Raj Read online

  Lawrence James studied History and English at York University and subsequently undertook a research degree at Merton College, Oxford. Following a career as a teacher, he became a full-time writer in 1985, and is the author of The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia; Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of Field Marshal Viscount Allenby; and the acclaimed The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.

  He now lives in St Andrews, where his wife is headmistress of St Leonard’s School, with their two sons.

  ALSO BY LAWRENCE JAMES

  Crimea: The War With Russia in Contemporary Photographs

  The Savage Wars: British Campaigns in Africa 1870–1920

  Mutiny: Mutinies in British and Commonwealth Forces 1797–1956

  Imperial Rearguard: The Last Wars of Empire

  The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

  The Iron Duke: A Military Biography of the Duke of Wellington

  Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of Field Marshal Viscount Allenby

  The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-748-12533-3

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence James

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk.

  To Nick and Jane Roe

  Contents

  Also by Lawrence James

  Copyright

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  THE COMPANY ASCENDANT: 1740 – 84

  1: Prologue: Mughal Twilight

  2: A Glorious Prospect: Robert Clive’s Wars, 1740 – 55

  3: New Strength from Conquest: Bengal, 1755 – 65

  4: An Empire Within an Empire: British Reactions to Indian Conquests

  PART TWO

  THE CONQUEST OF INDIA: 1784 – 1856

  1: No Retreat: Grand Strategy and Small Wars, 1784 – 1826

  2: The Cossack and the Sepoy: Misadventures of an Asian Power, 1826 – 42

  3: The cast of a Die: The Sind and the Sikhs, 1843 – 49

  4: Robust Bodies and Obstinate Minds: An Anatomy of Conquest

  PART THREE

  THE RAJ CONSOLIDATED: 1784 – 1856

  1: European Gentlemen: India ’s New Ruling Class

  2: Utility and Beneficence: British Visions and Indian Realities

  3: Gradual and Mild Correction: Taxing and Policing India

  4: A Hearty Desire: Sex, Religion and the Raj

  PART FOUR

  THE MUTINY: 1857 – 59

  1: The Sahib Paid No Attention: The Raj Imperilled, January – July 1857

  2: Very Harrowing Work: The Raj Resurgent, August 1857 – January 1859

  3: Like Elephants on Heat: Anglo- Indian Reactions to the Mutiny

  PART FIVE

  TRIUMPHS AND TREMORS: 1860 – 1914

  1: Low and Steady Pressure: The Exercise of Absolute Power

  2: Not as Relics but as Rulers: India’s Princes

  3: We are British Subjects: Loyalty and Dissent, 1860 – 1905

  4: Not Worth the Candle: Wars, Real and Imaginary, 1854 – 1914

  5: Never at Peace: India’s Frontiers and Armies

  6: Conciliatory Sugar Plums: Compromise and Coercion, 1906 – 14

  PART SIX

  DISTURBANCES AND DEPARTURES: 1914 – 48

  1: True to Our Salt: India and the First World War, 1914 – 18

  2: Strong Passion: Amritsar and After, 1919 – 22

  3: This Wonderful Land: Anglo - Indian Perspectives

  4: A Great Trial of Strength : Power Struggles, 1922–42

  5: A Bad Knock: India at War, January–July 1942

  6: An Occupied and Hostile Country: India at War, August 1942 – August 1945

  7: What Are We Here For?: September 1945 – February 1947

  8: Was It Too Quick?: Dividing and Departing, March – September 1947

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  List of Maps

  1 British Expansion, 1757–1818

  2 The Punjab Campaign, 1846–49

  3 The Mutiny, 1857–59

  4 India: Political, 1858–1947

  5 Central Asia

  6 Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier

  7 Nationalist Unrest, 1919–42

  8 The Partition of India, 1947

  Acknowledgements

  I would first like to thank my wife, Mary, for her forbearance, patience and good humour during the preparation and writing of this book. Thanks are also due to my sons, Edward and Henry, who have provided many valuable services. Help, suggestions, advice and information were also provided by Vice-Admiral Manohar Awati, Dr Richard Boyden, Dr Ian Bradley, Geordie Burnett-Stuart, Mrs Elsie Butler, William Dalrymple, Richard Demarco, Dr and Mrs Martin Edmonds, Sir Gerald Elliot, Professor Ray Furness, Dr Nile Gardiner, David Gilmour, Andrew Gordon, Ruth Guilding, John Hailwood, Robert Harvey, Mr and Mrs Guli Juneja, Professor Bruce Lenman, Andrew Lownie, Philip Mason, Michael Mates, Lieutenant-Colonel David Murray, Professor Alan Pat, Liz Pert-Davies, A-Rajagopalan, Professor Jeffrey Richards, the late General Sir Ouvry Roberts, Professor and Mrs Nick Roe, Trevor Royle, Buddahev Saha, Alan Samson, Dr Bill Shields, Linda Silverman, W. A. Simms, Captain James Squire, Emma Strouts of Christie’s Images, Deepak Vaidya, Andrew and Cherry Williams and Andrew Wilson.

  I am greatly indebted to the staff of St Andrews University Library and the India Office Library for their courtesy and efficiency in handling all manner of enquiries. I would also like to thank the staff of the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Library, Strathclyde Record Office, the Scottish Record Office, the National Army Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Public Record Office and the Ministry of Defence. All have been generous with their time and knowledge.

  Quotations from Crown Copyright collections appear by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, and those from the papers of General Sir Richard Savory by kind permission of his Literary Trustees.

  Picture Credits

  SECTION ONE

  1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10: The Hulton Getty Picture Collection; 2: Popperfoto; 3: Christie’s Images; 5: Trustees of the Blair Athol Estate; 6: Victoria & Albert Museum; 11, 12, 17, 18: India Office Library; 15, 16: Courtesy of Deepak Vaidya

  SECTION TWO

  1, 12: Popperfoto; 6: Christie’s Images; 8: Trustees of the Blair Athol Estate; 11: The Hulton Getty Picture Collection; 16, 17, 18, 19, 20: Courtesy of Geordie Burnett-Stuart; 21, 22: Imperial War Museum

  SECTION THREE

  1, 2, 3: Courtesy of Geordie Burnett-Stuart; 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 15, 17: The Hulton Getty Picture Collection; 9: Camera Press; 13, 14: National Army Museum; 16, 18: Popperfoto

  PART ONE

  THE COMPANY

  ASCENDANT:

  1740 – 84

  1

  Prologue: Mughal

  Twilight

  I

  India is a land of vanished supremacies. Each proclaimed its power and permanence by architecture on the grand scale, designed to inspire admiration, awe and even fear. Always the observer is compelled to look upwards. One cranes one’s neck to see the strongholds of Rajput warlords, perched precariously on the
hilltops of Rajputana (Rajasthan), and one stands back to view the great mosques and mausoleums of their overlords, the Mughal emperors. Approach requires a degree of supplication; one trudges up the hillside to reach the Jaipur maharajas’ palace at Amber and vast flights of steps skirt the government offices of the British Raj in New Delhi. The overall impression is of a country where power has been concentrated in a few hands and always flowed downwards.

  There is much truth in this. The public buildings of the Mughals, the Indian princes and the Raj were expressions of their authority, reminding the onlooker of his place in the scale of things. Wealth went hand in hand with political power; the elaborate and intricate marblework, jewelled inlays and painted panels which decorated mosques and palaces announced their patrons and owners as men of infinite richness. The British were more cautious about this sort of ostentation. Sir Edwin Lutyens, the mastermind behind that complex of official buildings which was to form the heart of ‘imperial’ Delhi, considered traditional Indian architecture too florid and therefore unsuitable for a regime whose chief characteristics were integrity and firmness. Like other, earlier architects of the Raj, he preferred to assert its supremacy with solid stonework and severe classical motifs, which was understandable given that they and their patrons saw Britain as the new Rome. The fashion had been set in the early 1800s by the Marquess Wellesley, who believed that the dignity of a Governor-General of Bengal required a colonnaded mansion in the contemporary Georgian neo-classical style. Opposite his austere but imposing Government House was a triumphal arch surmounted by a vigilant imperial lion, which soon became a popular roost for Calcutta’s cranes, vultures and kites.

  India’s official architecture was a backdrop for the traditional public rituals of state. The formal processions in which a ruler presented himself to his subjects and undertook his devotions, and the durbars (assemblies) where great men met, exchanged gifts and compliments and discussed high policy, required settings appropriate to what was, in effect, the theatre of power. At the heart of the Emperor Shahjahan’s great palace in Delhi, now called the Red Fort, are the great audience halls, one a vast open courtyard, the other enclosed and reserved for foreign ambassadors and other elevated visitors. Both are now stripped of their awnings and wall-hangings and the private chamber lacks the Peacock Throne, a stunning construction of gold and jewels surmounted by a golden arch and topped by two gilded peacocks, birds of allegedly incorruptible flesh which may have symbolised not only the splendour of the Mughals but also their durability.

  When Shahjahan held durbars for his subjects, dispensing justice and settling quarrels, he overlooked them from a high, canopied dias with a delicately painted ceiling. If he glanced upwards, he saw a panel which portrays Orpheus playing his lute before wild beasts who, bewitched by his music, are calmly seated around him. The scene was a reminder to the emperor and his successors that they were Solomonic kings. Like the Thracian musician, they were bringers of harmony, spreading peace among subjects who, if left to their own devices, would live according to the laws of the jungle. It was a nice and revealing conceit, a key to the nature of Mughal kingship and, for that matter, its successor, the British Raj.

  Shahjahan’s Delhi palace (he renamed the city Shahjahanabad) was completed in the middle years of the seventeenth century. He was a Timurid, a dynasty of interlopers who had founded their Indian empire in the mid-sixteenth century, and whose pedigree stretched back to the fourteenth-century conqueror, Timur the Great (Marlowe’s Tamburlaine). By Shahjahan’s time, Timurid domination extended from the Himalayan foothills to the borders of the Deccan. Even in the period of their ascendancy, the Mughals were never absolute masters of the whole of India; there were many remote, inaccessible regions where their will never penetrated. There were also areas, particularly in central India, where their authority rested on the submission and co-operation of local princes.

  For outsiders, the physical boundaries of Mughal power were immaterial. Contemporary Europeans, fed on travellers’ tales of the magnificence of his courts at Agra and Delhi, rated India’s emperor as one of the great princes of earth, equal in stature to the Sultan of Turkey or the Emperor of China. The Mughal emperor was a figure of immense dignity and grandeur, a potentate who was imagined to hold absolute sway over millions. For European intellectuals seeking to understand the nature of political power, the Great Mughal was the embodiment of that despotism which was thought to be natural to the Orient. And yet, the Mughals complied with the Renaissance ideals of kingship, for they were renowned as connoisseurs and patrons of the arts. On an embassy to the imperial court in 1615, Sir Thomas Roe judged the palace at Agra as ‘one of the great works and wonders of the world’ and admitted to the Emperor Jahangir, whose son, Shah Jehan, later had the Taj Mahal built, that his portrait painters surpassed those of James I.1 It was, of course, easy for Western visitors to be bowled over by the splendour of Mughal architecture and the magnificence of their state pageantry, and to imagine that together they were the façade of a power which was total and limitless.

  Appearances were misleading. Whatever its architecture announced to the contrary, the Mughal empire was never monolithic, nor did the emperor’s will run freely throughout India. He was shah-an-shah, a king of kings, a monarch whose dominions were a political mosaic, whose tessera included provinces administered by imperial governors and semi-independent petty states. In the Deccan alone there were over a thousand fortified towns and villages, each under the thumb of its own zamindar (landowner), who was both a subject of the emperor and his partner in government.2 The machinery of Mughal government needed the goodwill and co-operation of such men, as well as the services of its salaried administrators who enforced the law and gathered imperial revenues.

  Timurid power rested ultimately on the cash raised from the land tax. Its burden was heaviest on the ryots (peasants) and it was theoretically yielding an annual 232 million rupees (£31.3 million) at the close of the seventeenth century.3 Taken from an official revenue manual, this estimate ignored the often considerable sums siphoned off by venal officials. Nonetheless, the Mughals possessed, at least on paper, the wherewithal to play a political masterhand in their dominions: cash procured soldiers, allies and a loyal civil service. It could also seduce the discontented and purchase the allegiance of enemies. In the early 1690s, when the Emperor Aurangzeb’s armies were fighting in Karnataka, he lured back a renegade raja, Yacham Nair, with an offer of a jagir (a lifetime annuity from land revenue) worth 900,000 rupees (£121,500) a year. Not long after, Aurangzeb ordered Yacham’s arrest and murder.4

  This was a typical exercise in Mughal statecraft. Dynastic survival and India’s tranquillity depended upon an emperor’s mastery of the arcane arts of political fixing; he gave or withheld patronage, he bargained with lesser princes, and played ambitious courtiers, nobles and officials against each other. Shahjahan’s choice of Orpheus, the mollifier and enchanter, as a source of political inspiration was therefore very apt. It was also a very daring gesture, for the presence of a figure from pagan mythology above the imperial seat of power would certainly have made many of the emperor’s fellow Muslims uneasy.

  Like the Turkish and Persian empires, Mughal India was an Islamic state. It had, in 1700, an estimated population of about 180 million, of whom at least two-thirds were unbelievers, mostly Hindus. Although the emperors enjoyed the title khalifa (Caliph), and with it a claim to be regarded by Muslims as successors to Muhammad, they could only govern with the co-operation of the Hindus. A policy of pragmatic toleration was adopted, but unevenly and in ways which never wholly satisfied the Sikhs of the Punjab or the Hindu warrior castes, the Jats of Rajasthan and the Marathas of the Deccan. Integrated within the Mughal system, these groups submitted grudgingly and were always ready to spring to arms if their faith appeared to be in danger. Aurangzeb’s policy of destroying Hindu temples during the suppression of insurrections in Karnataka and Rajasthan stiffened rather than reduced resistance.

  Ever since the g
enesis of the Timurid empire under Akbar the Great (1556–1605), dynastic survival had depended on genetic good fortune in the form of emperors who were forceful, energetic and skilled manipulators. This luck ran out with the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, and the empire passed into nerveless and fumbling hands. Even so, it would have required rulers with superhuman talents to have preserved an inheritance which was already beset by difficulties, let alone overcome the problems which raised themselves during the next sixty years.

  II

  The Mughal empire fell apart swiftly. In what turned out to be the final surge of Mughal expansion, Aurangzeb overstepped himself by undertaking a series of campaigns designed to extend and consolidate his rule in the Deccan and Hyderabad. They became a war of attrition which stretched imperial resources beyond their breaking point, and by 1707, after nearly twenty years of intermittent fighting, the empire was exhausted. There was no breathing space; an eighteen-month war for the succession followed Aurangzeb’s death. Moreover, the repercussions of the stalemate in central and southern India and the civil war were felt across the country. From the early 1680s onwards the Jats of Rajasthan launched a sequence of insurrections against oppressive taxation, seizing whole districts, occupying towns and, growing more audacious, were raiding the suburbs of Delhi by 1717.

  Strong men flourished as anarchy spread. It was a period of making and breaking as determined and ambitious men snatched at opportunities to enrich themselves and usurp authority. Imperial officials, increasingly isolated and starved of funds, found their loyalty withering and looked for ways to preserve and advance themselves in a suddenly mutable world. There were fortunes to be made among the wreckage of an empire which was cracking up, and success went to the cunning and ruthless.

  The adventures of Riza Khan, an Afghan professional soldier in the imperial service, may serve as a template for the stories of many others. In about 1700 he was appointed governor of Ramgir in the Deccan, but found his entry barred by his predecessor. Riza, a determined and resourceful figure, gathered extra men and entered the town by force, and turned it into a private power base. Turning his back on an emperor who was no longer able to reward his servants, Riza decided to make his own destiny; he turned bandit and enriched himself by diverting imperial taxes into his own pocket and looting caravans. He prospered and attracted followers, men like himself who had been cast adrift in a violent and disorderly world and whose only assets were their wits and their swords. His horde grew, swollen by deserters, unpaid soldiers from other armies, and those whose livelihoods had been destroyed by war and brigandage. Within six years Riza Khan was the leader of 10,000 freelances and an important piece on the chessboard of local power politics. His services were sought and obtained by Mughal officials in Hyderabad, once to help run down another bandit. He might have ended his life as a landowner, perhaps the founder of a dynasty, but his luck ran out in 1712 when he was tricked, taken prisoner and executed by a new governor.5