How did the English ever get an Empire?

The Economic and Political Weekly September 6 2014

The Invisible Invincibility of the Madras Sepoys

Waking up as from a long sleep, Madrasis have been re-discovering the history of their city. The city’s corporation, 325 years old, is the second oldest in the world, like the Egmore Eye Hospital, or the city Archives. St. Mary’s Church in Fort St. George, where Clive was married, is the oldest church east of Suez, and Queen Mary’s College is 100 years old this year.[i]  Citizens have turned themselves into enthusiastic researchers, and every day in the last several months have brought to light a new interesting fact about a street or building in the 375-year period that turned Madras from a fishing village into the cultured city of today. There have even been active debates whether the founding day was the 22^nd of August, or of July, 1639. The city’s people are celebrating their heritage from the British period.

And yet, what the host of researchers have missed is the crucial string of events that brought Madras into being, the string of victories won by the sepoys of the Madras Native regiments against all odds. Indian historians have not deigned to research how and why they won so many battles which turned a trading company, battling European and Indian forces, into an Empire.  They seem to have swallowed hook line and sinker the canard spread assiduously by the British that the sepoys were mere mercenaries who served them with dog-like devotion, who followed blindly the instructions given to them, and at best only complemented the small British troops, who ‘won India by the sword.’[ii]

The first foreigners to employ Indian sepoys were the French, and with their help Dupleix was able to beat the English and their allies at the battle of Adyar in 1746. Clive learned the lesson well and convinced the English to raise some sepoy regiments themselves.[iii] A hero rose from among the recruited men – Yusuf Khan. His biographer states that he was a convert to Islam from a low caste, and contemporary records also support this contention.[iv] At the height of his career, Yusuf Khan was appointed Commandant of all the sepoy regiments – that is, as the de facto head of the British forces, and he beat back the French, and also Haider Ali. The English at Madras were terrified of his abilities, and they effected a surprise arrest and drumhead hanging of Yusuf Khan as a traitor in 1761. Their own confused history of the period gives rise to the belief that the treachery was more on their side than on his. [v]

In any case, after this tragic incident, no Indian sepoy was ever promoted to such power, and there were warnings in plenty in British records against giving power to sepoys, and Yusuf Khan’s name is brought up more than once. So carefully were these strictures followed that in all the despatches from the front, it is rare to find a complimentary mention of any sepoy. However, what cannot be hidden from regimental muster rolls is the regular promotion that some sepoys received right up to being made a Subedar, the highest rank achievable for them, though no mention is made as to why they were recognised after every successful battle. In contrast, the military despatches ring with praises of even a teenaged British cadet for a small action he may have participated in.

In lieu of fact, the British created and promoted a myth of the sepoys’ faithful devotion to their cause, but this is belied by the several small and regular mutinies that took place till the lie was exploded by the Vellore rebellion of 1806. The reasons were not far to seek. General Malcolm while examining their discontents emphasized that the sepoys most resented the rudeness displayed by certain callow British officers, and that if loyalty was to be gained then the sepoys should be treated with the respect accorded to experienced soldiers.[vi] Their pay afforded them a comfortable standard of living for their times, and they received a few other privileges, but they were willing to forfeit all that and be hanged or blown from cannons if their honour was besmirched. The voluminous Secret Committee reports that went into the cause of the Vellore rebellion shows, even at a cursury glance, the total lack of understanding that the British had of the sepoys, and their motivations. In their desperate search for truth they absurdly turned to interview washerwomen and cattle herders![vii] Marshall’s early warnings are echoed even more emphatically by Col. John Studholme Hodgson, prophetically months before the 1857 uprising![viii]

Among several pleas made by Hodgson for better behaviour by British officers towards Indian sepoys is the astonishing revelation that few could communicate in any Indian language with their men, and that while Clive may have won at Plassey without knowing an Indian language, the British could no longer afford to be so ignorant. We may then infer that the command of every battle that brought the British their empire was really in the hands of the Indian officers, the subadars, jemadars and risaldars, to whom perhaps the British communicated their wish that the battle should be won.

The only British officer who openly said that Indians should be promoted to high rank was the Duke of Wellington, though much was written later that that was not what he meant. And thereby hangs a tale. The crowning victory that ensured that the British Empire in India would become ‘the British Empire of India,’ to use Wellesley’s words, was the battle of Assaye, won by his brother, then General Arthur Wellesley, in 1803. A few years earlier at the Siege of Seringapatam, Arthur Wellesley had lost his men in a night action and would normally have been broken, if his general had not cannily remembered that the young man was the brother of the Governor-General.[ix] At Assaye, with only half his strength he blundered into the prepared position of the combined might of the Maratta Confederacy, with a bank of artillery behind a river and cavalry of his flank. It was an impossible position, in which advance or retreat were equally fatal. British military historians give us an implausible account of Wellesley somehow finding a ford in the river which he had never seen before, and they credit the victory to a small detachment of Highlanders, though half of them were led into ruinous action by their officers. Wellesley is much more honest and said that the sepoys ‘astonished’ him with their frontal victorious assault despite very heavy losses.[x] At the end of his illustrious life, recognised as the foremost commander of Europe after his victory at Waterloo, he was asked which of his battles were the most illustrious. He ‘was silent for about 10 seconds and then said “Assaye.” He did not add a word.’[xi] What he had learned at the hands of his Indian officers he put to good effect later in his European campaigns against Napoleon.

Who were these sepoys that so astonished Wellington? And why did they fight with such skill and ferocity in the British interest, when their rebellions repeatedly showed that the only loyalty they felt was that between honourable soldiers? Again, astonishingly, no personal account of any sepoy or Indian officer seems to exist anywhere, of all these great battles that established an Empire. The Madras archives have none, nor do those of the Madras Regiment at their home base in Wellington, in the Nilgiris. General BC Nanda, a well-known military historian, sadly told the writer that no such record exists to his knowledge.[xii] The presumption here is that none was written since the sepoys of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries were illiterate. But surely, as Shakespeare puts it in Henry V, ‘old men forget, but all shall be forgot but this, the deeds they did this day.’ It would be most unnatural if it were not so. The first personal, though guarded, account of a sepoy available to us was written by a north Indian, Sitaram Pandey, and published only in 1863 at the behest of his colonel, Northgate.[xiii]

Thanks to Sir Frederick Price, who published the first two volumes early in the 20^th century, we now have access to the detailed diary kept by Ananda Ranga Pillai, dubash to Dupleix.[xiv] This research work was initiated by the British for they wanted to know full details of what had transpired in the French camp, their main rival for so many crucial years in the 18^th century. Surely, the richer and more successful Madras dubashes must also have kept day-to-day diaries, but the British had no interest in bringing them to light, in fact the opposite would have been the case. Indian nationalist historians have accorded them an equal neglect under the mistaken inference that they were mere servants of the British rather than what they actually were, the real administrators of Madras and her fortunes.[xv] One of them was the famous Pachiappan Mudaliar, whose wealth has left an indelible stamp on the city. Some account from his times must surely still exist in some neglected chest or almirah? The Madras archives have several poorly researched or even un-catalogued documents in Indian languages. The famous Saraswati Mahal library in Tanjavur has hundreds of documents written in cursive Modi script, still to be opened. The personal archives of the Nawab of the Carnatic, now titled the Prince of Arcot, could be another likely source for the account of an Indian officer who helped win the British Empire.

Dodwell was an early historian of Madras who gives us tantalising glimpses into the social origins of the men who enlisted as sepoys with the British, but as with military muster rolls, he is rather erratic in classification. The recruits are marked down as ‘Telingas,’ ‘Gentoos,’ or ‘Malabars.’ Many are given the caste names of ‘untouchables’ and a goodly proportion of every regiment seem to have been made up of ‘Mussalmans.’ [xvi]An impression is gained that the great bulk of the Madras sepoys came from the ‘untouchable’ or lower castes, or were converts from such castes, as the great Yusuf Khan was said to be. It makes perfect sense then that the men, discriminated against by a caste-ridden society, gravitated to a service that treated them honourably. If they experienced any dishonourable treatment from any British officer, they fearlessly rebelled even at the cost of their lives. They fought for their own honour, and created an empire for foreigners from kingdoms that gave them little respect or social opportunity. Only the possible recovery of a lost military codex from those times can prove the price India has paid for observing the caste system.  

Vithal Rajan [an amateur military historian]

Hyderabad

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[i] Mr. V.Sriram has enlightened Madrasis through regular postings in The Hindu, Madras Musings, and on Facebook.

[ii] An assertion that used to be made repeatedly by old ‘India hands’ against the liberal ideas of Sir Henry Cotton or Mr AO Hume, a founder of the Indian National Congress.

[iii] Hoover, James W, The Origins of the Sepoy Military System 1498-1770, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1993.

[iv] Nelson, JH, Madura Country – A Manual, The Asylum Press Mount Road by William Thomas, Madras, 1868.

[v] Hill, SC, Yusuf Khan: The Rebel Commandant, 1914 edition, Asian Educational Services, New Delhi 1987.

[vi] Malcolm, Maj-Gen, Sir John, Observations in the Disturbances in the Madras Army in 1809, William Miller, London, 1812.

[vii] These records that throw such a clear light on the mind and psychology of the British rulers unfortunately lie water-drenched and neglected in the hoary archives of Madras.

[viii] Hodgson, Col. John Studholme, Opinions on the Indian Army, WH Allen, London. Feb 1857. Unfortunately only a mutilated copy of the book exists for public viewing. The United Services Institute, New Delhi might have an undamaged copy.

[ix] Guedalla, Philip, The Duke, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1931.

[x] Gurwood, Lt.-Col John, The Dispatches of the Duke of Wellington, Vol 1, John Murray, London 1834.

[xi] Hibbert, Christopher, Wellington, A Personal History, page 42-43, Harper Collins, London 1997.

[xii] Personal communication with the writer.

[xiii] Lunt, J., From Sepoy to Subedar, being the Life and Adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, translated by Lt. Col. Norgate, Vikas Books, Delhi, 1970.

[xiv] Ananda Ranga Pillai, J.Frederick Price & K.Ranagachari [eds.], The Private Diaries 1736-1761, 12 Vols, Asian Educational Services, New Delhi, 1985.

[xv] Basu, Susan Neild, ‘The Dubashes of Madras,’ Modern Asian Studies Vol XVIII, 1, 1984.

[xvi] Dodwell, H. Sepoy Recruitment in the Old Madras Army, Indian Historical Records Commission, Govt. Printing Press, Calcutta, 1922. See also Dodwell, The Old Coast Road Army and Mouat, Lt. Col GED, Madras Classes [Recruitment handbook of the Indian Army]Govt. Of India Press, New Delhi, 1938.