India Company kingmakers, Buxar made Bengal a company province.

By the end of the Seven Years' War (1754–63), France's position in India was reduced to a few trading enclaves that existed under British toleration. The real question was whether the East India Company or Parliament should rule India. For what had begun as another free market imperial adventure had become admixed with a sense of British responsibility. The East India Company paid a subvention to support the Royal Navy, but more important was extracting a commitment from the Company to govern according to British principles. Parliament wanted to ensure the Company did not topple native despotisms only to put its own rapacity in their place (the nouveaux riches nabobs were a bad advertisement for the Company); and Parliament did not want the native corruptions of the East to become the acceptable corruptions of Englishmen who served there.

To this end, the India Act of 1784 merged the authority of the East India Company with that of Parliament through a Board of Control. It brought some government regulation and supervision, but the burden on the Company was light. It was, in fact, largely moral. The goal was to ensure that British rule in India was conducted with probity and honor, and with a respect for Indian traditions and civilization, the study of which became an avocation of the more scholarly of the Company's men.

The Company believed its power rested on its prestige—especially as there were so few Englishmen and so many Indians—and that prestige was secured by military victories that swayed rajahs; the policy was “no retreat,” which in fact became a forward policy of annexation when native rulers
misbehaved, and there were plenty of French mercenary officers about to encourage them to misbehave. Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, was fiercely anti-British and did not need much encouragement; he styled himself a Muslim warrior and an ally of Revolutionary France.
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Fittingly, Tipu was given his just deserts by, among other serving officers, Arthur Wellesley—a dab hand at subduing both rebellious Indians and revolutionary and imperial French.

British India grew with the conquest of Nepal (1816), the defeat of the Mahrattas in central India (1818), and peace-keeping operations from Burma to Afghanistan. Aside from keeping native rulers in check, there developed “the Great Game”—the rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia. The British, ever wary of Russian inroads into India, especially through the Khyber Pass, kept up an extraordinary network of spies and soldier sahibs who could pass for natives—and pass sometimes alarming news to the British governor-general.

One consequence of the Company's “forward” policy—encapsulated by Clive's admonition that “to stop is dangerous, to recede is ruin”—was that India's borders kept advancing—north all the way to Kashmir, bordering China; west all the way to Aden where the Arabian Sea meets the Red Sea; south to Ceylon; and east to Burma. One particular sore point was Afghanistan—a potential Russian invasion route. The Afghan emir Dost Muhammad worried the British by dallying with the Russians, and a Russian-Persian attack on western Afghanistan seemed proof of Russia's aggressive intent. In 1839, British troops invaded the raucous tribal state to punish Dost Muhammad and warn off the armies of the czar.

Conquering Afghanistan and installing a new puppet emir proved easy—another remarkable feat of British arms, and one which did indeed seem to cause the Russian bear to retire. But holding Afghanistan proved a good deal harder. The sullen Afghans refused to support Dost Muhammad's usurper. Being Afghans, they expressed their displeasure with jezails
and knives, ambushes, assassination, and guerrilla war to the point that evacuation became a necessity. Among the assassinated was Sir William Hay Macnaghten, a political agent and de facto governor-general of Kabul—killed while negotiating with Dost Muhammad's son, Akbar Khan, who in typical Afghan fashion believed that an annoying interlocutor is often best stabbed to death.

Akbar Khan did, however, consent to the peaceful withdrawal of the British army and its camp followers (about 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 civilians) through the Khyber Pass back to India. They were commanded by the fifty-nine-year-old General Sir William Elphinstone, a veteran of Waterloo, whose enduring fame rests not on his role in Bonaparte's defeat but in leading one of the great epic disasters of the British Empire. Of the 16,000-plus Britons and Indians who entered the Khyber Pass in January 1842 only one, Dr. William Brydon, emerged alive. After promising them safe passage, the Afghans had treated the retiring Britons and Indians as a subject of violent sport, picking them off as they struggled through the frozen pass. The Britons' last stand was at the Battle of Gandamak (13 January 1842) when about 65 officers and men formed a square in the snow and battled the Afghans to the end, Captain Thomas Souter wrapping himself in the colors.

This, of course, could not be the end. The British stormed into Afghanistan, occupied Kabul, destroyed the villages of those responsible for the massacre, liberated hostages, and then called it a day. Vengeance achieved, the troops marched back to India, and Dost Muhammad returned to his throne. The British had made their point and the Afghans had made theirs. The Duke of Wellington, unperturbed by the Russian threat (Russian numbers, he thought, were no match for British officers), was worried, indeed, by the disaster in the Khyber Pass. “There is not a Moslem heart from Peking to Constantinople which will not vibrate when reflecting on the fact that the European ladies and other females attached to the troops at Kabul were made over to the tender mercies of the Moslem Chief who had with his own hand murdered Sir William Macnaghten.”
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But only a year later another million Muslims were brought under British rule with the conquest of Sind in 1843. In 1849, the Punjab was annexed, and the martial Sikhs filled the ranks of the British Indian army. The conquest of the Punjab was particularly impressive because the Sikhs met the Company's army not only with a larger force (that was usual; the odds this time were four to one) and with more artillery, but with an army just as well-trained (by Europeans) and well-equipped (by Europeans) as the British, who were led by the redoubtable Sir Hugh Gough, an angular, grey-haired, fearless, blustering, red-cheeked, sixty-six-year-old Anglo-Irishman who led from the front wearing his white “fighting jacket” and believing the only thing necessary to victory was to charge the enemy with the bayonet. This simple tactic did not recommend itself to finer tactical minds, which distrusted the chances of “cold steel” against artillery and musket fire; the British press chalked it up to Gough's being Irish—but it worked. As Gough himself pointed out, the British army had achieved what Alexander the Great could not: the conquest of India.