Richard Holmes - Sahib - The British Soldier in India 1750–1914

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Thomsett recorded that July 1879 was:

A very wet month in Bareilly, and twenty-five inches of rain fell. On the 23rd there was indeed a regular deluge – 7.5 inches in the previous twenty-four hours … The rain was followed by what I should call a regular plague of black caterpillars. And the creatures hung by silken threads from the branches of trees, and, as one drove along, found their way down one’s neck and all over one’s garments. Then August came with all its sultriness and snakes, reserved for those unfortunates who could not avail themselves of leave to the hills. 22

An Indian winter could be bitterly cold. Major James Outram, in the Sind desert in December 1838, described: ‘The coldest day I have ever experienced in the east – the thermometer never above 62° in the tents, and a bitter cold North-Easterly wind bringing with it intolerable dust, of so impalpable a nature, that it is impossible to exclude it.’ 23Sergeant William Forbes-Mitchell of the 93rd Highlanders wrote in 1857 that ‘with a raw north wind the climate of Lucknow feels uncommonly cold at night in November … ’. 24Things were far worse up on the frontier. Dr William Bryden awoke on the morning of 7 January 1842, the day of the British army’s disastrous retreat from Kabul:

I found the troops preparing to march so I called to the natives who had been lying near me to get up, which only a very few were able to do. Some of them actually laughed at me for urging them, and pointed to their feet, which looked like charred logs of wood; poor fellows, they were frost bitten, and had to be left behind. 25

Florentia Sale, whose husband Robert was commanding the garrison of Jelalabad, was also on the retreat. On the morning of 8 January, ‘nearly every man was paralysed with cold, so as to be scarcely able to hold his musket or move. Many frozen corpses lay on the ground. The Sipahees burnt their caps, accoutrements and clothes to keep themselves warm.’ 26On campaign in Afghanistan in 1880, the Revd Alfred Cave, an army chaplain, was shocked to discover that Lieutenant General Primrose ‘went comfortably to sleep in his tent and awoke to find 7 or 8 doolie [stretcher] bearers frozen to death round his tent & never reported it’. 27

The inescapable realities of terrain and climate helped determine India’s history. Successive waves of invaders pulsed in from the north, and once they had crossed the barriers of desert and mountain there was little to stop them. There are no easily defended river lines, no unassailable promontories, and an attacker who made himself master of the Indo-Gangetic plain would lose impetus as he pushed southwards, but could not easily be brought to a definitive halt. One of the few crucial military corridors leads through the little town of Panipat, north of Delhi, which lies between the southern foothills of the Himalayas and the Rajasthan desert: no less than four major battles (1399, 1526, 1556, 1761) were fought there.

Panipat retains its citadel and wall, pierced with fifteen gates. Fortresses and fortified towns might stand like islands in the torrent of invasion, and are, as the standard work on them observes, ‘practically innumerable throughout India. Almost every hill in the range running north-east through the south of Rajputana has a fortification on its summit; the same may be said of the Deccan … and of the hilly districts of south India.’ 28Captain Osborne wrote that: ‘Every village … possesses a small round mud fort with a turret in the centre, resembling an original Martello-tower, loopholed for musketry, and the generality of them with a dry and shallow ditch, but without guns.’ 29

Indian fortresses ranged from the mud-walled forts of petty rajas to prodigious structures such as that at Gwalior – a mile and three-quarters long on a rock 300 feet above the surrounding plain; Golconda, with its powerful citadel standing within three distinct lines of curtain wall; and Chitor, the Rajput fortress which clings to a whale-backed hill 500 feet above the land below. An abundance of stone and labour through most of the subcontinent enabled military engineers to throw up thick, high walls (those of Bijapur are up to 35 feet thick) with loopholes and merlons for defence, and elaborate gateways with twists and turns, invisible to the attacker, and great teak gates equipped with spikes to prevent them from being butted down by the foreheads of assaulting elephants.

While castle-building in Europe had largely stopped by the sixteenth century, many of these fortresses, which constitute one of India’s many abiding delights, show successive layers of fortification, often the work of new conquerors or resurgent local rulers. Chitor, held by Hindu Rajputs, was taken by Ala-ud-din Khalji, Sultan of Delhi, in 1303. Recovered by the Rajputs, it was taken again in 1535, this time by the Sultan of Gujarat. Again recovered, it was taken by the Emperor Akbar in 1567. On each occasion, when its fall was imminent, the Rajput women committed suicide by self-immolation, while their menfolk went out to fight to the last man. Rajput warriors traditionally wore long saffron-dyed gowns called maranacha poshak, or clothes of the dead, to symbolise that they were already dead, and battle was simply a sacrament to celebrate their sacrifice.

Although India produced more than its fair share of warriors, it was less well endowed with sailors. Most of the small craft based in Indian harbours were used for fishing, and although there was some maritime trade, both westwards towards Arabia and eastwards towards Indo-China and China itself, most was in vessels which were unable to make headway against the monsoon. While the Mughals snapped up useful military technology wherever they found it – a practice later continued by the Marathas and (as a survivor of Sobraon would have acknowledged grimly) the Sikhs – they did not generally attempt to build the large, sail-powered warships and merchantmen which were increasingly a feature of European war and commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Of course there were exceptions. In the 1750s the Maratha chieftain Tulaji Angria built a small fleet which was used for privateering attacks on European vessels trading in Indian waters. On 12 February 1756 it was wholly destroyed by a British squadron under Rear Admiral Charles Watson, and the next day the British took Angria’s fortified base of Gheria at a cost of only ten killed and seventeen wounded. ‘A fine harbour … in the hands of Europeans might defy the forces of Asia,’ mused Watson. European ability to use naval power to sidestep India’s vast distances and primitive communications would play a fundamental role in the conquest and dominion of India. In the capture of Gheria, HMS Kent – one of Watson’s warships – fired 120 barrels of powder. 30Moving powder and heavy guns on this scale by land was a time-consuming undertaking: but a nation which enjoyed command of the sea need not be daunted by India’s endless dusty wastes. By the time this story starts in earnest it was apparent that dangerous wasps were buzzing about the elephant’s head.

AT THE BEGINNING of the sixteenth century, a century before the story of British India really begins, Sikander Lodi, Sultan of Delhi, was hard at work building the city of Agra – which was to be his alternative capital – and on subduing local rivals. The Governor of the Punjab, nominally his subject, had attained something approaching independence, but had founded no proper state of his own and so the Moslem ruler of Afghanistan, Zahir-ud-din Muhammad (better known as Babur, ‘the Tiger’), could see that ‘the gates of Hind were swinging in the wind’. 31Babur was a Turco-Mongol prince, a descendant of the great Timur (Timur-i-Lenk, hence Tamerlane) who had himself invaded India, beating the Delhi sultan at the first battle of Panipat in 1399 and flattening his capital so thoroughly that it took almost a century to recover.